I had been some time in passing through the great pipestone hills. The old Medicine Chief of my village, Smiling Crow, had a pipe made of the sacred red stone of this country, that he claimed to have traded a small horse and a large woman for. Here it lay in abundance, great shattered columns and boulders and weird shapes like huge birds or tortoises or hares, standing out like the color of blood against the green firs and the white snows.

For the late snow had caught me in the passes of the Black Hills. My pony had plunged to the withers in it, struggling, and I had dismounted to lead him on. In shelters where the red stone overarched us, we camped, and to keep from freezing I built fires in the darkness. In one spot, a Lakota burial had taken place near by, and all night the pony whimpered at things that moved outside the globe of light around the campfire. I smudged sage in the coals to keep us safe from spirits.

But what I feared was flesh and blood. This was the holy ground of the Sioux. Everywhere were signs and totems warning of death to trespassers. On two occasions I had seen small parties of warriors moving along the creeks on their ponies, but we stayed in timber and remained unseen. After nearly ten days in those hills, I had taken ill. I prepared a poultice of bison fat and sage mixed with creosote, which I rubbed into my chest. This helped my cold but greatly reduced my hunting success, and even my pony seemed to resent my strong aroma, blowing sharply through his nostrils and nipping at my knee as we rode. The buffalo meat had become a tiresome repast, and I yearned for the meat of salmon, its taste and powerful nourishment.

Emerging from the snowy hills, I began to follow a creek that flowed due east, down through sunlit meadows and glades speckled red with paintbrush. It was as if we had passed through the cycle of the seasons from winter to spring, and the land took on a soft and languid appearance.

I had stopped to let my hungry pony graze the fresh spring shoots of grass when I saw at a place in the creek where the water pooled, then rushed through a gap between two boulders, the rough wicker form of a fish trap. Leaving the pony to graze, I walked slowly toward it, and beheld within it a large cutthroat trout, thrusting in futility with his fat tail against the trap frame. I again glanced about me, then carefully put my hand into the mouth of the trap. A sudden burst of nearby laughter stopped me cold, and I lay the trap back in the creek, creeping toward the place where I had heard the sound. On all fours, cresting a rise in the bank, I beheld a naked boy and girl embracing in a shadowed nook among the willows. As she giggled, he spoke softly to her in a tongue I recognized as Shoshone. Smiling to myself, I returned to the trap, removed the trout and ran a leather trace through the gills, slinging him to my pony. Across the top of the fish trap, I carefully laid seven strips of jerked buffalo meat.

After my fine meal of smoked trout, a sound night's sleep and a brilliant morning sun flushed the sickness from my body. With soft gray mud I lavaged the poultice off of my chest. The creek joined another, larger one and entered a valley where hundreds of elk grazed, barely troubling themselves to move enough to give us passage. The world seemed suspended in a dream, the land seemed never to have felt the tread of man and horse. We had ridden on, stopping only when it became too dark to find our faint path, and I slept beneath the vault of endless stars. In the morning, the persistent cry of a whippoorwill woke me from a dream in which I found myself treading the wide stone paths of a great village, the people therein being of flesh like snow, with eyes the blue of sky and hair like maize in sunshine. They smiling held out to me gifts, wonderful devices wrought in fantastic colors.

When I awoke, I stood and looked into the east, beholding the sun suspended low above a track of water that spanned the horizon. I had reached the Misoo-rie.