Bowers] HIDATSA SOCIAL AND CEREMONIAL ORGANIZATION 397 



His wife stood in front of their lodge with her face painted and was happy be- 

 cause her husband had been successful. 



Village- Young- Man instructed the people that the war leaders should not look 

 into holes in the ground nor eat meat from the buffalo's hocks. Village- Young- 

 Man taught the ceremony to those who came to him and wanted to give a feast 

 to the wolves. 



The Wolf rites differ from most other ceremonies in several re- 

 spects: (1) the sacred myths were more widely known than those for 

 other ceremonies, due in part it seems, to the training young men re- 

 ceived prior to and during their first military expeditions; and (2) 

 there were no special singers for the rites whose status during ritual 

 performances exceeded that of other comparable bundle owners. 



Items in a Wolf bundle were: a wolf hide; a braid of sweetgrass; 

 black medicine root; cap of wolf hide with the ears attached; any 

 fox or coyote — Wolf Chief's being a gray fox — to represent the 

 scouts; a buffalo skull; and 12 sticks. Four bundle lines represented by 

 Two Tails, Yellow Shoulder, Red Basket, and Small Anides survived 

 the smallpox epidemic of 1837. During the succeeding years the 

 number of bundles doubled but at no time were the sales sufficiently 

 numerous to become an annual event. 



Wolf Chief was one of the last to buy a bundle during which the 

 full ceremony was performed. This ceremony was performed in 1880 

 or 1882 in conjunction with his brother who was buying their father's 

 Woman Above rites. Since that time, due to the termination of 

 Plains warfare, interest in the bundles died out. Most of the bundles 

 have since been put away. 



Wolf Chief provided the following account of the purchase of a 

 Sunrise Wolf bundle. In this joint purchase his brother assisted 

 him and received their father's Woman Above bundle.^^ The details 

 of the purchase preliminaries and the final transfer are given essentially 

 as related by Wolf Chief. This narrative is especially valuable in 

 illustrating simultaneous purchase of two distinct bundles, a practice 

 characteristic of the later years when the aboriginal culture was 

 breaking down rapidly. Of the purchase, Wolf Chief said: 



This Wolf rite, before my time, belonged to my father, Small Ankles. One 

 day my brother, Red Basket, came to me and said, "I dreamed about our father's 

 Wolf bundle." 



That was when I was 30 and my brother was 24. 



I said to him, "I had such a dream, too. Now you are trying to do the same 

 thing but it is very difficult to do. Let's think it over a while and not make any 

 promises we cannot fulfill. In your mind you have it already for you have seen 

 it in your dream. I do not want to refuse you for we might get into trouble and 

 have serious misfortunes. You did not say a certain bundle. You said that you 

 want to own all the bundles that our father has. You know that he has many 

 other ceremonies which makes it all the harder. Our father owns the Wolf of the 



»« For the myths and additional information on the Woman Above ceremony see pp. 323-333. 



