1919] BARRETT AND HAWKES, KRATZ CREEK MOUNDS. 95 



"Suddenly I heard a voice from the spring calling me to enter. 

 I obeyed and went down through the water to the home of the 

 great water serpent. Here I remained many days in the bark lodge 

 of this great spirit. He showed me a medicine bag of snake skin 

 trom which he took two medicines, one with power to show the 

 dim past, the other the time of our grandfathers. The spirit then 

 said to me : 'My nephew, I have heard your prayers and I know 

 of all your desires since you were a small boy to learn of the earth 

 piles on the point near your village. You shall now see these as 

 they were built and the people who made them/ Then he gave me 

 the first medicine to drink. This caused my spirit to travel back 

 over the trail to the dim past, so many winters ago that they are 

 more than the leaves of the trees in our forest. 



"I stood at sunset on the point, with the serpent spirit beside 

 me. I was looking up the big river. My spirit was lonely, for 

 things were not as they are now, and I felt like a stranger in the 

 land. There was no broad river, grandfather, but only a shallow 

 stream almost hidden by the great fields of wild rice on either side. 

 From the point I could see big woods all along the shore, covering 

 the open spaces where our villages now stand. Had I not known 

 the ground beneath my feet, I should not have believed, grand- 

 father, that this was the same spot where we now make our landing. 



"Many canoes were drawn up along the shore, strange dugouts 

 with broad paddles, and the smoke of many camp fires curled up 

 from the woods. Far up the river I could hear the wail of a death 

 song. As I waited a large canoe drew up on the shore. In the 

 center of the canoe lay the body of a warrior wrapped in bark. 

 He must have been a great chief, for all the people came out of the 

 woods to meet him, and joined in the song of the mourners. They 

 bore him into the woods, and, prompted by the spirit, I followed 

 them. 



"They stopped at an open spot in the woods, where men were 

 working with wooden shovels and women were carrying away the 

 black earth in burden baskets. They had dug a shallow hole in 

 mother earth, grandfather, but it was like none that I had ever 

 seen before, for it was in the shape of a sleeping bear. 



"Into this hole the medicine men were casting sacred earth as 

 bright as the rays of the setting sun that glistened through the 

 leaves of the forest. This, the spirit whispered, was great medicine, 



