306 THE ORIGIN OF MEDICINE CEREMONIES OR POWER. 
swans. They were swans and they followed the boy. After a time the 
boy went up to them, laid his hands upon their necks and caught them, 
and they were squashes again. He picked them up and gave them to 
his mother. They went out of the lodge and went home. 
There was rejoicing in the lodge. The medicine-men thought that 
the father must have taught the boy how to do the wonderful things, but 
it was not so. The only man who did not seem to take pleasure in the 
boy ’s performances was his father, who with bowed head sat in the west. 
He thought within himself: ‘‘I thought the stranger very wonderful, 
but now my son comes, a mere child, and he performs greater things, 
and the things he does are not mine, and I have no knowledge of them.”’ 
Next day the boy and his mother took the squashes and dumped them 
into the creek. People told throughout the village the wonderful things 
that the boy had done. Nearly every day they talked about the boy. 
His father hastened the ceremony of the medicine-lodge to a close, for 
he did not feel right in his mind. 
The ceremony was over. Anoldmancried through the village, telling 
the people to store away their corn and other things and to get ready 
to go on a buffalo hunt. The people began to dig cache holes; others, 
who had them, cleaned them out. All this time the leading medicine-man 
never spoke to his son nor asked him to come near him. On the buffalo 
hunt he began to speak to the boy and called on him to help. 
One time when they were surrounding buffalo, the medicine-man told 
his son to stay by him and to follow him if he should run after a buffalo 
cow. When the run was made the boy watched his father, and when 
he saw him running after a buffalo cow that seemed to be getting away 
from him he followed, until they had gone away out among the hills by 
themselves. The father then whipped up his pony and soon overtook 
the cow. He shot at it and it fellintoa ravine. The boy caught up and 
they began to skin the buffalo. The father looked up and said, ‘‘My 
son, I must go up on the hill and look around, for we are in the enemy’s 
country and they may be coming.”’ The father climbed the hill, and as 
he went he thought of the wonderful things that the boy had done in his 
medicine-lodge and his heart was filled with envy. He reached the top 
of the hill, then turned and looked at his son for a moment, and then 
shot an arrow at him. The boy turned and started to run, but when he 
saw that it was his own father who had shot him, he fell to the ground and 
died. The man went to his son and made sure that he was dead. He 
picked him up and threw him into a tributary of the Republican River. 
He went back to the buffalo, cut the meat, packed the pony, and went 
home. He turned the boy’s pony loose. The man reached home in the 
