354 THE ORIGIN OF MEDICINE CEREMONIES OR POWER. 
was wounded in several places on the body, but he kept on fighting. 
The Skidi were run into a pond. Then the enemy turned their ponies 
and gave up the chase. As the Skidi crossed the pond, Bear-Woman’s 
husband began to give out. ‘‘Tell my wife that I am going to die; tell 
her that I was not possessed with the Bear’s spirit when we were attacked; 
tell her I fought hard, and as I have many wounds I must die.”’ 
Word was sent to the woman and she went through the camp asking 
the women if any of them were sick with blood. The man’s own niece 
came forward and said, ‘‘I am sick.’’ Bear-Woman took this young 
woman with her to where the men were coming with her husband. The 
women got there too late, for the man had died. The woman began to 
mourn for her husband. Many days and months the woman continued 
to mourn for her husband. As her children were growing up, she com- 
menced to teach to her boy the mysteries of the Bear. Her tipi was always 
decorated. 
The fame of her powers reached other bands, and once a Chaui came 
to her tipi and placed before her a parfleche filled with dried buffalo meat 
and many robes and two ponies. He placed his hands upon her head 
and begged her to teach him the mysteries of the Bear. He sat down 
in the lodge. She sat for a long time in silence. At last she spoke and 
said: “‘You are trying me; you want to see if what you have heard is 
true. I do not do the things that you have heard I do, for these things 
are done by other powers. I believe in these powers. You will doubt 
them and doubt me. I will try you, and if I see that you are not poor 
in spirit I will stop.”’ This Chaui man proved to be a believer in animal 
power; so the woman taught him the mysteries of the Bear. The Chaui 
man was so good that the woman gave him her Bear dance. His tipi 
was also painted like the woman ’s tipi. 
The Chaui man stayed with this woman for many years. He hunted 
and killed buffalo and game and brought them to the woman ’s tipi. He 
also cared for her children, and clothed them with the finest of buckskin. 
In the fall, after the hunts, the woman joined the medicine-men’s lodge, 
and sat with the Bear family, on the south side. She did not join the 
Bear family who sat in the west, and who were the Grizzlies, for these 
were the ones who caught men in the doctors’ lodge and cut them open 
with a bear’s claw, and pulled the liver through the opening and ate it. 
This, the woman said, she was not told to do. In her sleight-of-hand 
she made a plum tree grow from the hard ground, inside the medicine- 
men’s lodge; then she would shake it and many plums would fall from 
the tree. Many wonderful things she did in the sleight-of-hand performs 
ances. Most of these things she taught to her own son. 
