THE BOY WHO RECEIVED THE MOUSE POWER. 81 
to their caches and placed there all the things that they did not care 
to carry with them on the journey. Then they packed their ponies 
and moved on towards the west. 
One of the young men stayed behind and went from one lodge 
to another and finally stayed over night in the village. The next day 
he went through the village again, and he heard a woman crying. 
He went to the place where the crying came from. He looked into 
the lodge, and there was a woman sitting down crying. This woman 
had a buffalo robe wrapped around her and her hair was hanging 
loosely over her shoulders. The young man went in to see who it 
was. He wanted to know what she was crying about. She said: 
“T know that you are here, and I cried to bring you here. I have 
been crying for some time, for when the people left this lodge they 
took my children with them. I would like very much for you to go 
after my children. If you will bring my children back, I shall call 
my people together and they will give you some kind of power that 
will make you a great warrior.” The young man wanted to know 
where her people were. The woman said her children were in the 
sacred buffalo robe; that all the had to do to get the robe was to go 
to a man who had the robe and ask him to let him see the robe, and 
upon opening the robe he would see a nest in the robe, and there her 
children would be. 
It was customary among the Arikara to untie the robe when any- 
body asked that he might see it, so the young man knew that he would 
have no trouble in finding the children, and he promised the woman 
that he would have her children back as soon as he could. The young 
man ran in the direction where the people had gone, and on the 
second night he came to the camp which they had made. The young 
man went to his mother’s tipi and told her to give him a little meat; 
that he was in a hurry; that he could not stop; that he had to go back 
to the village. The mother gave the young man some meat. He 
ate and then he went to the tipi of the white buffalo robe. The young 
man begged the keeper of the white buffalo robe to let him see it. 
The keeper of the robe took it down and untied it. While the man 
was untying it the young man was watching for the nest. When he 
saw the nest the young man began to cry, as if praying to the white 
Buffalo, but he put his hands upon the robe, and upon the nest, so 
that the man would not take any notice of it. The young man stopped 
crying, took the nest with the young ones, put them in his blanket and 
left the tipi. 
