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15 THE DOG VISION We stayed there near the mouth of the Tongue until the end of the Moon of Making Fat (June). Then the soldier chief¹ told us that we could not be in that country because we had sold it and it was not ours any more.² We had not sold it; but the soldiers took all the rest of our horses from us³ and what guns we had and loaded us on a big fire-boat that carried us down the Yellowstone and the Missouri to Fort Yates.⁴ There they unloaded us, and it was one of the new reservations they had made for the Lakota. Many of Sitting Bull’s and Gall’s people were there, but Gall and Sitting Bull were still in Grandmother’s Land. The soldiers had taken the ponies away from all our people, and they said the Great Father in Washington would pay us for them; but if he ever did I have not heard of it. I learned that my own band, the Ogalalas, had been taken back to the country where we are now, and I decided that I ought to go there and perform my duty. So in the Moon When the Plums Are Scarlet (September )⁵ I started with three others. We had to go afoot and we had only bows and arrows for weapons. The Brules had been taken to the place where they are now on Rosebud Creek while I was in Grandmother’s Land, and we set out first for where they were, camping seven times on the way. One evening we crossed Smoky Earth River (the White) and camped on the south side. We camped by a plum thicket, and the plums were ripe. That is all we had to eat. There was a bluff close by, and I went up there alone and sat down with my face to where the sun was setting. It was a clear evening with no wind, and it seemed that everything was listening The Dog Vision 111 hard to hear something. While I was looking over there I felt that somebody wanted to talk to me. So I stood up and began to sing the first song of my vision, the one that the two spirits had sung to me. “Behold! A sacred voice is calling you! All over the sky a sacred voice is calling!” While I was singing this song, suddenly the two men of my vision were coming again out of the sunset, head first like arrows slanting down. They were pointing at me with their bows. Then they stopped and stood, raising their bows above their heads and looking at me. They said nothing, but I could feel what they wanted. It was that I should do my duty among the Ogalalas with the power they had brought me in the vision. I stood there singing to them, and afterwhile they turned around and went back into the sunset, head first like arrows flying. When I went back to our little camp by the plum thicket, the others there, who knew of my power and had heard me on the bluff, asked what I had seen up there. I told them I was only singing to some people I knew in the outer world.⁶ I stayed only a little while among the Brules on Rosebud Creek, and then I came on alone to White Clay Creek where the Wasichus were building Pine Ridge Agency for the Ogalalas. Our people called it the Seat of Red Cloud or the Place Where Everything Is Disputed.⁷ There I stayed, and that winter in the Moon of Popping Trees I was eighteen years old.* That was a very hard winter, and it was just like one long night, with me lying awake, waiting and waiting and waiting for daybreak. For now the thunder beings were like relatives to me and they had gone away when the frost came and would not come back until the grasses showed their tender faces again. Without them I felt lost, and I was alone there among my people. Very few of them had seen the horse dance or knew anything about my vision and the power that it gave me. They seemed heavy, heavy and dark; and they could not know that they were heavy and dark. I could feel them like a great burden upon me; but when I would go all through my vision again, I loved the burden...

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