How the Earth Became Bountiful (A Cheyenne Tale)

Long ago, the Plains were a hollow bowl. Babies too hungry to cry hung in their cradleboards from bare trees. When they could no longer bear empty cooking pots and hollow eyes, two warriors set out to search for whatever they could find. After seven days, a butte rose in the distance like a buffalo's back. An old woman stepped through the waterfall as if it was the flap of her tipi. Her skin was as brittle and lined as cornhusks, her hair as white as an antelope's belly. Above her cooking fire hung strips of dried buffalo meat. Why have you not come sooner, my grandsons? She handed the warriors two bowls filled with stew, two bowls filled with corn. While they ate, she pulled porcupine quills from a buffalo-bladder pouch, softened each quill in her mouth, flattened them between her gums. With an awl and sinew, she stitched the quills to a pouch shaped like a turtle, which would hold the earth's umbilical cord—a guarantee of its longevity. The bowls were still full when the warriors could eat no more, their stomachs firm as fish. The cowry shells sewn to the woman's bodice glowed like the moon's sisters as she lifted her arm, pointed to her left. In a haze of sage smoke, the warriors saw the earth laden in buffalo. Behind the woman, fields bristling with corn; to her right, prairies rich with horses. Straight ahead, they saw their own faces fierce as they fought alongside their tribe. And they knew this was an omen—that they would be victorious, that they would carry home many captives, that the storm clouds forming in the east were nothing but shadows.