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"Do not let your spirit touch my spirit to do me harm." PRAYER TO BUFFALO BUFFALO INDIAN often arose before dawn to watch the greatness of the coming light, the first graying, the pale blue followed by the pink clouds; these pulled behind them the sun, forced it once more into the sky; pale morning light each day brought forth-createdthe sun. The Indian prayed his morning prayer to the sun, the giver of life, the giver of buffalo to man. But, likely as not, outside his tipi the evening before , he had cast a buffalo stone on the ground to foretell tomorrow's luck. Buffalo power and sun power intertwined to make good medicine. The man with a buffalo stone knew buffalo would fall to his arrows and rain would erase his tracks in front of pursuing enemies. At night, in the glow of the tipi fire, he told once more how he came by his lucky, buffalo-shaped amulet (pebble or fossil). He had heard it singing, he said, singing a song that his ears recognized as no bird song, the magical sound a buffalo rock sang. He had slid off his horse to search about the grass bunches for the singer. But although he'd searched until dark, sniffing for the odor such a rock emitted, he found no humped buffalo-shaped pebble, no curled ammonite. He'd ridden toward home thinking he'd heard a bird song, not a rock song. Then he'd almost bumped into a grey, ghostly 75 buffalo in the dusk, and he knew him for a sign. Early next morning he'd ridden back. There, almost on the spot where his moccasin had first stepped, lay his curled stone. Big Medicine. A male rock-see how it's wrapped-definitely a male. Once he had wrapped male and female buffalo rock together and they had produced little buffalo rock offspring-but everyone did that with buffalo rocks. Everyone had seen the care he took of it, greasing it with castoreum, wrapping it in leather; everyone had seen his many horses, his big tipi, his good wives; everyone had seen him cast his rock to learn the good days to hunt, the bad days to war, had heard his prayers to it, knew he wore it on his successful horse raids. A fossil, a pebble, curved buffalo-like, held buffalo power; a stone, carved buffalo-shape, held buffalo power. A rock, jutting hump-shaped above the grass, held buffalo power; any hunter riding nigh knew to drop an offering at it: an eagle feather, a bit ofclothing, a bead, an animal skin, a bit of pemmican. Anything to acquire a little of the rock's power. For buffalo were magic. Some believed they had the power, after being eaten, to reflesh themselves and live again. No man had ever scanned a land full to the horizon circle with antelope, with deer or jackrabbit, as Heads, Hitles & Horns Oftentimes a Plains Indian carried, for good medicine, an uncarved stone in which he saw a buffalo shape. Courtes), Provincial Museum and Archives of Alberta. he had with buffalo. Although a prairie dog town stretched for miles and teemed with bodies (the estimated five billions of prairie dogs on the plains outnumbered the estimMed thirty to sixty millions ofbuf. falo). only buffalo numbers filled the hunter's dreams; prairie dogs, like sparrows, seemed boy's prey. Also, lakes and rivers teemed with trout and bass, but gathering fish to a Blackfeet was downright revoltinghe 'd eat none of it. On the Pacific Coast, salmon filled the Columbia and the Frazer, but fish had little of the magical appeal that the buffalo did. On the Atlantic seashore, shellfish , like dropped acorns, lay scattered thick for the gathering, and alewives choked the streams, but no magical clam or godlike fish filled men's concepts of life and th e supernatural. No danger lay in these plentiful foods as lay in the chanced sudden reviving of a half-dead buffalo bull under the skinner's knife, no danger to give a harvester pride in taking such a monster. No sensuous pleasure of hands dipped into warm entrails came from these cold bloods. Nor did these plenties provide as much for a g

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