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stinging their eyes, and making their throats hurt. During such times there might be much discomfort and distress, the mother and daughter huddling together in robes, trying to keep the baby warm, and they would murmur anxiously to each other about the safety of Hard Striker and Chiksika, who were living out in it somewhere without even a
wigewa.
The baby could feel their distress as well as he could feel the cold and the smoke, and he would cry a great deal then, his little voice muffled by the robes and the shriek and moan of the snowy gale outside. In this first winter of his life there were several weeks of such white and screaming weather, and then weeks when the wind would stop blowing and the stars would come out, but the still air would be so cold that trees would crack and the snow on the ground would crunch loudly when people walked by outside. The hunters found little during these times or could not travel back to Kispoko Town because of the cold, and some days there was no food anywhere in the whole town, and then dogs and old horses would be killed and divided. Several old people and some children died from the cold and hunger and from sickness brought on by the cold. It was not uncommon in the lives of the Shawnee to sufferlike this in midwinter. Some of the people lacked fingers and toes they had lost by freezing in winters past, and there was danger in going outside one’s lodge even to gather wood for the fires.
    Sometimes this winter there was nothing for Turtle Mother and Star Watcher to eat for days. This they could bear because they understood and knew it would end eventually, but when a mother has had no nourishment for a long time, she cannot explain to her baby why her milk is not nourishing and why his stomach hurts and he never has the good sleepiness. And he cries.
    But sooner or later a hunting party would return over the snowy meadow trail, wrapped to their ears in blankets and hides, their horses snorting frost, and these hunters would raise their cold-stiffened arms and cry a halloo to the village. Venison and bear and fowl, frozen rock hard, would be unloaded from the shivering horses and would be given not just to those hunters’ own families but to whoever was most weakened by hunger in the tribe. If there were five hundred hungry people in the town and one carcass, somehow it would be managed so that every person would receive either a sip of meat broth or a shred of flesh.
    But sometimes a hunting party would come in with nothing, nearly dead from exposure, and if they came when the famine was most dire, there might be at most a hunter’s lame, scrawny horse to butcher, and the people would relish a taste of meat, even though it was bad meat, and then with it stuttering and gurgling in their bellies they could smile and hope for another day, for another and luckier hunting party to ride in, for their own husbands and fathers and brothers to arrive, for a warm wind to melt the snow and ice, or for some miracle from Weshemoneto: an elk getting trapped in broken ice in nearby Scippo Creek or the discovery of a part of a beaver carcass unfinished by wolves.
    Then at last Hard Striker, Chiksika, and their hunters rode in across the twilit snow, yelling happily for help to unload and distribute the huge, hide-wrapped bundles of buffalo and elk and venison under which their horses were staggering in the deep snow. Soon, then, Hard Striker’s lodge was cozy with the heat from the cookfire and full of the delicious aroma and the flare and sizzle of roasting fat meat and the laughter and the familiar voices, happy, singing, tale telling. The baby was fed broth from a horn spoon and some warm marrow, strange tastes that caused him to look astonished and make serious faces, but then his stomach at last was content, and he went to sleep warmed by his parents’ bodies in their bed. And through the bark walls came thelaughter and pleasant voices of the other people of the village who also had been