y fire. So--this white dog--a
member of our household, a co-habitant of our wigwam, and on the
smoke that arises from the purging fires will arise also the
thanksgivings of all those who desire that the Great Spirit in His
happy hunting grounds will forever smoke His pipe of peace, for
peace is between Him and His children for all time."

The mournful voice ceases. Again the hollow pulsing of the Indian
drum, the purring, flexible step of cushioned feet. I lift my head,
which has been bowed on the chair before me. It is St. Paul's after
all--and the clear boy-voices rise above the rich echoes of the
organ.

As It Was in the Beginning

They account for it by the fact that I am a Redskin, but I am
something else, too--I am a woman.

I remember the first time I saw him. He came up the trail with some
Hudson's Bay trappers, and they stopped at the door of my father's
tepee. He seemed even then, fourteen years ago, an old man; his hair
seemed just as thin and white, his hands just as trembling and
fleshless as they were a month since, when I saw him for what I pray
his God is the last time.

My father sat in the tepee, polishing buffalo horns and smoking; my
mother, wrapped in her blanket, crouched over her quill-work, on the
buffalo-skin at his side; I was lounging at the doorway, idling,
watching, as I always watched, the thin, distant line of sky and
prairie; wondering, as I always wondered, what lay beyond it. Then
he came, this gentle old man with his white hair and thin, pale
face. He wore a long black coat, which I now know was the sign of
his office, and he carried a black leather-covered book, which, in
all the years I have known him, I have never seen him without.

The trappers explained to my father who he was, the Great Teacher,
the heart's Medicine Man, the "Blackcoat" we had heard of, who
brought peace where there was war, and the magic of whose black book
brought greater things than all the Happy Hunting Grounds of our
ancestors.

He told us many things that day, for he could speak the Cree tongue,
and my father listened, and listened, and when at last they left us,
my father said for him to come and sit within the tepee again.

He came, all the time he came, and my father welcomed him, but my
mother always sat in silence at work with the quills; my mother
never liked the Great "Blackcoat."

His stories fascinated me. I used to listen intently to the tale of
the strange new place he called "