e tongue.
The name, like other Indian names, was very ancient. It was a word that
went walking in the beginning of the world.

Dusty Star, unlike his name, was very young. But he was big--very big
for his nine years. Even in the star-time he must have done a lot of
growing, for when the morning light crept into the tepee, he was seen to
be a considerable-sized baby--extra large for a papoose. And the
thoughts in his head were like the bones in his body--big, very big! He
soon grew tired of lying in his little beaver-skin hammock, slung so
cunningly from one lodge pole to another, and listening to the prairie
larks as they sang in the blue morning. He did such tremendous things
with his fat arms that the lodge-poles creaked. And he screamed with the
sheer force of being alive. When he fell out of the hammock and all but
broke his neck, his mother thought he would be safer if she let him
crawl. Even in his crawling days, he learnt a lot about the world. He
learnt how grasshoppers jump and prairie mice run. He wanted to crawl
right out along the prairie into the middle west. His mother caught him
just in time. After that, she fastened a deer-thong round his middle. It
wasn't fair, and stopped him being one of the greatest explorers--for
his age--which the world has ever seen. But it probably saved his life.

After that he grew up as all prairie children grow, with a great deal of
play by day, and a huge deal of sleep by night. And the sun and the wind
were great companions, and meant very much to him; and the sun baked him
to a fine redness, and the wind searched him, and seemed somehow to send
gusts along his blood. And often and often he would fall asleep,
listening to the eerie whisper and whack of it, when the poles creaked
and the lodge-ears tapped; or to the long sobbing chorus of the coyotes,
far out where the prairie humped itself to blackness against an
orange-coloured sky, and the east began to be hollow for the rising of
the moon. And where the wind ran, and the moon walked, and the coyotes
chorused, was to him a magical country, with edges as sharp as the
prairie ridges, that girdled all his dreams.

On the day that he was nine years old, Dusty Star sat outside the tepee,
blinking in the sun. From where he sat he could look far across the
prairies, and so observe anything that might be moving over its immense
expanse. For a long time he saw nothing at all. That was not strange,
since in that vast apparent fla