s
not allowed to take any covering with him, nor to roof over his shelter
with skins. He always had with him a pipe, and this lay by him, filled, so
that, when the spirit, or dream, came, it could smoke. They did not appeal
to any special class of helpers, but prayed to all alike. Often by the end
of the fourth day, a secret helper--usually, but by no means always, in the
form of some animal--appeared to the man in a dream, and talked with him,
advising him, marking out his course through life, and giving him its
power. There were some, however, on whom the power would not work, and a
much greater number who gave up the fast, discouraged, before the
prescribed time had been completed, either not being able to endure the
lack of food and water, or being frightened by the strangeness or
loneliness of their surroundings, or by something that they thought they
saw or heard. It was no disgrace to fail, nor was the failure necessarily
known, for the seeker after power did not always, nor perhaps often, tell
any one what he was going to do.

Three modes of burial were practised by the Blackfeet. They buried their
dead on platforms placed in trees, on platforms in lodges, and on the
ground in lodges. If a man dies in a lodge, it is never used again. The
people would be afraid of the man's ghost. The lodge is often used to wrap
the body in, or perhaps the man may be buried in it.

As soon as a person is dead, be it man, woman, or child, the body is
immediately prepared for burial, by the nearest female relations. Until
recently, the corpse was wrapped in a number of robes, then in a lodge
covering, laced with rawhide ropes, and placed on a platform of lodge
poles, arranged on the branches of some convenient tree. Some times the
outer wrapping--the lodge covering--was omitted. If the deceased was a man,
his weapons, and often his medicine, were buried with him. With women a few
cooking utensils and implements for tanning robes were placed on the
scaffolds. When a man was buried on a platform in a lodge, the platform was
usually suspended from the lodge poles.

Sometimes, when a great chief or noted warrior died, his lodge would be
moved some little distance from the camp, and set up in a patch of
brush. It would be carefully pegged down all around, and stones piled on
the edges to make it additionally firm. For still greater security, a rope
fastened to the lodge poles, where they come together at the smoke hole,
came down, and