baby as well as the white woman does hers.
When the spirit takes its flight a wild howl goes up from the tent.
The baby form is wrapped in the best buffalo calfskin, or the best red
blanket, and laid away on a scaffold or on the branch of some tree.
There the mother goes with disheveled hair and oldest clothes, the
best ones having been given away, and wails out her sorrow in the
twilight, wailing often until far into the cold night. The nice
kettle of hominy is prepared, and carried to the scaffold where the
spirit hovers for several days. When the kettle has remained there
long enough for the _wanagi_, the spirit, to inhale the food, the
little children of the village are invited to eat up the rest.

When a hunter dies, the last act of the medicine man is to sing a song
to conduct the spirit over the _wanagi tacanku_, the spirit's road, as
the Milky Way is called. The friends give away their good clothes.
They wear ragged clothes, with bare feet, and ashes on their hands.
Both within and without the lodge there is a great wailing.
"_Micinski, micinski, my son, my son,_" is the lamentation in Dakota
land as it was in Israel.

The dead hunter is wrapped in the most beautifully painted buffalo
robe, or in the newest red and blue blanket. Young men are called and
feasted, and their duty it is to carry the body away and place it on a
scaffold, for the dead remain not long in the tepee. In more recent
times they bury it. The custom of burial immediately after death,
however, was not a Dakota custom. The spirit did not bid farewell to
the body for several days after death, and so the body was laid on a
high scaffold or in some tree crotch where it would have a good view
of the surrounding country, and also be safe from wolves.

WHY THE TETONS BURY ON SCAFFOLDS

_Teton_

In the olden days, the people buried some men on a hill. Then they
removed their camp to another place. Many winters afterwards, a man
visited the hill; but there were no graves there. So he told the
people.

Then many men came and dug far down into the hill. By and by a man
said, "There is a road here."

There they found a road, a tunnel, large enough for men to walk,
stooping. Other roads there were. They followed the first road and
they came to a place where a strange animal had dragged the bodies of
those who were buried in the hill.

Therefore the people refused to bury their dead in the ground. They
bury them on scaffolds where the a