The boys cut some green maple twigs, and on these as an improvised grate they heated the bread and fried the bacon.
“I’m glad you brought something to eat, Mr. Barker,” Tim remarked thankfully. “I was getting very hungry. You called us so early this morning.”
“I did,” replied Barker, “because the fish run most during the warm part of the day.”
“Do they know when the air is warm!” asked Bill. “How can they know down in the water?”
“Can’t tell, lads,” Barker smiled. “You lads ask a lot of hard questions. I reckon they can tell whether it is storming or whether the sun is shining.”
After the meal, Tatanka smoked in silence, with a far-away look on his face.
“What is it our brother is thinking of?” Barker asked him in Sioux. “His face is sad and his eyes heavy.”
“I was thinking of my people,” Tatanka replied, after a few moments of silence. “Not long ago they lived on this great river. Now they are driven away from their river, Minnesota, where deer used to be plentiful, and where elk, ducks, and geese live still in great flocks, and the muskrats build many little houses.
“But my people will never come back. They must now live in the country of short grass and small trees on the River Missouri. A few more years they will hunt buffaloes, but the white people are fast killing all the buffaloes and making robes out of their skins.
“When the buffalo are gone, we shall starve or become beggars, or we must learn to live like white men.
“A spirit tells me I ought to return to my people.”
“You cannot return now,” Barker told him in Sioux. “We need you. If the bad white men find us, they may steal the boys and kill me, if you leave us. You must stay with us and go with us to the city, where the white people have the big war.”
“I shall stay with you,” Tatanka promised, after a pause, “but I’m homesick for my people.”
A flock of chickadees had been attracted by the smoke and the fire. They hopped boldly on the ground and picked up the crumbs of bread, and one even took a bath in a little pool of snow-water collected under the bank by the combined beat of the fire and the sun.
“The little birds bring good luck,” remarked Tatanka. “May be the big guns will not kill us, when we go south,” he added pensively.