At last old
Mene-Seela, or Red-Water, who sat by himself at one side, looked up
with his withered face, and said he had always known what the thunder
was.
It was a great black bird; and once he had seen it, in a dream,
swooping down from the Black Hills, with its loud roaring wings; and
when it flapped them over a lake, they struck lightning from the
water.
"The thunder is bad," said another old man, who sat muffled in his
buffalo robe; "he killed my brother last summer."
Reynal, at my request, asked for an explanation; but the old man
remained doggedly silent, and would not look up. Some time after I
learned how the accident occurred. The man who was killed belonged
to an association which, among other mystic functions, claimed the
exclusive power and privilege of fighting the thunder. Whenever a
storm which they wished to avert was threatening, the thunder-
fighters would take their bows and arrows, their guns, their magic
drum, and a sort of whistle, made out of the wingbone of the war
eagle. Thus equipped, they would run out and fire at the rising
cloud, whooping, yelling, whistling, and beating their drum, to
frighten it down again. One afternoon a heavy black cloud was coming
up, and they repaired to the top of a hill, where they brought all
their magic artillery into play against it. But the undaunted
thunder, refusing to be terrified, kept moving straight onward, and
darted out a bright flash which struck one of the party dead, as he
was in the very act of shaking his long iron-pointed lance against
it.
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