Tanner; but
it also knocked down the pigeon. He then caught martins--and measles,
which was less entertaining. Even Indians have measles! But even
hunting is not altogether fun, when you start with no breakfast and have
no chance of supper unless you kill game.

The other Red Indian books, especially the cheap ones, don't tell you
that very often the Indians are more than half-starved. Then some one
builds a magic lodge, and prays to the Great Spirit. Tanner often did
this, and he would then dream how the Great Spirit appeared to him as a
beautiful young man, and told him where he would find game, and
prophesied other events in his life. It is curious to see a white man
taking to the Indian religion, and having exactly the same sort of
visions as their red converts described to the Jesuit fathers nearly two
hundred years before.

Tanner saw some Indian ghosts, too, when he grew up. On the bank of the
Little Saskawjewun there was a capital camping-place where the Indians
never camped. It was called _Jebingneezh-o-shin-naut_--"the place of two
Dead Men." Two Indians of the same _totem_ had killed each other there.
Now, their _totem_ was that which Tanner bore, the _totem_ of his adopted
Indian mother. The story was that if any man camped there, the ghosts
would come out of their graves; and that was just what happened. Tanner
made the experiment; he camped and fell asleep. "Very soon I saw the two
dead men come and sit down by my fire opposite me. I got up and sat
opposite them by the fire, and in this position I awoke." Perhaps he
fell asleep again, for he now saw the two dead men, who sat opposite to
him, and laughed and poked fun and sticks at him. He could neither speak
nor run away. One of them showed him a horse on a hill, and said,
"There, my brother, is a horse I give you to ride on your journey home,
and on your way you can call and leave the horse, and spend another night
with us." So, next morning, he found the horse and rode it, but he did
not spend another night with the ghosts of his own _totem_. He had seen
enough of them.

Though Tanner believed in his own dreams of the Great Spirit, he did
_not_ believe in those of his Indian mother. He thought she used to
prowl about in the daytime, find tracks of a bear or deer, watch where
they went to, and then say the beast's lair had been revealed to her in a
dream. But Tanner's own visions were "honest Injun." Once, in a hard
winter, Tanner