or screens her head and shoulders, is the skin
of a buffalo calf or a deer, soft, white, embroidered on the smooth
side, and often with the head and hoofs left on.

"You must never forget, my little daughter, that you are a woman like
myself. Do always those things that you see me do," her mother often
admonishes her.

Even the language of the Sioux has its feminine dialect, and the tiny
girl would be greatly abashed were it ever needful to correct her for
using a masculine termination.

This mother makes for her little daughter a miniature copy of every
rude tool that she uses in her daily tasks. There is a little scraper
of elk-horn to scrape raw-hides preparatory to tanning them, another
scraper of a different shape for tanning, bone knives, and stone
mallets for pounding choke-cherries and jerked meat.

While her mother is bending over a large buffalo-hide stretched and
pinned upon the ground, standing upon it and scraping off the fleshy
portion as nimbly as a carpenter shaves a board with his plane, Winona,
at five years of age, stands upon a corner of the great hide and
industriously scrapes away with her tiny instrument. When the mother
stops to sharpen her tool, the little woman always sharpens hers also.
Perhaps there is water to be fetched in bags made from the dried
pericardium of an animal; the girl brings some in a smaller water-bag.
When her mother goes for wood she carries one or two sticks on her
back. She pitches her play teepee to form an exact copy of her
mother's. Her little belongings are nearly all practical, and her very
play is real!

II

WINONA'S GIRLHOOD

Braver than the bravest,
You sought honors at death's door;
Could you not remember
One who weeps at home--
Could you not remember me?

Braver than the bravest,
You sought honors more than love;
Dear, I weep, yet I am not a coward;
My heart weeps for thee--
My heart weeps when I remember thee!

_--Sioux Love Song._

The sky is blue overhead, peeping through window-like openings in a
roof of green leaves. Right between a great pine and a birch tree their
soft doeskin shawls are spread, and there sit two Sioux maidens amid
their fineries--variously colored porcupine quills for embroidery laid
upon sheets of thin birch-bark, and moccasin tops worked in colors like
autumn leaves. It is Winona and her friend Miniyata.

They have arrived at the period during which the