From a field in the fertile river bottom my mother and aunt gathered an abundant supply of corn.  Near our tepee they spread a large canvas upon the grass, and dried their sweet corn in it.  I was left to watch the corn, that nothing should disturb it.  I played around it with dolls made of ears of corn.  I braided their soft fine silk for hair, and gave them blankets as various as the scraps I found in my mother’s workbag.

There was a little stranger with a black-and-yellow-striped coat that used to come to the drying corn.  It was a little ground squirrel, who was so fearless of me that he came to one corner of the canvas and carried away as much of the sweet corn as he could hold.  I wanted very much to catch him and rub his pretty fur back, but my mother said he would be so frightened if I caught him that he would bite my fingers.  So I was as content as he to keep the corn between us.  Every morning he came for more corn.  Some evenings I have seen him creeping about our grounds; and when I gave a sudden whoop of recognition he ran quickly out of sight.

When mother had dried all the corn she wished, then she sliced great pumpkins into thin rings; and these she doubled and linked together into long chains.  She hung them on a pole that stretched between two forked posts.  The wind and sun soon thoroughly dried the chains of pumpkin.  Then she packed them away in a case of thick and stiff buckskin.

In the sun and wind she also dried many wild fruits,—­cherries, berries, and plums.  But chiefest among my early recollections of autumn is that one of the corn drying and the ground squirrel.

I have few memories of winter days at this period of my life, though many of the summer.  There is one only which I can recall.

Some missionaries gave me a little bag of marbles.  They were all sizes and colors.  Among them were some of colored glass.  Walking with my mother to the river, on a late winter day, we found great chunks of ice piled all along the bank.  The ice on the river was floating in huge pieces.  As I stood beside one large block, I noticed for the first time the colors of the rainbow in the crystal ice.  Immediately I thought of my glass marbles at home.  With my bare fingers I tried to pick out some of the colors, for they seemed so near the surface.  But my fingers began to sting with the intense cold, and I had to bite them hard to keep from crying.

From that day on, for many a moon, I believed that glass marbles had river ice inside of them.

VII.

The big red apples.

The first turning away from the easy, natural flow of my life occurred in an early spring.  It was in my eighth year; in the month of March, I afterward learned.  At this age I knew but one language, and that was my mother’s native tongue.