Reading Notes Week 11: Myths & Legends of the Great Plains, Part B, "The Indian Who Wrestled with a Ghost"

(Owl at Night from Random Thoughts)

• "The Indian Who Wrestled a Ghost" - Teton Story
• I actually read this story at the beginning of the semester and wrote my first story about it. But I was having trouble staying under 1,000 words so it was not added to the blog stream for people to read and comment.
• this story tells of a young man who goes on the warpath alone
• he walks for a long while until he comes to a clearing in the woods
• he hears an owl calling
• in a lot of Native traditions owls are seen as omens of death
• foreshadowing
• he makes camp in the clearing and at midnight he is disturbed by the wailing of a woman crying "my son! my son!"
• the man covers himself with his blanket and plays dead as the woman approaches
• the woman lifts his leg and he lets it fall as if he were dead
• the woman pulls out a rusty knife to cut off his foot 
• he jumps up and scares the woman away
• when he gets up in the morning he notices a burial scaffold in the clearing and wonders if it belongs to the ghost-woman he encountered in the night
• he travels more and again comes to a clearing to make camp
• he makes camp and builds a fire
• he sits down to smoke his pipe and eat some wasna (buffalo meat mixed with fat and wild cherries - this type of mixture is sometimes called pemmican) 
• he begins to hear singing
• the singer came to the young man and asked for some food
• the man lied and said he had none
• the singer tells him he is lying so the man gives him some 
• fills his pipe
• the ghost smoked from the pipe and the man notices he has no flesh
• just skeleton
• when the skeleton finished smoking he tells the man that they should wrestle
• if the man bests the skeleton he shall kill his enemies and steal some horses
• the man agrees to wrestle
• they wrestle for a long time
• the skeleton weakens when it is near the fire and grows strong in the darkeness
• when the man began to get weary the sun rose
• he pushed more brush into the fire so it blazed
• the skeleton began to fall apart
• the young man won the wrestling match and so stole some horses and killed his enemies
• it ends by saying this is why you should always listen to a ghost
• Storytelling notes: I want to combine this story with the ghost stories I read in Part A of this unit and make a completely new story using elements of ghost lore from multiple tribes. 
• Bibliography: Myths and Legends of the Great Plains by Katharine Berry Judson