Folklore Tales Yankton Sioux

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“In the evenings of my boyhood days my father always told stories. I remember that I used to go to sleep while [pg 95] he was telling stories. This is one of the stories he used to tell: There goes a wolf on a journey. He came upon three buffalo. The wolf said to the buffalo: ‘My brothers, make me as one of you, and we will all live together.’ The buffalo told him: ‘Will you stand the life that we live?’ The wolf said ‘Yes,’ and they all told him to go a distance off and lie down on his back. The buffalo was going to make the wolf a buffalo, and he lay down on his back and sides and rolled in the dust, and then he got up and shook himself and he then made a plunge for the wolf and stuck his horns in him and threw him in the air. Just as he got to the wolf, the wolf jumped aside, and the buffalo said: ‘You made me make that hard run for nothing.’ The wolf said: ‘Try again.’ The buffalo said: ‘This time you stand up and I will come at you.’ So the wolf stood a good ways off. Just as the buffalo reached the wolf, the wolf turned into a buffalo, and they locked horns with each other. And thus he became a strong buffalo. He roamed with the buffalo for a while. The other buffalo went off a little way by themselves and grazed on the grass while the wolf-buffalo took the first grass near where he stood. While he was eating there another wolf came along, and he said to the buffalo: ‘Make me a buffalo, and we will all be brothers together.’ This wolf buffalo then told the wolf to stand just as he had stood before. This wolf [pg 96] buffalo lay down on his back and rolled in the dust and went for the wolf, and as he was going to strike him he turned back again into a wolf, and the two wolves were there together fighting. The wolf buffalo said: ‘I was happy as a buffalo, and was living fat—why did you come around here and make me into a wolf again?’ And he began to fight him. And thus the story ends. And this is why the Indians are always fighting each other.”


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