She held the nose rope of Old Bear’s pony.

Old Bear looked on Winona, not with much emotion. It was true she was not beautiful.

He wondered why it was that the young men had come to his cabin bringing horses and rifles.

One had brought three horses, for he was a rich Indian. Old Bear could remember when the pony herds of the Hunkpapa were so huge that you could tell their presence from miles away, because of the clouds of blackbirds come to feed on the grasshoppers stirred by their hoofs.

When I was young, said Old Bear to himself, I would not have brought horses for such a girl.

He did not speak to her for this was the day of medicine, but he nodded his head twice.

He reached for the nose rope of the pony and Winona, not touching him, placed it in his hand.

Across the pony’s shoulders, as she did every Sunday morning, Winona had drawn blue jagged lines, for the flash of lightning, which would be good medicine for the swiftness of the pony; and a red circle on the animal’s right forequarter, which recalled a wound that Old Bear’s pony, one that had died long ago, had received when War Bear and two braves had driven a party of Crows away from the hunting ground near Wounded Knee Creek.

It was not the best medicine that Winona had done this, for she was a woman, but Old Bear’s eyes were weak now, and his hand shook. It was better in the eyes of Wakan-Tonka that the marks should be well made, than that they should be poorly made and the pony and its rider needlessly endangered. Old Bear had known of a warrior who had made paint medicine badly and his pony had been insulted and had failed him, and the warrior had died. And once a man had told a lie and his medicine shield for that reason did not turn the bullet from the rifle of a marauding Crow, being ashamed that it should be borne by one who spoke with a double tongue.