Hand painted or wood burned keepsake and music boxes [link]
I am without my home. I have a home, my teepee, and the Crows let me walk among them, almost as one of them. A ghost among mortals is all that I am. Because I am Blackfoot. I should have been killed along time ago during the Crows first raid into the Blackfoot hunting grounds. Perhaps it was because of my education among the whites the Crow elders decided not to take my hair. Or maybe it was because I managed to lay out two handfuls of their best warriors. Then a stone thrown from an overhead cliff took me down.
I managed to run away a couple years after my capture. Encountering some of my own people they called me Sta-Ai-Tsi-Nix-Sin, ghost story. The girl I was going to marry had found another. My own Father spat at me, turned his eyes to the hills. It was his way of saying that I was no longer part of their world. I stayed for many days and eventually gave up. No one would offer me shelter, talk, or accept me again. I went back to the backlashing Crow nation.
Then when the murders began eventually they came to me. Who better to talk to a spirit than one who was considered a ghost by his own people.
"Sta-Ai-Nix-Sin come and see hurry." The little Crow buck grabbed me by the hand and pulled. When I had returned from my Blackfoot brothers, I kept the curse they had placed on my head as my Crow name. "Feathered Deer is dead in the gully. He was one of our best scouts. You must talk to his spirit and find out who killed him." The boy grabbed my horse. So I rode and let him run ahead for a time to wean out his excitement.
"Ghost Story it is about time you showed up. Didnt Barking Dog tell you that it was a time to hurry?" The senior Crow scout gruffed at me. "Such a man would know a murder is important but you feel more important than Crow?" Coyote was never fond of me and still throws insults at me randomly.
"I commune with the spirit of the dead as he raced past us to bid farewell to his family."
"Then you would know who was dead and who killed him!" Coyote spat.
I ignored him and went to climb down into the gully to examine the body. The young buck was still not even in his prime. Lean legs had twisted in his death throws. I turned him to see his face. The front of his scalp gone, several holes with blackened flesh on his chest and a long deep cut in the upper right side of his abdomen. The dirt, dried grass and sage was soaking in enormous amounts of blood.
"Feathered Deer says that a white man killed him in revenge for a wrong the brave had enacted against the white mans family." I said slowly.
"Barking Dog told you the braves name! You are always a fraud!"
"Feathered Deer echoes that he is sorry for putting the liver-eaters revenge out upon his friends. He is not the first act of revenge nor will he be the last. There are at least four other braves going before him into the other world." I pushed my fingers into the boys death wound to feel his insides. "Perhaps you were with Feathered Deer when he created the offense, Coyote!" I could feel the cut on the boys liver, sharp and hard along the protective outer coating of the organ.
"No the Liver-Eater will not come for me. My eyes will be as the birds and I will see him long before he becomes visible. I will kill the Liver-Eater just as I cut out the heart of the Flathead squaw he claimed as his own." Coyote was visibly excited now.
"Get my horse Barking Dog."
"Yes Sta-Ai-Tsi-Nix-Sin."
I walked past Coyote and made a finger mark in Feathered Deers blood on his cheek.










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