61 pages • 2 hours read
James WelchFools Crow
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1986A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary
The next day, the party camps near Woman Don’t Walk butte. Fast Horse searches for the ice spring from his dream but cannot find it, and Yellow Kidney worries that Fast Horse’s rashness will lead their party into trouble. After four more days of traveling, they stop to rest near a Napikwan trading fort. Yellow Kidney takes Eagle Ribs aside and tells him to go scout out the camp of Bull Shield, a Crow chief who is a long-time enemy of the Pikunis. As the men sit around the fire, Yellow Kidney tells the group that they will travel through the night and strike the camp of the infamous Bull Shield.
As the men approach the Crow camp, Yellow Kidney tells White Man’s Dog to lead all the men besides Fast Horse, Eagle Ribs, and himself in taking the horses back to Woman Don’t Walk butte. After informing them of the plan, White Man’s Dog leads the four other men into the camp, where they mount horses and coax many others with them as they ride away. As they are leaving the camp, it begins to snow, and White Man’s Dog thinks that Cold Maker must be helping them by covering their tracks. Meanwhile, Yellow Kidney, Fast Horse, and Eagle Ribs prepare to run individually into the camp to steal more horses.
Chapter 5 Summary
White Man’s Dog and the other men celebrate a successful raid, in which they capture 150 horses. They are worried, however, since Yellow Kidney and Fast Horse have yet to return. Eagle Ribs tells the men that he dreamed about a horse wandering through the snow with split hooves and covered in sores. Behind the “death horse” (36), he could see Yellow Kidney’s face in the sky approaching the Sand Hills, where the Pikunis go when they die. Later that night, Fast Horse appears. When they ask him where Yellow Kidney is, Fast Horse replies that he last saw Yellow Kidney walking through the Crow camp preparing to take a buffalo-runner horse. While waiting for the others, Cold Maker came to him in a vision and scolded him from neglecting his promise to find the ice spring. Cold Maker transported Fast Horse to Always Winter Land and showed him his daughters, who were shivering because Fast Horse had failed to bring the clothes they were promised. His daughters had no eyes, “only holes like small ice caves where their eyes should have been” (38). Cold Maker tells him that he will give him one more chance at life if he will promise to bring his daughters “not only […] two prime robes but red coals for their eyes” (38).
Eight sleeps later, the men return with the horses to the Lone Eaters camp. When his father asks whether Yellow Kidney is dead, White Man’s Dog tells him about Eagle Ribs’ dream showing Yellow Kidney “on his way to the Sand Hills to join our long-ago people” (40). White Man’s Dog tells his father that although he trusts Eagle Ribs’ dream, he does not believe that Yellow Kidney is dead.
Yellow Kidney’s wife, Heavy Shield Woman, leaves her lodge after three days with her arms and legs slashed and her hair cropped to show she is in mourning. That night, she tells her daughter, Red Paint, and sons, Good Young Man and One Spot, that she had a dream in which Yellow Kidney told her that he could not return unless she performed the role of the Medicine Woman at the Sun Dance ceremony. The next day, she goes to Three Bears, the chief of the Lone Eaters, to request the privilege of performing this role. That night, Three Bears gathers the important warriors in the band together to ask whether they would agree to let Heavy Shield Woman be the Medicine Woman (45). The men agree to support her in the hope that it will bring Yellow Kidney back.
Chapter 6 Summary
White Man’s Dog begins to leave meat for Yellow Kidney’s wife, Heavy Shield Woman, so she can feed herself and her children, since they no longer have anyone to hunt for them. He has noticed a change in Fast Horse since returning from the raid. He no longer brags about himself, teases White Man’s Dog, or flirts with women. One day, White Man’s Dog confronts Fast Horse and reminds him to fulfill his vow to bring two hides and red coals for Cold Maker’s daughters. He believes Cold Maker is holding Yellow Kidney hostage until Fast Horse’s promise is fulfilled. Fast Horse tells him that he will kill the blackhorns for Cold Maker on his own and that he does not need anyone’s help fulfilling his vows.
After returning from the raid, White Man’s Dog realizes that people have stopped teasing him and started giving him more respect. He begins to spend a great deal of time with Mik-api, the village’s “many-faces man” (51), and becomes his apprentice in the arts of healing. One day, Mik-api tells him about a dream in which Raven came to him and told him about a “Skunk-bear” (a wolverine) who is caught in a Napikwan’s trap and needs their help. Mik-api tasks White Man’s Dog with freeing the wolverine. He goes up into the mountains and follows a raven to a snow-covered lake deep in the wilderness. Eventually, Raven speaks to him to tell him that he will not need his weapons for the task at hand and directs him to the wolverine, who has been caught in the white man’s trap for four days. White Man’s Dog frees the animal from the trap and gives him some of his meat. As he prepares to leave, Raven tells him that he will dream of what has happened and come to “possess the magic of Skunk Bear” (59).
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
The early chapters highlight the importance of dreams and visions to the Pikuni people and the overall narrative. Fast Horse’s failure to fulfill the promises he made to Cold Maker during his two dreams before and after the raid are taken seriously as possible reasons for Yellow Kidney’s disappearance. When Fast Horse fails to find the ice spring that Cold Maker told him about in his dream, the men fear this will mean trouble for the raid.
When Fast Horse has another vision after the raid, he is given another task: to bring buffalo robes for Cold Maker’s daughters, along with red coals for their eyes. White Man’s Dog worries that Fast Horse’s failure to fulfill his second vows to Cold Maker could be the reason that Yellow Kidney has yet to return to the Lone Eaters camp. White Man’s Dog, Eagle Ribs, and Heavy Shield Woman also have important dreams. White Man’s Dog struggles to interpret his dream about the “white-faced girl,” but worries it could mean trouble for their raid; when Yellow Kidney fails to return, it appears that it may indeed have been a bad omen. Eagle Ribs has a dream in which he sees a “death horse” and an image of Yellow Kidney going to the Sand Hills, which the men take to mean that Yellow Kidney is dead. Finally, Heavy Shield Woman dreams that her husband will come back to her only if she takes on the difficult role of Medicine Woman at the Sun Ceremony. The fact that each of these dreams are taken very seriously by the dreamer and the community testifies to the way that dreams represent meaningful sources of authority in the culture.
The animals and natural phenomena (Sun Chief, Cold Maker, etc.) that the Pikunis worship are often personified in dreams and visions. For instance, Mik-api, the “many-faces man” who serves as a spiritual guide and healer in the Lone Eater community, has a dream in which Raven tells him to send a young man to free a wolverine from a Napikwan trap. This dream leads White Man’s Dog to encounter his animal-helper for the first time and to have his first experience communing with the spirits of the natural world through his conversations with Raven. The fact that the wolverine is caught in a white man’s trap calls attention to the hostile relationship that exists between the Napikwans and the natural world.
