Killing a Buffalo
Ethnographic Notes
Another vignette that can be linked specifically to Black Road. He is remembered to once have shot a buffalo cow, when a “buffalo bird” (cowbird) flew upward at the shot, and it was discovered that the bird had constructed a nest within the animal's thick fur. “Indians kept that hair [as talismans] a long time”(Meany, 1907). In Lakota, the buffalo cow is called pte, and the cowbird is “pecks at the cows,” (pteyahpa---Buechel, 1970: 448 & 449).