So this gravesite, the Elder that’s buried here, the story that my grandpa told me was that when he was a teenager they were having a drought and he had nine families living around him. So ten families were all living in a tent. And in this country, there was a drought. That year they were starving and living in a tent. He said that some of the dogs were dying because of starvation.
This boy he said went to sleep, he was a real young boy and he went to sleep and was starving. And when he was sleeping, his dad had tools for hunting for big game, like moose. He went to sleep and the boy was dreaming he saw that two lakes away there were two moose standing on the lake.
And when the boy got up, he took his dad's tools for killing moose. He took the tools and went out by himself. He didn’t wake his family up or anything. He just took the tools and walked back to the two lakes. He saw the moose from his dream, he killed the two moose. He was just a boy, so he didn’t know how to cut up the moose. He was scared because he thought his family would get mad at him. So he cut the leg out and he took the leg back with him to the camp. And at the camp, everyone woke up and found him gone. The parents got scared that their kid was gone. Everybody started looking for him around the tent. Yelling for him. The next thing they saw was the boy walking out with the moose leg and the tools that his dad had made. He walked up to his dad and the people all calmed down when they saw him. They all got excited when he walked up to his dad and put the spears and the moose hunting tools in front of his dad and dropped the leg in front of his dad.
His dad said, “Where did you get the leg from?” He told his dad that he saw in his dream two moose on a lake. So he got up and went out and killed those two moose. But he didn’t know how to cut it up, so he only cut out a leg, so they wouldn’t be mad at him. They were very excited and he saved the tribe that year with two moose. And that’s how his luck started when he was young. His story goes on until his death. Even after his death his stories still go on, and if we come here, they say that if we pray to him and give offerings and stuff, he might listen to us, if we do it right here, where he is buried. And that’s just one chapter in the story I’m telling you about this guy that is buried here. He was a spiritual leader, a kind of legend here for us.
So the gravesite looks like this, the tree grows all the way, you can tell how old and how big the tree is, you can age this tree and all this stuff around is just falling apart. Every year they come here and clean it up and pick up all this stuff. The people come here and they clear brush, they have cookouts. And they gather here and picnic, then go back. They used to do that once a year. You can see they still do that here. That’s the story I’ve been told by my grandfathers, that’s just the first chapter. Cool. Right on.