Page 42 - 1st Anthology 2011

As the story goes, some say it was a knife or a hatchet. She started trying to free that horn
from the ice. She was really trying to get it out of the ice, pulling on it and trying
whichever way to get it out. Every time she hit the ice, you can hear the ice cracking.

Then finally she got it out, and cleaned it off and gave it to her child. Then they continued
to walk again. The story doesn’t say whether the woman and the child made it across. The
story goes all hell broke loose. The ice started cracking, people panicking. Some made it
to the south and north side, people were panicking so they all scattered everywhere.
Some never made it out because they drowned.

At that time there was not much you can do. You either keep going because there was no
way of retrieving those bodies in the ice cold water. So the people on the north side got
stuck there or can’t get across. So they must of went back to set up camp.

The rest on the other side couldn’t wait any longer so they kept going. They probably
thought eventually those guys will catch up to us. They claim that happened at Buffalo
Lake. People say that if you stand there in the evenings you can hear those people. The
people who have drowned and that you can still hear them crying.

I’ve always wanted to go check it out, before I get too old. Nowadays they have new
machinery and it’s not hard to go back ten or twenty years ago. It was pretty hard to
travel, and now it only takes a couple hours to get up there. I mean just to see the place,
I’ve heard of it, read of it, and people telling me about it. I would just like to see it if it did
happen.

The people that went south kept going. I guess that’s the Apaches and Navajos. Over the
past year we had the chance to get all the Dene, Apaches and the Navajos to come to our
reserve. We got them together and got all the stories. To tell their version of what they
heard of the migrations. It’s just about the same, but it didn’t happen just that one time.
The migrations happened two or three more times. I mean they did migrate, and some
people would say yeah just that one tribe. It happened, and they came back and forth.
The reason why is that some say they did more or less following their food supply.
Wherever you found food, you had to go back long ago. So it’s very interesting and
sometimes it ponders your mind. We know it’s true and it did happen. I hear other people
telling stories about the same thing.

The Apaches and the Navajos are really hesitant when we have get togethers. Their
prediction on things like that are on their end times. They say if the Dene and the
Tsuut’ina come back together, time as we know it will end, and they don’t want it to
happen. So that’s why they’re kind of reluctant to come up to meet with us. Their
medicine men predicted this.

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