Description
Attached with leather ties, the dance stick lies across the middle of the hide - this is the warrior's fallen horse.
The horse is painted blue and brown with white hail spots and has a mane and tail of black horse hair. He wears dangles of imitation eagle feathers, a macaw feather, a white turkey feather and glass trade beads and around his tail, a beaded blue band. A beaded buffalo amulet around his neck. At his mid section, he is decorated with a band of beadwork and a strip of red trade cloth.
The hide hangs from a wooden bow and tells the story of how the horse was wounded in battle - as he stealthily charged across the battlefield with his owner, he was struck with an enemy arrow.
The pattern running down the side of the hide (across the path of the enemy) are the tracks of the horse. The other side of the hide features a record of the enemies the horse helped to kill in battle (this is denoted by the black horizontal lines with triangular shapes and circles at one end). To either side of this central scene quilled dangles of imitation eagle feathers, glass trade beads and deer dew claws hang from abalone shell discs.
The hide is commercially tanned. Both the hide and dance stick are painted with acrylics.