One day he was out under the bank of a stream trying to shoot the darting black birds which made their nests in holes in the bank high above his head. Because they lived near water, flew in a darting, zigzag way, and were dark like storm-clouds, these swallows were thought of as belonging to the Thunder. For some time he kept looking up and shooting with his little bow and arrow, but at last, he does not know how, he fell asleep and ‘died.’ His soul seemed to leave his body, and was in another place.

All at once he saw a man riding a black horse, his face and naked body painted with zigzag lightnings. This man addressed him: ‘Boy, you seem to like my birds. Look me over well, so that when you tell about me you will tell the exact truth. When I am facing anything, I do this.’

Then the man on the black horse rushed with his lance at a man who stood there and pierced him through the heart. Strangely, the dead man was transformed to a plant.

The man on the black horse continued: ‘When you have finished dreaming, you must do this.’ Then behold! The man on the black horse was holding a club. A cow was standing before him, a painted cow with a white face and horns and legs and tail — one somewhat like a white man’s cow. The man on the black horse struck the cow with the club.

[...]

Then appeared a man on a white horse who called out: ‘Do as I tell you, and I will be your friend.’ Then appeared a man on a sorrel horse painted in the same manner and shouted: ‘Look at me. You may have my power to look in four directions and kill a man in all four.’ The black horse had come from the west, the roan horse from the south, the white horse from the north, and the sorrel horse from the east.

[...]

Thus Bull-Standing-with-Cow was given the power of victory when riding horses of those four colors. This dream ‘made him brave.’ After that, he considered himself ready for war, and, somewhat later, fulfilled instructions and acted the part of a Heyoka clown, all alone.

Warpath: The True Story of the Fighting Sioux Told in a Biography of Chief White Bull, p. 12-15