Book excerpt: Saynday's People brings together two related volumes by the distinguished ethnologist and author Alice Marriott. The Saynday of the title and the central figure of Winter-Telling Stories is a combination of trickster and hero peculiar to Asiatic and American Indian mythology. He could do almost anything when he was using his medicine power for good, but Saynday was a great joker and when playing tricks often got what was coming to him. Indians on Horseback is both a history of the Kiowas and a vivid account of their way of life. The narrative is enriched not only by detailed descriptions of how these first Americans made moccasins and cradles, thread and arrows and tipis, but also by a Plains Indian cookbook which includes recipes for such dishes as pemmican and stone-boiled buffalo.