During a time of hardship and scarcity, Lakota tradition holds, two young men are sent out to scout for game and see a mysterious woman approaching in the distance, dressed in white buckskin and radiating a light that marks her as no ordinary person. One of the two scouts is overcome with desire and approaches her with disrespectful intent; a cloud descends around him, and when it clears he has been reduced to bones, consumed for his presumption. The second scout, recognizing what he is looking at and treating her with the proper humility and respect, is told to return to his camp and prepare the people, since she is coming to bring them something of great importance.
She arrives at the camp bearing a bundle, which she reveals to hold the sacred pipe, the Chanunpa, and instructs the people in its meaning and proper use, teaching them that it connects the one who smokes it in prayer to all of creation and to the Great Spirit, Wakan Tanka. She stays long enough to establish this teaching firmly among the people before departing again.
Some tellings identify the destroyed scout more specifically as having been consumed along with the disrespectful thoughts themselves, leaving only bones and worms as a visible warning of what improper approach to the sacred can bring, a detail that sets the story's stakes from its opening scene and frames everything the woman subsequently teaches as something that must be received with the same humility the second scout showed rather than presumed upon.