Russell was always keenly interested in Blackfoot Indian mythology. In 1919, for a letter to his friend the writer Frank Linderman, he painted a watercolor vignette of a character named Napa, or Old Man, leaning on a lance and listening to an owl speak into his ear. Five years later Russell created a model of this subject to be cast into bronze. A typescript in Russell’s papers bearing notations in Nancy Russell’s hand describes the subject in greater detail. The man crouching is The-Eagle-Ribs, a Blackfoot warrior who is on the trail of Crow enemies who have stolen his horses. Mrs. Russell continues: “The owl, which could see at night, was the ’Ghost Bird’. . . . Leaving his young men in a fireless camp, [The-Eagle-Ribs] has sought out a secluded spot. . . . Here he [has] lighted a small fire; here he [has] smoked the sacred medicine pipe; here he [has] laid his troubles before Manitou, and implored the Great Spirit to bare the ’Secrets of the Night.’ The ’Ghost Bird’ has come. Perched on The-Eagle-Ribs’ right shoulder, he delivers his message from the Shadow Land.” Russell completed the model for Secrets of the Night, along with several others, during his stay in California in early 1926, the last year of his life. The clay models were then transferred to the Corriera Plastic Art Company in Los Angeles, which converted the clay models into plaster for shipment to the foundry. The artist was in increasingly poor health, and he underwent surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, in July of that year. The initial casts of the bronze seem to have been made later that summer, and the example displayed here is one of two casts that remained in Mrs. Russell’s estate at the time of her death.