žįhe ąnąbraži hǫpai waali ąskike

Surely there must be some way for me to do Osage without keeping myself up until midnight? If so, I haven't found it yet. Blame my obsessive nature. I spent what seemed like forever paging through Quintero trying to uncover the term for "a few days ago" that I knew I'd seen somewhere, but if it hadn't been that, I'm sure it would've been something else.

But I got your answer, innerdoggie! It's always a tricky business trying to turn LaFlesche's dated, sloppy, Omaha-influenced transcriptions into proper modern Osage, but I think his "mo˜-ga" equates to mąka. I'm encouraged by finding maka "skunk, polecat" in my Lakota dictionary. This polysemy might explain the byform "mo˜-ga gthe-çe" in LaFlesche, where gthe-çe (mod. leze) is a word meaning "spotted, streaked, striped".

So let's go with mąkaleze, since that has a pleasant feel to it. As long as I was messing around, I decided to construct a more elabourate sentence, incorporating the word LaFlesche gives for "opossum" as well. It's probably the longest sentence I've ever constructed in Osage, which means it's got to be erroneous somewhere!

hąkaaši ðaha aalee aha sįešta ðe iiðaðe ną aži hceka mąkaleze iiðaðeðe

night-3SA-late when 1Sa-SUUS-go whenever opossum MOV PREV-1Sa-see ITER NEG new skunk PREV-1Sa-see-DECL

"When I return home late at night, I often see a possum stirring, but recently I saw a skunk."

Notes: hąkaaši ðaha, glossed as "late at night", is actually a temporal clause, i.e. "when (ðaha) the night (hąą) gets late (kaaši). hceka is an adjective meaning "new" here used adverbially, i.e. "newly, recently". There must be a better way of introducing contrast here than using aži "or; but", but I haven't learned it yet.