Gà zélbé, hâu?

Zélbé (zaydle-bay) isn't a particularly easy word to translate. One would translate it one way in a particular context in English, and in a seemingly unrelated way in another. In Kiowa, however, it is one word; one meaning. Maybe you can begin to glean its meaning with these examples:

There is an old War Mothers song from WWII that has the words:

Tén á zélbé (tane ah zadle-bay)

which usually gets translated as, "he is strong-hearted." Seems simple at first, but what does "strong-hearted" really mean? Brave? Tenacious? Willful? In English, all of those things are possible. But combine that ambiguity with *this* translation, an excerpt from Scott Momaday's "The Way to Rainy Mountain":

When [my grandmother] saw or heard or thought of something bad, she said the word zei-dl-bei, "frightful." It was the one word with which she confronted evil and the incomprehensible. I liked her to say it, for she screwed up her face in a wonderful look of displeasure and clicked her tongue. It was not an exclamation so much, I think, as it was a warding off, an exertion of language upon ignorance and disorder.

He spells it his own way, but its the same word. The meaning in the two examples is the same. They only seem different in English.