The Dying Grass, page 118
She used to be Theller’s gal.
Well, that’s different!
Now there’s a full-barrelled Indian pony! Thank you, Mr. Joe!
Don’t shoot that one; I want him.
You can have him. The reds lamed him up,
—Wilkinson rubbing his sunburned nose
(although he would never admit it, even he has begun to long for a double handful from that big glass butter jar back at Lapwai)
and Perry, walrus-bearded and formidable in his old style twelve-buttoned overcoat, glowering as he rides this Appaloosa formerly belonging to Joseph and now supposedly compensating him for Diamond, who currently feeds the buzzards, raises his field-glass
as we approach the Judiths:
rising swales growing green and a few sawtoothed ponds flashing in the coulees,
and then cottonwoods and aspens, dark coolness of pines
(well, he can pray day and night until the bugler blows “Payday,” but he can’t whip Mr. Joe!),
wrapping our blankets inside our overcoats as we march a hundred ten paces to the minute,
the Judiths now fading into grey, with blue-green patches at crest and hollow
(the usual disappointment attendant on nearing mountains);
and Fisher and Redington still trail-bewildered, together with all their Indians:
Now you’ve got it, d——n you, keep it
(Colonel Perry, did I hear profanity just now?
No, sir!)—
left—
left,
until even Chapman wouldn’t mind if right now he could be riding his grey racer up Mount Idaho’s wide main street, which is demarcated by fences and steep-roofed houses, and instead of continuing upward toward the cemetery knoll where our innocent victims of Indian barbarity await the resurrection, it might be pretty d——d sweet to hitch the old grey to a post right here and take a sip or two of barefoot whiskey with Major Shearer, toasting the Brave Seventeen or even the Lost Cause, why in shit’s name should I care, then running down Colonel Perry’s cowardice at White Bird Cañon and maybe reconnoitering whichever Celestial beauties might presently be in evidence in the back crib of the laundry, although if the Temperance killjoys get their way we won’t have a single pleasure
left,
up the wide windy swales, a few pools of dark water, the Judiths falling away to the left, and behind, some lost buffalo in a hollow—
LEFT.
3
Guy, I’d like to ask you something.
What is it, father?
Have you ever been ashamed of me?
Whatever do you mean?
I remember one evening long ago—o, in Washington it must have been—coming home to your mother, who I’m afraid was wringing her hands, while Gracie was in tears because her schoolmates had called me a nigger lover. And you—
Please, father, how could I ever be anything but proud and grateful to be your son?
Of course that’s how I would have answered my father, whatever my feelings.
May I ask a question?
All right.
Well, what were your feelings about him? You never say much about Grandfather.
I must have told you any number of times about the Sunday he called me away from the upper grain field to come and dress for church.
No, sir, you never told me.
I never did? You see, he almost never prayed, so in those days I saw no reason to, either. But that one Sunday he must have been touched by GOD. He wanted me with him, Guy—but I preferred to stay home, so I pretended not to hear him. We worked so hard on the farm; and for once I felt like running away, or . . . It was quite a blustery morning; I could barely hear his voice. But I did hear it. He called and called—
After all, you were only a child—
He sent Uncle Rowland to find me, but I was cunning, and poor Rowland was only seven. I crawled inside the haystack, where I fell asleep. When I woke up, all was quiet. Only the cold Maine wind, Guy; I do remember that. Much worse than this . . .
And Grandfather gave you a whipping?
No. They rode home early in the afternoon. I could hear the horses far away on the road. And then I heard him coughing, coughing! And your grandmother was weeping. While they were at church his lungs had hemorrhaged, and, I’m certain that the cause was overstrain from his calling and calling my name against the wind. He was never well again. Thirty-seven years now it’s been. April thirtieth, 1840; that’s when he passed on. I can’t ask his forgiveness, so I ask yours—
Please don’t, father!
I did the best I could. Well, son, we’ll both be wise old soldiers by the end.
4
Well, Mason, it’s time to prepare our quarterly return of deceased soldiers.
Here it is, general, as up to the minute as it can be, given that anything can happen up to the thirty-first.
A sad duty, isn’t it?
Yessir. Mr. Joe’s quite the widowmaker.
He’s a very impressive Indian, wouldn’t you say?
I’d like to get my hands on him, sir.
5
Chapman, what will you do after this campaign winds down?
Make money, general.
Recently my family and I heard an interesting sermon on the topic Worship Not the GOLDEN CALF. Have you reflected on your soul as well as your pocket-book?
Sure, general.
What was your conclusion?
General, that’s a real poser.
6
Perry, will your men hold a little longer?
Sure, general,
because you’re the one who can go home, retire and play with your pet niggers. Sherman wants you out; you’ve got the golden fucking ticket. We’re the ones who have to be here.
Wilkinson, is anything wrong?
No, sir.
How are you managing, Wood?
Just fine, sir. And of course you’re looking as strong as ever.
Thank you.
Well, sir, the hostiles are still showing a lot of fight.
True enough.
General, how do you think they can keep it up? What’s Joseph’s secret?
You see, Wood, a tribe of Indians usually takes its character from the head-chief. If he loves them as a father should, then they follow and do as he says, and
The men will cheer and the boys will shout—
7
Rain stinging their cheekbones like sand, they march on to save America:
What’s the matter, soldier?
Well, captain, I’m a mite freezy.
I don’t want to hear that. Pull yourself together.
Yessir.
Let’s see your feet.
Yessir.
JESUS! GODd——d weakling. I’m disgusted. Fall out, and go see Doctor Alexander.
Thank you, Captain Perry.
O, go to hell,
remembering that April night in ’68 in the Malheur country when we made fifteen stream crossings and then stood perfectly still in the snow until near about midnight in order to attack the Pi-Utes by moonlight:
We made “good” Indians out of twelve bucks and twenty papooses and squaws, then destroyed five thousand pounds of dried salmon in their campfire without any d——d weaklings getting a mite freezy
and I was young and had not yet gazed into Delia’s face.
8
His breath is frosting the rubber blanket,
the platinum brilliance of the moon and all its light first a joy, and then, because he cannot escape his numb shivering, inimical, as if not the cold but this fiendish light were to blame for his sleeplessness—how it dazzles his tired eyeballs! If only Nanny were on top of me, or, better yet
—but why better?—
some hot and vigorous squaw who—
(or home with Nanny under a goosedown comforter, a fire on the hearth and
—but even in my visions she and I can’t be alone anymore, given the way that Guy watches me all the time now, while even Fletch misdoubts me in his earnest sad stupidity! D——n them! What is it that I am called upon to do or refrain from doing? I cannot stop a single thing, and anyhow Joseph is evil, because Mrs. Osborne and Mrs. Manuel
[if Nanny were in his clutches I’d]
)
Why they don’t make pockets for our overcoats, I’ll never understand.
That’s because you don’t understand nothing.
The new issue have got a breast pocket. That’s what I heard. I—
Watch out. Here comes the Christian Fool,
happily plain and simple in his 1858 sack coat—
What’s that black bottle over there?
Well, general—
You’re under arrest.
9
What’s on your mind, soldier?
General, do you think we’ll be spending Christmas at home?
We can certainly hope for that. The end doesn’t seem very far off. In the meantime all we need to do is to carry out our duty patiently.
Yessir.
Why’s he staring up over our heads like that?
Cut it out. Generals hear whispers better than anybody.
10
All right, Mason. Shall we release First Cavalry?
I’m afraid we’d better, sir. They’re in bad shape, and our supplies—
I only required a yes or a no.
Sorry, general—
No, Mason, old friend, I am. Forgive me . . .
Of course, sir.
It’s becoming a long campaign.
You said it, sir!
Then draw up the orders. They’ll be relieved to get out of this mud—
Yessir. I’ll tell Sandford’s bunch—
Excuse me, general—
What do you need, Wood?
General, a rider is here. He says the Indians have attacked the depôt at Cow Island—
LEAN ELK AND THE LUCKY MAN
SEPTEMBER 21–27
1
Scraping out the pale inner bark of pine trees to eat as if it were now winter’s end, and chewing on the last dried buffalo meat
(our present from those women-cowards the River Crows),
the People ride north in their tattering deerskins,
Lean Elk’s admonitions losing flavor like old camas bread
(he too has become one who is no longer eager to speak),
the sky behind us black as baked camas bulbs (some People say that the Bluecoats have set this prairie fire, in order to drive the game away from us)
and the next butte silhouetted along with its pines: black jaw of tree-teeth;
so that Looking-Glass,
who on the very summer before she was enslaved and sold to the Americans, as he went riding with his Crow friends to steal horses, saw from ambush and tried to kill Theller’s squaw, because she was
so beautiful in her night-blue calico dress constellated with many faraway circles
(she galloped away with the other Shinbones),
begins wishing to lead some People against Walking Cutthroats, Shinbones or Big Bellies, to prove that he can make himself better than Lean Elk;
Toohhoolhoolsote is now riding a deep-chested, shortlegged mustang,
Helping Another rides almost easily now between her husband and mother
and Red Spy, the hunting-skilled man, is singing; his new Crow horse has the speckled face of an Appaloosa;
but Sound Of Running Feet stares sunken-eyed as she rides, with the corners of her mouth curving down like an old woman’s
(when she begins shivering, Ollokot unties his otterskin collar and wraps it around the neck of this dear girl, his brother’s daughter),
Heinmot Tooyalakekt riding sad and quiet, tight-wrapped in his black-striped grey blanket,
Swan Necklace riding wide-eyed, as if he is being troubled by the ghost of her who was his sister, Where Ducks Are Around,
Strong Eagle yearning for getting-drunk liquid,
our old ones hoping to die,
the others desiring mostly to arrive
(so that the Old Woman’s Country has become as lovely to us as sunlight seen through the wing-feathers of a turkey vulture in the sky),
White Thunder and Red Spy longing for Bostons to kill, even women and children—for their hatred is now as enduring as the scar on Springtime’s arm;
Heinmot Tooyalakekt desiring to carry ever more things uphill for his tired women, children, best men, wounded and old ones,
our longhaired riders appearing and disappearing along the soft hills,
the moon as weak as the shinings of their brass bracelets.
That night Good Woman cuts down her husband’s old goatskin leggings so that Springtime will not be so cold. She fills Sound Of Running Feet’s moccasins with buffalo hair.
2
Looking-Glass sleeps easily among his wives and daughters
and Toohhoolhoolsote sleeps,
his snores frosting out,
and White Bird, untroubled by toothache, is Dreaming his way home to his country: Sparse-Snowed Place, whose steep-banked creek runs brown over grey rocks, winding between spiderwebbed trees,
down the narrow gorge of trees between steep grassy walls exactly here where we first prepared to kill Cut Arm’s slaves,
then deep down into the hazy blue morning cañon of the Chinook Salmon Water;
to awake is to fly up into the high dry grass and bare rock above the treetops,
up to the yellow-grass ridgetop with piney hollows (sky above and below);
then finally it is all evergreens, mostly tall cones of spruce and pine crowded together with brownish-grey darkness between their branches
where spruce branches fan down like spiderwebs;
while to sleep is to catch our blood-red salmon;
and Strong Eagle now finds himself Dreaming of a halfnaked Painted Arrow enemy on a pony,
whose long loose hair, and the striped feather in it, has been pulled horizontal by the wind; his nipples are hard with cold, his eyes and mouth unmoving as he lifts his “Yellow Boy” Winchester and aims at Strong Eagle,
whose WYAKIN will not come;
and White Thunder is sleeping; so too his mother Swan Woman and his war-friend Wottolen, beside the boy Black Eagle,
as Heinmot Tooyalakekt dozes anxiously beneath the blanket with Good Woman
while Springtime lies apart, holding the baby, terrified to close her eyes.
3
In the dark of the moon, Swan Necklace catches a Crow boy among our horses, and takes him to the chiefs, saying: Shall I kill him?
No, this child is but a little girl. Cut off her hair and send her home to the Women Nation on a bad horse—
Áhaha!
Girl, show us how you piss like a woman!
Let us ride her like a horse!
Crow bitch, hear me! Shall I put a baby in your belly? Go home and give birth to human beings!
Áhaha!
4
Before dawn,
while Kate gathers yarrow for her husband to chew, since his toothache has come back,
and Ollokot and Cloudburst inhale each other,
Heinmot Tooyalakekt
(he whom the Bostons call Joseph),
waking up when Good Woman yawns and scratches her breasts,
tracks a buffalo by its breath-frost
(discovering a small herd not far away:
the dark animals on the snowy plain black and white like the beadwork on Fair Land’s old cradleboard),
until like some walking cloud, this fine bull, darkly bearded, with his upturned horn-crescents shining against the fur nearly as brightly as his huge eye-whites, comes pawing toward him;
now as Heinmot Tooyalakekt raises the Winchester, the animal is lowering his head and snorting;
he aims:
Pim!
mud-clots stinging his face as the fleeing bull kicks them up;
now he is dead;
then the young men kill two tender cows
(any human being could do it; it is as easy as teasing Bluecoats until they shoot wild)
so that our women ride quickly to cut up the meat
(Welweyas first and proud with her Wilson skinning knife),
and by sunrise
(horses sneezing and shivering)
the People are smiling at the sizzling fat;
Heinmot Tooyalakekt gives meat,
seared grey outside and blood-red inside
to each orphan and to all the old blind ones;
they eat until they feel warm, and strength and hope rise back up into their hearts; then they feel sleepy,
but Lean Elk is shouting: Hurry, hurry!
even though Cut Arm’s spies, slaves and murderers must surely be falling away;
hence Looking-Glass,
he who now well earns his name of Wind-Wrapped,
begins murmuring to Peopeo Tholekt,
whom he twice persuded to ride to Cut Arm’s Bluecoats on that morning when they stole our country from us:
Kamnaka, our Kamnaka—
My dear nephew, Lean Elk is not one of us
(I am telling you three times),
for he has closed his ears to the weeping of our children; and our oldest uncles waver on their horses,
our grandmothers growing as fragile as pine moss;
soon we must cross yet another coldly boiling river before the Medicine Line; and on the other side of that river, trees withdraw themselves, so that new Enemy People will surely see us:
the Painted Arrows
and the Cutthroats (Sitting Bull’s People)
—although it is to them that we must come hoping to smoke the pipe—
not to forget the Walking Cutthroats who have always killed us,
so that then we shall be riding and riding without rest. Speak to the chiefs, my dear nephew! You all know that my heart is to do right always. I am telling you, unless we soon rest now, our horses will be no good, and our children will fall from the saddles.
Well, that’s different!
Now there’s a full-barrelled Indian pony! Thank you, Mr. Joe!
Don’t shoot that one; I want him.
You can have him. The reds lamed him up,
—Wilkinson rubbing his sunburned nose
(although he would never admit it, even he has begun to long for a double handful from that big glass butter jar back at Lapwai)
and Perry, walrus-bearded and formidable in his old style twelve-buttoned overcoat, glowering as he rides this Appaloosa formerly belonging to Joseph and now supposedly compensating him for Diamond, who currently feeds the buzzards, raises his field-glass
as we approach the Judiths:
rising swales growing green and a few sawtoothed ponds flashing in the coulees,
and then cottonwoods and aspens, dark coolness of pines
(well, he can pray day and night until the bugler blows “Payday,” but he can’t whip Mr. Joe!),
wrapping our blankets inside our overcoats as we march a hundred ten paces to the minute,
the Judiths now fading into grey, with blue-green patches at crest and hollow
(the usual disappointment attendant on nearing mountains);
and Fisher and Redington still trail-bewildered, together with all their Indians:
Now you’ve got it, d——n you, keep it
(Colonel Perry, did I hear profanity just now?
No, sir!)—
left—
left,
until even Chapman wouldn’t mind if right now he could be riding his grey racer up Mount Idaho’s wide main street, which is demarcated by fences and steep-roofed houses, and instead of continuing upward toward the cemetery knoll where our innocent victims of Indian barbarity await the resurrection, it might be pretty d——d sweet to hitch the old grey to a post right here and take a sip or two of barefoot whiskey with Major Shearer, toasting the Brave Seventeen or even the Lost Cause, why in shit’s name should I care, then running down Colonel Perry’s cowardice at White Bird Cañon and maybe reconnoitering whichever Celestial beauties might presently be in evidence in the back crib of the laundry, although if the Temperance killjoys get their way we won’t have a single pleasure
left,
up the wide windy swales, a few pools of dark water, the Judiths falling away to the left, and behind, some lost buffalo in a hollow—
LEFT.
3
Guy, I’d like to ask you something.
What is it, father?
Have you ever been ashamed of me?
Whatever do you mean?
I remember one evening long ago—o, in Washington it must have been—coming home to your mother, who I’m afraid was wringing her hands, while Gracie was in tears because her schoolmates had called me a nigger lover. And you—
Please, father, how could I ever be anything but proud and grateful to be your son?
Of course that’s how I would have answered my father, whatever my feelings.
May I ask a question?
All right.
Well, what were your feelings about him? You never say much about Grandfather.
I must have told you any number of times about the Sunday he called me away from the upper grain field to come and dress for church.
No, sir, you never told me.
I never did? You see, he almost never prayed, so in those days I saw no reason to, either. But that one Sunday he must have been touched by GOD. He wanted me with him, Guy—but I preferred to stay home, so I pretended not to hear him. We worked so hard on the farm; and for once I felt like running away, or . . . It was quite a blustery morning; I could barely hear his voice. But I did hear it. He called and called—
After all, you were only a child—
He sent Uncle Rowland to find me, but I was cunning, and poor Rowland was only seven. I crawled inside the haystack, where I fell asleep. When I woke up, all was quiet. Only the cold Maine wind, Guy; I do remember that. Much worse than this . . .
And Grandfather gave you a whipping?
No. They rode home early in the afternoon. I could hear the horses far away on the road. And then I heard him coughing, coughing! And your grandmother was weeping. While they were at church his lungs had hemorrhaged, and, I’m certain that the cause was overstrain from his calling and calling my name against the wind. He was never well again. Thirty-seven years now it’s been. April thirtieth, 1840; that’s when he passed on. I can’t ask his forgiveness, so I ask yours—
Please don’t, father!
I did the best I could. Well, son, we’ll both be wise old soldiers by the end.
4
Well, Mason, it’s time to prepare our quarterly return of deceased soldiers.
Here it is, general, as up to the minute as it can be, given that anything can happen up to the thirty-first.
A sad duty, isn’t it?
Yessir. Mr. Joe’s quite the widowmaker.
He’s a very impressive Indian, wouldn’t you say?
I’d like to get my hands on him, sir.
5
Chapman, what will you do after this campaign winds down?
Make money, general.
Recently my family and I heard an interesting sermon on the topic Worship Not the GOLDEN CALF. Have you reflected on your soul as well as your pocket-book?
Sure, general.
What was your conclusion?
General, that’s a real poser.
6
Perry, will your men hold a little longer?
Sure, general,
because you’re the one who can go home, retire and play with your pet niggers. Sherman wants you out; you’ve got the golden fucking ticket. We’re the ones who have to be here.
Wilkinson, is anything wrong?
No, sir.
How are you managing, Wood?
Just fine, sir. And of course you’re looking as strong as ever.
Thank you.
Well, sir, the hostiles are still showing a lot of fight.
True enough.
General, how do you think they can keep it up? What’s Joseph’s secret?
You see, Wood, a tribe of Indians usually takes its character from the head-chief. If he loves them as a father should, then they follow and do as he says, and
The men will cheer and the boys will shout—
7
Rain stinging their cheekbones like sand, they march on to save America:
What’s the matter, soldier?
Well, captain, I’m a mite freezy.
I don’t want to hear that. Pull yourself together.
Yessir.
Let’s see your feet.
Yessir.
JESUS! GODd——d weakling. I’m disgusted. Fall out, and go see Doctor Alexander.
Thank you, Captain Perry.
O, go to hell,
remembering that April night in ’68 in the Malheur country when we made fifteen stream crossings and then stood perfectly still in the snow until near about midnight in order to attack the Pi-Utes by moonlight:
We made “good” Indians out of twelve bucks and twenty papooses and squaws, then destroyed five thousand pounds of dried salmon in their campfire without any d——d weaklings getting a mite freezy
and I was young and had not yet gazed into Delia’s face.
8
His breath is frosting the rubber blanket,
the platinum brilliance of the moon and all its light first a joy, and then, because he cannot escape his numb shivering, inimical, as if not the cold but this fiendish light were to blame for his sleeplessness—how it dazzles his tired eyeballs! If only Nanny were on top of me, or, better yet
—but why better?—
some hot and vigorous squaw who—
(or home with Nanny under a goosedown comforter, a fire on the hearth and
—but even in my visions she and I can’t be alone anymore, given the way that Guy watches me all the time now, while even Fletch misdoubts me in his earnest sad stupidity! D——n them! What is it that I am called upon to do or refrain from doing? I cannot stop a single thing, and anyhow Joseph is evil, because Mrs. Osborne and Mrs. Manuel
[if Nanny were in his clutches I’d]
)
Why they don’t make pockets for our overcoats, I’ll never understand.
That’s because you don’t understand nothing.
The new issue have got a breast pocket. That’s what I heard. I—
Watch out. Here comes the Christian Fool,
happily plain and simple in his 1858 sack coat—
What’s that black bottle over there?
Well, general—
You’re under arrest.
9
What’s on your mind, soldier?
General, do you think we’ll be spending Christmas at home?
We can certainly hope for that. The end doesn’t seem very far off. In the meantime all we need to do is to carry out our duty patiently.
Yessir.
Why’s he staring up over our heads like that?
Cut it out. Generals hear whispers better than anybody.
10
All right, Mason. Shall we release First Cavalry?
I’m afraid we’d better, sir. They’re in bad shape, and our supplies—
I only required a yes or a no.
Sorry, general—
No, Mason, old friend, I am. Forgive me . . .
Of course, sir.
It’s becoming a long campaign.
You said it, sir!
Then draw up the orders. They’ll be relieved to get out of this mud—
Yessir. I’ll tell Sandford’s bunch—
Excuse me, general—
What do you need, Wood?
General, a rider is here. He says the Indians have attacked the depôt at Cow Island—
LEAN ELK AND THE LUCKY MAN
SEPTEMBER 21–27
1
Scraping out the pale inner bark of pine trees to eat as if it were now winter’s end, and chewing on the last dried buffalo meat
(our present from those women-cowards the River Crows),
the People ride north in their tattering deerskins,
Lean Elk’s admonitions losing flavor like old camas bread
(he too has become one who is no longer eager to speak),
the sky behind us black as baked camas bulbs (some People say that the Bluecoats have set this prairie fire, in order to drive the game away from us)
and the next butte silhouetted along with its pines: black jaw of tree-teeth;
so that Looking-Glass,
who on the very summer before she was enslaved and sold to the Americans, as he went riding with his Crow friends to steal horses, saw from ambush and tried to kill Theller’s squaw, because she was
so beautiful in her night-blue calico dress constellated with many faraway circles
(she galloped away with the other Shinbones),
begins wishing to lead some People against Walking Cutthroats, Shinbones or Big Bellies, to prove that he can make himself better than Lean Elk;
Toohhoolhoolsote is now riding a deep-chested, shortlegged mustang,
Helping Another rides almost easily now between her husband and mother
and Red Spy, the hunting-skilled man, is singing; his new Crow horse has the speckled face of an Appaloosa;
but Sound Of Running Feet stares sunken-eyed as she rides, with the corners of her mouth curving down like an old woman’s
(when she begins shivering, Ollokot unties his otterskin collar and wraps it around the neck of this dear girl, his brother’s daughter),
Heinmot Tooyalakekt riding sad and quiet, tight-wrapped in his black-striped grey blanket,
Swan Necklace riding wide-eyed, as if he is being troubled by the ghost of her who was his sister, Where Ducks Are Around,
Strong Eagle yearning for getting-drunk liquid,
our old ones hoping to die,
the others desiring mostly to arrive
(so that the Old Woman’s Country has become as lovely to us as sunlight seen through the wing-feathers of a turkey vulture in the sky),
White Thunder and Red Spy longing for Bostons to kill, even women and children—for their hatred is now as enduring as the scar on Springtime’s arm;
Heinmot Tooyalakekt desiring to carry ever more things uphill for his tired women, children, best men, wounded and old ones,
our longhaired riders appearing and disappearing along the soft hills,
the moon as weak as the shinings of their brass bracelets.
That night Good Woman cuts down her husband’s old goatskin leggings so that Springtime will not be so cold. She fills Sound Of Running Feet’s moccasins with buffalo hair.
2
Looking-Glass sleeps easily among his wives and daughters
and Toohhoolhoolsote sleeps,
his snores frosting out,
and White Bird, untroubled by toothache, is Dreaming his way home to his country: Sparse-Snowed Place, whose steep-banked creek runs brown over grey rocks, winding between spiderwebbed trees,
down the narrow gorge of trees between steep grassy walls exactly here where we first prepared to kill Cut Arm’s slaves,
then deep down into the hazy blue morning cañon of the Chinook Salmon Water;
to awake is to fly up into the high dry grass and bare rock above the treetops,
up to the yellow-grass ridgetop with piney hollows (sky above and below);
then finally it is all evergreens, mostly tall cones of spruce and pine crowded together with brownish-grey darkness between their branches
where spruce branches fan down like spiderwebs;
while to sleep is to catch our blood-red salmon;
and Strong Eagle now finds himself Dreaming of a halfnaked Painted Arrow enemy on a pony,
whose long loose hair, and the striped feather in it, has been pulled horizontal by the wind; his nipples are hard with cold, his eyes and mouth unmoving as he lifts his “Yellow Boy” Winchester and aims at Strong Eagle,
whose WYAKIN will not come;
and White Thunder is sleeping; so too his mother Swan Woman and his war-friend Wottolen, beside the boy Black Eagle,
as Heinmot Tooyalakekt dozes anxiously beneath the blanket with Good Woman
while Springtime lies apart, holding the baby, terrified to close her eyes.
3
In the dark of the moon, Swan Necklace catches a Crow boy among our horses, and takes him to the chiefs, saying: Shall I kill him?
No, this child is but a little girl. Cut off her hair and send her home to the Women Nation on a bad horse—
Áhaha!
Girl, show us how you piss like a woman!
Let us ride her like a horse!
Crow bitch, hear me! Shall I put a baby in your belly? Go home and give birth to human beings!
Áhaha!
4
Before dawn,
while Kate gathers yarrow for her husband to chew, since his toothache has come back,
and Ollokot and Cloudburst inhale each other,
Heinmot Tooyalakekt
(he whom the Bostons call Joseph),
waking up when Good Woman yawns and scratches her breasts,
tracks a buffalo by its breath-frost
(discovering a small herd not far away:
the dark animals on the snowy plain black and white like the beadwork on Fair Land’s old cradleboard),
until like some walking cloud, this fine bull, darkly bearded, with his upturned horn-crescents shining against the fur nearly as brightly as his huge eye-whites, comes pawing toward him;
now as Heinmot Tooyalakekt raises the Winchester, the animal is lowering his head and snorting;
he aims:
Pim!
mud-clots stinging his face as the fleeing bull kicks them up;
now he is dead;
then the young men kill two tender cows
(any human being could do it; it is as easy as teasing Bluecoats until they shoot wild)
so that our women ride quickly to cut up the meat
(Welweyas first and proud with her Wilson skinning knife),
and by sunrise
(horses sneezing and shivering)
the People are smiling at the sizzling fat;
Heinmot Tooyalakekt gives meat,
seared grey outside and blood-red inside
to each orphan and to all the old blind ones;
they eat until they feel warm, and strength and hope rise back up into their hearts; then they feel sleepy,
but Lean Elk is shouting: Hurry, hurry!
even though Cut Arm’s spies, slaves and murderers must surely be falling away;
hence Looking-Glass,
he who now well earns his name of Wind-Wrapped,
begins murmuring to Peopeo Tholekt,
whom he twice persuded to ride to Cut Arm’s Bluecoats on that morning when they stole our country from us:
Kamnaka, our Kamnaka—
My dear nephew, Lean Elk is not one of us
(I am telling you three times),
for he has closed his ears to the weeping of our children; and our oldest uncles waver on their horses,
our grandmothers growing as fragile as pine moss;
soon we must cross yet another coldly boiling river before the Medicine Line; and on the other side of that river, trees withdraw themselves, so that new Enemy People will surely see us:
the Painted Arrows
and the Cutthroats (Sitting Bull’s People)
—although it is to them that we must come hoping to smoke the pipe—
not to forget the Walking Cutthroats who have always killed us,
so that then we shall be riding and riding without rest. Speak to the chiefs, my dear nephew! You all know that my heart is to do right always. I am telling you, unless we soon rest now, our horses will be no good, and our children will fall from the saddles.
