The Dying Grass, page 124
—but suddenly the baby begins to cry, so that later Springtime will be wondering whether it is certainly true what the People say, that the youngest child can often see what is hidden from the others,
and Black Eagle, unafraid of his father Wottolen’s nightmare, amuses himself by strutting around the camp in his loose soldier shoes;
even now when Red Spy and White Thunder come galloping up from the south, shouting: Stampeding buffalo! Bluecoats coming!
and Lean Elk sits slowly down, with his face in his hands,
Húsishúsis Kute pulling tight his striped blanket,
Looking-Glass shouts: Complete this talk! You saw buffalo but no Bluecoats. Bluecoats cannot come here. Hear me, you People! I am head-chief—
15
Whether his blindness has grown since Ground Squirrel Place
(perhaps senility now begins to grow up like a mushroom through his overripe heart, so that all that remains left to him is childish opposition to Lean Elk)
cannot be known; but the way to understanding his fatality may be simply this: When one is a lucky man whose luck has bled away
(Cut Arm devoured him; now he is nearly as poor as the meat of a salmon that has spawned and died),
habit may well be all that is left, and one goes on acting as if the luck will return, since without it one is certainly lost,
when he is lost regardless:
luck, like life itself, is no certain thing, but a loveliness which may alight upon my shoulder but more often seems to be some unknown brilliant quantity in motion.
16
Still our women, trusting Looking-Glass, carefully continue to pack the lovely bloody steaks of buffalo meat onto their horses and Cut Arm’s mules,
a pony cropping at dying grass,
and our forgotten old men smoking the pipe and uttering nonsense like magpies, pokát, pokát,
until Strong Eagle comes galloping, waving his blanket to show us: Bluecoats are here!
Some women begin screaming
(remembering Ground Squirrel Place),
the chiefs shouting: Young men, pack your horses and ride!
and the few women who are ready lift up their children onto the packed horses and begin to gallop north
as Wottolen runs for the horse herd
and White Thunder begins to feel something almost gleeful in his heart like a MONSTER swimming underwater: Now all this will be finished
—and White Bird remarks slowly: My heart is sad that we kept no scouts around our camp. Too late now!
while to his best men he murmurs: Looking-Glass is worse than nothing; he is a dead and wormy dog,
at which we do not even laugh, for it is so;
once again they have surprised us as if we were a herd of hoofed and hunted creatures running round and round:
therefore Looking-Glass has made himself to be not even nothing
(turning away, he pulls on his beaded gauntlets);
our best men,
who yet again believed him like children,
run into the southern coulees to prepare hidden welcomes for Cut Arm,
Ollokot among them, wishing that he could have painted his face one more time with the red earth that Fair Land used to prepare for him:
we are making the war-cry:
now we shall be quickly dead:
they are causing us to die
—while Strong Eagle, leaping off his horse, strips off his leggings and deerskin shirt; even if Ollokot will not do so, this man,
last of the Three Red Blankets,
pauses to paint himself black and red, then says: Now in only a brief time those Bluecoats will be here. I am going to collect their bones,
to which Toohhoolhoolsote replies: I am certainly ready,
as our dogs commence howling and snarling.
Now the first enemy,
newest of Cut Arm’s slaves,
begins to shows himself:
first his war bonnet,
then his grinning head, his painted face and shouting mouth puffing clouds of frost-breath as he screams his war-song,
then his naked shoulders
and the tip of his Springfield rifle already swinging toward us
as he comes galloping over the bluff on a spotted horse well decorated for war:
a Painted Arrow!—
with the hats of Bluecoats beginning to rise up behind him like mushrooms.
IT CANNOT SEEM RIGHT
SEPTEMBER 30–OCTOBER 4
1
About Asleep’s father shouts: My son, get your horse and ride away quick! You are yet too young; you cannot fight—
and Wottolen’s brave son Black Eagle begins running for the horses:
Save the horses! Save the horses!
(frowning in fury, he throws off his soldier shoes),
Young White Bird fleeing from the bullets of the Bluecoats and Painted Arrows, swimming across the icy creek
(his thumb-stump almost crazing him with chill-pain),
running, running,
barefoot and naked but for his deerskin shirt,
until finally a kindhearted woman sweeps him up onto her horse
even as Black Eagle, still unhorsed, runs up toward the frantic herd,
hears buffalo thunder from the south
(it is not buffalo but the Bluecoats, the Horse People, charging down),
tears his blanket into strips
and knotting them into a rope, he catches Peopeo Tholekt’s fine yellow horse, leaps up, and rides after the stampeding horses down into the coulee
where he sees many People already mounted,
shouting, milling, trying to catch our other horses,
because if Cut Arm gets them we are finally finished
(Looking-Glass’s daughters longing for Rainbow and the Three Red Blankets to live again and save us),
as Painted Arrows swoop in from the west:
but Peopeo Tholekt’s mother demands this horse, which Black Eagle must give her;
then she returns to him his blanket rope so that he can lassoo his own horse
and another woman gives him a leather strap with which he bridles the animal
as Heinmot Tooyalakekt,
he who was called Joseph,
and has been catching horses with his daughter,
whose round face and low forehead make her seem younger than her big strong hands,
throws her a rope, calling: Sound Of Running Feet, my brave one, my lovely one, hear me now: Catch a horse and ride away!
—to which she, wise and good young woman, wastes no time replying
(he will never see her again)
but looks for Yellow One,
Aunt Cloudburst’s gift,
and not finding him, lassoos one of Burning Coals’s quick stallions
(if he lives, the mean old man will be angry)
even as her father, seeing Black Mane-Stripe, runs to rope him for himself,
bullets singing like flies;
then, leaping up lightly onto her animal’s back, Sound Of Running Feet looks back once to see her father gazing directly at her, his eyes glittering almost as if in tears, which her heart will now remember together with that rectangular charm at his throat, and the V-necked fringe of his jacket
(on each of his sleeves a diagonal thick white stripe of quills, which gives way to dark stripes of quills)
as the rest of these People trapped there with horses begin to gallop away
from enemy guns shooting pim, pim, pim and kiw, kiw, kiw!
—uncaught horses stampeding with dilated nostrils and
Wounded Head’s stallion running loose in terror
as Sound Of Running Feet, now looking back for the second time, finds her father out of sight
(his heart is near exploding with sorrow);
and she is shivering as she goes
(wishing to be riding so brightly in that King George blanket given her by Looking-Glass),
and a Painted Arrow begins to chase her but is lured away by Cloudburst’s horse
(it is well that Sound Of Running Feet wears no pretty blanket);
while About Asleep keeps chasing the horse he has roped, pulling until the stallion finally braces his legs, snakes back his head and snaps his teeth at the boy
who struggles to leap onto his back as the Painted Arrows now ride up screaming:
About Asleep is too short to leap up like a man, but finally pulls himself on like some clumsy Boston
even as a Painted Arrow begins to level a Winchester at him:
this enemy’s mouth has opened as wide as it will go in a scream of triumphant murder,
so that About Asleep’s heartbeats begin to slow down; as his death approaches, each instant elongates, rendering him ever wealthier in life; there is now time to see everything:
his killer’s moccasins are so richly beaded as to be nearly ice-white, with lovely zigzag fissures showing the dark hide beneath
as he swings the Winchester around;
and About Asleep gallops away through the bullets
—kíw-kíw-kíw-kíw!—
to sweep up his younger brother, wheeling down into the soft low cañons in order to head north
and silently calling on his WYAKIN:
I am encircling; I am enclosing; I am circling as I go
—but as they flee, a bullet shoots off one of his younger brother’s braids just below the ear:
two Bluecoats are chasing them but this horse can gallop well;
. . . circling as I go . . .
the enemies fall behind;
but just ahead a Painted Arrow on a cream-colored horse is shooting at a woman
(his favorite sport):
Pim!
—she is galloping, galloping—
pim!
now she is flying down
to break her skull on OUR MOTHER’s frozen breast
so that the Painted Arrow, singing, vaults off his pony,
whisks out his knife,
bends over her and
then About Asleep and his brother have escaped beyond the rolling ridge
—but by now the People cannot catch more horses!
The Bluecoats and Painted Eagles are chasing them; they are driving them
as in bitter desperation we remember our name for Cut Arm: People Herder:
now he has herded our lovely horses,
the ones who have helped and saved us,
our friends, our wealth,
almost half of them,
so that our children and women and old ones can no longer flee;
hence the young men, wide-eyed and braided, gallop off to die.
2
Brave Cloudburst, who remembers how she once brought her husband a fresh horse when the Bluecoats were shooting at him at Cottonwood Place
(Fair Land, the one he loved better, still lived),
once more does exactly this,
minding Ollokot’s good counsel not to turn her horse broadside to enemies spewing cotton-smoke at her from their carbines
(she longs to kill them all);
so she brings Ollokot’s stallion back down into camp,
but Heinmot Tooyalakekt has not come back, and Springtime crouches weeping, with the two children in their cradleboards beside her.
3
Wounded Head leaps onto a staked horse, cuts the rope and gallops toward camp to get his rifle,
coming upon that Painted Arrow who on a cream-colored horse chases another of our women, who tries to whip her horse away
(she is pleading as she rides):
Wounded Head still lacks his gun to help,
and so the Painted Arrow shoots her:
Tsálalal!
and now he is counting coup on her corpse; surely he will scalp her; he is singing his war-song;
and Wounded Head gallops past, raging in his heart,
while Two Moons keeps galloping round and round the camp, holding back Bluecoats and Painted Arrows as best he can.
4
As for the Bluecoats charging four abreast from the south, our warriors, hiding prone in flanking coulees, begin to receive them,
dropping down, creeping back over the wide ridge of frozen grass toward the clouds,
looking up over the gentle wide shoulder of the coulee, to the east, where the plain almost flattens, and cloud-shadows stripe the rolling swales of white grass:
here they come, the Riding Soldiers, the Horse People!
—now our best men are raising themselves up just a little but staying low in the dying grass,
taking aim,
preparing to shoot from left and right as they gallop near,
the bugle screaming:
Cut Arm is galloping down! Where did he come from?
Where is his blue suit?
Kill the trumpeter!
No, it cannot be Cut Arm. Those are other Bluecoats.
Then why do they kill us?
—and as these enemies halt where OUR MOTHER suddenly steepens,
their horses rearing back, slipping in the icy grass,
with the Wallowa People’s lodges in sight below,
our best men leap up in a line to shoot point-blank.
5
Praying to THE ONE ABOVE
and singing his WYAKIN song,
Heinmot Tooyalakekt, leaping on Black Mane-Stripe,
gallops straight toward the Painted Arrows,
who are parading around, pretending to be brave,
seeking to catch stray horses and bridle them with brittle dead grass:
so he is met by a scout in a white shirt on a white war pony, his long loose white shirt cinched around his waist by a full cartridge belt which shines like the autumn sun: he is singing a Painted Arrow song and raising his rifle and
then rides through them all
(they are screaming in disappointment),
next passing the Bluecoats
as they shoot holes in his clothes and wound his dear horse;
indeed he has returned, down into the Place of the Manure Fires,
hastening along the dark creek,
passing the lodges on the east bank,
galloping up onto the tongue of flat land southeast of White Bird’s People,
who are running and shouting all together so that for an instant their bewilderment infects him,
then across the small dip, the creek wriggling at his left,
he comes home
where Ollokot is not
and Good Woman cannot be seen
but Springtime, his lovely síikstiwaa, stands waiting
(she has finally made herself brave),
holding out his rifle: My husband, here is your gun. Fight!
6
Rushing south toward the guns’ voices in the smooth hills, despairing for the People and himself
as Bluecoats fall dead off their horses
and their dead horses come tumbling down,
tsálalal!
so that our enemies now dismount again to fight
just as at Sparse-Snowed Place
and Place Like Split Rock
(we have shot their bugler; we are killing their officers),
he leaps off Black Mane-Stripe to meet Ollokot,
he who leads the young men,
but Ollokot is already dead, with a bullet in his skull.
7
Cloudburst and Good Woman are not here to know; Springtime has not yet been told; but our young men’s hearts are raging and grieving,
Lean Elk running toward this fight
(longing for Shore Crossing’s buffalo gun),
and Two Moons showing the young boys where to begin digging rifle-pits before he too comes running, with his Springfield upraised and a round chambered in it:
on that high bluff the Bluecoats now try to fire their big gun, but since they cannot depress its barrel, the shell flies laughably over our heads.
Seeing his younger brother thus dead in the stiff grey grass, Heinmot Tooyalakekt tells the warriors: We must complete our hearts without him. Since we have left our home forever, we can do no better than die for our women and children.
8
Even our oldest chiefs are now shouting, riding, fighting,
the Bluecoats firing ever more pressingly,
the first of them now galloping into our camp:
we kill three of them
(Heinmot Tooyalakekt shooting well)
but they kill six of us before we drive them out
(Red Owl is now dead: first he lost his country, then his life);
so we are stripping rifles and cartridges from the Horse People’s corpses
(Lean Elk is digging a rifle-pit on the brow of the hill
and White Thunder keeps aiming at each Bluecoat until his bullets are gone):
for a raven’s wingbeat our hearts are clear
unwrapping our Medicine bundles, we put them on for the last time,
and for the last time Red Spy sings out the scalp halloo
as White Bird says: We must send word to Sitting Bull.
Hear me; I saw a woman escape; perhaps she is now already among the Cutthroats—
Where is my husband? Tell me, where is my niece?
My People, we must dig in and wait.
9
As an officer in a light shortcoat
(his white charger already dead)
kneels down to reload his pistol, White Thunder shoots him in the neck:
Áhahhahahahahahahahaha!
(with this Winchester it is easy)
—Bluecoats falling tsálalal, horse-holders taking their places,
loosed horses whinnying back to the Bluecoat chief’s house
and Red Spy shooting away the last of his .50 calibre exploding bullets
