Chapter 11
Over the snow to the “angry men”
The next morning I left most of my stuff in storage at the hotel (my car was still being worked on somewhere by someone) and told them I would be back in a couple days. I still laugh about that. I had no idea. I had a very full backpack and I was wearing about six layers of clothing as I waddled over to Marc’s house. I went around to the back of the house and found Marc and his wife in the kitchen. She was filling thermoses with coffee (I would have preferred brandy), and stopped briefly to tell me what a great trip I was going to have, how marvelous the people were, how interesting the village, etc. Basically she had the same excitement level as she had had that first night she invited me over. I am confident if you look up “enthusiasm” in the dictionary, you will find her picture there. Marc just stood and waited, silent as always.
Eventually we got back outside and headed to the garage where the snowmobiles were waiting. We tied our packs on the back, started them up, and left. I was a pretty dangerous driver for the first block or two, but there was no traffic, so we just drove down the street with me trying to determine how much throttle would get me up to speed, hoping I wouldn’t have to turn the machine because I had no idea how to do that.
As it turned out, I did not need to make any turns for about five hours. We got to the end of the street and just kept going. There was no road, but it appeared there was a regular path where other machines had traveled. I bounced a bit here and there, but mostly, I just turned the throttled with my right hand, held on tight with my left, and hoped I wouldn’t do anything stupid. That was the first hour. The second hour I began to relax a bit and look around, but you can probably guess – there was nothing to see. It was white in every direction all the way to the horizon – and the horizon was a very long way off.
By the third hour I was getting cold. This was the longest I had been outside since arriving in Dakota, and even though I had dressed in multiple layers, the cold was seeping through. By the fourth hour I was shivering. My finger tips felt like someone was jamming needles into them. How much longer? We were doing about twenty five miles per hour. I guessed Marc could probably handle much higher speeds, but I was not sure I could. Once in a while the trail would bend left or right and I was beginning to get the feel of leaning as I would on a bike, but these machines weren’t bikes and they turned hard. At least they turned hard for me. So we plugged along for yet another hour with me becoming more and more miserable.
Finally I saw some smoke on the horizon. I might have been able to see it long before I finally did, but I had my eyes glued to the trail to make sure I stayed on it. Minutes later, Marc slowed to a stop and walked back to me.
“This is a potlatch weekend, so there will be people from six or eight villages here. There are customs that go with the potlatch, and I could explain them to you, but it is probably easier if you just try to do what I do. Besides, the elders know you are French, so they will expect a miscue to two.”
“Actually, I am American.”
“That’s not a difference that matters here.” He chuckled to himself, apparently seeing something funny in my assertion and walked back to his snowmobile.
What can I say about the village? It took us another fifteen minutes to get there. The trail came over a low ridge and there was the village lined up along a small river, not that I could see the river. It of course was covered in ice and snow, but the banks were obvious enough. It appeared the river was being used as a highway by snowmobilers from the other villages. There were many tracks in both directions and lots of snowmobiles pulled up on the embankment.
There were about a dozen houses, all small and low, as if they were partially embedded in the ridge we came over. About in the middle was a large brick building I assumed was the local school. It looked huge for a community of this size. I would guess it could handle an enrollment of a couple hundred, yet I doubted the total population of the village reached half that. Whatever the general need for a building that size, it appeared to be filling that Saturday. Folks carrying all manner of boxes and bags were entering.
I followed Marc to one of the houses, his I assumed. I was right about the houses being built into the hillside. It looked like the back side was about halfway embedded. The house also had a fairly low roof which was covered in several inches of snow. The only other feature I could see outside was a fairly large propane tank – apparently their heat source.
Inside was dark with little light coming through the small windows, but all the walls were covered with bright blankets that looked handmade. As you would expect with the weather, the house was basically built around a large gray metal furnace what stood exposed dead center in the building. Behind it appeared to be two bedrooms and a bath. In front of it were the living room and kitchen. There were three women in the kitchen, all engaged in preparing some kind of food, but they all turned and came to Marc the minute he come through the door.
I have no idea what they all said, since they spoke Sioux, but I gathered from gestures that Marc was introducing me, and that got the women to look at me briefly and smile, and then they were on about something else, which started pleasant enough, but gradually moved to some other topic that seemed to upset them. Through that second part of the conversation I started hearing a phrase in French – “angry men.” The first time I heard it, I thought I was imagining it, but it was repeated several times. “Angry men.” Marc was listening to them, seemed to be asking questions, and occasionally looked towards the school. When he got concerned, I got concerned. Who were these angry men? Had there been a fight?
Eventually they reached some sort of conclusion, and Marc gave them each a hug before leading me back out into the cold.
“Did I hear something about angry men?” I asked as we walked through the snow to the school. The snow as pretty packed down, but it was still not an easy walk, and I found myself trying to watch where I walked, look at Marc, and look ahead to the school.
“I forgot that was French. We have no equivalent term in Sioux, so we borrowed the French phrase, and now it seems like Sioux to us.”
“So, was there a fight?” I can’t say I cared much about the etymology of the term. I was more interested in knowing what kind of event I was walking into.
“No, but there are angry men in the next village, so people are concerned. Let me see what is happening at the school, and I will explain what is going on.”
I left things there as we entered the school. What can I say about the school? It looked pretty much like any other school building I have ever been in, except the gym/auditorium seemed much larger than would be expected for a school this size. The school appeared to be a gym with a few classrooms attached.
Big as the gym was, it appeared to be undersized for the crowd. Folks were everywhere. There were tables piled with food, coats and such stacked in every direction, and people mixing and mingling everywhere. Marc led me around to a few groups of men he knew and introduced me. There were a few sentences in French for me, and then they all returned to Sioux, and I stood waiting for Marc to take me to another group. There seemed to be lots of topics of conversation, but I did hear “angry men” repeated in each group, and each time it was repeated, there seemed to be concern.
A half an hour or so later, Marc had pretty much worked the room, and he led me back outside. To my chagrin he decided that outdoors was the best place for us to talk. I was still cold from the snowmobile ride, and while the time in the gym had helped, I felt I was constantly on the edge of shivering. Marc seemed to have no problem with the cold, nor did he seem to notice my discomfort. I hoped this wasn’t going to be a long conversation.
“No one seems to know why they are in the next village, but it is surprising that there are so many. One man said there might be two dozen. That has to be wrong.”
“Marc, I have no idea what you are talking about.” I have to admit to being a bit impatient as well a
s very cold.
“I don’t know when it started, certainly decades ago, but angry men started moving to the southern edge of Dakota, just outside the province – off Sioux lands. We call them angry men because we don’t have a better way to describe them. They sometimes have a wife, but usually they come alone. Maybe they were divorced, maybe they were fired, maybe they are just nasty people. But they are always angry. They find a small place out in the desert, and they hole up there. They have lots of guns, and they hunt, and sometimes they come on to Sioux lands. Sometimes they are lost and need help finding their way home, but sometimes they cause trouble. When they cause too much trouble, sometimes they disappear.” He stopped and looked at me when he said the last to see if I understood. I thought I did. I also thought I would not pursue that issue.
“Now there are more?”
“That’s what is odd. These men don’t like anyone, not even each other. Sometimes you might see three of four together, but never more. That’s why I don’t believe there are two dozen in the next village. Even ten or twelve would be unusual. These men never congregate.”
“Will they come here?”
“If they do, there will be trouble. No, it would be better for us to go to them.”
“Who will go?”
“You and me. We speak French the best. We have some understanding of their culture. Maybe we can make sense of what they are doing.” He had more to say, but basically I stopped listening after “you and me.” Why us? Why me? I had no experience what so ever with loners living off in the desert. If they wanted to live off by themselves, maybe there was a good reason for it.
Marc had more to say, mostly about his plan for our visit. He seemed to be working it out in his mind as we talked. The only part of his plan that I liked came when he said we should go tomorrow. That might give me a chance to get warm again before we rode those damn snowmobiles again. Then he made the mistake of explaining why we would wait until tomorrow. We could not get to the angry men before dark – and – I loved hearing this – it was not safe approaching angry men in the dark. So what made it safe during the day? They were angry, they were armed, they were nasty people. What would make any of this safe?
I am not sure I ever agreed to go with him. He just assumed I would, and I never said “no.” How could I? What would I do, take my snowmobile back to DeSmet alone? No, I would stay with Marc and see how this worked out.
Until then, I would experience the potlatch. We went back to Marc’s house and helped the three women gather up food, and then we all went back to the school. At some point Marc told everyone his plan, and we were visited by a series of older men who put a hand on his head, spoke some words, and literally blew smoke in our faces. Marc told me that was a blessing. I tried not to cough during the “blessing.”
In between blessings, we ate. We lined up and took food from the tables, the process being interminable since we not only took food, but said kind things to the ladies who stood by the food. I found various kinds of meat and thanked each provider in French. They smiled and replied in Sioux. Eventually I had a full plate and went back to a table that seemed to be the Marc family table. I felt half starved, but I forced myself to eat in the slow, measured style I saw the others using. There were formalities here, I could see. A kind of etiquette. You ate a bit, commented on the great quality of the food, and ate a bit more. That stretched the eating out a bit, but the food was good, and eventually I was full.
Entertainment started some time later. First was a basketball game. It was a variant I had never seen before. It was seven on seven, and it was the roughest game of basketball I have ever seen. There was some dribbling, and there was some shooting, but mostly there were charges to the basket, with efforts at dunking or layins, each of which was matched by efforts to block the shot. And bodies crashed every time. Sometimes the ball went into the basket, sometimes it was blocked, but every time there was a crash of at least three or four players. The crash might lead to a pile of bodies on the floor, or it might lead to a turnover and a lightning charge to the opposite basket. But the crash happened every time.
There were referees, but they seemed to feel it was smartest just to stay out of the way. I certainly would have. I have played in some pretty rough games with my brothers, but this was a whole new level of rough.
The game had gone on for ten or fifteen minutes, and there was blood and sweat everywhere, when Marc nudged me and pointed to a corner of the gym. There sat the ladies. There had to be twenty of them. They sat perfectly still, and watched. They didn’t talk to each other or shout out comments. They were silent and motionless. They were sixteen or eighteen or twenty. Their hair was done up, their clothes looked good, and they sat waiting. Suddenly I understood the game. The battle was rough, but the reward was clear. Marc waited until I understood and then smiled and nodded. Every culture had some way for men to do what men do and women to do what women do.
What the women did came next. The game eventually ended, the men went off to shower and bandage their cuts and scrapes. They were barely gone when a group of men brought a huge drum out to the floor. Six men gathered around it and began beating and chanting. The rhythms echoed off the block walls of the gym. Suddenly the room had a very different feel to it. I would almost say religious. And then the women started dancing.
I have to be a little careful here, in case Elise ever reads this, but wow those women were beautiful. It really is true that dances are made for women, and women are made for dancing. I sat and watched for hours until I felt myself beginning to nod off. Marc must have noticed since he nudged me and said it was time to go. It was unbelievably quiet out in the village, just us and our boots squeaking on the frozen snow. Back at Marc’s house he motioned toward the couch, and I gratefully dropped there and was asleep in seconds.
The Canadian Civil War: Volume 3 - West to the Wall Page 11