by Win Blevins
Stupid. Father, he said inside himself, I apologize.
Mother, he thought, picturing Annemarie in the trading post at the mouth of the Little Powder River, I will see you in the spring. Right now he took no joy in this prospect.
God, if he could only stop his mind from churning. What did his women think? Why had he failed at the sacrifice? Had he actually failed at his sacrifice—or was he looking for the wrong result, looking to get instead of give? Why did he feel so confused?
He stood up abruptly. He had an idea. He would stop his damned mind from rolling over and over restlessly. He went outside.
It was dark. Most people probably were eating now. He wouldn’t be seen.
He walked down to the small lake. It wasn’t quite frozen—the ice was thin and patchy. He walked a quarter of the way around the lake and clambered out onto a big rock that extended a dozen feet into the lake. Quickly he threw off his breechcloth and leggings and leaped into the lake.
He reeled. He yearned for something hard to hold on to, lest he fall off the circling earth. He thought he was bellowing, but then realized nothing was coming from his mouth but the hiss of his own breath.
He got the use of some of his limbs back and scrambled out.
Goddamn, he was cold. He chafed his chest and arms with his big hands. He’d never done the plunge except after a sweat bath. Until now. What a difference.
He started walking back toward his hut. He would warm up in his blankets, then eat a little, and then juggle. The thought of the ceaseless motion of the round balls pleased him.
It worked, he thought. I intimidated my mind into switching off for a while.
CHEYENNE OUTBREAK AT FORT ROBINSON
Elaine’s fingers clawed at the edge of the paper unconsciously as she read.
The Cheyennes had broken out of a barracks they’d been imprisoned in at Camp Robinson, Nebraska, in a hopeless situation, and many were dead. Trying to give their families a chance to get away, twenty-one men were killed in the first ten minutes of the outbreak. Nine women and children also died in the first minutes.
The newspaper ripped down the middle on one page. Elaine hadn’t known she was gripping it so hard. She held the torn edges together and skimmed the article for a list of the dead, and Adam’s name. Nothing.
More than a hundred escapees—why not more than two hundred? Had half of them died? She forced herself to push away the thought of the ones she cared for individually, didn’t permit herself to wonder whether the dead were Lisette, Rain and Big Soldier, Sings Wolf, and Adam.
They fled, the Herald said, without winter clothing, blankets, or food, and almost unarmed, through an unusually bitter Nebraska winter. It was assumed they would try to get to the Sioux reservation at Pine Ridge, South Dakota, and ask Red Cloud for shelter. They were judged by people who knew the country to have no chance at all of defying the elements and escaping the army long enough to reach Red Cloud.
Elaine let a wave of dizziness pass.
The Cheyennes had broken out of the barracks where they’d been held because the commanding officer, Captain Wessells, known as “the Little Flying Dutchman,” had deprived all of them, men, women, and children, of food for four days, and of water for another.
“Bastard,” snapped Elaine, and Vernon May shot her the oddest look over the wax he was molding.
Wessells said his intention was to make the Cheyennes agree to go back to Indian territory, as ordered by the Interior Department.
These Indians, though, had run away from their reservation there in September and astounded the civilized world by fighting their way against overwhelming odds all the way to the country where they wanted their reservation, near their Sioux relatives.
Despite this proof, Wessells evidently underestimated their resolve. They chose to die rather than to leave their home country.
Here was a speech by Morning Star. Why the hell was there no mention of Little Wolf? Was Adam among the escapees or not? Among the dead or the living?
“We bowed to the will of the Great Father,” Morning Star said, “and we went far into the south where he told us to go. There we found that a Cheyenne cannot live. We belong here. Many times you promised us an agency, but you only took us far to the south country, saying, ‘Go and see. You can come back.’ Then when we were dying there, and sick for our home, you said that was a mistake, that we must stay because everything was changed. You are now the many and we are the few, but we know that it is better to die fighting on the way to our old home than to perish of the sicknesses.”
Elaine was surprised that the newspaper printed this speech. Hadn’t Morning Star and Little Wolf told the whites the same thing all last summer in Indian territory? Hadn’t they demonstrated it beyond doubt by striking out for home? Old news.
Where in the hell was Adam?
One straw to grasp: Dr. Moseley, caring for the wounded in the post hospital, said, “The will to live runs strong in these people.”
Elaine finally realized the Herald Mr. May gave her was a week old. She would have the livery service take her to the office of the Herald, wherever it was, and read everything. God, when would Mr. May finish with this damn mold?
Smith juggled. Then he slept a few hours, ate a little more, and juggled again in the dark. He could sense the dawn coming.
He loved the feel of the ivory balls in his hands, smooth, hard, unforgivingly round, in their way sensual. And he loved the eternal motion of his hands. He wondered if he could juggle forever and never drop a ball. He wanted to go on forever.
And as Smith juggled toward his forever, an awareness came to him, stealthily yet fully, like a person who did not enter a room but is just suddenly there, standing palpable by a window.
He became aware that he heard new inner music. That was odd, because he had never known that he heard inner music. Yet it was clear. He heard an inner music that was, well … He couldn’t say. Whatever it was, it was him. He was different.
He wondered idly where this new inner music would lead him, whether he should dare to follow it. And at that he laughed at himself out loud. He couldn’t choose to follow it or not to follow it anywhere. It was within him. He might be able to turn it off—turn it off with that damned dialogue in his head!—but then he would simply be not listening. There was no other music to hear.
It was so important, and yet natural and commonplace, that he kept his mind on his juggling, his eyes a little glazed. Perhaps some other awareness would come to him, full-blown as from the head of Zeus.
It didn’t. But he got an idea to do something. The predawn light gave him the urge.
He went outside, looked around the valley lit lilac by the coming sun, drew the cold of a winter dawn into his lungs. And then he began to sing. It was a song he’d first heard sitting beside his father twenty years ago, a song sung then by an old man, a way of saying thank you, Maheo, for a long and fruitful life. He had wondered at the song then, not understanding. He had heard it on dozens of dawns in his life—it was a common song. For the first time he wanted to sing out its blessing.
He, our father,
He has shown his mercy unto me.
I walk the straight road.
He sang it slowly, lingeringly, with feeling. And for the first time since his wedding day, he felt light-hearted.
George Miller, the editor of the Omaha Herald, a rakish-looking young fellow, was gracious to Elaine. He not only showed her what had appeared in his newspaper about the Cheyenne outbreak at Fort Robinson, he handed her a file folder of telegraph sheets and clippings from other papers. “The death dance of the Cheyennes,” he said with glinting eyes and ironic smile, “is big news.”
She read for nearly an hour, in tears the entire time. The Cheyennes had broken out at night. Aside from the thirty dead, thirty-five had been recaptured that first night, mostly women and children. (Almost no names—how maddening!) A leader named Wild Hog had been held apart, and so was “in captivity,” like an animal in a zoological garden.
Tangle Hair, the Dog Soldier leader, was wounded and recaptured. The army was tracking a large group, three dozen or more said to be led by Little Finger Nail, westward along the bluffs of the White River, where they were hard to ferret out. The whereabouts of Morning Star and his family were unknown. (Why was Nail mentioned and not Little Wolf? Why never a mention of Adam? Wasn’t a half-breed doctor newsworthy?)
The rest of the Cheyennes were presumed scattered, and likely wounded or dead. Scouts were able to find no trace of anyone getting to Red Cloud’s camp, sixty miles to the northwest. Without food, clothing, and blankets, the Indians wouldn’t be able to hold out long, the news dispatches agreed.
Some of the news stories spoke of the Cheyennes as an inhuman problem, like beasts enduring a hard winter. A few struck a tone of romantic nostalgia for these “last of the free-roaming Redmen of the Plains.” Most seemed more interested in chuckling at the ineptitude of the government than in the human predicament of the Indians. Imagine letting a few starving Indians outwit the U.S. Army! they hooted. Imagine having mismanaged the poor creatures into this embarrassing dilemma!
Mr. Miller had written a ringing editorial about the matter that seemed really to understand the Cheyennes. “They will never return to Indian territory unless tied hand and foot and dragged there like so many dead cattle. It means starvation to them. I implore you for justice and humanity to those wronged red men. Let them stay in their own country.”
When Elaine got up to stump to the front door, she thanked Mr. Miller for his editorial. She had to resist touching him on the arm in gratitude.
“Yes,” he said in his rapid-fire speech, “this business shows the bankruptcy of Grant’s Indian policy. I think the administration will retire next year in humiliation.” He smiled wolfishly. “Are you a Democrat?” he asked.
Taken aback, she could think of nothing to say and started for the door. She made a point of walking as gracefully as she could.
“Say,” Mr. Miller called after her, “what’s your interest in this?”
She spoke simply, without turning around. “My husband is one of the Cheyennes.”
He pounced. “Can we talk? Do an interview? Will you make a statement?” He rummaged on a desktop for paper and lead pencil. “Were you there? Did you”—he fumbled for words—“get your injury in the fighting?”
She pegged painfully away from him. She resisted saying, “Human blood and bones to you are just a way to sell newspapers.” She shook her head emphatically. “I have nothing to say.”
“Then come back tomorrow, will you? There’ll be more news tomorrow. It may be over tomorrow.”
Elaine tried to incline her head toward him in a way that was polite, and even thankful.
Smith pondered. Raven sat silent, the pipe gone out now, resting on its beaded skin bag in front of the fire.
Though he did not understand, he had the strong feeling that telling Raven his dream was part of his way, part of laying down his old life and taking up the new. And part of his new life was that he was trusting such feelings.
He looked at Raven, the older man’s face patient, neutral, leaving the decision entirely to Smith. Yes, he wanted Raven to know what they had wrought together. He wanted what he saw and whatever it meant to be shared, to become part of the power of the Human Beings.
“Yes, I dreamed,” he said. “I dreamed of water.”
Smith considered for a while and decided to skip over the images that had come to him that night in passing, fragmented, incomplete. “I think water was in all my dreams,” he said. “I want to tell you of two episodes that seem like one large one.
“I was in a day of tribulation. I was walking in Bighorn Canyon,” which Raven knew was the deep, walled canyon of the Bighorn River above the trading house where Smith grew up. “I had walked along the river for a while, clambering over the boulders on the steep sides, laboring over the various difficulties, never able to move fast, or freely. Then I had to start walking up, up toward the walls. I walked up and up the talus, up further than there was to go, up forever, struggling, slipping back, getting nowhere, and I would never get anywhere. Yet I was doomed to this walk. I knew the doom, felt the hopelessness in every step, and knew I would ever claw my way upward, pointlessly, stupidly.
“Suddenly I came to the rock wall.” Raven would know these yellow walls, hundreds of feet high. “The end. Nowhere to go. I had not the courage and energy to cry out. I gave up. I fell to my knees. I put my head down where the gravel met the rock wall, and lay my body down flat on the hard, dry gravel, and wept. Wept and wept.
“And then noticed. At last noticed. Water. I raised my face out of the dirt and looked. Water. Water had sprung forth from where I had laid my head, the barren point where the gravel joined the rock. Water, real, live water.
“I turned and looked. It trickled down toward the river. It made its way around rocks and cactus and across patches of dry sand, and into swales of grass, and past and around and through every sort of obstacle, toward the river. I couldn’t see where it flowed into the river.
“I laid down in the water, facedown, full length, tried to get every inch of myself into this little, gorgeous trickle. Facedown, I knew I would suck in the water in a moment, and I would drown. And that was OK, that was even lovely, to drown in this gift of water. And after a few moments, I did suck it in, deeply and confidently, and the miracle took place. I breathed it. It was water, and it gave life, like the air.
“I breathed into that miracle, drew it into my body, wanting to be alive now, truly alive, and the water came into me and over me and washed me completely. It even picked me up and rocked me like a baby. I lolled in it, luxuriated in it, I may even have fallen asleep there, rocking in that water like a great, warm bed.
“When I felt like I was waking up, I was an otter. Not an otter of the river, an otter of the sea, which is similar but bigger. Delicious, so delicious, to be sleek and slender, and agile as the wind. I played. I played. For hours, I cavorted in the water. My mate and cubs came out of our den in the earth and we played together, we darted and did loops and nuzzled against one another and dived through the waves and … We were acrobats of the sea.
“I dived down and got something to eat, a creature off the ocean sand with a spiny back called a sea urchin. I brought several up for the cubs and my mate, and one for myself—they were orange, as orange as the yolk of the duck egg. At the same time we plopped them whole into our mouths and got the taste. It was the best taste imaginable. I savored it and closed my eyes and rolled over and over in the water, and over and over again, flying high in the sea, until I had sucked all the taste away.
“And then I looked at my mate with a gigantic eye and whistled raucously at her.” Smith smiled at Raven. An otter’s whistle was a mating call. “Horny old otter. Horny young otter, full of the seed of life and wanting to hump the world full of it.” He chuckled at himself, his mind back there feeling horny in the water.
“I have no idea why I was an otter. I had no inkling that there was a message in it. And still have none. I was the otter. It felt like … just for the crazy, wild-hair, blue-sky joy of being an otter.” He looked up at Raven, met his eye, spoke directly. “I felt like that otter feeling was what life …” He shook his head firmly. Wrong way.
He thought, and said at last, “Those moments were the most pleasurable of my life. Praise be to Maheo for granting them to me.”
The newspapers indicated two days later that it was over, or at least over as a hot news event. Elaine went back to the Herald office and pointedly ignored Mr. Miller as she read the stories. Now the accounts were full, dwelling on the bloody details.
The main group of escaped Cheyennes crossed a divide one bitter night and took refuge in some bluffs along Hat Creek. They were led, it said again, by Little Finger Nail, who seemed to Elaine too young for such responsibility. Captain Wessells pounded their position with cannon all the next day, getting no response other than two or three random shots. When he wen
t to inspect the site, expecting to find nothing but tattered corpses, Wessells found nothing. Before the barrage the Cheyennes under Nail had slipped away to the next ridge, unseen.
But the next day the soldiers caught up with them again, this time in a dry gulch known as Warbonnet Creek, in a hole in the cutbank, where the Indians threw up a little breastworks. Since the Cheyennes had no chance, and knew it, Wessells went out front and called to them several times to give up. No answer.
Finally the shooting began, and Little Finger Nail cried out, “If we die, our names will be remembered. They will tell the story and say, ‘This is the place.’”
The soldiers fired for about an hour with only a few answering shots—the Cheyennes had almost no ammunition—then went up close to the breastworks and fired through. When no one inside could be living, they jumped on top of the breastworks, but one more shot came, grazing Wessells’ head.
The soldiers fell back. From the hole in the cutbank came the high beautiful voice of Finger Nail, singing his death song. Then a few other thin voices joined it.
The soldiers charged the breastworks and cut loose a withering fire. When they fell back, waiting for the smoke to clear, the last three Cheyenne warriors leapt forth brandishing their weapons—Finger Nail, Roman Nose, and Bear. The soldiers dutifully shot them down.
The dead were eighteen men, five women, and two children. Among the bodies lay six other women and children, hurt but alive. Blood stood pooled on the frozen earth.
A soldier looked into the hole and muttered, “God, these people die hard.”
The remnant of Cheyennes, the wounded and frozen who had lived when they wanted to die, named that miserable piece of cutbank the Last Hole.
Elaine Cummings wiped the tears from her eyes and cheeks, gave the spying Mr. Miller a volcanic look, and stumped out.