RavenShadow

by Win Blevins

  I walked and saw no women who were obviously pregnant. Suddenly I had a thought. I wanted to look in on the Horn Cloud family, more properly Horned Cloud. I had read about them in the book, and felt curious about them. Horn Cloud was a leader, a headman next to Big Foot. Horn Cloud scoffed at the Spirit Dance, and the family kept themselves apart from it. But the young Horn Cloud men and the fighting tomorrow … I had read their deeds.

  I felt in a whirlwind about the dance. One breath of me wanted to believe in the good Big Lodge saw, in the vision of a world that was a more beautiful way to live. Another breath of me could not reconcile the vision of beauty with the way Big Foot’s people died in an orgy of bloodletting. But doubting the Spirit Dance, that felt like doubting the Lakota way, Lakota life itself. It felt like doubting my own journey, my presence here.

  The whirlwind ripped at me.

  Where was the Horn Cloud tipi?

  I heard the clink of shod hooves on stone. I looked out to the east and saw cavalrymen far beyond the road, circling toward the soldier tents. Lots of troops. No one else took note, no one else could see so far in the darkness. More troops. Darkness expanded in me, like ink clouding water.

  When I wandered near the Horn Cloud tipi, I knew them, and slipped into the tipi to watch and listen. Behind the center fire sat Horn Cloud himself, a sober man of maybe fifty, with the gravity and solidity of a leader. I reached out to his spirit, and it felt leaden, burdened by leading the people at a terrible time. His wife, who looked endlessly cheerful, was doing something domestic with a younger woman at the back of the tipi on a pallet of blankets—then I saw they were trying tiny moccasins on the feet of a small boy. Wet Feet, I remembered from one of the books, son of Dewey and Wears Eagle. Three young men talked somberly among themselves. The handsome older one must be Dewey. There was another grown son, Daniel, three teenage boys, Joseph, William, and Sherman, and a teenage girl, Pretty Enemy. Dewey, whose name was properly Iron Hail, kept sneaking looks over his shoulder at Wears Eagle and Wet Feet. His face went serious when he looked at his brothers, playful when he turned toward his wife and son.

  I wondered why she was called Wears Eagle, which seemed a name of honor. Why did she and Iron Hail have traditional names, the four younger brothers white names? It was as though the two were blessed with the old medicine, the four shorn of it.

  Wears Eagle started tossing the baby in the air, and Iron Hail could stand it no longer. He excused himself and went to his wife. They rocked tiny Wet Feet back and forth, wiggled his hands and legs, then tossed him lightly from mother to father and back, all the while chanting something. I slipped closer to hear, wondering if it was a song Unchee cooed to me decades later.

  The words were a heavily accented version of, “Rockabye baby, in the tree top, when the wind blows the cradle will rock.”

  I almost hooted. How did they learn that song? Joseph spoke English, but he was the only one in the family. What white mother, or sister or child, taught them that nursery tune? When, why, under what friendly circumstances?

  Then I wanted to squirm under my laughter. The cradle will fall.

  Senior Horn Cloud paid no attention to anyone, saw and heard nothing, sat with the look of a man who is looking inside, and hates what he sees. His wife set a speckled enamel cup of hot coffee in front of him, but Horn Cloud took no notice.

  Suddenly the scene seemed unreal. It’s pretense. You all know what’s coming. Unconsciously, you know what’s coming.

  At the same time this family moment was real. What would happen tomorrow, that was unreal, that was not human life….

  I cannot bear it.

  I rushed out of the tipi and into the darkness. Which Horn Clouds would live, which die? Except for Iron Hail, I didn’t remember from the books. Three-quarters of the people in this camp would die tomorrow morning, many killed horribly. To look into a face and wonder … My insides are like glass being ground to bits.

  This is living in ravenShadow, for Horn Cloud and for me.

  Suddenly voices. Our language. From the other side of the ravine. “Greetings, my relatives. Greetings, my relatives. Don’t answer, keep quiet.” A very young man’s voice—I could hear it perfectly. Three or four Mniconjou men, looking about strangely, walked closer to the ravine, trying to act nonchalant. The sentries eyed them hard, and they pretended to be doing nothing.

  The call came again, a different voice, an older man’s. “We are Oglala, scouts.”

  A third voice, reedy. “My wife is Mniconjou, Sky’s Bird, daughter of Black-Winged Hawk.”

  “Hey, my relatives,” said the oldest voice, “we want to tell you, the whites have brought in lots more soldiers, four more troops.”

  Pause.

  The reedy voice: “Two more cannons, too.”

  The young voice: “They have doubled their manpower and their gunpower.”

  Now the reedy voice. “They don’t want you to know, so they didn’t use the road, they snuck around to the east.”

  “Hey-hey,” cried the older man, “be careful, this is not a time for trouble. Be real careful.”

  Silence. After a while one of the listeners said “Thank you” in Lakota, and the listeners strolled back into the village.

  Now I saw, through the darkness, men bivouacking beyond the ravine, Oglala men, the army scouts. But they hadn’t forgotten their blood, and the Mniconjou would take heart from that.

  I wandered across the ravine, and noticed again that in spirit journeying there are no physical obstacles, really. If the traveler wants to cross a ravine, he goes somehow without the specifically physical acts of finding footholds to get down, and hoisting his weight up the other side. He glides.

  I walked to the scouts’ bivouac. About thirty men clumped around small fires, coffee cups in hands. Horses were staked everywhere. Bedrolls made dark shadows on the cold ground. Quiet conversations in our language came to my ears, talk of families, horses, weapons, births, marriages, deaths, nothing of consequence to me now. I studied the faces. They were ordinary faces, with the expressions of men during slack time on a job. I looked for signs of dissolution, drunkenness, or evil, eyes from which the spirit had fled, leaving emptiness. But I didn’t see that. I saw ordinary men.

  How can you fight on the soldiers’ side?

  I had talked to Plez about this, and knew part of the answer, perhaps as much as reason could know. Many honorable Lakota men walked this path. Little Big Man, the great friend of Crazy Horse. George Sword, captain of the Pine Ridge police. Being a scout or policeman was putting your feet on the new road, the white road. Though you loved the old ways, it might be an act of courage to throw yourself fiercely into the new. You would be following one of the traditions of your people, taking the path of a warrior. And the U.S. government, the real power in everyone’s life now, would give you a horse, a rifle, and a monthly salary.

  Perhaps these men made the right choice, no one can say. But the path led them to terrible conflicts and woeful deeds. When Little Big Man was taking Crazy Horse to jail, the warrior went for his knife. Little Big Man grabbed his arms, and in that grip Crazy Horse received the bayonet wound that pierced his kidneys and ended his life.

  Just two weeks ago forty-three Indian policemen rode to Sitting Bull’s cabin to enforce the white man’s law on the venerable chief, and killed him.

  Tomorrow the soldier leaders would hold these scouts apart from the fighting, not trusting them to kill people of their own blood.

  I wonder how Little Big Man lived with himself. I wonder if he drank himself to death.

  At that moment I saw a figure come out of the ravine, a dark shadow against the sagebrush. I watched. Without asking my heart who it was, I felt this was someone important to me. My great-grandmother?

  The figure took shape in the darkness, and it was a woman, small and round. She placed her feet surely on the black earth, and moved her body with the grace of a dancer. How had she slipped through the guard? She must have been very good at walking silentl
y and using shadows.

  Even now she minced along and was somehow hard to see. Her voice sounded, but I didn’t hear the words. Scouts at a campfire started and looked around at her. I moved close.

  “Sister,” one of the scouts said, a term of respect.

  She moved closer to the fire, and now I saw she was young but had a face of knowledge beyond her years, and the burden of knowledge. “Do you have medicine?” she asked. “White-man medicine for taking the fire out of wounds?” The voice had a tang, but I couldn’t place it.

  One of the older men said, “Is someone hurt, sister?”

  “Many people will be hurt tomorrow,” she answered. She had the soberness of prescience.

  “The soldiers want no trouble, sister,” said the older man.

  “There will be no trouble,” said a younger one.

  Impatience flicked through her eyes.

  “Do you have medicine?” Still the tang—what is that? Suddenly I recognized it and chuckled. Rosaphine’s reedy voice. This woman had Rosaphine’s voice—not her blocky body but the voice. And I knew. This is Sallee’s many-greats-grandmother.

  “The white-man doctor is here,” said the youngest of the men, of noble face. He rose. “I will take you to him.”

  “I am Walks Straight,” she said. “Thank you.”

  They went off into the darkness, Walks Straight padding her weight lightly behind the young scout.

  They found the army surgeon at another campfire, treating a wound on a scout, perhaps an infection. I watched without listening. At first the white man’s face spoke irritation. Then Walks Straight spoke briefly, and the surgeon listened with an open face. He finished up the wound he was treating. Then he sat down with Walks Straight and demonstrated to her the use of some bandages and what looked like poultices.

  At last she walked back toward the village with a small bundle. She didn’t bother to conceal herself from the guard coming back, and didn’t stop at their shouts.

  I will have good news for Sallee.

  I followed the ravine to the Agency Road and walked along the road to the cavalry camp. Other soldiers were bivouacked here and there, in for a cold night, and one of the longest of the year. But the main camp was Sibley tents arranged neat as lines in an architect’s drawing.

  The soldiers were mostly in their blankets now. They’d eaten, they had no stoves, it was hard to keep warm. They huddled and talked, or stared into the darkness, alone, waiting. I was struck by how young they looked. The Mniconjou were all ages. The Oglala scouts were mature men. So were the cavalry officers. But the enlisted men were kids—twenty, eighteen, even sixteen. In some of the tents they spoke languages I didn’t recognize, I guess European languages. I felt of their hearts, and found them even more scared than they looked. Though their ears didn’t understand much English, their noses smelled trouble.

  I remembered from the book that a lot of them had been in the army a month or less, and were city kids who could barely stay on a horse. In several of the tents were readers, keeping their minds occupied by lantern light. One was reading a Deadwood newspaper that was folded and refolded. I couldn’t tell whether it was a story about the so-called Ghost Dance uprising over here. Was the young man becoming an actor in a drama staged by a newspaper reporter who blew things up to captivate and titillate readers? Another was reading a catalogue of horse gear. A third was reading a novel in German by the romancer Karl May, who sold millions of books about cowboys, cavalry, and wild red Indians, but never crossed the ocean to this continent.

  I could feel what a lot of those kids were feeling. They were sleeping right next to savages. These people had unfathomable ways, obscure motives, alien hearts. They walked old, wicked, pre-Christian paths, and maybe they had some of the dark and ancient power too. They were half human. Savage ways and savage hearts.

  It’s okay—out of curiosity—to go west and see savages. Unspeakable to be killed by them. Not with civilization waiting, and a life….

  First you fear, then you fight.

  In one big tent some officers were having a fine time. When Colonel Forsyth led the additional four troops of the Seventh Cavalry out of the agency that afternoon, they were coming to finish the mission, to triumph and celebrate. The renegade Big Foot had been caught, and would surrender his weapons on the morrow. These officers thought they had a right to a victory and a right to whoop it up. Five of them had fought at the Little Big Horn, and even after fourteen years, it rankled deep and bitter. So they opened a keg and started the celebration early. I didn’t have to listen long. Everyone knows old war stories, colorfully retold, when you hear them.

  I walked across the space between the white and red camps, something over a hundred yards. This was where the soldiers would try to search each warrior for weapons tomorrow morning, this was where … I shivered and hurried forward.

  Immediately I saw a young woman coming from a tipi, and knew her. “Oh, bother!” she said back into the lodge.

  She had a beautiful, round face. She was plump, and seemed to like that. Her eyes were merry. In one hand she carried a coffeepot. She was huge with child. She looked straight at me.

  Unchee’s mother, my great-grandmother.

  I could not imagine why I had not seen her before. But Spirit shows us things in its own time.

  Now her expression changed, and settled on a head-wagging, let’s-do-it spirit. It wasn’t me she was seeing, but a young sentry behind me. She’d picked out her man. She walked toward him—sashayed would be the word, even for a woman as pregnant as she was—but it wasn’t flirtatious, just sassy. He was a very young recruit, red of hair, pale of skin, and uncomfortable. She hid the coffeepot under her blanket.

  She smiled at him and started to slip by.

  “Sorry, ma’am,” he said, and stepped in front of her.

  She gave him a questioning look, one eyebrow teasing.

  “No one leaves camp,” he said. The soldier got a frustrated expression on his face. He couldn’t tell his orders to someone who didn’t speak English.

  She shrugged theatrically and tried to skitter around him. Her feet were quick, and she was graceful, even heavy as she was.

  He stepped in front of her again. “Sorry, ma’am,” he said. “No go. No go.” At least the sentry had the decency to be embarrassed by the orders he was enforcing, or by his own baby talk.

  This time she danced clean around him, but the sentry reached out and grabbed her arm.

  “Hey,” she exclaimed, and gave him a dirty look.

  He dropped the arm sheepishly. Now she was standing outside the circle of sentries, glaring at him, one hand on her hip.

  “Anybody help?” cried the soldier. “I don’t speak Indian.”

  “I’ll help you,” said my great-grandmother in accented English, and with great delight in herself. “I gotta pee. The baby’s gotta pee.” She opened the blanket, put her free hand on her big belly. “And we are gonna pee.”

  She huffed, turned, and marched off. “In private,” she called back.

  The soldier flushed and turned back to the circle, acting like he didn’t know she was out behind him. Sentries on each side of him grinned, but he paid no attention.

  I looked inside the lodge she came from. Behind the center fire sat a tall, husky man in his early thirties with a bony face. I studied the big shoulders and the small ass. Hello, Blue Crow. He was cleaning a Winchester repeating rifle.

  Another woman, also his wife, was singing the children to sleep, two of them, her own children, I remembered. This woman was my great-grandmother’s older sister. Lots of times, among our people, a younger woman married her older sister’s husband.

  “Blue Crow,” the woman said, “they’re going to take that rifle tomorrow.”

  He looked up at her, and I saw my own face. I shivered a little. “No,” he said softly. “We can’t eat grass, Corn Woman.” He said it with a light, teasing spirit.

  And you’re not even young enough to be a hothead.

 
; Even feeling the tension in this lodge, I moved closer and sat down by the fire. I wanted to be with this family, my family. I wanted to talk with them, eat with them, drink coffee with them. I wanted to touch them.

  None of that would happen.

  At that moment my great-grandmother ducked her big belly through the tipi entrance and held out the coffeepot heavy with water. “Elk Medicine,” said Corn Woman, shaking her head, “how did you manage that?”

  Elk Medicine. I thrilled at the name. I know my great-grandmother’s name.

  She rolled her eyes and answered, clearly practicing her English, “Hey, I’d have them white people in my pocket, if I had any pockets.”

  Blue Crow laughed, and Corn Woman looked mystified.

  I laughed, too, for I suddenly thought of the meaning of Elk Medicine’s name. Elk Medicine was the power of love, the power to attract the object of your affections overwhelmingly. Maybe my great-grandmother was a terrific lover. She had that certain look.

  She waggled her big belly. “Come to white men, I get whatever I want, and I don’t give nothin’!”

  They all laughed again. Blue Crow’s face lit up when he laughed—white teeth, merry eyes, and a deep chuckle, like a bullfrog in a well. It was a wonderful, life-embracing sound.

  A swirl of emotions rocked me, like violent nausea.

  I can’t bear it. I can’t bear to see you alive today, knowing.

  I jumped up and rushed out the door. The anger gurgled up in me now, like small water spat from a geyser, such as might precede an eruption. I knew the deep, fiery wells I’d had all my life. I will not erupt. Not when I am present only as a spirit.

  Raven sat on one of the ear-flap poles. Hello, my friend. He sat on my shoulder, and the calm he gave me felt good.

  We walked through the Mniconjou camp. I simply looked at people. Help me think of something else, I asked. For instance, which of these people invested their faith and their lives in the Spirit Dance? I knew the faith, the hope, had grown big among these people. Their kinsman Kicking Bear inspired them.

  Since Hump defected a couple of weeks ago, Big Foot seemed to hesitate between belief and doubt. The people were divided now.