“He doesn’t care.”
I sipped my beer. “Where was he hunting yesterday?”
The young man gestured with his fork in a vague direction. “South of here.”
“Were you with him?”
“No, he hunts alone.”
I nodded sage-like, fished the elk call from my pocket, and tossed it between his hiking boots. “Is that yours or his?”
Nate balanced his plate on one knee and picked up the carved bone. “Artie’s—you can tell from the notch on the bottom; it’s his signature.” He looked back up. “Where did you get it?”
“Somebody tried to run me over in a ’70s red GMC pickup last night.”
He didn’t say anything to that.
“Doesn’t your uncle have a ’71 GMC?”
“Yeah, man, but I had that truck last night.” He stuffed the elk call in his shirt pocket. “I had a date, if it’s any of your business.”
“Do you always go out on dates with an elk tied to the hood?”
He looked a little uncertain. “Um… yeah.”
Mrs. Small Song exited the cabin and stopped to place a dollop of potato salad on Chief Long’s plate, paused to deposit more on Henry’s, and then advanced on me.
“Then you were the one who tried to run me over last night?”
His eyes dropped to his lap. “Um, yeah.”
The old woman paused and then gave me another portion as I continued talking to the kid. “Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know why you tried to run me over last night?”
He shrugged but stayed silent. He was obviously covering for his uncle—or for somebody—and wasn’t very good at it. I thought about the man I’d been able to make out at the wheel of the truck and thought he’d been bigger than the kid. “Where’s the truck now?”
“Art must have it—he lets me drive it over to work at the radio station, then he picks it up. I do the afternoon drive.”
“KRZZ?”
“Yeah.” He slipped into his on-air voice: “Nate Small Song with the big sound.”
I raised a fist in concert with Henry and Lolo, and we all chanted together, “Stay calm, have courage, and wait for signs.”
I ate a little bit, washing it down with the beer, giving him plenty of time to elaborate. I risked a glance up at the medicine woman, but she was looking off into the trees behind her house. I followed her clouded gaze and thought about how, even with her limited physical abilities, she was seeing far more than I was.
“I unloaded the elk and then parked the truck down the hill. It was gone this morning, so I figure Art took it.”
I glanced at the Bear, who continued eating. “How did Artie get here? You say you got the truck from him last night; where did you do that?”
If it hadn’t been for the seriousness of the subject, it would’ve been funny to see how fast the kid was trying to think. “Lame Deer.”
I continued badgering him. “Where in Lame Deer?”
“Well, not really Lame Deer—at the bar in Jimtown.”
It was actually a pretty good play; it would be difficult to get a straight answer out of anybody who was there as to whether they had seen Artie or what time that might’ve been. “So, Artie gave you the truck last night with this elk tied to the hood. Any idea what time that might’ve been?”
“Nope.”
I watched as the old woman beside me placed a hand on my shoulder, carefully took the can of beer from my hand, and then turned and went back in the house. It was a simple gesture, and you might’ve thought that it was completely innocent but for the touch. The medicine woman had tried to translate something to me in that instant. I attempted to see her in the kitchen, but she had disappeared. I turned back to look at Nate. “But the truck was gone this morning?”
He nodded his head, thankful that I’d taken the “nope” on his timing. “Maybe he got a ride from somebody in the bar, man. Maybe he just hiked over.”
I was a little incredulous. “That’s thirty miles.”
“He’s been known to do it.”
Henry’s voice rose from where he sat, across from the fire. “In the dark?”
The kid smiled back at him. “Tracking in the dark scare you, old Bear?”
Staring into the fire, the Cheyenne Nation took another bite of elk and chewed. The kid, naive as he was, didn’t know that Henry Standing Bear was the thing that scared the things in the dark.
Later, we helped collect the rest of the elk, clean up the site, and dampen the pit. The old woman was washing the dishes in a porcelain sink speckled with lead divots set in an equally battered metal kitchen cabinet.
It was as I was drying the mismatched discount-store plates that I took the time to take the place in; it reminded me of my grandparents’ house. Low-slung and notched into the back of the hillside, the house had been constructed with hand-scribed logs puttied with the old Oregon cement.
Her voice was little more than a whisper. “Ahsanta, you’re the one whose wife died?”
I was always surprised by the way the Indians referenced me through my deceased wife. “Yes, ma’am.”
I could see three different types of wallpaper in the kitchen addition over which the upper cabinets were affixed. They were also metal but were the kind found in gas stations, complete with stickers advertising AUTOLITE, CRANE CAMS, and PUROLATOR OIL & AIR FILTERS.
“You like my cabinets?”
“I do.”
“My son, he got them for me.”
I wondered which gas station he’d stolen them from. “They’re very nice.”
Her eyes looked over the sink and out the window to where the others were killing the fire. “Because Artie is the way he is, he is blamed for things he hasn’t done.” She shrugged. “Because he is who he is, he gets away with some of the things he has done—it is the nature of things.”
I smiled down at her. “I understand.”
She looked up at me, and again it was as if her eyes were reflecting the clouds I couldn’t see in the nighttime sky. “He didn’t do this thing you think he has.” Her knotted hands gripped the edge of the sink. “He done some bad things, I know, but nothing like this.”
I nodded.
Her eyes stayed on mine. “You believe me?”
“I do, but you are his mother.” She smiled a becoming smile for somebody with that much chewing tobacco in her teeth, but it faded a little when I asked the next question. “How is it you know why I’m looking for him, other than what I’ve told you?”
She nodded her head slowly. “I have a way with these things, powers that I use for the good of my family and my people.” She gestured toward the wall. “And somebody called me this afternoon on the telephone.”
She cackled a brief laugh, and I shook my head. “I don’t suppose you’d like to tell me who it was that called you?”
She hung her own dishrag over the faucet. “Artie.”
“He called you?”
Her smile faded completely now. “He said you were looking for him; that a woman was dead, but he didn’t do nothing.”
I rolled down the sleeves of my shirt and snapped the cuffs. “In all honesty, Mrs. Small Song, all we want to do is talk to him. He had an argument with a young woman over at Tribal Services last week—had words with her. This week she ends up dead and somebody tries to run me over with Artie’s truck—I think that warrants a conversation, don’t you?”
She said nothing for a while, and I started thinking that I should’ve known better than to confront an Elder, a medicine woman, and a traditional in such a way.
“After the claims settlement in 1963, my husband and me built this house from the logs of our old days house. My husband died not too long after that, and like so many do in great sorrow times, I took the religious road and became a peyote person. My oldest son was also religious, and he used to go to meetings with me. Five years later he died in the Vietnam, and I stopped going to meetings so much because it reminded me of
him.”
She paused for a moment and bent her head just a bit, her gaze landing on the base cabinet.
“I went and got baptized on the egg-dyeing day, but after a while somebody told one of the priests that I had been seen at a peyote meeting. One day at my confession, the black robe asked me if I was still praying to that dried-up old peyote and calling it God.” She smiled. “I told him no, that I pray to God, but that I sometimes still use the peyote medicine for when I am sick. He said that the peyote was a church and that I could not go to two churches, so I stopped going to the black robe church.” She continued to stare at me. “Do you go to the churches, Ahsanta?”
“No. My wife was the religious one in our family.”
She nodded. “My religion became my own. I would go visit sick and hurt people—that’s when people need religion, not just on Sunday mornings or Thursday nights. Some people got better after I visited with them and people started calling me a medicine woman, and after a while, I became one, I guess.” She pushed off from the sink and turned to face me more directly. “I tell you these things because I have had a two-part vision about you, and I would like to talk to you about it.”
I wondered what the old woman’s motivations were. “About me?”
“Yes.” She struggled with what she had to say but finally spoke. “There’s someone who would speak to you, but I don’t know who he is. He comes to me in my visions in a great bear shape; does this mean anything to you?”
I could feel the scouring of wing tips against the insides of my lungs. “Could be.”
“You have other family?”
The next words came out carefully. “I do; a daughter, and she’s expecting my first grandchild.”
She worked the chew in her jaw as if the words were tough and needed tenderizing. “The bear-person tells me that you must keep your family close; that there are those who would harm them.”
I thought about my experiences on the mountain a few months back, an adventure I wasn’t sure I’d ever be over. I thought about Virgil and the bear headdress he’d been wearing the last time I’d seen him, and about how I still wasn’t sure if he was alive or dead. I thought about his grandson, Owen, and how I knew most certainly that he was dead. Virgil or Owen had delivered a pronouncement upon my future or that of those close to me, some warning of impending disaster that I had put out of my mind—until now.
“Where is your daughter, Ahsanta?”
“Philadelphia, but she’ll be on her way here tomorrow.”
Her head nodded as she thought. “That’s good; it will be easier for you to keep an eye on them when they are here in the good country.”
Boy howdy.
“What’s the second part of the vision?”
“That you should come to church with me. Tonight.” She nodded.
I leaned an arm on the kitchen sink and lowered my head to look at her a little more closely as Henry, Lolo, and Nate entered through the kitchen door. “Go to church with you tonight?”
“Yes, the bear-man says that you should do this.”
I looked up and could see Henry looking at me, his eyes a little widened. I glanced back at the old woman and asked. “Which church?”
She grinned at me with the tobacco between her teeth.
There is a federal criminal penalty exemption for the religious use of peyote by members of the Native American Church. The consumption of the small, dried button cactus is older than the Controlled Substances Act by about five and a half thousand years.
Fair is fair.
I’d heard about the ceremony but had never taken part in the rituals, let alone in the mescaline-based substance itself. Henry said that he had been behind the moon four times and around the moon innumerable times; he also said that it was like driving on the highway, then rolling down your window and tossing your head out, which didn’t sound like something I wanted to experience.
The Bear dropped us off at the trailhead and sat there in the driver’s seat of Rezdawg. “I was not invited.”
The medicine woman was waiting by the grille guard of the truck, her head bowed and her hands stuffed into the folds of her skirt.
I leaned an elbow on the door of the vehicle I hated more than any other and twisted the ring on my little finger. “That means you can’t go?”
“No.”
“Can I invite you?”
“No.”
“Can I get her to invite you?”
“No.”
I nodded and glanced back at the ninety-pound woman who was taking me hostage. I turned to the Cheyenne Nation and could see just the slightest smile on his otherwise stoic face, which was pressed against his fist.
“Chief Long is not going to report me to the DEA, is she?”
He shook his head. “She is going home and going to bed.” He glanced at the watch on his wrist. “I was not invited there, either.”
“She doesn’t like you.”
“No.”
“Any idea why?”
“No.”
“You’re just a font of conversation tonight, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
I sighed and looked at the old woman again. “Big medicine.”
He shrugged. “It is a great honor to be invited.”
“I don’t want to have flashbacks.”
“You will not have flashbacks.”
“I don’t want to start going to Grateful Dead concerts.”
His eyes sharpened on mine, the twinkle there a little off-putting. “You definitely will not do that.”
I nodded.
“Unless, of course, it is something you have always wanted to do.” He lowered his hand and let it drop to the sill. “It amplifies the heart.” He reached out and thumped a curled fist into the center of my chest. “And I know this vehicle; it is a good one.”
I took a deep breath to steady my nerves. “Thanks.”
“There is no guarantee that you will even be offered peyote—you may simply be there to observe.”
I lowered my voice to a whisper. “I think there’s more to this than a simple come-to-Jesus meeting.”
The shards of obsidian glinted toward the corner of the truck, to where the medicine woman had moved off a few steps and was studying the trees the way she had before. “No doubt about it.”
“Where are you going to be?”
His eyes returned to mine. “Close.”
“Good.” I stepped back. “Don’t let me go off into the forest and follow the little animals, okay?”
He nodded and ground the starter on Rezdawg, which sputtered, coughed, and sat silent, the surrounding chirp of the crickets the only sound. “She only does this when you are around.” He patted the dash and ran his fingers through the eagle feathers along with the medicine bag that hung from the truck’s rearview mirror. I recognized the ritualized gesture. “Rezdawg knows you do not trust her.”
“She’s right.”
He hit the starter again, but this time the motor caught, fumbled a little on the lobes of her cam, and then cleared her tailpipe of a little soot and ran relatively smooth. “She feels your distrust and it causes her pain. You should apologize.”
“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—I’m not apologizing to your crappy truck.”
He jammed the aged three-quarter-ton into gear and pulled the steering wheel toward the road. “Good luck with the little animals.”
I watched as the single dim taillight with a lack of brake lights bumped down the wallowed-out dirt road and disappeared over a rise. Sighing, I stuffed my hands in my jeans and turned to look at the old woman patiently waiting for me at the trailhead. “I guess it’s time to go to church?”
She held out a hand, and I wasn’t sure if it was for her or me.
I took the hand and started up the trail with her following a little behind; she was careful to walk in my footsteps. The trail was pretty well worn and she was still holding my hand, but I was amazed at how well the old girl navigated by the stars at n
ight. The moon remained hidden, and I was just regretting having not brought a flashlight when I felt her tug at my hand.
I stopped and leaned down. “Something?”
She nodded and gestured with her left hand toward another branch of the trail I hadn’t seen.
“That way?”
She nodded.
It was about the third time she did this that I started wishing I’d brought not only a flashlight but bread crumbs. I figured if I kept the logistics in my head, I’d be able to orient myself with two lefts, a right, and a left and still have a fighting chance of discovering the road if I had to.
We got to a flattened area in a small clearing where there was a powerful glow from a large teepee with a fire inside. It was family style, painted around the edge with a brownish reflection of the individuals ringing the inside perimeter; at the apex, where the light didn’t reach, it was dark.
Mrs. Small Song’s hand tightened in mine, and she began leading the way. In keeping with tradition, the opening of the teepee was facing east in order to welcome the rising sun, and these flaps were tied open. The old woman paused at the doorway and spoke in a strong voice to the assembled within. After a moment, a collection of voices responded and, still holding my hand, she stooped at the entrance.
I followed, ducking my head through the opening, and stood, a little hunched in line with the angle of the canvas, my hat in my hands. I glanced around at the all but three smiling faces and didn’t recognize anybody. This was rare—I usually knew a percentage of folks in any Cheyenne gathering—but I guessed that these were highly religious people and it was possible that we’d never crossed each other’s paths. Some stood and approached me, but the three ancients who did not smile stayed seated.
I finally recognized one of the participants. It was the same man who’d ushered Chief Long and me into the casino, the ex-chief of the tribal police; he patted my shoulder. “Longmire, it is wonderful to have you with us this evening.” His hand touched his chest. “Albert Black Horse.”
“Yep, I remember.”
“I am to be your sponsor tonight. Is that all right with you?”
“Um, sure.”
He misread my confusion, “You would rather have someone else?”
“No, no.” Like an idiot, I patted his arm back. “I’m happy to be sponsored by you, Mr. Black Horse.”
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