Stone Song

by Win Blevins

  So they sent word for the village of the recent hostiles to move in close to Red Cloud’s village for a big council.

  When the headmen discussed it, Crazy Horse said he didn’t want to go. He was starting to talk often in council, and he thought that was another sign that he was leading a life that wasn’t for him. “I see no point in going,” he said. “They have broken their promise about the hunt. I am not willing to talk to them about anything. Let them send word that we can have our agency back in our country. Then we’ll talk about trading so we can leave.”

  Crazy Horse went on, “Every man can do as he wishes. Whoever wants to move next to Red Cloud for this council can say so by moving his lodges across the creek.”

  For once He Dog opposed him. “This is not the time to make a stand,” he said. “I will move across the creek. Everyone who doesn’t want your wives and children shot by soldiers, come with me.”

  No one knew why He Dog was so sure of a crisis coming. He would say nothing but, “Trouble is close.”

  Soon two soldier chiefs came to visit Crazy Horse, one of them Col. Luther Bradley, the new commanding officer at Fort Robinson. To show hospitality Crazy Horse offered them coffee, but he drank none himself. Though he was fond of the sweet taste, he had decided it was another wasicu weakness and had made up his mind never to touch it again.

  The soldier chiefs gave him a new knife in a leather scabbard and asked if he was willing to go to Washington City.

  If they wanted him to go before giving him an agency in his own country, Crazy Horse replied, he would have to think about that. Maybe his uncle Little Hawk should go.

  Crazy Horse hinted again that Little Hawk was a better man than he to lead the village now and the soldiers should look to him. But he could see they only thought he was being uncooperative.

  He said he had no more coffee, and they understood that he was breaking off the talk and left. He appreciated that. He wanted to go down by White Clay Creek and pray over Inyan and listen to the beat of the earth, hoping to see toward a future.

  Leaving, the soldier chiefs marked him down as sullen and evasive.

  He Dog thought he was changed, too. His friend had always been quiet and sometimes remote. Now he seemed even more withdrawn. “You seem different,” he said to Crazy Horse. “I wonder—if I move across the creek, will we still be friends?”

  Crazy Horse laughed easily. He Dog was glad to hear his laugh again. “Only white men draw a line and say, ‘If you camp here, we are friends. If you camp there, we are enemies.’ There’s plenty of room, my friend. Camp where you want.”

  But the big council never happened. Clark gave He Dog the food to host a feast so the soldier chief could talk to Crazy Horse. But the Strange Man didn’t come—he sent a message that he saw no point in talking to the soldiers anymore.

  He Dog considered before he spoke to the soldier chiefs. “His Crazy Horse has strong medicine,” he said. “I think it is warning him. Warning him of what? I don’t know.”

  “Is he going to break out?” Colonel Bradley asked in a demanding way.

  “No,” said He Dog. “He has said over and over that he came here for peace. He will stick to his word.”

  Bradley and Clark seemed to accept that.

  Crazy Horse spent more and more time with Inyan, listening, sometimes praying, often simply sitting with them. For entire days he waited over Inyan in the warrior way that Hump had taught him, paying attention only to his own breath, becoming in that way stiller than anything living could normally be, still as the living Inyan itself. Stronger and stronger came the sound that was not a sound, the pulse of the earth.

  He waited as a warrior waits, fully aware, fully ready, surrendering expectation, giving his being to awareness, to welcoming anything in the forest or on the plains or on Maka, Earth, that might come to his consciousness. Now, more than in his youth, that might include visitors from the realm of spirits, or dreams, or ideas, or visions.

  He had gone to Horn Chips to talk about his time with Inyan. Though he didn’t hear words from them, he said, he was hearing something, not with his ears, not even with his mind, with … He heard the pulse of the earth and of all living creatures. “In this pulse is a sense of vastness,” he said, “or something like vastness. Like the feelings you get when you sit all night in the warrior’s way, breathing as a warrior, and the prairies begin to get light, and that light is the prairie, and is you, and you are it, touching everything in the prairie, Inyan and Maka and all the creatures that grow, and the air, and the light is the air, and you are the air, and you are within everything, and everything is within you. And then Father Sun rises….”

  After a moment he went on. “When I have that feeling, I can’t be angry or rash or foolish. It makes me want to spend day after day with Inyan.”

  Horn Chips said, “Inyan is speaking.”

  Crazy Horse said, “I don’t know what the stones are saying.”

  Horn Chips’ only other comment was, “Keep listening. Expect nothing. Listen.”

  As Crazy Horse left, Chips remarked to his wife that he saw that his friend’s spirit was better, and he was glad.

  Though Crazy Horse concentrated on waiting without expectation, one of his thoughts was that Hawk might return to him if he spent his time this way, his heart open, his being receptive. Sometimes he had a sense that Hawk was near, just out of reach, close but not yet back in his heart. He knew better than to lurch toward this presence he felt hovering. Hawk would come when she was ready.

  His sense of the nearness of Hawk was not vague or ephemeral. It was definite, as Hawk’s perch in his heart had been unmistakable, and it clearly did not yet include Hawk. She was not within.

  His heart began to recover now. He recognized again the feelings of his youth and young manhood, tentative yet returning—aspiration and hope, a sense of possibility, the prospect of welcome challenges.

  Sometimes he thought the coming challenge was living wild again. Other times he thought it was his own death. Either way, desolation seemed to be loosening its grip on him.

  As he sat breathing, he thought often of the cante ista. He knew that when he was listening to Inyan and the beat of the earth, he saw with the single eye that is the heart. He had no words for what he saw and heard. It was just a sense of the rightness of things. It was healing.

  He would be willing to die if he could have Hawk back, and be healed.

  Crazy Horse called his friends to him in twos and threes, men he had ridden the war trail and the hunting trail with, men who could keep a secret and who were of like minds, as unsuited for agency life as he was. Red Feather, the younger brother of Black Shawl. Black Elk. Ashes and Bull Head, his father’s brothers, his ate. His father and Touch-the-Sky, his uncle on his birth mother’s side, slipped down from Spotted Tail Agency one night, and he talked all the next day with them. Club Man, his sister’s husband. Little Killer, Little Shield, and Short Bull. Good Weasel, his lieutenant through the last years of war. He wanted six or eight companions, with their families.

  He made them all the same proposition. He was weary of chieftainship, he said, and was setting it down as fast as the wasicu would let him. Little Hawk would be much better than Crazy Horse at facing the new challenges of agency life. For himself, he said, agency life was no life. His spirit was dead here, his medicine sapped. “Maybe agency life isn’t for you either,” said Crazy Horse to each one.

  “I have given my word,” he declared, “and I will not lead the people off the agency and back to the free life. I have given my word. But a few of us can slip away, and live as we like. Maybe you would like to do that on your own. Or maybe you have relatives with Sitting Bull in the Land Their Grandmother Claims. Or maybe you would like to do it with me.

  “Whoever wants to go with me should slip away quietly, one lodge at a time, without making any fuss. We will all meet on Goose Creek near the Shining Mountains in the first half of the Moon When the Leaves Fall,” which was more than a moon away.
“Maybe we will be able to live in the Shining Mountains. Maybe farther north. Maybe in Grandmother’s Land. Now that Black Shawl is better, I may be able to live there.”

  He used the old Lakota words for things and places. He had noticed that younger Lakota were changing some of these words—Maka Sika they called “the badlands” or “terre mauvais,” and White Earth River they referred to as “the river where the agency is.” He had let some of his own language change. Now he consciously used the oldest names he could remember.

  “Don’t answer me in words,” he said. “Come back and ask questions if you like. Then come to Goose Creek, or don’t, whatever is best for your family.”

  Red Feather and Good Weasel, young men of high spirits, were elated at the proposal and said immediately that they wanted to go. Most of the men said how attractive it sounded and promised an answer in a few days. Some looked worried.

  Worm said simply and briefly that he would come with his son.

  Touch-the-Sky said he would consider the suggestion, but his village weighed heavy on his mind. The people owned him, and maybe he was not free to seek a life good for himself alone.

  Little Big Man pondered his answer a long time before he spoke. “I will always be your friend,” Little Big Man said, “but I will not walk beside you on this journey.” Then he laughed a little. “Maybe that’s good. I won’t be able to hold your arms if anyone shoots at you.” They had teased each other occasionally about that. Tonight Crazy Horse didn’t feel like any teasing. He was thinking that if he died here at this agency, it would be because his own people were holding him back in some way.

  “I can’t go,” Little Big Man repeated. “I’ve set my feet on a new road, the agency road, and I will ride it as hard as I ever rode into battle.” He looked Crazy Horse in the eye. “I’m an akicita man. That is my promise to the whites and my duty to the people.

  “Many times it looks like a black road to me,” he said. “Many times. I see much that you see. But I have promised myself, my family, Clark, the people of the village that I will walk this road.” He paused. “And I will do whatever it asks of me.”

  He let this sit a long while. “I’m glad you’re going. I think it’s right for you. I think this place will kill your medicine.” He hesitated. “I’m also glad for myself. I’m afraid Clark might ask me to arrest you.” He shifted his weight on his bottom. “They never say so, but I think that’s on their minds sometimes.” He smiled wryly. “You would be less trouble a hundred sleeps away in a jail, they say to themselves.” Hesitation. “I couldn’t stand arresting you. But if I was ordered, I would do it.”

  The two friends looked at each other in the eerie flicker of the fire. E-i-i-i, thought Crazy Horse, the world has turned itself inside out….

  “So go, my friend. Go soon,” said Little Big Man, getting to his feet. “Part of my heart will go with you.”

  Crazy Horse thanked him. As always, he did not say good-bye, but, “Ake wancinyankin ktelo,” meaning, “Until I see you again.”

  A MISTAKE OVER WORDS

  Late in the Moon When All Things Ripen, which the whites called August, Clark summoned the leaders of the Crazy Horse people and of the agency people. Since Touch-the-Sky had been called down from Spotted Tail Agency for the occasion, Crazy Horse knew it was important. As the headmen walked into the building next to his nephew, Crazy Horse said quietly that he wondered what was going on. “Do you think this is the big bribe?”

  Touch-the-Sky didn’t answer. The rumor all this moon had been that the wasicu would offer Crazy Horse chieftainship of all the Lakota in return for leading the people to the new agencies on the Muddy Water. The two leaders had shaken their heads ruefully about it. “They don’t understand you at all,” Touch-the-Sky said.

  But the news Clark gave them in the council room was something else entirely: Led by Chief Joseph, the Nez Percé had broken off the reservation. No one knew where they were going or what they would do. They were in the Yellowstone River country. This was one of the reasons the Lakota couldn’t be allowed to go there to hunt, added Clark, but this was a lie: The hunt had been refused half a moon ago.

  “Well,” the lieutenant went on, “we would like your help, the army would like your help. General Crook and General Miles are going to the Yellowstone country to fight the Nez Percé, and Crook wants your scouts to go with him.”

  Clark looked at them eagerly while Grabber translated. Bordeaux was there too, up from Spotted Tail with Touch-the-Sky, but he let Grabber do the translating.

  Everyone was too surprised to say a word. Finally Little Hawk said, “Fight?”

  “Yes,” said Clark. “Your scouts fight the Nez Percé.”

  The Indians talked quietly among themselves, the Crazy Horse people and Mniconjou Touch-the-Sky on one side of the room and the Red Cloud people, including No Water, on the other.

  Fight? This was unexpected. There were various opinions. Some said the young men would be glad for the opportunity and it would be good for them. Others said they had quit fighting forever. Others said it was a only trick by the whites to make it look like they were going to war.

  Finally Little Hawk answered for the Crazy Horse people. “You whites always ask one thing and then another. You wanted us to come in, we did. You wanted us to give up our horses and our guns, we did. You wanted us to go on a buffalo hunt, we said yes. You asked us to go to see The One You Use for Father, we said all right. Now you say go to war.”

  Little Hawk paused in his oratory for effect, and some of the headmen made the sound of approval. “Our people have untied their horses’ tails,” he went on. “We want the peace we were promised. We are tired of war. We want to go to the Yellowstone to hunt buffalo.”

  Without even waiting to hear from the Red Cloud side, Clark burst out, “That’s impossible. We can’t have you in that country. There’s trouble up there. Everyone will think all the Indians are off the reservation. Who knows what would happen?”

  He talked loudly and blusteringly. The Lakota looked surreptitiously at each other. Some of them felt ashamed to be shouted at this way. Others felt embarrassment for Clark, that he allowed himself to act like this. The most experienced around the agency just said to themselves, The white men are acting like white men again.

  While Grouard, Grabber, translated Clark’s words, they were only half-listening. You don’t listen to the words of a man who has lost control of himself.

  When Grabber finished, they all sat and thought, wondering how to answer this odd white man. To Touch-the-Sky’s surprise, it was Crazy Horse who finally spoke up, softly and deliberately. “We want peace,” he said. Crazy Horse did not sound reticent or self-effacing now, but like a man sure of his powers. Touch-the-Sky thought it was a shame that he would lay down chieftainship just when he had grown into it fully. “We want peace,” he repeated. “We are tired of war.”

  While Grabber made these words into English for Clark, Crazy Horse held the floor with his commanding gaze. “The wasicu have lied to us and tricked us from the beginning, when you tried to put Bear-Scattering over us all, and thus killed him. You are still trying to trick us.”

  The Indians in the room were perfectly still while Grabber translated. They were dazed by Crazy Horse’s taking command like this.

  “Nevertheless,” Crazy Horse went on, “we want to do what is asked of us. If The One You Use for Father wants us to fight the Nez Percé, we will go to the north country and fight until not a Nez Percé is left.”

  As soon as Grabber had translated the words, Clark started shouting at Crazy Horse. He was on his feet, red-faced, bellowing like a crazed bull in his incomprehensible language. Neither Touch-the-Sky nor any of the other Indians knew what to make of this outburst. Impolite didn’t begin to describe it.

  “But Crazy Horse said he will do what you want!” said someone near Touch-the-Sky.

  Suddenly one of the Red Cloud headmen, Three Bears, was on his feet, too, pointing at the sandy-haired one. “If you want
to kill someone,” he yelled, “kill me!”

  Suddenly the two interpreters were arguing, Grabber and Bordeaux. “You liar!” Bordeaux said over and over in Lakota.

  Grabber hollered back at Bordeaux—some of the Lakota recognized the bad white-man word bastard—the traders’ sons were acting as bad as white men.

  Grabber jumped up. For a moment Touch-the-Sky thought he was going to strangle Bordeaux. Suddenly the half-breed stopped himself. He glared at Bordeaux. Then he turned slowly and gave Crazy Horse the queerest look. Touch-the-Sky thought the face glimmered with triumph. In an instant the look was gone, and Grabber stomped out of the room.

  The door slammed the room into silence. Bordeaux stuck his head down angrily. The Lakota fell silent—no one wanted to argue in front of a white man. They all waited in tense wordlessness. Touch-the-Sky thought everyone looked agitated but Crazy Horse. His nephew seemed recovered from his melancholy of the last several moons, in fact serene in the eye of the storm.

  Fear shot through Touch-the-Sky like lightning, fear for Crazy Horse.

  He looked at the door Grabber had slammed behind him. What now? he wondered. What has this trader’s son done? But the door was blank and mute.

  Lieutenant Clark asked Bordeaux to interpret, but the trader’s son refused. Clark didn’t know the man well anyway. He was from Spotted Tail Agency. So he told a soldier to go get Billy Garnett to finish the council.

  He was irate. This wasn’t just a government problem—it was a personal betrayal. Crazy Horse had promised Clark personally that he had quit war forever, and now he declared that he would fight until not a single white man was left alive.

  Insolence and effrontery!

  He thought they were friends!

  It proved all the nasty rumors flying around the agency were true. Crazy Horse hated white people. Though he pretended friendship sometimes, he was a reactionary who would fight until he was dead, and all his people were dead.

  Clark waited for Garnett. He had to finish this council somehow, get out of here without a knife in his back, and telegraph Crook quick.