Night Birds, The

by Maltman, Thomas

  HENRY DAVID THOREAU

  A BRIEF

  HISTORY OF

  THE OTHER

  THE MORNING OF his birth the sun rose pale and rimmed with sun dogs, like a harried old man chased by wolves across the great emptiness. On the open span of prairie below, a scattering of a dozen teepees huddled near a wooded draw. Smoke rose in thin breathing streams from only four of those teepees. The rest shuddered in the north wind, the buffalo skin flaps opening and closing like slit mouths. On the outskirts of the village circle, one teepee had collapsed inward as though crushed by a giant foot.

  A woman in fringed doeskin, her hair unbraided, passed this collapsed teepee carrying something close to her chest. Hungry half-wolf mongrels nipped at her ankles until she kicked them away. When she reached the edge of a winding creek, she broke through the skin of ice with the flat of one hand. A moment later she dunked the baby she carried headlong into the frigid water and then pulled it out again, holding it by the ankles. The village, silent until this moment, erupted with the sound of his squalling. She held him upside down for a moment longer, saying his name aloud: Wanikiya, Savior .

  With his birth winter would return, and the strange speckling illness that flourished in the unnatural warm air, killing half of Seeing Stone’s tribe, would release its hold.

  The woman’s name was Wichapewastwan, Good Star Woman , and after she dunked the child in the frigid water she carried him back to the teepee and coated his skin with bear grease and a fine layer of vermilion powder before binding him in the cradleboard. All that remained of her husband, Seeing Stone, was a lock of hair within a deerskin mourning bundle hanging from one of the cedar poles. This was where his second soul remained close to this earth, whispering inside her and telling her that this child, born to an old woman, would be proclaimed a “child beloved.”

  The baby had a fine head of dusky black hair and a single lock of silver. His mother would swear that sometimes the ghost of his father became visible in the child’s dark eyes, like glimmers of fish seen in a river at night.

  After the child’s birth the medicine man, Hanyokeyah, Flies in the Night , led the remaining band back onto the reservation and the camp the white soldiers chose for them to live, a place they had fled from when Chief Seeing Stone’s oldest son, Tatanyandowan, Pretty Singer , killed a cow that belonged to a settler.

  The hair-faced soldiers had come to the camp to demand they turn the killer over, but Seeing Stone refused and instead took his band of Wahpekute, The People Who Shoot Among the Leaves , out onto the prairie during the moon when the wind shakes the leaves from the trees. Flies in the Night had advised against this journey, dreaming of the illness— which caused skin to peel away like layers of birchbark—coming down on them in a red rain of pollen as they passed through a maple forest on the way out to the grasslands.

  Now, with the child’s birth, they would go back and turn over Pretty Singer to the soldiers. Eager to escape this place of sickness, they would leave some of the teepees still standing. The train of dogs and travois poles and speckled ponies marched into the moaning north wind, and if the child Wanikiya’s newborn vision had not been clouded, he might have turned his neck from the confines of the cradleboard and witnessed the grove of cottonwoods where bodies were draped from branches and leaning scaffolds, and seen his own father’s corpse among them.

  Like all Dakota, the Wahpekute marked time by winter. If this warm winter of illness made Wanikiya, it also made his brother, Tatanyandowan.

  Sequestered in a windowless cell dug from the sod, Pretty Singer slept on a matting of urine-soaked hay on a hard-packed floor. He did not eat the food the hair-faced soldiers brought for him, fearing that it was poisoned. His brother, Touches-the-Treetops, went into one of these prisons after he was accused of stealing eggs from a settler and never came out again. Pretty Singer must live, if only to revenge himself on the medicine man, Hanyokeyah, who had given him over to these wasicun.

  Already the soldiers had cut off his braids and scalp-lock, a source of his power. Pretty Singer was only twelve years old, but tall for his age. Thin and famished, he did not know enough English to tell the soldiers that he was only a boy and that he had killed the cow because he couldn’t stand to hear the rasping, hungry cries of his youngest sister, Little Wheat, any longer.

  If he lived this would be the summer the Zuya-Wakan , war shaman, led him through the ceremony of inipi , three days and nights of steam bathing during which he denied himself food and water. At the end of the ceremony he would be presented with his sacred armor and the vision of the animal who would be his spirit protector for life, an animal that he must never kill from that moment forward.

  The starvation hurt worse than he imagined, coiling through his bones like the red sickness he had watched kill so many. His tongue felt heavy as a dark stone in his parched mouth. When his hands passed over his ribs they felt as hard and cold as knives beneath his fingertips. The wool blanket wrapped around him crawled with vermin. Every night he was haunted by the memory of his father, sores cratering and bleeding from pustules on his body, even his eyelids and tongue. The vermin crawling on him made Pretty Singer think the sickness had come to him too.

  Pretty Singer’s starvation had an unintended affect. His vision came that winter in the prison cell on the fourth day he was without food.

  Outside it was snowing and as the soldiers passed his cell their boots crunched in the powder. He was too weak to turn his head toward the sound of their footsteps. Instead he watched the black ceiling above him, where sometimes dirt shook free in black clumps.

  The fourth morning the ceiling changed shape before his eyes and became a canopy of leaves, wet and dripping with rain.

  To his surprise he smelled braids of sweetgrass burning. He could smell the rain in the treetops. In his mind he saw an ancient cottonwood tree split down the middle like the opening of a teepee. Inside the tree there was an ugly dwarf-man only a foot tall with mottled skin and webbed fingers like a raccoon. When the dwarf spoke to him, Pretty Singer knew this was Canotina . The dwarf sat with his legs crossed, smoking a red pipe with a willow stem as long as his body. He beckoned Pretty Singer to sit beside him and share the pipe. While Pretty Singer smoked, the dwarf recited names of his living relatives: Little Wheat, and his mother Good Star Woman. Lastly he said the name of his new brother, Wanikiya. After each name the dwarf asked simply, “Will you give me this?” And even knowing what it meant, Pretty Singer nodded yes. The tree dweller then taught him a feast to prepare four times a year, and a song for days of hunting and battle, a song of power.

  Pretty Singer opened his eyes from the vision. Around him was the musty-smelling darkness of the sod cell. He lay there in the dark knowing that each person he named for the Canotina, including the “child beloved,” would be dead when he returned to camp. For the powers he would have now, he had traded their lives. He wondered why he did not mourn them, and if the Canotina also had taken a sliver of his soul.

  He passed ten days in this cell, but when he emerged again the winter spell was over. When he emerged again he no longer thought and feared like a child.

  His oldest cousin, Blue Sky Woman, secured his release. She loved one of the soldiers at the fort, a man named Eben Godfrey who had taught her English. When this soldier learned of Pretty Singer’s age he convinced Lieutenant Jenkins to let the boy go.

  All the way down the sloped ridge that led to the wide frozen river and beyond that to the camp of Seeing Stone’s band, Pretty Singer leaned on his oldest cousin’s shoulder. At the base of the hill he abandoned the striped trader’s blanket the soldiers had given him as if to make up for his captivity. And he couldn’t help noticing the swelling in Blue Sky Woman’s belly and knowing that his cousin was pregnant with one of the wasicun’s children. A quick moment of regret passed through him that he had not given her name to the Canotina instead of Little Wheat.

  Back at camp he pretended surprise when he learned of Little Wheat and Good Star Woman
’s deaths when they broke through the ice crossing the river with firewood they had gathered on the far side. Good Star Woman had left the baby Wanikiya in a cradleboard she tied to an oak limb at the base of hill. Swinging by a branch, the baby witnessed his sister and mother crack through the ice. Bound against the flat board, trussed in blankets, the baby watched as the women floundered in the water and tried to free themselves from the heavy load of firewood they carried on their backs. He alone heard them scream, their hands trying to claw the ice edges while the swirling river pulled them down. The two brothers lived for a while with their cousin Blue Sky Woman and her little girl, Winona. Pretty Singer figured it was an accident that the Canotina had not taken Wanikiya. Two beaded turtle charms hung from the boy’s cradleboard, one with the baby’s umbilical cord sewn inside, the other empty to fool the spirits trying to take the child’s life. That winter, Pretty Singer cut away the charm that held the umbilical cord and cast it in the river where his sister and mother had drowned. But the child did not sicken or die.

  Winters came and went, Wanikiya growing into a lean child with his father’s high cheekbones. The single lock of silver shone in his black hair. As a “child beloved” he was set aside from the others in a teepee decorated with thunder beings and a new spirit Blue Sky Woman learned about from her soldier: Tunkashila, the Son of Man, whom she painted with yellow hair radiating out from him like spokes of light. With both his parents dead, Wanikiya should have lost his status as a child beloved because they were not there to donate gifts and food to the poor in his name. Pretty Singer fumed when the medicine man Hanyokeyah did this in their stead. He waited for the Canotina to kill the child and so complete Pretty Singer’s power. As winter followed winter he grew impatient.

  During the moon when the geese lay eggs he took his brother out fishing in the flooding river and while Wanikiya stood in the front of the canoe, watching the swift current with his spear poised, Pretty Singer caused them to overturn. Somehow Wanikiya dog-paddled to a floating cottonwood limb which he clung to like a drowning muskrat and so floated to shore.

  The boy grew terrified of ice and rivers; his only concession was to wash himself with water from the skins his cousin carried up for him from the river.

  By now Pretty Singer was part of the soldier’s lodge, though he had not counted any coups in battle and earned the right to wear an eagle feather. One spring while hunting he cornered a small black bear in a wooded ravine. When he pulled the trigger of his single-action shotgun, the hammer came down with a rusty click and did not fire. The panicked bear attacked him, barreling into him in a blur of claws and black fur. One swipe tore open the flesh of his ribcage. A single bite of those jaws tore off his left ear. The bear would have mauled him to death had not another warrior, Good Thunder, heard Pretty Singer’s screams and come to shoot it down while it was still crunching on the cartilage of his ear. Pretty Singer survived and wore the white headband lower to hide his mutilated face. Slow to heal, he glowered all that summer during feasts and dances when Good Thunder reenacted his rescue, complete with a shrill imitation of the girlish screams Pretty Singer had loosed while being mauled. The maiden he had been courting, Jingling Dress, refused to come out of her teepee when he came to play for her on the red cedar flute, and turned away from him when he waited for her down by the river.

  Meanwhile, as he watched his brother grow up before him, he began to doubt the vision he had seen so many winters ago.

  The next summer he took his brother out riding across the prairie on the one skinny pinto pony he owned. The boy leaned against him while Pretty Singer taught him the names of birds and plants as they rode through bluestem grassland as high as the horse’s belly. The boy had wide, dark eyes and his hair was scented with sweetgrass Winona had wound through the braids. A knot grew in Pretty Singer’s throat when he thought of what he was about to do, but then he saw the boy’s perfectly formed ears, now turned attentively to listen to his older brother’s instruction, and he didn’t feel as guilty.

  They rode all day through wooded ravines, fording steep sloughs where mosquitoes lay in ambush from stagnant black puddles. They rode until they were far from any Dakota or whites, on a stretch of flat prairie spanned by an enormous blue sky where a white-hot sun burned like a cinder.

  He bid Wanikiya lay down on a spine of red rock that rose from the grass. The boy did as he asked, his eyes curious. Pretty Singer drove stakes into the ground around the rock and then he laced leather cords through the stakes and bound his brother tight against the boulder. “You must not be afraid,” he told his brother. “Every boy goes through this in order to become a warrior. This will be a second birth for you. If you are good and do not cry out, I will come back for you at the end of the day.” The boy nodded quietly, not knowing that his brother intended to abandon him to die of thirst or starvation. Wanikiya was dressed only in breechclout, and his copper-colored arms and legs blended into the red stone. A stain of sweat spread like pooling blood around him while the white sun looked down on them both like a single glaring eye.

  Then Pretty Singer rode to camp where he told a lie about a group of stray Pawnee warriors that he and the boy had come across while scouting for buffalo herds not seen in many summers on the prairie. He said the boy had been captured and shot when he tried to escape. Blue Sky Woman went into her teepee and cut her hair, weeping, after he told the story. The old medicine man Hanyokeyah studied him as though reading his soul in his eyes. Pretty Singer had to look away. He didn’t feel any different. Not ashamed. Yet no wash of power came from the Canotina.

  The sun dried the tears and sweat on his face, leaving white trails of salt lining his cheeks and chin until it looked as though his red skin had been painted for war. His throat was a torch. Wanikiya strained against the sinews, but was bound fast. When he shut his eyes he saw a wash of blue and reds and the sun, a darkly radiant ball of flame pressed close to his lids. He licked his lips, tasting shreds of peeling skin and his own blood. Pretty Singer was not coming back. There was only the hot wind in the tallgrass and the sun that would melt him like tallow before the fire.

  His backbone went numb against the spine of stone and just when he thought the torture could not get any worse, the sun faded in the sea of grass. He could feel his own burned skin breathing in the dark. The wind, soothing now, was filled with voices. Good Star Woman. It was said his mother was a healer. If she had lived she might have taught him the ways of the medicine society. Already, like his father, he was a finder of lost things, once rescuing a lone burrowing owl that he’d kept alive through the winter. Who would find him out here? There were locusts in the bluestem, the vibrating song of them. Wanikiya prayed aloud for his mother’s spirit and strength. He kept up the chant until his voice rasped down to a thread. The stars came and went. A sickle moon crossed the great span of dark on her pale horse.

  Then the sun rose again and the boy no longer had a voice. His body was a husk. His arms struggled against the sinews to no avail. Every breath left his chest in a tongue of fire. He could turn his head and see the bluestem swaying, each stand of tallgrass tinged with a head of seeds. A swaying army of pale men come to see him die on this stone. Then the rain. First a few drops that speckled the ground, the boy straining toward them. Voices in the clouds. Riders on dark steeds, the thunder gods. Rain and more rain and the boy drinking it in. The sun descended through shredded clouds.

  He slept and woke while it was still dark. Across the prairie a flight of dark birds, blackbirds the boy had been taught to fight to protect the corn. His enemy. All around him they descended like dark stones. One turned toward him with its bright yellow beak. It hopped onto the stone, only a few inches away from Wanikiya’s eyes. I am dead and dreaming, he thought, and now they will steal my flesh. The bird turned instead and began to peck at the sinews that bound him to stone. The stars swirled; he had a sense of the earth turning and himself at the center. The birds came from this region of darkness, down and down from the stars. They pecked at
pebbles, gnawed away at his ropes. He felt the tension release. Still he stayed on the stones, even as the birds rose again and disappeared in the dark. The wind came across the grass, the heads of seeds loosening and taking flight. He heard a voice in the breath of this wind. You are like this grass , the voice was saying, that burns in the summer and comes again. His mother’s voice, Child, the fire is coming and you are only a speck before it. How I wish I was there to guide you. The wind faded and with it her voice. He called after it, his throat rasping Good Star Woman’s name, but he was alone in the dark.

  After three days Wanikiya came back, carrying the leather thongs his brother had bound him with. He said nothing while the joyous village embraced him and celebrated his return. His lips were coated with black blood, his skin peeling and blistered with sun sores. Finally, Wanikiya told of some blackbirds coming down at night and pecking away the cords that held him. He told of following the pony’s hoofprints back across the prairie to find the camp again. He did not tell anyone that his own brother had tied him to the rock.

  The village celebrated his return as proof of his status and power. They said he would grow into a warrior even greater than his father, Seeing Stone, had been. They said it was clear now that he would be their leader.