The Bird Is Gone: A Manifesto

by Stephen Graham Jones

  1857

  Winter had left them thin and parched. Runs To The Tree had gone hunting, shot once, then never returned. Horns In Back nodded as if everything was as it was supposed to be, and then no one said Runs To The Tree's name again, ever, even when they found him in the coulee, a small hole in one side of his grinning skull, a larger hole in the other side. He was already in the forks of a tree so they left him there with a twist of tobacco and one of the yellow arrows and the dog horse. The dog horse didn't stay with him though; Billy still saw it in the trees or between the rocks, its black hooves wrapped in the soft skin of a calf so it made no noise. Horns In Back watched his hands all the time now. Maddy Bride watched him watch his hands, held Bird close, ¶ ‘what is it?’ Judas Horse asked, not looking directly at her, but she wouldn't tell him, so he wrapped his own feet in the soft skin of a calf, moved silent from tree to tree, taking the velvety deer any way he wanted, walking Back into camp with them slung over his shoulder. No one would eat them though, not even the porcupine who rolled into camp disguised as a dry weed. ‘It'snothing,’ Horns In Back said, but it was. The porcupine laughed four times as it rolled away, leaving no quills for roaches or plumes. Maddy Bride kept two pouches of pemmican tied just above her hips, inside her clothes, just in case. At first the dogs could smell it, but soon they left her alone. ¶ Three days from the porcupine, the dog horse skylined itself on a ridge for them, and its silhouette opened up into button-sized holes, little suns in its side. Billy felt one of the greased shooters thump into the grass at his feet. As the sound rolled in he crouched, never looking away from the dog horse, and dug the slug from the ground. It was still hot. He handed it to Horns In Back and Horns In Back put it hissing to his tongue, looked to the dog horse, still not falling, even when the shooters walked up beside it with their long guns and their boots, silver at the toes and heels. When Maddy Bride looked down to Bird, Bird was holding the Freak Pipe. He had unwrapped it too fast. She wailed, but there was nothing to do; they had to smoke it, go deeper into this still. ¶ As Horns In Back led them to a spot, Billy looked back once to the ridge, the white men touching the dog horse with the tips of their guns, and when he turned back, Horns In Back was walking in front of Judas Horse's horse, and for a moment Billy saw Horns In Back through Judas Horse's calf: it was a perfect, fifty-caliber hole, bloodless. He had never smoked the Freak Pipe twice this close together. Nobody had. He sung his power song to himself and followed.

  1860

  Bird was growing up, going out with Billy to hunt when Maddy Bride let him, and even when she didn't. The name he chose when it was time was ‘Bird,’ just like his old one. Horns In Back said not to do it like that, but he had already done it. ¶ For giveaway he gave to Horns In Back three horses he had led away from a soldier camp. They were good horses: Horns In Back nodded once, held his robe together at the neck. ¶ Once just after the snow they rode up on the buffalo humps, skinned, still steaming, the air still ringing, smelling hot, and Maddy Bride walked to the top of the hill, looked east on the chance that this was the same herd they had smelled six winters ago and skirted. She couldn't tell, but when she looked back down, one of the cows stood, tongueless, skinned, and Judas Horse fell on it. He wore a white head-on ermine skin around the hole in his calf. The cow died under his knife, and they took her intestine where it was thick, turned it inside out then stuffed it with fat, tied it at both ends, ate it until their chins dripped grease and they weren't afraid of anything. But they were. Judas Horse wouldn't eat it, wouldn't eat at all. He would die in four moons, his bones pushing through his skin, and after he died the hole in his calf would finally bleed out so Horns In Back could sing over him. ¶ They were down to eleven now, then ten when Gauche's younger sister cut her hand on a square nail in a lodgepole from when it had been a tree. It was just a scratch. At the fire after she died, Bird asked Maddy Bride if she remembered the yellow arrows, and she said she remembered that one, anyway, she remembered how that dog horse had saved all their lives. Maybe it was still standing, even. ¶ Bird smiled, stirred the coals. That night he ate the pemmican his mother had kept tied to her side for three years. Behind him the canvas patches of the lodge stared out across the grassland, at the voices that never went away anymore. Some of the dogs that had been born since the Freak Pipe didn't Know what the night was like without those voices, Billy said, then traded two of them to another band for a beaded parfleche. When they saw that band again just before winter, the woman who had beaded the parfleche was wearing a blanket from the fort and staring at him the whole time. He tried to give the case back, but she didn't want it, wanted her son instead, her brother, who had eaten the dogs. ¶ Horns In Back led his people away, and didn't stop riding for six days, and then it was just to stand in the middle of floodwater, his horse's tail whipping the surface, fish nipping at it. ¶ Watching them, Bird finally threw up his mother's pemmican. It swirled in the current and eddied away, and in the time it took for Bird to wipe the back of his mouth, Horns In Back had fallen from his cavalry saddle, was underwater nipping at hairs in the sunlight as well, having his vision, the one they used to mark the year: it started there at the flood, the ten of them all turned towards the sun, but then the sun halved itself and halved itself again, lined the sky like the wooden beads of the short robe who had to be dead by now. ¶ ‘Look away,’ the short robe said, pointing up with one finger so Horns In Back could see the back of his hand, the veins blue there, and because the Freak Pipe was still unwrapped, Horns In Back looked harder, beneath the black robes, to the breastplate beneath, lined like a turtle shell. ‘Look,’ the turtle said in a voice Horns In Back knew, and before Horns In Back could remember to do the opposite, it was too late he'd already followed the pointed finger through the hole in Judas Horse's calf to a white buffalo calf standing two rises over, calling for its mother then turning to Horns In Back, nosing through the grass towards him, rising to walk on two legs like a child, yellow and blue and red thunderbolts standing in the ground at all four corners of the sky, which was the back of the short-robe's hand, Judas Horse's ermine skin raising its head, opening its mouth to receive this white thing the hand was holding, and that was when Billy pulled Horns In Back from the flood. ¶ That night they rode to the highest ground they could find and waited for Horns In Back to tell all this to them, and when it was over, Bird arranged the choker of his brother's hair on the stones by the fire. In the morning it was gone, and that's how he knew they were alone, it was just them now. With the first snowfall he followed Billy out for meat day after day, and it was always there for them, and it tasted like it always had, but it was different, too.

  1861

  The year of the cat. It just started following them. Gauche said it was from the fort they'd passed four days before, always keeping it on the right, but Horns In Back had been seeing it before then, even, when it was still bellydown at the edge of the light, the dogs whimpering. Earlier that day they'd found three men under a tree. One of them was hung from a rope, but they were all dead. Billy took one of their hats and Bird matched two pair of boots from the two on the ground, but then left them a few hours later when they filled with seed from the tall grass. ¶ The cat went in and out of the lodges. No one talked around it. For voices it had to go to the other camp, out past where they could see. Sometimes it stayed there for days, then came back fat. Once it returned heavy with kittens, but they were all stillborn, and not even Horns In Back would skin them to line his moccasins. ¶ He wasn't watching his hands anymore, but they could all see it by now, the fluted pink stone, worn by generations, scorched at the end he always kept closest to the ground. It would take more than four days to wrap it now; it would take the rest of his life. But Horns In Back never looked at it anymore, kept his eyes on the horizon instead, not for the voices or the cat slinking back, but for the white buffalo calf that was supposed to lead them back to the real land, with the real meat and the real grass. ¶ When Gauche had her second child, they could see through the skin of its hands for twelv
e days, until Maddy Bride was holding it one night, standing on the shadow side of the lodge, and one of its small hands passed before her face. Through it she saw the other camp, or the shape of it, blotting out the stars like a short mesa, steam rising all around it. She handed the child back to Gauche and never held it again, but Horns In Back watched her all that next morning and knew. ¶ Three days later they found one of their yellow arrows rotting in the grass and Billy calmly got down from his horse and buried it. No one said anything: they were riding in circles, in cycles, on top of themselves. Soon Bird would go out for wood and Runs To The Tree would be there, the cat rubbing against his sunbleached shinbone. ¶ Once Maddy Bride tied a piece of ribbon from a dead girl they'd found to the cat, and it was gone for days, came back with a different ribbon, maybe from another dead girl, maybe the same one. ¶ Horns In Back sang songs so the white calf could hear them, and Bird sang them in his head as he followed Billy from ridge to ridge. They both carried lances now, with scalps or feathers or skins or whatever tied near the head, swaying in the wind as they sat horseback, staring off into the night. They were too close to each other to be able to see, and no one would tell them that their silhouettes were like the dog horse's had been that day: pocked with light. But they hadn't been shot. If Maddy Bride had looked at them from the back, it would have been like with Gauche's child all over, and she would have pounded berries into meat and tied it all over her body, until the birds came and carried her away, back.

  1861, again

  Gauche's child was dead. Horns In Back had sung over it and they had buried it like white people then walked backwards away from it for two days, even the horses and the dogs. Two moons later Horns In Back had his second vision, and in this one he was young and marching, being marched by the cavalry, and he heard one of the old men beside him say ‘There it is,’ and it was a wide black bird riding the column of heat all their bodies were, and the old man kept his eyes fixed on it the whole march, until the soldiers greased their round gun up and made Horns In Back and his band stand shoulder to shoulder. The bird never left, even when the gun filled the daylight with smoke, and the old man who had been watching it was the first to die. ¶ In the sweat lodge Billy and Bird built for Horns In Back to understand this, Horns In Back said that the old man asked him what kind of bird it was, right before he died, and Horns In Back hadn't been able to tell. Billy curled his lip and looked away, not believing. Bird either Even though it was Horns In Back. After that they left his meat in front of his old patched lodge without calling out, so that by the time he got out there he had to beat the dogs off. Maddy Bride said none of this was right, and Gauche nodded, nodded. Gauche's oldest born just before the Year of the Yellow Arrows, was running everywhere now, learning to talk. Like the younger dogs, he didn't know what the night was like without the murmur of voices; he would be scared of the silence if they ever made it back from here. ¶ Three camps over, her oldest came to her to ask her about the horse with the soft feet. He had seen it in the trees, watching them with human eyes. Gauche left camp that next morning and never came back. The whole tiospaye could fit in one lodge now. A day's ride away, Bird found a doe crushed, her eyes still open, her legs at all the wrong angles. He looked up to see where she could have fallen from, but there was nothing. All around. Just the grassland. He quartered her and left a piece of her in front of Horns In Back's lodge, but Horns In Back wouldn't eat it. ¶ They hadn't seen anyone for eighteen moons now, since the dead men at the tree, though once two horses wandered into camp, both mares. They were wearing saddles inlaid with silver, the horns reaching up to the middle of Billy's stomach. Maddy Bride used a bone file to rub them off for Billy and Bird-the horns-but all she could do with the back of the saddle was rub notches in it. Billy and Bird used them until the second snow, when they had to burn them for warmth. The smoke they made was thick and sweet and it was like the old times, when they would find a wagon and take it apart try to put it together into something else, something they could use.

  1863

  The year Bird died and Maddy Bride left her hair on the grass again. He was the fifth skin to die since the Freak Pipe. When Maddy Bride said it like that-spit it-Horns In Back said listen, and told them that he knew where they were now: on a tanned elk skin he'd seen once years ago, when it fell off someone's pack. It was the story of The Fifth Skin, only he was seeing it, not hearing it and what he was seeing was four people dead and then a fifth dying too, but coming back. The four who died first pushed the fifth back, up. ¶ Bird had died like Runs To The Tree had died, though: with a small hole in one side of his head, a larger one on the other side; shot. Maddy Bride said she didn't want him to come back. ¶ In the days after they left Bird in his tree, Billy ranged farther and farther out for meat, and always found it. He didn't tell anyone, but the wide black bird from Horns In Back's second vision had been showing him where the meat was, and once he had seen his son moving through the tall grass after him. His son was almost transparent now, but his hair was slick with grease, so he was finding meat too, somewhere. He didn't say his name, though, but rode away, because soon Gauche would rise from the grass too, running after her son, and he knew he would follow if he saw her, that the camp would starve. But maybe that would be best, too: eating the wrong-meat was making them wrong as well. ¶ That night Billy called out when he dropped Horns In Back's meat off, and stood there guarding it until Horns In Back leaned up from his flap. ¶ ‘Where is he?’ Billy asked, looking away, wherever the two eyes on Horns In Back's lodge were looking, and Horns In Back bunched his shoulders together in imitation of whatever Bird was going through and it was like he was in his mother again, fists up near his face. ¶ That night Billy said Bird's name where Maddy Bride could hear it, even if she pretended not to, and the next day when they were riding, the ground beneath them got louder, harder, even though it was just grass, and one of the new mares began running, her shod hooves leaving sparks that set the land on fire. Horns In Back's band ran from it until the lodge poles they were using for the travois were worn to nubs, and then they stood facing it, waiting, and it passed, taking all their breath with it, scorching their leggings and their eyelashes but that was all. It was the Year of the Black Moccasins. Everything burned. The black ash collected in the corners and rims of their eyes and around their lips until they were painted like clowns, but not holy, just lost. And still the other camp remained, still Billy sat his horse at dusk, the butt of his lance pushing a shiny spot in the ground, whatever was hanging off it swaying in the wind. He didn't smile. Sometimes now Horns In Back joined him, the Freak Pipe left alone in his lodge, on a spit carved from shed antlers. It was still smoking, and Horns In Back didn't have to say to Billy that maybe they were still smoking it that first time, that maybe Bird was still young, Gauche still back at camp rubbing brains into skin, Judas Horse still using his first name. ¶ Billy had been the one to find Bird, though. The crumbling bank beside him was splattered red, and Bird was still warm, and the gun he had found was still in his hand, Bird's. Billy had buried it, arranged Bird, then taken Bird's pouch from around his neck, weighed the yellow arrowhead in it then slung it up as high as he could. It never came down.

  186x

  The last recorded year. When Billy saw something coming to them from the other camp and gripped his lance tighter, finally raised it for the camp to see, to come see. Maddy Bride was the first to make it up the rise, Horns In Back the last Behind them meat sizzled and boiled and hones stamped and blew and a lodgeflap opened and closed, breathing smote out The grassland was greener than it had ever been that year, from the fire. The dogs were fat from rabbits and moles. Three days ago Billy had walked the horses single file through a prairie-dog town so wide they had to camp twice to get across it. Horns In Back had left small pieces of chewed meat at the edge of the light for the prairie-dog people. But they didn't mark the year with the prairie-dog people walking into camp, inspecting all their goods, taking all the brass buttons to trade underground. ¶ The voices were loude
r now, too, and Sioux, but not Sioux. Maybe Horns In Back's tiospaye had been gone long enough that the people had changed. They would still expect him to have the Freak Pipe, though, but he had left it smoking on its antler spit many moons ago. There was no wrapping for it anymore, no bundle. He watched it as they left, too, and saw what happened: an impossibly tall wasichu in citizen dress had rolled over the opposite hill, blinking in the Dakota sun, the Freak Pipe drawing him in. Once there he knelt, danced around it, knelt again, squinted at the sun and unfolded a piece of paper from his jacket, rolled it into a cigarette with no tobacco-with words for tobacco-and inserted it into the Pipe, settled it back into its spit, and loped off. Horns In Back couldn't see through him like he could everybody else; the tall man was solid, black. ¶ When Billy doubled back to bring Horns In Back along, he didn't see the tall man running away, but the shadow of his wide bird racing up the hill. ¶ ‘Should we wrap it?’ Billy asked, about the pipe, and Horns In Back lifted his fingers to the sky all around, meaning it was. It's just that they were in with it now. Neither of them looked back again, just forward, through the prairie-dog town, to the next camp and the next, and the next. ¶ Sometimes Billy still found Maddy Bride's hair woven into the top of the grass in mourning, and he kept it, stranded it all together into a breastplate spaced with rifle brass. He would never wear it, though. It was too powerful, too light. It was for his son, or for Bird or for Judas Horse, to protect them from the yellow arrow still falling out of the sky one day. They would have to be lying on their back, though. Billy was thinking about this when he saw it, gripped his lance: it was a puff of white far out in the grassland, as far as he could see, but slowly it stumbled forward into the shape of a buffalo calf, and he raised his lance, laughed, and when Maddy Bride saw it she laughed too, and they were all laughing, for the first time in years.