The Native American Experience
“You have enjoyed the day?” Big Star asked.
“I am a happy man,” Dane replied. “For the first time I feel that I am one of the People, those whom the white men call Indians.”
“The Sanakis, your people, have lived much with the whites, my son tells me.”
“Yes, the Cherokees have taken the white man’s way.”
Big Star sighed. “Someday I fear more of the Veheos will come to our country. I could not live like a white man.”
The circle of girls grew more spirited in their dancing; they were laughing and playing tricks on one another. “The young never tire,” Bear Woman said. “But when I think of tomorrow with all the meat to be dried and hides to be dressed I long for my bed.”
“Yes, I too must sleep,” Big Star said. “The men will hunt again tomorrow.”
Dane expressed his surprise that they would kill more buffalo so soon.
“Buffalo are like the wild plums,” Big Star told him. “They don’t stay around very long. We ask each animal to forgive us for taking life from it, and we use everything we kill, meat and hides and bones. The herds will leave us soon and then we will start for the Ghost Timbers to winter with our cousins from the north.”
From out of the shadows Yellow Hawk appeared, shouting teasing remarks at the dancing girls. “My body is like a stone,” he said to Dane. “Why are we not resting ourselves for tomorrow’s hunt?” They followed Yellow Hawk’s parents into the tipi, and in a minute Dane was stretched under a light blanket on the comfortable willow-and-sinew bed. He watched the tiny flickerings of the low fire as his tired muscles relaxed. Bear Woman called her daughter to come to bed. The laughter and dancing stopped, followed by soft girlish voices and subdued giggles near the tipi flap.
He saw a crouching shadow beyond the fire, gliding noiselessly across the tipi floor, not toward one of the family beds but circling toward his. Beyond the first shadow appeared others, moving as though walking animal-like on all fours. The first shadow was soon very near him. He caught the scent of her, and then she sprang toward his bed, lifting the blanket and lying beside him, her head on his outflung arm. She seemed to be trembling, but he could tell that it was only repressed laughter. The other forms stood erect then, tittering above them in the semidarkness, as Sweet Medicine Girl tried to leave him. But he turned the prank on her, holding her tight until he felt the cords around her thighs through her thin cloth dress, the nihpihist, forbidden to him, and he let her go.
In a sleepy voice Bear Woman ordered all of them to bed. The other girls scurried out of the tipi, and Sweet Medicine Girl vanished into the shadows. From across the fire he could hear the rustle of clothing and then a sigh after she crawled into her bed. All around him was the aroma of sweet grass from her hair and the fading female fragrance of her clean young body.
Dane remained with the Cheyennes through the Moon of Ripening Plums, awakening each day with a feeling of exhilaration that he had rarely known before. Now and then the sensation he experienced when first coming to the Plains recurred—that life was a dream. But his senses were so keen that he knew everything was reality—the excitement of the hunts, the hard sweaty work, the joy of dancing, the happy mischievous children, the pure freedom of the Cheyenne way of life, the shyly innocent coquetries of Sweet Medicine Girl.
With the coming of the first chilly nights, Big Star announced that they would soon start for a place they called the Hinta Nagi, the Ghost Timbers, to make winter camp. Dane knew then that his happy sojourn was coming to an end. He could not remain forever a guest of the chief and his family; he had given his word to Sam Lykins to return the horses and carbine; he longed to see Creek Mary and tell her of his adventures. And his thoughts kept returning to others of his family—Pleasant, Jerusha, Jotham. It was time to start back, return to the old life.
On the morning that he left he was surprised at the number of Cheyennes who came by Big Star’s tipi to wish him a safe journey, to give him little farewell presents. Lean Bear, who sometimes still looked at him in a strange way, came with the buffalo hunters. Red Bird Woman and her mother—Rainbow—the old woman who had come up to him that first day to peer at the teeth marks on his neck—brought him a pair of beaded moccasins.
He rode off on the pinto, leading Lykins’s two horses. Yellow Hawk and Sweet Medicine Girl accompanied him to the top of the first ridge. There Yellow Hawk offered his hand in farewell. And then as though on impulse, his sister dismounted and removed a horse bell from around her pony’s neck. She took the bell over to the pinto and fastened it around its neck. Dane leaned down, reaching for her, but she backed quickly away.
“That present is truly from her heart,” Yellow Hawk said. “The bell was a gift from me and she has prized it above all things.”
“Someday I will bring the bell back to you,” Dane promised her.
She mounted. “May the spirits guard you,” she said. Before she wheeled her pony he saw tears glistening in her eyes. Then she was gone at a fast gallop, with her brother following. Dane started down the slope of the ridge, looking back until they vanished behind him like shapes in a dream.
With no difficulty he found the trail to Independence. By traveling steadily from daylight to dark each day, and alternating mounts, he reached the Missouri River in ten days.
It was evening of a dusty late summer’s day when he rode up to Sam Lykins’s white clapboard house and dismounted at the hitching rail. Lykins must have seen him from a window; he came out waving a lighted cigar. “I would’ve wagered a fortune,” he cried, “that I’d never set eyes on you and my horses again! Did you get the Red Bird Woman to her folk?”
Dane told him of his adventures and spent the night, after enjoying a warm bath in Lykins’s big washtub and sharing the trader’s food, which seemed too richly flavored after the simple meals of the Cheyennes. It was in Dane’s mind to leave for Arkansas early the next day, but Lykins refused to hear of such a quick departure. Throughout the morning the trader kept inviting him to drive one of the wagons in his autumn train to Santa Fe, but Dane kept begging off. Finally Lykins put the proposal to him as an obligation. Dane was the only driver who had traveled the cutoff route that Red Bird Woman had guided them over, and his presence was needed on the first wagon journey over that poorly marked trail. “Besides,” Lykins added, “I trusted you with my horses and gun for that outlandish mission of yours.”
“I’ll go,” Dane finally told him, “but only if I can scout on horseback as you do. Not as a wagon driver.”
“For a supposedly unenlightened Indian,” Lykins replied in a tone of mock indignation, “you squeeze a man mighty hard.” Then he slapped his fist against his knee. “Done! We leave within the week.”
That second journey to Santa Fe was not nearly as exciting for Dane as the first. They did have one adventure with a Comanche hunting party. He and Lykins came near to being ambushed, but by putting spurs to their mounts and forcing them across a deep ravine they made it back to the safety of the wagon train. Upon arriving at Santa Fe, they found the market swamped with cheap goods. Lykins refused to sell at the prevailing low prices, and talked Dane into going on with him to El Paso.
Afterward he always remembered that journey as one of continual discomfort—a burning sun by day, freezing cold by night, of sand and thirst and recurring attacks of homesickness. With one delay after another—wrecked wagons, snowstorms, and flooded river crossings—they did not return to Independence until late spring.
On the last morning of the return journey, Dane awoke before sunrise, a strange feeling of dread oppressing him. He was in one of the empty wagons, and when he dropped silently upon the dewy grass to face the graying eastern sky he saw the black shape of a bird circling low, a hawk. Suddenly the hawk cried out, and with a quick flap of its wings sped toward the place where the sun would rise. In the faint light he could not determine the color of its feathers. It was only a sliding shadow against the slaty sky.
He thought of Creek Mary, and the dread
came upon him again. He ached to see her, to touch her, tell her of his travels. Her voice sounded in his ears, and then he heard a boot scuff against sandy earth. He turned and saw Sam Lykins standing beside the wagon, yawning while he buttoned his shirt. “You in a hurry to get started?” Lykins asked.
“I’m riding on ahead,” Dane said.
“You’ll stay with me in Independence?”
“No, I’m going home.”
He saddled the pinto and started off at a gallop for Independence. There he took the road southward into the Ozarks. Four days later, under low and threatening clouds, he turned into Cane Hill’s single street and trotted past Dr. Saviah Manning’s barbershop and office, seeing no sign of her presence. As he approached Timothy Rogers’s smithy and the log cabin they had built after fleeing from the Cherokee Nation, he was dismayed by the dilapidated appearance of the buildings. Someone had removed the sturdy front door from the cabin and most of the shakes from the roof. The blacksmith forge and tools were gone; the weathered doors of the empty shed swung open. Weeds were beginning to grow in the yards. He did not have to dismount to know that no one had lived there for many months.
Heartsick, he turned the pony and faced down the empty street, the dark skies adding to his gloom. What could have happened to all of them?
From a narrow side road, a buggy wheeled into the street and moved away from him. Above the lowered top he could see the driver’s flat-topped black hat with a faded yellow feather in the band. Dr. Saviah Manning. He overtook the buggy as it came to a stop in front of the barbershop.
“Dane!” she cried. “You look as though you’d seen a night spirit.”
He motioned toward the abandoned cabin and smithy. “I have. What happened to them?”
She leaped out of the buggy, lithe as a young boy in her jeans trousers. “You don’t know? Of course not, you ran off from them.” Raindrops spattered from the hovering clouds. She began hurriedly unhitching the black mare.
“They went back to the Nation,” she said. “Chief Ross visited them one day and told them the Cherokees had covered the bones of the dead, that it was safe for them to return.”
“They’re all right then?” he asked anxiously.
“I have heard nothing of them. Little news comes to us from the Nation these days. Jotham promised to come back to see me, but he has not.”
She led her horse around to a stable in the rear of her place, and he followed. “Put your pony in the stall,” she said, “unless you mean to ride into a rainy night.”
“The pinto needs a rest,” he said. “As I do.”
She invited him to share dinner in her room above the barbershop. During the meal they exchanged only a few words, he telling her briefly of where he had been, and she commenting on the differences between him and Jotham. “You have a wildness about you that repels me,” she said frankly, “although you do bear some physical resemblance to your half-blood cousin. He and I are much alike, our white blood constantly struggling with the Indian in us.”
The rain drumming on the roof made him sleepy. He reached for his saddlepack and stood up, thanking her for the food. “I’ll go find a place to sleep,” he said.
Her dark eyes studied him a moment from across the candle burning on the little table, and then she followed him down the stairway to the latched front door. When he opened it, rain swept into their faces. “Where will you go?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Up to the old cabin.”
“It has no roof,” she reminded him, “nor does the smithy.”
“Your stable has a loft.”
“Only rafters.” She touched his arm lightly. “Stay here. Remember, your grandmother made me one of your tribe. Suyeta, the Chosen One.” She smiled. “I will give you something that will make you dream.”
After he removed his Mexican boots and rolled his serape out on the floor, she brought two cups of light-brown liquid and sat cross-legged facing him. They drank in silence, sipping the slightly bitter drink. “Lie down,” she said, “and dream.” She disappeared with the candle, and he drifted into a strange sleep, half-unconscious, half-awake.
Brilliant streamers of color swirled from above, encircling him. Faces and then full figures of people he had known, clothed in bright reds and greens, floated in the air. The hands of Red Bird Woman and Jerusha and Sweet Medicine Girl reached for him until Saviah Manning, soaring like an eagle in brown nakedness, intruded upon them, pushing them away with her strong masculine hands, seizing him with a mouth that became a beak plucking at his belly. Their moans were intermingled. Her voice kept calling Jotham’s name as though she were in torment. He wanted to scream but his mouth was stopped.
He awoke in her bed, saturated with sweat. She was pounding on his chest. “Get up and dress,” she commanded. “I want you out of here before daylight.”
“Why?” He felt listless, unable to move.
“The people in this town believe me to be a half-breed spinster who hates men. It’s better for me that they keep believing that.” She pushed him off the bed, and after he dressed she followed him naked to the door, lifting the latch and pushing him out into the damp darkness. “Tell Jotham he lied to me,” she said, and closed the door behind him.
30
AT THAT POINT IN his life, Dane left me to go to bed. I had no difficulty in falling asleep, but was soon awakened by coyote harmonies, not a quartet or an octet, but what seemed to be a mighty choir of all the prairie wolves of Montana. I’m sure that I heard Dane’s voice from time to time joining in the performance as interlocutor. Eventually the singers departed, the sound of their melodies gradually receding as if they were members of an opera company departing into the wings.
After that I must have fallen into a deep sleep. When I awoke, Dane was bathing in the icy stream of melted snow that ran below my window. Just as I finished dressing in the shivering chill of the Montana spring morning, he came bounding in to warm his backside at the fireplace. He had already cooked breakfast for us.
“Saviah Manning pushed you out into the wet dawn,” I reminded him.
“Yes, I stopped telling you about that last night because I did not want to go to sleep with bad memories of my return to the Cherokee Nation. I suppose everyone who leaves his kin for a long time and then returns must suffer the same shock of discovering that everything changes, and that he is not the center of the world as he had thought, but only a grain of dust in other people’s lives. It was especially painful and grievous to me.
“Must’ve been past midnight when my tired pinto brought me to the double cabin Uncle Opothle built and that we had abandoned so hastily to flee to Arkansas. The house was dark, and I did not know for certain they had returned to it. I knew that if I awakened Grandmother Mary she would never go back to bed; she would want to know everything I had done.
“And so I rolled up in my serape on the porch and went to sleep. Aunt Suna-lee awoke me to the smell of woodsmoke and frying pork. She had seen the pinto from the window, and came out to investigate. When I rose up, she rushed to embrace me, weeping so freely that I felt her warm tears on my face. I had never known her to behave in such a manner. Still sobbing, she led me into the house and back to the kitchen, where Prissie stared at me in disbelief until tears came to her eyes.
“ ‘Where’s Grandmother Mary?’ I asked, knowing that she was always the first to arise, the guardian of all my childhood mornings.
“ ‘She still sleeps,’ Prissie said. ‘Each day she whispers to one of us that she will not go to the Darkening Land until you return.’ Prissie led the way to the open doorway of Grandmother Mary’s room. I could see the shape of her frail form under the blanket. Her face was only a skull with dark withered skin stretched across it. Her eyes opened slowly and she tried to rise, her trembling bony hands reaching out to me. When she said my name her voice was like the crackling of dry corn leaves.
“I went to her and held her up by the shoulders while she placed her hands on my face. Her body began to shake and I
thought she was crying, but then I heard the laughter, husky and triumphant, and I bent to see the gleam of victory in her old eyes. ‘I defeated them,’ she whispered. ‘I knew you would come, sogonisi, before the dark spirits took me away.’
“ ‘You sent the hawk for me, grandmother.’
“ ‘Yes, I sent the hawk and it brought you back to me.’ She tugged at the silver chain that held the Danish coin, lifting it from her breast and motioning for me to bow my head so that she could place it around my neck.
“ ‘No,’ I whispered.
“She shook her head angrily when I tried to give the silver piece back to her. ‘You are my only full-blood left,’ she said. ‘You must guard it for me.’
“I stayed with her until she fell asleep again, breathing easily like a child. Afterward Prissie told me that Jotham had married Griffa McBee, and that they were living in a new cabin near the crossroads. He and William had rebuilt the trading post, and Timothy Rogers’s smithy adjoined it. They were all busy and prospering.
“ ‘Pleasant and Jerusha?’ I asked. ‘Where are they?’
“Prissie shook her head, clucking her tongue at me. ‘You stayed away too long, Dane. Your son is no longer your son. Soon after we came back to the Nation, Jerusha married the Reverend Thomas Crookes.’
“ ‘The Reverend Thomas Crookes,’ I repeated in astonishment. ‘Who is he?’
“ ‘A true man of God,’ Prissie replied. ‘He knows that Pleasant was born in sin, but he has taken him as his son, and is bringing the boy up in the ways of salvation.’
“I wanted to go and see them, but I could not leave Grandmother Mary. Whenever she awoke from her fitful spells of sleep, she would call my name. That night I lay on the floor beside her bed, answering whenever she awakened to whisper my name. For a time before the dawn came she was silent, and when it was light I arose and looked at her face and knew she would never speak my name again. I could not weep because of the numbness that froze me, the desolation that surrounded me. Creek Mary had always been there, as certain as the stars she pointed out to me in the night skies, and I had thought she would always be there. Now she was gone to the Darkening Land.