Winter in the Blood

by James Welch

  I wondered why First Raise had come so often to see him. Had he found a way to narrow that distance? I tried to remember that one snowy day he had brought me with him. I remembered Teresa and the old lady commenting on my father’s judgment for taking me out on such a day; then riding behind him on the horse, laughing at the wet, falling snow. But I couldn’t remember Yellow Calf or what the two men talked about.

  “Did you know her at all?” I said.

  Without turning his head, he said, “She was a young woman; I was just a youth.”

  “Then you did know her then.”

  “She was the youngest wife of Standing Bear.”

  I was reaching for the wine bottle. My hand stopped.

  “He was a chief, a wise man—not like these conniving devils who run the agency today.”

  “How could you know Standing Bear? He was Blackfeet.”

  “We came from the mountains,” he said.

  “You’re Blackfeet?”

  “My people starved that winter; we all starved but they died. It was the cruelest winter. My folks died, one by one.” He seemed to recollect this without emotion.

  “But I thought you were Gros Ventre. I thought you were from around here.”

  “Many people starved that winter. We had to travel light—we were running from the soldiers—so we had few provisions. I remember, the day we entered this valley it began to snow and blizzard. We tried to hunt but the game refused to move. All winter long we looked for deer sign. I think we killed one deer. It was rare that we even jumped a porcupine. We snared a few rabbits but not enough …”

  “You survived,” I said.

  “Yes, I was strong in those days.” His voice was calm and monotonous.

  “How about my grandmother? How did she survive?”

  He pressed down on the toe of his rubber boot. It sprang back into shape.

  “She said Standing Bear got killed that winter,” I said.

  “He led a party against the Gros Ventres. They had meat. I was too young. I remember the men when they returned to camp—it was dark but you could see the white air from their horses’ nostrils. We all stood waiting, for we were sure they would bring meat. But they brought Standing Bear’s body instead. It was a bad time.”

  I tapped Yellow Calf’s knee with the bottle. He drank, then wiped his lips on his shirt sleeve.

  “It was then that we knew our medicine had gone bad. We had wintered some hard times before, winters were always hard, but seeing Standing Bear’s body made us realize that we were being punished for having left our home. The people resolved that as soon as spring came we would go home, soldiers or not.”

  “But you stayed,” I said. “Why?”

  He drew an arc with his hand, palm down, taking in the bend of the river behind his house. It was filled with tall cottonwoods, most of them dead, with tangles of brush and wild rose around their trunks. The land sloped down from where we were sitting so that the bend was not much higher than the river itself.

  “This was where we camped. It was not grown over then, only the cottonwoods were standing. But the willows were thick then, all around to provide a shelter. We camped very close together to take advantage of this situation. Sometimes in winter, when the wind has packed the snow and blown the clouds away, I can still hear the muttering of the people in their tepees. It was a very bad time.”

  “And your family starved …”

  “My father died of something else, a sickness, pneumonia maybe. I had four sisters. They were among the first to go. My mother hung on for a little while but soon she went. Many starved.”

  “But if the people went back in the spring, why did you stay?”

  “My people were here.”

  “And the old—my grandmother stayed too,” I said.

  “Yes. Being a widow is not easy work, especially when your husband had other wives. She was the youngest. She was considered quite beautiful in those days.”

  “But why did she stay?”

  He did not answer right away. He busied himself scraping a star in the tough skin of earth. He drew a circle around it and made marks around it as a child draws the sun. Then he scraped it away with the end of his stick and raised his face into the thickening wind. “You must understand how people think in desperate times. When their bellies are full, they can afford to be happy and generous with each other—the meat is shared, the women work and gossip, men gamble—it’s a good time and you do not see things clearly. There is no need. But when the pot is empty and your guts are tight in your belly, you begin to look around. The hunger sharpens your eye.”

  “But why her?”

  “She had not been with us more than a month or two, maybe three. You must understand the thinking. In that time the soldiers came, the people had to leave their home up near the mountains, then the starvation and the death of their leader. She had brought them bad medicine.”

  “But you—you don’t think that.”

  “It was apparent,” he said.

  “It was bad luck; the people grew angry because their luck was bad,” I said.

  “It was medicine.”

  I looked at his eyes. “She said it was because of her beauty.”

  “I believe it was that too. When Standing Bear was alive, they had to accept her. In fact, they were proud to have such beauty—you know how it is, even if it isn’t yours.” His lips trembled into what could have been a smile.

  “But when he died, her beauty worked against her,” I said.

  “That’s true, but it was more than that. When you are starving, you look for signs. Each event becomes big in your mind. His death was the final proof that they were cursed. The medicine man, Fish, interpreted the signs. They looked at your grandmother and realized that she had brought despair and death. And her beauty—it was as if her beauty made a mockery of their situation.”

  “They can’t have believed this …”

  “It wasn’t a question of belief, it was the way things were,” he said. “The day Standing Bear was laid to rest, the women walked away. Even his other wives gave her the silent treatment. It took the men longer—men are not sensitive. They considered her the widow of a chief and treated her with respect. But soon, as it must be, they began to notice the hatred in their women’s eyes, the coolness with which they were treated if they brought your grandmother a rabbit leg or a piece of fire in the morning. And they became ashamed of themselves for associating with the young widow and left her to herself.”

  I was staring at the bottle on the ground before me. I tried to understand the medicine, the power that directed the people to single out a young woman, to leave her to fend for herself in the middle of a cruel winter. I tried to understand the thinking, the hatred of the women, the shame of the men. Starvation. I didn’t know it. I couldn’t understand the medicine, her beauty.

  “What happened to her?”

  “She lived the rest of the winter by herself.”

  “How could she survive alone?”

  He shifted his weight and dug his stick into the earth. He seemed uncomfortable. Perhaps he was recalling things he didn’t want to or he felt that he had gone too far. He seemed to have lost his distance, but he went on: “She didn’t really leave. It was the dead of winter. To leave the camp would have meant a sure death, but there were tepees on the edge, empty—many were empty then.”

  “What did she do for food?”

  “What did any of us do? We waited for spring. Spring came, we hunted—the deer were weak and easy to kill.”

  “But she couldn’t hunt, could she?” It seemed important for me to know what she did for food. No woman, no man could live a winter like that alone without something.

  As I watched Yellow Calf dig at the earth I remembered how the old lady had ended her story of the journey of Standing Bear’s band.

  There had
been great confusion that spring. Should the people stay in this land of the Gros Ventres, should they go directly south to the nearest buffalo herd, or should they go back to the country west of here, their home up near the mountains? The few old people left were in favor of this last direction because they wanted to die in familiar surroundings, but the younger ones were divided as to whether they should stay put until they got stronger or head for the buffalo ranges to the south. They rejected the idea of going home because the soldiers were there. Many of them had encountered the Long Knives before, and they knew that in their condition they wouldn’t have a chance. There was much confusion, many decisions and indecisions, hostility.

  Finally it was the soldiers from Fort Assiniboine who took the choice away from the people. They rode down one late-spring day, gathered up the survivors and drove them west to the newly created Blackfeet Reservation. Because they didn’t care to take her with them, the people apparently didn’t mention her to the soldiers, and because she had left the band when the weather warmed and lived a distance away, the soldiers didn’t question her. They assumed she was a Gros Ventre.

  A gust of wind rattled the willows. The clouds towered white against the sky, but I could see their black underbellies as they floated toward us.

  The old lady had ended her story with the image of the people being driven “like cows” to their reservation. It was a strange triumph and I understood it. But why hadn’t she spoken of Yellow Calf? Why hadn’t she mentioned that he was a member of that band of Blackfeet and had, like herself, stayed behind?

  A swirl of dust skittered across the earth’s skin.

  “You say you were just a youth that winter—how old?” I said.

  He stopped digging. “That first winter, my folks all died then.”

  But I was not to be put off. “How old?”

  “It slips my mind,” he said. “When one is blind and old he loses track of the years.”

  “You must have some idea.”

  “When one is blind …”

  “Ten? Twelve? Fifteen?”

  “… and old, he no longer follows the cycles of the years. He knows each season in its place because he can feel it, but time becomes a procession. Time feeds upon itself and grows fat.” A mosquito took shelter in the hollow of his cheek, but he didn’t notice. He had attained that distance. “To an old dog like myself, the only cycle begins with birth and ends in death. This is the only cycle I know.”

  I thought of the calendar I had seen in his shack on my previous visit. It was dated 1936. He must have been able to see then. He had been blind for over thirty years, but if he was as old as I thought, he had lived out a lifetime before. He had lived a life without being blind. He had followed the calendar, the years, time—

  I thought for a moment.

  Bird farted.

  And it came to me, as though it were riding one moment of the gusting wind, as though Bird had had it in him all the time and had passed it to me in that one instant of corruption.

  “Listen, old man,” I said. “It was you—you were old enough to hunt!”

  But his white eyes were kneading the clouds.

  I began to laugh, at first quietly, with neither bitterness nor humor. It was the laughter of one who understands a moment in his life, of one who has been let in on the secret through luck and circumstance. “You … you’re the one.” I laughed, as the secret unfolded itself. “The only one … you, her hunter …” And the wave behind my eyes broke.

  Yellow Calf still looked off toward the east as though the wind could wash the wrinkles from his face. But the corners of his eyes wrinkled even more as his mouth fell open. Through my tears I could see his Adam’s apple jerk.

  “The only one,” I whispered, and the old man’s head dropped between his knees. His back shook, the bony shoulders squared and hunched like the folded wings of a hawk.

  “And the half-breed, Doagie!” But the laughter again racked my throat. He wasn’t Teresa’s father; it was you, Yellow Calf, the hunter!

  He turned to the sound of my laughter. His face was distorted so that the single snag seemed the only recognizable feature of the man I had come to visit. His eyes hid themselves behind the high cheekbones. His mouth had become the rubbery sneer of a jack-o’-lantern.

  And so we shared this secret in the presence of ghosts, in wind that called forth the muttering tepees, the blowing snow, the white air of the horses’ nostrils. The cottonwoods behind us, their dead white branches angling to the threatening clouds, sheltered these ghosts as they had sheltered the camp that winter. But there were others, so many others.

  Yellow Calf stood, his hands in his pockets, suddenly withdrawn and polite. I pressed what remained of the bottle of wine into his hand. “Thank you,” he said.

  “You must come visit me sometime,” I said.

  “You are kind.”

  I tightened the cinch around Bird’s belly. “I’ll think about you,” I said.

  “You’d better hurry,” he said. “It’s coming.”

  I picked up the reins and led Bird to the rotting plank bridge across the irrigation ditch.

  He lifted his hand.

  39

  Bird held his head high as he trotted down the fence line. He was anxious to get home. He was in a hurry to have a good pee and a good roll in the manure. Since growing old, he had lost his grace. With each step, I felt the leather of the saddle rub against my thighs.

  It was a good time for odor. Alfalfa, sweet and dusty, came with the wind, above it the smell of rain. The old man would be lifting his nose to this odor, thinking of other things, of those days he stood by the widow when everyone else had failed her. So much distance between them, and yet they lived only three miles apart. But what created this distance? And what made me think that he was Teresa’s father? After all, twenty-five years had passed between the time he had become my grandmother’s hunter and Teresa’s birth. They could have parted at any time. But he was the one. I knew that. The answer had come to me as if by instinct, sitting on the pump platform, watching his silent laughter, as though it was his blood in my veins that had told me.

  I tried to imagine what it must have been like, the two of them, hunter and widow. If I was right about Yellow Calf’s age, there couldn’t have been more than four or five years separating them. If she was not yet twenty, he must have been fifteen or sixteen. Old enough to hunt, but what about the other? Could he have been more than hunter then, or did that come later? It seemed likely that they had never lived together (except perhaps that first winter out of need). There had never been any talk, none that I heard. The woman who had told me about Doagie had implied that he hadn’t been Teresa’s father. She hadn’t mentioned Yellow Calf.

  So for years the three miles must have been as close as an early morning walk down this path I was now riding. The fence hadn’t been here in the beginning, nor the odor of alfalfa. But the other things, the cottonwoods and willows, the open spaces of the valley, the hills to the south, the Little Rockies, had all been here then; none had changed. Bird lifted his head and whinnied. He had settled into a gait that would have been a dance in his younger days. It was only the thudding of his hooves and the saddle rubbing against my thighs that gave him away. So for years the old man had made this trip; but could it have been twenty-five? Twenty-five years without living together, twenty-five years of an affair so solemn and secretive it had not even been rumored?

  Again I thought of the time First Raise had taken me to see the old man. Again I felt the cold canvas of his coat as I clung to him, the steady clopping of the horse’s hooves on the frozen path growing quieter as the wet snow began to pile up. I remembered the flour sack filled with frozen deer meat hanging from the saddle horn, and First Raise getting down to open the gate, then peeing what he said was my name in the snow. But I couldn’t remember being at the shack. I couldn’t remember Yellow Calf.

>   Yet I had felt it then, that feeling of event. Perhaps it was the distance, those three new miles, that I felt, or perhaps I had felt something of that other distance; but the event of distance was as vivid to me as the cold canvas of First Raise’s coat against my cheek. He must have known then what I had just discovered. Although he told me nothing of it up to the day he died, he had taken me that snowy day to see my grandfather.

  40

  A glint of sunlight caught my eye. A car was pulling off the highway onto our road. It was too far away to recognize. It looked like a dark beetle lumbering slowly over the bumps and ruts of the dusty tracks. I had reached the gate but I didn’t get down. Bird pawed the ground and looked off toward the ranch. From this angle only the slough and corral were visible. Bird studied them. The buildings were hidden behind a rise in the road.

  The clouds were now directly overhead, but the sun to the west was still glaring hot. The wind had died down to a steady breeze. The rain was very close.

  It was Ferdinand Horn and his wife. As the dark green Hudson hit the stretch of raised road between the alfalfa fields, he honked the horn as if I had planned to disappear. He leaned out his window and waved. “Hello there, partner,” he called. He turned off the motor and the car coasted to a stop. He looked up at me. “We just stopped to offer our condolences.”

  “What?”

  Ferdinand Horn’s wife leaned forward on the seat and looked up through the windshield. She had a pained look.

  “Oh, the old lady!” It was strange, but I had forgotten that she was dead.

  “She was a fine woman,” Ferdinand Horn said. He gazed at the alfalfa field out his window.

  “Teresa and Lame Bull went to Harlem to get her. They probably won’t get back before dark.”