by Win Blevins
“The effigy represents the Moon, and the lodge is the Sun.
“Now, when anyone wants a sun dance, he asks an effigy owner to direct it.” Bell Rock gestured to the bundle in front of him. “You have asked me.
“You and I and our helpers have many tasks. First we must, with guidance, choose the place for the dance. Then, in four movements, the people go to this site. We must perform ceremonies in the whistler’s lodge. We must choose the proper trees for the Sun’s lodge, fell them, and then with many ceremonies build it.
“Finally, we will enter the lodge.
“Joins with Buffalo, you seek a vision of revenge. For that vision you will go without eating from the day we begin with ceremonies in the whistler’s lodge. Then, when we enter the sun lodge, you will neither eat nor drink until the vision comes.”
Sam’s stomach flip-flopped. “How long?”
“No food for several days before we go into the sun lodge. After that, no food or water for however many days are needed until your vision comes. Maybe it will come the first night, maybe the fourth or fifth.”
Sam thought maybe he couldn’t go four days without water. Or a week without food.
“We will call on the spirits, and they will give you strength.”
Coy crept over against Sam’s thigh.
“Why are you doing this for me?”
“You have a good heart.”
ON A BRIGHT mountain morning Sam walked toward a small tipi with Bell Rock and Coming-from-the-Water. He wore nothing but a breechcloth, so the cold air dimpled his skin.
This was his tipi during the ceremony. Nearby women were putting up a lodge for the buffalo tongues.
They walked without speaking, for this was an occasion of high seriousness.
Coy was tied up for the ceremony, taken care of by Flat Dog and other Foxes. “I don’t want him there to remind you of who you are, or think you are.”
Inside Coming-from-the-Water, in her formal role as the wife of the effigy owner, dressed Sam in a deerskin kilt and moccasins. The kilt had been sewn by a virtuous woman, a wife completely faithful to her husband. When asked to make this kilt, a woman might decline by saying, “No, I have a hole in my moccasin.” If she didn’t speak up, yet had been unfaithful, her lover would shame her publicly.
Coming-from-the-Water slipped moccasins blackened with charcoal onto Sam’s feet. They had been sewn by the wife of a man who killed and scalped an enemy. Black, which would be everywhere during the ceremony, represented revenge.
These two women, and almost everyone who helped with the ceremony, would receive a buffalo tongue. So would many warriors of distinction.
Bell Rock spoke solemnly. “On purpose I have told you very little about the actual dance. It may be difficult for you. Listen to me very carefully.
“This ceremony…” He seemed to take thought. “This ceremony has many, many songs, many, many deeds, many, many parts. They won’t make sense to you.”
He looked Sam hard in the eyes. “So I’m asking you, for a while, to give up sense, or what you think is sense. I ask you join in without question.”
He let that sit. “More, I ask you to do everything I say with the greatest attention and caring. When it seems trivial, do it anyway, and exactly as asked. Exactly as asked.
“Nothing is going to be terrible. You will not be cut, wounded, anything like that. I believe strongly that a great blessing waits for you in this ceremony. A great blessing. If you give yourself up to it.
“Do you agree?”
Sam felt committed. “Yes.”
“From now on you will eat nothing.”
Coming-from-the-Water took a skunk skin, slit it, and draped it around Sam’s shoulders and chest.
“Come,” called Bell Rock.
A half-dozen men came in, some carrying drums. Immediately, they started a song.
“Attention,” said Bell Rock.
Sam sank his mind into the music.
From within the music, he only half-noticed what was done. Bell Rock painted all of him, head to toe, with white clay. He drew something on Sam’s chest and back, and something below his eyes, and performed other rituals. Sam would remember the plaintive music perfectly.
After all this, the fourth song ended. Coming-from-the-Water handed Sam a small mirror. He looked at his own face and saw a stranger. His entire body was as white as his hair. On his chest were crosses, which he knew represented the morning star. Beneath his eyes flashed lightning bolts.
Sam felt like a stranger had stepped from within him, and was him.
The whistler’s tipi was taken down, and the tipi holding the tongues. All the people rode and walked a couple of miles to a clearing Sam hadn’t seen before. The dance site.
Bell Rock instructed two skilled hunters to go out and bring back one buffalo bull each. The bulls must be killed with only one arrow, he cautioned. If the arrow went clear through the buffalo, making two holes in the skin, the hunter was to leave the carcass and hunt another animal.
Bell Rock sent scouts out to look for enemies. Women busied themselves putting up the two ceremonial lodges. When the scouts came back, the people mock-treated them as enemies. Young men took their weapons and counted coup on them.
Then Bell Rock tied the effigy to a willow hoop, gave it to Sam, and said, “Walk alongside me.”
Carrying the effigy, Sam led all the people to a cottonwood that had been chosen, for reasons he didn’t know.
Again a woman who had no hole in her moccasin came forward. “This is a big gesture for her,” Bell Rock said softly. “After she acts as our tree-notcher, if her husband dies, she cannot marry again.”
The woman touched the cottonwood four times with the tip of an elk antler. A man painted a black ring around the three. Another one cut it down.
Suddenly, everyone rushed forward gleefully. They hit the tree with their hands, with sticks, with lances, and proudly counted coup. The tree represented the enemy.
The young men found twenty lodgepoles and dragged them to the dance site. Then, if they were among the first, they ran away, or pretended to run. But the Kit Foxes, acting as policemen for the dance, rode after them and brought them back.
Carefully instructed, Sam now painted the faces of the first four and brushed them all over with the effigy. By consenting to this ritual, these men accepted a great honor and responsibility—never to retreat from an enemy. The herald announced their commitments of courage to all the people, and the women trilled their acclaim.
Bell Rock chose a spot to erect the sun dance lodge. There he planted a small cedar tree and tied the effigy to it.
Before Sam lay down in the whistler’s lodge for the night, he asked Coming-from-the-Water for a drink. She gave it, adding, “Drink as little as you can. The more you sacrifice, the more quickly your vision will come.”
The next morning they built the sun dance lodge, which was huge. Bell Rock blackened his face. He and Sam wore cedar headdresses. Sam kept feeling more and more odd, like he wasn’t himself.
The women cut willows. This lodge would be enclosed not with hides but limbs, and a head-high space would be left open so the people could watch.
First, though, a half-dozen groups of men came one at a time. “War parties,” said Bell Rock quietly. They marched into the lodge and pantomimed fighting. “They hope the effigy’s medicine will give them a vision of a dead enemy,” said Bell Rock.
Sam watched. He tried to give his undivided attention to the mock war, and to everything. He wanted to see, listen, smell, take in everything that happened, know completely what his sun dance ceremony was.
But his mind kept wandering. Sometimes he felt sleepy. As one group left and another entered, Sam smacked himself in the head with his own hand. He blinked his eyes several times and shook his head.
“Hard, isn’t it?” Bell Rock gave him a half smile.
The worst was that his mind kept nagging at him. Why are you doing this? This is absurd. You aren’t an Indian. This is
all superstition. Worse, it’s savagery. What the devil are you thinking?
“What you want,” said Bell Rock, “is not to think. Just lose yourself in observing.” He paused. “Some of the difficulty, though, is that you’re weak from not eating. Tomorrow or the next day, that will get better.”
Sam wondered why, as he got further and further from his last bite of food, his weakness would ease off.
THE NEXT DAY, it turned out, was the first of the great days. That’s what Sam called them to himself. True, he didn’t know why they were great, or even have a clear sense that they would be. He simply made up his mind to call them that, purely as an act of faith.
Dressed ceremonially in his kilt, skunk hide, and black moccasins, Sam left the whistler’s tipi and, stopping four times, carried the effigy to the sun dance lodge. There Bell Rock met him and tied the effigy to the cedar tree at the height of Sam’s eyes.
“From now on you will drink nothing until your vision comes,” he said.
Coming-from-the-Water (no other woman was permitted to be near Sam) built a center fire, hung pots, and put buffalo tongues in them to cook.
Warriors entered the lodge one at a time and reenacted their fights against enemies.
At last Flat Dog appeared, carrying two hide ropes. Sam hadn’t seen him since the ceremony began. Dressed only in a kilt, he came to be first to make the sacrifice of his blood.
Altogether seven young men came bearing hide ropes. They tied their rigging high on lodge poles, painted themselves white all over, and lay down on buffalo robes. Bell Rock went to Flat Dog, and afterward each man in turn. He handed Flat Dog an eagle-wing fan. Flat Dog put the hide handle in his mouth and bit down on it, Sam supposed to keep from crying out.
Between the nipple and the collar bone on each side, Bell Rock made two shallow, parallel cuts. Then he slipped a wooden skewer beneath the skin, so that it stuck out from behind the flesh of the chest on both sides. Finally he tied the ends of the ropes, which were fashioned into a Y, onto each skewer.
One young man, a tall fellow with a piratical scar on his face, sat calmly while Bell Rock made cuts on his back, above his shoulder blades. Bell Rock fixed the ropes from these skewers to buffalo skulls, and the young man danced out of the lodge, dragging the skulls behind him. He would dance until the skulls broke the skin and pulled free.
The drum began, and the day’s first song swirled through Sam’s mind. The young blood sacrificers danced. Sometimes they leaned back on the ropes and stretched their skin away from their chests. But always they danced. They would dance, Sam understood, as long as the musicians played, to the end of the day. Blood rivuleted down their chests and into their kilts.
Warriors came into the lodge, and went with the skull-dragger, to help. They recited their own brave deeds in the face of the enemy and added beseechingly, “May this man do likewise.”
Now Sam came to it. He didn’t understand, and he had to act. He faced the sun dance effigy tied to the cedar. He stared at it. And slowly, to the beat of the drum, he began to dance. He did a simple toe-heel step, repetitive, monotonous, soon automatic and forgotten. He blew the eagle-bone whistle, sending an eerie piping above the music of the singers.
At the beginning he repeated in his mind Bell Rock’s words: “The people have been wounded. With or without fault, you brought that wound. Now you can gain the strength to heal it.”
Soon, though, he lost track of all words, and of language itself. His mind drifted into a state…He could not have described it. The drum pounded, the songs rose, the men’s blood ran down their chests, and Sam’s mind ran headlong into the effigy.
The lower body of the effigy was wrapped in buffalo hide, hair turned in. The face had eyes and mouth roughly drawn in black. The hair was parted in the woman’s way, and sprouted feathers in every direction. And the whole was littered with morning star crosses. Sam stared into the crude, blank eyes of the effigy. “Give me whatever power you have for me,” he said silently. He danced. He stared. He danced. He danced until he forgot he was dancing, and why. Dancing was all.
Songs were repeated over and over. Men came to recite their deeds and went. The seven making the sacrifice of their blood danced. Sam stared into the blankness, or mystery, of the sun dance effigy, and he danced.
Sometimes he failed, or thought he was failing. He got distracted. He remembered the day his brother Owen’s fiancée made love to him, or the day he slugged Owen. He remembered cowering inside the buffalo carcass during the prairie fire. He remembered the massive Gideon’s gentle wit, and missed him.
Suddenly, he would snap back to it. Attention. What I must do is pay complete attention to dancing and to the effigy. And his mind would flow again into the song and the motion.
At some point he imagined, or dreamed, or envisioned himself as a sac being filled with the voices of the singers and the beat of the drums. Like an ambrosial liquid it flowed into him, sweet and satisfying. The sac of himself swelled with the liquid of…he didn’t know what and he didn’t care. He swam on the sea of music, he floated into the air like one of Benjamin’s Franklin’s balloons he’d heard about, he drifted, joyous, fulfilled.
Suddenly—or it seemed sudden—the singers and drummers stopped. In his fantasy the sac that was Sam Morgan began to lose…whatever was him. The singers left. Fluid kept trickling out of Sam’s sac. The tears leaked from his eyes. All his bodily fluids seeped away. Even his blood ran onto the ground, and he was a dry husk.
Those making the blood sacrifice leaned back against their ropes hard and broke free. Bell Rock removed their skewers. One by one, they departed.
Sam felt utterly deflated, drained of all energy, even of self.
Bell Rock helped him onto a bed of cedar leaves. He felt barely able to stagger, even with support. In his private world he had become a nothing.
Coming-from-the-Water put cedar on the burning charcoal at the foot of his bed, so the purifying smoke would drift through the lodge. And they left him, they thought to sleep, but in truth, as Sam felt things, to lie there empty.
It was the strangest feeling of his life, utter emptiness, everything gone that made up Sam Morgan, his memories, his feelings for people and places and things, his convictions, his skills, everything he had fashioned into a self. Yet in a way, it was pleasant.
He put his left hand out idly and felt something that shouldn’t have been there. He picked it up. A pouch, a…A gage d’amour! Despite all, Meadowlark had managed to send him a message, one of love. Flat Dog must have left it here.
Now he decided to enumerate the things he was, things he could be glad of and grateful for. He was alive. He hadn’t begged for water. Young men, though not as many as Bell Rock hoped, had used this sun dance to seek visions. The gods hadn’t sent lightning bolts or an earthquake to punish him for presuming to dance like a Crow.
Then he switched moods. He railed at himself. He had no vision yet. He didn’t even have a glimpse of what corner a vision might be hiding behind. Was he going to humiliate himself by failing to see anything? Was he going to thirst and starve and dance until he died, blind?
Now he had shaken the feeling of emptiness, but he was full of a mental business that was uncomfortable. He told his mind to gentle down, treating it like a skittish horse. After a while, it got out of the way, and after another while he slept.
EVERYTHING MAY HAVE been the same on the second day, but Sam felt changed, so everything was different.
He made up his mind not to think about whether he was empty or full or in any other state, simply to do the ceremony. Quietly, he let Coming-from-the-Water dress him as before, and Bell Rock painted him the same way.
As they walked ritually to the sun dance lodge, Bell Rock said softly, “Remember, whenever there is singing, you must dance. Later in the day that will get hard, very hard, but you must dance.”
The first song rose up, Sam fixed his eyes on the effigy, and his feet moved.
Time passed, measured only in drum beats.
The sun’s shadow moved from northwest to north in the lodge, but Sam didn’t notice. Seven pairs of feet, plus Sam’s, were drawn to the earth as the stick was drawn to the drum.
Men came into the lodge and spoke words retelling their brave deeds. The people watched, and they hoped.
The music stopped. All the songs had been sung and repeated several times. The dancers rested. In a few minutes the endless motion began again.
During one break in the music Bell Rock cut a root Sam didn’t recognize and held it to his nose. It felt like an elixir, and his spirits rose.
Music. Dance. Music. Dance.
The sun’s shadow slid from the north side of the lodge to the northeast. Sam didn’t notice. He danced and saw nothing but the effigy and heard nothing but the words, the melodies, and the thump of the drum. He swayed with the words, he undulated with them, he circled with them. He was the words and melody.
Sometimes pictures floated into his mind, every odd kind of picture, things not seen before on earth or in heaven, things he was seeing or dreaming or imagining now. Often he reminded himself to put his mind on the effigy and in the music. What worked best was to dance more vigorously. He lifted his knees high, bent his body double, threw his arms high, tried to dance himself to exhaustion.
Except that he was already exhausted. In his emptiness he didn’t know where his strength came from. He asked the effigy for more strength, and felt it flow into his arms and legs. He felt it animate him. But the energy was the effigy’s, or the music’s, and he only borrowed it, as a wing borrows lift from the wind.
One more time the drum stopped. Four times they will stop, Bell Rock had said, and after the fourth you will sleep. Unless you have seen something.
Shadows rose on the brushy walls of the lodge—the wintering sun was falling.
The musicians rolled into a cadence that promised the last repetition of the last song. The day’s dancing slid toward an end.
