by Win Blevins
When they’d eaten plenty and the sun was fully up, Hump said, “Did you know the Sahiyela woman Yellow Woman and the child are going to join their families on the Red Shield River? With Stick and Lark?”
Curly jerked his eyes into his hunka’s face and smiled. The woman he had saved in the lightning storm and her son, plus her sister and brother-in-law.
His spirits lifted.
“You want to go adventuring to the Sahiyela?” asked Hump, his eyes merry. “You and me?” It was another country, far to the south.
“To!” Damn right!
MEDICINE LODGE CEREMONY
Curly felt the power in the beat of the drum. Subtle and insistent, this was the pulse of the dancing, the life force of the ceremony.
This was the eighth day of the medicine lodge ceremony of the Sahiyela people. All the people were gathered here on Beaver Creek in this land the Lakota called Fat Meat Earth, far to the south and east of the country of Curly’s people. All the Sahiyela were here, dancing and singing and drumming as the sun came back to its full strength.
It was a ceremony for all the tribe held every Moon of the Ripening Berries, which the Sahiyela called the Time When the Horses Get Fat and the wasicu called June. The people gave thanks to Maka, Earth, for the things that grew, the things that nurtured and fed human beings. They gave thanks to Power for the great pattern of birthing and growing and dying that was the energy of life on earth.
Some men made private gestures during this ceremony. Having made pledges to Spirit during the year, they danced and fasted and thirsted for the final four days. They gazed at the live sunpole tree cut down and planted, still green, at the center of the sundance ground. They called it the sun pole and filled its leafy branches with tobacco ties of buckskin, each representing a prayer. They shed their blood through cuts on their chests or backs. They tied themselves to the sun pole by their bloody breasts or dragged buffalo skulls around camp by the wounds in their backs.
But these were private matters. The great matter was the welfare of all the tribe, the sustenance of the great cycle of nurturing between the Sahiyela and Earth.
For that reason all the Sahiyela were here each year—every tribe, every band, every village, and every lodge.
It was a year of change. All sun cycles were times of change, for change was the nature of life. But this time the changes were sharper, and caused by wasicu.
This Fat Meat Earth lay between two great rivers, the Shell River, which the wasicu called the Platte, on the north and the Feather River, which the wasicu called the Arkansas, on the south. These wasicu, whom the Sahiyela people called veho, as the wasicu called them Cheyenne, were running up the trails on these two rivers like ants to carcasses, as many wasicu as buffalo in one of the greatest herds. This was what was happening in the wasicu’s summer of 1857.
But it was one of the endless summers that the Sahiyela did not number, in one of the endless circle of years that made up time, yet spiraled beyond time, and what was happening was the medicine lodge ceremony. It renewed the ancient way, the earth’s giving the people sustenance.
The drumbeat, ever-present, inexhaustible, eternal.
Curly looked sideways at Buffalo Hump. Both the young men felt the spirit of the Sahiyela pump like blood into this dance. They had talked about it. For one more than twenty winters now, since the wasicu who came for the beaver had built the big lodge they called Fort Laramie where the Swimming Bird River flowed into the Shell River, the Lakota had not given this kind of spirit to the wiwanyag wachipi, the gazing-at-the-sun-pole dance. Instead many people loafed around the fort. They brought in hides and traded them for the wasicu’s knives and pots and beads and bells and guns and powder, and mni wakan, holy water, whiskey. Especially whiskey.
Curly and Hump’s band, the Hunkpatila Oglala, had stayed close to the fort too, but now they were keeping away. Otherwise you might become dependent, helpless, willing to do anything for the wasicu. Women might become every man’s women in exchange for a drink. Worst of all, when you drank, you lost control of your spirit. You had no power and no connection to Power. You had no spirit to give to the great ceremonies and could take none. So the strength of the ceremonies among the Lakota had waned these last twenty winters.
Curly and Hump thought it was grand to see the Sahiyela still so strong, so fervent, so united in their awareness of the sacred, their connection to Earth and Sun. They thought now that traveling all these many sleeps and spending these moons among the Sahiyela was beyond doubt worth it: They knew that the Lakota people must stand as unified in spirit as the Sahiyela.
Now Curly began to wonder: He had had a vision. He thought of it as his own, and how he triumphed or suffered through it was his own business. But was that so?
Here he saw that visions and all connectedness to Power in some sense belonged to the people. Individual power was the people’s power.
Did Curly have a right, however weak or strong his vision might have been, to keep it secret? To not live it? Did not all the people own the strength in it?
The medicine lodge ceremony was basically like the sun-gazing dance of the Lakota, but not exactly like it. Curly and Hump had been learning the differences every day. The first four days were a kind of building up, and the camp moved each day. The Sahiyela built three lodges, what they called a gathering lodge, a lonely lodge, and at the last camp the medicine lodge. The first two were tipis, but the third was an arbor of poles, with a sunpole tree in the middle, the sacred center.
In the gathering lodge, as far as Curly and Hump could tell, the leaders planned the ceremony. In the lonely lodge people who had pledged to offer the ceremony, two men and a woman this time, got instruction from experienced medicine lodge givers. The medicine lodge itself was the sacred heart of the ceremony, with its center sun pole, its buffalo skull, its prayer mound. It was a circular arbor supported by poles, with an opening to the east. In and around this lodge was done the painting of the makers and the dancers, the praying and offering, and singing and dancing, ever to the drumbeat.
The drum throbbed now, the voice of Earth herself, her pulse. The pulse that sounded in the streams, that made the winds blow, that pushed life through the trees until buds came out, that brought the grasses back, that birthed the buffalo. Thump, thump, thump, the beat of Earth.
The dancers were making their final ceremonial homage to both Earth and Sun. Curly and Hump had watched their mentors prepare them. They were already painted, many with red suns on their chests and crescent moons on their left shoulder blades, others with white spots of hail or long forks of lightning. Now the instructors made smoke from sweetgrass for each dancer, rubbed and blew on the bodies of each one, put dried grass in their hair, showed them just how to salute the sun pole or the sky itself.
To the beat of the drum they danced. They blew their eagle-bone whistles. Four days ago the sound had often been energetic, jubilant, defiant. Now it was faded, thin, forlorn. The dancers had taken neither food nor water for four days. Their only energy now came from the drum-throb itself. Curly could feel their weakness in his knees, their dizziness in his mind. The women sang stoutheart songs to keep the dancers going. He could see in their dances and feel by sympathy in their bodies what was happening to them: The heartbeat of the drum moved their legs and arms, its force kept their bodies upright, its spirit entered them, animated them, and became them. All of existence became the thump of the foot on Mother Earth and the beat of drum, which was the pulse, the rhythm of the blood, the body, the rivers, the earth.
Curly felt it primally. He felt it in the soles of feet, in his legs, his balls, his belly, heart, and brain. He wondered: Is this the song of Inyan?Is this the song of Maka, Earth? But it didn’t matter. He felt it.
Yet another pause came. Most of the dancers, all except those who had dreamed of wakinyan and wore hail spots, wiped off their paint and left the medicine lodge wrapped in blankets. Yellow Woman slipped up beside Curly and Hump. Her son, the one saved in the thunders
torm, toddled behind her. “This is the last dance,” she said softly. Only the lodge givers and the hail-painted dancers, those who had dreamed of wakinyan, were left. They were being painted one final time.
One of the men put four bundles of white sage on four sides of the sun pole, to the southeast and southwest, then the northeast and northwest. One by one the lodge givers led two hail-painted men in dancing from the bundles to the sun pole and back, waving their right arms as they advanced toward the pole, left arms as they retreated. As they danced, each lodge giver dropped his clothing and it was wrapped back around him.
Then the mentors of the lodge givers did similar dances.
Now the sun was just down. The throbbing of the drum spoke climax.
A command was shouted.
One of the mentors stood just east of the sun pole, hail dancers to his left and right. He held a peeled willow stick as tall as a man, with a scalp tied to the tip.
Driven by the drum they danced forward toward the east entrance. Then stopped and danced in place. Thump, thump, forward to the door again, and again in place. Thump, thump, once more forward and in place. The fourth time they charged out onto the prairie to the east, circled the lodge, and dashed back to the pole.
Out they charged three more times in different directions, the leader waving the willow stick like a lance, running back to the pole, bursting out again.
Just before full dark the voices fell silent and the drum ceased. Curly could still feel it from Earth herself.
The dancers sat on the ground in the lodge and washed their paint off. The ceremony was over.
“Come eat with us,” said Yellow Woman. She was remarried, to her older sister’s husband, Stick.
Curly and Buffalo Hump smiled, nodded yes at her, and looked at each other. They held each other’s eyes. Neither needed to put the lesson here into words: We’ll take this spirit home, this sense of unity, all the people as one beating heart, its pulse the pulse of the drum, which is Earthbeat.
A RING, A CIRCLE
Everyone had a grand time, the moon after the medicine lodge ceremony. First all the camps stayed together to hunt buffalo. The Lakota visitors found out that everyone called this Fat Meat Country for a reason. And the young Lakota showed that they were good guests—they hunted as fiercely as anyone and gave the meat to the families who had shown them hospitality.
When the big herds began to wander east, where the grass was deeper, the people hunted deer and antelope. The Sahiyela would have plenty to eat this year.
They might not have their ease, though. The agent had told those who went in to trade that the wasicu soldiers were determined to find the Sahiyela and fight. Horse soldiers, walking soldiers, wagon-gun soldiers, they were all coming.
“Why?” everyone wanted to know.
Incidents along the Holy Road, where the wagons traveled.
“But we were the ones who were wronged, not the wasicu,” the people complained.
The agent just shrugged. “The soldiers are going to look for you this summer,” he warned.
So they kept the wolves out, and sure enough, soldiers were coming from the Feather River to the south and the Shell River to the north. Everyone would be able to tell them where the medicine lodge had been, and the trail of pony drags would be easy to follow from there. It was just a matter of time before the soldiers blundered close.
The Sahiyela were all camped together, though—at their strongest both physically and spiritually. Surely the soldiers wouldn’t dare strike them now.
That was why Curly and Hump were glad when other young Lakota showed up to visit, Young Man-Whose-Enemies, Black Elk, Lone Bear, and He Dog. Curly was even half-glad to see the twins, No Water, and Pretty Fellow. If war came, the youth would feel better with Lakota at his side and not just strangers.
Everyone talked about what to do. The young men wanted to fight—men weren’t men if they didn’t stand up for their rights. The older men wanted to find a way to keep the peace. Nothing was decided, and everyone was buzzing about what would happen.
So they went hunting and waited and traded news and waited and gossiped and waited. The young men competed at fancy riding and trick shooting, or played the team sport of hitting the ball at a goal with a stick, or the kicking game. Young women gathered plants together, showed each other what they had quilled and beaded over the winter, or traded secrets about what young man had an eye for what young woman.
Curly noticed that the young women of the Sahiyela were freer than those of the Lakota. They wore the hide belts between their legs to keep lovers away, naturally, but they were not so closely chaperoned, and they talked with the young men more. Sometimes a woman would stand in a man’s blanket with him for a long time, their faces close, their eyes deep into each other’s. Supposedly the talk was not personal—just what the band would do, where the buffalo were, how the weather was changing, whether the berries were ripening early or late—but who knew? Who knew how many of them slipped off for an afternoon together, as Curly and Black Buffalo Woman sometimes did?
The Sahiyela had a custom Curly had never heard of but liked. A young man and woman who wanted to marry exchanged rings. Traditionally, these were made of horn, sometimes of metal, not new rings but ones made precious by wearing. They might wear these rings for a long time before being allowed to marry. Sometimes they weren’t allowed to marry at all, or one of them had a change of heart. Then they sent the rings back.
Curly saw one young woman, Three Small Stones, throw a ring away. When she was helping her mother cook in front of the lodge one evening, wearing a man’s ring, Three Small Stones saw the man’s grandfather lead a string of horses into camp. She stood up straight, expectant. Curly saw her smile, but she and her mother both pretended to be totally absorbed in the cooking, acted like they didn’t see the horses coming.
The old man led the horses right past Three Small Stones and staked them in front of a neighboring lodge, where another eligible young woman lived.
Three Small Stones’ eyes went flat, her body rigid. She looked at her mother by the cooking tripod, but neither said anything. Suddenly the girl slipped the man’s ring off her finger, cocked her arm, and threw it into the willows—viciously, the way she would throw a hunting stick at a rabbit. Curly thought the young man was lucky she didn’t crack his head with the ring. Then Three Small Stones called raucously at her younger brother to get those tipsila, those prairie turnips, on over here, and in her voice Curly could hear how she would sound as a crabby old woman.
But Curly liked the ring-giving custom, and thought of Black Buffalo Woman.
Sometimes he fevered with the thought of her. Sometimes he dwelt on the details of their times together—the touching, the kissing, the passionate coupling, yes, and even more the sense of union of spirit. Sometimes he just imagined them sitting in a lodge together, just the two of them, eating quietly, sharing the hours, each knowing the other’s thoughts without words, connected in their separateness as a man and woman are when their bodies are joined, in too deep a knowing for talk. For Curly all knowing was too deep for talk. Black Buffalo Woman was the same way, so they would be perfect together.
Perfect together after the years they had to wait. He found that hard to imagine. He had been here with the Sahiyela for eight moons, and the pain of missing Black Buffalo Woman was sharp. If he saw her every day, it would be worse. It was terrible during the half-moon he had stayed in the Oglala camp, before he left with Yellow Woman and her family. The evening before the trip, he had spoken only a few words to Black Buffalo Woman. As she was gathering sticks in the woods, he called softly. She came. They looked into each other’s eyes for a long moment. Finally he said, “I’m going to the Fat Meat Country to visit the Sahiyela.”
She blinked her eyes as a kind of nod. She’d surely heard the news already. She would know that, leaving this time of year, he would stay the winter. He wanted her to kiss him but knew she would not, not here where some other woman gathering sticks mi
ght see them. She looked at him soulfully.
He felt that she was wringing his heart in her hands.
She turned toward a downed tree and picked up more sticks.
Light Curly Hair thought that people who needed words to communicate were handicapped.
No, he had not run from her, he told himself, not really.
Another thought slapped him lightly, the way a man slaps a lump-raiser, a mosquito: No, no, he had not run from his responsibility to Rider, and to his vision.
Curly wore no rings—his vision forbade him ornamentation. So Blue Ear showed him how to carve one from the base of an elk antler. Curly shaped it to fit his smallest finger, polished it with fine white river sand, and brought it to a high gleam by rubbing it with back fat from a pte, a buffalo cow he himself had shot for Yellow Woman and her family. Yellow Woman gave the hoof bones to her small son, the one whose life Curly had saved.
He carved the top into a circle, like a hill with a flat top. He borrowed an awl from Yellow Woman, and in the circle he carved three simple lines, representing Hawk, who perched always in his heart, Hawk who would one day fly over his head as he went into battle.
He wished he could wear the ring. But he just put it away. His ring now, Black Buffalo Woman’s ring soon, and the sign of their oneness in spirit, a circle, a whole.
BATTLE
Curly stopped at the edge of the turquoise lake. He looked to the east, where the sun was just bubbling over the horizon. Its first light, not yet full-strength, played on the clear water, glimmering off the surface, flashing into his eyes. It was a dance, this sunlight reflecting off water, a bedazzling whirl of spirit.
Curly slowly and gently dipped his hands into the cool water, left and then right. He dipped them once more, together, held them high, and watched the water trickle home to the lake, catching the sun’s rays as it went, so transforming itself from liquid into light.
Miracle, this water. So said Hail and Dark.
