A Geography of Blood (7 page)

In all likelihood, we had encountered a juvenile member of the species
Canis latrans,
still behaviorally naïve, which had vocalized in response to the novel stimulus of our activities. Strange to say, however, that's not how it felt. Instead, I had an eerie sense that the land was speaking to us, calling us yet again to pay attention.

Back at my desk in the city, I settled down to learn as much as I could about the stone circles. As always with a new quest, my first step was to make a sweep through all of the available sources—books, articles, websites, videos, whatever I could find—looking for anything and everything that might have a bearing on my subject. The goal is, as quickly as possible, to catch a glimpse of the big picture, figure out who's who and what happened when, and generally get myself oriented. It's a bit like constructing a mental map of a landscape when you first encounter it, the way Keith and I had done in our early days in Eastend.

Almost immediately, I found myself entangled in a dense thicket of words. It took me a while, for example, to figure out that the term “Blackfoot” could refer to either a single nation, the Siksika, or more generally to the member nations of the Niitsítapi, or Blackfoot-speaking peoples, a group that includes the Siksika (Blackfoot), the Káínai (Bloods), and the Piikáni (both the North Peigan of Alberta and the South Peigan, or Blackfeet, of Montana). What's more, the Niitsítapi alliance formerly included the A-a-ni-nin, a people who are also known as the Atsina or Gros Ventre. At times the Niitsítapi were at peace with the Ktunaxa, or Kootenais, who migrated with the seasons from the mountains onto the plains. At other times (particularly times of hunger), these nations faced each other as enemies. The same was true of the Niitsítapi's relationship with the Nakoda, or Assiniboines, and the Nehiyawak, or Cree, two allied groups who had expanded westward and northwestward onto the plains by the 1600s. Adding to the remarkable cultural scene on the northern plains were the Yankton and Plains Sioux, also known respectively as the Dakota and the Lakota. And, of course, by the eighteenth century, there were also the half-breeds, or Métis people.

It was like entering an unknown country, and it left my mind in a spin. But sometimes, in the midst of the confusion, my research turned up a gem. That was the case with a story, first published in 1901, under the title of “Little Friend Coyote.”
2
I wish I could tell you exactly when and where this story was first recorded, but unfortunately the text doesn't say. I'm guessing northern Montana, in the mid- to late 1800s. All we know is that the story was told “by the flickering fire in [a] Blackfoot skin-lodge” by an unnamed elder (probably a member of the Piikáni nation) and that it was written down, with the aid of an unnamed translator, by an amateur ethnographer from New York City named George Bird Grinnell. If a photographer had been present, he'd have captured a huddle of figures seated around a luminous spire of smoke and the glint of a steel nib scratching away in a notebook.

Grinnell understood the importance of recording the stories as accurately as he could. “As the Indians have no written characters,” he noted, “memorable events are retained only in the minds of the people, and are handed down by the elders to their children, and by these again transmitted to their children, so passing from generation to generation.”

“Until recent years,” Grinnell continued, “one of the sacred duties of certain elders of the tribes was the handing down of these histories to their successors. As they repeated them, they impressed upon the hearer the importance of remembering the stories precisely as told, and of telling them again exactly as he had received them, neither adding nor taking away anything. Thus early taught his duty, each listener strove to perform it, and to impress on those whom he in turn instructed a similar obligation.”

So here is the story as nearly as possible as Grinnell recorded it. One summer when the Siksika (Blackfoot) and Piikáni (South Peigan) people were camped together, a young Blackfoot man named Front Wolf and a Peigan woman named Su-yé-sai-pi met, married, and decided to settle with the Peigan camp. Unhappily for Su-yé-sai-pi, however, her new husband was a natural leader and was often away from home on one expedition or another. So when he announced that he was going to visit his parents, Su-yé-sai-pi, who had been lonely during his absence, insisted on going along. Front Wolf tried to dissuade her—“The distance is great,” he told her, “and there is danger on the way.” Her parents were worried too, but Su-yé-sai-pi just laughed and began to prepare for the journey.

“At this time,” the storyteller continues, “the Peigan were hunting on the Lower Milk River, but the morning that Front Wolf and his wife started away the whole camp moved too, for the chiefs wished to pass the hot season along the foothills of the great mountains. At the last moment five young Blackfoot men, visitors in the camp, decided that they too would return home, so they set forth with the couple and helped drive the little herd of horses that Front Wolf intended to give his relatives.

“The northern tribe was thought to be summering on the Red Deer River, and a course was roughly taken for the place where it joins the Saskatchewan. This brought the little party, after three or four days' travel, to the Cypress Hills, or, as they were named by the Indians, the Gap-in-the-Middle Hills.

“They reached the southern slopes of the low buttes one morning, after being without water all the preceding day, and prepared to camp and rest at the edge of a little grove, close to which a large, clear spring bubbled up from a pile of sunken boulders. They did not know that a large camp of Kutenais was just behind the hills where they stopped, and that one of their hunters, seeing them coming, had hurried home and spread the news. Su-yé-sai-pi had scarcely started a fire when the warriors from the camp were seen to be approaching the little party from all directions, completely hemming them in. Although these two tribes, the Blackfeet and Kutenais had once been very friendly to each other, they were now at war.”

And so it happened, somewhere on the south slope of the Cypress Hills, that Front Wolf and his five companions were killed, and Su-yé-sai-pi, the sole survivor, was taken into captivity. Who knows what fate would have awaited her had it not been for an elderly widow who, filled with pity by the girl's plight, supplied her with provisions and advised her to escape into the night? Pursued by scouts, tormented by thirst, the young woman hid wherever she could, once spending an entire day deep in an old wolf den. When night fell, she climbed out to search for water, wandering this way and that, “and when daylight again brightened the sky, found herself at the place where her husband lay. Yes, there lay the bodies of Front Wolf and his friends, now shapeless and terrible things. And the Kutenais had vanished.

“Worn out from her long tramp, and nearly crazed from thirst, the poor woman had barely strength to go on to the spring, where she drank long of the cool water, and then fell asleep.

“The sun was hot, but Su-yé-sai-pi slept on. Well on in the afternoon she was awakened by something nudging her side. ‘They have found me,' she said to herself, shivering with terror, ‘and when I move a knife will be thrust in my side.' She lay motionless a little while, and then could bear the suspense no longer; slowly rising up and turning back her robe, what should she find lying by her side but a coyote, looking up into her face and wagging his tail!

“‘Oh, little wolf!' she cried. ‘Oh, little brother! Have pity on me. You know the wide plains; lead me to my people, for my husband is killed, and I am lost.'

“The little animal kept wagging his tail, and when she arose and went again to the spring, he followed her. She drank, and then ate a little dried meat, not forgetting to give him some, which he hastily devoured. She talked to him all the time, telling him what had happened, and what she wished to do; and he seemed to understand, for when she started to leave the spring he bounded on ahead, often stopping and looking back, as much as to say, ‘Come on; this is the way.'

“They were passing through the broken hills [the Cypress Hills], and the coyote, quite a long way ahead, had climbed to the top of a low butte and looked cautiously over it, when he turned, ran back part way, and then circled off to the right. Su-yé-sai-pi was frightened, thinking he had sighted the Kutenais, and she ran after him as fast as she could go.

“He led her to the top of another hill, and then, looking away along the ridge, she saw that he had led her around a band of grizzly bears, feeding and playing on the steep slope. Then she knew for certain that he was to be trusted, and she told him to keep a long way ahead, to look over the country from every rise of ground, and to warn her if he saw anything suspicious.

“This he did. He would wait for her at the top of a ridge, where they would sit and rest awhile, and as soon as she was ready to go on he would run to the top of the next rise before she had taken fifty steps. If thirsty, she would tell him, and in a little while he would always take her to some water. Sometimes it would be a small trickling stream in a coulée; sometimes a soft, damp gravel-bed, where she was obliged to scoop out a hole; sometimes it was a muddy buffalo-wallow—and it was always strong with alkali—but it was the best there was.”

In this way “little friend coyote” led Su-yé-sai-pi all the way from the Cypress Hills to her own people on the east slope of the Rocky Mountains. There, aware that the camp dogs would kill him given a chance, she reluctantly bade him farewell. But she promised that, whenever the camp moved, she and her family would depart last, so that they could leave food for him.

“And often,” the anonymous elder tells us, “as Su-yé-sai-pi and her people started on after the others, they saw him standing on a near hill, watching them out of sight.”

That other coyote had stood on a hill and watched Keith and me out of sight as we left the tipi rings. Where had little friend coyote been trying to lead me?

{six} Chimney Coulee

The antelope mourns the buffalo in the night.

CORB LUND, “The Truth Comes Out,” 2005

Who were the
stone people and what had become of them? Although I was born and raised on the prairies, had read prairie authors and studied prairie ecology, it was remarkable how little I knew. The mystery of the stone circles exposed my ignorance of the deep human story of the Cypress Hills and of my home territory in general.

Fortunately, thanks to my sweep through the library, I had acquired a stack of scholarly papers on northern plains archaeology. They confirmed that the tipi dwellers had lived by hunting buffalo (I had been pretty sure about that) and that all the sites Keith and I had found were old and possibly ancient. The earliest known stone circles on the Canadian prairies were created between four thousand and five thousand years ago, making them as evocative in their own quiet way as the standing stones of Britain or the pyramids of Egypt, with which they are roughly contemporary. The majority of the rings that have so far been studied, however, date from the last two thousand years. This means that when Jesus was born and when Nero fiddled while Rome burned and when the Maya were building their temples in Mesoamerica, people were using these stones to secure their shelters against the wind, both here in the Cypress Hills and across the broad heartland of North America. A conservative estimate puts the number of surviving stone circles in southern Alberta alone at more than a million.

Unfortunately, you can't tell how old a tipi ring is just by looking at it. Although the buildup of soil around the stones and the growth of lichens are often suggestive, the only way to get an exact fix is by unearthing shards of bone and sending them off for radiocarbon analysis, an option far beyond the means of casual investigation. The sites that Keith and I discovered might have lain there for decades or centuries or millennia, but we would never know for sure. And perhaps, in the end, it didn't really matter. Taken together, these abandoned campsites represented an ancestral human habitation that extended from the late nineteenth century back to the invention of the tipi and even beyond, to the retreat of the glaciers. Ten thousand years of hunting and gathering, of births and deaths, of hard work and repose. Ten thousand years of continuity, adaptation, and survival. Although the physical traces the people left were often subtle, their perennially renewed presence on the landscape was a monument in itself and put my four generations of proud belonging into a humbling new perspective.

Most of what I know about tipi rings comes courtesy of University of Calgary archaeologist Gerald A. Oetelaar, who in 2003 published a long, lucid, blissfully readable article that might have been entitled “Almost Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Stone Circles.” (Instead, it was sent out into the world under the drab banner of “Tipi Rings and Alberta Archaeology: A Brief Overview.”) If you've ever wondered about the size of an average ring or the number of tipis per camp or the reason some rings are single while others are outlined with a double row of stones, then Professor Oetelaar is the person to turn to. His answers, in case you are curious, are as follows:

SIZE: Tipi rings range from 2.5 to 9 paces (or yards) in diameter. The size differential is thought to reflect differences in family size, wealth, and status. The old theory that small rings date from the time of the dog-drawn travois, with the larger ones reflecting the hauling power of the horse, is no longer accepted. Very large stone circles (more than 9 yards in diameter) are interpreted as ceremonial structures.

NUMBER: A typical site contains the traces of between one and four homes, each with room to sleep, on average, about eight people. Camps of up to one hundred tipis, with space for hundreds of inhabitants, have also been documented.

CONSTRUCTION: Single rings with sparsely spaced stones are thought to have been used for brief stopovers in summer. When excavated, they generally yield very few artifacts. By contrast, heavily built circles, with double rows or closely packed stones, are thought to represent long-term winter encampments and are typically much richer repositories of artifacts and, hence, of information.

What is the most promising place to look for tipi rings? Oetelaar has an answer for that as well. Although there's a chance of finding stone circles wherever the grasslands have survived in a natural state, the prospects are best along the banks of major rivers and in isolated uplands. One notable case in point is the Cypress Hills.

As evidence, Oetelaar cites a survey conducted in the 1990s by an archaeologist named Alison Landals, who with two colleagues mapped all the tipi rings along a 250-mile stretch of a soon-to-be-constructed oil pipeline. Beginning at the wonderfully named Wild Horse border crossing on the Alberta-Montana line, she and her companions walked north, crossing the westernmost slope of the hills, all the way to central Alberta. From the outset, the trek was pleasantly eventful, with discoveries along the way, but things really got exciting when the researchers began the ascent into hill country. Suddenly, instead of occasional, scattered findings, they encountered dozens of circles each day, far more than anywhere else on their journey. In addition, many of the campsites in the hills were heavily loaded with stone—as much as a ton of rock per tent—an indication that they may have been extended winter residences. (This impression was strengthened by test excavations that yielded a rich store of mementos, including bone shards, stone tools, and fire-cracked rock from hearths.) If every campsite along the route had been marked with a point of light, the Cypress Hills would have lit up like a beacon.

Who would have dared to imagine that a landscape capable of recalling the epic of geological creation and the travails of extinct beasts would also conserve an important chapter in the history of our own species?

The special magic of archaeology lies in its ability to take oddments of abandoned, long-forgotten debris and infuse these mundane objects with meaning. The tipi ring sites in the Cypress Hills, for instance, are not just mute circles of rocks. To an archaeologist, they speak of the long-term importance of this region as a place of sustenance. For countless generations, the hills have provided water in a dry land, firewood on the otherwise treeless plains, and, on their westernmost heights, the only stands of lodgepole pines (for tipi poles) for hundreds of miles in any direction. In summer, the coulees offered glistening harvests of berries and sources of medicinal plants; in winter, they provided shelter not only for people but also for animals, including the all-important buffalo.
Otapanihowin,
the Cree called them, a word that translates as “livelihood” or “the means of survival.” Even in times of severe adversity—during decades and occasionally whole centuries when the plains were scorched with drought—the hills provided a refuge for the two-legged, the four-legged, the winged ones, and the plants.

How they must have loved this place, those resilient people, with its sudden drops and its long vistas, with the glint of the little river coiling down below. As people who were fed by the land, did they sense the vitality of the wild earth pulsing through their veins? Did they know, beyond any need for conscious knowing, that they were another name for the grass and the wind and the snow? These questions were beyond the reach of archaeology or any certain knowledge, though that didn't keep me from wondering.

Despite the best that science had to offer, the people who once lived inside the stone circles remained inscrutable. What languages had they spoken? Where had they and their descendants gone? The answers, if any existed, were not to be found at my desk. It was time to hit the road again and see what stories the land itself could be persuaded to tell.

Early on, I'd picked up a tourist map of Eastend and environs, a simple photocopied sheet with one side devoted to the attractions of the town—among them, the Wallace Stegner House, the T.rex Discovery Centre, and Charlie's Lunch (ice cream!)—and the other detailing points of interest in the surrounding country. Two of the latter in particular had caught my attention. The first, labeled “Crazy Horse Camp,” was on the near end of the Ravenscrag road, a ten-minute drive from our house. “Legend has it,” the map caption read, “that Chief Crazy Horse and a group of his followers camped here in 1876.” Crazy Horse, the great warrior and the leader of the Lakota resistance? And 1876—wasn't that the summer when the Lakota and their allies had defeated the golden-haired General Custer (“Old Curly” to his troops) near the Greasy Grass River? I had a dim recollection that, in addition to that engagement, Crazy Horse had been involved in several other costly battles with U.S. forces in succeeding months and that he had been killed, in government custody, the following autumn. Had he really found time to slip across the border and slip back again, in time to keep his appointment with history?

Given the number of times that Keith and I had traveled the Ravenscrag road, I'm surprised that we hadn't stopped earlier to check out the Crazy Horse site. But there it was, just where the map had promised, marked both by a small signboard and by an arrow that gestured to the northwest, across the river flats. If the powers-that-be had gone to this much trouble to draw attention to the place, maybe there really was something to the Crazy Horse story. So off we set with high hopes, clambering over tussocks and through tangles of potentilla, looking for whatever might remain of the historic encampment. Instead, an hour of searching yielded an abundance of cow pies and a scatter of rocks but nothing that bore the signature of a Lakota presence.

It wasn't until months later that a friend (one of those invaluable small-town people who have the inside dope on everyone and everything) explained that we'd been misled. Apparently, there really is a large campsite, with dozens of tipi rings and the outline of what might have been a ceremonial lodge, but it is up on the rim of the valley, several miles from the signage and the dot on the map. If you stand at the information point and squint in a northwesterly direction, you can more or less make out the approximate location. “But don't you go up there and look for it,” our friend warned. “The site is on private land and the landowner takes a mighty dim view of trespassers.”

So that was that. Maybe the Lakota had visited here and maybe they had not. Wherever they were, I bet they weren't blithering about oneness with nature, I thought, suddenly embarrassed by my earlier flights of romanticism. I bet they were angry and desperately sad. How had it felt to become a trespasser in your own homeland?

Fortunately, there was another location on the visitors' map that looked more promising. It bore the alliterative name of Chimney Coulee, and to get there we turned our backs on Crazy Horse hill and headed east, via the main drag, to the outskirts of town. An immediate left turn took us north along the voluptuous margin of yet another wide, light-filled valley. (And to think that people have the nerve to say the prairies are boring!) Five minutes later, we drew up in a grassy lay-by and, with the inevitable escort of dogs, proceeded on foot along a dirt path toward a three-paneled sign, much larger and more impressive than the one at the purported Crazy Horse site. With luck, its enhanced dignity signaled an enhanced intent to divulge the whole truth and nothing but.

The air that day was tangy with sage and bright with the shimmer of aspens that crowded around the kiosk. Pools of flattened grass showed where deer had bedded down in the shelter of the signboards. A few steps farther along the path, someone had provided a picnic table, now half-buried in thistles, and erected a squat stone cairn, presumably as a supplementary source of information. Beyond the cairn, the footpath forked, with one branch swinging invitingly up a grassy slope to the left and the other plunging straight down into a dark, spruce-filled chasm. It wasn't so much a coulee as a miniature canyon. Down there the air was cool and green, scented by evergreens and alive with the bright
dee-dee
's of forest birds. This place seemed to have everything, the best of two ecological worlds.

Over the years, we've visited Chimney Coulee so often that I'm no longer sure exactly what happened when. But I do know that this is where I first heard the rasping sigh of a nighthawk's wings cutting through the sky as the bird performed its undulating aerial courtship dance on a spring evening. Experiences like that were pure prairie. When we headed into the ravine, by contrast, we were instantly transported to what might have been a hidden valley in the Rockies. Once, for instance, we were hiking on one of the paths that tunnel along the course of the canyon, struggling over deadfall and through prickly underbrush, when we happened upon a series of muddy wallows. What was that musky smell? And who or what had left those large cloven prints deeply impressed in the muck? Just as we were putting two and two together—autumn, rutting pits, bulls, the most dangerous animals in the forest—something up ahead grunted and huffed in a menacing way, and we scrambled out of there in a hurry.