Charbonneau (34 page)

“We may not for one, two, or three years be able to till the ground. The Sioux may trouble us. But when the Sioux are taken care of, we can do well. Will the whites be allowed to build houses on our reservation? I do not object to traders coming among us, and care nothing about the miners and mining country where they are getting out gold. I may bye and bye get some of that myself.

“I want for my home the valley of the Wind River and lands on its tributaries as far east as the Popo-agie, and want the privilege of going over the mountains to hunt where I please.”

Paump also hunted as he pleased. He had opted out of the momentous struggle of the Shoshone against the white man. With Spotted Deer he lived the balance of his life in the wild and inaccessible Salmon River Mountains, moving with the weather, hunting and trapping and fishing, watching the seasons change and then change back, making his music. Later, the Shoshones, when they told tales about him, said that nothing happened to him the rest of his life. He would have said that what mattered to him happened every day of his life.

AUGUST, 1876: The old man awoke in the pre-dawn light. He felt it, sometimes, like this; he could sense that in a few moments the sun, like a bubble of air that has risen from the bottom of a lake, would burst silently over the ridge to the east. He got up quietly from the buffalo robe, not disturbing the two squaws who slept nearby, and walked to the flap that always faced the rising sun and looked out at the eastern sky. His sense had been right, as it had been right on most mornings since he had come to live here in this wide grove beside the Salmon River. He looked at the distant ridge across the river where the sun would appear, this time of year, to the right of three juniper pines just below its flat top. The sky was not yellow or red—the sun had been above the earth’s horizon for more than an hour already. The sky was instead the crystalline, cornflower blue of mornings in the mountains. The spot where the sun was aiming turned a brilliant white, and then the first edge of the yellow globule flickered above the ridge.

The old man stood facing it, as he did every morning, naked in the cool air.

Acknowledgments

My first and most pervasive debt is to an imaginative, stimulating, and discriminating editor, Ruth Glushanok. Thanks as well to Barbara Branden and Dennis F. Shanahan, who made seminal suggestions, and to other friends whose thoughts helped to sharpen my own.

About the Author

Win Blevins is the author of thirty-one books. He has received the Owen Wister Award for Lifetime Contributions to Western Literature, has twice been named Writer of the Year by Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers, has been selected for the Western Writers Hall of Fame, and has won two Spur Awards for Novel of the West. His novel about Crazy Horse,
Stone Song
, was a candidate for the Pulitzer Prize.

A native of Little Rock, Arkansas, Blevins is of Cherokee and Welsh Irish descent. He received a master’s degree from Columbia University and attended the music conservatory of the University of Southern California. He started his writing career as a music and drama reviewer for the
Los Angeles Times
and then became the entertainment editor and principal theater and movie critic for the
Los Angeles Herald Examiner
. His first book was published in 1973, and since then he has made a living as a freelance writer, publishing essays, articles, and reviews. From 2010 to 2012, Blevins served as Gaylord Family Visiting Professor of Professional Writing at the University of Oklahoma.

Blevins has five children and a growing number of grandchildren. He lives with his wife, the novelist Meredith Blevins, among the Navajos in San Juan County, Utah. He has been a river runner and has climbed mountains on three continents. His greatest loves are his family, music, and the untamed places of the West.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2012 by Winfred Blevins

Cover design by Mimi Bark

978-1-4976-4984-2

This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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New York, NY 10014

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