Neither Wolf nor Dog (37 page)

But most of all I felt the pain of their confusion that their god had failed.

In a land that as a child had filled me with dreams of pony rides and ice cream cones and four presidents' heads on a mountain, people who had sensed the power of God in every rock and bird and square inch of land had been reduced to dancing crazily in a circle, in hopes that their desperate ecstasy would call forth a savior who would keep them from having to watch one more of their children die hollow-eyed and uncomprehending in their arms.

The last afterglow of twilight had silhouetted the Black Hills against the night. It was easy to understand how they had become the sacred center. They stood mutely, majestically, in the middle of this endless plain, like a cathedral of the gods.

For these mountains, I thought, the Lakota had been willing to give away everything else, only to have them, too, taken away when white people who had trespassed illegally shouted the magic word, “Gold.” “The metal that makes the
wasichu
crazy,” the Lakota had called it. An ore in the ground.

For that, my ancestors had been willing to lie and steal and kill old people and children, and then spend the next century remaking the story so that all the dead and all the betrayals would effectively disappear from history.

For that, and the hunger to own a piece of the earth, we had destroyed the dreams and families of an entire race, leaving them homeless, faithless, and with nothing but the ashes of a once graceful and balanced way of life. And now we had the arrogance to claim to “rediscover” them and to appropriate the very spiritual truths we had tried to destroy, in order to fill the void of our own spiritual bankruptcy.

I was filled with a helpless shame and contrition. My mind moved fitfully across this bleak inner terrain, seeking rest and finding none. Dan's motionless form was outlined against the night. I wondered how he could live with such rage, how anyone could live with such rage. His last words, “I just wish I knew why it happened this way,” echoed in my mind. The
Paha Sapa
rose ragged against the western sky as Grover's headlights strafed the silent land. I, too, wondered why it had to happen that way, and if this earth, with the knowledge it had, would ever grant any of us peace.

“L
et me out,” Dan said.

I jumped in my seat. It had been an exhausting day, and under the preternatural moonlight I had given my mind free reign to wander. Dan's voice shocked me back to reality.

“Right here,” Dan said.

I looked quickly to Grover. His face showed no emotion. He slowed the car as if the request were completely natural.

Outside the night had grown large. High, thin clouds wisped across the darkness like shadows, hiding, then revealing, the hollow moon and causing the hills and valleys to dance in a spirit play of ghostly movement.

Grover pulled off the pavement into a rutted path that coursed up a steep rise. I assumed that Dan's anger and grief had
caused him to want to speak to the spirits once again. I did not blame him. If one of his personal rituals would help salve the pain he was feeling, such a stop was a small price to pay.

“Get out,” he said. He was looking at me.

I stared at him, confused.

“Get out,” he repeated. There was no gentleness in his voice. A thousand thoughts raced through my mind: I was being abandoned; he was so angry he couldn't stand a white man in the same car with him; we had reached a campsite; there was some point of interest he wanted to show me. It could have been anything. But he gave no indication beyond the brusque command.

I shifted uneasily in my seat and opened the door. Fatback clamored desperately across my lap and scuttered out onto the ground. Grover shut off the engine and the night engulfed us.

The moon had risen high in the sky. It was now no more than a hole in the night, revealed sporadically by the parting of the clouds.

Far up on the rise I could make out two brick pillars with a metal arch between them. They formed an entry of some sort; perhaps the remains of an old building or the entrance to an abandoned cemetery.

“Open the trunk,” Dan ordered. He was now giving instructions with no explanation.

Grover fiddled with the key and popped the trunk lid. Dan reached in and took a large, beaded, animal skin bag. “Take your pack,” he said to me. I dared not ask for an explanation; his manner was too curt and formidable.

“Is Fatback going?” I asked stupidly.

“Come on,” Dan answered.

I waited for Grover to get his things out. But he simply slammed the trunk and walked back to the driver's door.

“How about Grover?” I said.

Grover slid in behind the steering wheel and shut his door. He started the engine. “See you later, Nerburn.”

Dan said something in Lakota. Grover responded with a few words, then drove off. I stood watching his red taillights grow tiny in the distance, then disappear altogether as he passed over a ridge. In a moment they appeared again, even further away, then disappeared once and for all.

I stared at their afterimage in the darkness. The hum of the engine could still be heard on the edge of the silence. Then that, too, went out, and we were cast into the night.

Fatback snuffled in the grass nearby. Nighttime always made her come alive. Dan spoke several words in Lakota and she panted over to his side.

He gestured up the hill and started walking. The path was deeply rutted. Each step risked a fall or a turned ankle. Dan walked slowly but steadily, keeping his eyes ever on the shadowy columns at the top of the rise.

Somewhere far in the distance a dog barked. I could hear Dan's labored breathing as he lifted one foot, then the other, never pausing, never varying. I stayed several paces behind and said nothing.

The moon cut through the clouds and bathed the hill in empty, phosphorescent light. I could see that the backs and sides of the brick pillars on the hilltop had been painted white. They glowed like bones against the darkened sky. In the front of each was an alcove, a shrine for an absent saint. From this distance they appeared to be empty. The latticework arch between the two pillars reminded me of the tracery over the entrance to the Nazi death camps. I half expected to see “Arbeit Macht Frei” written in forged metal letters in the center of the arch. But instead, a small white cross rose from its top.

Dan stumbled and fell. I reached quickly for him. He
pushed me away. I tried to help him with his bag, but he pulled it toward him. He made his way slowly to his feet and continued upward.

It was not an easy climb. The ruts made each step precarious. Our bags became burdens uncomfortable to bear. The straps on mine cut into my hand, and I shifted it clumsily from left to right when the pain became too great.

Fatback sensed that Dan was laboring. She stayed close to him, and even seemed to be charting a path by walking directly in front of him. Dan's breathing became raspy; I worried for his health. But he would not slow or vary his pace. In between the gasps and heaves I could hear him trying to aspirate some kind of a song, but the wind and his heavy breathing made it almost inaudible.

A car whined through the night far in the distance. Its lights moved away like a ship disappearing on the sea. Dan stumbled again but caught himself; we were almost to the top.

I could see the arch clearly now. It was the entrance to a small cemetery that stood forlornly on the top of the rise.

The alcoves in the front of the pillars were indeed empty. They stared like blind eyes out over the landscape and made the whole arch seem like an ancient ruin, long abandoned by those who had once built and tended it.

A flapping caught the corner of my eye. I looked up. All along the steel latticework of the arch were tied ragged pieces of ribbon. They squirmed like minnows in the dark.

Dan led me to the arch. Plastic Pepsi bottles and cellophane candy wrappers littered the ground in front of the entrance. If it was a ruin, it was a ruin that people still visited.

“Come,” Dan said.

We crossed between the pillars and under the arch. Inside, directly in front of us, a plot of ground maybe eighty feet long and eight feet wide had been marked off and bordered by
cement. It was enclosed by a bent and dented chainlink fence that also was hung with ribbons ripped ragged by the wind.

In the center of the plot, a single monument — an obelisk about nine feet tall — stood grey and austere under the moonlight. Plastic flowers were strewn haphazardly around its base.

Dan walked slowly around the outside of the fence to the left. A dirt path had been worn into the prairie grasses. On either side of the enclosure lay other graves, newer, marked with simple white crosses or low square headstones. They rose in tiny mounds above the surface of the land, providing a ghostly reminder of the bodies that lay within.

A shiver came across me as I followed Dan on the path. The earth was alive here, but there was nothing living. From the graves to the alcoves to the ribbons flapping in the dark, this place spoke of life that had fled. You could almost feel the earth moan beneath your feet.

A plastic flower from one of the graves blew onto the path in front of me. It lay in shadowy isolation in the dirt. I started to reach for it, then backed off. I did not want to touch it. It was part of the dead.

Fatback wandered among the graves, never crossing any of the mounds. It was as if she had a sixth sense. A flying thing swooped in front of me. I could not tell if it was a bat or a bird; it moved too fast and quickly disappeared into the shadows.

Dan circled the entire fenced area. He would walk slowly, chanting something under his breath, then suddenly come to a halt and reach into the large bag he was carrying. At each stop he took out a small cloth bundle and tied it to the fence before proceeding. He did this seven times.

Four times he took a pinch of tobacco or something else from a tiny pouch and offered it to the wind. He did not do it casually, like a man scattering seed. Rather, he stopped, faced out from the fence, and held the substance at arm's length
before him, raising it up toward the sky, then down toward the earth, and at last speaking some low incantation before releasing it gently, like a man setting a bird free or releasing the ashes of the dead.

I followed behind in silence. Dan's chanting was unearthly. It wove amid the gusts and echoes of the wind as if it were a part of them.

When we had completed our circle, Dan opened the gate to the chainlink fence and walked in. His singing was louder now, more forceful. The winds seemed to sing back to him, to take his song and mingle it with their own. I stood at the gate, uncertain if I should enter. Though the boundary was only a fence, something — maybe the strict formality of the cement border or the monument in the center — made the ground within seem hallowed, a
sanctum sanctorum
that one needed permission to approach.

Dan sensed I was not behind him. He turned and saw me at the gate. He jerked his head to tell me to follow. I stepped in, meekly, uncertain, a man treading on foreign ground. Fatback stayed outside the perimeter.

“Come,” Dan spoke. His voice, in English, sounded stilted and distant, like a man not speaking his own language. Turning away from me, he joined his voice once more with the chorus of the wind.

I walked gingerly along the cement border. Its formality and echoes of city spaces were alien and intrusive here on this windswept hilltop.

“Come,” he said again. He was standing by the monument.

He reached deep into his bag and took out a long roll of chamois-like leather. Meticulously he unrolled it and removed a small red pipe bowl. He took the wooden handle that had also been in the roll and fitted it onto the bowl. All the time he continued the chant.

I glanced at the slate-grey monument behind him and tried to read the inscription in the moonlight. Shadow obscured most of the words, but I was able to make out the first sentence: “This monument is erected by the surviving relatives and other Ogallala and Cheyenne River Sioux Indians in Memory of the Chief Big Foot Massacre December 29, 1890.” There was more writing, then the sentence, “Many innocent women and children who knew no wrong died here.”

A sense of utter desolation came across me. What was this place and what was the effect it was having on me?

Dan had filled the pipe and was attempting to light it. The match flared in the darkness and quickly went out. In the short burst of illumination I was able to read another side of the monument. “Horncloud. The peacemaker died here innocent.”

There was a sense of outcry in all these words, all protesting innocence. What had happened here?

Dan had lit the pipe and was facing toward the west. He held the pipe outward, with the stem pointing at the dark horizon. He then turned it back and smoked from it, lifting the smoke around his head with a cupped hand. He walked around the monument and repeated the action to the north, the east, and the south, while speaking a private incantation in each direction.