Neither Wolf nor Dog (18 page)

“But others say that this time there is a change, that now it is time for you to really hear. They think you know that you are lost and that you want us to help you find your way.

“That is what I think. That is why I am talking. When I would write my notes over the years, my friends would laugh. They would say I am a crazy old Indian. I told them what my father had told me, and that different times would come, and that those notes would mean something.

“Every day as I wrote I offered those notes to the Creator as my gift. I knew he would use them. When I read your other book, I knew you would help me use them.

“Listen to me. We Indians don't talk to white people much. We never have. There is a reason. White people have never listened to us when we talked. They have only heard what they wanted to hear. Sometimes they pretended to hear and made promises. Then they broke those promises. There was no more reason for us to talk. So we stopped talking. Even now, we tell our children, ‘Be careful when talking to the
wasichu.
They will use your words against you.'

“This is a wise teaching. But it is a bad one. It is not good that we do not talk. But we have learned not to trust your people. It was not something we wanted to learn. You forced us to learn it.

“When your white people first came among us, you didn't know what to think of us. You didn't know if we were devils or if we were people who were pure and free. You didn't even know if we were people. We welcomed you to our land. We gave you food and smoked with you. We taught you our ways.

“We trusted the goodness in your hearts. We tried to share with you. But our trust was not returned. No matter what we gave you, there was always something else. For the Spanish, it
was gold. For the French, it was furs. For the English, it was land. But always there was something. Always you were looking past us at something else.

“We could see in your eyes that you were not hearing us. Soon we learned to be silent.

“When I look in your eyes, Nerburn, I see that something else is there, too. I want it to go away. It is not something bad. Some of it is your family. That's good. Some of it is your truck. That is not good. That is a waste of your heart. Some of it might be greed. I don't know. But I want it to go away. All of it. For now, it has to go away.

“To speak out like I am doing is not easy. I am not a leader. No one has elected me to speak. I am just an old man with clear eyes. Some Indians will be mad at me. But others will understand. They will see what I am doing and they will respect me. They know that I am reaching out for the grandchildren.

“I am reaching out to you, Nerburn. You must help the grandchildren, too. If you are afraid, or if you are too small, it is too late. You are here.”

At that point he stopped and turned back to the fire. He reached into his pocket and removed a second pouch, took something from it, and sprinkled it on the coals. A different smell rose into the morning air. “Sage,” Grover whispered. “The bad spirits hate sage. It fills them with fear and they go away. He is telling you important things, Nerburn. You'd better listen.”

Dan was rocking, almost hypnotically. “Listen to me some more,” he said. “I have a little more to say.

“I have called you to come. In the old days our people did not call your people to come. They waited for you to come, because they did not know what to do with the white man. Some of them wanted to fight you. Some wanted to live with you. No one knew what was right. The white man did terrible
things to us. You lied to us and you took our land. You killed our people and you never heard when we tried to speak.

“But now your people are here. We cannot make you go away, even if we want to. There is a reason why the white man came and took our land. Only the Creator knows it. We can only do what we think is best.

“I think that talking to you is best.

“That is why I am welcoming you. Our people tried to welcome your people once before. But you destroyed that welcome. You destroyed it with crosses and diseases and whiskey and guns.

“Now I am trying to welcome you as one person. I have called you to my house and you have come. I reach out my hand to you in welcome.
Wakan Tanka
, the Great Spirit, hears and knows. We will work together.”

As he finished, Dan reached over and extended his hand toward me. I stood up and reached my hand toward his. He grasped my hand in his fingers and took hold with a soft firmness that held my fingers like a vise. Though it looked like a handshake, it was more. His whole being was in that grasp. It was a pact, a sealing, a promise.

We stood there, united by that grasp. My hand, so used to perfunctory shakings in greetings and casual introductions, wanted to wriggle and escape. But the old man would not let go. He held my hand until our touch had an understanding.

“I welcome you,” he said. “Welcome to our land.”

W
e did not go to the powwow. Dan and Grover conferred at some length before getting into the car, but finally decided that the “little trip” needed to go in other directions.

“Nerburn needs to call home,” he told Grover. “He needs to get his mind straight.” It was said without rancor, a concession to my world and my life. We were now working together.

Grover nodded gravely, then turned the car onto a faint path through the wiregrass. “Shortcut,” was all the explanation he offered.

The car bucked and clanked over the grassy ridges. The faint tracks in the grasses often seemed to disappear. But Grover drove with confidence. One time he hit a particularly deep rut
and his exhaust pipe clunked hard against the dusty ground. He muttered something like, “Easy, junker,” and continued without stopping to inspect the damage.

I sat in amazement as we jolted and bumped through the hills and hollows. Grover seemed oblivious to the perils of the terrain. He churned along, his front bumper pushing down grasses like a ship plowing through the sea.

Our pace was not rapid, but it was inexorable. Before long we were out of sight of all indications of roads or houses. The land flowed like a retreating tide toward the horizon. Grover was enjoying himself immensely.

Fatback was not a good rider on these bumpy ruts. She began burping and swallowing and licking her lips. “Shove her head out the window,” Grover suggested.

“It was those cheeseburgers,” Dan chimed in.

“I think it was the onions,” I offered from my vantage point nearer her mouth. Fatback issued a long and doleful “errup” from her throat and stared at me with pained eyes.

“I think you'd better stop, Grover,” I said. “Fatback's not going to last.”

Grover just laughed and bounced the car into another set of dusty ruts. “It ain't gonna get any easier for a while. She's a good dog. She'll make it.”

“That's easy for you to say,” I hollered, trying to make myself heard over the creaks of the springs and the clanks from the undercarriage. “You're in the front seat.” The old dog gurgled and hung her head out the window. I rolled down the window on my side, half in anticipation of some Vesuvian disaster from Fatback, and half to drink in the sweet warmth of the growing high-plains morning. The buzzing of insects mingled with the clanking and the urping.

“So, you want to call the old lady,” Grover shouted over his shoulder.

“I think I'd better,” I said. “She's probably expecting me back pretty soon.”

“You need an Indian squaw,” said Grover. “They never ask any questions.”

“Not much for women's rights, are you,” I chided.

Grover took both hands off the wheel and held them up like a man supplicating heaven.

“Women's rights. You white guys don't know anything about women's rights,” he said. “All your women want to wear pants and do men's stuff. Then they call that equality.”

“There's a little more to it than that,” I said. “Besides, that is equality of a sort.”

“It ain't worth a damn, if you ask me,” Grover snorted. The car lurched once in sympathy, as if choreographed to accentuate Grover's comments.

“Stop this damn car,” Dan ordered. “I don't have a stallion's bladder.”

Grover ground to a halt. Fatback scrambled out the window and rushed off into the weeds. Dan pushed open his door and made his way unsteadily to a stand of trees that were bent over a drywash a hundred feet away.

Grover settled back in his seat. “This is the pit stop, Nerburn. Better go with the old man and the dog if you think you need to.”

“Bladder of steel,” I answered.

Grover opened his door and stepped outside. The silence of the landscape flooded in on us. Actually, it was no silence at all, but a teeming, buzzing, chirping symphony of small sounds that had been masked by the clunking thunder of the forging automobile. But it was all of a piece, with no sharp edges or punctuating sounds. Like the sweet smell of the air, it was an overpowering, intoxicating presence that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at the same time.

Once stopped, the breadth and distance of the landscape stunned me. “Do you know where we are?” I asked Grover.

“There's the sun,” he pointed. “So that's west.”

“That's a start.”

“It's good enough. There's a road over here not too far, if I've got my figuring right.” He gestured broadly in the direction of the distant hills.

“Are you serious? You're just plowing your way through these backlands, expecting to come to some road in the distance?”

“Sure. Why not?”

I was incredulous. “What about draws? What about holes? You're not driving a tractor, Grover. You could blow a tire and we'd be sitting out here in the middle of nowhere . . .”

“This ain't nowhere, Nerburn. This is Indian land. Just because you don't see a house or a road doesn't mean that we're in the middle of some goddamn ocean.”

I surveyed the land around me. In point of fact it did look like an ocean: the sea that had once covered these plains had left its undulations on the land it had left behind. Gentle swells and rises gave way to dips and hollows. It was a feminine landscape in its shapes if not in its textures — a terrain of graceful movement frozen into a finality of sculptural form. It took no imagination at all to see the figure of a single horseman, or a herd of bison, making their way across this burnished landscape beneath a cobalt sky.

“Maybe it's just the white man in me, Grover, but I kind of associate automobiles with roads. This seems to be more horse kind of country.”

“Didn't you hear me calling my car ‘
Shunka kan'?”

“I thought you were saying something about a junker.”

Grover let out a guffaw. “‘
Shunka kan'
means ‘horse.' You white guys buy cars called ponies and colts and mustangs, but
you pee in your pants when you treat them like one. Old
Shunka kan
is the real thing.”

The old man had still not returned from the copse of trees down in the draw. “Speaking of peeing in the pants,” I said, “do you think Dan's alright? He's been gone an awfully long time.”

Grover picked up a piece of wiregrass and started filing it between his teeth. “He's okay. He likes to stay places sometimes.”

“Like how long?”

“I don't know. You got someplace you have to go?”

“I'm going to go look for him.”

Grover gave a noncommittal shrug. I turned toward the draw and began searching for the old man.

I saw no sign of him until I made my way over a rise. Then I saw his familiar form frozen in that vigilant squat next to a small gathering of trees at the edge of the drycreek. He didn't turn around, but obviously was aware of my coming. He reached back with his right hand and made several downward gestures, like a conductor quieting a noisy section in an orchestra. I made my way slowly down toward him. When I arrived he gestured me down.

“Look over there,” he said.

The hills on the other side of the draw were turning golden in the early afternoon sun. Shadows moved across them like great winged birds as the clouds overhead obscured the sun for a moment, then moved on.

I saw nothing other than the lyrical folds of the landscape punctuated by an occasional dark bush or gnarled tree.

I squatted beside him and stared toward the horizon.

“See?” he said.

“What?”

“Watch.”

The wind blew the grasses like waves on the sea. An occasional
tumbleweed bounced and raced its way across our line of vision. Other than that, there was nothing.

“Watch that bush.”

I stared intently in the direction he was pointing. A large dark clump clung to the side of one of the hills in the distance. From where we were I could not tell if it was a bush or a small tree, grown low against the incessant winds. I stared for a few more seconds. The bush seemed to move. Then, in the next instant, it shifted. It was not the movement of vegetation responding to the wind. This movement had volition and intention, a kind of muscular certainty.