Neither Wolf nor Dog (19 page)

“
Tatanka.
The buffalo.”

I squinted my eyes to see more clearly. Slowly, the large animal moved its head and took on the familiar configuration of a buffalo.

“That's amazing,” I said. “I didn't even see it.”

“You weren't supposed to see it.
Tatanka
didn't want you to see him.”

I absorbed the mysterious possibility without comment.

“
Tatanka
is more powerful than you know, Nerburn.”

The buffalo shifted its weight again and moved slowly along the hill.

I thought back to the time near his home when he had “called” Fatback without ever saying a word.

“Dan,” I said. “Let me ask you something. I mean this with no disrespect. I really want to know.”

“Go ahead.”

“Do you really believe that the buffalo can cloud our minds in some mystical fashion like that?”

“What's mystical about it?”

“You say he didn't want me to see him.”

“That's not mystical. That's science. If a lizard doesn't want you to see him, what does he do?”

“I don't know. Hides under a rock. Blends in somehow, I suppose.”

“Exactly. Now, how does a buffalo blend in?”

“Hides his contour?”

“Tricks your eye. He understands how you see. Knows that you see outline. Knows that you see movement. All big animals know that.”

“So they stay still when they sense danger?”

“And when they want to learn about you. Sometimes they are watching you when you think you are watching them.”

“Was he watching us?”

“I can't say. He knew we were here, I know that.”

“But he wasn't afraid. How did he know he didn't have to fear us?”

“I told you. He's a powerful animal.”

“But we might have had a gun.”

“I don't mean ‘powerful' that way. I mean he has power. He knows things.”

I pushed a bit. “You mean he knows whether or not we have a gun?”

Dan was a little irritated. “I didn't say that. I said he knows things. He knew whether or not he had to fear us.”

“By smell? By some psychic power?”

“Maybe. I don't know. How do you know whether you like somebody or not?”

I smiled and shrugged. He had me.

“Look, Nerburn. You ever had a dog?”

“Sure,” I answered.

“How about a cat?”

“Got one now. A rasty orange thing.”

“Were the dog and the cat different?”

“Of course. From each other. From other dogs and cats, too.”

“And they each knew different things.”

“Right.”

“So why is it so hard for you to understand that
Tatanka
is different from other animals?”

“I've never had a lot of dealings with buffalo.”

“Well, my people have. The buffalo gave us our food, our clothes, our shelter, almost everything we needed to live. We lived around them like brothers and sisters. We know more about them than you know about your dogs and cats. And I'm telling you that they have power.”

In the distance the buffalo continued to graze. Its sense of indifference to us was palpable.

“I didn't mean to sound disrespectful,” I began.

Dan waved me off. “I know. You're trying to learn. White people like to learn by asking questions. Come on. Let's go back to the car.”

We struggled our way up the rise. The old man walked slowly and unsteadily. He stepped cautiously; his eyes were in his feet. I wanted to reach over and take his arm, but it felt more demeaning than respectful. I almost asked him if he wanted some help. But the words stuck in my throat.

Then it struck me. If he could barely see the ground in front of him, how had he seen the buffalo on that ridgetop almost half a mile away?

“How did you see that buffalo?” I asked him.

He turned his head and nodded several times, as if satisfied with the question. “I didn't see him, Nerburn,” he said. “He showed himself to me.”

G
rover had stretched out on the car hood like a cowboy in some cheap cigarette ad. He had his legs crossed at the ankles and his hands folded behind his head. The cowboy hat was
tilted down over his eyes. Sunlight sparkled and glanced off its silver hatband.

“You save him, Nerburn?” he asked from beneath the hat.

“It was close,” I answered. “If I hadn't shown up he was going to turn into a buffalo.”

“Glad he didn't. Never fit in the car,” Grover said, pulling himself up to a sitting position.

Dan choffed a low sound and made his way over to the front passenger door. Fatback was chewing hard at some burr between the pads on her back foot. Dan leaned over in a slow, arthritic bend. “Tsuk, tsuk,” he sucked to get her attention. She stopped her gnawing and looked at him. Then, without further command, she rolled on her back and stuck her back foot toward him. With practiced fingers he spread the pads of her foot and reached in and pulled out the burr. Fatback curved up and licked his hand several times, then delved her tongue back into the crevice between the pads and began licking away at the wound. Dan cuffed the scruff of her neck and opened the car door.

It was a small moment, but full of love and understanding. Maybe Grover had meant more than I thought when he had told me to watch Fatback and get my book from her.

I
n a manner that seemed almost incredible to me, Grover continued through the trackless hills for almost the entire afternoon. Occasionally he would find an old path and follow it for a bit. Once or twice we had crossed gravel roads, but rather than turn onto one, Grover pushed across them like fording a stream, then plunged back into the grasslands. I had no idea what he was doing or why he was doing it. All he would ever say was, “Shortcut.”

Dan assured me that there was a track here. “How the hell else would he know where he was going?” he said. I could not tell if it was a joke or a statement of fact.

I had the distinct sense that there was a purpose behind our journey, but it seemed so random, so serendipitous. Grover
tried to get me to eat a steamy baloney sandwich that he had stored under the front seat, but I declined. He shrugged and ate two. Dan did some housekeeping on his with ketchup and mayonnaise packs that he found in the glove compartment, then chewed it down in contented, rhythmic bites. Fatback looked longingly from the back seat. “Bad for the stomach,” I consoled her.

As the shadows began to lengthen we came to a gravel road that stretched off over the hills. To my surprise, Grover turned onto it and headed south.

“Annie,” he said. The shorthand meant nothing to me, but elicited great nods of approval from Dan.

“Good,” he said. “Haven't seen that old squaw for a while.”

My spirit lightened considerably now that we were on a recognizable road. My life had been full of too many tiny automotive apocalypses where a tire had blown or a warning light had suddenly come on, and I now unconsciously found solace on well-traveled roads where solutions were close at hand and small problems were less likely to turn into automotive nightmares.

This dusty gravel path was no highway, but at least it spoke of intention and destination in a way that the trackless fields of our day's travel had not.

Dan turned around and looked at me with a cockeyed grin. “Happy now?”

“I was happy before.”

“Yeah, but you like roads. I could tell it from that first time we drove up on the hill behind my house. You go where they send you.”

“Like I said to Grover, cars and roads sort of go together.”

“Not in Indian country,” he laughed.

“Besides, they tend to lead to phones,” I said, “and I still would like to find one. Does this Annie have one?”

Grover guffawed. “Where the hell do you think you are,
Nerburn? America? They don't put phone lines out here. Electric lines, either.” His voice was tinged with bitterness.

“And it's a good thing, too, as far as I'm concerned,” Dan added. “This is a better way to live. The people are happier. This is the way it was when I was a kid. We all helped each other because we had to. Nobody had anything. We just shared. When someone came to your house it meant they really wanted to see you. You honored them.”

Grover leaned back in his seat and sighed. “Yeah, that was the thing when we were young. Honor and respect. We were taught honor. I don't know what the hell happened.”

A pickup roared by in the opposite direction. Grover and the other driver exchanged waves.

Dan picked up the conversation. “That's something you should think about, Nerburn.”

“Huh?” I blurted. I was thinking about roads and telephones.

“Freedom and honor.”

It sounded like a military slogan. “What do you mean?” I said, only vaguely interested.

“This is important,” Dan emphasized. “I want you to get it down.”

I remembered that his shoe box full of notes had contained many references to freedom and honor. I rummaged in my duffel bag and pulled out the tape recorder.

“Okay,” he said. “Ready?”

“Ready.” I really wasn't; I wanted to just sit and think. But it was clear that Dan was going to give one of his “little talks.” I fiddled with the volume control on the tiny recorder and slipped in a new cassette.

“This is something I've thought about for a long time. It's about white people and why they don't understand us. I think I know why.”

“Go ahead, tell me,” I said.

“I think it's because the most important thing for white people is freedom. The most important thing for Indian people is honor.

“This is why white people have listened to the black people more than to us Indians,” he said. “The black people want freedom, too, just like white people. And since the white people took freedom from the black people, the whites feel guilty about the blacks. You see what I'm saying?”

I nodded absently.

“But the Indian has always been free. We are free today. We have always been freer than the white man, even when he first came here. When you came to our shore your people wore clothes made out of chains. Our people wore nothing at all. Yet you tried to bring us freedom.

“The white world puts all the power at the top, Nerburn. When someone gets to the top, they have the power to take your freedom. When your people first came to our land they were trying to get away from those people at the top. But they still thought the same, and soon there were new people at the top in the new country. It is just the way you were taught to think.

“In your churches there is someone at the top. In your schools, too. In your government. In your business. There is always someone at the top and that person has the right to say whether you are good or bad. They own you.

“No wonder Americans always worry about freedom. You have so damn little of it. If you don't protect it, someone will take it away from you. You have to guard it every second, like a dog guards a bone.”

“This is a good talk, Dan,” Grover interjected. Dan nodded in acknowledgment.

“When you came among us, you couldn't understand our way. You wanted to find the person at the top. You wanted to
find the fences that bound us in — how far our land went, how far our government went. Your world was made of cages and you thought ours was, too. Even though you hated your cages you believed in them. They defined your world and you needed them to define ours.

“Our old people noticed this from the beginning. They said that the white man lived in a world of cages, and that if we didn't look out, they would make us live in a world of cages, too.

“So we started noticing. Everything looked like cages. Your clothes fit like cages. Your houses looked like cages. You put fences around your yards so they looked like cages. Everything was a cage. You turned the land into cages. Little squares.