July 6
A wet morning. The clouds scud by, looking dark and broken. They have that startled watchfulness of things flying past. I hunch on the gravel lot, making coffee. Six scoops, and one for the pot. Across the ravine, the yellow grasses of Bear Butte lift into fog: I can see nothing of the high rocks, sacred place of Crazy Horse. On the ceremonial grounds just beyond the ravine are two tents, our little dome, still standing, and one of the those large Coleman contraptions that blew down last night and now, deserted, lies drenched across the shapes of coolers and upturned cots.
His time approaching, Jethro submits to a final obligation: he squats at the side-view mirror and begins to snip off his mustache. The last of the whiskers gather on a paper towel that already holds his beard clippings—an impressive collection, enough hair to cover a small animal. When he comes round to the tailgate, he looks like a middle-aged boy, brave and bashful.
“Sure is strange,” he says, feeling his face.
I smile at the sight of him, and hold out a cup of coffee. He takes it, but his eyes are on the horizon.
“Any time now,” he says, again.
We look at the road that is to bring us the Cheyenne holy man called Vernon Bullcoming. The gravel curves up through prairie wildflowers and disappears against the clouds. The rattle trap Toyota, I notice, is gone. Its owner probably left when the weather turned bad. He was a white man who, like us, had arrived in the heat and stillness of the previous afternoon. Apparently, he’d placed himself on the mountain in order to fast and pray, as the Cheyenne have done since the days before they were called Cheyenne. Or perhaps he had another tradition in mind and had come to seek a vision in the way of the Sioux. Lamenting, they call it. In any case, while helping Jethro collect sage, I’d glimpsed the man through the pines. He lay prone on a blanket: a person waiting for something. At that haunted hour of late day, the entire earth—the golden plains and far Black Hills—seemed itself to be waiting, every needle and seed inclined to contemplation. The air had been full of sun, stunning it its stillness, the sort of afternoon in which the whole world appears finally to have gotten itself to rights. Indeed, anyone would have been hard pressed to have lain on those slopes and escaped a little circumstantial peace with God.
Many tribes share a spiritual history with this place. The Mandan and Kiowa, the Arikara, and those two old rivals the Crow and Sioux—all see Bear Butte as a source of divine emanation. But it is the Cheyenne to whom this mountain is most significant; it’s their cathedral, built of fire and wind. Their own word for it refers not to a bear (which the mountain is thought to resemble) but to a locus of spiritual instruction—Nowah’wus—The Sacred Mountain Where People Are Taught. It’s the place, they say, where spirits taught a holy man called Sweet Medicine how to live rightly. They taught him the dance of world renewal, the Sun Dance. They gave him Maahotse, the four Sacred Arrows, through which God gazes and gives his strength to the people. I’m told that these arrows are still with the Cheyenne, guarded by a keeper who lives in Oklahoma. During times of renewal ceremonies, the arrows are driven from one sacred place to another. I imagine them—mythic arrows—wrapped carefully and stored in a car trunk, perhaps at rest near something as ordinary as a suitcase or tire jack.
In accord with tradition, a Cheyenne male gets placed on the butte only after having received the instruction of a holy man. It’s a time-consuming and expensive tutelage; one has many rituals to complete in preparation for the fast and many giveaways to make in gratitude for the instruction. A man may be inspired to fast for any number of reasons: to pray for the well-being of a loved one, to heal an old sorrow, but always to learn something about what God has in mind for him. (Women, too, fast, and for the similar reasons, but they do so at the base of the mountain, near the tents.) A man in fasting remains on the slope, exposed to all weather, from sunset the first night until sunrise the fourth morning, and although he may become terrified by what he dreams or sees, he has his religion, his discipline, to guide him through the worst of it. I picture that white man fleeing the storm, his blanket balled up in his arms. What mixture of relief and humiliation had he felt as he drove through the downpour to the highway below?
With the Toyota gone, our truck and a nearby van are the only vehicles left in the lot. There’s a coup stick leaning against the van, and a spear decorated with eagle feathers. After a while, the van rocks and a white-haired man emerges. He limps over to us, adjusting his cap—a cap like those favored by truckers, except that his logo is a dainty peace pipe, complete with miniscule, free-swinging feathers.
“New York,” he says, noting our license plate.
“Upstate,” I explain. “Four hours from the nearest knish vender.”
He takes the mug Jethro offers him, sips appreciatively, then taps out a Marlboro Gold.
“Coffee and cigarettes,” he tells us. “It’s what keeps me going.”
Jethro explains that he’s here to be placed on the mountain and that I’m the helper. The man introduces himself as Grover Horn Antelope. He tells us that he is Lakota Sioux, that he’s here to help those who will come for the July ceremonies. He gazes up past the flattened tent. On higher ground, pines draped with strips of cloth rise toward the rocks. The fog has begun to lift, showing the first glimpses of talus.
“I’ve been coming here thirty-three years,” Grover says. “I placed a lot of people on these slopes. I’m the old man of this mountain.” His voice is soft, pleasing to hear. “I don’t charge anybody,” he tells us. “I never have.” This seems to be a point that he needs to establish. He goes on to talk about how Bear Butte is too often abused by charlatans who traffic vision quests to a gullible population of non-Indians.
“We had some protesters here, “Grover says. “Activists who came with megaphones. They were angry at the people who had paid some spiritual leaders hundreds of dollars to fast, and they wanted to pull them down from the mountain. Can you imagine that?” Grover shakes his head. “It is a blasphemy,” he says.
I am touched by the reach of his assessment, for I take him to mean that he finds the entire situation—the greed of the holy men, the virulence of the activists, the foolishness of the non-Indians—all of it an affront to the power that Bear Butte signifies. Grover remains with a us a while, talking about the mountain with a kind of sweet and wistful reverence. At one point he peeks into his mug and confesses that last summer he lost his wife of forty-three years. He thanks us for the coffee, then shuffles back to his van.
A vehicle surfaces against the sky and Jethro rises from the tailgate. We see that it is not Bullcoming, but another Cheyenne elder, a man called Ralph Red Fox. His truck, a beat-up camper, makes its dusty way around the curve and parks next to us. Ralph climbs out, followed by his partner, a woman in blond braids called Dana. They have come to wish Jethro luck, before making their long drive back to Idaho. I show them the coffee pot, and Ralph produces a convenience store mug the size of a Bavarian tankard.
We met them the day before, in front of the Visitor’s Center. When Ralph discovered that Jethro was preparing for a fast, he tarried a while, talking with us about the power of the mountain. I was struck by the formidability of his presence. In his lined face and mirthful eyes lay a peculiar quality of oldness; it wasn’t the venerable quality of human age but rather something much older; the humorous and elemental longevity of hills and sky. He spoke quietly, like Grover, talking about the supernatural in the calm fashion of a man who knows and respects his weather. He told us that he was a shaman, that he had knowledge of an ancient ceremony called the Massaum. He said that each summer he passed a few weeks traveling among the sacred places to talk with anyone who wanted to learn what they meant to the Cheyenne. Like Grover he’d seen his share of sham medicine men.
“So, what do you do when you encounter these people?” I asked.
“I go talk to them,” he said.
“And what do they do?”
“They leave.”
“They leave?” I said. “Just like that?”
He nodded, then replied in a way that I would have judged fatuous, but for the considerable dignity of his bearing. “I speak from the heart,” he said. “People know.”
As that evening approached—the day still warm and golden—Ralph invited us to join Dana and him for a visit. We finished our supper then drove to their camp at Bear Butte Lake. By then it was nightfall. Lightning blinked along the hills and the wind plied the stillness, leisurely sweeps of it, fragrant with rain. Dana set out sweet rolls, and the four of us sat at a picnic table where we talked about the day and how good it felt to be at the mountain. When we finished our coffee, Ralph invited us to pray. He produced some sage and began rolling it between his palms. He whispered, speaking in syllables I’d never heard before, a melodic concatenation, one that put me in mind of chipped cliffs against a spatter of clouds. When he finished, he placed the sage in Jethro’s palm. He showed him the way to hold it, then encouraged him to pray. Jethro was quiet a moment, his lips moving beneath his beard. A moment later, he passed the sage to Dana who whispered a prayer and then passed the sage to me. I lay in my palm, a slender sphere of crushed leaves that Jethro later told me signified a wolf’s tail.
“Just pray?” I asked.
Ralph nodded, so I did, then hoped that what I’d murmured was appropriate. When I finished, Ralph placed the sphere on the table and touched it with his cigarette. As the leaves smoldered, he poked among several sandwich bags in his medicine bundle. “Hmm,” he mumbled. “Don’t want this…better not use that…Ah!” He sprinkled what looked like wood shavings over the fragrant smoke. After smudging himself, he motioned for us to do the same, then passed around his medicine bundle so that we each could cradle it in our arms. When our praying was finished, Ralph lowered his face to the table and blew away the ashes. We were quiet awhile, reflecting on what had transpired. The wind continued to blow—the gusts more powerful than before—filling the cottonwoods with an urgent, lonesome sound. I felt at peace, as I had in childhood, when my family was gathered around the table and outside it was dark and raining.
Ralph lit another cigarette. “I received my bundle in 1937,” he said. “That was the last time the Massaum was held.”
The Massaum, as he explained it, and as Jethro later recounted from his own reading,*1was a complex ceremony in which the Cheyenne, or the Tsistsistas, reenacted the creation of all things—from the inception of time to the gift of the hunt—and in doing so reaffirmed their covenant with the spirits. Once a year the different bands came together to build a lodge that symbolized Bear Butte. Around this they raised other lodges and tipis, all contained within a circle. Here, for five days, they performed the innumerable rituals required to bring the universe into being. The last day culminated in the Massaum’s most effusive ritual: scores of people, all dressed as animals, emerged from tipis and danced in a grand circle, now mimicking wolves, buffalo, magpie, elk, now falling at the hands of contraries—sacred clowns who hunted them with tiny bows and arrows. Beginning with its genesis at Bear Butte, the Massaum took place once each summer for over two thousand years. It is older than the culture of the pipe, even older than the gift of the four Sacred Arrows; in tracing the Massaum to its origins, one traces the forging of a people to its source.
“No one person knew all of the Massaum,” Ralph said. “It was too big. But for a time there were three of us left who could initiate a ceremony. We each had our part, our power.
“One of us was a shape-changer. You threw a buffalo robe over him and he’d fly off an eagle, then a moment later you’d see him come walking back over the hill.”
“You mean you actually saw that happen? ”I said.
Ralph nodded. “His power was the eagle. The other’s was the wolf. Mine too is the wolf.” He smiled at me.
I wasn’t sure what to make of this fantastic claim. I was convinced of his sincerity, yet at the same time I doubted that any man could literally, I don’t know—puff like vapor? slither like fluid? fold like origami?—become a bird. It’s a familiar ambiguity, one that I experience whenever credible people tell me about the ghosts they’ve encountered, or about strange and giant lights adrift beneath the stars. At any rate, something within me believed—the same something that believes Ralph Red Fox—though whether that something has its source in subconscious wisdom, or merely credulous desire, I cannot say.
“So,” I asked, “where are they now, these two men?”
Ralph waved his hand. “Passed over. A long time ago. What they knew went with them. There was no one to pass their knowledge along to.”
He took a puff of his cigarette. I looked at him, more stirred by that bit of news than I had been by the implications of the shape-changer; if what he had said were true, then I was seeing a person who embodied the last living part of a religion that predated Christ. His eyes twinkled, full of humor. “You know,” he said, “the days are past when this mountain was for Cheyenne and Sioux only. It’s for everybody now.”
Later, as Jethro drove us back to our own campsite, I stared out the window at the many different lightnings. In a less peaceful mood, I found myself not only dwelling on the loss of the Massaum, but also on the implications of Ralph’s pronouncement: the mountain is for everybody now. This sentiment, so childlike, so necessary, nonetheless presents a problem. I see it in the folly of that white man who had fled the storm. Clearly he thought “the mountain is for everybody now.” And yet he had not been prepared to face the power to which he was praying. Perhaps Ralph meant that Bear Butte, pursued as a spiritual locus, is for anybody willing to submit to the religious tradition that the mountain informs. In contrast to a literal reading of Ralph’s words, this interpretation is more qualified, and I’d hazard more accurate. I think it’s dangerous to presume that I could walk into any sacred place and under the protectorship of my own good will safely engage its deeper mysteries. Sincerity alone is no match for a confrontation with terror. It’s not that a person like me, governed largely by humanism, or the Toyota man, governed by who knows what, isn’t welcomed to these places, isn’t invited into the love they offer—I sense that we are, and abundantly so. But without exercising the appropriate humility we put our lives at risk.
Standing in the lot with his tankard of coffee, Ralph wishes Jethro good fortune; Dana gives him an enviable hug, and then we are watching their old camper trundle up the road, bound for Devil’s Tower or some other holy place. The rest of the day we haunt the parking lot, waiting for Bullcoming. The fog burns away, revealing the rocks of the high summit. According to park literature, Bear Butte is a laccolith—the remains of a volcano that never blew. From a distance to the west , this uplift stands like an enormous tipi collared by shelves of upended limestone. As the Cheyenne see it, the summit is so much deep earth—home of spirits—flung high into the sphere of breath: what is hidden elsewhere is revealed here.
In the afternoon I put on more coffee. When it’s ready, Grover Horn Antelope limps over, and we three sit on the tailgate, not saying much. Now and then Jethro feels his naked chin. The clouds have slowed. They uncobble and form a haze through which a hawk floats up to a more bracing altitude. It is a lazy time, and I think of that James Wright poem about a wasted life. Grover gives us a the scoop on medicine man gossip. Once he caught the famous Fool’s Crow telling a lie, how he had misled a group into believing that he’d passed corporally through the heart of Bear Butte. Grover gestured angrily, two fingers thrust to one side, which apparently unsettled his crone.
“I have walked through this mountain,” Grover announces, gesturing. “But in spirit. If I were to do it in person, I’d have to dig with a shovel. My power”—he touches his chest—“is the spotted eagle.” He pauses, gazing up at the sky. When the coffee is gone, he returns to his van. Earlier I noticed his medicine bundle—like Ralph’s, a beautifully beaded affair—tucked up on the dash amid coffee-stained papers and wads of crumpled cellophane.
At dusk Jethro and I hike from the ceremonial grounds up to the Visitors’ Center. The place is closed; behind us, Bear Butte rises in darkened splendor. There’s a trailhead for sight-seers. Like the aisles of a temple, the trail is posted with signs that warn tourists away from sacred areas. From our high vantage, the plains open below, the grasses freckled with bison. The haze has passed over, and a star or two shines in a contrite way. As we gaze into the distance, I find that all the worries I cannot will into oblivion now fade without effort. About distances, perhaps Emerson is right: “The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.” Together, Jethro and I watch the cars as they approach from Sturgis. All day long, people have been arriving for the first of the July ceremonies. Mostly Indians in big Plymouths and low-slung Rivieras. They park their cars and haul gear across the ravine to the ceremonial grounds. A couple of tipis have gone up. On the twilit slope, they glow like lanterns.
We conjecture about Bullcoming’s continuing absence. At last report he has in Montana, assisting in a Sun Dance ceremony. Jethro feels the tops of the grass. His expression is composed, yet drawn; in a rare moment I witness the strain of the burden that has brought him here. I admire him for the dignity of his restraint, for all that he has not told me. I do not know him well, this colleague. Though we’ve been acquainted for a number of years, I knew nothing of his spiritual apprenticeship (if that is the word) with the Seneca Indians of western New York. He was, to me, simply a farmer with merry eyes, a librarian with a habit of making kindly asides to bushes and pigeons. Since I agreed to accompany him, he has but once alluded to the brutal violence that his wife had suffered and which had brought here to fast for their mutual healing.
How Jethro came under the guidance of a Cheyenne holy man occurred in the curious way that a number of coincidences, by force of their collective effect, upgrade to a mystical experience. It begins one spring night with a dream. In it Jethro sees a mountain whose power and beauty remain with him in his waking hours. Weeks later, while reviewing some photographs, he is astonished to discover that this dream mountain is an actual place, Bear Butte. That fall, after a visit to his mother in Oklahoma, he rents a car and begins to drive north. He is bound for no particular place, though there is someone he wishes to find—Roy Bullcoming—a man whose picture he’d encountered while studying a demographic text of the Southern Cheyenne. Like the mountain of his dream, the image of Roy Bullcoming stays with him, though given the number of prints in the text he cannot explain what draws him to the picture of that particular man. Tooling north he turns to the east or west whenever the urge takes him. At a few crossroads he is unsure about which way to turn, and so he waits until a hawk appears—one always does—and in the direction it flies is the direction he goes.
Come late afternoon he arrives in a town called Seiling. Feeling that this is the right place, he knocks at a few doors and does his best to explain himself. A woman tells him that yes, she knew of Roy Bullcoming, that he man died some years ago. But his wife is still alive, she lives just up the road. Jethro walks to the door of Bullcoming’s widow. He introduces himself, explains how it is that he has come to Seiling. The woman hears him out, and eventually Jethro ends up in a small room, seated at a table where two other women are at work, beading pipe bags. A television blares in the next room, a Western, Jethro notices, complete with whooping Indians. Bullcoming’s widow allows that she has a son, Vernon, to whom her husband passed his medicine, and whom she will tell of Jethro’s intentions when he returns home that evening. Jethro thanks her for her time, then takes a room at the local motel. At dusk, Vernon Bullcoming shows, a big man wearing a ball cap.
“Oh, ho,” he says.
They shake hands, then Vernon sits in a chair and listens to what this man from New York has to say. When Jethro finishes his petition, when it is clear that he said all that he intended, Vernon assents: he agrees to place Jethro on the mountain. They arrange to meet the next morning, then shake hands at the doorway.
“I’m grateful for your help,” Jethro says.
“I knew you were coming here,” Vernon tells him.
Jethro asks how he could have known such a thing.
“I dreamed you,” Vernon replies.
Night comes and still Vernon has not arrived. We build a fire. For a while I help Jethro keep vigil. We smoke quietly, waiting for a light to appear in the parking lot. Eventually I grow sleepy and so take a stroll out into the grasses. At the ravine, I gaze upward. Clear again. A sky so starry that it seems as if one night has slightly overlapped another. It is a sky that I have seen in other places: from the Escalante River, the Adirondack mountains, the red cliffs of Superior’s southern shore. If the center is everywhere, as I feel it must be, then what’s the point of a place like Bear Butte? Why a Ganges or a Mecca? What vestiges of a bygone spiritual event make any one of these places more divinely central than any other place? Or is sanctification subordinate to the effects of accumulated prayer? I stare into the stars. From their remove, how absurd our geographical distinctions must seem. To think that God, in touching this blue point of light, presses more firmly upon this butte here, that river there. Yet despite my skepticism, I cannot deny the inordinate sense of awe I feel in the company of this butte. Or that I have felt before the windows of Chartres, or among the ruins of Incan temples. In all these places, I encountered a powerful and immediate presence, a genius loci, that I must admit does not so apparently grace the common byways, that I cannot explain without producing postulates no more true—and far less interesting—than those plucky nostrums put forth by the old natural philosophers. And so these places exist. And so we covet them. And for that reason soil their names with our inhumanity, as evidenced by Grover’s story of the angry protesters and exploited acolytes.
July 7
Dawn. Assuming Bullcoming arrives, Jethro will begin his fast this evening: three nights and two days on a blanket. I turn around and find his sleeping bag empty. Outside, a magpie lifts from the sumac; the valleys look cool and breathed upon. Down at the parking lot I discover him keeping vigil on his tailgate, one leg crossed, the coffee ready. I barely finish my first cup when a sedan surfaces at the ridge. It drifts toward us, slumped to one side, a rack of suitcases twined to the roof.
“It’s them!” Jethro says.
The car stops in front of us. A big man steps out and rises slowly to his full height. He greets Jethro, then stretches and looks around. I put him at fifty, a pot-bellied fellow wearing a short-sleeved dress shirt and reading glasses. Unlike Ralph Red Fox, Vernon does not match my preconception of a Cheyenne hold man; he reminds me, somehow, of an electrician. His car is filled with the Bullcoming family, some sleeping soundly, others newly awake and frowning thoughtfully. Though the sun is just rising, it is clear they’ve been on the road for hours. While Bullcoming produces a number of folding chairs, I pour coffee for him and his wife, Rhoda. They accept it gratefully. Meanwhile Grover Antelope, coffee-prescient, limps over from his van.
While I cook breakfast, everybody sits in a circle and talks in a pleasant, lazy fashion. We have much to do, and I am anxious to work, but nothing is said about Jethro’s fast. Instead Vernon and Grover exchange stories about hunting mishaps. By degrees, the children empty themselves from the sedan: One after the other, they roll out of the back seat like stowed circus clowns. They are jug-eared and skinny, solemn before this fresh change of events. They go to Rhoda and wait shyly for their oatmeal and fruit.
As the morning grows hot, we go to work hauling gear onto the ceremonial grounds. We establish a fire pit and raise a large tent. Bullcoming fashions an awning, using strips of scrap wood, frayed bailing twine, and a ratty tarp. When his work is done, he gives one of the posts an affectionate shake.
“Indian,” he says.
We drive to Sturgis for groceries: pounds of meat, sweet rolls, and coffee. Later, while Rhoda cooks, Vernon talks quietly to Jethro. He offers last-minute counsel, his hands drifting in a series of deliberate gestures. An hour before sundown, the ceremony begins. Two other Cheyenne men amble up from another campsite. No introductions are made; they simply join Vernon, Jethro and me in the tent. We sit in a circle and Jethro tells the story of his coming to Bear Butte. He talks about the violence visited upon his wife and, so, upon him. While we listen, his voice cracks. We remain silent as he wipes his eyes and continues. He expresses his wish to heal and, in accord with tradition, to pray for the healing of the earth. He ends by thanking us for being with him at this, his first fast. When he has finished, the men grunt affirmingly. Then Bullcoming instructs Jethro to light his pipe—a genuine catlinite pipe that Jethro has spent the year carving. The pipe is passed around the circle. Each man points it in the six directions, then puffs with easeful vigor. At least, I get the pipe. I have never held one before. I aim it around at the various directions then take a few tentative puffs. Nobody appears to judge my awkwardness.
Bullcoming puts out a bit of food for the spirits, then we feast on grilled chicken and sweet rolls. The meal complete, Jethro takes his last gulp from a plastic bucket containing water from his farm in the Finger Lakes and my old home in the Wisconsin River Valley. He sets it down, gives me a wry grin. He is now a man in fasting.
As the dusk approaches, Bullcoming signals us and a couple of teenagers to his sedan. We drive along a lane to a trailhead hidden by plum trees. Bullcoming removes a buffalo skull from the trunk and starts walking. We follow him up into the grasses: Jethro empty-handed, the teenagers bearing his things, and I at the rear with a flashlight. We walk in silently, and I enjoy the comradely pleasure of moving single file through a dusky landscape. The sun, just setting, draws a long shadow from Bear Butte. The shadow is shaped like a tipi. Far below us lies Bear Butte Lake, shaped like an arrowhead. As the land darkens, the tipi disappears, but the lake remains blue and lighted.
Bullcoming seems to use the buffalo skull as a kind of divining rod. When he—or it—finds the right spot, he plants the skull with pronounced finality. As we look on, he kneels and begins plucking away grass. He rubs his thumb into the earth, then arranges a bed of sage bundles. At last, he instructs Jethro to remove all but his shorts. While I aim the light, Bullcoming paints Jethro’s wrists and ankles. He paints his cheeks blue, his chest red, then ends with a general basting of yellow. We unfurl Jethro’s bedroll then tip him, like a pole, backward to the earth. We draw a sheet over his body and, rather tenderly, tuck him in. Near his head, I arrange some matches and his pipe. Then I join the teenagers standing back beside a clump of yucca. They seem detached, yet unhurried. When at last Bullcoming finishes the initiation, the four of us walk away as silently as we’d arrived.
To the east a few stars twinkle contentedly. The west glows like lighted blood.
At midnight, I help the Bullcoming family carry gear down to their sedan. They must travel back to Montana to return grandchildren and collect additional cookware. We cross the ravine to the parking lot. On the hill above us, flashlights bob as yet another group makes camp. Rhoda carefully inserts limp children into the back seat. As Bullcoming starts the engine, I step away and peek through the windows. The dash lights, those that work, glow wanly on an array of hands and knees. The back is dark and crowded, the small bodies arranged among thick blankets and pillows. As the sedan begins its backwards drift, I glimpse the face of a small child. It peers out blankly at me from deep within its burrow of siblings. What magnificent memories you will have, I think.
July 8
After sunrise, I walk past the plum trees to check on Jethro. I am to do this at dawn and dusk for each day of the fast. I stroll, hands in my pockets, on this fine, chilly morning. Bear Butte Lake sparkles flinty blue, and the giant tipi-shadow of the mountain slants steeply to the west. I find Jethro laid out among the cone flowers.
“How is it?” I say, sitting beside him.
He rubs his face, looks rested and content. “Just fine,” he says.
I sit a while longer, and we both look out at the freshly lighted plains. In the far distance, we can see Harney Peak. It was there, in his famous vision, that Black Elk had been shown the hoop of the world: a giant circle of circles containing his people and all the nations of earth. It was a transcendent vision, built upon many images of beauty and vitality—the revolving rows of horses, the flowering trees—but upon destruction and suffering too, for the Grandfathers did not spare Black Elk the heartbreaking sight of his own broken hoop: the dying tree of his people, the spectacle of their bewildered lamentations. I give Jethro’s arm a squeeze and start back down the slope.
In camp, I start my chores. There is a pile of scrap lumber in the parking lot and my task is to carry the boards across the ravine and up the slope to our fire pit. There I must use my foot to crack the boards into manageable lengths. It is nasty work. I have no gloves and all the lumber is ungainly and splintered. After stocking our camp, I haul still more lumber to an inipi, or sweat-lodge site. I keep at it for quite a while, hauling load after load to the fire pit beside the inipi frame. As I work, the two Cheyenne men who attended last evening’s ceremonial dinner wander out from their tent. They arrange folding chairs in the shade and for a long time sip coffee and monitor the progress of my labor. Eventually I have accumulated an enormous heap beside the inipi frame. I catch my breath, then spend time arranging the wood into what looks to me like a neat, spiritual pile. Sweat-soaked, I approach the two men to find out precisely how much wood I will need to collect for two sweat-lodge ceremonies. They lean from their chairs, observing my pile. One of them is tall and gray-haired, dressed like a cowboy. the other is a stout, narrow-eyed man with a belly like the Buddha. The gray-haired man says that I’m getting close. I thank him, and he nods agreeably. He then mentions, as an aside, that some other group will simply take all my wood and burn it for their own ceremony. I brush at my arms, imagine tipping him out of his chair. The gray-haired man laughs. His laughter is sharp. He looks to his companion, who smiles sleepily, then back at me: “Your friend is all right?”
“It’s getting hot,” I say.
The gray-haired man snatches at the air, making a fist. “The sun is watching,” he says. “It will try to beat him.”
He instructs me to sit down—something I do not have to be told twice. The man tells me that he is Gilbert White Dirt, his companion a man called Glen. Gilbert, too, is a Cheyenne holy man. With pride, he gestures at the mountain and lets me know that he has placed many people up there. He touches Glen’s arm. “I placed Glen,” he says. His companion, who is looking elsewhere and does not appear to be listening, smiles in agreement. I tell Gilbert that a couple of days ago I didn’t know any holy men, and now I know four. I tell him about our evening with Ralph Red Fox, how moving it had been to learn about the Massaum, to sit and pray with him.
Gilbert is unimpressed. He dismisses Ralph with a wave of his hand. Ralph, he tells me, is a fake. Startled by this pronouncement, I review my memory of Ralph, and though I sense that Gilbert is both informed and sincere, I cannot abide by his judgment. Nonetheless Gilbert remains adamant, so much so that he finds the subject beneath debate. He will say no more about Ralph, but turns with vigor to my questions about worship. Like Ralph, like Bullcoming and old Grover, Gilbert White Dirt appears to relish an occasion for spiritual discourse; indeed, he settles into it as readily as other men settle into talk about sports. He listens to what I offer about my own religious history. I allow that I was raised Catholic, but have not practiced that faith in fifteen years. Nonetheless I have always believed in God and have even retained a Christian impression of Him—that is, the impression of an imperious and yet loving presence from whom we have become separated and who wishes that we would rejoin Him once again. I do not tell Gilbert how I tend to visualize this presence: as the distortion of a childhood memory, the blue and white swirls of my grandmother’s kitchen floor thinned to transparency—God, a kind of etherealized linoleum. It is, I believe, a semblance that can only survive in the head of a person whom hardship is not pressed into forging a more restorative image.
In the end, Gilbert tells me that I must get myself placed on that mountain.
I squint up at the glaring talus.
“You will come back to Bear Butte,” he says, pointing at me.
“Well,” I say.
At last Gilbert rises. He stretches, then tips back his cowboy hat. “Tonight,” he says. “You come and pray with us.”
In the full heat of afternoon, I stroll up to the Visitor’s Center to view the distant Black Hills. Despite the ferocity of the light, I forego sunglasses. I’ve noticed that none of the Indians around here wear them. Hat-brimmed or open-faced, all go about their day squinting complacently. It’s a signature look, quite distinct from the polarized, mirrory gaze of tourists. I pause to squint at the view which last night had looked so pleasing. Now, as I peer across that vast cauldron of grasses, I think about Jethro, who surely must be having a time of it.
How peculiar, our use of pain to transcend an early, greater suffering. There are Cheyenne men who have walked in wide circles, dragging behind them a cavalcade of buffalo skulls, each one attached by cord to a slice in his back. What visions of heaven flower from the soil of so great a tribulation? I am always sobered to meet the profoundly religious, those who have voluntarily undergone privation tin order to better understand God’s will for them. Invariably, these individuals glow with an inner grace not nearly so consistent—or even evident—in the rest of us. Spiritus lenitatis, St. Bernard called it. Indeed, the serene clarity and compassion in the eyes of the devout seem testimony to the rightness of their difficult choices.
I glance up at those scorched slopes that have housed so much suffering and transcendence, and I wonder about my own choices: whether it’s folly to sidestep religious tradition and instead seek a largely secular path to God by acting on the most magnanimous thoughts of mortals like Emerson or Whitman, by emulating the tradition of all those poets whose passion for life is so mindfully tempered by their address of suffering and death, whose response to the human condition is to live out their days filled with a rollicking mixture of uncertainty, ebullience, compassion, and pride.
In the Visitors’ Center, I drink deep from the icy arc of the water fountain. The interior is dim and cool. There is the usual circumference of glass cases. I regard the stones and dried plants, the assortment of ceremonial garments. There are no tourists around, so Chuck Rambow, the head ranger, spends some time talking with me. He is an affable man. Twenty years on the job, and he still visibly lights up at the prospect of a discussion about the butte. He has about him that air of childlike wonder common among people who have found themselves in a particular landscape. I think of Edward Abbey, bounding up all those slot canyons, or John Muir, striding through the columbine in the Sierras.
While Chuck brews some coffee, I question him about Grover Horn Antelope’s dig at Fools Crow, about Gilbert White Dirt’s disparagement of Ralph. Chuck smiles, somewhat sadly. Apparently there is a measure of petty rivalry among the various holy men. Some of the more purely traditional sort, like Gilbert, resent the more progressive, politically oriented tactics of an itinerant like Ralph. Others, like Grover and Fools Crow, interpret their religion in ways so distinct from one another that they find themselves at loggerheads.
In any case, Chuck’s assessment strikes me as so obvious that I find myself embarrassed for not having figured this out on my own; impressed as I was by the spiritual presence of each, I failed to allow for their humanity and so reduced them to so many religious cartoons. It is that tendency, I imagine, that makes it so easy for spiritual hucksters to swindle a crowd.
At dusk, I hike up the hill to check on Jethro. I find him tucked beneath his sheet. There is no moisture around his lips, just a tacky whiteness. The paints have streaked from his skin, leaving the after-image of a lighter sunburn. I reach over to his pipe bag and set down an extra book of matches.
“How is it? I ask.
He rises up on one elbow, stares out at the land, blinking. “Awfully warm,” he replies. “How about you?”
“Not as bad.”
He laughs, then lifts his arm, pointing at a place in the sky. You know that sun? It stayed right there. In fact, I think at one point it went backwards.”
We rest awhile, looking out at the prettiness of the valley.
After dark, I light a fire and wait for the Bullcomings to return. I’m just washing my pots when a child runs up to me. He nods to the tent of Gilbert White Dirt, then runs away. I follow after him and find Gilbert waiting for me, holding his pipe bag the way a person holds a newborn. Glen is at his side, wrapped in a shawl. We walk past a tent where five Cheyenne women sit under the stars, fasting. We go another twenty paces, then sit three abreast in the dry grass. Gilbert faces the sky and begins to sing the Cheyenne “Song of the Buffalo,” the sound of it as melodic as the antiphony of any Benedictine monk. Every now and then Glen blows on a whistle made of eagle bone; the device produces a sound so shrill that it must bring even the stars to attention. I am left feeling alert, fully alive.
We each pray aloud in our own turn, I in English, they in Cheyenne. At one point Gilbert’s voice cracks, and I realize that he is in tears. He continues his prayers, his voice faltering, hands open to the sky. Then he settles back and we are quiet. The pipe is passed. I puff, feel the joy and peace that I had after rolling the sage with Jethro, Dana, and Ralph Red Fox.
The praying finished, we struggle to our feet. We pause before the tent, so that Gilbert can bless the women. While waiting, I stare at the tiny lights shimmering on the plains below and am moved by their beauty and remoteness. Yet unlike the previous evening, I do not experience this spectacle of distance with the tender rejuvenation to which Emerson referred, but rather I am struck by a more troubling acuity as noted by Virginia Woolf, here commenting on the distant twinkling of a beach town: “The lights were rippling and running as if they were drops of silver water held firm in the wind. And all the poverty, all the suffering had turned to that—“ How much there is to keep in mind if we are to be true to this world: A swoon inspired by a pretty horizon is never the whole of it, but only marks the threshold of a more complicated communion. As we file back toward the tents, the pale glow of a beacon from Ellsworth Air Force Base sweeps lightly across the back of Glen’s old shawl. There is an appeal in the light, something beseeching in its constant return, to which the shawl does not respond. I once lived with a Navajo man who told me one day that I would make a terrible Indian. I laughed, because I saw that he was right, and the observation has had the curious effect of freeing me from ever wanting to become an Indian, or of succumbing to the delusion that because a culture appeals to me I could assume the emotional weight of its history, as if all its complexities could be swallowed whole and brought to life inside of me. Of course, I may convert to another religion, or adopt another culture—but only as an application to the inviolate core of my own heritage. In my case, a heritage that reaches back through centuries of Christian Europe: stones, candles, iron, books.
We emerge from the bushes, walking single file. I gaze up at the butte, am amazed to see an aura sliding like silk along the highest rocks. I tug Glen’s shawl and point this out to him.
“It does that,” he tells me.
Dawn. the Bullcomings have returned from Montana, and all are sleeping soundly. Rhoda’s pots and pans rest in a ready heap near the fire pit. The air is soft and still. I hear only the delicate questionings of birds and from somewhere among the tents, a man snoring with astounding resonance. Quietly, I make coffee. I notice that across the ravine, on the slope above the parking lot, as yet another camp has established itself. The group—the largest one yet—has arranged a kind of chuck wagon at its center. A small figure stands before it, manipulating different steams and smokes.
Nearer the ravine, the sumac quiver. A row of women emerges. Wrapped in white sheets, they walk single file through the campsite. The move swiftly and without words, the downward tilt of their heads suggesting—from even my vantage—a deep and focused humility. They disappear among some cottonwoods, the sheets twitching at their heels. It is a stirring sight, a human archetype of this hemisphere.
“Boy,” Jethro says, when I visit him. “Who was doing all that drumming and singing last night?”
“What drumming and singing?” I say.
He blinks, wipes a crust of skin from his lips. The rocks glow with the first strong blast of sunlight.
I spend the morning running errands for Rhoda. Seated in a her chair, she recites a list of goods for the feast that she will prepare to honor Jethro’s return. Though it is a long list, there is no hesitancy in her recital.
“You’ve done this before,” I say.
She indulges me with a smile, then looks out at the cliffs. I sit with her for a while, and she tells me how she is worried about Jethro. I recall the quiet way she had approved of the ceremonial moccasins that he had spent the year designing and beading. The heat intensifies. It casts a stillness over the entire camp. Even the crickets call it quits. We each find a place under the awning, and I fall into a deep sleep.
When I awake I find that the Bullcomings have left. To town perhaps. There is no movement among the tents. The sun, at least, has slipped into the west. It ignites a ridge of wrinkled limestone. The stone, so deeply creased with shadow, seems alive, composed of faces that shift watchfully. Compared with this subtle and ominous sight, Mount Rushmore seems an even greater travesty than I’d previously judged it. As I gaze across the ravine, I am surprised to see that the new campsite with the chuck wagon is gone. Where once there had been so many tents and people, there now is only a flattened spread of grass, eerily vacant.
Alone before those old watchful rocks, I put on a pot of coffee and find that I am depressed. The shift of mood reminds me of how circumstantial my peace tends to be, how tentative—much like the stillness on our first afternoon at this butte, before the weather turned. Just as the coffee is ready, Grover Horn Antelope appears strolling through the grass with a walking stick. He joins me under the awning, and I happily hand him a cup. He sips, gazing at the rocks. I absorb what I can of his peacefulness, this old man who lost his wife of forty-three years, who as a Lakota elder has surely seen his share of suffering and injustice.
“Those people across the ravine,” I say, “That was quite a spread they had there. What happened to them?”
Grover sets down his cup. He continues to look out at the rocks. “Oh, they had a young girl in their group, and she broke her fast. When that happens, it can bring bad luck for the other people up on the hill. They had to clear out quick.” He is quiet a moment, as if to let his account of them come apart in the air and drift away. He lights a cigarette then tells me about the time when he was a boy, how he had lain under the sun for nine days. “It was long,” he says, “But I had my vision.”
At dusk, when I visit Jethro, he does not lift his head. I worry that he has suffered heat stroke. I squat beside him, watchful. His face is swollen. He opens his eyes and manages a smile.
“The sun,” he says. “Stayed right there, all day.” He points, as he had yesterday, then lets his arm drop.
“How are you doing otherwise?“
He nods vaguely. “Got some ticks coming around. The same one, I think. Throw him off and an hour later he’s back. I took some notes.” He gestures at his journal, bookmarked with a pen.
“Tomorrow,” I say. “We’ll go to town and I’ll buy you a milkshake.”
“Now, that’s a good idea,” he says, and closes his eyes.
As the sky reddens, I return to camp just in time for the inipi ceremony. Grover Horn Antelope has been asked to conduct it. I join the others, a bunch of loose-gutted men and women standing around in bathing trunks. Grover stands near the fire pit, wrapped in a beach towel advertising Marlboro cigarettes. He holds his pipe aloft, singing loudly to the four directions. We go into the dome and in the darkness Grover touches sweet grass to the heated rocks. It gives off a stirring scent, a savor whose mnemonic powers are on par with the pungency of wet juniper or a crush of crisp, brown leaves. We pray and chant. There are four sessions. Each one builds to a kind of spiritual free-for-all, our chanting swirls skyward like flocks of joyful starlings. I think of Ralph Red Fox and imagine the Massaum, all of those whirling animal-people and sacred clowns, all two thousand years of them, rising with our songs and dispersing among the stars. When at last the ceremony ends, I stagger out and see that the day is gone. The sky is cool, and the planets shine, bright and wet. The group picks its way over the stony ground to shake hands with Grover. High above the sweat lodge, a remote sound pierces the air. Looking up, I can just make out the specks of innumerable birds—eagles—source of Grover’s power. People point at the sky, agree that it was a good ceremony. I make it my wish that what we have done helps Jethro and the others through this final night.
July 10
Two hours until sunrise. The Bullcoming family moves around in the lantern light, preparing the feast. More Bullcoming relatives have arrived late in the night, many young men in cowboy hats. In the cool air these men and I shuffle around in the ravine, yanking deadwood from the tangle of poison ivy.
As the sky lightens, Vernon gathers a number of the men, and we all make the long walk up the hill. Jethro sits up when he sees us coming. We help him to his feet, drape the white sheet from his shoulders. He looks wan and pink, but amenable. He gazes out at the landscape whose company he has kept these last sixty hours. The men in the cowboy hats gather up his bedroll, his pipe and tobacco ties. Bullcoming tucks sage into the buffalo skull, then hands it to me. With Vernon out front, followed by Jethro and the rest, we file down the hill. Approaching the camp, we are greeted by a row of five Cheyenne men. They are facing the sunrise. They are singing for Jethro, a Cheyenne song of welcome and return: “YOU ARE A MAN NOW!” they sing, “YOU ARE A MAN NOW!”
After the inipi, Bullcoming blesses some cloth which I am asked to tie to a branch of ponderosa pine. And thus Jethro’s fast is officially finished. We have our feast, and Jethro hands out his giveaways: handmade shirts and blankets for all those who have helped him. He looks exhausted, but serene. Perhaps the long, slowly healing for both him and his wife has begun to take hold. Eventually, all of his gift boxes are empty.. The children run off to play, while the adults lounge in the shade.
As the afternoon grows hotter, people throughout the camp begin to take leave. We say goodbye to the men in Cheyenne cowboy hats. Gilbert White Dirt strikes his camp and says farewell. In parting, he sets a mirror on a card table, along with a scrap of paper and pencil. He commands me to look into the mirror while drawing a circle. Then Gilbert takes the pencil and does the same. Glen follows him, and then the young boy who had fetched me down for prayers. I look at the results: three perfect hoops next to my crumpled line. Gilbert swats me on the shoulder.
“You’ll come back!” he says.
I smile at him, still uncertain, but pleased.
By late afternoon, the Bullcomings have left, gone north to another Sun Dance ceremony. All that remains on the campground are a couple of inipi frames and a few empty fire pits. While hauling the last of our gear to Jethro’s truck, I find Grover Antelope seated in the shade of a cottonwood.
“I’ll be here a while, “ he says. He gazes out at the fire pits. “It gets kind of lonely when they all go. But I like the quiet.” I thank him for his company, give him a fresh pack of Marlboros and a pound of gourmet coffee.
“Come back,” he says in his quiet , pleasing way. “I’ll drill some more into your head.”
In the parking lot, I find Jethro standing by himself, his thumbs in his pockets. We take a last look around before falling into the truck for the long drive home. In the sky, over the ridge of wildflowers, Jethro spots an unusual cloud, brilliantly white. It is shaped like a buffalo in full gallop,. The likeness is stunning, requires no effort to conceptualize.
“Jesus,” I say. “You want me to get a picture?”
“No, no,” Jethro says, “let it be.”
And so I do, and we drive up the road, and a moment later the buffalo is only a cloud drifting apart over a hill.
1 An illuminating book on this subject, to which I ow my synopsis of the Massaum, is Karl Schlesier’s comprehensive text, The Wolves of Heaven, University of Oklahoma Press, 1987.