Night Birds, The (11 page)

Then Pretty Singer rode to camp where he told a lie about a group of stray Pawnee warriors that he and the boy had come across while scouting for buffalo herds not seen in many summers on the prairie. He said the boy had been captured and shot when he tried to escape. Blue Sky Woman went into her teepee and cut her hair, weeping, after he told the story. The old medicine man Hanyokeyah studied him as though reading his soul in his eyes. Pretty Singer had to look away. He didn’t feel any different. Not ashamed. Yet no wash of power came from the Canotina.

The sun dried the tears and sweat on his face, leaving white trails of salt lining his cheeks and chin until it looked as though his red skin had been painted for war. His throat was a torch. Wanikiya strained against the sinews, but was bound fast. When he shut his eyes he saw a wash of blue and reds and the sun, a darkly radiant ball of flame pressed close to his lids. He licked his lips, tasting shreds of peeling skin and his own blood. Pretty Singer was not coming back. There was only the hot wind in the tallgrass and the sun that would melt him like tallow before the fire.

His backbone went numb against the spine of stone and just when he thought the torture could not get any worse, the sun faded in the sea of grass. He could feel his own burned skin breathing in the dark. The wind, soothing now, was filled with voices. Good Star Woman. It was said his mother was a healer. If she had lived she might have taught him the ways of the medicine society. Already, like his father, he was a finder of lost things, once rescuing a lone burrowing owl that he’d kept alive through the winter. Who would find him out here? There were locusts in the bluestem, the vibrating song of them. Wanikiya prayed aloud for his mother’s spirit and strength. He kept up the chant until his voice rasped down to a thread. The stars came and went. A sickle moon crossed the great span of dark on her pale horse.

Then the sun rose again and the boy no longer had a voice. His body was a husk. His arms struggled against the sinews to no avail. Every breath left his chest in a tongue of fire. He could turn his head and see the bluestem swaying, each stand of tallgrass tinged with a head of seeds. A swaying army of pale men come to see him die on this stone. Then the rain. First a few drops that speckled the ground, the boy straining toward them. Voices in the clouds. Riders on dark steeds, the thunder gods. Rain and more rain and the boy drinking it in. The sun descended through shredded clouds.

He slept and woke while it was still dark. Across the prairie a flight of dark birds, blackbirds the boy had been taught to fight to protect the corn. His enemy. All around him they descended like dark stones. One turned toward him with its bright yellow beak. It hopped onto the stone, only a few inches away from Wanikiya’s eyes. I am dead and dreaming, he thought, and now they will steal my flesh. The bird turned instead and began to peck at the sinews that bound him to stone. The stars swirled; he had a sense of the earth turning and himself at the center. The birds came from this region of darkness, down and down from the stars. They pecked at pebbles, gnawed away at his ropes. He felt the tension release. Still he stayed on the stones, even as the birds rose again and disappeared in the dark. The wind came across the grass, the heads of seeds loosening and taking flight. He heard a voice in the breath of this wind.
You are like this grass
, the voice was saying,
that burns in the summer and comes again.
His mother’s voice,
Child, the fire is coming and you are only a speck before it. How I wish I was there to guide you.
The wind faded and with it her voice. He called after it, his throat rasping Good Star Woman’s name, but he was alone in the dark.

After three days Wanikiya came back, carrying the leather thongs his brother had bound him with. He said nothing while the joyous village embraced him and celebrated his return. His lips were coated with black blood, his skin peeling and blistered with sun sores. Finally, Wanikiya told of some blackbirds coming down at night and pecking away the cords that held him. He told of following the pony’s hoofprints back across the prairie to find the camp again. He did not tell anyone that his own brother had tied him to the rock.

The village celebrated his return as proof of his status and power. They said he would grow into a warrior even greater than his father, Seeing Stone, had been. They said it was clear now that he would be their leader.

Pretty Singer listened and feigned happiness. In his younger brother’s curious, dark eyes he read a caution now. Wanikiya jumped when he came across him alone at the creek or in the woods.

All the while the world changed around them. The buffalo disappeared. Leaders of other tribes signed away territories without consulting Seeing Stone’s small band: Traverse Des Sioux, 1851. The years and names, meaningless to them. Every day more and more whites filled the valley, eating up all the fish from the creek, hunting out the lands, digging homes for themselves in the sod where they lived like rodents.

One such family moved directly across the river from where Seeing Stone’s band lived. There was a tall, hair-faced man who carried a great toothlike gleaming thing he used to hew down a part of the hardwood forest that sheltered the people in winters of the past. He had a wife so hugely pregnant she waddled when she walked, a pale-skinned woman who wore a headpiece that made her nearly blind. Both had fine yellow hair and pink skin which they must have been ashamed of to cover up in so many layers of clothing. These
wasicun
squawked like prairie chickens and ran whenever any of the tribe came on their land. Worse, they had a huge, lumbering bear of a dog they would turn on the people who approached their side of the river.

One day a girl named Whispering Cloud went across this river to gather
teepsinna
—a juicy, delicious tuber that grew in the marshes over there—and was mauled by the bearlike dog. She ran screaming through the camp, blood soaking through her dress, one of her ears dangling by a single shred of skin. The injury, so close to his own mutilation, enraged Pretty Singer.

That very night Pretty Singer went over to the other side carrying with him some pemmican to feed to dog. Once the animal learned to trust him and grew greedy, Pretty Singer coaxed it to come forward and then plunged his knife into the animal’s chest. He held onto the shuddering dog until the last low death rattle rumbled up out of its throat. Every single moment of fear and uselessness in his life felt purged by this dog’s blood. This was what he could have done with the bear. This was the power that the Canotina’s song should have given him.

Pretty Singer did not stop with their dog. He entered the sod stable where they kept the clumsy four-hoofed creatures they used to tear up the black earth. The smell of the sod around him returned him to the memory of his prison cell and his vision. The oxen inside shied at the strange smell of this man, the iron scent of dog’s blood on his knife. But each was in its own pen and had nowhere to run. One of them began to bellow in fear. The lowing of this beast filled the small room. Pretty Singer opened the stall’s door and stroked the ox’s bristling fur, whispering soft things in the animal’s ears. “I am Tatanyandowan,” he told it. “Be still.” Then he drew the knife across the wide throat and the great ox went down on its knees, spilling blood in a torrent through the sod barn. The other oxen began to panic and kick at the solid earthen walls. In the darkness their eyes glazed over with a terror that paralyzed them before the man with the knife.

Within his cabin, the settler heard the sound of the frightened oxen and his wife encouraged him to go out and check in case wolves were bothering the stock again, but he had been chopping wood all day and was too tired even to lift his arms.

One by one Pretty Singer killed the trapped cattle. Then he went into the grove of remaining woods and lay down in a spot of grass to watch for morning.

It was the wife who found them. She went down to water the stock before the sun’s first rising. There was a silence in the barn, a smell that prickled the hair on the back of her neck. She held onto her huge belly and waddled through the door. In the slick warmth inside she slipped and fell, turning as she went down to avoid landing on her stomach. The black mud and straw kept her glued to the ground, but as the breath came back into her lungs she looked across the stall and saw the flat eyes of one the dead oxen looking back at her and knew then what she was lying in. She screamed and managed to scramble up out of the sod barn. She screamed as she ran all the way back to the cabin, her dress saturated with gore, her voice going hoarse.

All of this took place in 1857 by the reckoning of the white world. The Swedish family, the Gustavsons, who had lived in this place, abandoned the square-house they had made from the trees and returned back to where they came from.

Still drenched in blood, Pretty Singer returned to the camp, delighting in the fear he saw in his brother’s eyes and those of the medicine man, Hanyokeyah. He had learned that he did not need to wait for the Canotina. That night in the sod barn, he had fashioned his own medicine from blood. When he returned again, he would complete the vision that he had seen so many winters before.

Fearing the soldiers would come for him again, he fled that winter out onto the prairies to live with another renegade, a Wahpekute named Inkpaduta, whose father was said to have killed a chief. He did not wait to see whether Hanyokeyah urged the council to exile him from his own people.

Wanikiya stood before the old man, his chin tilted up, while a charcoal stick coated his throat and chest with blackness. Hanyokeyah’s hands were steady. He darkened even the boy’s face, drawing careful ovals around the eyes. Both of them wore only breechclout and leggings even though their breath rose in white clouds around them on this chill spring day. Seeing the preparations for this fasting ceremony, a few of the camp’s children danced around the boy with freshly cooked meat, taunting and tempting him.

When Hanyokeyah finished with the charcoal he stepped back and studied the boy before him. He looked in his eyes for that flicker of the father that Good Star Woman had said dwelled inside him. The boy watched him in return, not speaking, oblivious even to the children waving strips of meat under his nose.

A burrowing owl the boy had rescued from the prairie danced on his shoulder and squawked at this new creature his master had become. It fluttered up to perch on the boy’s head, the talons fixing a hold near the single lock of silver in the boy’s hair. The boy lifted it back down on his finger, speaking to it softly. Watching them together, the old man rec- ognized that the boy loved this pet more than anything in the world. An orphan, like him. It would make a suitable sacrifice for the Great Mystery when the boy was ready.

A few flecks of icy drizzle spat from a low gray sky, but the old man made them leave the striped woolen trader blankets behind. Both he and the boy would wear only breechclout and leggings even as squalls of black clouds passed over the wintry sun and the north wind grew teeth and claws. They walked through the winter-dry prairie grasses and found a place to lie down on the opposite side of the still-frozen river.

Red Otter had reported that a new family had come to live in the place the whites abandoned after Pretty Singer killed their animals. The old man hoped to teach the boy lessons about watchfulness today, and also to discover just what sort of people this new family would prove to be.

He and the boy cut strands of waving bluestem and wove this through their headbands. Hanyokeyah left the two feathers he had earned in battle against the Ojibwe waving in his hair. Any who saw this from the distance would think him no more than a grouse or prairie chicken. Then he and the boy hunched down in the grass to get out of the wind.

They were not there long before some of the white family came down. The family followed a beaten path down to the river, past stumps of the trees the last white had cut out of the grove. Nearest the river, a dense matting of burr oak branches tossed above their heads like nests of dark serpents. The underbrush rustled with chickadees flitting about to stay warm.

They watched as the largest of the whites, a tall boy with gold hair and lean, hawklike features, chopped through the ice with a pickax to get at the water rushing beneath. Hanyokeyah felt Wanikiya shudder beside him at the sound of ice breaking. The taller boy leaned over the rim and dipped in a bucket he passed to another boy beside him. This boy was shorter, slightly bowlegged, with bright red hair and speckles on his skin. Neither child paid any attention to their surroundings except for a few nervous glances at the woods around them. An entire war party could have lain on this prairie and they would not have seen them. The old man told himself to make sure to point this out to Wanikiya later. Fasting taught watchfulness. The world never stopped being perilous and the leaf-dwellers were no more than kit foxes in a land of wolves and ravenous eagles.

A new figure emerged on the far bank, a girl with dark hair, her long dress thrashing in the wind. She came down the bank along with the boys and gazed out from the woods into the span of golden grassland that stretched around the watchers.

Her eyes quickly found the old man and Wanikiya. Hanyokeyah saw her jaw go slack with fear.
This is the moment she will yell and scream
, he thought. He lay low and placed a hand on the boy’s back to make sure he didn’t move. He imagined sending out his mind to the girl standing on the far shore.
I am only a bird in the grass
, he said. And later he wondered if it was only his imagination when a voice came back and answered his own, saying:
You are not. I see you
. Hanyokeyah sat all the way up in the grass, his head cresting above the waving tips. The two boys with this girl were still engrossed in their task. The older one laughed as he climbed back up the bank, water sloshing around him. But the girl stayed where she was, pale in her dress, her fists on her hips. Then he realized that she was doing what they had come here for. She was trying to understand how much of a threat they were to her family. She saw them because she had looked with the eyes of her heart and did not believe the disguise they had made. Finally, the girl scrambled up after her brothers and hid behind one of the trees.