The Pastures of Beyond (24 page)

High on the ridges above the Cheyenne River, I see wild horses running in pure joy. Life goes on; my job as a volunteer goes on. Since that day I left Yamsi, I have been able to give the wild horses over ten thousand horse years of freedom, but what is really important is this. There are still some of us who care.

 

 

* Butch Powers was then lieutenant governor of California.

Chapter Twenty-Three

F
ROM THE TIME THE LAND MAKING
up the Black Hills Sanctuary was settled in 1878 to the time I took it over, Indians had not been welcomed there. Perhaps the early white settlers on the land had too many bitter memories of massacres along the trail west. And yet for thousands of years, this land had been one of the great centers of native activity. The flint mines atop the sanctuary, with pits as big as a threebedroom house, are thought to be twelve to fourteen thousand years old.

To me it was very important that the sanctuary be made available not only to the wild horses but for native ceremonies. Now, every year in June, the Sioux have a sun dance on a ridge overlooking the Cheyenne River. From my little prairie house along the river, I can hear their drums and the sound of chanting. Smoke rises in the air from a host of campfires, and I have a sense that I have done a little some thing to make peace with history.

My friend Ernest Afraid of Bears appreciates what I am doing here with the wild horses, and his people who run the sun dance make sure when they leave that there is not a soft drink can or a gum wrapper left on the land. Hundreds of Native Americans attend the dance, camping in a host of tipis rising like white mushrooms upon the Cheyenne plain.

Ernest has a sweat lodge along the river, and invited me to sweat with his people. I knew I wasn't tough enough, but I went. For hours the participants heated rocks in a huge cottonwood fire, and about midnight we went into the sweat lodge, the chief first, then me as the guest of honor, until there were probably fifteen of us crowded into the tiny lodge.

The lodge was made of chokecherry and willow saplings bent into a dome and tied, then covered with hides and canvas. A pipe was passed around the circle, then the hot rocks were brought in with deer antler tongs and placed in a pit in the center, while men chanted prayers in Sioux and poured water on the hot rocks. It was soon so hot that I was ready to pass out. Now and then someone would pass a tin dipper of cool water around the circle, which only enhanced my desire for more. I hugged the ground, trying for cool air to help my burning lungs.

I wanted out, but I didn't want to hurt anyone's feelings or be thought a wimp. I eyed the door desperately, thinking that if I tried to climb out half-naked over the chief, he would go right through the roof. It got hotter and hotter, and there was no sweat left in me. I panicked and, like a berserk badger, dug my way out under the edge of the hut, then leaped into the river. I drank and drank, hoping I wouldn't come down with beaver fever.

No one came out, and had it not been for the chanting, I would have thought them all dead. There was a big pot of stew simmering on the coals of the fire, and I sat there alone, helping myself to bowl after bowl. At last Ernest came out of the lodge as I was helping myself to another bowl. “Dig deeper in the pot,” he grinned. “You get the best puppy!”

The history of the land is written in fossils, petrified wood, seashells, and ancient corals from the time when this was a warm, shallow ocean stretching to what is now the Caribbean, some sixtyfive million years ago. Signs of early man, in the form of petroglyphs, flint points, and stone implements such as axe heads used in butchering woolly mammoths are present, but even they are recent compared to the brutal canyons carved into the land by the nervous fingers of the wind.

I hunt arrowheads constantly, but my eyes are a long way from the ground. In my sixteen years here I have found only a handful of ancient points, bone needles, a pestle and mortar, a stone axe, an ancient agate lamp, and the ironstone figure of a pregnant woman. I have probably stepped over hundreds more. Some folks have a special knack.

Back in Oregon I knew an old cowboy named Holly Brown. In his youth, Holly was riding a horse and fell into a well, and when folks fished Holly out, he was bent stiff at a ninety-degree angle. Holly did the best he could with his affliction and sold Watkins Products around the country. He could even joke a little about his condition. “I don't know anything about birds in the treetops,” he said, “but I bet I can find more arrowheads than most folks, twenty to one.”

I relish the presence of live Indians as much as traces of their ancestors. Not long ago an elderly Sioux couple arrived at the sanctuary to see the wild horses. She was ninety-three, and her husband was two years her junior. There was a sparkle to them both, and a love of life that made it fun to be with them. I drove them back into the mountains in my old, experienced pickup truck. To make the woman more comfortable sitting in the middle, I took off my buckskin gloves and placed them over the ends of the seat belt receptacles protruding from the seat.

She had been sitting on the gloves for some minutes, as we bounced over bumps in the road, when she turned to her husband and said with a twinkle, “Henry! This is more fun than I've had in thirty years.”

I had never eaten antelope meat, and the couple invited me down to the reservation for supper that night. I was sitting in the parlor reading some historic reservation records, and they were in the kitchen frying some antelope over an old woodstove. As Henry passed behind his wife, he reached out and pinched her bottom. She retaliated by patting him on the front of his trousers. “Oh, my, Henry,” she grinned. “That make very fine bone for soup!”

Sometimes things happen that I can't begin to explain. There is a cave overlooking the Cheyenne that was used for ceremonies by ancient people. Petroglyphs adorn the walls, and in one corner are old dried buffalo bones, cracked for their marrow. Just inside the entrance of the cave, the soil is dark from ashes of ancient campfires; in front of the cave is a huge rectangular rock shaped like an altar. The massive rock has been split in two by the roots of an ancient hackberry tree.

There is something powerful about the place that attracts me. Not long ago, seeking a better understanding of the cave's energies, I made a tobacco offering at the entrance, hoping that the spirits of the cave would welcome me. Many years ago, I had a young Blackfoot friend named Robert Butterfly, who eventually died of alcoholism on Seattle's skid row. As I entered the cave, I was feeling very white, and asked Robert Butterfly's spirit to join me.

I had scarcely seated myself inside when a small black skipper butterfly appeared before me and, for some minutes, danced before my face. I thought I heard the guttural murmuring of Indian voices, and saw unexplained facelike shadows moving on the rock walls. When the butterfly left, a group of seven rock wrens flew into the cave and hopped about me, showing no fear. They perched on my legs, my arms, my head, and my shoulders, and peered at me from adjoining rocks. When they departed, a sudden blinding wind filled the cave, choking me with dust, and obliterating all traces of the bird tracks in the sand. Then, as suddenly as the wind had started, it was gone, and out of the starkness of the silence there came the deafening roar of cicadas from the surrounding pines and hackberry trees. The shadows of the Indian faces flickered for a moment on the rock walls, then all was quiet and the cave seemed deserted. But I was filled with peace. It was as though the ancients knew my love for this great sanctuary, and were thanking me for protecting it.

As I left the cave, a haze of old friends sat there on their horses waiting for me, smiling. I might have gone with them at that moment, but I knew that the wild horses still needed me, and that my job here on the sanctuary was a long ways from being finished.

Chapter Twenty-Four

H
ERE IN THIS OLD PRAIRIE HOUSE
, as I lie in my old bedroll, I hear voices in the night. I know it is only the muttering of the winds in the eaves, but it's mighty good company. No one lived here for twenty-six years, and there is still lots of repair work to do, much of it on the clapboards where windblown sand made lacework of the wood. I'll do it a few boards at a time, and work until I get tired. No sense getting in a rush. I'd guess it will be a few years yet before I too ride the pastures of beyond, but not a day goes by that I don't think about death and wonder.

If I were a praying man, I'd say, “Lord, be kind to this old cowboy. Don't send me to a land where there are no horses running wild and free, and no cattle to care for, or a place where there are no cowboys and no Indians. There are folks in this life I cared for and would like to see again. Maybe some of them weren't considered good enough in this life to go to your special place, but 'cept for one or two I could name, they were all good men and women in their way. Consider the time they were born to and the way they were raised. The best of them never had much except a good horse between their knees, a slicker, and a bedroll, and the endless sky overhead, with maybe a good roof and stove as comfort in the winter. Now that I'm seventy-nine, Lord, with two titanium hips, I can't for the life of me remember the mean things they did. All I can think about is the good times, the pranks and laughter of friends like Slim and Mel.

“I'd like to think of heaven as a place where everyone can go and live equal and forgiven, regardless of the color of their skin, how much money they gave the church, or even the bad, thoughtless things they sometimes did. When I go, Lord, I want everybody there I ever knew, even the folks I sometimes could have done without, and especially the girls who loved me enough to say ‘no.' Yes, Lord, I'd like to see my pals again. And my old horse pals like Red and Willie, the first wild horses I ever broke, and Whingding even, though it might surprise a lot of cowboys if that old rascal made it up your way.”

Sometimes as I sit before the old Majestic woodstove my mother cooked on over a hundred years ago, one I tracked down at the old Hyde camp in northern Michigan and brought to South Dakota, I think of my folks and wish I could fill them in on all the things I've done. They died before my life was fully formed. They worked so hard to raise me; it doesn't hardly seem fair, unless they're looking down from above, watching the playout of my days.

And Rose. Last I heard she'd retired after a career of nursing, married a guy who was nice to her, and together they went on to fosterparenting a whole passel of Indian kids. I'm proud of Rose and what she managed to do. There was no feeling sorry for herself, no “pity me,” blaming other

people for her troubles. She just went and did it. And never looked back.

I think a lot about Felix Cooper, that great black rodeo contestant and clown.

Not long ago, Mel Lambert told me that Felix was living out his days in a Louisiana nursing home. I tracked him down and got him on the telephone.

“Felix,” I said, “do you remember those two old Brahma bulls Mac Barbour had, Impossible Ike and Double Trouble?” “Who's that callin' old Felix?” he said. “I know, gotta be that big tall Hyde kid from Oregon. Only cowboy still alive would remember them two bulls!”

“Felix,” I asked, “is there anything you need — anything I can do?”

“Yeah,” he replied. “Just one thing. I want you to talk to this head nurse here. I want you to tell her about old Felix Cooper, that I'm not just some old black shoeshine boy off the streets gettin' ready to die. Tell her that in my time I was one helluva rodeo cowboy!”

I told the nurse that she had a celebrity on her hands, that Felix Cooper, great athlete that he was, had been a respected cowboy in rodeo back in the forties. Not long after we talked, Felix went to his reward. I hope that in his last days he got some of the attention he deserved.

I feel a restlessness tonight. Tomorrow I will saddle up my old blue roan mustang mare, Lark, and ride west into the backcountry. From on high I will be able to look south and see Nebraska, and look west and see Wyoming. And maybe, someday, Lark and I will just keep riding on and on. Riding west over the Continental Divide, and the Bitterroots, across the Owyhee country and the Oregon desert, until at last I can show that old pony the land I knew and loved. Yamsi Ranch, Fuego Mountain, Wildhorse Meadows, the Tablelands, Calimus, the old BarY range, and the lovely headwaters of the Williamson.