Buffalo Jump Blues (15 page)

He'd first seen the brothers, Brady and Levi Karlson, at the Heart Butte Indian Days the prior summer. They were among few whites who had taken part in the Intertribal dances, shuffling around the oval with everyone from tiny tots wearing doeskin dresses decorated with fake elk teeth to competition grass dancers, their brooches of porcupine hair rippling in the wind.

“I thought they were ‘windians'—Indian wannabes. I didn't think about it; they were just there.”

John said that he had found himself alone later, sitting on the grass, when the brothers flopped down on either side of him to watch the Crazy Dogs versus Blackfeet Veterans Stick Ball Game. They talked across him, stems of grass bobbing in their teeth, then began to pepper him with questions about the rules. Such was an acquaintanceship struck, and having nothing better to do, John had taken the brothers up on their offer to drive into Browning and tip back longnecks. They wanted to experience a genuine Indian bar, not a real good idea for a couple of boys with loud voices and blond hair, but the hour was early and John swallowed his misgivings and took them to the Warbonnet, the biggest bar in town. They left when the eyes of several men stared a little too intently in their direction, had a second round at Ick's, got out of that establishment unscathed, and ended up in Charlie's in Babb, the most white-friendly bar on the reservation, where John could breathe easier.

When they dropped him back in Heart Butte, they swore they would keep in touch, the hour and the liquor talking, and of course John didn't hear from them and hadn't expected to. So he'd been surprised when his mother answered a knock three weeks ago and said there were two white men to see him. The brothers told John they were staying with their parents at a ranch in the Madison Valley and thought of him because they'd taken an elective course in Native American history at Dartmouth. They were keen to drive around the reservation and visit museums and historical sites. Would he be their guide?

He took them to the Museum of the Plains Indian in Browning first, where they spent a long time examining a papier-mâché diorama of a pishkun, complete with miniature bison, hunters carrying bows and arrows, even women skinning hides at the bottom of the jump. The diorama was a replica of the famous Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump in Alberta, and they asked how long it took to get there. John had only been to Canada once, to visit relatives in the Blood Nation near Lethbridge, and thought the historical sight was near
there; it was quite a drive. But there was another site much closer, where the Two Medicine River carved a corridor in the Front Range. Only recently discovered, it encompassed a vast area, tiers of cliffs marching for miles, that had drawn the attention of archaeologists intent on verifying the site as sacred Blackfeet hunting grounds. If they could, it would be a card to play in the future against the trump hands held by the oil companies that had bought up exploration leases years before.

John accompanied them to the area, where they hiked to the top of a U-shaped band of cliffs in time to see the sun set over Moskitsipahpi-istuki, the sacred mountain. Brady told John he had a proposition, but first he would have to take a blood oath of secrecy, and saying that, Brady had pulled a belt knife from its sheath and without hesitation drew it across his palm. He handed John the knife. It was his masculine pride at stake now, and John had done the same, and then Levi had drawn the knife and they were blood brothers, three hands pressed together.

“What are we going to do?” John had asked.

And Brady had spread his hand, dripping blood, to encompass the vista. “We're going to drive buffalo over cliffs like these. We're going to conduct the first buffalo jump since Indians had horses.”

He said the idea had come to him while volunteering for the American Bison Crusade, that every evening they would gather around a campfire and listen to the stories told by their leader, whom they called Tatanka. One night Tatanka had related the story of the great buffalo hunt that had taken place in the Dakota Territory in 1883, when a herd estimated at ten thousand moved through the Standing Rock Reservation. The Sioux, who had not seen buffalo on the prairies in years, believed that this was the last herd on earth, and that the buffalo had returned to sacrifice themselves to their Indian brothers, and thus be saved from ignoble death at the hands of the white hunters who were amassing outside the reservation borders. The Indians set fires along the borderline to keep the animals from
straying. Then six hundred Lakota mounted their horses, some carrying repeating rifles, others with bows and arrows. When the smoke cleared, the blood of half the herd had seeped into the earth. White hunters quickly finished bison that fled the reservation. One of the commercial hunters, a man by the name of Vic Smith, declared, “When we got through with the hunt there was not a hoof left.”

Brady had explained that the bison that left the sanctuary of Yellowstone Park were the walking dead, that their death warrant was signed even as they advanced a foreleg across an invisible border. But that every once in a while a small herd escaped murder for a time, and that as they were speaking this had happened, but that it was only a matter of days before those bison were shot by the Department of Livestock.

He concluded his pitch, saying that by killing the bison they actually would be rescuing them from state hunters, and that the act would shine a light on the injustice of not letting bison roam freely to reclaim their homeland.

John had picked up on his meaning. “They would be sacrificing themselves to us, like the buffalo did in the Dakotas.”

“You understand now why we have come to you,” Brady said.

A buffalo jump would have a stronger symbolic meaning, Brady claimed, and be more persuasive if it was conducted at least partly by Native Americans. He asked John if he knew any other Blackfeet men who might join them, who were fleet of foot, for he saw the Indians in the hunt as the runners who led the buffalo to the brink. He said he had bought a buffalo skin to make into robes, so that the runners would resemble bison calves. The brothers would conduct the drive and wear wolf skins. John was impressed with the detail of the plan, down to driving climbers' pitons into the cliffs so the runners could suspend themselves safely over the edge while bison tumbled past. John had looked out over the sea of mountains and plain, the people's land, complete but for the one animal that had made it holy, and told Brady he would think about it. But he meant he would think about
another runner; he was already sold on the hunt. There were only two catches. You had to know where to find the buffalo, and you had to have cliffs to push them over.

Brady told him that the location would be in the upper Madison Valley, and that he would be informed when the bison showed up.

What would happen after they drove the bison over the cliffs? That was a question that neither of the brothers had addressed. John didn't see how they could get away with it without being caught.

Brady said he'd missed the point. There would be no effort to cover their tracks, or even to leave. They'd be skinning the bison as the television cameras rolled. How else would they get their message to the public? As for the authorities, they would dare them to arrest them.

—

An hour had passed. The coffee was drunk or cold. Sean, listening to John's recitation, felt the hangover of the trip dropping its weight on his skull and thought he'd better get in a question he'd been holding back.

“Brady told you he would be informed about the buffalo. Who would inform him?”

“I don't know,” John said. He raised his eyes to Sean; it was the first time he'd looked at him squarely. “He said that the person hadn't committed to taking part in the drive, only to telling them when and where to find the buffalo.”

“No names, then?”

“Brady called him the highway man. They would move when they got the highway man's call.”

“Does that mean anything to you?”

“No.”

“Did you ask him about it?”

“No.”

Sean was standing to pour another round of coffee as a flutter of
wings made him duck. A bird that had entered one of the open windows was flitting in panic. When it swooped over the coffee table, the hand was so fast Sean didn't see it move. John Running Boy cupped the bird in both hands, allowing its head to peek out, like a fledging peering out from the hole in a birdhouse. He carried the bird to the window and opened his hands.

“Fly away,
poksistki
,” he said.

Melvin Campbell lifted his head. “I didn't think you would remember that,” he said. He waved his hand to include Ida and Sean. “John, when he was a little one, I taught him some of the language. He had to learn a new word each time I gave him stone. Poksistki is ‘little bird'—the sparrow, the chickadee.”

“So you agreed to take part,” Sean said, prompting John to continue.

John nodded. He said that Gary Hixon, a kid he'd known from childhood, had recently returned to the reservation and was up for accompanying him, no questions asked. Plus Gary had a cell phone, and the brothers would need a way to reach them when the time came. John said he'd introduced Hixon to the brothers, and the next day they had gone back to the buffalo jump to practice climbing with pitons. One of the books Melvin Campbell loaned John had a chapter about pishkuns and they read it aloud. That's when Joseph's brother-in-law had reprimanded them for trespass and taken down their names—probably, John thought, just for the chance of scaring a couple white people.

A few days later, John and Gary had driven to the Madison Valley, an all-day affair in the Fairlane, which maxed out at fifty miles an hour. Brady had spotted them gas money, and they had arrived with just enough light in the sky to set up a tent on the West Fork, which was secluded from passing traffic and one of the few camping places in the valley that had cell reception. Brady and Levi had met them there and they had driven to the Palisades the following morning to get the lay of the land.

They decided on the jump site and built the rock cairns to funnel the herd. Three pairs, which was optimistic, for, as far as John could determine, there were only the four of them—the brothers, who would drive the bison, and John and Gary, who'd run ahead of the herd. But Brady had thought of a contingency plan and bought straw scarecrows to stand behind the rock cairns. The brothers had already fixed the pitons, and John and Gary attached ropes to rocks and practiced climbing down to the recess under an overhang.

“How were you supposed to kill the bison that fell over the cliffs and broke their legs?” Sean asked.

John pantomimed pulling a bow. “I brought shafts and a bag of obsidian. That's what we did in camp while we waited for the buffalo. We napped points and fletched arrows and sewed the bison robes. I thought we'd be lucky to get three or four buffalo, so one bow and a few dozen arrows seemed plenty.”

“Did the brothers have rifles? Handguns?”

John shook his head. “Brady wanted to keep it primitive. It wouldn't make the right impression if we used white man's weapons.”

Sean had done enough research to understand that the chance of four amateurs pulling off a jump that a millennium ago would have included several dozen seasoned hunters should have been doomed to failure.

And possibly it would have been if the animals had not shown up on the one day of the year when thunder and lightning were assured.

—

The call came in early evening. The buffalo were there, fifteen or so, a manageable-sized herd. Brady told them to hurry, that there was just enough light to carry out the plan. Twenty minutes later they rendezvoused at the boat ramp, which at this late hour was deserted. They wasted no time fording the river, John pausing only long enough to stash his bow and his arrow quiver where he could find them later, before climbing the cliffs. Above, on the open ground of the
escarpment, the bison appeared as miniature triangles, their humps pitched black tents against the gold of the evening grasses.

The four hunters pressed their hands together a last time, Brady reminding everyone that he would blow a call that resembled the shriek of a red-tailed hawk to begin the drive. John and Gary crouched behind clumps of sage, staying out of sight while the brothers worked through shallow fissures in the escarpment to circle above the herd. The scarecrows they had placed the evening before were gaunt silhouettes, soulless long-haired ghosts recalling legends of cannibal heads that John had read about in Indian folklore.

As the twilight deepened, the first fireworks from the scattered homes along the Madison exploded in umbrellas of color. They would see the long trailing glittersnake of the launch, the pause, then the bright bloom as the thunder rolled up the valley. Like most Indian boys, John had played with sparklers and charcoal snakes sold at the Fourth of July stands on the reservation, but he had never seen real fireworks before and was so mesmerized that the cry of the hawk came as a surprise.

For a time, nothing changed. Then, almost imperceptibly, the black triangles began to move, drawing toward each other like magnetized bits of iron.

“It was going to happen,” he said, looking across the coffee table.

Sean saw the dark brown eyes swim out of focus and draw inward, as John Running Boy began to relive the night that would change his life forever.

W
hen he heard the hawk call, the fingers of his right hand instinctively reached into his pocket. All his life, John Running Boy had carried arrowheads for luck, so that he did not own pants that hadn't been mended with needle and thread as the stone edges wore through the pockets. It had been a standing joke with his aunt, who was always telling him he'd lose his money, John Running Boy, who had never had a nickel to fall from a pocket. Silently he cursed himself for not replacing the point he'd given the bartender.

The arrowhead made him think of her, even as the fireworks lit up the sky. Ida Evening Star was what the schoolboys called cinnamon and sugar, a quarter-white Chippewa Cree from the Rocky Boy Reservation who smelled like cedar shavings. They had fumbled halfway out of their innocence at eleven and twelve, Ida a year older and an inch taller, in the dank gloom of a root cellar, only hours before her parents had driven away with her for a new beginning somewhere else. But the memory that endured went further back, to a day captured by a photograph, the two children crammed onto a slat of wood that made the seat of a swing. The photograph had faded by half, and though it had become increasingly difficult for John Running Boy to imagine the girl's face behind the grain, he could still bring back her scent and in the hollow of his loneliness often did.

Thinking of her, John Running Boy fastened the elk bone buttons on the buffalo skin vest. Had it actually been Ida? He hadn't been certain at first, this vision in blue-tinted water behind a pane of thick glass, nor had Gary been sure. But when John edged to the bar for a
closer look, he had seen the eyes that could be no other woman's. And surely she had seen him, too, though her face had not registered obvious recognition. He wondered if the arrowhead he'd handed the bartender was in her pocket now.

Then again he heard the hawk's cry and the invisible chain that had unraveled through the years tightened, and he was pulled back to the present. Stepping from behind the sage, John began prancing about on all fours. He had practiced the bleating sound that calf buffalo made when they were separated from their mothers, and cupped his hands so that the bleat resonated. The herd was still too far away for his antics to register, for a buffalo's eyesight is poor. Their hearing, however, is superb and he could not believe they hadn't heard the bleats. He did not own binoculars, but even in the gloom he could spot two upright figures advancing on the herd from behind, the light wolfskin coats the brothers wore showing as indistinct stains against the veil of darkness. And between them, higher up the slope, was that a third driver? There had been no mention of another. Possibly it was an illusion.

Again, John Running Boy brought his cupped hands to his mouth. Under the hairy robe, his stomach convulsed as he forced the air from his lungs. “
Euuugh!
”

Were the buffalo moving? Yes, they were coming, not running, but the herd had tightened into a knot that was drawing closer. They would see him, see the two of them, and it took all his nerve to remain where he was. It was only when they were almost upon him that he'd run, luring them into a gallop, then the stampede that ended with the fall. John Running Boy turned broadside to the herd, showing himself. He gripped the edges of the robe and flapped the hide. Then he turned and began to move toward the lip of the cliffs in a crouch.

He could hear the howls of the drivers now, in the spaces between the dull, heavy booms of the fireworks. Sparkling cascades of light imprinted against the horizon, held for a heartbeat, and collapsed in colorful tears. He picked up his pace, telling himself not to look back even as he craned his neck, almost tripping on a rock. Forty yards.
Thirty. The buffalo were coming in a ragged V, shoulder to hip to shoulder, like geese flying in a wedge. Twenty yards. Their hooves made a thunder he could feel in his pulse. Ten yards.

A blur of motion as Gary went past him, the figure seeming to stumble, sliding toward the edge of the cliff. John had marked his rope with a bandana tied around a stone and frantically drove his legs toward the edge, even as the cow in the lead drew abreast, pounding by him. He saw her front legs buckle, then she tipped into space. Another buffalo, so close he felt its wind, skidded and fell to avoid going over the edge. He leaped over the stirring hooves, then dove for the rope tied around the rock. Grasping it above a double knot, he swung himself over the precipice, searching for the first piton with his feet. There. Now for the next. Quickly he descended two more, using the pitons like rungs in a ladder, then pulled his body tight to the rock overhang. Below, he could hear the sickening thuds and expelled grunts as the animals smacked the scree at the base of the cliffs.

John Running Boy raised his right hand in a fist and gave his war whoop, but the pleasure that he had anticipated wasn't there. His was not a cry of triumph but of regret, even despair. He heard a drawn-out scream somewhere below and then abruptly, as he lowered his fist and called Gary's name, the rope broke. For a moment his shoes faltered on the metal pitons, then he was falling through space, his eyes registering the upside-down image of a buffalo falling alongside, its iris as wide as a saucer. He hit something that gave under his weight, bounced off it and felt the back of his head smack the stones, and he was out.

Minutes later, or hours, knowing only that the fireworks had stopped and the valley was engulfed in darkness, he came to, his head pounding and a sharp pain in his chest each time he filled his lungs. Something was pinning his legs to the stones. Without turning his head he knew it was a buffalo, its breath sputtering. Each time its ribs accordioned out, the added pressure on his legs made him scream, though no sound came from his mouth.

John tried to drag his leg out from under the buffalo, then fell back,
gasping. All around him, animals were dead or dying, steam rising in columns from their nostrils to hang in a fog, their grunts guttural and concussive, like a roaring of rapids. He could smell the blood, the bowels the buffalo had emptied with the impacts, could smell even their fear.

For a moment he thought about Gary, if he had been killed in the fall or managed to survive. He tried to call out, but the pain in his chest was too severe to exhale the breath. He was becoming lightheaded. The world began to spin, and to stop it he shut his eyes. At first there was only blackness behind the lids, starshot with ruby points of light. Then an image came into focus, the face of his aunt. The image seemed to pulse, to expand and draw back as another took its place, his mother, as young as his oldest memory of her, then his father's face upside down, a flicker, his presence in life not much more than that anyway, as others crowded past him into the frame. And then without bidding she was there, with her Indian eye and wind-stirred hair, emerging from the photograph to take his hand into the darkness.

—

When he came around for the second time, the weight on his legs had lifted and he was shuddering from cold. From somewhere close a nightjar sang its two-note lament, over and over. The bison that had pinned his legs had rolled off him and was dead now, and John crawled a few yards down the hill to nest against the warmth from its body. All around him rose the sighs of dying animals.

He didn't hear words at first, only the incongruity of human voices. They came from somewhere above and he saw a beam of light paint up and down the cliff face, and then the light and the voices faded out, and then he heard them again, closer, the lights sweeping snarls of undergrowth. It had to be the brothers, searching back and forth for him. He wondered if they'd found Gary, if he was alive or had fallen to his death. John would call out to them, damn the pain, but something in the tone made him hesitate.

Now the voices were closer and he heard, quite clearly, a voice far from sure of itself. “He's got to be here. He's got to be here . . . doesn't he? Or do you think he took the car?”

It was Levi Karlson's voice, John was sure of it.

A second voice: “We'd have heard it. You can't start that thing without two ‘shits' and a ‘goddamn.'” Brady.

“The highway man's not going to like this.” Levi again, his voice rising on the word “like.” Lilting.

“Don't talk like a baby.”

A sudden incandescence illuminated a limber pine over John's head, lighting it like a Christmas tree. The beam swept across the branches, the men close enough now that John could hear their clothes catching on the thorns, the tearing sounds and their labored breathing. He sipped at air, taking only shallow breaths, willing himself silent.

“I'm going to be sick.”

“If you throw up, you're going to eat it. We're not going to leave anything to tie us to this place. No thing and no one. Do you got that? Nothing.”

“But he was going to die. What we did, you said, it was the highway man's fault. ‘The buck stops with the highway man.' That's what you said.”

“It
is
his doing. Let me think.”

“But we shouldn't have left him, they're going to find him, we can still—”

“Shut up.” Then: “Did you touch the arrow?”

“You got the arrow. The highway man, he's—”

“Not that arrow. Other arrows. Did you touch them? I mean without the gloves on.”

“N . . . no.”

“Don't cry. No fucking crying. You saw how he was acting. He was a fucking time bomb.”

“But—”

“But nothing. If they pin it on anybody it's going to be John.”

“But John's gone.”

“Think. Do you know how to do that? Because everything here's his. The arrows, they're his. The bow, it's his. Look at me now. Whatever you've got yourself into, I've got you out of it. Like Mary Ellen, remember how worked up you got?

“But you, you wanted . . . that was an accident.”

“Trust me. Do you trust me?”

“But if he talks—”

“He won't. If he's alive, he'll make a run for the reservation, mark my words.”

“But Dad will—”

“Papa-san won't know. And you and me, we go on like nothing happened. We go to bed, we get up, we eat breakfast like nothing happened. Next week, we drive back up to the rez to fish the lakes like we said we would, like nothing happened. We go back to school next month like . . .” Waiting for the answer. “Like what, Levi?”

“Like nothing happened?”

“Are you crying?”

“I'm not, it's just—”

“Shut up. I say fuck John Running Boy. Let's tear down the cairns and haul our asses out of here.”

“But his car?”

“We don't touch the car. The car points to him, not to us. Are you with me on this? Say you're with me.”

Silence.

In a small voice: “I'm with you.”

“Good. Let's climb back on top.”

The light swept over John's head and he saw, imprinted on the trunk of the pine, mottled like the bark, the blurred outline of the nightjar. John tried to become as invisible as it was. Then the light moved on, flashing up at the rock walls. The voices faded, and after a while there was only the river running and the bison dying and the mourning call of the bird.