THE SOUL OF LA MANCHA
I
Our souls are like the musical instruments, which do not emit their
melody unless they are beaten, plucked, blown or scraped.
And on this text, I pray you hear my sermon.
The European has goods to add up, neighbors from whom he subtracts,
estates to multiply, and fortune to divide. For this arithmetic he
needs machinery of the brain which widens out the forehead. To him
are given all knowledge, glory, pride, magnificence, the dominion of
the earth, the mastery of the sea, the command of the air.
But from the red Indian who hath not, and whose forehead is pinched
for lack of exercise, all things are taken away.
And yet it is my comfort to remember that ancestors of mine, who
conquered the new world, married with Indian women. From that blood
in my veins I have the pinched forehead of an Indian, the happy
poverty, the shiftless lassitude, which mocks at the laboring white
man.
Do you suppose the Indian venerates a religion worn on Sundays only?
Do you imagine he respects the laws--a spider's web to catch the
flies and let the hawk go free?
The white man's only ambition is to have; his years are spent in a
fussy aimless selfishness, for which he forsakes the dignity of
manhood, and being too busy, he has no time to live.
The Indian's holy ideal is to be, to learn from nature the upward way
toward God.
The Indian sees the white man self-made, self-conscious,
self-centered, self-sufficient, self-opinionated--all and entirely
self. For this poor prisoner within the bars of self the windows of
the soul have all been darkened, so that he can not see, or hear, or
scent, or taste, or feel the world he lives in, Heaven's fairest
province. Blinded and deafened, dulled, a groping creature, he is a
specter haunting Paradise, waiting for death to reveal the glories
which life has offered.
Just at the last, before I said "Adios" to the world, I saw a little
of the United States, something of England, and of my native Spain.
I saw Spain, the land of the past, England, the land of the present,
America, the land of the future. In America, I witnessed the rise of
nations, in England, the poise at the zenith, in Spain, the fall. It
was like a coast, the very coast of time, with the rushing onset, the
tumultuous crash, and piteous dragging ebb of rising, breaking, dying
empires. They come, they have, they fall, passing away, and are not.
From all that I rode away, leaving the storm of nations to rage and
break on pitiless coasts of time.
"Leave all that you have, and rise, and follow me."
Having is only a shadow which flies away at sundown.
Do you remember that our Lord was forty days away in the spirit
teaching souls in prison? He may not have mentioned His Jewish name
to them. They may have called Him Love, for that is the real name of
the Only Son.
And if He came again, do you think it would be to the stupendous
temples, which the white men need as trumpets to make their prayers
heard above the deafening clamor of the cities? Would not the
Indians be swifter to give Him welcome?
The world-storm died away in the far distance.
Give me the weal of being, which is no shadow flying away at sunset,
for when my sun goes down, I shall pass into star-clad night, to be
immortal in eternal heavens.
II
The homestead in Lonely Valley belonged to the señora, not to me.
For any larger career than that of pioneer farmer my penmanship was
childish, my spelling gaudy, while as to sums, well--if I added two
and two, it made one blot, which I had to wipe up with my tongue.
And as to being a threadbare marquis in old Spain, I think I am still
too much alive for that.
Very high and pompous with my dreams, I put on my buckskin war-dress
as Charging Buffalo, the Piegan Chief, loaded a couple of pack-ponies
and set out from Lonely Valley riding my lop-eared, wall-eyed pinto
cow-horse. That night in camp, I boiled a tea of herbs, which gave
me the Indian color.
Next day, a pack-horse had my saddle in his load, for I was riding
once again bareback, as Indians ride, rejoicing in the natural and
perfect savage grace of a horsemanship whose rhythm is like the easy
flight of birds. The half-forgotten language came back phrase by
phrase, until I could think in Blackfoot as a poet might think in
verse. The Indian life was coming back to me, the hardy,
resourceful, abstemious habit of the war trails. Mount Rising Wolf
lifted his head above the northern skyline, and on the fourth
evening, I trailed across the meadows beside Two Medicine Lake where
once--
The mile-wide ring of the tribal camp was gone like any snowdrift,
empty was the field where I had killed Tail-Feathers in the ordeal of
battle. Now, as then, the low sun filled the valley with a dust of
gold, and out of that my enemy had come in a whirling cloud.
Standing behind my horse I had sighted--waiting--and clenched my hand
on the gun as that thundering charge swept home. There his horse
leaped and crashed to the ground in death. Here, the man's smashing
fall, and he lay, twitching horribly--
Out of the golden haze came a cluster of mounted people, men and
women, not the fierce warriors, Blackfeet of six years ago, but the
poor blanket Indians of the reservation, cowed broken paupers on
their way to draw their weekly rations at the agency.
And these, as in a dream, saw the red sunlight kindle a buckskin
war-shirt, the blithe wind streaming with a warrior's eagle plumes, a
chief out of their great past, riding down from Dreamland.
Men sighed and women whimpered as they saw that.
But now the warrior from Dreamland reined his horse, dismounted, took
cover, and with a little glittering revolver--
Then they remembered! At this very place had Charging Buffalo killed
the champion rifle-shot of the Blackfoot nation, and saved Rain the
sacred woman from being murdered!
At their shout of welcome I swung astride my horse to give them the
signs of peace, of greeting.
Then, from their midst, bidding them halt, a woman rode forward
alone, dropping the blanket from her shoulders, tidying her hair with
little pats and strokes, greeting me in her shy sweet English, and
with mocking, derisive eyes.
"So," she said, "you come!"
"Rain!"
"My dream--he say you come."
"Rain! Rain!"
"Yes," she chuckled, "um--Boy-drunk-in-the-morning!"
"Nay. Charging Buffalo!"
"How many horses you bring to buy Rain?"
Squinting delightfully in his efforts at Indian gravity came Rain's
big brother, Many Horses, ambling beside me to reach out a bashful
hand.
"Brother," he said, in Blackfoot, "I knew you must come back."
Now my Indian blood-brother had no ideas of his own, but his mind was
like a lending library to take and issue the ideas of others. And
what Rain thought, he said. So she had known for all these years I
would come back to her.
It went without any saying that I came back to marry Rain. All her
people knew as much, for when they had given me their gracious
welcome, they went on, as they must, to draw their rations, telling
Many Horses to hurry up and join them. Not that a hint could
penetrate his hide. But, then, there was no need for Rain and myself
to be alone, for she and I were one, and nobody else existed as we
rode side by side through a haze of glory. Out of that, we came to a
little cluster of teepees by the lake-side.
Rain's only son, young Two Bears, had gone away to the Sand Hills,
but her brother had a bunch of brown babies--three of them in his
lodge--who were trying with grubby hands to mend her heart. Rain was
a very great lady among the Blackfeet, daughter of
Brings-down-the-Sun, widow of Tail-Feathers, and a sacred woman, but
in her brother's lodge only a nurse, the down-trodden victim of that
triumphant sits-beside-him wife, Owl-Calling-"Coming," mother of real
brown babies. Children were scarce as angels in the Blackfoot camps,
and Owl had full right to make merry.
All in a bustle, she prepared a feast for me. There was pathetic
borrowing from the neighbors to make that slender supper, at which we
all pretended to have no appetite. Only when it was over could I
unload my horses, and for once in my life play at being millionaire.
I had never dreamed I was so fabulously rich, but there were presents
for everybody hidden away in my cargo, besides provisions enough for
a great banquet, which kept the tribe feasting till sunrise.
The gods of the Blackfeet had deserted them. Within a generation
their forty thousand mounted warriors had become a remnant of five
hundred paupers, sick with tuberculosis, brutalized with liquor.
They had lost their faith, their self-respect, their native
cleanliness, their arts, games, festivals, and now, in sullen apathy,
awaited death.
Yet in one camp at least the dying fires flickered up at my coming.
Old Medicine Robe called his priests and sacred women to the sweet
and solemn ritual, with which I was formally adopted as a Blackfoot,
as a chief and as his son. The young men roused themselves for a
hunting and killed deer, so that the women might dress the skins, and
make clothes for Rain and for me. The poles were cut, the cover sewn
for my lodge, in which I had to sit in lonely state while Rain
attended me with meals, which she brought from her hearth. The lodge
was furnished for me with robes, blankets, panther skins, back-rests
and parfleche trunks.
Then I must take my ponies and tie them at the lodge door of my
brother, Many Horses. But Many Horses, not to be outdone, tethered
every pony he had left at the door of my new teepee. That was Rain's
dowry.
And lastly, the wedding moccasins were made, beautifully embroidered
with porcupine quills, dyed in wild herbs. These, with a fine
dinner, were brought to my lodge by Rain and Owl. But Owl stayed
outside, while Rain came in, and by that happy action became my woman.
I kneel at my table here, to pay my reverent tribute to this adorable
woman, and her commanding loveliness. Rain was a lady to her
finger-tips, and in any society would have had the men at her feet.
Shy, dainty, with a quaint delicate humor all her own, she mothered
and owned me with perfect tact and rare intelligence, for the woman
who obeys her husband rules him. If my lady had faults, I loved her
for them. And where every dog, baby and kitten saw her excellence,
how could I be blind?
It was my right and privilege to serve my lady, but her heart was
like a sanctuary too holy for me to enter. To her came men in
trouble, confessing their sins; and all their secrets, with many of
her own, she kept to herself. She told me only what it was good for
me to know, and if she told me secrets, I can keep them. I have
nothing else to keep.
For seven years I was not the Blackguard at all, but something quite
different, so the chronicle of that time hardly belongs to this
writing. And yet writing is a sixth sense for the absent, a
consolation for those who are alone, for those who are lonely.
By all the codes, the sanctions of conduct and standards of judgment
which make the world's opinion, I was the husband of a prostitute and
kept a squaw for mistress.
But by the pity of Christ, I had tried to save a falling soul from
ruin before I married an honorable woman.
Our codes, our sanction, standards, opinions, views, like our bilious
attacks, our selfishness and our debts, are matters demanding
attention without adding to our welfare. Will you accept my opinions
as a gift? Shall I adopt your views?
These are infirmities of the mind or body which we can not sell or
give away or thrust upon our neighbors. Our bodies are fouled by the
world, our minds are fogged until the blazing truth of God burns our
impurities. It is conceivable that from such a world as ours only as
pariahs can we advance in manhood, in moral worth, in spiritual
growth. I have climbed mountains from whose summits all the ways of
the world looked small as spider-threads, leading to nowhere in
particular; and if we descried from the heavens these beaten paths of
men, they would not seem, I think, to be the only trails through the
star-fields.
Since public opinion hanged the Saviour of mankind, it seems to need
a guide.
III
The fox who had lost his tail attempted to set a fashion in docked
foxes.
So I, who could not ask for rations as an Indian, persuaded my
friends to have no further dealings with the white man. His agent
was a thief, his missionary, schoolmaster and farm instructor were a
pack of fools, his regulations were fences to be jumped, his rations
poison to their self-respect, his clothes were sinful forms of
ugliness, his stuffy buildings killed them with consumption, his
manners and customs ruined Indian women.
Our head chief gave me leave to form a band of hunters and trappers,
men, women and children sworn to earn their living, and avoid the
whites, to eat wild meat, to wear skin clothes, and be real Indians,
not imitation whites.
And so we took to the woods.
Through our separation, Rain had played the woman, but from the time
of our marriage was a child again, for life was one long game at
which she played with happy gravity. When I confessed my trouble in
keeping clear of Sarde, my enemy, because I wanted always to take his
life, Rain went to work playing at magic, with all the simple
earnestness she gave to cooking eggs. To her mind eggs, casting out
devils and making poultices were parts of housekeeping, and she must
have my soul cleaned or my socks patched, because she insisted on a
tidy husband. She banished Sarde from my thoughts, she exorcised Red
Saunders. She made me pray to the fairy animals, and threatened to
sacrifice all my hair to the sun unless I behaved myself and spoke
respectfully about my mother-in-law. This mother-in-law, if you
please, was the beaver woman spirit who helped Rain in her dreams.
It was not etiquette that I should meet the lady.
Among the Blackfeet, as with the whites and other barbarians, the
women rule all they love. It was part of Rain's game to rule our
wandering tribe, so we poor tribes-folk obeyed her when we had to.
Her religion forbade us to eat fish or ground game, but we needed a
few sins just to keep us in practise, so when she had duly forbidden
unholy food, she used to do the cooking. Her faith denied us the
shooting of wolves because they were hunting comrades, but I must own
that the government bounty on their scalps appealed to me more
powerfully than religion--and then she gave my earnings to the poor.
In the matter of bears, however, Rain's piety was rather quarrelsome.
She would not let me mention any bear except in terms of compliment,
as "The gentleman with the fur coat," or "The Inspector General of
Berries." Once, when I used the words, "Damned Greedy Brute," a
grizzly overheard me, and ate our camp that night. "I told you so,"
said Rain.
As to shooting a grizzly: "He is always annoyed," quoth Rain. "And
sometimes more so." I shot that robber, all the same, and my wife
needs hang up her best frock as a sacrifice to the sun before she
dared touch the skin. She moistened its brain with her tears while
she dressed the pelt, and when the work was finished refused to sleep
in the lodge with it for company. Indeed, she made such a fuss that
I gave up hunting bears and they could cock snooks at me whenever we
happened to meet. The fact is, Rain tamed me until I had not so much
as a vice to call my own.
They do say that when the lion is dead, even the very hares will pull
its mane.
We had our little troubles. There was, for example, a good deal of
starving to do. But God is omnipotent: and money is His lieutenant.
My pay for being a marquis, five hundred dollars a year, went a long
way toward putting off inevitable famines. Each year, too, we
brought our pelts to the traders, who were surprised at the prices
they had to pay in guns and ammunition, traps, tobacco and comforts.
They said I was aptly named as Charging Buffalo.
Under our chief's direction, we turned weavers, making our scratchy
blankets of mountain goat hair. They fetched a deal of money; but
with the pottery we were not successful. My Indian brother, Many
Horses, had only to give one squint, and our best pots fell all to
pieces.
Sometimes in spring we would plant corn, pumpkins and tobacco, and if
we happened to pass that way in the fall, would gather such a crop as
the wild things had spared to us. Great were our harvests, too, of
camass and wild fruit dried and stored up for winter. If ever we
happened to kill a maverick cow, we tanned the skin, dried the meat
and buried the bones, leaving no trace of our crime against the white
men's buffalo. Very particular, too, was Rain with our young men,
forbidding them to steal chickens or even to scalp settlers.
That was not, she said, the way to ignore the white men. So, barring
the needs of trade, we left them severely alone, and played at ghosts
on our moonlight flittings through any outlying settlements.
Sometimes we rescued lost and starving travelers, who would spread
the news of an unknown Indian tribe at large in the wilderness.
Once, an official came to herd us back to our reservation, but
unfortunately his interpreter could not speak our language and, as
none of us understood a single word of English, we could not make out
what was the matter with him. We fed this person and his
interpreter, we gave them tobacco, we tucked them up in bed and sang
a lullaby; but when they fell asleep, we broke our camp and vanished,
leaving no tracks on land because we went by water, a long night's
march along a river bed. The white men reported us drowned, but Rain
explained to me that this was not so.
We wandered along the ranges wherever we found food, southward to
Mexico and northward into the Alps of St. Elias, wintering in alpine
pastures, traveling in summer through the upper forests and the
nether deserts. But where we went during those happy years, I have
not the slightest notion, for, after all, heart's ease and life's
delight are poor geographers. We were not careful of maps,
considerate of the way, or very much concerned as to our destination.
Once we were in a valley of the Canadian Rockies, a gorge so fouled
with deadfall, with beaver swamps and snow-slides, that, high as the
water ran, we were forced to seek our passage along the river bed.
Then came a cut bank strewn with fallen trees, which reached out into
the middle of the current. At that, the rock floor on which our
horses waded came to an end, and down we went into deep water,
compelled to swim across to the farther bank. The ponies rolled in
the swell of that white-manned rapid like boats in a storm at sea. I
turned and saw Rain laughing. Then my horse went under altogether,
rolling over three times without touching bottom, and both of us were
very nearly drowned.
Afterward, I asked my wife if she had been frightened.
"When I saw my big baby," she said, "getting its inside wet, I told
my secret helper to swim quick. And the woman-beaver dived."
"So you were frightened?"
"If you died, Big Baby, you'd have to come back to me to be
comforted. And when I die I shall look after you. And when we're
both dead, we shall ride the Wolf Trail together, because you are me
and I am you for always. Nothing else matters, and there isn't
anything left to frighten us."
Rain would be teaching me quaint dances, or setting our household in
a roar with imitations of my face as I played the flute. She mocked,
flouted, caressed all in a breath, and chaffed me with make-believe
flirtations, pretending to fall in love with Left Hand or Bearpaw,
our young warriors. Yet while she crooned and twittered over her
household work, for all the world like some fussy bird at nesting
time, I began, vaguely at first, then with a growing sureness, to
feel that the play was forced, that my fairy woman was in pain,
trying to hide some illness which sapped her strength. Then once, by
accident, I saw, when she thought herself to be alone, agony in the
poise of her body, desperate fear in her eyes.
That summer, a certain attentiveness of the traders, a disposition to
ask needless questions, gave us a sense of being watched by the
authorities. Traveling with horses, and leaving tracks, we were
liable to be followed and interfered with. For that reason, we built
birch-bark canoes which, swimming upside down as a rule, gave us more
bathing than we really needed. At least, we left no tracks.
Our river, without disclosing its name, went bubbling affably,
capsizing us at rapids through hundreds of miles of alpine
wonderland, northward at first, then west, then southward--in black
pine jungles now, which yielded us no food. Beyond that, the river
took to evil courses, plunging as one long riffle, broken by cascades
into an ever deepening abyss whose walls were mountains. Our
web-foot-tribe--for so Rain called us--began to be afraid.
From our next camp, I climbed a hill to see what became of the river;
and on my return found a white man seated beside Rain's fire. He was
a great gaunt frontiersman, whose mouth had been large for a dog, and
in his eyes the smile of heaven's own sunlight. Owl's two little
girls were climbing all over him, the dogs were adoring him, and Rain
had given him the very last of our coffee.
At shrewd sight, this visitor addressed me in English, with a soft
Texan drawl.
"How much do you want for the bunch of babies?"
"More than you've got," said I.
"I aim to cheapen them babies--or get them wings."
"Wings?"
"They'll need 'em."
"You mean, there's bad water down yonder?"
"Yes, sir. Bad for brown babies. Thar's thousands of millions in
Heaven, but they're scarce to be spared down heah, so I'll trade for
this lot rather than see 'em wasted."
"Where does the river go?"
"To Heaven. Jest keep right on. You cayn't miss it."
"Is the canyon long?"
"Ef the first mile ain't enough, thar's two hundred comin'."
"We're looking for the sea."
"So's Fraser River."
"Then it's the Fraser!"
"I wouldn't call a man plumb lost who'd eyes like your'n, so maybe
the country hereaways has gawn strayed."
"Or perhaps our planet has wandered out of the way?"
"Out of which way?"
"God's way."
"Say. I like you a whole lot. My name's Smith, 'cept that my
friends call me Jesse, Sailor Jesse."
"My name is--call me Squaw-man."
"Put her thar," said Jesse.
I have been easy of acquaintance, but of my few friendships that with
Sailor Jesse of Caribou was perhaps most intimate.
We sat together on the river bank under the golden mountains, where
groves of yellow pines, like throngs of angels, swayed to the organ
peal of a triumphant wind. We watched the brave river go merrily to
her drowning. So merrily went my wife, full conscious of great death.
I told Jesse about that red imp of pain, which danced and glowed like
fire within her shoulder. To consult a doctor, I must risk a visit
to settlements, where the authorities would arrest my tribe, herding
them to imprisonment on their reservation. And that involved my own
fate as a deserter from the mounted police, accused of bigamy with
Sarde's wife.
Most wonderfully my friend's words flattened the rough difficulties,
made my journey short and eased the way. On the coast, he told me,
Indians went free and unquestioned like the white men. Food was
abundant both by land and water. He would show me where I could make
a base camp for my tribe within one day's journey of a cottage
hospital.
So Jesse led us by a portage across the coast range, and through the
abysmal chasm of Bute Inlet to a cove in Valdez Island. There the
Douglas pines towered three hundred feet into the sunshine, and
through their cathedral aisles ranged herds of elk. Sheer from the
feet of the trees went the fathomless blue of a deep channel, and,
far beneath, the waving swaying groves of a seaweed forest faded away
into the nether darkness.
My wife would not allow me to take her to the cottage hospital, lest
seeing her untidiness in blood and pain, I cease to love. "If Iesse
sees me," she said, "it doesn't matter, and if I die it will be so
easy to find this camp. I shall think of your waiting, guarded by
spirit trees."
She went with Jesse, trusting him, and contented, and when my friend
returned alone, on his way homeward, all the news looked good. There
had been an operation for cancer, but Rain was doing well, and would
be ready to leave the hospital in a month. For Jesse, a month had
thirty days or so, but for me it numbered thirty years. I set my
tribe to work praying by watch and watch for Rain's recovery, then
fearing senile decay if I remained, I prepared a one-man outfit with
thirty days' provisions, and set off in my loaded canoe to be near my
wife at Comox.
Although I doubt if God believes in churches, the Catholic faith in
which I had been reared provides good medicine. So I made confession
to a priest, and having received his medicine, which was good,
secured his help as an interpreter. He arranged with the hospital
that I should have news of my wife, and he wired for me to
Staff-Sergeant Buckie, N.W.M.P., bidding my friend come because I was
in trouble. When Buckie answered that he had applied for furlough, I
was content at my camp outside the village with fasting and prayer
and the daily bulletins. My hair changed from black to silver-gray,
clear proof that God's hand was upon me. And then, one morning, as I
came up from bathing, I found Rain waiting, seated by the fire.
There had been a shower, but now, as the sunshine swept great fields
of color across the Gulf of Georgia at our feet, God's birds, like
little angels, rocked the woods with song.
My wife sat by the embers putting on little twigs. "Your fire," she
whispered to me, "was almost out."
Yes, almost dead. Of late, it had been hard to keep the fire alive.
Faith is like that. One hardly sees it while the sun is shining, but
it glows bravely in the night, a comfort in the darkness, a mercy in
times of hunger, pain or loneliness. The world-thought comes like
rain to damp the fires of faith, which feed on winds of trouble, blow
high on gales of persecution, set the whole world alight just when
our need is greatest.
"See," said my wife, "the little flames have come. We'll make a fine
blaze now."
So a good woman makes our faith burn strongly.
"There's no smoke now," she said.
Prayer is the smoke which comes from the fire of faith, and when the
air is calm it goes straight up. Mine had been blown about during
the time of waiting, but now my faith blazed clear in great
thanksgiving.
A few days later, when Rain was quite recovered and fixed in camp
again, a telegram from Buckie told me to expect him. So I went to
the railroad station and watched the day's train arrive.
I was looking for a non-commissioned officer of mounted police, whose
gold and scarlet made him the most brilliantly conspicuous personage
in North America.
Buckie was looking for some sort of cowboy.
So it happened that a well-dressed civilian in tweeds, with a
portmanteau, a rod and a shotgun, came along the platform, and was
hailed in stage whispers by an Indian loafer. "Oh, Buckie, how could
you? Trousers turned down--umbrella rolled up--what awful side!"
"Liar!" he answered. "I wouldn't be seen dead with an umbrella."
"Oh, what a dog! wouldn't be seen dead with an umbrella! Don't let
the crowd see us together. Follow where I lead. Drown your false
teeth, Buckie, change clothes, take a bath--and God won't know you."
Outside the village, I let him walk beside me,
"But," he gasped, "you're an Indian!"
"Aye, Buckie. The troop jester is dead. Wasn't he killed nine years
ago by the fall of a horse in Montana?"
"But--Blackguard!"
"He's dead, too."
A comedian's fun is the echo of pain, the motley worn by sorrow. But
when sorrow and pain have fled away, you miss them, for we only know
the light because it casts a shadow.
"How you've changed!" sighed Buckie.
Once upon a time there was an inventive fish, who discovered water.
Some day, perhaps, an inventive man may discover love, the atmosphere
our souls breathe. And other men will tell him, "How you've changed!"
When we had gained the secrecy of the woods, and Buckie put down his
load to sit on a wayside log among the fern, he told me wonderful
gossip.
My telegram had found him acting regimental sergeant-major at
headquarters, and when he applied for a furlough on urgent private
affairs, the commissioner gave him a parchment signed and sealed by
the viceroy, Her Majesty's commission. He was Inspector Buckie
posted to his old Troop D at Fort French, by special request of Sam,
the officer commanding. The senior inspector there was Mr. Sarde.
The orderly-room clerk was Staff-Sergeant la Mancha, my Brat. The
rest of the fellows were new, and total strangers. Nine years. Of
course.
"Your wife--" he asked.
"Oh, yes." I remembered. "How's my señora?"
"Dead."
"Can you prove that?"
With all his old, quaint official delight in documents, Buckie showed
me a letter from the sheriff at Helena. It seemed that the señora
had become a woman of the town, and died quite naturally of drink.
Only the sudden flight of her kept man, Red Saunders, had given rise
to a certain amount of suspicion, perhaps ill-founded. At least, the
señora's death had set me free.
So far, Buckie knew nothing of my alliance under the Indian law with
my dear lady, and when we came to her camp, he was shocked to his
official soul at being presented. Yet during the long years, he had
learned to speak Blackfoot with a strong Canadian accent, and shy as
my lady always was of strangers, she seemed to like my friend. After
all, the chap was a gentleman, delicately tactful, reverencing women,
and presently surrendered to her charm. Moreover, the pain and
danger of her illness had partly unsheathed the sweet and radiant
spirit of the sacred woman, so that her beauty had taken on an
unearthly glamour. To that, my friend proved sensitive.
After dinner, I told Rain of my new freedom, and begged her to accept
the white men's rite of marriage. To her, that observance seemed a
very trivial matter, and quite ridiculous was the rank it would give
to my consort as Marchioness of the Alpuxarras. And yet, as we hoped
for children, she consented to legalize our marriage, and that
afternoon we waited upon the priest to whom I had made confession.
So far, my lady had been amused, but when Buckie unpacked his
baggage, he gave her a wedding present, an old Spanish poignard, its
Toledo blade mounted in ivory and tarnished silver. I thought the
toy a most unlucky gift, but to Rain it was a perfect revelation, the
first entirely useless thing she had ever owned, a possession for
pleasure only, and therefore priceless. We spent the rest of our
wedding-day hunting the village stores for objects of perfect
uselessness.
It was mid-afternoon next day before my lady, Buckie and I left, our
canoe loaded to the gunwale with treasures. Till dusk, we paddled
gently along shore, then on to midnight in glassy starlit waters. An
hour's nap refreshed us for a pull against the tide, then dawn broke
above the splintered ice of the coast range, day kindled the
Vancouver Alps until they glowed like flame, and the sun melted the
hills into the cloudy air. Then mighty whirlpools spun our canoe
like a top between a tide of eleven knots and a backwater running
eight. Dark forest closed in on either side of the tide-race, and we
spurted across the back-sluice into our tiny bay.
A bevy of children were skirting like gulls as we landed, a cluster
of laughing women hauled the canoe aground. We were hailed by our
one-legged Japanese cook, our three-legged dog, our lame wild goose,
an old blind siwash crone, and all the mixed assemblage of our tribal
pets. Many Horses, Owl-calling-"Coming" and their young son, Bears,
Left Hand and Bear Paw, the hunters, two darling old scare-crows, who
called themselves my wives because they were Rain's attendants; yes,
the whole Blackfoot tribe came clown to greet our chief and make her
welcome home out of the Valley of Death. Then all together we
attended Rain through the dim naves of that stupendous forest, until
we came to a fire of cedar-wood, with its blue film of incense.
There the clamor ceased, while our chief, as priestess, burned sweet
grass upon the altar fire, and offered thanks for her recovery. Then
came hymns and sacred dances, prayer and reading of the Bible in our
own Blackfoot language. Buckie went fast asleep standing, and Bears
gave an imitation of that performance, which broke up our service
into roars of laughter.
During the weeks of his furlough, Buckie, with grave enjoyment,
shared our hunting in the forest, our fishing by torchlight in
channels phosphorescent as liquid starlight, the bathing, the feasts,
the dances, the matins at the dawn, the evensong at dusk. But most
of all, he liked to sit with me within the portico of our forest
temple, whence one looked out between colossal pine trunks to the sea
channel, the far white Alps and the great pageantry forever marching
across the summer sky. The humming-birds, the bees, the woodland
perfume, sunbeams athwart vast shadows and the strong music of the
winds and seas, made that place sacred in its loveliness.
At times we were driven into our teepees by riots of the weather,
when the women dressed skins and made clothing, while Many Horses
kept an eye on the fire, and his other eye on the children.
But into that great peace there came foreboding. Buckie and I knew
well that cancer is incurable, that soon or late the inevitable pain
would warn my wife of death which science could only delay, which
prayer could only ease, and which no power on earth could possibly
avert. She seemed to sense death, and at times would jest with
Buckie, telling him that he must take her to the plains, or muttering
in her sleep she would speak of the Blackfoot camps, or during matins
would pray looking toward the East. She wanted to go home, and I
must take her back. God would preserve me from my enemies.
I think it was in that camp I first began to notice how often the
dogs howled, as they do when they sense ghosts. I have seen Rain
frequently stop on her way through camp to speak to her father, to
her mother or to friends long dead. She saw them plainly, she said,
and spoke to them familiarly, as we do to living people, without the
slightest sense of fear. And her own spirit-power seemed daily to
gain in strength. It was her custom to make magic for our amusement.
On the last evening of Buckie's visit, a steady drizzle had driven us
to make our fire inside the teepee, and half the tribe had gathered
for a feast of berries. Then the children asked Rain to call
Wind-maker.
"Come, Wind-maker," she whispered into the hearth-smoke, and as she
threw some sweet grass into the fire, we heard a sigh in the air far
off. Bears gathered the younger children about him, snuggling for
protection, and all their eyes glowed in the firelight, as though
they were a wolf-pack besetting our winter camp in the Moon of
Famine. "Wind-maker hears!" they whispered. "Wind-maker comes! Oh,
Rain, don't let him come too near us!"
For answer, we heard a distant muttering of thunder.
A gust shook the rain-drops out of the trees above us, a seething of
fine rain swept along the tent wall, and sudden little breakers
lashing on the beach sent us a splash of spray. The smoke hole let
in a swirling down-draft filling the lodge with smoke, while the wind
sighed through the timber like hands upon a harp. Then the deep
storm notes volleyed, thundered with blaze after blaze of lightning,
crash upon rending crash, and wailing flute-notes lifted to a
hurricane-screaming blast, thrashing three-hundred-foot timber like a
whipping reed-bed, rocking the teepee until the children skirled and
the women huddled together in their fright. I saw Many Horses
revealed in a livid blaze of lightning, his iron hard face set rigid,
his teeth clenched, his crossed eyes glittering as though he rode
into battle.
His son, Bears, was standing exultant, shouting with triumph. And
all about my wife arose a mist of human spirits and vague animals,
while the rain roared, the cyclone yelled, the thunder crashed and
volleyed. Then my wife's hands swept slowly downward, while in
obedience, the hurricane rolled away, and the rain eased and
steadied, until a last throbbing of thunder like ruffled drums
muttered among the echoes of the coast range.
Our lives are such illusions as that. Our lives are God's dreams in
which we drive, like storm-swept ships, upon a sea of terror. We
suffer and go to wreck, supposing our tragic miseries all real, while
God is dreaming the world-storm in which He trains our courage.