Long ago on the northern plains, it was necessary for large villages to break up into several smaller ones for the winter. Large villages and many people scared away the game animals. Because winter was an unpredictable season on the plains—one year there was little snow, while the next the snow lay deep and it was difficult to travel or hunt—laying in enough meat in the autumn was the best approach.
In the time before horses, one small group located their winter village in a deep gully that led down to the Great Muddy River. It was a small village, only six families and a few elders. They were led by a head man named Uses Cane. Up and down the river were other villages, each no less than a day’s travel from the next. All were sheltered against the south- or east-facing slopes of deep gullies. In the first days of the winter moon, the men of the village were busy hunting before the snows came. They were working hard to bring in enough meat to last through the long prairie winter, so that no one would be hungry.
Of the 36 people in the village of Uses Cane, 10 were full-fledged hunters and warriors. Each lodge had at least one hunter, except for one. In that lodge was an old woman, a widow, and her grandson. Her name was Gray Grass, his was Slow. (Author’s note: we met Gray Grass and Slow in Chapter One.) Theirs was a sad story. In two years they had lost three members of their family. Slow’s mother and father had died in a flash flood two summers past, and a winter ago his grandfather had broken his leg while hunting and had frozen to death. Though they had been close before, now the boy and his grandmother were absolutely devoted to each other. Slow was 12, leaving his boyhood behind but not yet ready to be a man. But by the time the last snows of spring would finally melt, he would be well on his way to being a good man.
Winter was intent on punishing the land and all its inhabitants, it seemed. Blizzards howled out of the northwest, leaving a thick blanket of snow. The people were not alarmed, because they had prepared as much as possible. Food containers were full. Firewood was piled high outside of each lodge. Behind the inner lining in each lodge, plenty of grass had been stuffed to create a thick layer of insulation. But not only did the snows come early, they did not let up.
Hard winters were nothing new. Spring always came no matter how long or how hard the winter, so the people went on with life. But those in the village who had seen hard winters before knew that overconfidence could be dangerous. Though the elders advised everyone to be judicious with the food stores, very few took heed.
Gray Grass was very careful, however, mainly because she and Slow did not have much to begin with. Though hunters shared with them, the old woman nonetheless stretched their supply as much as possible. When the weather permitted, she encouraged her grandson to hunt for small game to supplement what they had. The boy was a good hunter, well taught by his father and grandfather, and he had heeded his lessons well. Not only that, he was more than an average marksman with his bow and arrows.
Toward the end of the Mid-Winter Moon (December) there was no longer any doubt that the people were in the middle of the severest winter in memory. Not only would snow fall for days without stopping, the wind blew and created drifts nearly as high as the tops of the lodges. All of the village’s hunters, like Slow, pursued small game, such as rabbits, until there were practically none to be found. When the elders asked the people to take stock of their food supplies, they were not surprised to learn that supplies might not last until the first snow melt. That was normally early in the Moon When Geese Return (April). The prospect of hunger seemed certain, and the elders advised everyone to cut their daily consumption of food in half. In the meantime they would hope and pray for a break in the weather so the men could hunt.
Gray Grass, like the other elders, watched and listened. There were good men in the village, many good hunters, but few of them had seen such a winter. One or two of the elders made quiet suggestions that were largely ignored. But Gray Grass had a plan, though she knew the men in the village would not listen to anything she might suggest about hunting. She had grown up there and knew every hill, meadow, and gully. She also knew the habits of animals like the deer, elk, and buffalo during hard winters with deep snow. She decided her grandson was good enough to carry out her plan.
She sent Slow out on short hunting forays, giving him careful instructions about landmarks to look for. Though sometimes he returned empty-handed, nonetheless he was gaining firsthand knowledge of the land, and gaining confidence as well. One evening Gray Grass opened a bundle and revealed her husband’s hunting bow. Though she had given away all of his personal possessions after he had died, she had kept the bow with a specific purpose in mind. She had planned to give it to her grandson one day, and though that day had come sooner than she anticipated, she knew it was time.
Slow was astonished to see his grandfather’s hunting bow, and speechless when his grandmother told him it was his now, along with the arrows. She helped him adjust the tautness of the string to suit his size and strength and showed him several replacement strings. Those strings were made of thistle, instead of sinew, and were used in wet weather because they withstood moisture better than sinew strings.
While Slow practiced with his new bow, his grandmother sketched a map for him on a tanned deer hide and prepared a special wolf-hide cape. At night she told stories of his father’s and grandfather’s hunting escapades. Finally one evening she told him her plan.
“Buffalo look for grass even in deep snow,” she said. “They will go to the meadows and dig, scraping away the snow. When they find it, they will stay and graze. They will run, even in the deep snow, when they see human hunters. Yet they will not be alarmed when a single wolf comes among them.”
Slow had heard such stories before, but he sensed there was a reason his grandmother was telling them again. So he kept silent and listened.
Gray Grass showed her grandson the map she had sketched and the wolf-hide cape. “Since I was a little girl, the buffalo have always gone to a certain meadow when the snow was deep, as it is now. Your grandfather would find them there and crawl in among them wearing his wolf hide. Now it is up to you to go out there or not.”
Slow listened to his grandmother’s plan, his eyes full of excitement and his heart pounding. She was asking him to do a man’s task. That night he was too excited to fall asleep, not certain that he could do what his grandmother was asking, but certain that he must try.
Two mornings later Slow departed the village. Across his back were his encased bow and quiver of arrows, and he carried a short lance. Anyone who saw him leave assumed the boy was after rabbits again. The snowshoes he was carrying were not unusual and no one seemed to notice that he was also carrying half a buffalo hide rolled up into a bundle. They couldn’t see that he had a bag full of pounded dried meat mixed with chokecherries, a staple for hunters—enough for several days. Nor could they see the map he had carefully hidden in his shirt or the wolf hide wrapped inside the buffalo robe. On his hands were elk-hide mittens and on his feet were thick elk-hide moccasins. In his heart burned fierce determination.
Back in her modest lodge, Gray Grass burned sweetgrass and prayed, asking the spirits to watch over her grandson. She had sent him on his mission with all the meat they had left.
Slow followed his grandmother’s instructions down to the smallest detail. Before sunset he found the first landmark she had described—a sandstone outcropping with the outline of an elk carved on it. There he made a snow cave and built a small fire to keep himself warm for the night. The danger he faced was mainly from the cold and another hunter, the great cat, which some called a mountain lion. That was the reason for his lance and the second reason for the fire. Bears were in their winter dens and wolves did not bother people.
As dawn broke, Slow doused the fire with snow and resumed his trek, buoyed with confidence because the weather was good and because he had found the first landmark. But early in the afternoon, gray clouds gathered low and snow began to fall. Wisely, Slow made camp out of the wind against a high bank in an old creek bed. He was able to keep a very small fire burning through most of the night with the wood he had gathered along the way. But when the fire sputtered out, he was still safe wrapped in his buffalo robe.
Slow waited for the weather to clear the next day, then strapped on snowshoes to travel. Before sundown he found another landmark, an ancient cottonwood tree that had been split by lightning. There he camped and found enough wood to build a good fire so he could dry his wet moccasins. He was now in territory new to him, but he was encouraged that his grandmother’s memory of the landscape was so dependable. By another sunset, he estimated, he would find the last landmark, a grove of giant cottonwoods on a river bottom with four of the trees standing in a straight north-south line.
Wolves howled and coyotes barked during the night, strangely comforting and familiar voices. Though he strained to hear the bellow of buffalo bulls, he heard nothing. The fire of determination still burned in him, however. At times he imagined, or felt, the presence of his father and grandfather. That chased away the loneliness and the reality that he was farther away from home by himself than he had ever been. During those moments of loneliness, he took out his grandmother’s map. That simple act reassured him and he could hear her voice describing the landmarks he was to look for.
When he did find the grove of leafless cottonwood trees along the river bottom the next day, he was reassured to see tufts of grass poking up from the snow. But no buffalo. In spite of a pang of doubt, Slow built a hunting blind as his grandmother had instructed, making it appear like a mound of snow. Inside it he prepared his weapons and wrapped himself in the buffalo robe—and waited.
Sometime in the night, he heard a strange noise and imagined it might be a large, fierce animal of some kind. Though he looked out of his snow blind, he saw nothing. The rest of the night he tried to stay awake. When a cold dawn came, he heard the noise again, and for the first time on his quest he felt a real fear. Slow realized, again, that he was alone and far from home.
He was right about the noise. It was made by the largest animal on the plains—the buffalo. Several of them, as a matter of fact, in the meadow not far from his shelter. Their enormous forms were like large shadows in the dawn light. His grandmother was right. Now a different kind of apprehension took hold: a fear of failure.
Even at this distance, at the outside range of his bow, the animals still loomed very large. Suddenly Slow felt weak and puny—and cold. He had slept without a fire, curled inside the folds of his buffalo robe. Outside his shelter snow was falling quietly in large, lazy flakes—the kind that brought a sense of connection. But the only things on Slow’s mind were his cold fingers and the thick hides of the buffalo digging for grass in the meadow. Was he strong enough to pull his grandfather’s bow? Was he good enough to hit the mark?
For a time he pulled his head back into the robe, considering the idea of going home and saying he had not found the buffalo. At the same time, he knew his grandmother had asked him to do something important. She did not say she expected him to succeed. She only wanted him to do his best. If he tried and missed, he knew he could go home with the knowledge that he had done his best, and his grandmother would welcome him home. Slow threw off the robe and reached for the bow and arrows.
A while later a wolf crawled out of the snow shelter. In its right hand was the sinew-backed ash wood bow with its thistle string. In its mouth were two arrows; on each tip was an extremely sharp flint point and on the ends a notch and three goose feathers. Two more arrows were in his left hand.
The wolf-hide cape fit Slow perfectly. For all intents and purposes, he was a wolf stalking the buffalo. Of course, the snowshoes tied on his back were not something a wolf would carry, but they would mean nothing to the buffalo. He estimated the distance at about a hundred long paces. He needed to get 20 paces from the enormous animals to take a good shot.
“Remember,” his grandmother had instructed, “act like a wolf. Stop and sit on your haunches now and then. Lift your head, sniff the air. Do not crawl straight toward them. Go off to the side, as if circling them. It is what a wolf does. Go to the right. Shoot at the right side, behind the ribs.”
Her words played over and over in his head as he crawled. He became the wolf, stalking his prey. He had heard the stories of how powerful buffalo were. How with one shake of their great heads they could toss a man high into the air. But he wasn’t a man on two legs. He was the wolf, stalking and circling. Though the buffalo did see him when he was within 40 paces, they stared for a moment and then returned to digging and grazing on the grass they found. Now and then one would stop and gaze at him. Slow wondered if they could hear his heart pounding like a drum in his chest.
Like the wolf, he selected his prey. A cow with an injured leg, limping as she moved through the deep snow. Slow, mimicking the wolf, circled to the right until he was at 20 or so paces. He sat back, his mouth going dry as the cow turned her head and stared at the wolf sitting on its haunches. Only then did he realize that his hands were trembling.
When the cow turned away and began digging again, he raised his bow and placed an arrow on the string. Heart pounding, he pulled, aimed, and released. He missed!
The arrow had flown just below the cow’s belly, but it had flown silently and the great animal was not in the least alarmed. Taking deep breaths to calm himself, Slow took the second arrow from his mouth and prepared to shoot again.
Quietly, snow was still falling. Slow’s leggings from his knees to his ankles were soaked, but he barely felt the cold. The morning air was frigid, and he could feel it in his lungs with each excited, nervous breath he drew. He paused a moment to blow on the fingers of his right hand so he could hold the arrow and pull the bowstring. With a deep breath, he took aim again.
He heard the soft twang as he released the arrow. In the next instant he saw the cow jump forward and stop broadside to him, her tail curled upward. Slow nearly forgot to notch the third arrow. But he did, and drew back on the string again, heart thudding in his chest. Holding his breath yet again, he released. This time he followed the brief flight of his arrow, watched it slice into her chest. As did the fourth and final arrow, which he barely remembered shooting at all.
With a grunt of surprise and confusion, the wounded cow bolted through the deep snow. Slow watched partly in disbelief, mostly with awe, as the other animals joined her brief flight. Though the others heaved their way up a small slope and over, the wounded one was obviously struggling. She paused at the top and fell on her side. Though she tried to rise, she could not.
Slow’s hands shook and he found himself panting as though he had run a race. He rose and walked back to his snow shelter. He needed a fire to warm himself and dry his wet leggings.
At midmorning a cold-looking sun broke through the clouds briefly. On the slope the cow was down and not moving. Sooner or later, however, he knew the coyotes, wolves, and ravens would arrive. According to his grandmother’s instructions, he still had several chores to finish.
Sometime in the afternoon, a bundle of sage in his hand, he trudged through the deep snow to the cow. She had expired. There was no feeling of elation, however, only sadness. The words of his grandfather ran through his mind.
We do not kill because we can, we do it because we must. For that, the hunter gives thanks and humbles himself for the animal’s gift of life.
Slow laid the bundle of sage next to the cow’s head. Then, drawing his knife, he set about finishing his chore.
He stayed the night in his snow shelter, cheered by a warm fire on which he roasted a piece of the flank meat he had cut away. In a special bag he had placed the proof of his hunt, as his grandmother had instructed. Through the night he heard the barks and growls of wolves as they came to feast on the carcass. But that was just as his grandmother had said it would be. He had hunted for those hungry relatives as well, so the meat would not go to waste.
When he left his shelter after sunrise, the wolves were still at the carcass. On a nearby hill a family of coyotes were patiently waiting their turn. Such was life.
Four days after he set out, Slow made it home. That evening Gray Grass made soup and invited the head man Uses Cane and the leader of the hunters to her lodge. They were surprised to see she had fresh buffalo tongue to feed them. They ate while they listened to the boy’s story of his journey to a far valley and his hunt. Neither man had any reason to dismiss offhand what they had heard. When they asked the boy to lead the hunters back to the valley, he did not hesitate for a moment.
And so it was that Slow became a man, though he was only 12, that hard winter. He led the hunters to the valley of Turtle Butte Creek, once again following his grandmother’s map and his own memory of the trek. There the hunters found the skeleton of the cow, all that was left of the carcass. From there they tracked the small herd and found them.
There was just enough meat from that hunt to feed the people of the small village until the spring snows melted. When they rejoined the other villages, they boasted of the new hunter among them. Along with him, however, there was another gift. They had been reminded that the older the man or the woman, the greater the knowledge and the deeper the wisdom.
Woksape
(woh-ksah-peh)
wisdom, to be wise or discerning
THE INTELLIGENCE OF THE PAST
Most of us who live in industrialized countries and use technology daily to make life easier forget that humans also have roots in the past—farther back than we care to or even can imagine.
As a case in point, someone goes home to a modern apartment on a cold day and pushes a button to ignite a gas fireplace, but has no inkling that a distant ancestor laid the foundation for that modern convenience. That ancient ancestor rotated a softwood rod between his calloused palms to create friction between it and a hardwood base, grinding off tiny hot embers. He blew softly to turn the tiny embers into live coals, which he then transferred to dry, light kindling, such as grass, or seaweed, or lichen. When the kindling erupted into tiny flames, he placed small twigs or dry wood shavings on it to make a larger fire. In elapsed time, this process probably took 20 to 30 minutes, only because he was highly skilled at the art of making fire.
The modern apartment dweller pushes a button and has a cheery fire burning in all of three seconds, perhaps less. Furthermore, he probably thinks ancient fire making had something to do with wooden matches, if he thinks about it at all. If he knew truly the atavistic connection he had to the convenience of fire, it is possible he would appreciate the eons of process that brought him to his moment of comfort, and gain understanding and respect for it.
Perhaps that is the solution to many, if not all, of the problems we confront daily in this technology whirl we call modern life—chief among them greed, arrogance, apathy, and the loss of respect. We need to go back to the beginning and remember the foundations for the values that are antitheses to greed, arrogance, and apathy, such as compassion, respect, and humility.
To solve our current problems, perhaps even to save ourselves from ourselves, we must make a necessary journey into the past. The stories in this book come from the past. And if we go back of our own accord, we may not have to repeat many of the mistakes we made along the way the first time.
It is probably safe to state that most of us who live in industrialized countries think of advances in civilization in terms of technology. There is significant pride in how high and fast an airplane can fly, how instantaneous communication is, how telescopes enable us to see across our universe, how our cars can tell us where to go with the help of a satellite, and so on and so on. As a matter of fact our modern societies, especially in the West, are defined by technology.
Technology has definitely made human existence more comfortable. We live, work, and travel in controlled environments. Medical technology has contributed to the increase in our longevity, and the list goes on. Many, if not most, of us tend to think that our grandparents who lived in a time without movies on DVD or cellular telephones had a primitive existence. We tend to feel sorry for them because they did not have the comforts we do. But we also may think less of them because their technology was not as good as ours is today.
Russia and the United States engaged in the “race for space” after Russia orbited the Sputnik satellite in 1957, vying to develop the technology that would gain them any advantage in that “new frontier.” After an expenditure of billions of rubles and dollars, the United States was the first to land a man on the moon, a grand contest that schoolchildren can read about in the history books. But our contemporary fascination and love affair with modern technology often obscures the intangibles that are also part of culture and lifestyle, such as values and character, as well as genuine human need. (What nation is openly, with the same publicity and resources as the space race had, working to solve the homeless problem?) Furthermore, what we tend to overlook, or forget, is that every nation that has risen to power and asserted and identified itself by the physicality of power has fallen—great societies such as the Romans, Greeks, Minoans, Phoenicians, Persians, and Chinese. The markers of power, such as large armies and navies and complex infrastructure enabled by the technology of the day, could not save them.
Most of the trials and tribulations inflicted on humankind by humankind, from the beginnings of civilization to now, can be attributed to imperialism and greed. It can be safely said that greed instigates imperialism because there is the need and desire to have more, if not all. But once having most or all of it, there is then the need for control in order to keep it all—whether it be land or gold or the resources that enable comfort and power.
In order to acquire territory and resources and maintain control over them, the greedy imperialist control freak must have the inclination and means to wield the power required. Thus the concept of military power was born to implement the means to maintain and control. Not everyone had the means to put armies in the field. And so the few preyed on the many, and one need only study the feudal age in Europe to understand this tragic dynamic of human interaction.
The many, the masses who had not the means to resist, had two choices: capitulate or try to resist anyway. Resisting with force was out of the question. There was only one other way: to develop fortitude so that, no matter the savagery of the outward assault, enough of the essence of the person and the identity of a group would survive. It was the only viable “counterattack,” one that could be carried out without weapons. Therefore, military might could not entirely wipe out courage and fortitude, compassion and generosity, and all the other values that were the basis for survival and eventually became the core of many cultures and societies.
We know that Thomas Edison invented the light-bulb; that the Chinese invented the compass, the clock, gunpowder, and a printing press before Johann Gutenberg; that Galileo invented the telescope, and so on; but do we know with the same certainty who invented compassion, tolerance, generosity, honor, respect, or humility? I suggest that these human values were not invented by one person or by one group of people, but that they emerged because they were the only defenses against cruelty, imperialism, and hopelessness that did not have to be funded or constructed; they were intrinsic in most people. And these values are the weapons that those perceived to be powerless use to confront and overcome the trials and tribulations of life.
Another reality is that some, or perhaps many, of those trials and tribulations are self-inflicted. That is, we humans can be our own worst enemy, especially when we forget the path we have traveled over time to reach the point where we are today. A wise man once likened human memory to a beam of light passing through the darkness. It is easy enough to see what the light illuminates, but once the light passes on, what was once visible returns to the darkness and is forgotten.
The metaphoric beam of light for our time is our fascination and daily identification with technology, whether or not we can fully understand it. It does obscure the hard-won lessons of the past, like the wisdom of an old woman in the story of The Hunter. Therein we are reminded that wisdom, one of the core values of many cultures past and present, is just as powerful and critical as any tangible tool or weapon. It was the knowledge and wisdom of the old woman, Gray Grass, that placed her grandson in the position to wield his skills with the weapon. Therefore we must ask the question: Which was more powerful, the weapon or the wisdom? In this case, wisdom is much more powerful.
Which should logically lead to other questions, such as Can technology solve all of our problems? What place should values have in our modern world?
In 1990 a columnist for the Casper Star-Tribune of Casper, Wyoming, wrote: “The greatest arrogance of the present is to forget the intelligence of the past.” I firmly believe that we modern humans are so enamored with our industry and technology that we look with disdain on the primitive lifestyles of our ancestors. We forget that there are aspects of our lives that do not require tools, utensils, or weapons. The people of Egypt demonstrated that in 2011. They showed the world that while technology is critical, human initiative is still a powerful driving force. In this case, technology—the Internet and social media—enabled Egyptians to unite with one another and the world. While that in turn enabled the ousting of a dictator, it might not have occurred if the people did not have the basic value of courage to take to the streets and face the mechanical and technological power wielded by the military rulers.
Most of us in the Western world cannot think that we will ever be without the technology that enables our lifestyles. We flip a switch to have light, we turn a dial to heat and cool our homes, and now we can carry on “face-to-face” conversations using our laptop computers. Many of us have lived in a time when fast communication was a handwritten letter (or one typed on a manual typewriter) that reached its destination in two days via the U.S. mail. Now we grow impatient and indignant when an attached file does not download in a few seconds.
To be sure, modern technology has improved our lives, and that is critically important for those of us who are physically challenged or depend on medicines in order to function every day. But technology should not obscure or diminish our basic humanity, that part of us that can be self-reliant, compassionate, moral, and ethical, as well as having faith, tolerance, patience, and selflessness. Such values are what define us as human beings because they are part of us, or can be. Anything external—a cell phone, automobile, television remote, for example—is only a useful tool, nothing more and nothing less.
Basic values do not need to be changed or improved, the way tools, instruments, and weapons are. We simply need to remember that they have been part of us since before we learned to write. If we look past our modern arrogance to see the intelligence and wisdom of our ancestors, we will connect with the timeless values that can be as powerful as any product of industry or technology. We will shine a beam of light into the darkness and find again what we have lost.