24.

Time. Relentless, mindless Time. It chews away at itself and is never satisfied. By the summer of 1986, Paul Ruder, Pactola District ranger for the U.S. Forest Service, had made his report on the Yellow Thunder Camp: “There haven’t been more than five people there all summer long. Last winter was the first time no one was up there.”

Today, no visible signs of the camp remain. The rushing, happy sounds of the early spring runoff can be heard at the creek. Here and there, the land is blotted with scattered garbage left by tourists.

Following my last encounter with Collins Catch the Bear, three decades sped carelessly by. During those years, Collins had been paroled, released, reconvicted of nonviolent crimes associated with his alcoholism, and paroled and released again to face the bitter outside world. He was like a small, featherless bird dropped in the middle of South Dakota in January. The longing for place had given way to the simple, cruel will to survive.

On May 19, 1997, about ten years before Collins’s death, Jim Leach, who had just completed a visit with him in Rapid City, wrote me, “Collins looks real different. I wouldn’t have recognized him if I hadn’t been expecting to see him. He looks old. He looks older than I look. He looked to me like he is in his 50s. He is slightly balding in the front.”

On that same day, Collins wrote me. His lengthy, apologetic letter stated in part:

I am writing this letter to thank both you and Mr. Moriarity for the gracious help which you both gave to me in 1982–1983. I know that without your help I would likely still be in jail.

On May 29, 1997, I replied:

Collins,

Thanks for your letter. Your thanks was a gift back to me. You are a whole, beautiful person. Believe it. Judge yourself with love. It is hard to find your way as a white man finds his. Perhaps there are other ways that will open to you.

Be open—

Waiting—

Loving.

Gerry Spence

Collins’s reprieves from jails and prisons often left him living on the street. He once wrote Jim that he’d been offered a job as a dishwasher. Whether he showed up for work is not recorded.

Then came this note from Jim to me on May 20, 1999:

Collins was in prison for unlawful entry to a motor vehicle. He was mixing vodka and cough medicine, and fought with a police officer. Says he loves me. I tell him I love him. Says he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia . . . Says he’s been locked up for 13 of the 17 years since he was 19 . . . but I never would have known it from spending the day with him. He is polite and direct and does not act “institutionalized” or angry.

He asked me to drive him out to the old Yellow Thunder Camp.

We went out there and walked around. We talked about those days.

Nothing in Jim’s letter suggested that they talked about Collins’s guilty plea in the Tollefson case.

Later, Jim sent me a letter from Collins dated July 16, 1999. He wrote that he had been transferred to the state prison in Jamestown, North Dakota:

I’m back in prison because I started drinking, and I know that if I am to stay free I must completely abstain from alcohol. If I stay out of trouble in here I am looking at about thirteen months.

By August 31, 2000, Collins wrote Jim that he just gotten out of jail in Bismarck and would be starting a minimum-wage job the next day. But by May 4, 2001, he had called Jim to tell him that he had received a five-year sentence with five years’ probation for assault on a police officer, and that he’d been in custody since December 2000 for that offense. He told Jim, “I let the bottle get the best of me again. This is the seventh time I’ve been in the North Dakota State Prison.”

On December 3, 2004, Collins had been in custody in Wakpala, in north-central South Dakota. Released in April of that year, he traveled down to Rapid City to visit Jim, where he got drunk. He was incarcerated in the Pennington County Jail in Rapid City as an “absconder,” apparently for having violated his parole by leaving the Wakpala area without permission.

By April 26, 2005, Collins was in jail in Bismarck, North Dakota. Jim notes that he sent Collins a book he’d wanted. Collins then wrote Jim that he had been sentenced to thirty months for some unidentified crime and that he should be out in about two years.

On July 18, 2005, Collins wrote Jim from prison in North Dakota, thanking him for his birthday gift, a fifty-dollar money order, and asking if he could arrange for him a subscription to the Jerusalem Post, a leading Jewish newspaper. Jim did so.

On September 19, 2007, Collins called Jim from Bismarck to report that his sister Sharon had died two weeks before. As for Collins, he was living on the street. Jim reported that Collins told him, “I love you, bro,” and Jim replied, “I love you, too, Collins.”

Jim told me, “On December 6, 2007, I sent Collins money for a bus ticket to San Diego. I did not want him to freeze to death in winter in North Dakota. On January 3, 2008, Collins called me from North Dakota, saying he did not get on the bus to San Diego. He said he thinks the ticket is still good and he may still go there. He said he was calling to “get straight with me.” This was the last time Jim heard from Collins Catch the Bear.

In some ways, Jim Leach took care of Collins as if he were a wayward son. I think most men have a set of father-son genes lurking around in them. I asked Jim if his loyal, seemingly irreversible caring for Collins didn’t have something to do with that. He said he hadn’t really considered it, but he thought not.

On the twenty-seventh day of January 2008, at eight minutes past one in the afternoon, Collins Spencer Catch the Bear was trying to cross eight lanes of highway, four lanes each way, on Interstate 8 a few miles east of San Diego. An oncoming motorist was unable to avoid hitting him. The authorities could not determine why he attempted to cross the freeway. Upon arrival, medics tried CPR but were unsuccessful.

The chief medical examiner reported that Collins’s blood alcohol level was .28 percent, which is beyond the point at which most men black out. The legal limit is .08 percent for adults in California. His blood also contained evidence of recent use of marijuana. The report recited: “He had a tattoo of CCTB noted on his left forearm and a large partially healed cut to his right forearm. Numerous cut mark scars were noted to both wrists[,] possibly indicative of previous suicide attempts.” At last, Collins was safe and provided with a sanitary resting place. “He was secured in a new white vinyl pouch and a blue tamper-proof seal was affixed.” The examiner’s record reported that no next of kin was found. His remains were buried at Saint Elizabeth Cemetery, Wakpala, South Dakota.

Russell Means died on October 22, 2012, a month short of his seventy-third birthday. He was an activist, a writer, an actor, an agitator, a renegade, a brash showman, and a hero. He was crafty, cunning, outspoken, and, yes, courageous. Those remaining safely hidden from the fray have criticized his antics and his causes. Still, Means devoted his life in a sometimes single-handed fight for the rights of Indian people. His ashes were spread over the Black Hills, including Yellow Thunder Camp.

Bruce Ellison, a widely known and respected criminal defense lawyer, defended many Indians, including Russell Means. Ellison never compromised his principles or his voice in his fight for Indian people. He continues his good work in the law.

Jim Leach is a respected, successful practicing trial lawyer in Rapid City and has earned the highest ratings offered by the organizations that evaluate trial lawyers. He has been a member of our staff at my Trial Lawyers College and represents only people, not corporations or insurance companies. His lifetime of pro bono work for the America Indian has repeatedly proven his commitment to their cause. I am proud to include him as one of my personal friends.

My former partner Eddie Moriarity is still practicing law. He is one of the great human beings on the face of this earth. I love him like my son and admire him as a peer. His commitment to justice and to his clients is exemplary. He works out of an honest and loving heart, something rarely observed or appreciated in lawyers for the people. He has offices in Missoula, Montana.

Judge Roland E. Grosshans died on June 7, 2012, of Lou Gehrig’s disease, having retired after a distinguished career as state’s attorney for ten years and as a South Dakota jurist for sixteen years. His attempt to save Collins Catch the Bear is among his most admirable work from the bench. It restores our hope for judges who are willing to serve justice even at their own expense.

Rodney Lefholz, sixty-seven, is engaged in a selective, out-of-court practice in Rapid City. He remained out of politics after he was defeated in his early bid for attorney general and for reelection as state’s attorney. He and his wife have three grown children and four grandchildren.

I talked with Mr. Lefholz these thirty years later and found him to be open and candid. When I asked him about using No Heart Jones as his chief witness, he said, “As a prosecutor, you do the best you can with the witnesses you’ve got.”

Lefholz thought that Collins’s best defense was that the killing of Tollefson was committed in the defense of another. “It was a pretty solid defense,” Lefholz said. “But his lawyers might have thought that a good defense won’t always get you an acquittal.” I agreed.

My darling Imaging is as alive, perceptive, insightful, and beautiful as she was the first day I saw her. I have wondered if she wasn’t born under a magic tree in the forest. She has been a loving guide though the forest of my life, not to mention through the mothering of my four children and her two along with our thirteen grandchildren. She is a friend to many; an artist, a designer, a philosopher, a teacher, a coach, a businesswoman—in short, a miracle. No man has ever been so blessed or so loved.

I am in my ninetieth year and still riding one of the wooden horses that swings up and down on life’s merry-go-round, keeping time to the carnival music of being.