JOHN BEAR-IN-THE-WATER trotted on foot to meet her, and I could hear her contralto voice returning his greeting as he reached for the halter of her pony. He led the pony up the slope toward the tipi skeleton, and they were etched against the sky like one of those old medieval tapestries showing a hostler leading the caparisoned steed of a knight’s lady or a princess in from the hunt.
She dropped easily from the saddle, adjusted her divided riding skirt, and stood looking at the tipi frame while Dane and Red Bird Woman moved toward her.
“So you’ve started the tipi,” she said. Red Bird Woman embraced her, speaking softly in Cheyenne.
“No,” she said. “They refused to help.”
“You had to find out,” Dane said. “You’ll have to start in the cabin.”
“You can’t give up your cabin,” she answered him strongly.
“I’ll live in the tipi,” he said. “It’s warmer in winter and cooler in summer.”
“And easier to keep clean,” Red Bird Woman added.
“No,” she said. “For a hospital we’ll need beds and instruments and medicines. Cost too much maka-eta.”
“We get medicine house things same way we make you a doctor,” Red Bird Woman said. “Everybody share.”
“I got six steers,” John Bear-in-the-Water said. “I will sell all of them for you. My old man will sell two.”
“Nohetto! Now then!” Red Bird Woman’s hands gripped Mary Amayi’s shoulders. “If Crows help like that, think what Cheyennes will do.”
Dane turned her toward me, whispering something. Noticing me for the first time, she smiled, and I could feel an impulse of life, that driving force I had felt the day I saw her at Teddy Roosevelt’s luncheon in the White House. In some romantic fashion, I suppose, I thought of her as the essence of America, the Lady of Cofitachequi and Hernando De Soto, Muskogean blood and Spanish blood, and the Long Warrior and the blood of the Ani-Yun-Wiya, the Real People, the magic of the Cherokees mixed with that of the Tall People, the Cheyennes, and the unnamed Frenchman, the voyageur, whom I saw as a young man of noble blood bearing a magnificent nose, fugitive from the French Revolution, and then the Minneconjous of the Teton Sioux, the mighty Dakotas. Warriors they all had been, male and female, warrior survivors. What was she, if she was not America?
I felt her strong hand in mine and looked into her eyes and knew the heritage of all those strains of blood, and when she drew away I saw the Danish coin, larger than I had imagined it to be, silvery against the tawny risings of her breasts. She was Creek Mary, the reason for my being there, the sun lowering behind her reminding me that I was only a sojourner there, an outsider, and I said something about the train I must board.
“You ride in wagon to Dundee station with me and John Bear-in-the-Water,” Red Bird Woman said.
I could have stayed forever. I wanted to see the unfolding of the dream, but this was not my world to live in.
When I looked back from the wagon seat, waving, her hand was resting on her grandfather’s shoulder, and he was smiling with his thin lips closed, the ends of his smile extending into the wrinkles of his aging face. And then the wagon jolted over a hump in the land and there was only the framework of the tipi sinking slowly out of view.
The wagon seat was not wide enough for the three of us, and John Bear-in-the-Water crouched forward of Red Bird Woman’s wide girth, slapping the lines and urging the team to move faster. “He want to get back to Mary Amayi in a big hurry,” she said, blinking at me.
“I would be in a hurry, too,” I replied.
“I glad you there today.”
“Why?”
“Easier for me to make Dane give in for tipi with you there.” Her body shook against me as she laughed. We were already nearing the brown-stained railroad depot. The wagon swung with the turning of the road, the wheels spinning up dust. John Bear-in-the-Water sawed at the lines, whoa-ing the team to a jarring halt. I reached behind the seat for my bag, and stepped down, thanking them for the ride. “See you sometime,” he said. Red Bird Woman said nothing. She just looked at me with her young-old eyes that had seen more pain and grief and injustice and hate and love and farewells than I could imagine. As the wagon started rolling away, she turned and placed her fingers on her lips and blew me a Veheo kiss. I returned it.
From the rear the depot appeared to be deserted, but when I turned the corner onto the cindered platform I found a man seated on an iron bench facing the tracks. He looked up at me in surprise. “By God, you startled me,” he said. “Seldom see a white man around here.”
He was the bearded man who earlier in the afternoon had passed Dane’s cabin without acknowledging our presence, the man who Dane said was looking for coal so that miners could come and dig up the Indians’ earth.
“Going to catch the eastbound?” he asked.
I told him that I was.
“I’m waiting for supplies coming on the baggage car,” he explained. “You one of the ranchers hereabouts?”
I told him I was a traveling newspaperman from Washington.
“Roving correspondent, eh? Not much going on here, is there? Nothing but Indians. I’m a geologist. Work for a coal company.”
“What are the prospects?” I asked.
“God, this country is rich in coal, close to the surface, easy to mine, just scrape the worthless earth away. Most of it’s on reservation land, though. The government gave the land to the Indians because it looks so damned worthless, arid and scrubby. But there are fortunes underneath when the time comes to mine it. Someday we’ll have to move these Indians out of here. They wouldn’t know what to do with coal, any more than they know how to do anything else for themselves. They stand in the way of progress, you know. Got all these strange notions about land being sacred—”
The hoarse whistle of the approaching train overrode his words, the locomotive bearing down upon us, its black smoke pluming across the tall grass. Somehow it metamorphosed into the drawing described to me by Dane of his daughter Amayi’s calendar depiction of an Iron Horse breathing fire and smoke through its teeth. The cars swept by us, the geologist rising from the bench and clumping angrily along the cinders in his high-laced miner’s boots toward the distant baggage car.
A blue-uniformed conductor dropped down from the first passenger car and motioned me to board. Before I fell into a plush seat and faced eastward, the train was moving again. Through the dingy window I watched the daylight fade, and then I quickly pressed my forehead against the glass. For a moment a line of low irregular hills seemed to shape themselves into the silhouette of a woman supine, gazing up at the indigo sky, Creek Mary’s Sleeping Woman materializing on the Western Plain. It could have been a trick of the light and the motion of the train, or some magic in the landscape of Montana.