Mammoths of the Great Plains

ELEANOR ARNASON

Eleanor Arnason published her first novel, The Sword Smith, in 1978, and followed it with novels such as Daughter of the Bear King and To the Resurrection Station. In 1991, she published her best-known novel, one of the strongest novels of the nineties, the critically acclaimed A Woman of the Iron People, a complex and substantial novel which won the prestigious James Tipree, Jr., Memorial Award. Her short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Amazing, Orbit, Xanadu, and elsewhere. Her most recent books are Ring of Swords and Tomb of the Fathers, and an eponymous chapbook version of the novella that follows, which also included an interview with her and a long essay. Her novelette “Stellar Harvest” was a Hugo finalist in 2000. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Here she takes us sideways in time to an alternate history not dissimilar to our own—except that mammoths survived in the American West into historical times before finally being wiped out by white hunters—for a sequence of embedded narratives covering the lives of three generations of Native American women, told by a grandmother to her grandchild on a hot summer’s day, and relayed to us across time by that child grown up, a story at once contemplative and autumnal in tone, but with a steely core of anger at the treatment of the Indians and of the continuing destruction of the environment that you can see in progress all around you as you read these words.

Every summer my parents sent me to stay with my grandmother in Fort Yates, North Dakota. I took the rocket train from Minneapolis, waving at Mom and Dad on the platform as the train pulled out, then settling comfortably into my coach seat. I loved my parents, but I also loved to travel, and I was especially fond of the trip to Fort Yates.

We glided north along the Mississippi, gaining speed as we left the city and entered the wide ring of suburbs around Minneapolis and St. Paul. Looking out, I saw scrub woods and weedy meadows, dotted with the ruins of McMansions and shopping malls.

The suburbs had been built on good land, my dad told me, replacing farms, wood lots, lakes and marshes. “A terrible waste of good soil, which could have fed thousands of people; and the land is not easy to reclaim, given all the asphalt and concrete which has been poured over it. That’s why we’ve left it alone. Let time and nature work on it and soften it up!”

Dad’s employer, the Agricultural Recovery Administration, might be ignoring the suburbs. But there were people in them. Looking out my window, I saw gardens and tents among the weeds and ruined houses; and there were platforms made of scrap wood along the tracks. The rocket trains didn’t stop at the platforms; but local trains did, picking up produce for markets in the city. Now and then I saw an actual person, hanging clothes on a line or riding a bicycle bumpily along a trail.

“Fools,” Dad called them and refused to buy their food in the market, though it had passed inspection. I thought the people were romantic: modern pioneers. My grandmother had things to say about pioneers, of course.

North of St. Cloud, the forest began, and I went to the bubble car, riding its lift to the second floor and a new seat with a better view. The forest was second or third growth, a mixture of confers and hardwoods; and there was a terrible problem with deer. They were a problem on farms as well, though not as much as gen-mod weeds and bugs. Market hunters controlled the deer, insofar as they were controlled. Wolves and panthers would do a better job, my father said; but the farmers didn’t like them.

Trees flashed by, light green and dark green, brown if they were dying. The conifers were heat-stressed and vulnerable to parasites and disease. In time the forest would be entirely hardwood. Now and then I saw a gleam of blue: a pond or lake surrounded by forest. Sometimes the train crossed a river.

Around noon we reached the bed of fossil Lake Agassiz, also known as the Red River Valley. The forest ended, and we traveled through farm land, amazingly flat. Trees grew in lines between the fields: windbreaks. They were necessary, given the wind that came off the western plains. The main crops were potatoes and sugar beets. The farmers had to keep changing the varieties they grew as the climate changed, getting hotter. “We’re like the Red Queen in Alice,” Dad said. “Running and running in order to remain in one place.”

The train stopped at Fargo-Moorhead, then turned due north, going along the Red River to Grand Forks. Then it turned again. I went to the dining car and ate lunch while we raced west across the North Dakota plain. This was wind farm country. Rows of giant windmills extended as far as I could see. Between them were fields of sunflowers. In the old days, my dad said, the fields had been dotted with pothole lakes and marshes full of wild birds. Most were gone now, the water dried up and the birds flown. In any case, the train moved so rapidly that I couldn’t bird watch, except to look at hawks soaring in the dusty blue sky, too far up to identify.

I got off at Minot and stayed the night with my mother’s second cousin Thelma Horn. In the morning Thelma put me on a local train that ran south along the Missouri River. There was only one passenger car, hitched to an engine that hauled boxcars and tankers. The track was not nearly as well maintained as the rocket train’s line. The local rocked slowly along, stopping often. By late morning we were on the Standing Rock Reservation. There were bison on the hillsides, the only livestock that made sense in short grass prairie, my dad said, and hawks in the sky. If I was lucky, I might see pronghorns or a flock of wild turkeys.

By noon I was at the Fort Yates station. My grandmother waited there, tall and thin and upright, her hair pulled back in a bun and her nose jutting like the nose on the Crazy Horse monument. At home in Minneapolis, I forgot I was part Lakota. Here, looking at my grandmother, I remembered.

She hugged me and took me to her house, an old wood frame as spare and upright as she was. My bedroom was on the second floor, overlooking an empty lot. Grandmother had turned it into a garden, full of native plants that thrived in the dry heat of the western Dakotas. Prairie flowers bloomed among wild grasses. A bird feeder fed native sparrows; and a rail fence hosted meadowlarks, who stood as tall as possible, showing off their bright yellow chests, and sang—oh! so loudly!

What could be better than our breakfasts in the kitchen, the windows open to let in cool morning air? Or the hours when I played with the Fort Yates kids, brown-skinned and black-haired? I was darker than they were, and my hair frizzed, because my dad came from the Ivory Coast. But they were relatives, and we got along most of the time.

In the afternoon, when it was too hot to play, I talked with Grandmother—either in the kitchen as we worked on dinner, or in the parlor under a turning ceiling fan. This is when I learned the story of the mammoths.

*   *   *

According to Grandmother, the trouble began with Lewis and Clark. “We’d heard rumors about what was happening in the east, and the voyageurs had been through our country. Those Frenchmen got everywhere like mice, which is why so many Ojibwa and some Dakota and even Lakota have names like Boisvert, Trudel, Bellecourt and Zephier. But the French were interested in beaver, not our bison and mammoths. We told them if they behaved, they could have safe passage to the Rockies. For the most part, they did behave themselves; and for the most part, we kept our word.

“The thing to remember about the French and the Scots is, they were businessmen. You could reason with them. But the English and Americans were explorers and scientists and farmers searching for new land. People like these are driven by dreams—discovery, investigation, conquest, farms on the short grass prairie where there isn’t enough water for trees. No one could reason with them.” Grandmother had a Ph.D. in molecular biology from the University of Massachusetts. She was joking, not speaking out of ignorance or disrespect for science.

I’m telling the story the way she told it to me, sitting in her living room in Fort Yates, North Dakota, when I came to visit her on the Standing Rock Reservation in summer. She didn’t tell the whole story at once, but piece by piece over days and weeks and from summer to summer. I heard most parts more than once. But I’m going to retell it as a single continuous story; and after this, I’m not going to point out the jokes. There are plenty. Grandmother used to say, “The only way Indians survive is through patience and a strong sense of humor. What a joke the Great Spirit played on us, when it sent Europeans here!”

Anyway, the trouble began that morning in 1805, when Meriwether Lewis became the first white man of English descent to see a mammoth since mammoths died out in England. The animal in question was an adult male, sixty years old or so, older than Meriwether Lewis would ever get to be. It was standing on the bank of the Missouri River drinking water, while its tusks—magnificent ten foot long spirals—shone in the early light. Lewis knew what he was seeing. His neighbor, President Thomas Jefferson, had told him to keep a lookout for mammoths, which white men in the east knew from fossils.

The animal Lewis was looking at was not Mammuthus columbii, which had left fossils in the east. Instead this was Mammuthus missourii, a smaller descendent. An adult male Columbian mammoth could stand 13 feet tall and weigh 10 tons. The fellow drinking water from the Missouri stood 10 feet tall at most and weighed 5 or 6 tons.

Did he actually have tusks as long as he was tall? Yes, according to Lewis and later scientists who studied Mammuthus missourii. It was, my grandmother said, a classic case of sexual selection.

“In order for a female to achieve reproductive success, she has to be healthy and not too unlucky. This is not true for every species, but it is true of many. In order for a male to breed, he has to impress females and other males. Humans did this with paint, feathers and beads. Look at the paintings by people like George Catlin! Indian men were always gaudier than Indian women. That’s because they were trying to proclaim their reproductive fitness. An old-time chief in a war bonnet was exactly like a turkey cock, displaying in the spring.”

Don’t think Grandmother was speaking disrespectfully of our male ancestors. The wild turkey was her favorite bird; and she felt that little on Earth equaled the sight of a cock spreading his shining bronze tail and making a noise that sounds like “Hubba-hubba.”

The tusks of mammoth females stop growing when the animals are 25 or 30, but male tusks keep growing, spiraling out and up until—in some cases—they cross each other.

“All show, of course,” my grandmother said. “But what a show!”

Lewis did exactly what you’d expect of a 19th century explorer and scientist. He picked up a gun and shot the mammoth. It was a good shot or possibly lucky. The ball went into the old bull’s bright, brown eye. The old fellow screamed in pain and fury, then fell down dead. That was the beginning of the end, my grandmother said.

The expedition butchered the animal, keeping the tusks and skin, which was covered with short, thick, curly fur—most likely light brown; though some mammoths are tan or yellow, and a few are white. They had mammoth steaks for dinner and breakfast, then went on, dragging their boats upriver. Most of the meat was left behind to be eaten by wolves and grizzlies. One tusk made it back east to delight President Jefferson. The other was abandoned as too damn heavy; the skin was lost when a boat overturned.

“It was an epic journey,” my grandmother said. “And they found many things which Indian people can’t remember misplacing, such as the Rocky Mountains. I think you could say that their most famous discovery, even more famous than the Rockies, was living mammoths.”

Decades after Lewis and Clark returned to the United States, white people wandered around the west, looking for mastodons, giant ground sloths and saber-tooth cats. But all those animals were gone. Only the mammoths had survived into modern times.

There are white scientists who say Indians killed the ice age megafauna. Grandmother didn’t believe this. “If we were so good at killing, why did so many large animals survive? Moose, musk oxen, elk, caribou, bison, mountain lions, five kinds of bear. The turkey, for heaven’s sake! They’re big; they can’t really fly; and though I love them, no one who has seen a turkey try to go through a barbed wire fence can claim they are especially adaptable.

“Why did horses and camels die out in the New World, when other large animals—moose, mammoth, musk ox and bison—survived? Are we to believe that our ancestors preferred eating horse and camel to eating bison? Hardly likely!”

Most likely, the animals that died out were killed by changes in the climate, my grandmother said. Everything got drier and hotter after the glaciers retreated. The mammoth steppe was replaced by short grass prairie. This was no problem for the bison, but mammoths—like elephants—need lots of moisture.

“In the spring when the grass was green and wet, they’d move out onto the plains. Our ancestors would see them in groups of ten or twenty, grazing among the dark-brown bison. By early summer, they retreated to the rivers, especially the Missouri, and fed on shrubs in the bottom lands. Water was always available. Think what it must have been like to float down river in a pirogue or a round bison-hide boat like the ones made by Mandans and Hidatsa! There the mammoths would be, calves and matrons, bathing in the shallows, squirting water on each other.

“Our ancestors always said, be careful of the mammoths when they’re by rivers. Wolves, the big ones called bison wolves, and grizzly bears, which used to be a plains animal till white people drove them into the mountains, lurked in the bottom lands. They couldn’t harm a healthy adult, but preyed on calves, the old, the injured. Because of this, the mammoths were uneasy close to water.”

If I close my eyes now, I can see her living room. The sky is big everywhere in the Dakotas, but west of the Missouri, it gets even bigger; and sunlight comes down through the dry air like a lance. In Grandmother’s house, it came through white gauze curtains that fluttered in the wind and danced in spots on her linoleum floor. The furniture in the room was straight and spare, like Grandmother and her house: a kitchen table, four kitchen chairs and a rocker, all old and scratched, but solid wood that Grandmother kept polished. On the floor, along with dancing spots of sunlight, was a genuine oriental rug, the edges frayed and the pile worn flat. Grandmother bought it in an antique store in Minneapolis. She liked the faded colors and the pattern, geometric like our Lakota patterns.

“The Chinese and Indians make carpets like gardens; but people from dry, wide-open countries—the people in Central Asia and here—like geometry.”

Her most treasured belonging was a mammoth tusk about three feet long. The ivory was honey-colored and carved with horsemen chasing bison. She held it on her lap while she told me stories, stroking the tusk’s gentle curve and the incised lines.

“There were two young men, hunters in the days before horses and guns; and they were out on the prairie, looking for something to kill. All they had were spears with stone tips and a dog dragging a travois. If you think it was easy hunting this way in a world full of bison, mammoths, wolves and grizzlies, then you haven’t given serious consideration to the question.

“The young men thought they might be able to sneak up on a bison disguised as wolves, which the bison don’t usually fear, or find a mammoth weakened by drought. It was midsummer and so dry that many streams and small rivers were empty.

“But they had no luck. Exhausted and discouraged, they made camp, tying the dog securely, since it might become food soon, if they didn’t find anything else. They ate the last of their pemmican and drank water dug from a river bed, then slept.

“When they woke, the moon was up and full. Two maidens in white dresses stood at the edge of their camp. Never had they seen girls so lovely. One man was clever enough to recognize spirits when he saw them; he greeted the women respectfully. But the other man was stupid and rude. Getting up, he tried to grab one of the women. She turned and walked quickly across the moonlit prairie. He followed. When they were almost out of sight, the woman turned into a white mammoth, her fur shining like snow in the moonlight. But this didn’t make the rude man pause. He followed the mammoth till both of them were gone.

“The second woman said, ‘That is my sister, White Mammoth Calf Woman. Your companion will follow her till he’s out of this world entirely. But you have greeted me with respect, so I’ll teach you the way to hunt bison and how to use every part of the animal, so your people won’t be hungry in the future. Remember, though, not to hunt the mammoths, since your companion has made them angry. If you hunt them in spite of my warning, you’ll make the bison angry as well; and they and the mammoths will leave.’

“Then she taught him everything about bison. He thanked her gratefully; and she turned to go. ‘What is your name?’ the polite man asked. In answer, she turned into a snow-white bison calf and ran off across the plain.

“After that,” my grandmother said, “our ancestors hunted bison, but not mammoths. There were practical reasons for this decision. Can you imagine trying to attack a full-sized mammoth on foot with no weapon except a spear? The calves were less formidable, but their mothers and aunts protected them; and the males formed groups of their own.

“The only truly vulnerable mammoths were juvenile males, after they’d been driven from the maternal herd, while they were wandering around alone, confused and ignorant. People did hunt them sometimes, but that didn’t lead to extinction.

“Maybe, using fire and stampeding, we could have killed mammoth herds. But we didn’t, because White Bison Calf Woman had warned us.”

Then Grandmother told another story. “There was a man who went hunting in a hard time, a drought. He came on a huge bull mammoth with magnificent tusks. The animal had a foot that was broken or dislocated.

“‘Brother mammoth,’ the man said. ‘My family is starving. Will you give your flesh to me?’

“The mammoth considered, waving his trunk around and smelling the dusty air. ‘All right,’ he said finally. ‘But I want to keep my tusks. Call me vain or sentimental, if you like. They mean a lot to me; and I want them to stay where I’ve lived. Take everything else—my flesh, my skin, even my bones—but leave my tusks here.’

“The man agreed. The mammoth let him strike a killing blow.

“When the mammoth was dead, the man brought his wife to butcher the carcass. ‘We can’t leave the tusks here,’ the woman said. ‘Look at how huge they are, how perfectly curved.’

“‘I promised,’ said the man. But the woman wouldn’t listen. She chopped the tusks out of the mammoth’s skull. They took everything home: the flesh, the skin covered with tawny curling hair, the tusks.

“After that, the woman had trouble sleeping. The mammoth came to her, wearing his flesh and skin, but with two bloody wounds where his tusks should have been. ‘What have you done?’ he asked. ‘Why have you stolen the only things I asked to keep?’ Gradually, lack of sleep wore the woman down. Finally, she died. Soon after that, her husband visited another village and saw a maiden of remarkable beauty. ‘What will you take for her?’ he asked the girl’s father, who was an old man, still handsome and imposing, except for his missing teeth.

“‘Your famous mammoth tusks,’ the old man said.

“The warrior was reluctant, but he had never seen a woman like this one; and she seemed more than willing to go with him. Grudgingly, he agreed to the bargain, went home and returned with the mammoth tusks. The old man took the splendid objects and caressed them. ‘I will use them to frame my door,’ he said. This was a Mandan or Hidatsa village, as I forgot to mention. Our neighbors along the Missouri often took tusks from drowned mammoths and used them as frames for the doors of their log and dirt houses. We didn’t, of course, since we lived in tipis in those days.

“The warrior and his new wife took off across the plain. At their first camp, the warrior said, ‘I want to have sex with you.’ He’d been thinking about nothing else for days.

“‘You people!’ said the maiden. ‘You never learn!’ Rising, she turned into a white mammoth. Her fur shone like snow in the moonlight, as did her small female tusks. ‘You asked for help from my kinsman, then took the only things he wanted to keep, though he was willing to give you everything else, even his life. Now he has his tusks back. You will get nothing more from me.’ She turned and moved rapidly over the prairie.”

“If we aren’t supposed to kill mammoths and take their tusks, how do you have that one on your lap?” I asked when I was ten and full of questions, which I had learned to ask in an experimental school in Minneapolis.

“The point of the story,” said Grandmother, “is to ask permission, listen to the answer with respect and keep the promises you make. The tusk on my lap is from a juvenile. One of our ancestors may have killed it before it joined a male group; if it was female, then it died of injury or drought, and our ancestor scavenged the tusks.

“If it was a young cow, then our ancestor may have made a mistake by carving a hunting scene on the tusk. But I don’t know any stories about the ancestor; most likely he didn’t come to harm, as he would have, if he’d done something seriously wrong.” It was hard to tell with grandmother, because of her irony, if she meant a statement like this. On the one hand, she was a scientist and a woman who believed that much harm happened in the world and went unpunished. On the other hand, she took the old stories seriously. “There is more than one way to organize knowledge; and more than one way to formulate truth; and with time and patience, persistence and luck, justice can prevail.”

There was a story about the fate of Meriwether Lewis, which Grandmother told me. He came back from his journey a famous man, who became governor of the Missouri Territory; but despair overtook him. He died of suicide at the age of 35, alone while traveling along the Natchez Trace. On a scrap of paper in his pocket were his last words. ‘Mammoths,’ he wrote in an agitated scrawl. ‘Indians.’ That was all, though—being Lewis—he misspelled both ‘mammoth’ and ‘Indian.’

“What does the message mean?” I asked.

“Who can say?” my grandmother replied. “Maybe it was a warning of some kind. ‘Treat mammoths as I have done, and you will end like me.’ Or maybe he was drunk. He had a problem with alcohol and opium. In any case, no one paid attention. More white people came up the Missouri—scientists, explorers, traders, hunters, English noblemen, Russian princes. They all shot mammoths; or so it seemed to our ancestors, who watched with horror. We tried to warn the Europeans, but they didn’t listen. Maybe they didn’t care. At some point, we realized they had an idea of the way our country ought to be: full of white farmers on farms like the ones in Europe, though our land is nothing like England or France. The mammoths would be gone and the bison and us. If you look at the paintings done along the Missouri in the 19th century, it always seems to be sunset. The small mammoth herds, the vast bison herds, the Indians are always heading west into the sunset, vanishing from the plains.

“Some of the tusks went to hang on walls in England and Moscow. Others went to museums in the east, along with entire skeletons and skins. The American Museum of Natural History in New York has a stuffed herd in their Hall of Mammoths. I’ve seen it. You ought to go some day.

“As the century went on, the Europeans began to take animals alive. In almost every case, these were calves whose mothers had been shot. Mammoth Bill Cody had two in his Wild West show. Sitting Bull used to visit with them, during the year the great Lakota spent with the show. People say he talked with them, while they curled their trunks around his arms and searched in his clothing for hidden food. We don’t know what they told him. He came away looking sad and grim.

“By the end of the 19th century, the only mammoths left were in circuses and zoos, except for a small herd in the Glacier Park area. At most, four hundred animals were left. The ones in circuses were calves. The ones in zoos were a mixture of old and young, though all had grown up in captivity. Their culture—which they used to learn from elders, as did we—was gone, except in the Glacier Park herd, which still preserved some of its ancestral wisdom. In this, the Glacier mammoths were like our neighbors the Blackfoot. Louis W. Hill, the son of the Empire Builder, encouraged the Blackfoot to maintain their old ways, in order to present tourists coming out on the Great Northern Railroad with an authentic western experience. Historians have said many bad things about the Hill family, but they protected the mammoths and the Blackfoot from the rest of white civilization.

“White Bison Calf Woman’s warnings were proved true. As the mammoths disappeared, so did the far more numerous bison. By century end, only a few hundred of them remained, though they had roamed the west in herds of millions; and we all know what happened to Indians. Because I don’t like being angry, I am not going to recount that story. In any case, I’m talking about mammoths.

“At this point, the story turns to my own grandmother, who was your great-great-grandmother. Her first name was Rosa, and her real last name was Red Mammoth, but she was adopted by missionaries when she was very young and took their name, which was Stevens. They sent her east to school, and she studied veterinary medicine, becoming the first woman to receive a DVM from her college. Although Rosa had little experience with Indian culture, she had good dreams. In one of these a mammoth came to her, a white female.

“‘I want you to devote your life to mammoth care,’ the animal said. ‘We have reached the point where anything could kill us: a disease gotten from domestic animals, ailments caused by inbreeding, or a change of heart among white men. What if Louis W. Hill decides there is a better way to promote his railroad? In addition, most of us no longer know how to behave.’

“‘I certainly want to work with large animals,’ Rosa said. ‘But I was thinking of cattle and horses, not mammoths. I know nothing about them.’

“‘You can learn,’ the mammoth said. ‘What you don’t find out from the herd in Glacier can be discovered by studying elephants, who are our closest relatives. If we are not saved, the bison will die as well; and I don’t hold out a lot of hope for Indians. These white people are crazy. There’s no way to farm the high plains or to raise European cattle on them. This country is too dry and cold. Yes, the white people can come here and ruin everything—overgraze the prairie, drain the rivers or fill them with poison, mine and log the sacred Black Hills. Once they have finished, they will have to leave or live like scavengers in the wreckage they have made. The only way to make a living here is through bison and us.’ As you might be able to tell, Granddaughter, the mammoth was angry. Like their relatives the elephants, mammoths can feel grief and hold serious grudges.

“Rosa was no fool. It was pretty obvious this was no ordinary dream. The white mammoth was some kind of spirit. She agreed to the animal’s request. Because she was Lakota and had a college degree, she was able to get a job at Glacier Park. This was in 1911, when the park had just opened and the famous tourists lodges were not yet built.

“She spent three years at Glacier. The job proved frustrating. The herd wasn’t growing. The animals ranged too far, maybe in response to tourists, who wanted nothing more than to photograph these spectacular and shy animals. Once out of the park, ranchers shot them, claiming that the mammoths stampeded cattle. In the park, they were occasionally shot by poachers and even by park rangers, if they went into musth, which is a reproductive frenzy, more common among males than females.

“The animals were less fertile than elephants. Rosa couldn’t tell if this was a natural difference between the two species; or if it was due to inbreeding or stress. The fact that mammoths seized cameras whenever they were able, flung them to the ground and stamped on them, suggested that part of the problem was stress. She was unable to convince the park administration to outlaw cameras.

“Finally, discouraged and thinking of leaving her job, she had another dream. A woman wearing a white deerskin dress came to her. The woman was middle aged and obviously Indian, her skin dark, her hair straight and black. Her dress had white beadwork over the shoulders. She had on white moccasins, decorated like her dress with white beadwork. Long earrings made of ivory hung from her ears. ‘This isn’t working,’ she told Rosa.

“‘I know,’ Rosa replied.

“‘We need a new plan,’ the woman continued. ‘Do you know about the mammoths which have been found frozen in ice in eastern Russia?’

“‘Yes.’

“‘Learn everything you can about them. They died thousands of years ago, but have been preserved well enough so flesh and skin and hair remains. Maybe it will be possible to revive them someday. White men are ingenious, especially when it comes to doing things that are unnatural.’ The woman paused. Rosa blinked, and the woman became a mammoth with snow-white fur and ice-blue eyes. The mammoth waved her trunk back and forth in the air like a conductor directing an orchestra. Her pale eyes seemed to look into the far distance. The dream ended.”

My grandmother got up and went to the bathroom, then took iced tea out of her refrigerator. It had lemon juice already in it, along with sugar and mint from her garden. She poured us both glasses and sat down again in her rocker. The tusk was back hanging on her wall, along with other mementos which she had tacked up: pictures of relatives, including my mom and dad, a bunch of postcards of places in the Black Hills. Not Mount Rushmore, but Spearfish Canyon and the Needles Road and Crazy Horse monument. Lastly, there was a necklace of silver beads hanging from a nail. A tiny, beautifully carved mammoth hung from the necklace, made of pipestone with turquoise eyes.

We sipped the tea. Grandmother rocked.

“What happened next?” I asked.

“To Rosa? She went to Russia, taking the eastern route via China since World War I had begun. Louis W. Hill funded her trip. He was worried about the Glacier Park mammoths, too. In his own strange way—the way of an entrepreneur, who must possess what he loves and make money from it, if possible—he loved his Blackfoot and their mammoths.

“Rosa ended in Siberia in a town with a name I can’t remember now, though it’s on the tip of my tongue. Maybe it’ll come to me. Old age, Emma! It comes to all of us, and even gene tech can’t repair all the damage! The houses were built of logs, and the streets were dirt. It was like being in the Wild West, she told me, except this was the wild east. The people were drunk Russians and brown-skinned natives, who looked like Indians or Inuit. It was easy to see where we Indians had come from, Rosa told me. The native people drank also. It’s a curse that goes around the North Pole and among all native peoples. Pine forest rose around the town. The trees were huge and dark and shut out the sky. Rosa said that’s what she missed most in Siberia, the sky. Our kinfolk, the Dakota, were driven out of pine forest by the Ojibwa, who were armed with European guns. The Dakota are still angry about this. Rosa said, in her opinion the pine forest was no loss; though the sugar maples and wild rice lakes might be something to mourn.

“She was in Siberia through most of the war, studying with a Russian scientist who was an expert on frozen mammoths. He was a young man, but he’d lost toes to frostbite and walked with a limp and a cane, so the Russian army wasn’t interested in him. A small fellow, Rosa told me, no taller than she was, wiry, with yellow hair and green eyes slanted above cheekbones that looked Indian. Sergei Ivanoff.

“This is the hardest part of Rosa’s story to tell,” my grandmother said. “I’ve never been to Siberia, and Rosa kept her own counsel about much that happened there. I imagine them in a log cabin, lamps glowing in the midwinter darkness, studying the mammoth tissues that they’d found. Sergei had brought equipment with him from the west, so they could stain the tissue and examine it under microscopes.

“As far as she and Sergei could determine, given the primitive science of the time, all the tissue they examined had been damaged—most likely by the process of freezing, then thawing, then freezing again. Ice is a remarkable solid, less dense than its liquid form. As the water in the mammoth cells froze, it expanded. The cells’ walls ruptured; the delicate natural machinery within was broken past any repair they could imagine.

“For the most part, they were able to ignore the war. Travel was interrupted, but neither of them was planning to travel. Sergei wanted more scientific supplies, but he was too poor to order them. Rosa sent letters to Louis W. Hill, asking for more money. They weren’t answered. She didn’t know if Hill had received them. In 1917 the war led to the famous Russian Revolution. This happened in the far west, in places like St. Petersburg. Only rumors reached them in their cabin. The local trappers and hunters said, Tsar Nicholas had died and been replaced with a new tsar named Lenin-and-Trotsky.

“One evening soldiers arrived on horses. They heard them coming, shouting to each other.

“Sergei said, ‘Take our notes and hide. I’ll deal with this.’

“Her arms full of paper, Rosa darted behind their cabin. It was winter, snow falling thickly. A mammoth carcass, thousands of years old, lay in a shack. Rosa climbed in among the ancient bones and skin. She crouched down, shivering. Did voices speak, muffled by the snow? She wasn’t certain. At last the silence was broken by two loud, sharp noises like doors slamming.

“‘Aaay,’ Rosa whispered. In her mind she prayed to her foster family’s deity, the God of Episcopalians. The door to the shack opened. A man spoke in a language she didn’t understand: Russian.

“She and Sergei had always conversed in German, the language of science, or French, the language of civilization.

“Instead of entering, the man went elsewhere, leaving the shack door open. An icy wind blew in. Rosa cowered in the middle of the mammoth. A vision came to her: she was in a hut. The walls were made of mammoth jaws. The roof beams were tusks. A dung fire burned on the dirt floor. Across the fire from her was an ancient woman, her long hair gray, her dress smoke-darkened and greasy.

“‘Stay here a while,’ the woman said. ‘Till the soldiers are gone.’

“‘Who are they?’ Rosa asked.

“‘Red Guards or White Guards, what does it matter? They are ignorant and desperate. Tsar Nicholas is dead, and his son will never rule. Tsar Lenin-and-Trotsky will not achieve the wonderful things he—they dream of. Things must get worse before they get better.’

“Rosa didn’t like to hear this, but she remained in the mammoth hut, which seemed warmer than her shack. The old woman fed dried dung into the fire. Her eyes were milky blue. Blind, maybe. Rosa couldn’t tell.

“Finally the old woman said, ‘You’ll freeze to death if you stay here. The soldiers have gone. Get up and go back to the cabin.’

“Obedient, Rosa stood and walked to the hut door. A mammoth skin hung over it. As Rosa raised her hand to push the skin aside, the woman said, ‘Remember one thing.’

“‘Yes?’

“‘The cold has done a marvelous job of preserving the bodies of my kin. But—like the revolution that is now beginning to fail—the job has not been good enough. What can make it better, Rosa? Don’t give up! Persist! And think!’

“Rosa turned to ask for more information, but the old woman was gone. For a moment, she stared at the empty hut. Then the dung fire vanished; and she found herself standing, numb with cold, at the entrance to the mammoth shack. Snow fell around her, kissing her cheeks. She couldn’t feel her hands. Her feet were barely able to move. Stumbling, she crossed the space to the cabin’s back door.

“Inside was chaos: spilled books, overturned furniture. Sergei lay on the floor in a pool of blood. The cabin stove was still lit, thank God. Red fire shone through the cracks around its door, and the cabin felt warm. She knelt by Sergei. Blood covered half his face, coming from a wound in his forehead. There was more blood on his carefully laundered, white shirt. His pince-nez glasses lay on the floor beside him, one lens shattered.

“‘Aaay, Sergei,’ she moaned.

“A green eye opened. ‘Rosa,’ he whispered. ‘They didn’t find you.’

“‘No,’ she replied, her heart full of joy.

“Examining him, she discovered he’d been shot twice. One bullet had gone through his shoulder. The other had grazed his head. Eager for loot, the soldiers had not given him a close look after he fell. Instead, they’d gathered the jar that held their little store of money; Sergei’s lovely instruments, made of brass and steel; her jewelry and most of their warm clothes. Half their books had gone into the stove to warm the soldiers while they searched the cabin.

“Once he was bandaged, Sergei said, ‘This is the end. We’re going to China. Do you have our notes?’

“Rosa hurried back to the mammoth shack and found them, fallen among huge bones and shreds of hairy skin. Oddly enough, they smelled of smoke, though there hadn’t been a fire in the shack. She carried the papers back to the cabin. She and Sergei packed what remained of their belongings, put on their skis and set out for the nearest town.

“Their journey to Beijing was long and arduous. In spite of many difficulties they made it safely. In Beijing they parted, Rosa going home to America, while Sergei remained to study Chinese fossils. It was he, along with Teilard de Chardin, who discovered the remains of Peking Man and he who carried those remarkable relicts to safety when the Japanese invaded China.

“Rosa never saw him again, though she carried a memento back with her. Do you know what it was, Emma?”

“No.”

“Think!”

I frowned and tried of think of something Russian. “A samovar?”

Grandmother laughed. “It was a baby. By the time Rosa returned to America, she knew she was pregnant, though it didn’t show when she reported to Hill. A good thing, since he was a fierce moralist.

“Do you know who the baby was, Emma?”

I could see the question was serious and thought hard. “Your mother?”

“Yes. The father was Sergei. You get your green eyes from him and the way they slant over your cheekbones. If you are lucky, you will inherit some of his intelligence and commitment to work.”

“Oh.” Grandmother had only two grandfathers, which made her unusual. Most people I knew had three or four. One had come from the Rosebud Reservation. I’d seen several pictures of him: a tall young man, his black hair cut short, looking stiff and awkward in his white clothing. In some of the pictures, he was next to his parents, who dressed in the old Indian way, blankets around their bent shoulders. In other pictures he was with his pretty young wife, who was mixed race and had light-colored eyes, striking even in an old photograph. They had two children who lived, Grandmother told me.

I had seen a single picture of my grandmother’s other grandfather: an old man with white hair and a trim, white beard.

“He’s old in the photo,” I said.

“Sergei? Yes. It was taken years later, when he won the Nobel Prize for Medicine. Rosa clipped it out of a magazine.”

“He never even wrote?” I asked.

Grandmother paused a long while. “I never knew for certain,” she said at last. “Rosa kept her own counsel.

“Once she was back in Montana, Rosa reported to Louis W. Hill. By this time, he was seriously worried. A disease had killed all the mammoths in the Ringling Brothers Circus. Neither the circus veterinary staff not the scientists brought in had been able to identify the disease, though it was suspected that it came from the circus elephants; several Indian elephants became ill at the same time, and one died. Now we know it was a herpes virus, which infects African elephants. It’s harmless to them, but can cause a serious illness in Indian elephants. We have a vaccine now; before that was developed, the disease was 100% fatal to mammoths.

“Thus far, Hill told my grandmother, this was an isolated incident. Nonetheless, he had taken precautions. Circus trains were not allowed to use the section of Northern Pacific’s high line which went through Glacier. The park lodges had been instructed to hire no one who admitted to a circus past; and law officers in nearby towns were asked to report any carnivals to the park administrations. This was not enough to keep Hill happy. He dug into his pocket and personally paid for an elite group of specially trained mammoth wranglers, who watched the animals and made sure that tourists saw them from a distance. Of course, there were stories about the wranglers in newspapers and magazines; Hill had a genius for marketing. There was even a movie that starred Tom Mix as an outlaw trying to make an honest life as a wrangler. Sagebrush and Mammoths. I think that’s the right name.

“Still, Hill remained concerned. What if some miserable little carnival managed to elude his precautions and get close to the park? An infected elephant might get loose and wander into the park, or a roaming mammoth might find the circus. What if an infected tourist managed to get close to a mammoth? He could hardly prevent tourists from coming to Glacier; and there was no way to check their backgrounds. The disease might be like rabies, which can infect many kinds of mammals. It might leap from elephants to elk or prairie dogs. Who could say?

“My grandmother thought Hill was worrying too much. More serious, it seemed to her, was the herd’s reproductive rate and the danger of inbreeding. Like elephants, mammoths had long gestation periods. They produced single children, and the children had long childhoods. This meant that the Glacier herd was increasing very slowly; and fear of infection meant that they could not introduce genetic variety by bringing in new animals. But she said nothing about this. Instead, she listened—silent and impassive—while Hill paced up and down his private railway car, explaining his concerns. Electric lanterns shone on polished mahogany, dark velvet, oriental carpets and gilded picture frames. The art within the frames was minor. Unlike J. P. Morgan, Hill was not a connoisseur.

“He was stern-looking man, with a trim-white beard. My grandmother said the picture of Sergei when he received the Novel Prize reminded her of Hill a little. He wore a buttoned vest, even in Glacier; though here in the west he wore jodhpurs and high boots, instead of suit pants and shoes. A battered western hat lay on a chair, along with a drover’s coat. His glasses were gold-rimmed pince-nez.

“He stopped finally and asked her to report on her trip. She did, though much was left out.

“‘What conclusions have you come to?’ he asked. ‘Have you learned anything useful, or have I wasted my money?’

“Rose had spent her journey home thinking. ‘I believe the secret of saving the mammoths is refrigeration.’

“Hill frowned. ‘Explain yourself, Miss Stevens!’

“Rosa took a deep breath and continued. ‘With luck, you may be able to maintain the herd in Glacier. But it is small; the total population of mammoths alive on Earth is small; and we now know that a disease fatal to the mammoths exists. We need a second plan, a position to which we can fall back, if the worst happens.’

“‘Yes?’

“‘I would like you to consider two things, sir. First is the remarkable history of the previous century. Consider how much was discovered, how many advances in human knowledge were made! Pasteur and Edison are only two of the geniuses who have transformed the world as we know it. Surely this present century will provide us with comparable discoveries and advances.’

“Hill nodded abruptly. ‘Go on.’

“‘Second, consider how well preserved the Siberian mammoths are—and for how long—in spite of imperfect conditions. It is my belief that freezing and thawing have damaged the Siberian tissue beyond hope of repair. But it ought to be possible to find a more efficient method of freezing flesh than that provided by a glacier! If we could find a way to freeze tissue samples without damaging the delicate machinery of the cells; and if we could then maintain the tissue samples at a constant temperature, without the freezing and thawing which has done so much harm to the Siberian tissue, then someday—not now, but later in this wonderful new century—it may become possible to start the cellular machinery in motion and reanimate the frozen flesh.’

“‘Balderdash!’ said Hill. He paced the length of the railway car, picked up a riding crop and paced back to her, hitting the crop against his boot. Thwack! Thwack! Thwack! ‘I hired you to give me solid science, not ideas out of scientific romances! This plan belongs in the mind of Mr. H. G. Wells, not in the mind of a scientist or in the mind of practical businessman.’

“‘Well, then,’ said Rosa. ‘Consider how useful a really good refrigerated rail car would be for your business. If you could bring the fruits of the west—unspoiled! In perfection condition!—to Chicago and the eastern markets—’

“Hill paused and laid the riding crop down on a mahogany table. Then he paced up and down the car several more times. Finally he stopped in front of a bell jar which contained a pair of beaded moccasins. He tapped the jar top gently. ‘In spite of all my efforts, in my heart of hearts I believe my Blackfoot are doomed. Progress can’t be stopped. Those in its way will be tossed aside, like a bison standing on a rail line when the express comes through. The future belongs to Anglo-American civilization. The Blackfoot, the bison, my mammoths all belong to an age which is ending or has already ended. But you are right about the usefulness of a really good refrigerated rail car; and modern science ought to be able to find something better than a car full of hay and blocks of ice. I will take your advice and invest in refrigeration; and you—Miss Stevens—can continue to your work on mammoth tissue. I will do what I can for the mammoths.’

“Rosa found herself grinning. ‘Yes, sir!’

“Why did he love the mammoths so strongly?” my grandmother asked. “I have never been able to decide. Was it their rugged power and persistence? Or the sense that they were survivors from a past age, as he was, the 20th century son of a fierce 19th century father? Whatever his reason, Hill established a research foundation devoted to the study of refrigeration. You must have seen it. It’s in St. Paul. A fine example of Art Deco architecture. The tile facade with trumpeting mammoths is especially distinguished.

“While the building was being planned, Rosa went to visit her relatives on the Standing Rock Reservation. My mother was born there. When Rosa returned to work, she left Clara with her Lakota relatives. This was hard to do, but she knew that Hill would not approve of an illegitimate child or a scientist who was also a mother. She refused to give up her research. The mammoths had spoken to her. She would not ignore their advice.

“She wasn’t a religious person. The faith she learned as a child faded over time; and she never found another one. But she took her dreams seriously, though she wasn’t sure where they came from. Maybe from her unconscious, as Freud and his followers argued; or maybe from a collective unconscious, as other psychologists had argued. In any case, Rosa knew, dreams could provide insight into scientific problems. The structure of benzene came to its discoverer—drat it! I have forgotten the man’s name!—in a dream.”

Grandmother got up and went to the bathroom again, then refilled our glasses with iced tea. The light coming through the lace curtains came at a lower angle now and had the rich gold of late afternoon. I was getting tired. But I had been raised to listen when elders talked. There were things to be learned here in Fort Yates which I could never learn in my experimental school.

Grandmother settled back in her rocker. “Rosa settled in St. Paul and began work at the Hill Institute. She was Indian and looked it; and she was female. Obviously there were problems at the Institute and in the city. Dislike of Indians goes deep in this part of the country; and at that time there were plenty of people in Minnesota who remembered the Great Sioux Uprising of 1862. Twenty-nine of our Dakota kinsmen were hanged for their part in the uprising, though not all of those who were hanged had taken part. Be that as it may, it was the largest mass execution in the history of the United States.

“Rosa encountered prejudice and difficulty; but the good opinion of Louis W. Hill went a long way in St. Paul in the 1920s. With him standing behind her, she met and overcame every adversity.

“She never married, possibly because she was Indian. White men were reluctant to marry an Indian woman; and there were not many Indian men with her education. Her child remained on Standing Rock. She visited Clara—your great-grandmother—as often as possible, but they were never close. The girl regarded one of Rosa’s cousins as her true mother, her mother of the heart. This saddened Rosa, as she told me in her extreme old age. Do you want more iced tea?”

I said no.

“In 1929, the stock market collapsed—as you ought to know, Emma. You’ve studied some history.”

“I do know.”

“What did you learn?”

“Never buy on margin.”

“That’s true enough,” said Grandmother and nodded her head. “But there’s more to be learned from 1929, as you find out when you’re older. At time the market fell, Louis W. Hill was heavily invested. He was trying to buy control of several west coast rail lines, so he could extend his father’s empire into California. By now he had the best refrigerated rail cars in the world; and he wanted to fill them with California produce.

“He was lucky. He didn’t go broke when the market crashed. But he had a hard time until the Second World War began. His attention turned from Glacier and the Hill Institute to saving the Great Northern Railroad. The Institute’s funds were sharply reduced. Research came to a halt. Rosa ended as a maintenance person, who made sure doors were locked and lights off and the freezers containing the mammoth tissue on. There was still enough money to pay the power bill. Louis W. Hill did not forget the Institute entirely.

“I asked Rosa once if she had felt despair in that period. She said, ‘I had a job, which was more than millions had, and I was able to keep an eye on my tissue samples.’ She was a stoic woman, who kept much to herself, maybe because she lived between two worlds. Who could she confide in, being Indian by descent and white by culture?”

I sort of understood this, since my dad was mixed race. But things had been worse back in the 20th century. I knew that.

“In 1938, in the depths of Great Depression, the herd in Glacier became infected with the same disease which had killed the Ringling and Lincoln Park mammoths. To this day, no one knows how the virus got to Glacier. Millions of people were on the move, looking for work. Many rode the rails; and some camped in Glacier. The rangers drove them out. But the park was large and the times troubled. It was not possible to keep all the hobos out. Obviously, none of these people were traveling with an elephant; and as far as Rosa was able to find out, none of them came into contact with the Glacier mammoths.

“Many years later I became interested in the question at a time when I was between research projects. I did a search on hobos and mammoths, using one of the CDC epidemiology programs. Rosa had no such resource, of course. The program did not find an epidemiological connection between hobos and mammoths, but I did find this.” Grandmother got up stiffly and went to her computer. It was on a wood side table, its monitor like a glass flower on a curving blue stalk. The keyboard lay to one side, where Grandmother had pushed it while working directly on the screen. As she approached the screen lit up. She touched it lightly with a bony finger.

“You ought to be interested, Emma, since your father plays the blues. This is a WPA recording made in Kansas City in 1936. It’s the only recording Frypan Charlie Harrison ever made, and the only time this song was ever recorded.” She touched the computer two more times. A guitar began to play old-fashioned country blues, the real thing, but on a really bad instrument. I could tell from the sound. My Dad wouldn’t have touched a guitar that sounded like that. Grandmother sat down.

A man’s voice—thin and cracked and distant—began to sing:

“Hard times is here, hardest I ever did see.

Hard times is here, hardest I ever did see.

Feels like a big bull mammoth stepped on me.

“Been riding the rails, looking to earn some pay.

I been riding the rails, looking to earn some pay.

That big bull mammoth keeps getting in my way.

“Blackbird flying and shining in the sun.

Blackbird flying and shining in the sun.

Won’t get no rest till my last day is done.”

There was more guitar playing, then the recording ended. The computer monitor went dark.

“The recording could have been made to sound like a modern recording,” Grandmother said. “For that matter, the technology we have now could make Frypan Charlie sound like a far better blues singer than he was, someone out of the past like Robert Johnson or a present day singer like Delhi John Patel. But this is from the Smithsonian Collection. It sounds the way it would have, if you’d played the original recording right after it was made in 1936. The notes say ‘big bull mammoth’ is probably a reference to the private police employed by railroads in the 19th and 20th centuries. Though it may also refer to the economic system that was treating Charlie so badly. In any case, the song isn’t about Rosa’s animals. But I like it. It’s the single thing we know about Charlie. He shows up in no other recording.”

She was silent for a while, her bony hands folded in her lap and her bright blue eyes gazing right through the living room wall, it seemed to me, into the West River distance. There was no one in my life like her then, and I have never found a replacement for her.

“I especially like the stanza about the blackbird. It reminds me of red-winged blackbirds in the spring. They show up before the marshes turn green, and each male grabs hold of the tallest dry stalk he can find and hangs there, as visible as he can make himself. ‘I’m here,’ he sings. ‘This is me. This is my individual song.’

“That was Charlie’s individual song. He’s lucky—and we’re lucky—that someone recorded it.

“For the next three years, Rosa struggled to save the mammoths. It was to no avail. In 1941, the last Glacier mammoth—a young, pregnant female named Minerva—passed on, with Rosa in attendance. A few animals still remained in zoos around the world, but not enough to form a breeding population. The species was doomed.

“She had wired Hill when the mammoth began to fail. He arrived a day after Minerva’s death. Rosa had already removed the fetus and put it into a refrigerator car to be shipped back to St. Paul. She was doing an autopsy of the mother when Hill walked in, dressed in an eastern suit with an eastern hat in his hand.

“He stood for a moment, staring at the corpse, small for a mammoth, but still large.

“‘That’s it,’” he said finally. ‘It’s over.’

“‘We have the tissue samples,’ said Rosa. ‘And I have frozen every infant that died.’

“He laughed harshly. ‘I never believed in your idea of saving the mammoths through refrigeration; but the advice you gave me—to establish the Institute—was excellent, as is the work you have done on freeze-drying.’

“I forgot to mention that,” my grandmother said. “As I told you. Rosa’s research in Siberia suggested that water was the culprit in the destruction of mammoth cells. Therefore she had investigated ways to freeze tissue in extremely dry conditions, so as to reduce the amount of water in the cells. She was not able to solve the problem of cellular destruction; but other scientists at the Institute became interested in her work as a method of preserving food.

“Hill had failed in his attempt to move south into California. First the crash slowed him, then that damned communist Franklin Roosevelt was elected, bringing trust busters like a hoard of Visigoths to Washington. Hill could see the writing on the wall; and looking across the Mississippi to the grain mills in Minneapolis, he could see there was a lot of money to be made in food. He gave up on the idea of a western railroad monopoly. Instead, Great Northern diversified into food processing. No matter how bad the times got, people still had to eat.

“His first product was the Pemmican line of dried food, designed to be inexpensive and durable. It came off the production line for the first time in 1940; and the U.S. Army became his first important customer. Along with Spam, another Minnesota product, Pemmican brand dried meat, fruit and vegetables helped to win the war. According to G.I. lore, Pemmican had a thousand uses. You could eat it, use it for shingles or to resole boots, for dry flooring in a tent, as shrapnel in a cannon or flak when dropped from a plane.

“After the war, Great Northern Food Products introduced the Glacier line of frozen vegetables. The packages featured romantic paintings of the national park: Hill’s beloved Blackfoot, elk, bison, bears and the vanished mammoths.

“By this time the Hill Institute was back in business, and Rosa was a senior scientist. She might not have been able to save the mammoths, but her work had been key to development of frozen foods. Louis Hill was grateful, though he held the patents to the freezing process, and she never got any royalties. I don’t think she minded. She wasn’t much interested in money.

“She was in her mid-fifties. You’ve seen pictures of her, Emma. I’ve always thought she was as handsome as a woman gets—pure Lakota, with cheekbones like knife blades and the high nose of the Indian on the old-time nickel. Her eyes were as black as space and as bright as stars. Our old stories say we used to be star people. I could see that in her eyes, even though she always dressed like a white, and my relatives on Standing Rock said she thought like a white.

“It’s hard to pick the worst time for Indians. Was it when we lost our land, not through wars—we Lakota won our wars!—but through treaties? Or was it when we starved on the reservations and were shot down by soldiers and agency police? Or when our children were stolen from us and taken to boarding schools, dressed in white clothing and punished if they spoke their own language?

“I think the worst time was the middle of the 20th century, when our elders died, the ones who had grown up in the old days and learned the old ways from their parents and grandparents. White people had their history in books and movies that showed cowboys shooting down the Indians. Our history was in the minds and mouths of those old men and women. When they died—the last survivors of Little Big Horn and Wounded Knee, people who had known Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse and seen mammoths wading in the shallows of the Missouri River—then it seemed as if we might vanish as entirely as the mammoths. A few bodies might be left, shambling drunks or white people in red skins, but we would be gone.” She paused and drew a deep breath, then got up and went for more iced tea.

We drank in silence for a while. The tea was so cold against my tongue! So tart with lemon and sweet with sugar! The sunbeams that entered the room were almost horizontal now. Dust motes danced in them.

“I think it was in this period that Clara, her daughter and my mother, came to dislike Rosa so much. She would come out to Standing Rock in her Chrysler New Yorker—a big, heavy, burgundy-colored car—climb out and stand in the dirt road, looking tired and remote. It was a long, hard drive from St. Paul, and that may explain her expression. But Clara took it as a disowning.

“Rosa always wore slacks, shirts and comfortable shoes on these trips. Even wrinkled by the long drive to the reservation, her clothing looked expensive; and her comfortable shoes shone under their film of South Dakota dust. To Clara, Rosa was a white woman in a red skin. Living on the reservation, watching the old people die and the young people give in to despair, nothing could be worse to her. Rosa had turned her back on the Lakota, so Clara turned her back on Rosa.

“This was done silently. Rosa had money to give, and Clara’s family on the reservation was desperately poor. She took her mother’s money, but refused to visit her in St. Paul—a terrifying place!

“Clara married in 1945. Her husband was a soldier from Rosebud, back from the war: Thomas Two Crows. I don’t know how they met, only that he was very handsome and full of stories. My relatives on Standing Rock told me that later. Somehow the stories—about Rosebud and his travels as a soldier—tantalized Clara, though she was afraid to visit St. Paul. I don’t know why. Maybe because he was a handsome young warrior of proven courage, full of apparent confidence.

“I was born in 1949, the only child that lived, though there had been two before me. Thomas was drinking heavily by then. He died a few years later. He’d been drinking at a friend’s house. After a while, they noticed he wasn’t there. He must have gone out to pee, my relatives on Standing Rock told me. It was snowing, with a strong wind blowing, and he got lost. They found him two days later, after the storm ended, frozen like one of Rosa’s mammoths. If I sound cold when I tell you this, remember that I didn’t know him. He died when I was so young. And maybe I’m angry with him for losing himself in drink and the winter. It was a long time ago, and I should have forgiven him by now. But Clara needed him.

“I did know her, though she died when I was still a child. I remember her sitting in our little house, which Thomas paid for with his soldiering money. She was silent for hours at a time. Her anger made the house seem dark to me. It wasn’t the darkness of night, with stars blazing above Standing Rock; but the darkness of a winter afternoon when the sky is low and gray, and a cold wind is blowing out of the north. As much as possible, I stayed outside and waited for Rosa’s next visit. She came in her big, burgundy-colored car, dust all over the side panels. Once—it must have been in late summer—the entire front of the car was caked with dead grasshoppers. She hated that and spent hours cleaning the grill.

“I’d run to her, and she’d embrace me. She smelled like no other person I knew. Later I discovered it was the scent of fine soap and perfume. There were always gifts for me: wonderful toys, books and her own stories about the Twin Cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis. I gave the toys away. It would have been wrong to keep them, when the children around me had nothing similar. But I kept the books, and I treasured Rosa’s stories. The Twin Cities sounded like the Emerald City of Oz to me. I wanted to visit her, and Rosa invited me many times. But Clara wouldn’t let me go. She was afraid that Rosa would steal me, the way the white people had stolen so many Lakota children.

“Well,” said Grandmother and paused. “This story is about Rosa, not about me.

“She kept at her research, going to the Hill Institute almost every day. The work she did in this period did not lead to any important discoveries. Her real task was making sure that her collection of frozen mammoth tissue remained frozen.

“The mammoths endured nine years longer, the last one—an old male at the Cleveland Zoo—dying in 1957. It was the end of an era, white commentators said. The Old West was gone, along with its most famous denizens. We heard about the death out in the Dakotas and mourned deeply. The sacred mammoths, our allies for generations, were no more. We and the few remaining buffalo were alone in the terrible world made by white men. Our grief was so deep that people died of it. Most were old people, but that was the year that Clara became sick.

“T.B. killed Clara—and bitterness and grief, I have always thought, though she might have lasted longer in a warmer place. That house was cold as well as dark. What was left for her? The old ways had died, along with her husband and the last mammoth, Trojan. She was losing me to Rosa. She sat in the dark house, in her own darkness, and coughed. Rosa tried to get her good medical care, but Clara wouldn’t leave the reservation.

“Rosa came to Standing Rock and sat with her while she was dying, though only at the very end. As long as Clara was conscious, she refused to have Rosa near her. It was a bad situation, and it did not make the other relatives happy. This was not a good way to leave life. But Clara did.

“When she was gone and in the ground, Rosa brought me to St. Paul. I finally made the journey I had wanted to make for years. What a way to make that journey! I sat beside Rosa in her old Chrysler New Yorker, stiff with grief. The fields of eastern South Dakota went past, flat and green and foreign. Trees, which were rare among the golden-brown hills of my home, became common. They didn’t remain along the creeks and rivers. Instead, they grew in rows between the fields and in clusters around the farm houses, and—finally, as we reached eastern Minnesota—in woods that covered the hilltops.

“All the people we saw were white, their faces burnt red by summer, their hair brown or blond. They gave us unfriendly looks. ‘Don’t worry,’ said Rosa. ‘They may stare, but that’s as far as it’s likely to go. As a rule, Minnesotans don’t say what’s on their minds.’

“This didn’t reassure me. But we arrived safely in St. Paul. Rosa drove me through streets lined with tall elms and bigger houses than I had ever seen before. The lawns were as green as the Emerald City. Sprinklers flashed in the sunlight like diamonds. I felt utterly lost. Now I began to cry—not for Clara, but for myself.

“‘It will be all right,’ said Rosa.

“I was still crying when we arrived at her house. I stopped once we were inside, awed by the house’s size. Two full stories and three bedrooms! One bedroom would belong to me, Rosa said. The house was old, built more than fifty years before, but Rosa had installed a state of the art bathroom, and a new, electric kitchen. I was entranced and frightened. How could I use objects so clean and shining? Clara had made do with an outhouse and a well.

“There was television set in the living room. On top of it stood a mammoth family, carved out of honey-colored ivory. It was mammoth ivory from Siberia, Rosa said, thousands of years old. A great curving mammoth tusk hung over the living room fireplace. This came from an animal that had died in the 20th century. ‘They lasted so long,’ Rosa said sadly. ‘If we had managed to keep them alive just a little longer, I am confident that modern science would have found a cure for their illness and a way to keep them in existence indefinitely. Well, their tissue remains, and it is my job to make sure it stays safely in the Institute freezers. There are times, Emma, when the best one can do is preserve.’

“Louis W. Hill had died in 1948, though I didn’t learn this until later. His will left a substantial sum to the Hill Institute, but only if the institute continued to maintain Rosa’s mammoth remains on its premises in a safely frozen state, with Rosa on staff as the custodian. Of course, there were scientists at the Institute that thought this was folly. They wanted Hill’s money, but not the mammoths or Rosa. The rest of her career was a fight to keep her job and the freezers full of mammoth fetuses and tissue. It was as hard as trying to maintain treaty rights. But as I said, I learned this later.

“The house’s dining room had two splendid photographs of mammoths by Ansel Adams. Louis Hill had commissioned him to record the Glacier herd in its last days. Adams was not an animal photographer, but mammoths were part of the west he loved deeply; and they were vanishing. He accepted the commission. Both of Rosa’s photographs showed the animals at a distance, grazing in a meadow below tall pines and snow-streaked mountains. Seen with Adams’ eye and taken with his box camera, the mammoths seemed as solid and permanent as the landscape they inhabited.

“I came to Rosa’s house in the summer of 1958, at the age of nine. By mid-August I was settled into my new room. The windows looked into green caves made of leaves, a disturbing sight for someone used to the wide, treeless distances of western South Dakota. When sunlight shone in, it was tinged green, and green shadows danced on my floor and walls. The days were hot and humid, the nights were full of noise: leaves rustling, bugs singing, radios playing, people talking on neighboring porches. The sky, hedged by rooftops and foliage, held too few stars.

“It was hard, but I survived that first summer. Children are resilient! In the fall I went to school. Rosa managed to get me into the University of Minnesota lab elementary school, though this wasn’t easy at short notice. She said I would get a better education and encounter less prejudice. ‘Prejudice against Indians is deeply rooted here. But the world is changing. The powers that were defeated in the last world war have shown us how bad human society can become. Maybe we will learn from this and make the world better.’

“Unlike Clara, Rosa was an optimist. It may not be a more rational way to see the world, but it makes life happier.

“She was right about the education I got at U Elementary and U High. It was good. To this day, I don’t know how much prejudice I encountered. I was shy and lonely, the only Indian student in a school that was entirely white, except for one African-American family and a single Asian-American student. For the most part the other students were polite and left me on my own. Once or twice, a few were cruel in an ordinary, adolescent way. The other children stopped that behavior. I was not to be a target or a friend.

“You have to remember that I wasn’t Indian in an obvious way. My last name was Ivanoff. It was the only thing that Clara got from Sergei, except possibly for Russian sadness. Rosa thought it would be better to use Ivanoff than Two Crows. ‘White people are more likely to take you seriously, if you have a white name,’ she told me. I could have used Stevens, which was her white name, but I think she wanted that small memento of Sergei.

“My eyes were blue; my hair was brown and wavy; and I was a lot lighter than I am now, because I was so bookish. Either I was inside reading, or I was outside under a tree reading. Sunlight scarcely ever touched me.

“I don’t think it was prejudice which kept me alone, though I can’t be certain. I think it was my bookishness and inability to understand the other students. What on earth made them tick? Their lives—made of dates and grades—seemed small and confined, like the neighborhoods hemmed in by houses and trees. Their plans seemed equally small: a college education, followed by a good job and marriage. Surely there was more to life than this. I wanted something larger, something as wide as the sky over Standing Rock, though I didn’t know what. So I read science fiction and dreamed.

“My one friend was the Asian-American student, Hiram Fong. His sister was retarded; we used that kind of language in those days; and he was his family’s hope. They were betting on a sure thing, Rosa told me. ‘Hiram is as smart as your grandfather Sergei.’

“How can I describe him? He wasn’t shy like me, but he had a cutting wit that scared the other children; and he was far too bright to be popular. Half the time I didn’t understand what he was saying. Almost no adolescents in any era understand irony, which was Hiram’s favorite kind of humor; and few adolescents of the time understood 20th century physics, which was his passion. My twin loves were biology and literature, though I wasn’t interested in analyzing works of fiction, any more than a fish wants to analyze water. I simply wanted to sink into them and live among words the way a fish lives among underwater plants.

“We both liked science fiction. That was the bond that held us together. And we liked each other’s families. Hiram’s father was a research doctor at the U. His mother had an advanced degree, I think in psychology, but stayed at home to care for Hiram’s sister, a sweet Down’s Syndrome child, who did far better than such children were expected to do in the 1960s.

“Their house was like Rosa’s, large and full of books and artifacts. In the case of the Fong family, the artifacts were from China: silk rugs and porcelain vases, framed examples of calligraphy, opium pipes. Opium was a wonderful medicine, Dr. Fong said, if used prudently and with thought. When shoved down people’s throats by the British empire, it was a curse.

“Like Rosa, the Fongs saw a world differently from most of the people I knew, and that made me comfortable with them. Although they didn’t like frozen food—Mrs. Fong always used fresh ingredients when she cooked—they respected the work Rosa had done. ‘At present, we have a limited need for frozen tissue,’ said Dr. Fong. ‘But I’m sure the need will increase, and your grandmother’s work will become increasingly important.’

“‘Maybe we’ll be able to make people someday,’ said Hiram as he picked over his dinner with flashing chopsticks. ‘Out of frozen parts, like the Frankenstein monster. Or maybe we’ll be able to freeze people and wake them a thousand years in the future. That sounds more interesting than frozen peas.’

“‘There will probably be more practical uses for the techniques which Rosa Stevens has pioneered,’ said Dr. Fong.

“Mrs. Fong, who was a reader, said, ‘The monster wasn’t made from frozen parts. He might have turned out better if he’d been fresher. Cynthia, please don’t play with your food.’

“Hiram and I graduated from high school in 1967. The United States was at war in Asia and at home, against its own citizens. You must have studied this in school, Emma.”

“The burning of the cities,” I said. “And the Black Panthers and AIM.”

“‘The American Indian Movement came a little later. Otherwise you are correct. Even Minneapolis burned a little in this period. It was a modest blaze, compared to places like Detroit.

“Hiram went to Harvard. I went to a small liberal arts college outside Philadelphia. He and I swore to stay in touch, and we did for our first year. After that, circumstances pulled us apart. Hiram’s interest in physics intensified and left him little time for any other interest. I developed an interest in politics. He thought the war was wrong, and he had no desire to go to Vietnam; but he knew he was likely to need a security clearance in order to do his kind of physics. Protesting the war was a risk. He wouldn’t take it.

“I felt sorry for him and a little contemptuous. How could anyone be so careful, in that era when everything was being questioned and the world seemed full of possibility?

“The thing your teachers may not have told you is how full of hope the late 60s were. Yes, there was violence. The police and FBI and National Guard were dangerous. Plenty of people—good people—died in fishy ways; and plenty went to prison for things they almost certainly did not do. But the times were changing, and many of us thought we were building a new world in the shell of the old. As it turned out, we were wrong, at least for the time being. The 60s wound down slowly through the 70s, and in 1980 Ronald Reagan began a long period of reaction.

“I still think Hiram was wrong to be careful. We stopped corresponding, because we no longer had anything important to say to one another. Our friendship ended before the war did, not with an argument, but in silence. I was able to track his later career through the science magazines. It was impressive. I have always been surprised that he didn’t win a Nobel Prize like Sergei.

“After graduation, I stayed in the east and began work on a Ph.D. in biology. I never got involved with AIM, though I read about it in the papers. The occupation of Alcatraz! The battles on Pine Ridge! Why didn’t I come home to St. Paul or Standing Rock? Maybe because I felt more comfortable with political theory than with shoot-outs; and I didn’t feel that much like an Indian; and my issue was peace.

“When I came back to St. Paul for visits, I noticed that Rosa was undergoing a strange transformation. Always cold and increasingly indifferent to her appearance, she wrapped herself in cardigans and throws, which made her like a 19th century Lakota matriarch in a blanket. Her hair, which had always been short and neatly styled, grew long. She wore it in braids wound around her head or hanging down. Her face, wrinkled by age and sunlight, looked like the faces of my great-great-aunts.

“She still went to the Hill Institute daily. Louis W. Hill’s will had mentioned no retirement age for her. This outraged the other scientists. By this time the Institute had a director who’d decided—after consulting several lawyers—that the best thing to do was out-wait Rosa. Louis Hill was a man with a passion for control and an eye for detail. He had micromanaged the building of Glacier Park. Even the trim on the famous lodges and the design of their menus had gone past him for approval. Death might cause him to lose control of Glacier. It belonged to the American people, at least in theory. The Institute was his alone. Living or dead, he would control it. His bequest had numerous stipulations; if these were not followed, his money was to go to Glacier for maintenance of the lodges.

“The director could try to break the will, but he was likely to fail. He could ignore the stipulations, but the Department of the Interior had been coveting the Hill money for decades and was likely to sue. Better to put up with Hill’s eccentricities: the out-of-date Art Deco building with its tile facade of extinct mammoths and the doddering Indian scientist. Let Rosa potter around her office and lab. In the end, she would die of old age, and the space could be put to better use.

“She lived into her 93rd year and kept going to work until the last few weeks of her life. When she died—in 1985—I inherited her house.

“As she requested, I had her cremated. She wanted to be buried on Standing Rock. I wasn’t sure how my relatives would feel about this, so I didn’t tell them what I was going to do. Remember that I had been living in the white world for a long time. I stopped learning how to be Lakota at the age of ten, and there were big gaps in my Lakota education.

“I took Rosa’s urn to the reservation and borrowed a horse from my second cousin Billy Horn. By this time, Billy was a middle-aged man with a comfortable gut; but he had been a lean and angry AIM activist with long, flowing hair and a feather tucked into the band of his cowboy hat. His hair was in two braids now. He still wore a cowboy hat, minus the feather; and he still had a rifle—he was one hell of a shot—but he didn’t pose with it anymore. Instead, it stayed in his pickup till he needed it. ‘Four-legged varmints now,’ he told me. ‘I gave up shooting at the FBIs. It’s a waste of ammunition.’

“The horse Billy loaned me was an appaloosa with an easy gait and beautiful manners. ‘It’d be easier to fall out of a rocking chair,’ he said. ‘Try to stay on board. You don’t want to hurt Moonie’s feelings.’ He stroked the mare’s lovely neck.

“I rode into the dry, golden hills. Hawks soared above me in a wide, wide blue sky. These were Swainson hawks, not the Redtails I knew from Minnesota. It came to me as I rode that I loved this country. The Missouri was a blue gleam in the distance. One of those damn lakes, made by the damn Corps of Engineers. But from here you couldn’t see the eerie, unnatural pool of water, edged with bare mud flats. Instead, you could imagine the river as it ought to be, full of shoals, edged with willow and cottonwood bottoms. There would be—should be—driftwood floating in the slow, late-summer current, coming to rest on shoals; and mammoths should wade in the shallows, sucking up the muddy water in their trunks and spraying one another.

“I unpacked my shovel and dug Rosa’s grave. After I buried her, I burned some sage. Moonie cropped dry grass nearby. That afternoon I decided I’d come back to Standing Rock, though I wasn’t sure when. I’d finish my Lakota education.

“I returned to Billy’s house at twilight. He took care of Moonie. ‘Didn’t do her any harm that I can see. Did everything go all right? Did you get Rosa settled?’

“I looked at him with surprise. He grinned. ‘You may have a lot more degrees than I do, but that doesn’t make me stupid, Liz. It was pretty easy to figure out what you wanted Moonie for. I’m planning to follow your trail tomorrow, go and talk to Rosa and make sure everything’s okay with her.’

“‘I wasn’t sure I ought to do it.’

“‘Crazy Horse said his land was where his dead were buried. That’s how we nail all this down.’ He waved his hand around at Standing Rock, hidden in darkness. ‘So long as we can keep the anthropologists from digging everyone up. If I was going to argue about anything, it’d be the cremation. It isn’t traditional. But Rosa always did things her own way.’

“He was joking about the anthropologists. We’d managed to stop them by then and gotten a lot of our ancestors back from places like the Smithsonian. The current problem was people who stole artifacts and fossils from our land. An entire Tyrannosaurus Rex taken and sold to the Field Museum! People have no shame! They will steal anything from Indians!”

My grandmother paused and glared, her blue eyes gleaming brightly. Then she took a deep breath and continued her story.

“I went back to St. Paul and looked at Rosa’s house. I’d visited her regularly, but it wasn’t my home anymore; and there were places—the basement and the attic—where I hadn’t been in years.

“The attic looked ordinary: unfinished, full of dust and boxes. I’d have to go through them all, I thought and groaned out loud. The basement was full of freezers. Not the kind you use for storing your Glacier frozen peas. These were the big freezers you’d find in a lab. Heaven knows how she got them down the stairs. Large men and some kind of hoist, I imagined. A note had been taped on one of the freezer doors. ‘Dear Liza,’ it said in shaky print. “I don’t trust the director of the Institute, so have moved my tissue here. There are two backup generators. Please keep the temperature constant. Love, your grandmother.’

“I laughed with surprise, though not with pleasure. Rosa must have gotten stranger than I had realized in her last years. Moving mammoth tissue into her basement? How was I going to sell the house in this condition? I laughed again and shrugged my shoulders, then made sure the freezers were running properly. One thing at a time. First I had to clean the house.

“Some people’s lives change dramatically, Emma, in a single moment, through a single decision or event. That has never happened to me. My life has always changed slowly, through a series of small events and decisions.

“I took my first step at Standing Rock, when I realized how much I loved those golden hills. Step two was finding the freezers and making sure they were running properly. Without thinking it through, making no conscious decision, I made the freezers my responsibility. If there is a moral in my story, it’s do nothing lightly. I’m not complaining about the way my life turned out. I have enjoyed it so far. But I wish I’d been more mindful in places.

“Step three was cleaning the house. You may think of that as a tiresome project, like cleaning your bedroom. But I was going over my grandmother’s life, exploring it the way Lewis and Clark explored the Missouri River and Rocky Mountains. Like them, I found plenty of mammoths; and like them, I did a lot of hard, dirty work. If I had to decide which I’d rather do—clean another house like Rosa’s or drag a boat up the Missouri River, I’d have to consider a long time before making my decision.

“The closets were not difficult. Rosa had gotten rid of most of her clothing. The woman I remembered as elegant had spent her last years in blue jeans, flannel shirts, frayed cardigans and battered shoes. Nothing was in good enough condition to give to a homeless shelter. It all went in the trash.

“The boxes in the attic were business papers, most of them years old. It’s amazing what otherwise sane people will save! Maybe Rosa became anxious as she aged and afraid of throwing anything out, or maybe she simply became tired of sorting through papers. Almost everything could be burned, which I did on a cold, wet day when rain beat against the living room windows. There is something satisfying about sitting by the fireplace on such a day and watching old tax returns curl and blacken.

“Some of the burden of Rosa’s belongings lifted off me that day, though I knew the hardest work still lay ahead. The house was full of books. There was no way I could fit Rosa’s collection into my small apartment in Massachusetts; and I didn’t want most of the collection. But a book can’t be thrown away, and selling it or giving it away has to be done carefully. The best thing is to give books to friends. Rosa’s friends were gone by then. She had outlived them all. And none of my friends were in the Twin Cities.

“I planned to keep the books on Indians and packed them for shipment east. Then I went in Rosa’s den and looked at the books on mammoths. They lined one wall. Another wall was windows, looking out on Rosa’s garden, which had become a wild mixture of perennials and weeds. She had been such a careful gardener in the past! A third wall had her desk and an antique file cabinet made of oak. Two of the drawers were full of articles on mammoths and freeze drying, many written by Rosa. The other two drawers were full of Rosa’s notes.

“Surely the contents of the den should go somewhere special. This was Rosa’s life work, and she had been a distinguished scholar. I gritted my teeth and called the director of the Hill Institute. I don’t remember his name anymore. It was something that sounded East Coast and English stock: two last names stuck together with a title in front. Dr. Ramsey Sibley or Crosby Washburn. His accent was Midwestern with a trace of East Coast refinement. He was very sorry to hear of my grandmother’s death. A remarkable woman! An inspiration to us all! And no, he wasn’t interested in her papers. ‘We have moved in a new direction here, away from mammoths, Ms. Ivanoff. The university might be interested. I suggest you try them.’

“I mentioned the mammoth tissue. Dr. Sibley chuckled. ‘I’m afraid your grandmother became a bit eccentric toward the end. She decided the tissue would be safer in her basement. We didn’t oppose her decision. As you may know, Mr. Hill’s will required us to keep the tissue in perpetuity. But it belonged to Dr. Stevens; she had the right to remove it. Once it was gone, our lawyers told us, we do not have to take it back.’

“This sounded like shifty law to me, but I wasn’t going to argue. I thanked Dr. Crosby Sibley for his help and hung up.

“There I was, Emma, with a den full of mammoth books and a basement full of frozen mammoth. I could pack the den and put it in storage. But the tissue was a serious problem. I couldn’t put the house on the market until I found a home for it. I spent the next two weeks desperately calling academic institutions. But it was summer. The people who made decisions were not around.

“I was still sorting and packing. Rosa’s sheets and towels were too worn to sell or give away. They went in the trash. The kitchen had a few things I wanted: handmade cups and dishes by local potters. Looking at the rest, I decided on a yard sale.

“At last I reached my childhood room. The elm outside the window was gone, replaced by a silver maple. Otherwise, the room was unchanged. A star quilt covered the bed. One of my cousins on Standing Rock had made it. My favorite stuffed animal, a threadbare mammoth named Mamie, lay on the pillow. One of her glass eyes had been replaced years ago and was blue. Its mate, which was original, was golden brown.

“I had reached some kind of limit. It isn’t easy to sort through the belongings of the person who raised you. If I hadn’t been so busy, I would have realized that I was sick with grief. In addition, I was frustrated. I couldn’t leave the freezers untended; and I wasn’t going to be able to find a new home for the tissue before fall. I’d have to ask for a leave of absence from my job. If my department wouldn’t give it to me, I’d have to resign.

“That evening I sat in Rosa’s living room and drank wine, looking at the objects I hadn’t yet packed: the mammoth figurines on top of Rosa’s ancient TV, the mammoth tusk over the mantel, Ansel Adams’ photographs and most of the books. What was I going to do? Why had Rosa landed me with this mess? Why had she gotten old and died? Didn’t she realize how much I would miss her? Even though I hadn’t been home often, I had drawn comfort from knowing she was there, pottering around her garden and her tissue. I am an elder now, Emma. But I still miss my own elders, Rosa especially.

“I’ve never been much of a drinker. It’s a bad habit for Indians. But that night I had a glass or two too many. I felt a bit hazy when I went up to bed. Instead of going to the guest bedroom, where I had been staying, I went to my old room. I took the star quilt off the bed and folded it, then lay on the clean sheets, which smelled of lavender. Rosa had loved the stuff. I’d found sachets tucked between her threadbare linens and in every clothing drawer.

“I dozed off, lying next to Mamie, and dreamed. I don’t usually remember my dreams, and when I do they are usually fragments of the day’s events, fitted together crazily, like a jigsaw puzzle done wrong—evidence that white psychologists are right, when they say our dreams are simply our minds sorting through recent experiences, as part of the process of storing them in our RAM.

“This dream was different. I was in a house built of bones. The only light was a small, dim fire; and shadows filled the house. Nonetheless, I was aware of the bones. They were huge.

“A tiny, withered woman sat across the fire from me. She wore a hide dress, stained by smoke and spotted with grease. It might have been white once. Now it was dun. Her hair fell over her shoulders, long and loose and gray.

“‘I don’t want this problem,’ I said to her. ‘Rosa handed it to me after she died. She didn’t give me a chance to argue or refuse. I don’t belong here. This isn’t my life.’ I waved around at the house made of bones, though what I really meant was Rosa’s house.

‘“Don’t talk to me of life,’ the old woman said. ‘My people are dead; and your people are likely to follow. Isn’t that the promise which was made to the Lakota? If they respected the mammoths, the buffalo and the Lakota would survive.’

“‘The buffalo have survived,’ I said.

“‘Just barely! How many were left at the end of the Great White Killing? A few hundred! All the thousands alive today are descended from those few. I am a spirit, not a geneticist, but surely the species has gone through a genetic bottleneck. It cannot have the genetic variation it had two centuries ago.’

“‘The same would be true of mammoths, if they were brought back,’ I said.

“‘Rosa saved a lot of tissue, though it did not come from a large number of individuals. It might be possible to find variation among so many chromosomes,’ the old woman said. ‘We mammoths might be in better shape than the buffalo, if we were alive. We could not be in worse shape than we are now.’

“Another voice spoke from the darkness. ‘You have studied biology. You know about the new technologies that are coming into existence. All these white men starting companies to make money out of genes! The technology we need to re-create our people will be invented soon.’

“Now I saw the second person: a solidly built, middle-aged woman. Her long, braided hair was black; and her dress was the creamy color of clouds on a hot summer afternoon, when they shine through the haze above Standing Rock.

“‘Biology is a tricky business,’ I said to the second woman. ‘You can’t listen to the men who start gene tech companies. Of course they promise miracles in the next year or two. They’re looking for investors. I have no reason to believe it will possible to re-create mammoths from frozen tissue in the near future.’

“‘It won’t be possible at all, if the tissue isn’t there,’ said the crone.

“‘There has to be tissue in other places,’ I replied.

“A third voice—young and clear and musical—spoke. ‘Rosa was the great expert on the freezing of mammoths. Has anyone has done work equal to hers? How good are the samples in other places?’

The third woman—slim and graceful, in a hide dress as white as fresh snow—moved out of the shadows. She stopped next to the matron. The crone sat at their feet. They all stared at me, their dark eyes shining in firelight.

“I said, ‘I’ll find a home for the tissue. I owe Rosa that much. But that will be the end of it. I have my own life to live.’ The dark eyes kept watching me. ‘Are you sure you are Indian spirits? You know a lot about biology.’

“‘First of all,’ the crone said. ‘We are in your dream. Obviously, we know what you know. And we, like you, are at the end of the 20th century. White people have a god who exists outside time and history and pays far too little attention to his creatures’ misbehavior, in my opinion.

“‘Indian spirits live in the world we helped make. Why not? We did good work! It’s a good place! And like people of every kind—the two legs and four legs, birds and fish and insects—we change in response to time and events. Don’t expect us to be like the spirits in an anthropology textbook.’

“‘And don’t drink so much,’ the matron said. ‘It isn’t good for you.’

“That was the last thing the women said to me. I think they turned into mammoths, and the house vanished, so we were all standing on a wide, dark plain, under a sky packed full of stars. But maybe I made that part up. Maybe I made everything up. I have never been certain about dreams, Emma, though many other people are, and I respect their opinions.

“I woke my old bedroom, next to Mamie. For a while, I lay in the darkness, trying to fix the dream in my memory. Finally, I got up and turned on a light and wrote the dream down. Did I believe I had actually spoken with spirits? No. The dream came from alcohol and my stay in the mammoth-haunted house. Rosa was the person who spoke with mammoths, not I. Still, it had been so vivid and had seemed so full of meaning.

“It was time to tackle the books, I decided. Not Rosa’s scholarly collection, but the rest. Her popular science books were out of date; I wasn’t interested in modern Russia; and I rarely read novels. Almost everything could go into the yard sale, along with 30 years of Scientific American and National Geographic.

“I held the sale three weeks later. The day was hot and bright, the sky full of big cumuli that were likely to become thunderclouds by late afternoon. I moved Rosa’s belongings onto the front lawn: books and kitchenware and a few pieces of furniture.

“The first person to arrive was a tall man with long, straight, black hair. It flowed over his shoulders and down his back. He wore a plaid shirt, jeans, work boots and a wide belt with a silver and turquoise buckle. Maybe you don’t think I can remember him so clearly after all these years. But I do. Not that it’s hard to remember what Delbert wore on any given day. His costume rarely changed. In the winter, his shirts were flannel, and sometimes his belt buckle was beadwork. His brown skin was lightly scarred by acne. His eyes were hazel, though I didn’t notice this at first. How could I? He was bent over the books. He was obviously Indian, but not Lakota. Ojibwa, I thought, looking at his broad chest. An academic or a member of AIM or both.

“Other people came and bought furniture and dishes. The man remained with Rosa’s books, going through them carefully. Finally, he came over with a stack. They were mostly histories and mostly about Minnesota and the Upper Midwest. ‘I was hoping for more on Native Americans,’ he said. ‘And mammoths. They aren’t nearly as important to the Ojibwa as to the Lakota and Dakota, but we do have some mammoth stories and songs.

“‘I’m keeping those,’ I said.

“‘My tough luck,’ he said and smiled. I noticed his eyes. There were white people in his background. Probably voyageurs. ‘My name is Delbert Boisvert,’ he added. ‘You must be Rosa’s granddaughter. I saw your name in the obituary. I’ve been watching for a yard sale, since I learned that she died. I don’t rice or sugar like my relatives. But I do hunt and gather books.”

“We ended on my porch, talking and drinking lemonade. Delbert helped people load the furniture and dishes they bought. And he recited a song about mammoths that the famous anthropologist Frances Densmore had written down:

“They are coming.

They are coming like thunder,

Oh, my Mide brothers.

“After that, he recited an Ojibwa love poem, also written down by Densmore:

“I thought it was

A loon.

It was my lover’s

Splashing oar.

“‘Depending on the direction of the canoe—arriving or departing—it’s a sad or happy love song,’ Delbert said. ‘I like happy songs. For me, the canoe is arriving.’

“That’s how I met your grandfather. I had always been careful about love before, maybe because I’d lost my mother and home when still young. I had learned that people were not reliable. They would die like Clara or vanish out of my life like my Standing Rock relatives.

“You would think I could have looked at Rosa and seen her reliability. She loved me and cared for me as long as she lived. If I had been paying better attention, I could have learned about integrity and loyalty. Rosa was always herself and always loyal to me.

“In any case, we talked till midnight. Then he went home, and I went to my bedroom. There were no dreams that night, just me staring into darkness and seeing Delbert’s male beauty. There’s nothing lovelier than a good-looking man. He’s like a tom turkey spreading his feathers or a mammoth bull trumpeting.

“Del came back the next morning, and we spent the day talking about my life in St. Paul and Massachusetts and his life on the Red Lake Reservation and in Minneapolis.

“I was partly right about him. He had studied at the University in the studio art department, though he didn’t have a degree. ‘It cost too much money and time. I didn’t have enough of either.’ He was a painter, he told me. ‘In fact, I am two kinds of painter. I do houses to make a living and pieces of canvas to keep from going crazy.’ He knew the AIM people, though he wasn’t a member of AIM. ‘I have disagreements with them about strategy and personal disagreements as well. But I won’t speak about them with disrespect.’

There was a story there, which he did not tell. In many ways, he was an odd duck, more Indian than I was, but not as Indian as his relatives on Red Lake or in the slums along Franklin Avenue in Minneapolis. In those days, Indians were the poorest people in America, the most badly educated, the sickest and the shortest-lived. Even black people lived longer than we did. But there Delbert and I sat on the porch of Rosa’s house, drinking iced tea instead of whiskey or beer, two Indians with enough money to get by and good white educations. But I was haunted by the hills of Standing Rock; and he was haunted by Red Lake’s forests; and we were both haunted by our relatives and ancestors.

“As I said before, my life has turned on small events and decisions that I often did not notice at the time. When I came west to close Rosa’s house, I was certain that I was going back to Massachusetts.”

Grandmother paused. I could tell she was thinking. Two vertical lines had appeared between her eyebrows. “I’m not sure I would have sold the house, even if I had not met Del. It was my childhood home and far closer to Standing Rock than my apartment in the east; and the mammoth tissue was a problem. The more I considered the question, the more I realized I couldn’t dump it on the first institution that expressed an interest. It was Rosa’s life work, a sacred trust. I had to be sure it was used properly.

“But falling in love with Del made my decision almost easy. He was settled in Minneapolis and not interested in moving east. If I went back to Massachusetts, I would lose him. I was not willing to do this. He was so handsome! I am not sure I should tell you this. Does a granddaughter need to know that her grandmother was a romantic, willing to change her life because she met a beautiful man?

“Mind you, there is nothing wrong with beauty, so long as you have the right standards. The right kind of beauty tells you that your potential mate is strong and healthy, able to produce and maintain a large tail or a pair of enormous tusks. It may tell you that he is intelligent, since intelligence depends—at least in part—on good health. It also depends on education and experience. I am speaking about real intelligence, working intelligence, not the intelligence found by scientists in labs. Del had good health, a good education and lots of useful experience. He was bright and a fine artist. I don’t regret picking him.”

I was too young to have an opinion on how to chose a mate, though I was interested in how Grandmother went about it. Grandfather lived in New Mexico now, in a house with a big studio full of paintings. I couldn’t tell if he was handsome. To me he looked like Gramps: a tall, thin man in faded jeans and a faded shirt, almost always blue. He wore his gray hair in braids; and there was usually a paint-stained rag tucked in his back pocket.

“In any case, I fell in love. We spent the summer together. In the fall, I went east and packed up my apartment, bringing everything back to St. Paul.

“Del moved into the house while I was gone and finished the attic. Rosa had left it as it came to her: bare wood and dust. He sheet rocked the walls and ceiling, put skylights in facing north and covered the floor with black ceramic tiles. They were easier to clean than wood, he said, and he liked the way they looked.

“It’s been decades since I last saw the studio, but if I close my eyes, there it is: light flooding through the skylights, reflecting off the white walls and making the black floor shine. Del’s paintings lined the room. At that point, his art was abstract, but I could see the landscapes of northern Minnesota in them: broad, dark, horizontal bands like pine forest edging a lake or river; narrow, vertical lines like the trunks of birches; blues as clear as the winter sky; and reds like a sunrise or an autumn maple.

“I loved that studio and the house and Del. It wasn’t a wrong choice I made.

“When I got back, I sent out my resume and got a job at a local community college, Introductory Biology at first. I found that I liked teaching. I hadn’t, as an instructor in the east. My students were older than the kids at a university; and they saw education as a way to get ahead in a world that wasn’t getting any easier. I think they saw the hard times coming sooner than I did. Thanks to Rosa, I was middle class and out of touch, the way the middle classes so often are. You’d think being Indian would have helped.

“In any case, my students were serious about learning; and teaching is a pleasure, when the students want to learn. Some of them—a surprising number, it seemed to me—liked learning for its own sake, maybe because it was an unexpected gift. Oh brave new world, that has such knowledge in it!” Grandmother smiled.

“The college had no facilities for research. But I had plenty to do. The research could wait.” She leaned back and flexed her bony shoulders and sighed. “The next thing I knew, I was pregnant with your mother. I hadn’t planned to be; it was a genuine accident; but I knew at once that I was going to keep the baby. I was in my middle 30s. If I was going to have children, it was time to get started. By this time, I knew Del and his family well enough to be confident that his genetic material was good. And too many Indian children had died over the years of poverty and disease and simple killing. Too many had been taken from their families and raised white, like Rosa. Too many lost their parents to illness and alcohol. I wanted this child to live and be raised by her parents.”

Grandmother paused and I had a sense she was thinking about things she might not tell me. Finally she said, “Del was less certain. Artists have trouble settling down. Their art asks too much of them. But we talked it through, and I had help from his family. His mother wanted grandchildren, and he owed a lot to her. She had spotted his ability when he was a child and sent him to live with relatives in the Cities, so he’d be able to go to art museums and buy art supplies. Without her, he might have been—what? Another unemployed fisherman, after the Red Lake tribal fishery closed down?

“His father’s mother was on my side as well. Delores. She was an elder, very much respected. Your mother was going to be her first great-grandchild. There was no way she was going to let Del off the hook.

“They all would have preferred an Ojibwa mother, but at least I was Indian. They had worried about Del. He had dated a lot of white women.”

“What did Great-grandfather Claud say?” I asked.

“He said, they would help, if Del needed help. ‘All the venison and wild rice you can eat, and you know my mother can sew. That baby will have the finest clothes of any baby in the Twin Cities.’ He kept his promise. Your mother had clothes that could have gone into a museum, covered with beadwork and trimmed with fur. We put them away, in case hard times came, and we needed to sell them.

“The baby was born and named Delores, after her great-grandmother. I had planned to go back to work. But my contract with the college was for a year, and they didn’t renew it. The pregnancy had been difficult. I had taken a lot of time off. I suspected this was the reason my contract wasn’t renewed, but I couldn’t prove it. In any case, losing the job was almost a relief. I didn’t bounce back from the pregnancy as quickly as women are supposed to. I needed time to recover; and your mother was so tiny and vulnerable! No more so than any baby, but I couldn’t imagine putting someone so small, who could barely move and couldn’t speak, in the hands of a stranger. I also could not imagine Del as a stay-at-home father. He’d get interested in what he was painting and not even hear the baby cry. I had some money in the bank, my inheritance from Rosa, not a lot, but enough for a while. I decided to wait before I began to look for another job.

“All this time the mammoth tissue was still in the basement. I suppose I should have been a better custodian, but I had been distracted by moving and teaching and having the baby; and I needed time to think. The tissue might be worth money, and we certainly needed money. But would it be right to sell Rosa’s life work? I might be able to use the tissue to find a new job, once I was ready to work. I could tell an interested school, ‘If you want the tissue, you have to take me as well.’

“I hadn’t been entirely negligent. I’d written letters and made phone calls and given away some of the tissue. That was prudent. You shouldn’t keep all your eggs—or any organic material—in one basket. Schools knew about me now. More and more were becoming interested. Biotechnology meant it was going to be possible to analyze mammoth DNA and compare it to the DNA of living elephants. That was the kind of achievement that made the papers and TV news and helped get grants. I didn’t have the only mammoth tissue on the planet or in the country; but Rosa had made sure that her tissue—my tissue—was in very good shape. I had the freezers and generators checked on a regular basis, and I paid the electric bill as soon as I got it every month.”

Grandmother paused. “Where was I?”

“In St. Paul with my mother,” I replied.

“We scraped through a year. I took care of the baby and gave away mammoth tissue. Del moved away from abstraction. Now his paintings showed Indians hunting and fishing and ricing. Partly this was the influence of Patrick DesJarlait, the Ojibwa artist from Red Lake. He was dead by then. But Del had studied his work. Of course he had! The world was not full of Ojibwa painters in those days.

“It was also the influence of our trips north to show little Delores to her relatives. Del came back with sketchbooks full of Claud at work. Your great-grandfather had lost his job when the tribal fishery closed. Now he made his living in the old way, hunting and trapping and ricing and doing some construction. Home repairs, mostly. He was also good at fixing cars. On a reservation full of rez cars, this was a valuable skill. Mostly, he got paid in food or thank yous. If you wanted to know poor in those days, you went to a reservation.

“There were sketches of Del’s mother holding the baby and old Delores bent over her sewing. Sometimes, when he painted, the figures remained modern Indians; and sometimes their clothes became traditional. There was one I loved—Claud, dressed like an old-time warrior, bent under the hood of a beat-up rez car, working on the engine. I could see the influence of DesJarlait and the WPA or maybe it was the Mexican muralists. Claud in his buckskin and fur and feathers looked like a heroic worker in a post office mural. He was big and bold and bright.

“Del had a show at the American Indian Center in Minneapolis. Then he got a job at the new casino being built south of the Twin Cities. There was a tiny reservation there: Prairie Lake, and this was the end of the 1980s, after the Supreme Court ruled that states could not regulate Indian gaming. It was the start of good times for a handful of Indian bands, the ones near white centers of population. Most, of course, were in the middle of nowhere and did far less well with gaming. But it was a help. I will not be cynical about it. We had been so poor for so long. Even a little money was wealth; and for a few bands, like the ones at Prairie Lake, the money was serious, even by white standards.

“The band decided to name their casino Mammoth Treasure. I suppose it was a good name. Their emblem was a golden mammoth, a male with huge twisting tusks. They wanted a mural in the entrance lobby, showing traditional Indian activities. Del’s work fit the bill. Even though he was Ojibwa, and they weren’t, he got the job.

“I went down to Prairie Lake with him sometimes. The lobby was circular, and the mural went all the way around the curving wall. If you stood in the middle of the lobby, you were surrounded by a nineteenth century landscape, rolling prairie with clumps of trees. It was a cloudless day in mid-autumn. The grass was tan and gold. The trees were red and brown. In the foreground were Indian hunters on horseback. In the middle distance bison grazed; and in the far distance were four groups of mammoths, one on each side of the lobby, in each of the four directions. Birds sailed above the prairie, so high up that their markings were invisible. But the length of their wings said they were eagles. Hard to say what they were doing there. Bald eagles are fishers and usually keep close to water. The raptors over a prairie ought to be hawks.

“Was the mural corny? Yes. But Del had a streak of romance that went right through him, along with a streak of irony; and the band building the casino absolutely loved the mural; and we needed the money.

“Of course, most of the time when I went down, I saw white plaster and scaffolding. The mural was a work in progress. I nursed little Delores and watched Del or talked with the band treasurer, who was a woman, a big matron with gray hair. The first dribbles of gambling money had gotten her a fine set of new teeth, but it couldn’t do anything about the lines in her face. Marion Forte. A good name. She was as strong and solid as a fort. She took to me once she discovered I was Lakota. ‘I have nothing against the Ojibwa,’ she told me. ‘Even though they used to be our enemies. But the Lakota are our cousins. How did you manage to marry an Ojibwa?’

“I told her I wasn’t sure. It simply happened. She nodded. ‘That’s possible. He is a good painter, even though those eagles shouldn’t be up there. We aren’t close enough to the Mississippi. And those hunters are overdressed, unless they’re going to war. All that paint and feathers! No one hunted bison that way.’

“I told her I had wondered about that, and she laughed. ‘Most of the council are men. They wanted to see warriors, but they didn’t want people to come in and see a war. This is a place to have fun. We can’t have blood in the lobby.’

“She was an easy woman to talk to, about the age my mother would have been, if she had lived, and both sharp and kind. So I told her about Clara and Rosa and my childhood and my current life. In the end—it was inevitable—I told her about the freezers in the basement, and the tissue which was an inheritance and problem.

“Marion looked thoughtful. ‘Mammoths,’ she said. ‘No wonder Del has painted them. He’s living with what’s left of them.’ That was the end of the conversation.” My grandmother looked at me. “But you must know the next part of the story.”

I nodded. “She went to the council and said, they should put money into research.”

“Yes,” said Grandmother. “And they refused. They were too new to having money. They wanted it for themselves and rest of the band and for the casino, so they could make more money.”

“‘Men never think ahead,’ Marion said. ‘That’s why they make good warriors. The council president came back from Korea with a chest full of medals. He has never looked beyond the next hill in his entire life. Well, this hill is the new casino. Let’s wait and see what lies on the other side.’

“I went home and looked at the bank balance and sent out my resume. Del was getting paid well for the mural, but that money wouldn’t last; and our utility bills were high.”

Grandmother shrugged. “Why make a long story longer than it is by nature? The Prairie Lake council voted to set up a foundation. It took another four years, with Marion pushing at every meeting; but it finally happened. By then Del had a job teaching at the Minneapolis College of Art, and he’d even had a show in a white museum—not his current work, but the older abstractions. Young Delores was old enough for day care, though she didn’t like it. How your mother yelled the first time I left her!

“The University got the first grant for mammoth research; and I went to work for the research lab. The U had no choice. I came with the money and the mammoth tissue. Did I feel guilty, using the tissue and the Prairie Lake band’s clout? Not a bit. It was the 1990s by then, the last great hurrah of capitalism before the dark days of the early 21st century. The white people were busy grabbing everything they could with both hands. I thought, I could do a little of the same, enough to pay the bills and get myself back into research.

“Of course the people in the lab resented me, a woman and an Indian, who had gotten her job through luck and casino money. How could I be any good? I won’t bother you with the story of my struggles. This story is about the mammoths, not me. But always remember that power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. ‘If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation … want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters…’”

At the time I did not recognize the quote. It was Frederick Douglass, of course. Odd to hear my grandmother talk about the ocean on the bone-dry Dakota prairie.

“The first several grants came from Prairie Lake. Then other money began to come in, as the lab reported its first success, which was decoding mammoth and elephant DNA and finding out that mammoths were closely related to Asian elephants. The next step was obvious, though not easy: building a viable mammoth egg and implanting it in an elephant.” Grandmother smiled. “Imagine what a statement that is! It used to be, we could not imagine re-creating extinct animals, except maybe in science fiction stories. Now we have the quagga—the real quagga, not the bred-back version; and the giant ground sloth, though I’m not sure what use it is, except as an exhibit in a zoo. And we have two species of mammoths, though the Siberian species is a genetic patchwork. Still, it’s different enough from our Missouri mammoths to be called a separate species.

“I have to say, my contribution to the research was not key; and I did my own best work later in another area. But I still remember—how could I ever forget?—the morning when the first baby mammoth was born and helped to stand by a vet and the surrogate mother’s mahout. The rest of us watched on a monitor. The calf was tiny, unsteady, wet and very hairy. The mother fondled it with her trunk, unsurprised—as far as we could tell—by all the hair.

“The first species brought back from extinction! Not from the edge of extinction, but from the void beyond the edge! The research team broke out champagne, and the Prairie Lake band ordered new commercials for their casino starring the baby. That led to a fight, but the band had good lawyers, and the grants had been carefully written. Prairie Lake owned the right to publicize any results of the research they funded. My colleagues at the U made angry jokes about Indian givers. But the band never asked for its money back. It simply wanted its share of the results, which included—ultimately—enough mammoths to start their own herd. Always be careful what you sign, Emma.”

She stopped and leaned back, her eyes closed. It was a long story. Of course, I felt pride. My family had helped save the Missouri mammoths, though most of the mammoths lived north and west of us. The great river was diminishing, due to lack of snow in the Rockies; and the moist bottom lands the mammoths needed no longer existed.

“There’s one good side to that,” Grandmother said. “They blew up the Oahe Dam. That damn lake is gone. It never looked natural, and it took so much of our land. Though it didn’t do to us what it did to the Mandan and Hidatsa and Akikawa. They lost their entire reservation. I know it happened in another century, and I know that people shouldn’t hold grudges. Life has gotten better for us and many people. But I hated that lake. I could dance on the dry land where it used to be. In fact I do. That’s where we hold the annual Standing Rock powwow.”

She didn’t say ‘powwow.’ She said ‘wacipi,’ which is the Lakota word. But I knew what she meant.

“It would have happened, anyway,” Grandmother said. “They would have built mammoths from other DNA. Rosa wasn’t the only person who kept tissue, though hers was the best. So don’t feel too proud, young Miss Emma. History is a collaborative process. The important thing is to be a part of history and on the right side, which is not always easy to determine. It’s not enough to hold onto the past, though we Indians proved that losing the past is dangerous. We almost died of trying to be white. Not that white people have done much better. They almost destroyed the planet by getting and spending and laying waste.

“What do we keep from the past? What do we discard? How do we change? These are all important questions, which all of us have to answer. The mammoths are important, though they may not graze by the Missouri again in our lifetimes. But the bison are back—over a million; and the herds are still growing; and you can see them here on Standing Rock. There’s plenty left to do to remake the planet, but we have achieved a fair amount already. One step forward and two steps back, and then one or two or three steps forward. We dance into the future like dancers in a Grand Entry.”

*   *   *

At the end of every visit, I went home, rocking through Standing Rock past the grazing bison. My mother’s second cousin Thelma in Minot gave me dinner and a bed. In the morning, I rode the eastbound rocket train. Windmills turned. The train glided through forest. My parents waited on the platform in Minneapolis. If I wanted to see mammoths, I could go to Mammoth Treasure Park by the casino. They were there, wading in an artificial river and spraying each other with water, their ancient eyes glittering with pleasure. Above them in the blue sky might be eagles. They have grown so common that they are everywhere these days.