{five} Stone Circles

Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle.

LAKOTA ELDER BLACK ELK, Black Elk Speaks, 1932

By the time I’d settled my score with Wolf Willow, a couple of years had passed, and life and work had been moving along, ordered and full of purpose. Then, as another winter closed down around us and just as I was preparing to write the last chapter in my prairie book, something terrible happened to us. Keith was diagnosed with cancer. Unable to foresee the three years of treatment that would follow or his eventual recovery, we were jittery, brittle with anxiety.

For Keith and me in this time of crisis, Eastend and its circle of hills offered a respite not just from the city but also from the wonderful, terrible technologies—the wheezing scanners, the cold sizzle of radiation, the monstrous hypodermics—that were busily saving Keith’s life. Naturally, all of our worries came with us when we hit the highway, and sometimes the deserted streets and empty rooms that greeted us on our arrival threatened to make things worse. Our thoughts echoed in our minds and in the small-town silence: Don’t die, don’t die, don’t die. But then something would happen to break the spell and draw us back out into the light.

For instance, we might be sitting at the kitchen table and look up just in time to see, right there in front of us, a tiny round bird with big round eyes and a spangle of red atop its head, feeding in the pine tree at the front of our house. It couldn’t be, but there it was, a ruby-crowned kinglet, a spectacular little number that is typically found far to the north and west but that has a pinpoint distribution right here in the Cypress Hills. And now, we were among the lucky few who had seen it.

Or we’d take the dogs for a walk in some scuffed-up, dung-strewn patch of pasture on the outskirts of town, heads down, wrangling dachshunds or preoccupied by our own thoughts, until one of us caught a flicker of movement under the thin thatch of grass. “You’ve got to see this,” a voice rings out, and then we’re both down on our hands and knees, watching a bizarre creepy-crawly with the body of an ant, the hairy integument of a woolly bear caterpillar, and the red-and-black warning coloration of something poisonous, hurrying from wherever it was to wherever it wants to be. Back at the house, we Google “red black hairy ant” and discover that what we’ve seen is a kind of wasp with a sting so powerful that people only half-jokingly have dubbed it the “cow killer.”

A marshy seep beside a broken-down bridge yields a ground-hugging patch of gentians the color of winter twilight. Small sinks in the course of a summer-dry gully are studded with shooting stars and blue-eyed grass, flowers so precisely formed and so perfect that they could have been crafted out of porcelain. Ruby-red strawberries glisten in the grass, condensing the sweetness of summer into a morsel the size of one’s littlest fingernail. Through all the long, trying months of Keith’s treatment and subsequent recovery, the hills repeatedly offered us these small moments of beauty and surprise, quietly distracting us from our troubles and suffusing every cell in our bodies with a species of joy. One or both of us might be dying, but for the moment, we were alive.

Denn alles Fleisch es ist wie Gras, und alle Herrlichkeit des Menschen wie des Grases Blumen.1 All flesh is like grass, and all loveliness is like a flower in the field.

Was there ever such a country for empathy with our frailty?

It is a characteristic of the prairies that things hide in plain view. Think of pronghorns, for example. For all their gracile runner’s build, they are substantial animals, comparable in height and weight to Great Danes or female mountain goats. Yet seen at any distance, a herd of pronghorns looks strangely insubstantial, as if they were caramel-colored exhalations of the caramel-colored grass. (It’s amazing what several million years of evolutionary coexistence can accomplish!) I’ve been known to laugh out loud when a blotchy, whitish boulder resting in a field suddenly raises its head and fixes me with its dark eyes. That ain’t no rock, ma’am. That there’s an antelope. It’s enough to make you wonder what you’ve been smoking. The prairie’s hallucinatory powers seem to be strongest when clouds settle low over the curve of the land, and the light is caught, shimmering, between earth and heaven. In the gloaming, a jackrabbit standing against the sky looms as big as a deer, and the ground-nesting birds that leap up at your feet almost immediately vanish into the dazzle. It was on one of those strange twilit days that Keith and I stumbled across something half hidden in the grass that was to give my travels in the hills a sharp new focus.

We were walking our dogs on the north bench of the Frenchman Valley, upslope from the T.rex Centre, twenty minutes or so from our house, following a route that we had taken dozens of times before. If we’d been in the mood, we could have dropped in to visit the fossil clamshell in a coulee a short hike below, but the weather was brisk—a perfect day for striking out across the high tablelands that line the valley. So away we went, shouldering into the wind, our words blown from our mouths in tatters, our heads and eyes turned down. The earth beneath our feet was covered with a Persian carpet of ground-hugging vegetation, no more than ankle high: a finely knotted fabric of selaginella, or club moss, fringed with Artemisia frigida (silver sage), and tufted with the curly leaf blades and dainty eyelash-shaped seed heads of Bouteloua gracilis, blue grama grass.

The whole place was strewn with rocks, rocks, and more rocks, all river rounded and smooth, as if they had been flung from fast-moving water onto this arid shore. In a sense, of course, that is exactly what happened, since these cobbles are a manifestation of the Cypress Hills Formation (last seen atop the cliffs along the Ravenscrag road) and were carried here by mighty rivers thirty or forty million years ago. No wonder the rocks are blotched and crusted with lichens; even at a rate of millimeters per year, they’ve had time to grow. No wonder the stones are strewn about at random, dropped wherever Miocene rivers and, much later, Ice Age glaciers happened to leave them. There is no rhyme or reason to these deposits, but that doesn’t stop your eye from trying to find a pattern by literally connecting the dots, searching for meaning where none is possible.

And, then—wouldn’t you know it?—a hint of order appears. At first, you’re sure that you are seeing things, but no, the array of stones that you’ve stumbled across really does form an arc. See, you can follow it, step by step, all the way back to where you started, a complete circumference. And now that you know what you’re looking for, you quickly locate half a dozen more rings clustered round about, each set apart from its neighbors at a companionable distance. Some of the circles are drawn with single rows of rocks, while others are framed by two or more stones laid side by side, so they seem to form a narrow path. Walking on these eloquent relics is like walking the spiral pathways of a labyrinth.

Apparently, the play of light and shadow on that particular day had allowed us to detect a phenomenon that had previously been hidden from view. Although Keith and I had seen tipi rings before, we had never found any for ourselves. Now here we were, the proud “discoverers” of the tracings of a small encampment. Since then, we have had the good fortune to trip across dozens of similar rings along the Frenchman and in other places round about, including a large and well-documented site in Chambery Coulee, overlooking the T. rex quarry. (As one of our new Eastend area acquaintances once commented, evincing more pleasure at the thought than her choice of words denotes, “This whole part of the country is infested” with stone circles.) But no matter how many times the experience is repeated, there’s nothing like a first kiss, and the impact of that very first time has never faded.

I’ve lost count of the number of times we’ve been back to visit that spectral village since we first encountered it. Part of the wonder of the place is the precarious chance of its survival, on a fringe of natural prairie bordered on the south by the drop of the valley and on the north by a straggly stand of cultivated grass. If the farmer had made even two or three more rounds with his plow, the whole site would have been lost and the stones would have ended up, sans stories, in anonymous rock piles. It is thanks to the thin soil and uneven ground along the valley rim that these stone circles were spared from destruction.

The special charm of the site lies in its location on a bench overlooking the modern town, as if daring you not to make the connection between then and now. Standing in the center of the largest circle, where the fire would have been, I try to imagine the people who lived here for an unknown span of days at some unknown time in the past. Were they here two centuries ago or two millennia? I find myself straining to hear fragments of their conversation, their laughter, the barking of their dogs, but all I hear is the wind and the great silence.

And then I’m eight years old again and standing on the road that cuts across the Indian Quarter on my father’s father’s farm. In my mind’s eye, I see my grandmother and the buckskin-clad princess just as I had left them all those years ago, still facing each other, mute and immobile, across an empty field. I’m reminded of picnicking by the Beaverlodge River, thinking of the disappeared encampments and of the people who had lived in them. Now we were here, having a good time, and they were . . . well, the best I could say was that they were somewhere else.

By settling in Eastend, Keith and I had unwittingly gained intimate access to the past, not only to the stupendous grotesqueries of evolution and earth history but also, as the tipi rings made clear, to the more recent, domestic experiences of people. So here I was, a mortal being; a wide-eyed traveler in a country that knew more tales than a mere human could ever tell, a dislocated child who longed for an attic full of old stories, a disgruntled adult who smelled a rat in the accepted version of the homestead saga, and a writer at the end of her big Prairie project, with the prospect of time on her hands.

An intention began to form in my mind, hazy at first, like a cryptic boulder-that-could-be-an-animal seen from afar but becoming clear as time advanced. I would find out who these stone people were, learn what had become of them, and see how their story intersected with the myth of agricultural settlement. I’d pry open the locked wooden chest labeled “1870–1885, End of the Frontier” and reveal whatever moldy, disagreeable truths were stored within.

If I had wanted a reason for being in Eastend, I now had one. My mission, should I choose to accept it. Had I suspected how much I had to learn or how painful the truth can be, I might have set the project aside and gone on to other things. Even without that foreknowledge, I harbored certain doubts. What if I wasn’t the right person to do this work? After all, I was just a visitor here, a glorified tourist really. Who was I to muck around with local history? More troubling still, I am the descendant of incoming settlers, with no filial link to the people who had made the tipi rings. Was it disrespectful, or just plain wrong, for me to attempt to address their history?

But even as I wrestled with these misgivings, that first vague impulse to proceed was coalescing into a plan. And I was encouraged by what, logically, must have been mere happenstance. It was another monochrome, overcast day, and this time we had driven up onto the north bench and parked our truck on the edge of a dirt track that parallels the valley rim. Our plan was to hike the few hundred yards cross-country to the edge of the bank, pause and take in the view, and then proceed toward the headland where the tipi rings were. At first, everything was perfectly ordinary, and we scuffed along, oohing and aahing over plants, rocks, lichens, the spiral ascent of a hawk. Then, just as we rounded the last curve, almost in sight of our goal, we were stopped in our tracks by a voice that seemed to come out of nowhere. And again—a throaty, mournful song, punctuated by high-pitched yips.

“What was that?”

“A coyote?”

“Look. I think it’s straight ahead.”

Against the silvered sky, a silvery shape raised its muzzle and uttered a tremulous howl.

“Isn’t that where the tipi rings are? It has to be sitting right in the middle of them.”

Calling our dogs close beside us, for the coyote’s safety and their own, we continued slowly forward, not at all sure what would happen. The coyote watched us advance for a minute and then retreated to the top of the next rise, far enough away for comfort but still in plain sight. When we moved, the coyote moved; when we stopped, it stopped up ahead and sang, for all the world as if it were trying to tell us something. This continued for the better part of an hour, until we’d finished our walk. When we finally turned our backs on the valley and headed for our vehicle, the coyote sat down on its haunches and watched us retreat, its quavering notes continuing to bridge the gap in between.

In all likelihood, we had encountered a juvenile member of the species Canis latrans, still behaviorally naïve, which had vocalized in response to the novel stimulus of our activities. Strange to say, however, that’s not how it felt. Instead, I had an eerie sense that the land was speaking to us, calling us yet again to pay attention.

Back at my desk in the city, I settled down to learn as much as I could about the stone circles. As always with a new quest, my first step was to make a sweep through all of the available sources—books, articles, websites, videos, whatever I could find—looking for anything and everything that might have a bearing on my subject. The goal is, as quickly as possible, to catch a glimpse of the big picture, figure out who’s who and what happened when, and generally get myself oriented. It’s a bit like constructing a mental map of a landscape when you first encounter it, the way Keith and I had done in our early days in Eastend.

Almost immediately, I found myself entangled in a dense thicket of words. It took me a while, for example, to figure out that the term “Blackfoot” could refer to either a single nation, the Siksika, or more generally to the member nations of the Niitsítapi, or Blackfoot-speaking peoples, a group that includes the Siksika (Blackfoot), the Káínai (Bloods), and the Piikáni (both the North Peigan of Alberta and the South Peigan, or Blackfeet, of Montana). What’s more, the Niitsítapi alliance formerly included the A-a-ni-nin, a people who are also known as the Atsina or Gros Ventre. At times the Niitsítapi were at peace with the Ktunaxa, or Kootenais, who migrated with the seasons from the mountains onto the plains. At other times (particularly times of hunger), these nations faced each other as enemies. The same was true of the Niitsítapi’s relationship with the Nakoda, or Assiniboines, and the Nehiyawak, or Cree, two allied groups who had expanded westward and northwestward onto the plains by the 1600s. Adding to the remarkable cultural scene on the northern plains were the Yankton and Plains Sioux, also known respectively as the Dakota and the Lakota. And, of course, by the eighteenth century, there were also the half-breeds, or Métis people.

It was like entering an unknown country, and it left my mind in a spin. But sometimes, in the midst of the confusion, my research turned up a gem. That was the case with a story, first published in 1901, under the title of “Little Friend Coyote.” 2 I wish I could tell you exactly when and where this story was first recorded, but unfortunately the text doesn’t say. I’m guessing northern Montana, in the mid- to late 1800s. All we know is that the story was told “by the flickering fire in [a] Blackfoot skin-lodge” by an unnamed elder (probably a member of the Piikáni nation) and that it was written down, with the aid of an unnamed translator, by an amateur ethnographer from New York City named George Bird Grinnell. If a photographer had been present, he’d have captured a huddle of figures seated around a luminous spire of smoke and the glint of a steel nib scratching away in a notebook.

Grinnell understood the importance of recording the stories as accurately as he could. “As the Indians have no written characters,” he noted, “memorable events are retained only in the minds of the people, and are handed down by the elders to their children, and by these again transmitted to their children, so passing from generation to generation.”

“Until recent years,” Grinnell continued, “one of the sacred duties of certain elders of the tribes was the handing down of these histories to their successors. As they repeated them, they impressed upon the hearer the importance of remembering the stories precisely as told, and of telling them again exactly as he had received them, neither adding nor taking away anything. Thus early taught his duty, each listener strove to perform it, and to impress on those whom he in turn instructed a similar obligation.”

So here is the story as nearly as possible as Grinnell recorded it. One summer when the Siksika (Blackfoot) and Piikáni (South Peigan) people were camped together, a young Blackfoot man named Front Wolf and a Peigan woman named Su-yé-sai-pi met, married, and decided to settle with the Peigan camp. Unhappily for Su-yé-sai-pi, however, her new husband was a natural leader and was often away from home on one expedition or another. So when he announced that he was going to visit his parents, Su-yé-sai-pi, who had been lonely during his absence, insisted on going along. Front Wolf tried to dissuade her—“The distance is great,” he told her, “and there is danger on the way.” Her parents were worried too, but Su-yé-sai-pi just laughed and began to prepare for the journey.

“At this time,” the storyteller continues, “the Peigan were hunting on the Lower Milk River, but the morning that Front Wolf and his wife started away the whole camp moved too, for the chiefs wished to pass the hot season along the foothills of the great mountains. At the last moment five young Blackfoot men, visitors in the camp, decided that they too would return home, so they set forth with the couple and helped drive the little herd of horses that Front Wolf intended to give his relatives.

“The northern tribe was thought to be summering on the Red Deer River, and a course was roughly taken for the place where it joins the Saskatchewan. This brought the little party, after three or four days’ travel, to the Cypress Hills, or, as they were named by the Indians, the Gap-in-the-Middle Hills.

“They reached the southern slopes of the low buttes one morning, after being without water all the preceding day, and prepared to camp and rest at the edge of a little grove, close to which a large, clear spring bubbled up from a pile of sunken boulders. They did not know that a large camp of Kutenais was just behind the hills where they stopped, and that one of their hunters, seeing them coming, had hurried home and spread the news. Su-yé-sai-pi had scarcely started a fire when the warriors from the camp were seen to be approaching the little party from all directions, completely hemming them in. Although these two tribes, the Blackfeet and Kutenais had once been very friendly to each other, they were now at war.”

And so it happened, somewhere on the south slope of the Cypress Hills, that Front Wolf and his five companions were killed, and Su-yé-sai-pi, the sole survivor, was taken into captivity. Who knows what fate would have awaited her had it not been for an elderly widow who, filled with pity by the girl’s plight, supplied her with provisions and advised her to escape into the night? Pursued by scouts, tormented by thirst, the young woman hid wherever she could, once spending an entire day deep in an old wolf den. When night fell, she climbed out to search for water, wandering this way and that, “and when daylight again brightened the sky, found herself at the place where her husband lay. Yes, there lay the bodies of Front Wolf and his friends, now shapeless and terrible things. And the Kutenais had vanished.

“Worn out from her long tramp, and nearly crazed from thirst, the poor woman had barely strength to go on to the spring, where she drank long of the cool water, and then fell asleep.

“The sun was hot, but Su-yé-sai-pi slept on. Well on in the afternoon she was awakened by something nudging her side. ‘They have found me,’ she said to herself, shivering with terror, ‘and when I move a knife will be thrust in my side.’ She lay motionless a little while, and then could bear the suspense no longer; slowly rising up and turning back her robe, what should she find lying by her side but a coyote, looking up into her face and wagging his tail!

“‘Oh, little wolf!’ she cried. ‘Oh, little brother! Have pity on me. You know the wide plains; lead me to my people, for my husband is killed, and I am lost.’

“The little animal kept wagging his tail, and when she arose and went again to the spring, he followed her. She drank, and then ate a little dried meat, not forgetting to give him some, which he hastily devoured. She talked to him all the time, telling him what had happened, and what she wished to do; and he seemed to understand, for when she started to leave the spring he bounded on ahead, often stopping and looking back, as much as to say, ‘Come on; this is the way.’

“They were passing through the broken hills [the Cypress Hills], and the coyote, quite a long way ahead, had climbed to the top of a low butte and looked cautiously over it, when he turned, ran back part way, and then circled off to the right. Su-yé-sai-pi was frightened, thinking he had sighted the Kutenais, and she ran after him as fast as she could go.

“He led her to the top of another hill, and then, looking away along the ridge, she saw that he had led her around a band of grizzly bears, feeding and playing on the steep slope. Then she knew for certain that he was to be trusted, and she told him to keep a long way ahead, to look over the country from every rise of ground, and to warn her if he saw anything suspicious.

“This he did. He would wait for her at the top of a ridge, where they would sit and rest awhile, and as soon as she was ready to go on he would run to the top of the next rise before she had taken fifty steps. If thirsty, she would tell him, and in a little while he would always take her to some water. Sometimes it would be a small trickling stream in a coulée; sometimes a soft, damp gravel-bed, where she was obliged to scoop out a hole; sometimes it was a muddy buffalo-wallow—and it was always strong with alkali—but it was the best there was.”

In this way “little friend coyote” led Su-yé-sai-pi all the way from the Cypress Hills to her own people on the east slope of the Rocky Mountains. There, aware that the camp dogs would kill him given a chance, she reluctantly bade him farewell. But she promised that, whenever the camp moved, she and her family would depart last, so that they could leave food for him.

“And often,” the anonymous elder tells us, “as Su-yé-sai-pi and her people started on after the others, they saw him standing on a near hill, watching them out of sight.”

That other coyote had stood on a hill and watched Keith and me out of sight as we left the tipi rings. Where had little friend coyote been trying to lead me?