IT WENT SWIMMINGLY

Juniper Old Person (middle)

We were nearly out of cat food, so off I went to the discount store in Cut Bank where it’s only fifty cents a can, except that they had raised the price to sixty-nine cents.  So I went over to Albertsons and found their catfood was fifty cents a can, though they are not a discount store.  I once overheard the manager explain to some regional suit that the key to sales next to a rez is low prices, and he meant it.  Esp. now that the tribe has its own store.  So I stocked up.

The checker was a very big Blackfeet with a vaguely familiar face, so I asked and he turned out to be the great-grandson of Juniper Old Person, a major figure who was Earl Old Person’s father.  When this clerk was a small boy, he used to come to the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife with Earl when Earl came on business to confer with Bob.  

He told me about how he could barely see over the edge of the stone waterfall pool at the museum entrance and how fascinated he was by the trout.  They were really hatchery trout who ate trout chow, but it was always fun to find dead flies along the windowsills and throw them in so the fish would rise to snatch them.  One tourist lady held onto her fly too long and a trout rose out of the water to grab the end of her fingers.  She discovered trout have teeth and screamed.  By August the fishes were tired of all foods and began to eat each other.  By September there was only one great big fish, burping.  The checker said he remembered it well, that big satisfied fish.  We could have fried it up for supper, but Bob was allergic to fish.

illustration from "The Sword in the Stone"

When I got home, I took a nap because these days driving always makes me sleepy and because old ladies should nap in the afternoon.  This nap was lovely because there’s a cold front coming through so the temp is down to seventy and one doesn’t mind the smoke scrim so much when its cool.  I had been reading “The Sword in the Stone” which somehow mixed in dreams with memories of summer in the Sixties when Bob’s grandson Lane was six and I would have called him “Wart” if I’d had this book then.  Instead I read him the book about “Stuart Little” by E.B. White.  And Bob called him “Jimmy” which was the name of his son when he used to keep him for the summer, when he was six.

Bob Scriver and Eegy

It was the summer that Lane helped with everything, fearlessly, walking right under the horse’s bellies to grease their hooves -- they didn’t kick him though he must have tickled -- helping to shoot a gopher every morning to feed to the eagle.  The Old Person grocery checker said he used to bring gophers for Bob to store in the freezer for winter.  The boy loved the eagle and never teased her, though others did.  If we caught those others, we threatened to throw them into the cage with the screaming bird and made as if to open the door while we held them by the neck.  We were never PC.  We weren’t even always sensible.

Sucker

“The Sword In the Stone” is not a sensible book.  It is as much Monty Python as it is Camelot.  It is the ancestor of Earthsea, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and Game of Thrones.  I just read the part of the "S in the S" where Merlyn and Wart became fish in the moat of the castle and Wart had to learn how to swim all over again with totally different surroundings and body.  (Comparative consciousness!)  I remembered how we all went swimming in the reservation creeks and how there were always suckers in the bottom -- great big dark fish who moved around in schools, staying in the deeper pockets of water and tasting the bottom with their round mouths.  Once we took a very rich lady with us.  She had no suit to wear but said no matter, she’d swim in her underwear.  She had not quite realized that the water would turn her underwear transparent and we would all know that she was not really a redhead by birth.  We tried to be polite and not look.

Another time in much faster, colder water, we were sliding over a rock ledge into a truly deep and wide pool that hardly slowed the current.  I went over it sideways and slid under the water, forgetting how to swim which I didn’t do well anyway.  I came up, gasped, went down, came up, gasped and went down.  Finally when I was up Bob grabbed me by the hair and asked,  “Are you doing that on purpose?”  “NO.”  So he towed me over to the side.

Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife

I suppose that even grownups felt a little bit enchanted when they went into the museum where the lights were dim and soft music played.  None of the animals were behind glass and they were all pretty convincingly mounted, esp. when the pets were in there playing:  badgers and bobcats and the occasional fox.  The bobcat was particularly fond of sleeping on the moose’s head where the horns made a nice nest.  Of course, they were all sub-adult, because we only fed them and slept with them and let them do what they pleased because we were pretty much sub-adult ourselves.  In the fall they left.  Mostly people killed them.  They would come back to tell us they did, looking closely to see how we reacted.  We were stony.  Most people are adults.  But they don’t come to their senses, as one would expect.  Instead they leave them.

Not that we had any idea what we were doing.  We just grabbed life, tried as hard as we could and hoped we wouldn’t kill anyone we cared about.  If we had to duck the law, we did, even though Bob WAS the law -- at least City Magistrate and Justice of the Peace.  Some youngsters explored the building after Bob had died and, prying around in the corners, found a false wall and behind it a whole bevy of mounted birds.  They were the ones that the officious Federal Game Warden had said were illegal enough to justify padlocking the museum and take Bob off to prison.  He was going blind at the time. (1962)  They had been collected by kids in a sudden spring cold snap that left too early migrating songbirds stiff on the ground.  Bob paid a quarter each.

Christophermartinphotography.com

Like T.H. White’s attempt to tame a hawk, we made a lot of brutal mistakes, mostly hurting ourselves but sometimes the animals.  There was darkness hidden in the famously vast landscapes under endlessly glowing sky.  Love braided with hate but rarely indifference.  Gradually the skills accrued in our muscles more than in our brains.

The Blackfeet watched all this, some of them angry that we weren’t proper adults who would make them famous so everyone could be rich.  Some of them wistful because they wanted to be included -- some of them were.  Some were far too preoccupied by survival to pay much attention.  Some counted coup whenever they got the chance.  Some were secret friends.  Not everyone was Blackfeet, nor white neither.  Outsiders never get it.  It is so much more complex than they think.

Ariel DeSmet

I left in 1973 which is slightly more than forty years ago.  Bob wasn’t Merlyn and I wasn’t Wart or Kay.  Lane, the grandson, grew up to be a sensible man of great stability with a son who is a world-class fencing champion.  (Ariel DeSmet)  But there was a fish in my heart, one with teeth rather than a sucker-mouth, and I swam back, upstream against the current.  I was doing it on purpose.  I was born a redhead.  I still might drown.