EARLY DAYS ON THE REZ (Fiction: part of a novel in progress)

The papers in the boxes she was sorting were out of order, not like the sort of archeology dig -- let's say a buffalo jump -- where the layers are dated according to when the evidence was laid down in sediments.  She picked up papers and objects from the box that drove her memories back and forth across time.  One moment she was “just a kid,” though she and society considered her an adult with a finished degree and a certain amount of experience, and the next moment she was at the first major crossroads for a woman: would she marry and have babies or would she . . . what? 

The Egyptologist’s wife she knew, who had no career but was highly educated, explained how marrying a man who would spend his life in the field meant that there would be no children because there would be little medical care and many dangers.  She could, of course, have stayed “home” or even near her parents -- a lonely, possibly infantilizing life.  “If I stayed near my parents, I stayed their daughter.  If I went with my husband, I stayed his wife.  Of course, I could simply turn away to another man, but I loved this one.  And I loved Egypt as much as he did.”

On the reservation in those days local women found their men to be come-and-go, but organized their lives around the children anyway.  Money was the problem, but they didn’t need as much as if they hadn't been tribal.  The small service jobs circulated among them.  One quit -- her cousin applied for the job.  When men came back from welding pipelines or fighting fires, maybe to the same women and maybe not, the women moved the money among them.  There was always public aid to women and children.

Those were two patterns and there were more but she paid very little attention to them.  Beginning in spring she lived like a happy animal, or her body did, responding to weather, food, and the cycle of the day/night while her head spun with ideas, wove ideas, made a fabric of ideas, patterned by the steady flow of people who came to see Joe, the anthropologist.  It wasn’t quite like a campus academic life, this reservation boundary-delineated concentration on what people did and how they did it, what their essential nature was, their material culture, what they thought their tribal past had been like.  But there was a steady stream of colleagues, drifters, novelists, artists, the curious.

The local people went on with their lives, not bothering to think about what all these outsiders were imagining.  The sun shone most days, the wind blew dust most days, and some days were different, maybe stormy and sometimes almost blank -- just gray stillness.  Plants went through their cycles so that some days the prairie was blue with lupine and other days they were yellow with arrowleaf balsam root.  Since the people were not dependent on digging for roots and rhizomes, they no longer paid attention.  They smiled at her childlike gathering of bouquets, put in Mason jars for lack of vases.  (The jars were tinted blue-green in those days and had wire bales to hold the lids on tight.)  

In recent years she had learned not to do that because so many of her bouquets were blooming weeds that she was inadvertently spreading.  She was never an arranger -- just put the handful into the jar as she had carried them, and always intended to sketch them, but often didn’t.  What she did was look them up in guide books, carefully reading the whole entries about how they were grouped, their common and Latin names, what else was happening along the curve of the season when they bloomed.

She walked.  The force logic of glacier-scraping and deposition was easy to see, though most people would have looked at the mountains on the horizon instead.  The town’s settlement, beginning in a small comfortable place and then spreading out over the low hills and marshy flood plains of small streams, had less logic though it was in squares.  A lot of draining and filling was necessary.  Some cabins had been there before plats were drawn.

In evenings she read unless there was company at Joe’s where she would go to make coffee, serve packaged cookies, and listen to the constant flow of talk through theories and stories.  She was his clerk/secretary, but also more than that -- in a proper way.  A hostess.  There was no alcohol served if the indigenous people were there, but if there were none, Joe provided brandy.  A few alcoholic scholars and writers managed to find the supply and covertly put a bit in their coffee.  The Indians added so many spoonfuls of sugar to their coffee that they were nearly drinking syrup.  

They (almost always men) talked about what the old people did, what first contact must have been like, how the people dealt with the new threats like incarceration and diseases like trachoma which made them blind.  How much the old men loved silk scarves around their necks or even tied over their heads like the Queen of England to shield their ears from the wind and how much the women still love small metal objects like thimbles and buttonhooks, though not all of them sewed and no shoes have buttons these days. 

She thought about how, now that there was no need for the constant on-going handwork -- the braiding, beading, rubbing, twisting that used to be on every lap -- people didn’t quite know whether to gesture as they listened in a kind of quasi-signtalk or to pet the children and animals that always crowded around.  The little comfort-seekers climbed into her lap, too, and she accepted them.  But that was when they were in the local homes, the cabins and shacks that were partly supplied by the government, partly built in prosperous times, and partly improvised.  When they were in Joe’s place, either his public space or his private rooms, she wrote notes to type and file later.  By the time video cameras were in use, Joe was gone.  He was much older than she.  But she took the occasional still photo.

Now, as she unpacked the boxes, she would turn up little sketches of weeds and pages of notes, as varied as the Moccasin Flat houses, according to the circumstances.  "Dr. So-and-so says that the difference between Blackfeet patterns, whether painted or beaded, and Cree patterns was that Blackfeet were geometric, which he felt indicated some sort of pre-mathematics and which he tried to relate to the desert Abrahamic people’s invention of geometry", and so on.  The Cree tended to make plant-like patterns, including flowers, which indicated to Dr. S-and-S that they were concrete in their thinking, could not abstract in a more intellectual way, and harbored Euro-ideas about beauty, like symmetry.  He was a great devotee of modern abstract art.

Reading this in the present, she noted in a deconstructing aside to herself that Dr. S-and-S was analyzing to a level that verged on fantasy, first in composing his values (mathematical linearity as a sign of intelligence and superiority) and second in his memory of the materials he was supposed to be describing.  

When she looked at the beading she saw a lot of individuality, a lot of responding to circumstances -- that and the givens of materials.  If the beaders tended to lean to blue and orange patterns, maybe it was because the store had stocked a lot of those bead colors.  She thought about how sophisticated clothing fashions, haute couture, went in cycles, responding to what had been all the rage last season by turning away from it, and taking up something fresh.  So if green beads suddenly appealed to the eye, it was only natural that they suggested stems and leaves, which asked for red flowers.  But they all, sooner or later, went back to that blue.

She found her sketches of beading patterns, the best of the records made with colored pencils but some merely drawn and then labeled with the names of the colors.  That was the real beginning of her art, nothing at all like the oil-on-canvas work she did now, but still the early consciousness of color and shape and somehow, the resistance to linearity, the love of surprise.

BOTH SIDES NOW: The Boy on the Horse

This is from a novel I work on now and then.  An old female painter is living on the rez.  She is widowed.  Her husband, much older than she, had been a famous anthropologist.  Now she is painting but also sorting through her husband’s effects. 

THE BOY ON THE HORSE

The photo was down in the bottom of the box but also in an envelope with nothing written on it.  By now she was wary of these unlabeled envelopes containing photos.  One of them might have been an accident, an omission, but they were beginning to seem like a pattern, an un-label that meant something.

She opened it up and was stunned.  It was HER photo.  Not a photo OF her, but a photo that belonged to her, that she had looked for everywhere.  It was a Blackfeet boy, about fourteen, barely adolescent, looking into the camera from the back of a horse with no saddle.  No bridle either.  Just a rope and not much of one, maybe baling twine.  But he and his horse were getting along fine.  They were in total agreement.  She had loved the boy, not in a sexual way and not exactly maternally either.  Just as a being, like his horse.

The day long ago rushed back into her consciousness.  Her husband had left her out on the prairie where she had a view of the mountains, promising to return when the light went bad at the end of the afternoon.  She had arranged her easel and folding chair, with its obligatory clamp-on black umbrella for shading the artist.  After a bit of sketching to establish composition, she had easily slipped into absorption in issues of color values and their interactions.  It was bright, so the usual subtle Payne’s gray versus yellow ochre interplay was replaced by cerulean and cadmium.  She thought about geology a lot, how to bring up the mighty forces of nature from under the “prettiness” of mere scenery.  This was such a challenge that she nearly forgot to eat her lunch sandwich.

She had missed seeing the boy until he was close, managing his skinny young horse skillfully as it warily approached what the steed clearly considered to be a horse-eating umbrella.  When she called to the pair, the horse was not reassured, but the boy laughed, implying that he as well had been rather wondering at this strange apparition so unexpectedly deployed on a glacial moraine in the prairie.

For her part, she was now attentive to the structural anatomy of the summer-darkened boy, who was wearing only jeans, and the horse with no saddle.  The boy’s relaxed shoulders and hips, his flexible narrow waist, his slender neck balancing a head of long loose hair, danced in compensation to the four shifting feet and weaving head of his steed, and under their feet was a moving banner of shadow, waving in the grass.  She picked up her sketch tablet and began trying to capture the articulation of the bones, the overlay and interplay of the muscles as the graceful young creatures moved together.

The boy slid off and came over, careless of his horse, which finally saw that there was no immanent danger and went to grazing, the need for which was always present in its long head.  There was plenty of grass and no need to run off.  The boy stood where he could see her drawing and considered gravely.  He did not think such practices trivial.

“Hullo,” she said distractedly.  Taking this as an invitation, he sank down cross-legged on the ground, settling to watch the way he might watch grazing buffalo, memorizing small details and trying to predict what the animal would do next.  Hunter’s skills.  He was still, which pleased her as she tried to capture the curves of the side of his head: the hair moving in the wind, the curled snail of his ear, the gentle scoop of neck down to the dip between there and the knob of his shoulder.  She was always pleased by the way a hook of bone from the scapula reached to the front in order to attach the collarbone, the bone unique to humans, the bone that held the shoulders apart so that arms could throw.  The clavicula,  named for Roman doorkeys because someone fancied the clavicles were the same shape -- sort of.  

The boy knew nothing about all that, though he was pretty good at throwing as well as running and strategy.  He had a hunter’s practical grip on anatomy; that is, where to penetrate for a sure kill and which parts were the best eating.  But he had not seen a woman who drew -- until now -- because most of the tribal artists were men recording their own or history’s exploits, using more symbols than realistic representations.  Still, this woman was doing something that made him see more than what was there, though it was recognizably there.  A lot to think about.  He needed more information.

“What are you doing?”  

“Well, I was painting.  Now I’m drawing you.”

He digested that.  He was not displeased.

“What for?”

“Mostly because it pleases me.”

He understood that.  He said nothing more and for the next few hours he just watched while the woman, untroubled by any need to make conversation, filled a page with sketches of parts of him, then put her landscape off the easel and painted his portrait in bold strokes that still caught details of mouth and eyelid.

Finally a cloud of dust was raised by a car on the wagon trail to the ridge.  Her husband was coming to collect her.  The boy rose and walked to get his wandered horse, but then rode the pony back instead of leaving, so that he was there when her husband swung out of the car.  “I see you found a model.”

“A very good one.”

“Clearly.  His portrait demonstrates exactly that.”  He reached up to shake hands with the boy, which the latter was plainly not used to, and began to inquire about family and so on.  The boy was not shy but didn’t volunteer a lot of information.  While the two males established identity, she went to the car to load in her painting gear.  Her camera was in the glovebox, so she brought it back and took a picture of the boy on his horse.  She promised him a copy.  They all parted happily, satisfied.  Indeed, her husband had seemed almost euphoric.

Now, holding the photo, she saw who this boy was.  Her landlord.

BOTH SIDES NOW: "Freckles and the Condor"

It was early June when she first saw the condor, or rather its shadow. She’d been painting “plein aire” out on the open land, looking away from the mountains for once. The grass was barely long enough to be rumpled by the wind and then her eye went to the softly dark spot moving along the moire pattern of the grass. She thought it was a hawk, riding the thermals that were forming as the land warmed. Thunderheads were just beginning on the horizon -- she was only beginning to sketch them into her sky.

But then she saw that this bird was much bigger than a hawk or eagle and had an entirely different wing shape. It must have been seven feet from one wing tip to the other -- maybe more. It dropped down a bit more, perhaps to take a look at her own strange shape on the east slope prairie, then lifted and spiraled away and away until it disappeared like a mote in one’s eye being blinked away.

“Condor,” she thought, wondering why she thought so. But that can’t be. There haven’t been condors here since the buffalo disappeared. They were part of that paleolithic world that fit together tightly until the white people came in such numbers that they pried apart all the connections. “Condor.”

She thought of a book she had read in childhood, finding it in her grandmother’s bookshelf. It was “Freckles” by Gene Stratton-Porter, the strong-minded “bird woman” who had fought to save the midwestern Limberlost ancient trees and the birds that lived in them. “Freckles” had begun with a huge black feather floating down from so high in the sky that Freckles, who was a timber-cruiser, couldn’t see the bird it fell from. It was a condor feather and even in those days they were supposed to be extinct in the midwest.

Of course, now the world of Gene Stratton-Porter with her huge box of a camera and hats tied on with veils and small towns where daughters struggled to come to terms with their mothers -- that world was gone now. In fact, Stratton-Porter herself had fallen afoul of the New Invaders, the post-colonial Marxist accusers who hated authority figures, hated any sign of racism, hated any science that didn’t agree with their notion of a Edenic world that never existed -- though they insisted that it had.

No feather fell from Clare’s sky. The science part of her brain kicked in. It wasn’t impossible for a condor to have returned to the east side of the Rockies, though it was unlikely. Still, the population pressure on the Pacific coast was driving out some of the people who had always loved living there, so why not these immense glorious birds, so scarce that they were individually known to the researchers. Who should one call? Maybe best to call no one. If the word got out, photographers and opportunist hunters -- polarized into those who practically worship animals and those who saw them only as raw material for their own lives -- would be everywhere.

She would keep it a secret. This had been a spring when the major blizzards persisted very late, so that some ranchers had moved their cattle up into the foothills too early. Meant to graze among the high country trees, they were instead trapped in deep snow the wind couldn’t get at, and they died in piles. It was impossible for cowboys to get in on horseback and gather them out, as they would in the fall. It was a gift to the grizzlies, carrion piled everywhere. Maybe that drew the condor. All ecologies are woven of pushing and pulling like that: deadends here, a breeze of opportunity there.

Still, a condor sighting was way out on the edge. Even in Stratton-Porter’s novel, the condor was a rarity and Freckles hardly knew how to react. She had read the novel so many times that she knew some paragraphs by heart:

“Out of the clear sky above him, first level with his face, then skimming, dipping, tilting, whirling until it lit, quill down, in the path in front of him came a glossy, iridescent, big black feather. As it struck the ground, Freckles snatched it up and with an almost continuous movement faced the sky. There was not a tree of any size in a large open space. There was no wind to carry it. From the clear sky it had fallen, and Freckles, gazing eagerly into the arch of June blue with a few lazy clouds floating far up in the sea of ether, had neither mind nor knowledge to dream of a bird hanging as if frozen there. He turned the big quill questioningly, and again his awed eyes swept the sky.”

No long black wing feather fell for Clare. She smiled at the use of the word “ether.” No one uses that anymore. When she got home, after a bit of scouring through her bookshelves, she located the book. She’d never been able to give it up. It was at the heart of her relationship to the world, not an artifact but a story.

The crucial passage was a few pages into the third chapter with a “margin decoration” by E. Stetson Crawford: a long wing feather obviously drawn from life. She recognized the artist’s name -- she hadn’t as a child -- and knew he was from that Parisian turn-of-the-century Beaux Arts school that guided so many fine Western visions. In the States he’d attended MacMonnies’ school (which partly belonged to Whistler) and she could picture in her mind the several fine Native American monumental bronzes done by MacMonnies. She recognized now that the marginal “drawings” were etchings.

Both Stratton-Porter and Crawford were part of an Edwardian time that saturated everything with Victorian Christianity, believing that this was the true way to see the world. Industrialism was just dawning, sending the great railroads stretching across the continent in the same way that the steamships went out across the oceans. Writers and artists had convenient access to a new world and because they met the Plains Indians with the romantic optimism that assumed surely nature was God’s work, gently forced all the Indian religious assumptions into Christian categories. Star Boy became Jesus and the earth became “Our Mother.”

Clare had forgotten Freckles’ Irish Catholic fantasy that the long black feather came from the wing of a wicked angel, battering at the Gates of Heaven for mercy. Universalism was sweeping the land, the idea that God -- in the end -- would forgive everyone, even Lucifer. All was optimism and security, if only a few wicked people could be brought under control.

BOTH SIDES NOW: "First Encounter"

It was fifty or sixty years ago that she’d swung down off the train in East Glacier with the other tourists, carrying her paint box because she didn’t want to let it out of her sight. She had a bit of money, enough to live for the summer in this vast east slope place which she only barely realized was a reservation, and she had assumed she would paint landscapes, the mountains -- so glorious. But then she had met the anthropologist, much older than she was, confident and knowledgeable. When he discovered that she could draw, he asked her to come along while he interviewed Blackfeet, usually elders. They charged money for photos and took poses in front of a camera, because they thought that’s what was wanted. He paid them to talk, not pose, but wanted a visual record as well. One more natural and unguarded.

In the end she hardly painted anything that summer but filled tablet after tablet with sketches of faces and figures: dark, complex, expressive. Indians were supposedly stoic, but these old Blackfeet were full of emotion and as soon as they got used to her they paid no attention to her. At least the men paid no attention. The women paid close attention and kept the babies from crawling on her while she drew. They kept up a steady chatter in Blackfeet among themselves, with occasional directives to the men, who ignored them.

“Tell me about the way horses were managed,” the anthropologist would ask. The old men didn’t always agree and if more than one was present, they would interrupt to argue, which the anthro coped with by simply putting down both accounts and noting who said what. Clearly he knew he wasn’t getting some kind of revealed knowledge, an ultimate truth.

A small storefront had been rented for the summer, so the light flooded through what was normally a display window, at least on the bright days, but the overcast days were also good with evenly subtle light that revealed detail instead of drowning it in light or shadow. There was a big work table and some straight chairs. The anthro slept on a daybed behind a screen at one corner and hung his clothes on pegs on the wall. On a little wood stove he cooked his meals and made tea through the day.

Clare remembered this always as one of the best times of her life, partly because of the sensory experience -- wood smoke, the smell of sweetgrass which the anthro invited the old men to smudge on the stove, and the smell of the people themselves, rich and funky, at the same time exotic and familiar. She often caught a whiff of Ben Gay or Vicks. Then sometimes pine pitch or earth. The slightly hooded eyes, the thin gray braids, the men’s bits of innocent decoration (shell earrings, a woman’s brooch, a rosette of ribbons, bright neck scarves), the restlessly competent hands that needed to do something all the time, copper bracelets to ward off rheumatism, and sometimes a little gathered-up bag of something mysterious hung around a neck. They wore "citizen's dress," meaning not buckskins but mostly second-hand suits, mismatched.

“Them old timers loved to throw a cougar-skin over their saddles. Best ones had a red border on. That was really showin’ off.”

“What kind of saddle was that?”

“Oh, we made good saddles our own way. Sometimes a prairie chicken saddle, not with high front and back like a woman’s saddle, but with a frame. Not just a pad.”

“Did you ever use a regular white man’s saddle?”

“When I was a boy, not many of ‘em around. But you needed ‘em for cows. For ropin’, you know.”

They say that people always want newly met cultures to stay the way they were at first contact and this was true for her. All the rest of her life she thought of “Indians” as necessarily being like these old men and their families -- even though she knew logically that even after they’d begun to go to grad school and come back to the rez as M.D.’s and Ph.D’s, they were still just as Indian. Late in life, listening to them, she wondered what Blackfeet had been like before any white contact, maybe even before horses -- nearly impossible to imagine. Dog days. A hard time, but they thrived until they met the white man’s germs, long before they met any white men. The horse, the gun, and the germ. Deceptive advantages followed by disaster and deep changes in the ways of the People.

When she had grown old herself, she reflected about this all the time. Some argued that if one traced the history of the Blackfeet back far enough that they weren’t Blackfeet anymore, but what was that supposed to mean? That they weren’t like the First Contact people? That they weren’t like the horse-and-gun warriors that everyone admired so much in the movies, which was most peoples’ first contact? Would they have been genetically different? Surely the land was the same clear back to the time of the glaciers and mammoths -- but if an asteroid killed all the woolly mammoths, what did it do to the people? The anthro had said that people came to North American from Asia in three waves: was one of them necessary to repopulate the prairies after the Clovis people disappeared?

That first anthro in her life -- she continued with him as his wife until his death, trying to help him save what he said was a vanishing people. But to her it seemed that they had not vanished, while he had. Everything was changed over time: identity individual or communal.

She knew the evidence of Indian origin was genetic and sometimes it seemed to her that the Blackfeet were almost some kind of northern Chinese, in some deep patterning of temperament and ritual that people took for granted. But what exactly? Respect for elders and love of formality? A kind of Taoist understanding and fatalism? She had seen photos of people around Lake Baikal who looked very much like Blackfeet.

What did it mean to be defined as “Blackfeet?” Where was the center and where was the edge? Was “tribe” just a made up concept? A cookie cutter coming down on a continuous sheet of prairie people? She knew she was not the only one to wonder about these matters. When she got to know the young folks, esp. in the Sixties and Seventies, they wondered a lot -- but then they took the militant stand that THEY were the definition. By then the old people she had sketched so many times -- their worn faces and hands -- were gone. The young folks, whose hands were idle and who stayed indoors most of the time, didn’t look the same. Their hands and faces were smooth and pale. It bothered them sometimes. They seemed to swell up.

And the anthro’s work, which they both had thought was eternal and would guarantee his importance down through all the ages to come, did it mean anything? Or had the theories and the discipline of anthropology itself changed so much that the work they had done that summer was essentially meaningless, transient? Just a personal experience that was mildly interesting, no more.

DOOGIE'S PROJECT

CLARE

It was a bit awkward to be a survivor for so long. She’d outlived Clive for a decade now but their relationship was still intense and she had no desire to start another. What she wanted was time to think, alone, but in a place and with a people she had known and cared about. That was NOT the campus where they had spent so many years -- she couldn’t leave quickly enough. She didn’t like the way things were going there -- the corporate taint, the left wing bullying, the pernicious reliance on theory with no connection back to the reality it was supposed to address. She wanted the Blackfeet reservation where they'd spent so many summers.

Now painting was exactly the right thing for her: color, shape, distillation and elaboration, just enough pressure to observe and interpret to keep her mind occupied -- which seemed to be the best way to keep her emotions under control. She didn’t want to admit how much depression had crept over her like a gray shawl, somehow gray and sheltering. It took away the sharp edge of reappraisal that had begun to fray her understanding of Clive’s work, for one thing. And it kept her from thinking about whether she’d given up her own life and goals for his -- for no good reason. She’d had such a high regard for academic achievement and such a love for the raw encounter with a unique culture. That was what she had thought was the point of anthropology. Wasn’t the idea to interpret them so that they would be respected, protected, and willing participants in the future?

What happened to that idea? Was it wrong from the beginning? Now it seemed as though people were full of hatred, paranoid about any inquiry, demanding money and demanding control though they had no idea what was going on. They wanted “this” -- but when you gave them “this,” they said they had really wanted “that,” and if you showed them a paper contract or even a tape recording, they claimed they were tricked. But they had no idea of what academic rewards were: tenure, publication, respect from one’s peers. They had no idea about the definition of a discipline, like anthropology -- and now the whole field was morphing so quickly -- both in response to the changing world and in response to more sophisticated methods (but were they?), how could anyone get sense out of it?

So she backed off to not looking for sense, though a friend of hers had once remarked that painting was the most cerebral of the art forms. One had to constantly think about the focus, the implications of using a warm color here and cool there, how to make a brush stroke that caressed, delineated, illuminated... It was true. If she didn’t keep focus, the painting was no good and at the end of the day she scraped off as much paint as she could so she could re-use the canvas.

Was that what was happening to intellectual disciplines? Was this a time in which paint was being scraped off the canvas? Who was doing it? Which thinkers?


A knock on the door of the studio. It was Doogie. His buzz cut was growing out and he’d gained a little more weight so his t-shirt crept up from his belt, exposing a brown belly. He wanted to ask her some questions.

“What kind of paint should I use on buckskin?”

“What are you doing, Doogie?”

“I want to paint on this piece of deerhide I have.”

“Commercially tanned or Indian tanned?”

“My auntie brain-tanned it a long time ago. Want me to get it from the pickup?” He didn’t wait. In a minute he was back with it rolled up under his arm. It was dark and smoky. He threw it out over the old wicker chair.

“I dunno, Doogie. The smoke might interfere. The best thing to do is to test a little corner, see what works. It’s so dark that you might have to use thick paint to get the image to show.” They bent over the supple hide.

“Maybe I ought to use it for beading -- cut it up.” She didn’t answer but she didn’t like the idea. “But I do a lot of body work, you know, on cars? And I got a LOT of car body paint left over.”

She had a sudden flash of what metallic paint might look like on this old soft hide. What would gold or silver look like? “What are you going to paint? Old-style horses and warriors? A war story?”

He looked at her, balancing the risks of telling her the truth. “A Thunderbird.” She looked surprised. “You know Thunderbird?”

“The huge bird that lives on top of Chief Mountain and comes in spring thunderstorms.”

He relaxed a little. “That one. You know that Thunderbird fought the Water Monster, the one that lives at the bottom of lakes and swallows our people? I want to paint that battle on here.”

“It’s a beautiful myth, Doogie.”

“Not no myth -- it really happened,” now Doogie was alarmed again. Danged white women never REALLY understand. “I’ve seen the bones, really I have.”

Clare was silent, thinking about the concern and frustration in his face. “It must have been quite a battle. Good against bad.”

“Yeah. Water Monster is evil but Thunderbird ROCKS.” In her mind she saw “rocs” as in Sinbad the Sailor. She stroked the leather. Just accept his reality, she thought. “Doogie, I think if you tried a little lacquer thinner on a scrap off the edge, just to get rid of oil, and then painted a little bit, it might work for a good test.”

“Thanks, Missus.” He rose with dignity, rolled up his hide and left. His old pickup hammered and smoked its way down the hill.

That night Clare dreamt of the battle between the Water Monster and the Thunderbird, the surging up with gaping jaws like a shark, sending shock waves of water flying -- the Thunderbird coming down out of a cloud with outstretched huge flapping wings, grabbing with outstretched claws like grappling hooks. Strangely there was a soundtrack -- “Rites of Spring,” the Stravinsky sequence that Walt Disney made famous.

Of course! How many times had she seen Fantasia? Dinosaurs! Doogie’s Thunderbird and Water Monster bones were fossil bones from dinosaurs. He HAD seen them, the bones eroding out of the Montana prairie as they did all the time. Had he seen “Fantasia?” She’d ask him. On campus it was fashionable to watch that movie while high on acid.