the way to rainy mountain

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A single knoll rises out of the plain

For my people, the Kiowas, it is an old landmark

Winter brings blizzards, hot tornadic winds

and in summer the prairie is a anvil’s edge.

The grass turns brittle and brown, and it cracks beneath your feet. There are green belts along the rivers and creeks, linear groves of hickory and pecan, willow and witch hazel.

the steaming foliage seems almost to writhe in fire

green-and-yellow grasshoppers are everywhere

, popping up like corn to sting the flesh, and tortoises crawl

going nowhere in the plenty of time

the plain are isolate

is to lose the sense of proportion

Your imagination comes to life

I wanted to be at her grave.

and at last infirm

they had controlled the open range from

from the headwaters of the Canadian

In alliance with the Comanches

War was their sacred business

among the finest horseman the world has ever known.

But warfare for the Kiows was preeminently a matter of disposition rather than of survival, and they never understood the grim, unrelenting advance of the U.S. Cavalry

divided and ill-provisioned,

they fell into panic

they abandoned their crucial stores to pillage

they surrender to the soldiers at Fort Sill and were imprisoned in the old stone corral as a military museum

was spared the humiliation of those high gray

from birth the affection of defeat, the dark brooding of old warriors.

Her forebears came down from the high country

a mysterious tribe of hunters

positively classified in any major group

they began a long migration

the Kiowas were befriended by the Crows, who gave them the culture and religion of the Plains their ancient nomadic spirit was suddenly free of the ground.

From that moment the object and symbol of their worship, and so shared in the divinity of the sun.

sense of destiny, therefore

the southern Plains, they had been transformed. No longer were they slaves to the simple necessity of survival; they were lordly and dangerous society of fighters and thieves, hunters and priests of the sun.

According to their origin myth, they entered the world through a hollow log

their migration was the fruit of an old prophecy, for indeed they emerged from a sunless world. in the shadow of Rainy Mountain, the immense landscape of the continental interior lay like

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memory in her blood.

I wanted to see in reality

miles to begin my pilgrimage.

deep lakes and dark timber, canyons and waterfalls

the sense of confinement

woods and deep cleavages of shade

belongs to the eagle and elk, the badger and the bear. The Kiowas reckoned their stature by the distance they could see, and they were bent and blind in the wilderness.

Descending eastward, the highland meadows are a stairway to the plain

the Rockies is luxuriant with flax and buckwheat, stonecrop and larkspur.

The earth unfolds and the limit of the land recedes.

Clusters of trees and animals grazing far in the distance cause the vision to reach away and wonder to build upon the mind.

the sky is immense beyond all comparison

The great billowing clouds that sail upon it are th shadows that move upon the grain like water, dividing light.

Sweet clover takes hold of the hills and bends upon itself to cover and seal the soil. There the Kiowas paused on their way; they had come

Precisely there does it have the certain character of a god

the dark lees of the hills at dawn across the Bighorn River, the profusion of light on the grain shelves, the oldest deity ranging after the solstices. Not yet would they veer southward to the caldron of the land that lay below, they must wean their blood from the northern

They bore Tai-me in procession to the east.

A dark mist lay over land was like iron.

At the top of a ridge I caught sight of Devil’s Tower upthrust

as if in the birth of time the core of the earth had broken through its crust and the motion of the world was begun. There are things in nature that engender an awful quiet in the heart of man; Suddenly the boy was struck dumb; he trembled and began to run upon

His fingers became claws.

They came to the stump of a tree

It bade them climb upon

It reared against the tree and scored the bark

, and so long as the legend lives, the Kiowas kinsmen in the night sky.

However tenuous their well-being, however much they had suffered and would suffer out of the wilderness.

My grandmother had a reverence for the sun, a holy regard that now is all but gone out of mankind. There was a wariness in her, and an ancient awe.

she never forgot her birthright

; she had taken part in those annual rites, and by them she had learned the restoration of her people in the presence of Tai

In order to consummate the ancient sacrifice—to impale the head of a buffalo bull upon the medicine tree---- a delegation of old men journeyed into Texas, there to beg and barter for an animal from the Goodnight herd.

an old hide from the sacred tree.

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under orders to disperse the tribe. Forbidden without cause the essential act of their faith, having seen the wild herds slaughtered and left to rot upon the ground, the

, at the great bend of the Washita

Without bitterness, and for as long as she lived, she bore a vision of deicide

I see my grandmother in the several postures that were peculiar to her;

at the wood stove

turning meat in a great iron skillet; sitting

when her vision had failed

, going out upon a cane

; praying, I remember her most often at a prayer

She made long, rambling prayers out of suffering and hope

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