“Five Wounds charged up the gulch and was killed without a doubt. . . .”
“What are the ribbons for?” her little sister asked, interrupting. Leaning on each other, the parents stepped back, gentled by fatigue. The girl stopped reading and looked up.
“What ribbons?” Her eyes squinted for distance, then focused on the paper again. “It doesn’t say.”
Driving on, I was tipsy with gratitude. Fenceposts passing fast out the open window were pine with the bark left on, and they chirred like insects—whisp, whisp, whisp, whisp—down the long straight road heat blurred. The mountains stood up in a blue ring distant around the valley. Sage entered me, then a hint of cut hay, then the wind-twisted fragrance of smoke and manure from a little clutter of ranch buildings at the long, tapered end of its drive. After a few miles, Wisdom itself was a truck filled with horses saddled and stamping fitfully, a wall of deer antlers below a TV satellite dish, country music aching from loudspeakers nailed to the trading post façade, and a poster at the bar advertising a rodeo memorial for two teenagers killed in a car wreck: “Only working cowboys within a hundred-mile radius of Wisdom will be eligible for the purse.”
Then Wisdom was behind, and I was sailing out the highway banked on the long curves the river led east, past fields where ponies put their ears forward to the passing snap of my fingers in the wind, and on into the open country that somehow forgot to get changed from plain gray sage and rocky bluffs, from ravines dark with willow shade and stone litter glittering down a hillside where hard rain scattered it, and the trees getting scarce for the long dry of days like this.
I was changed. The ribbons had pulled the sky right down to the ground, and tethered my soul to a story. If I was not changed, not wise, I had a way to become so. I possessed a vision-book of one moment, a story small as the pitchy pith of juniper seed to nibble for the rest of my life.
Then I saw the bear, and stopped the car. It was a young bear, about my size and black as lightning’s footprint, rambling northeast along the south-facing slope of the river gully, in the direction the Nez Perce survivors of the battle had taken toward Canada, toward the place called Bear Paws where they were finally stopped. When I climbed out and the car door made a sound, the bear didn’t shy suddenly off to the side like I’ve seen bear do, or coyotes feeling the bullet-blast of human sight graze their shoulders. Wind riffled the bear’s fur, and it turned slowly to look over its shoulder from about a hundred yards off. Even at that distance, I could see the close squint of eyes, the nostril-flare of pertinent curiosity. She lifted her nose to know me by the thin ribbon of scent wind trailed out. Not in haste but not wasting daylight, she turned away, head swung down, and she ambled away over the open slope of sage, climbing toward the bluffs at the crest of my sight.
The afternoon still: a wisp of wind-whistle in sage, and the little rattle of stone where the bear’s paws swung along. I felt history receding with the click and scatter of her steps, as if I saw the last run of a river trail away down the geologic trough of its bed. What made seeing not enough? What made me want to meet that shaggy woman, not merely see her sip the wind over her shoulder and turn away?
In the car I stared at the choke, the odometer, the radio. The paltry pleasures of speed and distance were mine. How had exhilaration evaporated so fast? The dwindling hummock of the bear was approaching the ridge as I turned the key and swung out, cruised a half mile out of sight around the bend, killed the engine and coasted to a stop, left the white car’s pod, the road’s gray vine, and climbed on foot toward the ridge. A need for quiet now—now that the bear’s scent would follow the wind toward me as her path met mine. She would not know I was there. Now she would come close enough with her poor eyes to see my shape rise up.
At the brow of the ridge, along her natural way, I crouched breathless among sage scrub abuzz with insect tremor and sound. The ground fell away to my left toward the river’s long curve. To my right stretched miles of open sage. The only hidden ground lay before me, toward the afternoon sun. There, I had seen the bear aim straight this way. There was no alternative for her but to come up over the hump of ground to meet me. If she turned, I would see her on the open ground to either side. From here, I would see first the black hackles of her back like a ruffled wave over the sage horizon, then the bobbing rims of her ears, then her small, close-set eyes, her lips pulled back to pant—and then I would stand up slowly.
My fear brightened the hillside as with sweat. Every tongue of sage leaf glittered, and the sand before me was exact with sunlight. I faced west, where the breeze at my face trembled cool with rumor and scent: the smoky scent of bruised stone, the thin sweet fragrance of crushed grass. Soon, it would be bear. Soon my heart would stop its percussive haste. I would stand, and speak. Some compliment. Some respectful word.
Wind rattled the dry sticks of the sage. My bones held an old juniper’s arthritic stance. The sun moved, and an ant came toward me, crossed a fathom of epic sand, and disappeared into the shade I cast. Blank wind chilled my face. Somehow, the bear slipped past my vision by some private tunnel of her own power.
The risk I took to meet the bear was a responsibility greater than being husband, father, or son. But it was not enough. I was no true citizen of wisdom, but spent all I had on being afraid. So busy with fear, I had not enough hospitality for danger and change. There was only dwindling light on the place itself.
I stood up dizzy with regret, stumbled back to the car, slid in the key, drove on, drove two hundred miles east by a path of dash-lined curves, of skid marks and guard rails dented with rust, of gas-stop exits numbered monotonous, of passing and being passed by wind-tailed trucks made brazen by their size, drove miles of signs promising greater distances to Bozeman than Butte, to Billings than Bozeman, and miles of travel without change. And Change was my sworn brother—that we would die the same day, as Five Wounds swore to Rainbow, and fulfilled.
The day ended in Billings, where the librarians were meeting. They had come by air and car from Missoula, Boise, Seattle, Portland. They talked about change, and tradition. After the banquet, I stood at the podium, the microphone one breath’s distance from my lips, and spoke: The Role of the Humanist in a Technological Age. I was not able to tell what I was learning, only what I had learned—too long before to be true. There was kind applause, and draining of the last wine. At the end, at midnight in the twenty-third floor conference suite, among the swirl of my smart companions, good people of my tribe holding their drinks in clear cups that tingled with the buzz and din of talk—at the end I saw the crowd divide when lightning began to play over the city below us. Some drew back against the wall. “Should we really be up here? Is the basement safer now? The stairwell . . .?”
But some set down their champagne cups to press outward against tall windows, as lightning came faster toward us over the grid of streets, the jagged light that started fires that night all over Montana. I stepped toward the bright hot ribbons hanging down, and the din of our talk was hushed. One light on every thing: antenna, automobile, hilarious newspaper debris rolling through the streets below, the dark distant hills. In a flash our party’s reflection in the window eclipsed—the ribbons hanging down, and a girl’s voice telling the story, the burnt ozone scent of change come through sage to meet me.
Still, I am afraid. A man of my own tribe trusted me with the story of the ribbons, and I trust you with the beads. He may have been wrong, and I may be wrong. I would let the place alone, but it will not let me alone.
They say in Japan stands a building filled with national cultural treasures so valuable no steel door, no lock is strong enough to protect them from thieves. Instead of such a door, the state has hired an old man to watch the building in case of fire. He slowly walks about the building, then rests in the shade. Tied by thread to the simple door-latch, a note from the Emperor explains the supreme value of the treasury inside. There is no other lock.
I