The Spirit

The Indian lay down among the rocks, his face turned to the sky. Only his eyes moved. It had been seventy years since the Plains Indians sent their young to sacred places such as this rock aerie for fasting and self-­torture. The Indian had come up here to learn his name. This name would be given him by a spirit, a sort of guardian angel, who would leave a talisman. If the spirit were a bird, it would leave a feather, which he would tuck into the fringed leather medicine bundle tied to his waist. If it were a bear, it would leave a claw. In the old days humans and animals were the same. They talked freely to each other and helped in times of battle and famine. Sometimes the spirit was a human, the ghost of an ancestor or a great chief.

And sometimes the spirit never came. The Indian would not learn his name and he would wither away and die young, bereft of the taproot of his existence.

On the second day, thirst became a constant discomfort for the Indian. There was a puddle of muddy water by his head. He did not drink. In his medicine bundle was some corn fried in brown sugar. He did not eat. The nearness of food and water was mental torture, which was good. Only through suffering would he gain a vision. Pain would scrape away the walls of mortality that kept him from his spirit.

The medicine bundle belonged to his dead grandfather, who had left it for him. The old man had come up here many years before and stayed three days. On the third day a man had stepped out of a lodge-­pole pine tree and the two of them had a long conversation about crops, weather, and the bad game of that year. The ghost had given him a piece of wood, telling him he should be a carpenter. The Indian’s grandfather worked with wood for the rest of his life in a pleasant, moderately successful way, building his own home and raising his family. The Indian was the only one left of that family now. A fire had swept the house one night, and he was shifted to the Catholic mission school. The Black Robes had said their medicine was more powerful than his grandfather’s. Just to be safe, he had slipped a crucifix into the medicine bundle, along with his grandfather’s clay pipe, the piece of wood, and the cartridge with which he had killed his first deer.