The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

What I am is the Indian who can’t die. I’m the worst dream America ever had.

it wasn’t us, it would have been another regiment,” I said, calmer again. “You can’t stop a country from happening, Good Stab.” “But we were already a nation,” he said up to me. “We didn’t ask you to come.

You put your reminders of pain on the wall and pray to them. We still hurt, so we don’t need that reminder.

Good Stab fell to his knees, pressed his forehead to the floor and he screamed too, and I daresay our screams harmonized, at least in how much they pained us. This, I believe, is the story of America, told in a forgotten church in the hinterlands, with a choir of the dead mutely witnessing.

The depravity of man's heart knows no floor, and everyone in this hard country has a sordid chapter in the story of their life, that they're trying either to atone for, or stay ahead of.

You can’t stop a country from happening, Good Stab.” “But we were already a nation,” he said up to me. “We didn’t ask you to come.

You don’t understand,” I said pleadingly as if to a higher power, longing to use my hands to gesture with, to make him see, to get him to understand that these were different times, with a different breed of men——the kind necessary to forge a new land, a better country, one that made use of its resources rather than letting them lie fallow. “I understand,” he said, however. “You wanted to make us cry. And so you did. You wanted our land, so you took it. You wanted us out of the way, so you killed us in our lodges. Is there more to it, Three-Persons?

We never called this place ours like that, though, but that didn't mean it was yours.

I didn’t look around, though. You can’t look around, every time you think you’re not alone. Once you start, you never stop.

I didn’t mean to name that buffalo calf that, but once I said it I couldn’t take it back. But Wolf Calf told me when I was young that a real Pikuni gives away what’s closest to him, and my childhood name was the one thing the Cat Man and the soldiers hadn’t been able to touch. So I had to give it away.

What I am is the Indian who can't die. I'm the worst dream America ever had.

Weasel Plume. I never knew you, but God do I miss you.

It flew above the Bear the day they killed Heavy Runner,” Good Stab said back without pause. “It flies above every camp of dead Indians. I will always pull them down. You put your reminders of pain on the wall and pray to them. We still hurt, so we don’t need that reminder.

Fine. I give myself permission, thanks. It’s what we white folk do.

But we are German still, from the old country.” “The old country,” he said, unable not to grin. “That’s where the Pikuni are from as well. Maybe we’re German like you.

I know the Lord sees all. But, too, I have to imagine He’s inured to the many and various frailties contained in His multitudinous children. Perhaps we’re even amusing to him.

I was born the year the stars fell.

Your American words were coming over me like heavy wet snow sliding down the mountain, not caring what was in their way. The words picked me up and carried me with them, inside them. They were all around me. When I opened my mouth, they were the only thing I could breathe. Taking them in burned inside at first, but then, like bees coming back to their nest, each one found its little hole to sleep in, that it fit in, and having them inside wasn’t cold or hot anymore.

You must be this stupid to ride this ride.

The humor of the west knows no bounds, respects no boundaries.

My father used to tell me that I needed to pay attention to where I was instead of looking farther away than I could see, and I know he was right, but knowing and doing aren’t the same thing.

After the tragedy of last week’s loaf of German bread having disappeared so quickly but lingered so long in memory

but the adversaries are treating the case in such a way as to show that they are seeking neither truth nor concord

When will it be enough?" I asked. "When will napikwans have enough of our land?" he asked back.

And, lastly, damning my immortal soul, “God looks the other way when men must dole out justice. I can show you in the Bible whereof it speaks that. No forgiveness is necessary when those you punish are naught but savages.

We don’t choose the shape or meter of our struggles, however. Our duty, insofar as this aging pastor can tell, is to simply endure them, and, when and if opportunity arises, overcome them.

The depravity of man’s heart knows no floor, and everyone in this hard country has a sordid chapter in the story of their life, that they’re trying either to atone for, or stay ahead of. It’s what binds us one to the other.

Either way, the time for scalping is well behind us,” I said. “This is a new day, is it not?” I lifted my arms, enveloping the whole grand chapel, and the civilized town beyond it. “Or it’s a single, long night,

Sits-beside-him wife,” “big-mouth” and their coyote brethren the “little big-mouths”——it’s all so rational and easy, so descriptive and childlike. Over the course of our afternoon, this ancient language would pile up and up like a mountain of buffalo skulls——pardon, “blackhorn” skulls. “Real-bear.” “Long-legs.” “Coldmaker.” “Sticky-mouth.” This last one I take from context to be not quite a bear but more than a weasel, perhaps with a mouth characterized by saliva?

I wasn't expecting Etsy, though. I wasn't expecting this academic wrapper at all, really. But, I'm not the boss. I just run along that splintery, decrepit fence between worlds and write down what I can see from the cracks and holes along the way. I don't think this is how Tolstoy did it, no. --- Acknowledgements