Читать книгу Neither Wolf Nor Dog - Kent Nerburn - Страница 15

CHAPTER FIVE

A LAND OF DREAMS AND PHANTASMS

It had been several weeks since I arrived on the reservation. The weather was starting to take a slight autumn turn. Great roiling cumulus clouds rolled like tumbrels across the sky. The light seemed filtered, the ground animals more industrious.

As a child of the woodlands, I had never had much of a sense for the plains and the prairies. But now, as the days passed, the hypnotic power of the land had overtaken me. I felt like a man on an inland sea. The billowing, waving prairie grasses were symphonic in their ebbs and swells; the marching cadences of the passing clouds transfixed the eye. Sound was magnified, as if echoing against some vast, celestial vault. Thunder would roll in from beyond the horizon; the buzzing of insects would seem to be inside your head. It was equal parts peace and dread — a land of dreams and phantasms.

Sometimes at night I would spread out a sleeping bag in my pickup bed and watch distant flashes of lightning illuminate the inside of giant, looming thunderheads six or seven miles high. The earth itself had ceased to be the prime element in my consciousness. This was a land of the sky, and every turn, every action, lifted the eye upward.

Dan had noticed my growing fascination. We had taken to visiting his favorite hilltop almost every day. He never said anything, but I could see him watching me as I would stare out over the plains. We would sit for hours, oftentimes without speaking. The only sound would be the endless rushing of the wind and the rustling and snuffling of Fatback as she burrowed around in the tall prairie grasses.

Sometimes the old man would make a passing comment, like the time he told me that his father had brought him to this spot when he was a child, and many things had happened to him here that he couldn’t talk about. Other times he would begin singing, keeping his song low and private, as if meant for no one to hear. One time he looked at me and nodded. “Your eyes are different, Nerburn,” he said. “You are looking farther.” He didn’t elaborate or say another word, but that phrase, with all its cryptic meaning, buoyed me like nothing else he had ever said.

When we were on the hill, I would pass my time thinking of my family, or wondering about God or any number of other topics that fill the mind when confronted with vast, empty spaces. Never having been much for examining flora or fauna, I found little of interest in the profusion of tiny flowers and plant life that seemed to occupy so much of Dan’s attention. For me, this was a land of poetry — sparse, singular, with lyricism written on the wind.

One day Dan startled me with a full sentence. “You’re getting better with silence,” he said.

“I am?”

“I watch you.”

“I know.”

“You’re learning. I can tell because of your silence.”

I sensed that he had something to say. Dan did not make small talk when he was on his hill.

“We Indians know about silence,” he said. “We aren’t afraid of it. In fact, to us it is more powerful than words.”

I nodded in agreement.

“Our elders were schooled in the ways of silence, and they passed that along to us. Watch, listen, and then act, they told us. This is the way to live.

“Watch the animals to see how they care for their young. Watch the elders to see how they behave. Watch the white man to see what he wants. Always watch first, with a still heart and mind, then you will learn. When you have watched enough, then you can act.”

There was a silence.

“That’s quite a bit different from our way,” I volunteered, hoping to prod him into further conversation.

“Yes,” he said. “With you it is just the opposite. You learn by talking. You reward the kids who talk the most in school. At your parties everyone is trying to talk. In your work you are always having meetings where everyone interrupts everyone else and everyone talks five, ten, or a hundred times. You say it is working out a problem. To us it just sounds like a bunch of people saying anything that comes into their heads and then trying to make what they say come around to something that makes sense.

“Indians have known this for a long time. We like to use it on you. We know that when you are in a room and it is quiet you get nervous. You have to fill the space with sound. So you talk right away, before you even know what you are going to say.

“Our elders told us this was the best way to deal with white people. Be silent until they get nervous, then they will start talking. They will keep talking, and if you stay silent, they will say too much. Then you will be able to see into their hearts and know what they really mean. Then you will know what to do.”

“I imagine it works,” I said. I knew full well it did; my students had used the same trick on me, and it had taken me months to catch on.

“It works, all right,” the old man said. “But it causes problems, too. I remember as a little boy in school. When the teacher would call on me I would sometimes want to think about my answer. She would get nervous and tap her ruler on the desk. Then she’d get angry at me and ask me if maybe I didn’t hear her or if the cat got my tongue.

“How was I supposed to think up my answer when I could see her getting upset and nervous and knew that the longer I waited the worse it would be? I’d end up saying one word or, ‘I don’t know.’ I’d say anything to get her away from me. Pretty soon they said I was stupid.

“I remember one teacher telling me I needed to learn how to think. She really didn’t care about my thinking. She just wanted me to talk. She thought talking meant thinking. She was never going to be happy unless I started talking the second she called on me. And the longer I talked, the happier she would be. It didn’t even matter what I said. I was just supposed to talk.

“I wouldn’t do it. I thought it was disrespectful to talk when I didn’t have anything to say. They said I was a bad student and that I was dumb.

“Now I see the same thing happening to my little great grandchildren. Their teachers say they don’t pay attention because they don’t look at the teacher’s eyes all the time and they say they aren’t very smart because they don’t talk all the time.

“I know what they are really doing. They don’t look at the teacher’s eyes because they are trying to form their thoughts. They are just being respectful in the way we teach them, because for us it is respect to keep your eyes down when someone more important is talking. If the teachers would give them time to form their thoughts and let them do it inside their own minds, they would see that my great grandchildren are very smart. But the teachers don’t think like us. They want everyone connected to everyone else by words and looks. They don’t like silence and they don’t like empty space.”

“Like the pioneers didn’t like the empty space of the land,” I said.

Dan brightened perceptibly. “Exactly! You’re starting to understand.” I glowed inwardly and kept listening.

Dan continued. “This is a lot of the reason why we Indians make white people nervous, Nerburn. White people like to argue. They don’t even let each other finish sentences. They are always interrupting and saying, ‘Well, I think...’

“To Indians this is very disrespectful and even very stupid. If you start talking, I’m not going to interrupt you. I will listen. Maybe I will stop listening if I don’t like what you are saying. But I won’t interrupt you.

“When you are done I will make my decision on what you said, but I won’t tell you if I disagree with you unless it is important. Otherwise I will just be quiet and go away. You have told me what I need to know. There is nothing more to say.

“But this isn’t enough for most white people. They want me to tell them what I think about what they are thinking, and if they don’t agree with me, they want to talk more and try to convince me.

“You don’t convince anyone by arguing. People make their decisions in their heart. Talk doesn’t touch my heart.

“People should think of their words like seeds. They should plant them, then let them grow in silence. Our old people taught us that the earth is always speaking to us, but that we have to be silent to hear her.

“I try to be that way. I taught my children to be that way.”

He swept his hand out across the panorama in front of us. “Do you hear the sound of the prairie? That is a great sound. But when I’m talking I can’t hear it.

“There are lots of voices besides ours, Nerburn. Lots of voices.”

I smiled at his gentle lecture. “You make good sense, old man,” I said. He nodded in quiet acknowledgment. I think we both felt a sense of pride at how things were progressing.

He picked up a handful of loose earth and looked at it. “What do you do in your mind while we are up here, Nerburn?” he asked.

“Oh, I think about my family. Sometimes I make little prayers or look for shapes in the clouds. Mostly, I guess I’m just in some kind of reverie.”

“Do you know what I do?” he said. “I listen to voices. For me this hill is so full of life I can never be quiet enough to hear all the voices.”

I wanted to press him on this, but gently. I didn’t want to break the spell. “Do you mean real voices, or sensations that seem to have meaning?”

“I mean real voices. They’re not all people. They’re not all speaking our language. But they are voices. Listen.”

I heard the buzzing of locusts and the distant, rhythmic call of some kind of bird.

“Do you hear that bird?” asked Dan.

I told him I did.

“Do you know what he is saying?”

“I don’t speak ‘bird,’” I answered.

“You should,” he twinkled. “Learn a lot. The birds are ‘two-legs,’ like us. They are very close to us. He is calling to another. He is saying it will rain soon.”

“You can tell that?”

“Yes, and I can tell that the wind is switching to the north and we will soon have colder weather.”

“How do you know that?”

“I just do,” he responded cryptically. “It’s in the voices I hear. I can understand all the trees. The wind. All the animals. The insects. I can tell what a color of the sky means. Everything speaks to me.

“There,” he said, pointing to a patch of scrubby grass in the distance. “What do you see?”

“It looks a little greener than the rest of the hills,” I answered. “At least in a few patches.”

“Good. Now why is that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Look closer.”

I squinted my eyes. There was nothing to be seen except the short green grass.

“I don’t see anything,” I said.

“Look closer.”

I squinted again. There seemed to be some kind of movement, but it was too small to make out.

“Something is moving,” I said.

“Good. Do you know what it is?”

I admitted I didn’t.

“Pispiza. You call them prairie dogs.”

“Okay,” I acknowledged.

“That’s why the grass is green. Our brother prairie dogs dig under the ground to make their homes. They dig up the earth so the rain can go deeper and the roots of the grass can grow stronger.

“Where the grass is richer, the bigger animals come to feed. If we sit here quietly, in the morning, when the antelope are hungry, we will see them and we could hunt them. It is all because of our brother prairie dog. Where he lives, we can live.

“These are the kind of things I see when I look out here. They are things my grandfathers taught me. I hear them, too. My grandfathers. I hear their bones under the ground.”

I looked at the clump of dusty earth he held in his hand.

“You think I’m lying, don’t you? Or just a crazy old fool. I can’t explain it. But I know where the dead are buried. I hear them. They speak to me in some ancient tongue. It’s a gift I have.

“You’ve read about those people who can find water by using a forked stick? They walk along with the stick above the ground, and when they get above water the stick just points down.

“That’s the way it is with me. When I get over one of the graves I have a feeling inside me. It’s like a shiver. My grandmother had it, too. She said that our ancestors gave it to us, and that I should always listen.

“That’s why I come up here, Nerburn. Out there is where my people are buried. This is where I come to listen.”

“I believe you, Dan,” I said. And I did. Once, many years ago, I had taken a great deal of peyote. I had thought nothing of it at the time — it was just one of those acts that went along with life in the sixties. Within hours I was lying on my back under the midnight sky listening to the springs flow under the ground. It was a rushing sound, as if they were all speaking to each other. I felt like I was overhearing a conversation in the earth. Then, as I walked to a certain spot that sat like a plateau overlooking a valley, I felt a cold shiver come across me. “There are graves here,” I had said to myself. I knew I believed it, but I had never been sure whether it was the peyote talking or whether I had been opened to some deeper realm of meaning. I had never forgotten that moment, though I seldom shared it with anyone.

Now, this old man was telling me the same thing, but for him it was not some drug-induced awareness, but a part of everyday reality. I wondered what it must be like to have that sensitivity every moment of your life.

He saw my curiosity. “Here,” he said, “watch this.” He sat back on his haunches and cupped his hands over his knees. Nothing seemed to be different. I sat silently beside him, wondering what it was I was supposed to see. Suddenly, Fatback came rustling through the tall grasses wagging her tail.

“Good dog,” he said, and ruffled the scruff of her neck. Fatback wagged her tail furiously, then pushed back off through the weeds.

I raised my eyebrows and gave Dan a little half smile.

“See,” he said.

“You called her over here?”

“Want me to do it again?”

“No,” I answered, though I truly wanted to challenge him on this. But I knew that, on some level, everything was a test, and I did not want to appear the skeptic. My job was to record what I saw as he wanted it told, not to get involved in some ersatz anthropological research. All I could think of was what one tough old woman had said to me when I first arrived on the Red Lake reservation to begin the oral history project. I had gone over to her office to request her assistance in identifying elders who might be interested in participating. She stared at me with a hard glare, then stated, simply, “If you think you’re going to come up here and do one of those goddamn white anthropology projects, you can just get on your pony and ride.” Then she turned back to her beadwork and never said another word.

As much as I wanted Dan to prove that he had called Fatback, it seemed too close to a “goddamn white anthropology project.” So, I just said, “That dog’s got good hearing,” and let things go at that.

Dan chuckled knowingly. “You’re a good boy, Nerburn. Let’s go get some lunch.”