Yelloweye
8
Echoing Thunder
The Family
COLE AND ASHLEY had taken a four-wheeler to the upper pasture and returned upset. This had the potential to turn into another range war. The Forest Service had cancelled their lease.
“Those fuckers can’t do that,” Ashley stormed. “We’ve leased that land for forty years. We’ve cared for it. Now they want us off so the cattle don’t interfere with the oil company. How many people do they think they’ll feed with oil?”
“Doesn’t make a damn bit of difference,” Cole said. “Kids, we’re going to have cattle coming back down next week. Rafe and the boys will be rounding them up this weekend to start the drive. We’ll have to share the pasturelands. What do you think we can sustain?”
“The horses don’t graze the land down as badly as cattle do. We’ve never had to supplement in summer before. We put four hundred head of cattle out there with the hundred rescues and we’d have that pasture so bare it won’t be fit for grazing for two years.”
“I don’t want to risk your operation,” Cole said. “Yours is the future. We’ll drive the cattle to the Alexander pens and I’ll ship them to the auction house.”
“Don’t do that, Pa,” Kyle said. “We’ve got an option on the Calhoun ranch. We’ve been dickering over terms for near a year. If we go in with a cash offer, we could own 2,000 more acres next week. We can sustain the cattle for two weeks without doing any damage.”
“So, you want cash?” Cole said.
“Pa, you aren’t fifty yet,” Ramie said. “It was never our intention to put you out of business. We want your cattle to thrive. The Calhouns haven’t run anything on their range in the two years since Obert died. It’s a good move for the cattle and it’s good for the land.”
“You’re right, as usual,” Cole responded.
“Cole, you know you’ve wanted that piece of land forever. Your kids got an option on it. Bankroll them.”
“Let me make a couple calls. How soon is dinner?”
Third Live Report
“Earth Sister, you’ve threatened the oil company with buffalo and with elk. Yet they disappear after a brief appearance. Ron Grisholm, the president of Shale Oil Inc., says that you are dealing in illusions,” said reporter Sarah d’Angelo as she interviewed Earth Sister.
“He is avoiding the inevitable,” Earth Sister said. “This site will be returned to Earth Mother. He needs to salvage what he can and retreat. And not only from this site. The Rocky Mountains are Earth Mother’s backbone. She will shake herself and rid the mountains of this abomination like a dog shaking water off her back.”
“The Park Service has indicated that their investigation revealed no tracks to match herds the size we have seen on the rise over there,” the reporter insisted. Earth Sister turned to face the camera and pulled the right sleeve of her blouse down her arm. The faces of both wolves were revealed. The exposure of her skin was only barely within the limits of broadcast television.
“Today, the wolves,” Earth Sister announced. On cue, the drums in the village began.
Buffalo and herds of elk, deer, and sheep had made no sound in the past. But the howl of wolves on the hunt preceded the appearance of the first heads over the rise. Nearly a hundred wolves were known to inhabit the greater Yellowstone area. Three times that many came over the rise. Nor were they alone. Foxes, coyotes, bobcats, and cougars came with them. And behind them came bears. Black bears loped on all fours as grizzlies rose on their hind legs and bellowed. In the lead came a massive silver gray wolf.
“It’s Wolf!” Ramie exclaimed. “She’s called Creator Wolf!”
“I don’t think she’s doing the calling,” Mary Beth said. “She’s the voice of the Twin Wolves. Our children are out there somewhere.”
The animals stopped after they had crossed the rise, just as the herds of buffalo and elk had done. They continued to howl and snarl, however, as the silver wolf loped toward Earth Sister and the frightened reporter. From nearly twenty feet away, the wolf sprang. The cameraman was backing up steadily, but kept the camera focused on Earth Sister and the frozen reporter.
The wolf landed lightly with massive paws on the reporter’s shoulders as she screamed. She dropped to her knees in front of the wolf.
“Don’t kill me. Please, don’t kill me!” the reporter cried out.
The wolf paced around her, glancing at the cameraman, who backed away farther. Then, in complete disdain, the wolf raised a leg and pissed on the reporter. He loped away and the wolves, foxes, coyotes, bob cats, cougars, and bears retreated over the rise.
“Explain that illusion to the president of Shale Oil Company,” Earth Sister said to the reporter, still on the ground in front of her. “I am sad for the men and women who stand between The People and the scorpion,” she continued, pointing at a distant line of security guards surrounding the fenced in site of the pseudo-fracking machinery. “Tomorrow we darken the sky.”
The Family
“We backed your offer and the Calhouns accepted it.” Cole said as the family settled into office to read. “I don’t know what’s coming, but Mandy—Earth Sister—said every site would be destroyed. I don’t know how they’ll do it, but I know the Yellowstone site is only one of twenty-three sites that have they’ve surveyed in the mountains. I just pray that our children have not been trapped by the ancients.”
After verifying there had been no more developments at the Yellowstone standoff, the family gathered again to read. Ramie claimed the polished box and plopped herself in her father’s chair. Then getting up so Kyle could sit down, she settled in his lap with Aubrey cuddling the babies next to her.
“I think I need a bigger chair,” Cole laughed as he settled on the sofa with Ashley and Mary Beth cuddled against him.
“Sometimes I just need to be closer to my family than others,” Ramie said. “I need to read. I’m getting too fidgety to listen.”
“Go ahead, daughter,” Mary Beth said.
Caitlin: Making Thunder
For a long time, Wolf Riding Woman and Wolf Rising waited, looking at the herd of buffalo. It was a rich valley that supported thousands. We made camp and built a hut of sticks and mud. We set to work taking a cow from the herd and smoking the meat. We stripped the hide and cleaned it. An old doe from a herd of whitetail approached our camp. I leapt into her mind and she offered herself. We took her and thanked her spirit for this gift. I searched for roots, berries, and wild grain that we gathered into our camp, preparing for a long winter, even though it was still the long days of summer.
The alpha female of the pack was sitting by our fire when I came out in the morning. I’d almost become used to seeing the wolves, but I still fingered my hatchet. I hacked a piece of buffalo from the meat we were roasting and tossed it to the bitch. Phile and I sat to eat our roast and berries for breakfast. I seldom tried to touch the mind of a wolf, but I could feel her reaching out to me.
“It is time,” she said. “White Mouth awaits.”
She led and we followed. It was unusual to be led by the wolves without having the whole pack with us. Having just one made me nervous. I reached out to Mandy in Lame Deer in now-time and she gladly came into my head.
“This is it?” she asked. “I will be quiet and watch. Tread with care, my loves.”
The wolf led us to a small clearing high on the mountain. Above us, I could see an indent in the rocks and was certain there was a cave entrance on the far side. The wolf approached us and in an unusual gesture, licked our faces. She bade us farewell. No one fronts a bear in his cave.
We sat at the edge of the clearing and stilled our hearts. In now-time, Phile and I hid in the barn so we could focus all our attention on Oxėse.
We waited.
We cast out our minds and felt the grizzly deep in the cave. And then he began to growl. He was deep in the cave when the sounds began, but we could hear them clearly, both in our minds and in our ears. He lumbered forward until his bulk filled the cave entrance. We sat as small and as still as we could. This was no ordinary grizzly bear, though even an ordinary one would have frightened me. This boar was Grandfather White Mouth. He weighed a ton and stood twelve feet tall when he walked on his hinds.
And when he roared, the thunder echoed from the mountain.
When we touched his mind, he let us glide around the edges. What we got was that he was a bit of a showoff. He liked being the biggest animal on the mountain. He was one of the few who could stand a buffalo charge and hold his own. He normally ate small things—fruit, berries, grubs, and an occasional mole or rabbit. He traveled down to the river to fish. He had frozen a small elk with his roar and killed it with a single swat of his massive paw. He feasted on that flesh just before hibernating.
He loved to hear his own voice echoing through the mountains.
“How can we make that sound?” Phile asked. We’d been to the clearing to observe the great bear three days in a row. I tapped on the deer hide we had stretched at our camp to dry. It thudded.
“Have you ever used a drum?” Wolf Riding Woman asked.
“Sweet Medicine gave our people small drums so we could dance and celebrate,” Wolf Rising answered.
“Drums,” I whispered in now-time. Phile squeezed me in our bed.
“Onéhavo'e. We need big drums,” he said.
Drums were not unknown to our people. But we were migratory. We followed herds and moved across the prairies and into the mountains. We did not collect a lot of things that were hard to move. Wolf Rising and I had made and discarded countless bows, clothes, and dwellings. When we rode north on the buffalo herd and when we ran with the wolves, we took nothing with us but the clothes we wore, our hatchets, and our wolf skin robes. We had abandoned our tent in Oklahoma, our wigwam in Wyoming, and sleeping skins whenever we had to move. Even our horses roamed wild until we called them with our minds. Drums were small things among our people. We held them in one hand while we beat on them with the other.
Drum-making is hard work. We studied in now-time and practiced in Oxėse. It would be days before we could experiment. We had a deer hide stretched, but not tanned. We cut branches and wove them into a hoop and then stretched a circle of rawhide across the hoop. We wet the hide to shrink it and let it dry in the sun.
Merv had left his trading post in the hands of a cousin and we visited to buy a pair of small drums. He explained that they were Ute drums, but made a pleasant sound. He didn’t treat us seriously when we said we were interested in Cheyenne drums. I scowled at him and we bought the pair of little drums for a price that Merv never would have charged.
These were hollow log drums. They had skins stretched across both ends of a cylinder. We could beat them with our hands or with a wrapped stick. For little drums, they had a pretty big sound.
Wolf Rising located a hollow log and cut a length to fasten a skin to for a drumhead. He broke the first one by swinging his hatchet too hard. We learned from that to make tiny light strokes.
After weeks of work, we took our little drums to the cave of White Mouth. When we heard him start his morning grumblings, we answered with beats of our drums. He came lumbering out of the cave on all fours and stood before us to roar. I thought we had offended him. It was hard to read the mind of this primitive and egotistical creature. He grabbed my hoop drum out of my hand with his teeth and lumbered back to the cave. He dropped it on the ground and turned to roar again—a roar that echoed throughout the valley.
I heeded his call. Wolf Rising and I approached the cave mouth. We had never come fully into the clearing before. This was the home of the great spirit bear. I picked up the drum from where he dropped it. He stood on his hind legs in the mouth of the cave and roared. Then I could feel it. The massive sound was echoing from inside the cave and out the mouth as an amplifier. I thumped my drum and it was ten times louder echoing from inside the cave. Wolf Rising joined me on the log drum he had created and with White Mouth leading us, we duplicated the subtle changes of his mighty voice. As we beat our drums in concert with the great bear, I could see reality waver and the great valley beneath us was filled with animals that disappeared when I stopped beating the drum.
And for just a moment, I saw my other self.
Wolf Rising and I had to hunt to have food for the winter. It appeared we would be in this location for a long time. But hunting gave us rawhide for drums. And in now-time, we found the meaning.
Phile and I went to Lame Deer under the pretense of checking on a couple new horses. Kyle and Ramie had thrown themselves into the upkeep of the ranch so thoroughly that I don’t think they noticed we were gone. It was nearly five hundred miles, but we drove it on Friday, expecting to return on Sunday. By Friday evening, Mandy was in our arms.
“My darlings, I’ve missed you so much,” she panted. “Not that there is anything wrong with mental orgasms, but I want my arms around you as we make love.”
“Mandy, my love,” Phile said. “You might get your arms around all of us.”
“How?!”
“We think we’ve learned how to make thunder echo from the mountains. At the moment, it’s just a little thunder, but it might be enough,” I said.
“What happened?”
“We made drums in Oxėse. We don’t have time to make drums in now-time, but we’ve bought some. When we experimented a few days ago, we actually saw each other,” Phile said excitedly.
“Saw? You mean you saw Wolf Riding Woman and Wolf Rising? Could you touch?” she asked.
“Almost,” I said. “Mandy, my Earth Sister and my voice, I think we need you as our catalyst. I don’t think we can cross between times without you.”
Mandy hustled us to her cabin and we spent the night in each other’s arms as we explained what we believed was happening. We wanted to try it immediately, of course, but Mandy suggested we wait until Saturday night.
“There will be a powwow with dancing, singing, and drumming,” she said. “Let’s use the group music to augment our own. Please, please, let this work!”
It was mid-August. The nights were warm and the skies were clear. Over a hundred tribal members gathered to celebrate first harvest. The drumming and dancing started in the middle of the afternoon. At first it was just the old men who gathered. Younger people started to arrive at dinner time and the tables were spread with tons of food. We joined and were welcomed. We made a show of drumming and learning some of the traditional dances. Mandy, of course, had been practicing all summer. But after dark, we slipped away to her cabin with the various drums we had brought.
We stripped ourselves in both timelines and sat with our drums, three of us in Mandy’s cabin and two in front of the bear cave. We started tentatively, but the strong rhythm set by the drummers in the circle outside filtered into our hands and we all five started to play on our drums. I was lost in the rhythms and seemed to float on the drumbeats. And then I felt lips on mine. Soft and sensuous. I thought Mandy had moved to kiss me, but when I opened my eyes, I saw myself looking back at me. My lips sought the lips of Wolf Riding Woman and she touched my soul. Beside me I saw Phile in a very unexpected embrace with Wolf Rising. Then all four of us turned to Mandy, who stared at us in disbelief. Our drums were forgotten as we embraced our dear love.
“It’s real. You are all here with me,” she gasped as Wolf Rising kissed her deeply. “I am beloved by all four and I love you equally. Take me. Make me your lover and your woman.”
There was remarkably little confusion as we celebrated our love physically for the first time. I don’t know if it was Phile or Wolf Rising that penetrated me for the first time. I don’t know if it was Phile’s come or Wolf Rising’s come that I licked out of Mandy and Wolf Riding Woman. I know that I felt every rise and every release of each of my lovers.
I was sixteen years old. I’d had my share of orgasms, diddling my clit with my fingers. I’d had a good share of orgasms with either Phile or Wolf Rising doing the diddling. I’d joined with Mandy as we pleasured each other. But having five souls wrapped together, all experiencing not only their own orgasm with the other four, but experiencing the other four as well…
There has never been a woman—nor a man—who had more joy in her first sexual experience than I had. Unless it was Wolf Riding Woman or Mandy. Or Phile or Wolf Rising, for that matter. It was our season and we made love as often, as hard, and as long as we could last. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I felt the drums of the tribe beginning to slack off. I knew our time together was coming to an end, as did my mates.
I kissed myself—Wolf Riding Woman—again. I kissed Wolf Rising as I stroked his hardened manhood and pointed it at my other self. I held fast as Phile penetrated Mandy again and kissed them as the drumming finally faded to a stop and we found ourselves again in Mandy’s cabin, still making love. Wolf Riding Woman and Wolf Rising left their drums at the cave entrance as they returned to their hut to make love again and again. Mandy and Phile made love to me all night long and we kept our link together. Now, no matter what, we would not hesitate to couple in any combination.
We purchased two quarter horse mares that weekend and brought Mandy’s Wildfire home with us. We knew now. Not only could we reunite with our other selves, but we could make love with our sweet Earth Sister whenever we wanted. And we wanted often.
Our junior year in high school was a different experience. I was happy when Aubrey got together with Ramie and Kyle again. They got married on Christmas. All three of them together. It seemed there was a lot of moaning next door that fall. But maybe that was just me moaning. I loved Phile so much that I welcomed him into my body at every opportunity we had. Mandy continued to come to the ranch to tend to her horse and get screwed senseless as soon as we could get her alone. It looked like it would be a wonderful year.
Phile: Lovers
I guess one of the advantages of having been such pains in the butt for so long was that no one noticed how often we were sneaking out. Moms had assumed that Caitlin and I had sex when we were twelve or something. So, when we actually started, no one even batted an eye. Except Caitlin and me. We were stunned.
First of all, it was almost impossible for Wolf Riding Woman and Wolf Rising to make love without Caitlin and I being at least aware of it and most of the time participating. The same was true in reverse. Second, we had Mandy riding with us almost all the time. Sometimes literally. It was so easy to slip up to the Bear Claw in a four-wheeler and bring her back to our room. We could be up before the cowboys and zip right past the Alexander place in the morning to get her back to her car.
The best, though, was all those weekends we went camping, even in the snow. On those weekends, we’d tap on our drums up on the ridge and feel Wolf Riding Woman and Wolf Rising join us. Then we’d all five be together. Some of those weekends, we never got out of our sleeping furs, it seemed. How ideal is it for a teenager to have a place to go make love that literally no one knows about? Absolutely no chance of discovery.
It was becoming so easy to move between now-time and Oxėse that we could move Mandy with us even when she wasn’t physically in the same location. We didn’t have to worry about her driving up to the Bear Claw in winter for us to pick her up. We’d all drum, link our minds together, and bring her to us.
And that’s what it seemed that Yelloweye wanted us working on. We had an anchor in two worlds and could move freely between them.
Caitlin: Two Sticks
I wish it was all as rosy as Phile says. Well, dipping his wick in three hot girls is kind of a fantasy, isn’t it? Even if two of the hot girls shared one mind. All the stories I’d heard about that were similar were a girl in one body who had two different personalities. I had pretty much the same personality but two bodies.
You just can’t imagine what it was like to receive two different sensory experiences. Yeah, one mind, but the input from the two bodies was completely different. To start with, Phile and I were about six inches taller than Wolf Rising and Wolf Riding Woman. So, it was a completely different sensation when I lay beneath Wolf Rising than when I jumped Phile’s bones. And my now-time body reacted differently—chemically—to Phile and Wolf Rising.
It’s really no wonder that we spent every opportunity in bed. But add in Mandy. She changed the dynamic all the way around and it was all for the better. I think she had the strongest orgasms of the five of us and when we were linked together it wasn’t unusual for us all to pass out when she came.
But it wasn’t all fun and games. We had school in now-time. Junior year was different than lower grades. We had a lot more independent study and small groups. Teachers seemed to give up on trying to separate us—or else they just didn’t care. We learned a lot and actually got some use out of things that other kids swore they’d never use.
For instance, if you want a round drum that is eight inches across, how long a piece of wood do you need to bend into the body? C=2πr.
And that was what we had to figure out. White Mouth told us so.
It was nearing time for his long winter’s nap and he was grouchy as… um… a bear. We’d noticed, after we’d drummed the five of us together, that White Mouth was joining less and less in our thunder making. We were preparing hides for drums, and had made one that was a little larger, but the thump seemed dead. We decided the body was too thick and we weren’t getting enough echo inside. We brought the drum to the cave mouth to see if that improved it.
Not only did it not improve it, White Mouth got angry.
He roared from deep within the cave and the sound knocked us off our feet and into the clearing. Even when he was showing off it hadn’t been like this. He lumbered out of the cave and looked at our drum. Then he stuck his claws through the two log drums and shredded the skins, hurling the heavy logs past us as if they were pebbles.
In the time of Sweet Medicine, I taught Tsétsėhéstȧhese to make drums. You must go to the sacred mountain of the people and learn there how to bend the tree to your will and make the skin echo the thunder.
We didn’t have enough drum power left to call Mandy to us to speak for us, but she was listening and prompting our questions.
“Vóhpȧhtse, where is the mountain and how shall we get there?”
We will go to the time of the People. Ride!
Usually, we reach out and make a jump into the mind of an animal, but this was more like having our minds dragged out of us and into White Mouth. He was not content to have just our minds, though. He made our hands grab the thick fur at the hump of his back and he lurched forward. Only Wolf Riding Woman and Wolf Rising made the physical leap, but Phile, Caitlin, and Mandy were all physically knocked out as we made the mental ride with White Mouth. The fact that we were meeting with Merv after school at the time was the only thing that kept us from discovery. We rode with the bear across time and across the mountains. And when the bear slowed to a stop, Wolf Riding Woman and Wolf Rising were in before-time facing Náhkȯhe-vose, called Bear Butte, in the Black Hills.
Go in! Here you will learn to make the People’s drums.
Wolf Riding Woman and Wolf Rising entered the mountain.
In now-time, Phile and I woke up next to Mandy. Merv was kneeling beside us, chanting softly. The journey had been breathtaking and we weren’t entirely back in now-time as we journeyed into the mountain with Wolf Riding Woman and Wolf Rising. At the same time, we rode with Mandy as she spoke to Merv.
“Grandfather, it was amazing. We rode on the back of White Mouth. He has left us at the gate to the holy mountain and we have found the passage inside,” she gasped.
“The passage? At Náhkȯhe-vose?” Merv asked incredulously. “Why are you there?”
“We must learn to make drums,” Phile said. “We must learn to make Cheyenne drums.”
Merv looked at us for a long time—at least it seemed like a long time. Then he stood to leave us.
“I must think on this,” he said. “Making sacred drums is a secret. My granddaughter, you are not permitted this knowledge because you are a woman. Women work a different kind of medicine. And you two… you would be considered hobbyists—white people who try to take the ways of the People and make them your own. Yet if Vóhpȧhtse has taken the Wolf Twins to learn to make drums, I cannot deny them. I must sleep. Perhaps the old ones will come to me in a dream.”
He left us and we turned our thoughts back to our other selves, carrying Mandy with us in our heads.
We journeyed into the mountain, not knowing where we were going. There was some powerful magic going on. We knew that we were inside the mountain—underground—yet we could see perfectly well, as if it were daylight. Yet there was no sun and no fire. Wolf Riding Woman and Wolf Rising had only what was with us when White Mouth commanded us to ride—our hatchets, knives, and ever-present wolf robes.
Deep within the mountain, we heard a single drum beat reverberate for many seconds. Then there was a second, but of a different timbre. Minutes later, there was a third beat and we entered a vast chamber where a man walked among a dozen drums, picking each up and striking it with a padded stick. When he had struck the drumhead, he paused to listen to it echo through the chamber. Two drums he took to his work area and began taking them apart.
“Come,” he said. “I will speak the legends and you will learn to make the sacred drums of Tsétsėhéstȧhese.”
Thus began our apprenticeship to Two Sticks.
“Long ago, there lived a man of the People named Motsé'eóeve, Sweet Medicine. He was touched by the ancient spirits. I will not recite all the things that Sweet Medicine did in his life. You should know that he brought order to our society, rules to live by, ways to judge truth and people. He was given four arrows that dwell yet among the People. Two were for war and two for hunting. As long as these arrows are with us, we have good hunting and victories. He also prophesied that the Ho'evȯtse would come with horses and with guns and the People would change. These things are known to all the People and we see the coming of the white man and how he throws death from far away—farther than the best bow,” Two Sticks said.
A long trough filled with water ran through the center of the cavern. Into this trough, Two Sticks placed poplar saplings that had been flattened and smoothed on one side. He moved to a stack of logs and selected one. This he held with his knees as he scraped it with his knife. As he scraped to flatten one side, he continued his story.
“But in addition to rules and strength, Sweet Medicine returned to the people with many other arts and skills. He showed us how to make the earth house, the tipi, and the smokehouse. And he taught us to dance and to drum our thanks to the spirits. In order to dance, we had to learn to make the thunder drums. This is what I do in the mountain even today.”
Through the winter, we worked with Two Sticks to learn how to bend the saplings into a perfect circle, glue the ends together, wet and stretch the hide over its frame, and to lace it and tighten it until it rang clearly. When completed and struck, the sound of the drum would fill the chamber and echo from the walls.
No matter how it was when Sweet Medicine came to the mountain, neither Two Sticks nor we were confined to the mountain. We needed to hunt. We needed to trade with others for food that we could not grow. And as we traded, we learned a bit about the world we now lived in.
Even though Bear Butte was sacred to the Cheyenne, most of the People had been pushed farther west by both whiteman and other tribes. The nearest villages to the mountain were Lakota. When we took skins and meat to trade for vegetables and fruit, we learned much about what was happening in the world.
Red Cloud had signed a treaty, but Crazy Horse was gathering bands to oppose the white eyes. We knew how that worked out. I was ready to go find him and help wipe out the blue coats. Mandy and Caitlin convinced me otherwise. This was not the battle we were being prepared for. Still, I seethed and I could tell Wolf Rising was barely constrained. They spoke of a yellow-haired general who was gathering an army to oppose them. I knew at once, from school history, that they were talking about General George Armstrong Custer. And I remembered standing together under a flag while the blonde soldier and his companions screamed into our camp shooting at us—killing our mother. The anger and pain in my heart threatened to spill out into the mountain.
Inside the mountain, though, Two Sticks showed us the construction of drums and talked long into the night about how to awaken the drum spirit. Each step had a prayer, from bending the frame to smudging it with the sacred smoke to using the yellow mud to bind the skin to the frame. He taught us that it was not only the tension of the drumhead that determined the timbre of the drum, but also the thickness of the hide. Hides of different animals gave different sounds. He even traded for the hides of cows that were now being herded by some of the People.
We stayed with Two Sticks for the entire winter and we listened. Prior to this time, the only human mind we had entered was Mandy’s. But while listening to Two Sticks, we found ourselves looking out his eyes. He seemed unaware that we were there. But riding silently, we learned much more than the making of drums.
Two Sticks’ mind was a constant narrative of the lore of the People and their history from long before Sweet Medicine to the present. And this he shared with us.
And on those nights when we journeyed away from the mountain, we beat our little prayer drums and joined our five fingers together in love.
The Family
“How could making drums be so important?” Mom Mar asked.
“I traveled with John Hamm, White Horse, for many years. I think we’ve all figured out that he was Theresa Ranae Bell’s husband and the father of the first Laramie Wyoming Bell,” Jason said. “John and I had a dream that we’d be able to bring true peace between the People and the whites. He always said that true peace would never be possible until the white man’s heart beat in time with the Cheyenne prayer drums.”
“The drums were that important?” Cole asked.
“The drums were given to the People along with the rules—what we’d call the law. They were small, only about a foot across and a couple inches deep. But they were said to speak with the voice of the old ones,” Jason said. “I heard them a couple times when John and I visited a tribe. But I never got to witness one of the sacred dances.”
“I think I’d have shit my pants if I’d have grabbed a twelve-foot grizzly’s hump fur,” Ashley said. “I wish I had known how incredibly brave my children were.”
“Remember when they came up that morning and said there was a mare in distress among the rescues and they were going to go get her? They said to call the vet and they’d have her up in the paddock in an hour,” Ramie said. “The vet got there and that horse had an inflammation in her uterus that none of us would have guessed at until she was dead. There’s no question in my mind anymore that those kids talked to the animals.”
“And the animals answered,” Kyle affirmed.
“Still, wolves? Elk? Grizzly bears?” Mom Mar said. “I just wanted them to be my babies. Even when they were older.”
The family wandered off to their beds. There was no longer any question about the younger generation going back to the bunkhouse. For the duration, the babies were in Kyle’s old room and Ramie, Kyle, and Aubrey were in Ramie’s old room. Without saying anything, they all hoped Caitlin would bring Phile back to her old room.
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