Death Chants (20 page)

He shook his head
in utter dismay, which made his nose bleed.

He noticed the
blood and frowned. "Hoo boy! I am in some damn lousy shape. I better hurry damn quick! I am going
so damn fast I can hardly hold my nose open!"

He poured the sheep
dip on his fingers and held them up to the sky.

"You see this stuff
here that is supposed to be bear grease, Great Spirit? I hope that you will pretend that it is
bear grease, Great Spirit, on account I want you should grease the chute before I go sliding up
it! I have lived one dog lifetime!

"I am out of
ammunition. I am out of medicine. And parts are falling off. I am tired as hell." He looked down
at his lap, sur­prise on his face. "I am also at the last minute feeling very sexy, which is, you
gotta admit, a very funny funny, so before I slide up the tunnel into the sky, Great Spirit,
slick it up good, OK? I don't want no splinters in my ass is why I even mention it.

"Now the funny
stuff, Great Spirit, there is the matter of my grandson. I don't know why I even bother. I never
saw such a stupid in my whole life!"

If I wasn't so busy
trying to put out the fire I might have said something pretty sarcastic at this point. I might
even have thought about hitting him but what's the use of hitting some­body who isn't even there.
I'd never be sure he felt it.

"But what can I do?
Blood is thicker than water as you know if you ever sat in it. He has got his grandmother's
brains and my nose. What can I do?" said White Fox, shaking his head sadly.

He waved his arm,
trying to get the smoke out of his face.

"Do something for
him. But if it is too much trouble on account of he is so stupid, forget the whole
thing."

"Thanks for
nothing," I said, dancing on the fire but not quite fast enough to stay ahead of it. The bottoms
of my boots were smoking.

"Where's my arrows
and bowl of deer blood?" demanded the old man.

"I don't think you
are going to last long enough for me to find them. You are going pretty quick," I reminded
him.

The old man sighed.
He looked up at the sky through the bullet holes. "Am I embarrassed, Great Spirit? You bet your
ass! I could have done a big magic right at the end there but with one thing this way and that
thing that way." He spread his hands in a how-could-I-help-it gesture. "Also, I got to make a
bowel move­ment real bad, which I didn't count on, so I guess we just got to let this thing go
whipping by."

His eyes began to
glaze.

"Quit playing with
fire!" roared the old man. "I am doing my big exit. This is a dumb time to go fooling with
matches! Help me on my stomach, hurry up quick!"

I stopped fighting
the fire, which was OK 'cause I wasn't winning that one anyway, and came over to help the old
man.

I got hold of him
and started to roll him over. "Ain't you supposed to ... ain't the traditional way . . . well,
ain't you supposed to lay on your back and aim your eyes at the sky as you die?"

"Boils!" said the
old man with a wink. His eye stuck shut. With his other eye, he watched me flip him
over.

"OK, clear the damn
runway, I am out of gas, you bet your ass
!"

I he old man closed
his one working eye, and died. He did this lot a little while and was doing very good at it but
then he had to stop.

"It's funny as
hell." An eye opened, the last one still working. I could barely hear his voice. It was the
tiniest of whispers.

1 bent down till my
head was next to his. He whispered in my ear. It seemed like an important message.

"Is David Round Fox
here with the beer?"

"No,
Grandfather."

"He's a horse's
ass!"

I sighed. That was
Grandfather. He was ornery as hell.

"You are going to
end the world," he said suddenly, and then he closed his last eye and this time he died pretty
much all the way.

He had a pained
expression on his face, which I think was maybe the bowel movement.

He was such a
terrible old rascal it probably was justice he had so much trouble at the end.

"Now what the hell
did you mean by that?" I asked, which was a waste of time since he was real dead this
time.

Well, I was angry.
It was just like Grandfather to try to drop a lot of bad news on me with his last
breath.

I didn't want to
know I was going to be the one who ended the world. Who would want to know a thing like
that?

Later, of course, I
would be sad about the old man. I loved him a lot. As much as anyone can love anyone who isn't
even there. He raised me since I was little. He had been both father and grandfather to
me.

My father had been
lost successfully for twenty years and my mother was only my mother when she wasn't trying to
raise the dead and scare the living with the insides of her legs in the only three bars in
Cheyenne, Wyoming, that hadn't thrown her out yet.

They would throw
her out eventually, since she spent too much time thinking with her legs and not enough time
taking baths, but till that happened, she was as gone as anybody can be gone.

That had left me to
grow up with the old man who wasn't there and if you think it isn't confusing to learn to live
life from a man who isn't there, you ought to give it a shot sometime and see how it does by
you.

But for the moment,
I was going to postpone my grief.

Mostly so I could
concentrate on surviving the fire.

By the time the old
man, what with stalling and everything, got himself deaded up, the whole damn place was on
fire.

I had a fast few
seconds there, trying to figure out just how I was going to get out of there without joining my
grandfather, when one of the walls fell down and, suddenly, it was easy.

I just ran toward
the wall, jumped as far as I could and landed the dirt behind the house.

I was smoldering a
little, my shirt was going pretty good, so I got rid of it quick.

I had a couple of
blisters on my shoulders and my boots were no longer made for walking, but other than that, I was
just fine. The roof fell in as I was standing there. I looked back inside the house, trying to
see Grandfather's body. It was gone.

With the roof and
one wall gone, I could see inside the house clearly. There was no mistaking it. Grandfather's
body was gone. I guess, thinking about it, it was to be expected. Grandmother always said he
didn't exist. Now I knew she was right.

Mostly then, this
is just a funny story about death but it is also about disappeared persons and the end of the
world, which is not quite so funny.

If you are
wondering where the end of the world comes in, it was buried not very deep in my grandfather's
last words. It was in his not being, not existing, going without having come.

Perhaps I have
always known the bad news about Grandfa­ther, about the end of the world, about how he became a
disap­peared person.

After all, what is
the end of the world? If the young don't have the old people inside them, when the old ones die,
when they disappear, then the world comes to an end.

So dies the Indian
world. I woke up the next morning and I had disappeared.

The white man
fancied himself a hunter of animals and men. For the animals, he carried a gun, for men he
carried a college education that designated him an anthropologist.

He sat in Wolf
Walker's lodge and told tales of hunting. He was establishing rapport. It was a form of barter.
He told stories calculated to establish kinship. In exchange, he expected to collect
anthropological hunting trophies, perhaps unrecorded legends or creation myths or simply details
of Indian life as it once was lived.

He felt as much for
his prey, human or animal, as any white hunter felt.

Wolf Walker was a
rich man in an Indian way. He had deep knowledge of the coming from of his people. He saw much
with the eyes of a shaman and it was said he could see deeper into the night than any night
stalker.

He was poor in the
white way and would not have eaten so well or so fully if the white man had not been there to
provide the meal.

The old man chewed
on a chicken bone and seemed to follow the anthropologist's story with interest.

The white man
relived the attacks and combats between him­self and the animals he had killed, raising his arms
and acting out the parts of both hunter and hunted.

The old man ate and
listened gravely. The story was punc­tuated by an occasional cracking sound as Walking Wolf bit
down on the bones, grinding them between his teeth.

He liked the taste
of the bones almost as much as he liked the meat. He thanked the Great Spirit he still had strong
teeth to break bones.

When the white
man's story was finished, Walking Wolf wiped his hands on a piece of torn buckskin.

The white man had a
way of making his stories exciting, but wisely, his stories seldom made him out as the hero. More
often than not, the animals he hunted emerged victorious in his sto­nes. He talked of the
too-clever animals that got away.

The anthropologist
knew that this would tend to make him seem more sympathetic.

"I eat your food
and it is good because in the days that now come to me, I am often hungry," said Walking Wolf.
"Your manner of speaking is pleasant and the telling of the tales is skillful and good-eared.
They are lies. These are but lies you wish to exchange for my goodwill. I do not mind. It does
not trouble me. Now I will pay you for the food."

The white man
shifted uncomfortably on his hard wooden chair.

"Answer me this,
white man, do you think it possible that a
wolf could bite a man's arm hard enough to tear his heart out?"

"It doesn't seem
likely. Knowing what I know about human
bodies,
the arm might come off,
but no, the heart ripped out,
impossible, I would say."

"Then I shall tell
you a story that will show that you are wrong. I do not mind telling a story that proves a white
man wrong. This story I tell you is a hunting story and you seem to like hunting stories. There
is much that is strange in this story. In the dark­ness of my old age, the thunder of this story
still makes utterance to me and so it comes forth."

The white man, as
unobtrusively as possible, got a notebook |nd pen out and laid them on his lap.

"As you have hunted
and other white men have hunted in this valley for a living, there were two brothers, men of our
people, who hunted more than all of you. They hunted on the dim paths of night.

'They rose up in
the morning of their manhood and hunted and loved nothing else, talked only of this and lived as
such shadowless souls, living their waking lives for only this. Do you know of such great
passion, white man, this great fever whose tongue is the wind's tongue? This fever that I too
have known." I lie old man's voice shook with emotion.

The old man touched
his chest with a closed fist. "Yes, the great war wind of the chase sat in my chest and I made
the trails
of the hunted shake with my
passing. So it was once, but no more.

"And even as my
heart was full of the hunter's madness, the younger of the two brothers in all forms of his
faces, all terrible in the light of other days, in all the works of his killing hands, he had the
greater wind at his back. No, not a wind, a great storm, and his madness was a great
shield.

"When first he
arose, younger brother shook off the bonds of night and took on the chains of the hunt, his steps
sought the wild ones and violence was his first waking thought. Each morn­ing began with the
death of a forest creature and each day ended with the quick snap of stalking death."

"I have met men
like that," said the white man, quietly.

"No. Such men are
gone from the world, and gone before your time and gone in my time. I do not hunt. Listen and you
shall see," said Walking Wolf, and there was almost anger in his face.

"Now these two
brothers I speak of were as wild as the forgot­ten things in the unsearchable places of the
time-stricken lands. In youth, they walked large as trees, and the blood was quick in them and
swift-running. They had great night-seeing eyes. And they cried the great hunting cry which comes
deep-rooted in the heart like worms bred in the black bark of the tree of all trees."

The white man wrote
quickly in his notebook, his hand danc­ing to capture each and every word.

"It was to kill
that a flower bloomed within them. No woman was embraced, when death was the woman in their arms.
They worshipped blood and breathed the fragrance of its long red hair." Walking Wolf looked to
the four directions, reading the winds of memory and his body shook with the passing of the wind.
His face was a fire, all death and all life, and his body shook again like a nation in
ruin.