Read Online Light Action in the Caribbean by Barry Lopez - Free Book Online
Authors: Barry Lopez
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proceeded so slowly through the air that we passed them by. More often than I, the two men turned to look behind them.
I knew these people no better than two deer I might have stumbled upon, but I was comfortable with them, and the way we fit against the prairie satisfied me. I felt I could ride a very long way like this, absorbed by whatever it was we now shared, a kind of residency. It seemed, because of the absenceof fences or the intercession of the horses, or perhaps only as an accident of conducive weather, that we were traveling a seam together. There was nothing to do but ride on, marking the country in unison and feeling the inspiritedness of the afternoon, smelling the leather, the horses, the prairie.
When we came to what I recognized as the intermittently dry bed of Cut Bank Creek, I said the words out loud, “Cut Bank Creek.”
The second man said something softly. The first man repeated his words so I could hear,
“Akip atashetwah.”
I lifted my left hand to suggest, again, our trail. First Man mimicked the gesture perfectly, indicating they meant to go in a different direction from mine, north and west. We regarded each other with savor, pleased and wondering but not puzzled. I laid my reins around the pommel and pulled off the belt my father had given me as a wedding present years ago. I cut two of its seventeen sand-cast silver conchas free with a pocketknife. Dismounting, I handed one to each man. Second Man pulled a thin white object from a bag tied to his saddle frame. When he held it out for me, I recognized it as a large bird’s wing bone, drilled with a line of small holes. A flute. I remounted with it as First Man stepped to the ground. He lifted a snowy owl feather he’d taken from his horse’s mane and tied it into the blue roan’s mane.
We rode away without speaking. The first time I looked back, I couldn’t see them. I sat the horse and watched the emptiness where they should have been until dusk laid blue and then purple across the grass.
The Deaf Girl
The girl’s problem appeared to be deafness, but deafness was only a pivot around which part of her psyche turned and an easy thing to notice. Once, standing on the porch of the hotel, I watched her move through a field of high grass below an abandoned pear orchard a half mile distant. It was a bright day in November and the grass was turning saffron and magenta in the sweep of the wind. She moved in such a tentative way down the hillside I thought her sightless. But I knew her to be the deaf girl from this place, and so imagined it was only how she examined the world that made her appear blind.
She was twelve, the lone child of parents who projected austerity on the street, one of perhaps eight or nine children around the town. Occasionally I saw her playing with another girl, older by a few years, but most often when I saw her she was walking alone. Her parents called out after her, “Delamina,”but the name came to her in some other way, a vibration passing through her body, and she would turn. Closer in, she read the muscles moving in a speaker’s face.
I didn’t arrive in the town by accident, exactly, but initially it was not my intention even to stop. I drove out of Great Falls on the Missouri before dawn, late July, and headed for Williston in North Dakota. At Lewiston I turned north on the road for Malta. I’d crossed the river, and somewhere south of the Fort Belknap Reservation I turned east on a state road I thought would shorten the distance to Glasgow. North of the Fort Peck Reservoir, in a series of crests and troughs, the cottonwood draws and their bare hills, I became confused. After an hour of just pushing on regardless, I drove in to what I thought was Telegraph Creek, but it wasn’t, it was Gannett. A few storefronts and houses on its main street, a few standalone buildings, and a scatter of mobile homes at the end of dirt tracks splayed like tendrils away from the road, which ended here.
An old-fashioned
I knew these people no better than two deer I might have stumbled upon, but I was comfortable with them, and the way we fit against the prairie satisfied me. I felt I could ride a very long way like this, absorbed by whatever it was we now shared, a kind of residency. It seemed, because of the absenceof fences or the intercession of the horses, or perhaps only as an accident of conducive weather, that we were traveling a seam together. There was nothing to do but ride on, marking the country in unison and feeling the inspiritedness of the afternoon, smelling the leather, the horses, the prairie.
When we came to what I recognized as the intermittently dry bed of Cut Bank Creek, I said the words out loud, “Cut Bank Creek.”
The second man said something softly. The first man repeated his words so I could hear,
“Akip atashetwah.”
I lifted my left hand to suggest, again, our trail. First Man mimicked the gesture perfectly, indicating they meant to go in a different direction from mine, north and west. We regarded each other with savor, pleased and wondering but not puzzled. I laid my reins around the pommel and pulled off the belt my father had given me as a wedding present years ago. I cut two of its seventeen sand-cast silver conchas free with a pocketknife. Dismounting, I handed one to each man. Second Man pulled a thin white object from a bag tied to his saddle frame. When he held it out for me, I recognized it as a large bird’s wing bone, drilled with a line of small holes. A flute. I remounted with it as First Man stepped to the ground. He lifted a snowy owl feather he’d taken from his horse’s mane and tied it into the blue roan’s mane.
We rode away without speaking. The first time I looked back, I couldn’t see them. I sat the horse and watched the emptiness where they should have been until dusk laid blue and then purple across the grass.
The Deaf Girl
The girl’s problem appeared to be deafness, but deafness was only a pivot around which part of her psyche turned and an easy thing to notice. Once, standing on the porch of the hotel, I watched her move through a field of high grass below an abandoned pear orchard a half mile distant. It was a bright day in November and the grass was turning saffron and magenta in the sweep of the wind. She moved in such a tentative way down the hillside I thought her sightless. But I knew her to be the deaf girl from this place, and so imagined it was only how she examined the world that made her appear blind.
She was twelve, the lone child of parents who projected austerity on the street, one of perhaps eight or nine children around the town. Occasionally I saw her playing with another girl, older by a few years, but most often when I saw her she was walking alone. Her parents called out after her, “Delamina,”but the name came to her in some other way, a vibration passing through her body, and she would turn. Closer in, she read the muscles moving in a speaker’s face.
I didn’t arrive in the town by accident, exactly, but initially it was not my intention even to stop. I drove out of Great Falls on the Missouri before dawn, late July, and headed for Williston in North Dakota. At Lewiston I turned north on the road for Malta. I’d crossed the river, and somewhere south of the Fort Belknap Reservation I turned east on a state road I thought would shorten the distance to Glasgow. North of the Fort Peck Reservoir, in a series of crests and troughs, the cottonwood draws and their bare hills, I became confused. After an hour of just pushing on regardless, I drove in to what I thought was Telegraph Creek, but it wasn’t, it was Gannett. A few storefronts and houses on its main street, a few standalone buildings, and a scatter of mobile homes at the end of dirt tracks splayed like tendrils away from the road, which ended here.
An old-fashioned
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