Heartsong Read Free Page B

look at their suits, even though his eyes took in their somber faces.
    After Crazy Horse’s death, the Oglalas were taken from the Red Cloud Agency to their own agency at Pine Ridge. The children were put into the white mans school, and so Charging Elk became a student and learned some of the American words. But less than a year later, when he was thirteen winters, he and Strikes Plenty ran away and went to live with Strikes Plenty’s people at the Whirlwind Compound, far from the agency and the school. Later they would move again, when the wcwichud threatened to come get them, along with the other children. They moved to a place in the badlands called the Stronghold, a long tall grassy butte with sheer cliffs on three sides that could be easily defended. But the white men, soldiers and settlers alike, were afraid of the Stronghold. TheIndians out there were considered bad Indians, even by their own people who had settled at the agency and the surrounding communities. Charging Elk and Strikes Plenty lived off and on at the Stronghold for the next nine years, hunting game, exploring, learning and continuing the old ways with the help of two old medicine people. Sometimes they rode into the Black Hills, Paha Sapa, and stole things from the gold miners. They visited Bear Butte, a lone cone-shaped holy hill where many Oglalas had sought their visions in the past but which was now surrounded by settlers and mining claims. Charging Elk had had his hanblechia in the badlands surrounding the Stronghold. He had been prepared well by his wiccua wakan , an old man who made many prayers in the sweat lodge, and when he turned sixteen he went out and made many prayers to Wakan Tanka to help him dream his power animal. He never told anyone what the animal was, not even Strikes Plenty, but he later killed a badger and made a small necklace of its claws.
    Now Charging Elk tried to ask the two men what happened to the necklace, and he suddenly remembered the holy card the white woman had given him in Paris, which became his wasichu medicine, but he knew it was impossible. For the first time in his life, he wished he had stayed in school and learned the brown suit’s language. “Buffalo Bill,” he said, without hope. “Wild West.”

    A fter the two men left, Charging Elk sank down into himself. He was alone, and the enormity of what that meant hit him hard. He had no friends here. He couldn’t tell the men in suits where his home was. But they had to know that he was an Indian and he came from across the big water as part of the Wild West show. He was an Indian, an Oglala from Pine Ridge, his home.
    Even in his despair, Charging Elk found his mind clearing and he remembered more things. It was like waking up after a night ofdrinking mni wakan , the white mans holy water, but this night seemed to have lasted a long time.
    Charging Elk almost felt the impact again as he remembered falling from his horse and landing on the packed earth. That was the last thing he remembered before he was brought to this healing house. He had been chasing the small buffalo herd around the arena with his friends, an act he had performed hundreds of times since coming to this country of the Frenchmen. They liked to see the wild Indians chase the buffalo because it was one of the few acts in the show that was dangerous. And the Indians themselves made it more dangerous by eventually catching up and riding at headlong speed among the thundering animals. Charging Elk remembered a young bull, one that he had become familiar with in the several moons they had performed in the big Paris arena, suddenly swerve and swing its head. Its horn caught the horse on the left shoulder and the horse squealed and almost went down and Charging Elk tumbled past its head. And that was all he remembered until he got to the sickhouse.
    But he had been sick before the evening’s performance and he became more ill during the course of the several acts. The