Winona watched him ride down to the river, the blue calico of her dress swept in the wind that moved across the top of Medicine Ridge.
Then she turned and retraced her steps to the cabin.
And so it was that Old Bear, a gaunt and withered brave of the Hunkpapa, with an eagle feather in his hair, rode alone along the north bank of the Grand River, on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation.
He had ridden in this fashion many Sunday mornings, looking for the sign of the white buffalo.
But he felt that this morning – this medicine day-was different. When he had touched his shield he had felt that. The medicine in the shield had told him that this was not a morning like other mornings.
Perhaps this would be the morning in which he would find the sign of the white buffalo.
Slowly, along the muddy bank of the Grand River, Old Bear rode until the sun was overhead, to his dim eyes a storm of fire in the sky, and the shadow of himself and his mount was a small dark cloud under his pony’s belly.
He was about to turn back when he heard something moving in the brush across the river.
Old Bear strained his eyes to make out what it might be that moved in the brush across that pocketed, muddy belt of water and sand that was the Grand River.
If it were a patrol of Long Knives from Fort Yates, it would not be good to be caught in the forbidden paint. Old Bear was not afraid for his body, but his spirit was afraid, for if they saw that he was old, they might laugh at him, and this would be hard for him.
One time no Long Knife would have laughed.
Perhaps it was only a young Indian and his woman wrestling in the bushes, or a young antelope come down to dip its black nose to the muddy water, with its quick, delicate tongue daintily slaking its thirst.
Then Old Bear’s eyes saw the blurred image of a rider on a paint horse.
“Hou Kola!” cried a strong voice, from across the river, carrying the accent of one of the western dialects. Then the figure moved toward him.
It was a man on a paint horse, splashing across the river. Twice the rider cried out, urging his horse through the sluggish, turbid water.
Old Bear strained his eyes, the better to make out the figure on horseback. The horse had stepped from the water, dripping and shaking its head.
“Hou,” said the man, an Indian, who now on horseback approached Old Bear. He had lifted his right hand which was open and bore no weapon.
“Hou,” said Old Bear, who also lifted his weapon hand, empty.
Old Bear grunted in surprise.
The man, like Old Bear, was dressed in the full regalia of a Plains warrior. Four eagle feathers, tied together, dangled from his left braid over his left shoulder; he wore buckskin, and a colored vest wrought with dyed porcupine quills; about his neck was a necklace of puma claws. He carried a lance, some nine feet long, and worked with blue and white beads. It was tipped with a long point of bluish, chipped stone and tailed with the wing feather of a hawk. His buffalo-hide shield carried the design of a coming moon, and his face was painted with radiating yellow lines, proclaiming the beginning of a new day.
This is no simple warrior, said Old Bear, looking on the paint. This is a medicine man.
Most surprising to Old Bear was that the man was so much younger than he, not young as a boy is young, but much younger than Old Bear-and yet, though so young, this man did not look as though he had ever tugged at the wheel of a wagon, as if he had ever touched the handle of a plow or thrown seed to domestic fowl.
Old Bear wondered if the young man were from the spirit world, come to guide him over the trail of stars.
No.
There was a rifle across his saddle. It would fire seven times, metal cartridges, before reloading.
There would be no white man’s weapons in the spirit world.
The saddle was made of wood, and Old Bear had not seen one like it in many years. The pommel rose more than a foot above the horse’s mane. The design, though Old Bear did not know this, might have been traced to Spanish saddles of more than three centuries before, used by conquistadores who had come to seek cities of gold and had lost their lives and horses.
Old Bear looked into the eyes of the man. They were as sharp and black as the hawk’s, as keen as the eagle’s. My eyes were once so, said Old Bear to himself. And the man’s head was held high, like one who rides over land that he owns, and his back was straight and proud. Yes, said Old Bear to himself, so young men used to ride, so did I too ride.
“I am Old Bear,” said Old Bear, “of the Hunkpapa.”
The younger man looked at him, and his eyes blazed between the bars of yellow paint on his face, blazed as though with victory. “It is good,” he said in his strong, young voice. “Good!” He looked proudly on the old Hunkpapa. “It is a strong sign,” he said, “for I am Kicking Bear-Kicking Bear of the Minneconjou from the Cheyenne River.”
“I am looking for the white buffalo,” said Old Bear, feeling that somehow he could tell this to the young man, and that he would understand.
Kicking Bear looked for a long time at the old man on the painted pony who sat across from him. Kicking Bear did not smile or laugh. Then he said, “The buffalo are coming back.”
Old Bear said nothing, but sat unmoving on his pony’s back, his heart pounding.
“The buffalo are dead,” said Old Bear. He whispered this.
“The buffalo are coming back,” said Kicking Bear, suddenly laughing and raising his shield and lance with a joyous upward movement of his arms. He repeated, even shouted happily, “The buffalo-are coming back!”
“They are dead,” said Old Bear, his hands clutched suddenly in the mane of his pony.
Kicking Bear reached forth gently and touched the old man’s arm, then grasped it. Old Bear could feel the strong grip on his frail arm, feel the tightness and the stirring tremble of those locked brown fingers on his old arm. “The buffalo are coming back,” said Kicking Bear.
Then Kicking Bear released the old man’s arm and laughed again, as a young warrior used to laugh, as if going to claim his bride or in showing scalps to his father, and saying nothing more, Kicking Bear turned the nose rope of his pony and rode away from Old Bear, beginning to sing a medicine song.
For a long time after Kicking Bear rode away, Old Bear sat still on his pony. He still felt the fingers of the young man tight on his arm, and still heard his words. Were the buffalo coming back? What did the young man mean? One should not lie-and most of all not lie about such things, not about the dead, or the buffalo.
Not far from the hoofs of his pony, lying in the sage by the river, Old Bear saw the white shards of a buffalo skull, broken, lying near a patch of cactus.
The buffalo were dead.
But the young man had said they were coming back.
And one should not lie of such matters.
On the back of his pony Old Bear, in spite of the fiery sun overhead, shivered, trembled, and the pony, startled, shifted his footing.
Old Bear’s eyes stung with tears.
Had it been a vision?
Could it be that even now Old Bear had died, and was riding with ghosts in the spirit land?
But he looked about himself, at the slow, muddy river, at the brush and sage, the sand, the cottonwoods along the banks. At the cactus, and the shattered fragments of the skull of a buffalo that lay near it.
No, said Old Bear, I am not in the spirit land.
But perhaps the young man had come from the spirit land, in spite of the rifle, come to tell him about the buffalo? Old Bear looked after the distant figure, who had ridden away singing medicine as it had not been sung for twenty years.
And the young man was riding toward the camp of Sitting Bull. This was also the camp of Old Bear.