The Way to Rainy Mountain by N - Heritage High School

The Way to Rainy Mountain by N - Heritage High School The Way to Rainy Mountain by N. Scott Momaday the Smoky Hill River to the Red, from the headwaters of the Canadian to the fork of the Arkansas and Cimarron. In alliance A single knoll rises out of the plain in Oklahoma, north and with the Comanches, they had ruled the whole of the southern west of the Wichita Range. For my people, the Kiowas, it is an Plains. War was their sacred business, and they were among old landmark, and they gave it the name Rainy Mountain. The the finest horsemen the world has ever known. But warfare for hardest weather in the world is there. Winter brings blizzards, the Kiowas was preeminently a matter of disposition rather than of survival, and they never understood the grim, hot tornadic winds arise in the spring, and in summer the prairie is an anvil's edge. The grass turns brittle and brown, and unrelenting advance of the U.S. Cavalry. When at last, divided it cracks beneath your feet. There are green belts along the and illprovisioned, they were driven onto the Staked Plains in rivers and creeks, linear groves of hickory and pecan, willow the cold rains of autumn, they fell into panic. In Palo Duro and witch hazel. At a distance in July or August the steaming Canyon they abandoned their crucial stores to pillage and had nothing then but their lives. In order to save themselves, they foliage seems almost to writhe in fire. Great green and yellow grasshoppers are everywhere in the tall grass, popping up like surrendered to the soldiers at Fort Sill and were imprisoned in corn to sting the flesh, and tortoises crawl about on the red the old stone corral that now stands as a military museum. My earth, going nowhere in the plenty of time. Loneliness is an grandmother was spared the humiliation of those high gray aspect of the land. All things in the plain are isolate; there is no walls by eight or ten years, but she must have known from birth the affliction of defeat, the dark brooding of old warriors. confusion of objects in the eye, but one hill or one tree or one man. To look upon that landscape in the early morning, with the sun at your back, is to lose the sense of proportion. Your Her name was Aho, and she belonged to the last culture to imagination comes to life, and this, you think, is where evolve in North America. Her forebears came down from the Creation was begun. high country in western Montana nearly three centuries ago. They were a mountain people, a mysterious tribe of hunters I returned to Rainy Mountain in July. My grandmother had whose language has never been positively classified in any died in the spring, and I wanted to be at her grave. She had major group. In the late seventeenth century they began a long lived to be very old and at last infirm. Her only living daughter migration to the south and east. It was a journey toward the was with her when she died, and I was told that in death her dawn, and it led to a golden age. Along the way the Kiowas face was that of a child. were befriended by the Crows, who gave them the culture and religion of the Plains. They acquired horses, and their ancient nomadic spirit was suddenly free of the ground. They acquired I like to think of her as a child. When she was born, the Kiowas Tai-me, the sacred Sun Dance doll, from that moment the were living the last great moment of their history. For more than a hundred years they had controlled the open range from object and symbol of their worship, and so shared in the 1 divinity of the sun. Not least, they acquired the sense of destiny, with flax and buckwheat, stonecrop and larkspur. The earth therefore courage and pride. When they entered upon the unfolds and the limit of the land recedes. Clusters of trees, and southern Plains they had been transformed. No longer were animals grazing far in the distance, cause the vision to reach they slaves to the simple necessity of survival; they were a away and wonder to build upon the mind. The sun follows a lordly and dangerous society of fighters and thieves, hunters longer course in the day, and the sky is immense beyond all and priests of the sun. According to their origin myth, they comparison. The great billowing clouds that sail upon it are entered the world through a hollow log. From one point of shadows that move upon the grain like water, dividing light. view, their migration was the fruit of an old prophecy, for Farther down, in the land of the Crows and Blackfeet, the plain indeed they emerged from a sunless world. is yellow. Sweet clover takes hold of the hills and bends upon itself to cover and seal the soil. There the Kiowas paused on their way; they had come to the place where they must change Although my grandmother lived out her long life in the shadow their lives. The sun is at home on the plains. Precisely there of Rainy Mountain, the immense landscape of the continental does it have the certain character of a god. When the Kiowas interior lay like memory in her blood. She could tell of the came to the land of the Crows, they could see the darklees of Crows, whom she had never seen, and of the Black Hills, the hills at dawn across the Bighorn River, the profusion of where she had never been. I wanted to see in reality what she light on the grain shelves, the oldest deity ranging after the had seen more perfectly in the mind's eye, and traveled fifteen solstices. Not yet would they veer southward to the caldron of hundred miles to begin my pilgrimage. the land that lay below; they must wean their blood from the northern winter and hold the mountains a while longer in their Yellowstone, it seemed to me, was the top of the world, a view. They bore Tai-me in procession to the east. region of deep lakes and dark timber, canyons and waterfalls. But, beautiful as it is, one might have the sense of confinement A dark mist lay over the Black Hills, and the land was like iron. there. The skyline in all directions is close at hand, the high At the top of a ridge I caught sight of Devil's Tower upthrust wall of the woods and deep cleavages of shade. There is a against the gray sky as if in the birth of time the core of the perfect freedom in the mountains, but it belongs to the eagle earth had broken through its crust and the motion of the world and the elk, the badger and the bear. The Kiowas reckoned was begun. There are things in nature that engender an awful their stature by the distance they could see, and they were bent quiet in the heart of man; Devil's Tower is one of them. Two and blind in the wilderness. centuries ago, because they could not do otherwise, the Kiowas made a legend at the base of the rock. My grandmother said: Descending eastward, the highland meadows are a stairway to the plain. In July the inland slope of the Rockies is luxuriant 2 Eight children were there at play, seven sisters and their medicine tree--a delegation of old men journeyed into Texas, brother. Suddenly the boy was struck dumb; he trembled and there to beg and barter for an animal from the Goodnight herd. began to run upon his hands and feet. His fingers became claws, She was ten when the Kiowas came together for the last time as and his body was covered with fur. Directly there was a bear a living Sun Dance culture. They could find no buffalo; they where the boy had been. The sisters were terrified; they ran, had to hang an old hide from the sacred tree. Before the dance and the bear after them. They came to the stump of a great tree, could begin, a company of soldiers rode out from Fort Sill and the tree spoke to them. It bade them climb upon it, and as under orders to disperse the tribe. Forbidden without cause the they did so it began to rise into the air. The bear came to kill essential act of their faith, having seen the wild herds them, but they were just beyond its reach. It reared against the slaughtered and left to rot upon the ground, the Kiowas backed tree and scored the bark all around with its claws. The seven away forever from the medicine tree. That was July 20, 1890, sisters were borne into the sky, and they became the stars of the at the great bend of the Washita. My grandmother was there. Big Dipper. Without bitterness, and for as long as she lived, she bore a vision of deicide. From that moment, and so long as the legend lives, the Kiowas have kinsmen in the night sky. Whatever they were in the Now that I can have her only in memory, I see my grandmother mountains, they could be no more. However tenuous their in the several postures that were peculiar to her: standing at the well-being, however much they had suffered and would suffer wood stove on a winter morning and turning meat in a great again, they had found a way out of the wilderness. iron skillet; sitting at the south window, bent above her beadwork, and afterwards, when her vision failed, looking down for a long time into the fold of her hands; going out upon My grandmother had a reverence for the sun, a holy regard that a cane, very slowly as she did when the weight of age came now is all but gone out of mankind. There was a wariness in upon her; praying. I remember her most often at prayer. She her, and an ancient awe. She was a Christian in her later years, made long, rambling prayers out of suffering and hope, having but she had come a long way about, and she never forgot her seen many things. I was never sure that I had the right to hear, birthright. As a child she had been to the Sun Dances; she had so exclusive were they of all mere custom and company. The taken part in those annual rites, and by them she had learned last time I saw her she prayed standing by the side of her bed at the restoration of her people in the presence of Tai-me. She night, naked to the waist, the light of a kerosene lamp moving was about seven when the last Kiowa Sun Dance was held in upon her dark skin. Her long, black hair, always drawn and 1887 on the Washita River above Rainy Mountain Creek. The braided in the day, lay upon her shoulders and against her buffalo were gone. In order to consummate the ancient breasts like a shawl. I do not speak Kiowa, and I never sacrifice--to impale the head of a buffalo bull upon the understood her prayers, but there was something inherently sad 3 in the sound, some merest hesitation upon the syllables of hair and wound their braids with strips of colored cloth. Some sorrow. She began in a high and descending pitch, exhausting of them painted their faces and carried the scars of old and her breath to silence; then again and again--and always the cherished enmities. They were an old council of warlords, same intensity of effort, of something that is, and is not, like come to remind and be reminded of who they were. Their urgency in the human voice. Transported so in the dancing wives and daughters served them well. The women might light among the shadows of her room, she seemed beyond the indulge themselves; gossip was at once the mark and reach of time. But that was illusion; I think I knew then that I compensation of their servitude. They made loud and elaborate should not see her again. talk among themselves, full of jest and gesture, fright and false alarm. They went abroad in fringed and flowered shawls, bright beadwork and German silver. They were at home in the Houses are like sentinels in the plain, old keepers of the kitchen, and they prepared meals that were banquets. weather watch. There, in a very little while, wood takes on the appearance of great age. All colors wear soon away in the wind and rain, and then the wood is burned gray and the grain There were frequent prayer meetings, and great nocturnal appears and the nails turn red with rust. The windowpanes are feasts. When I was a child I played with my cousins outside, black and opaque; you imagine there is nothing within, and where the lamplight fell upon the ground and the singing of the indeed there are many ghosts, bones given up to the land. They old people rose up around us and carried away into the stand here and there against the sky, and you approach them for darkness. There were a lot of good things to eat, a lot of a longer time than you expect. They belong in the distance; it is laughter and surprise. And afterwards, when the quiet returned, their domain. I lay down with my grandmother and could hear the frogs away by the river and feel the motion of the air. Once there was a lot of sound in my grandmother's house, a lot of coming and going, feasting and talk. The summers there Now there is a funeral silence in the rooms, the endless wake were full of excitement and reunion. The Kiowas are a summer of some final word. The walls have closed in upon my people; they abide the cold and keep to themselves, but when grandmother's house. When I returned to it in mourning, I saw the season turns and the land becomes warm and vital they for the first time in my life how small it was. It was late at cannot hold still; an old love of going returns upon them. The night, and there was a white moon, nearly full. I sat for a long aged visitors who came to my grandmother's house when I was time on the stone steps by the kitchen door. From there I could a child were made of lean and leather, and they bore see out across the land; I could see the long row of trees by the themselves upright. They wore great black hats and bright creek, the low light upon the rolling plains, and the stars of the ample shirts that shook in the wind. They rubbed fat upon their Big Dipper. Once I looked at the moon and caught sight of a 4 strange thing. A cricket had perched upon the handrail, only a few inches away from me. My line of vision was such that the creature filled the moon like a fossil. It had gone there, I thought, to live and die, for there, of all places, was its small definition made whole and eternal. A warm wind rose up and purled like the longing within me. The next morning I awoke at dawn and went out on the dirt road to Rainy Mountain. It was already hot, and the grasshoppers began to fill the air. Still, it was early in the morning, and the birds sang out of the shadows. The long yellow grass on the mountain shone in the bright light, and a scissortail hied above the land. There, where it ought to be, at the end of a long and legendary way, was my grandmother's grave. Here and there on the dark stones were ancestral names. Looking back once, I saw the mountain and came away. 5