XVI
The fasting had already been accomplished, but quite by accident. Little Elk had not eaten since the previous day, having given her meager ration of corn dodger last night to one of her neighbor’s children. No one in the camp had seen any meat besides field mice or rabbit in weeks. Her belly was tight and empty, ready to be filled with the wisdom of the spirit world, her flesh purified of the white man’s food.
She stood with the four women she had gathered outside her tent. Chosen because they adhered to the Old Ways, the women regarded her with silent solemnity. They knew their business, but they waited for her to give the word.
They had all done their best to seal the drafty shelter, and the women had all brought blankets to pile over the tent to hold in as much heat as possible, so many that the tent sagged in the middle now, but it would hold. When Little Elk had erected the tent, she had made sure that the entrance faced west. She had prepared a basin of fresh water and dug the sacred pit in the center for the stones. For a moment she fretted again that this was not a proper sweat lodge and hoped that the spirits would not take offense. Must they not acknowledge the earnestness of her actions?
Her chief concern now was whether the size of her fire would gain the unwanted attention of the Bluecoats. Properly heating the stones required a fire of sufficient size.
Others of her people stood around them with mixtures of wonder, disapproval, and fear. They had chosen, or been forced, to follow the Christ of the white man, whose book taught that the Old Ways were evil. Little Elk had further chosen her assistants from those who had not danced the Ghost Dance; because of the speed that the fervor had swept through all the reservation camps, those were but few. While the teachings of this outsider they called “the Father” did not sound inherently evil to her, neither did they ring true to her. His words ran contrary to the stories on which she was raised.
When word had first come of travelers from the west last summer with the Paiute Messiah’s disciples, and it spread that he was coming to deliver the world into a peaceful, renewed happiness, Little Elk had felt a deep skepticism. From the time she was a little girl, she had been a Dreamer, and her father, the medicine man, Yellow Hawk, had promised to teach her the mysteries of the universe. At that time, their band had been forced onto the Pine Ridge Reservation, and in the white government’s efforts to “civilize” the Lakota, Little Elk had been taken from her family at the age of ten winters, sent to a Catholic boarding school in the east until she was sixteen.
At this boarding school, she had learned English and Christianity. They tried to make her forget the Old Ways, but the Dreams would not let her forget. Even the nuns and rectors with their paddles and accusations of “witch” could not stop the Dreams. In her early life, before reservations and the treaties, her Dreams had become renowned for their truth.
Her chief helper for this ceremony would be Jane Two Hawks, a woman ten years elder to Little Elk, whose husband had once been akicita, camp guard and advisor to Crazy Horse. She still carried a pipe that had come down from her ancestors, and it would more than suffice. After her husband had been killed at the Battle of the Greasy Grass, after the subsequent peace treaty of 1876, Jane Two Hawks had taken an English name like many of her people, but her blood and her adherence to the Old Ways still ran true.
Near the entrance, a small hill of fresh earth stood beside the fire in which sixteen stones lay carefully arranged, heating. The earth of the small hill had been taken from the pit Little Elk had dug in the center of her tent. The ground between the two had been properly swept clean, the symbolic path between worlds. The pipe lay across the top of the mound, pointing east. Inside the tent, offerings of tobacco hung from pouches tied to the ceiling.
All was in readiness.
Little Elk took a deep breath and nodded. The four women standing around her raised the blankets in their arms to head height, hiding Little Elk from view. She disrobed quickly and stood nude, gooseflesh rising instantly in the chilly evening air. Taking the spray of sage leaves from Jane Two Hawks and using it to cover herself, she faced in each of the four directions and entreated the spirits to grant her a vision.
Then she ducked inside and seated herself before the pit. The last of her sage leaves lay scattered on the ground around her. Moments later, the flap parted and a large stone was presented in the crook of a forked stick fashioned for just this purpose, carrying in with it the smells of searing hot stone and blackening wood. Waves of heat emanated from the stone, and she took it in another forked stick before placing it in the pit. Its warmth tingled across her chilled flesh, and three more stones came in solemn succession.
With the first group of four stones in place, Jane now offered the pipe through the tent flap. A thread of pungent smoke followed the pipe bowl toward Little Elk’s hands.
She took the pipe, held it before her, and intoned. “Mitakuye oyas’in.” All my relatives, living and dead.
Raising it to her lips, she drew a deep lungful of smoke and held it for a moment. Three more long draughts of smoke made the sacred count of four and hazed the interior darkness of the tent, thickening the air. She passed the pipe back outside. From the basin of water beside her, she filled a spoon made from the horn of a mountain sheep and poured the water over the stones. A crackling, sizzling blast of steam boiled from the rocks and filled the tent. Three more splashes of water made the sacred count of four, and the interior of the tent grew hot and thick and smothering. The steam burned the inside of her nostrils, made her eyes water, and sweat sprang from her skin. She started breathing through her mouth.
She took up the small skin drum beside her and began to sing the old songs. At this prearranged moment, her assistants and several complicit friends outside began to sing other songs, loud and raucous and unrelated to her efforts. If the white soldiers came to investigate the noise, the women were only singing songs to entertain themselves.
Her words and her mind fell into the old songs, and her wish for a vision swirled with the rhythm of her voice.