Michael Blake: The Holy Road

the time of his boyhood, Ten Bears had kept the shy young man who knew so much about horses under his wing, and on quiet days, the two passed a few minutes together. It was on such a day that Hunting For Something had come in with a bowl of pemmican for her grandfather.

Greeting Ten Bears, she dropped to her knees on the opposite side of the fire and with a single look that lasted no more than a second or two, turned Smiles A Lot's world upside down. It was nothing more than a shy glance, delivered under lidded eyes. But it was directed squarely at Smiles A Lot and carried the power of a mortal brow. In that instant she changed from a skinny girl of barely fifteen summers to a woman of profound mystery whose spell was paralyzing.

From then on she was never far from his thoughts, and Smiles A Lot, without any experience as a suitor pursued her. Whenever possible he watched Ten Bears' lodge, hoping to see her go inside so he could make an entrance of his own. He made it a point to look in on the old man each day, and every time he came to the lodge flap it was with a heart that threatened to jump out of his chest.

Her family lived on the other side of the village from his own, and he conjured any excuse he could to travel that way, hoping to catch a glimpse of her. He loitered along the path to water, joining other young men with crushes on various girls. And suddenly he was in attendance at any communal gathering that might include her.

But he had no success. Every time he went to Ten Bears, lodge it was as if all the forces of earth and sky were conspiring against him. She was never there. He had seen her only once as she disappeared into the traffic of camp. The fleeting view of the glistening black hair trailing below

her waist, the long dress, and the moccasined feet had held him transfixed as he wondered about her feet and arms and legs, the smell of her skin, the touch of her finger, the sound of her voice.

His surveillance of the trail to water yielded only two sightings. Each time she was with her mother, and when he saw them he immediately turned away, too nervous to rook in their direction. As he stared at the ground, or into the branch of a tree, he thought of himself as foolish beyond words. She was passing so near. It was the opportunity he had sought to the exclusion of all else, yet he could not act. He could only subject himself to torture. And if he found the courage to cast his eyes about in time to see the fading form of mother and daughter, that was worse. All he could see then was the impossibility of his vain dream.

It was just as bad at a dance or ceremony which brought everyone together. A public setting made any contact out of the question, and all he could do was peer through the fire and into the faceless crowd of girls steeped in shadow on the other side.

At times Smiles A Lot wished fervently that she had never looked at him because all the difficulties of his life were nothing compared to the fix he was in now.

And what if she looked at him again? What if they talked? What if they touched? The obstacles that lay beyond were insurmountable. Her father, Horned Antelope, was the son of Ten Bears and a Hard Shield. Smiles A Lot's father was a craftsman, a master of bow-making, but nothing else. Matches like that were not made.

It was terrible to be stuck. It seemed to take all the power he possessed to get up each day, to walk and talk and sleep. He was a fluttering piece of chaff whose every motion was under the absolute control of a momentary meeting with the eyes of a girl.

Yet there was a strength coming out of it, a hardening in Smiles A Lot he had never felt before. He possessed the heart of a dreamer and the sanctity of dreaming was something to be protected. At his darkest moment, the lonely, desperate heart that beat inside him grew suddenly large and powerful at the thought of defending his dream. In a strange way it didn't matter if they never spoke or touched. She was already in him. A dream of blinding, beautiful purity was buried in his heart. No one could take it away. He didn't care about Wind In His Hair's scalp or the coming of the whites. He didn't care if the earth yawned one morning and swallowed the whole village, for he knew that as he drifted down,

spiraling head over heels into the void, he would be encased in the cocoon of her being. . of the girl called Hunting For Something.

All communities are susceptible to exotic influences, and this was true of Ten Bears' village. Kicking Bird's deviation into the wider stream of political life had created a vacancy in the spiritual life of the band which was now occupied by the secretive, mysterious man known as Owl Prophet.

In many ways he was as traditional as any Comanche. He was happily married, the father of two likeable daughters. He practiced the medicine of healing and curing with better than average results, steadily building a lucrative practice that largely freed him from the time-consuming labor of the hunt and the inherent dangers of raiding.

But Owl Prophet's true specialty was not medicine. Medicine was but a sidelight to his true calling of prophecy and Owl Prophet conjured the future with a magic so dazzling that he was able at times to hold the entire village in sway.

He operated out of a lodge adjacent to his family's. No one knew what went on inside, because no one had ever entered. In fact, the power that resided within was so daunting that it stifled the natural curiosity of children. Not one among them brave enough or foolhardy enough to lift the flap of Owl Prophet's lodge and peek inside. What prayers he softly chanted, what charms he maintained, what spells he concocted were known only to him. Since childhood he had been the most inscrutable member of Ten Bears' band and the mystery about him only deepened as more and more of his predictions came true.

Everyone knew about the owl. It was the one object inside the special lodge that people had seen, and its rare appearances were not to be missed because his most spectacular forecasts had come after publicly consulting with his animal assistant.

Owl Prophet routinely predicted dry summers, difficult births, and spectacular weather. Of course he was not right every time, but his many successes made his failures, especially ones without import, easy to forget.

He was particularly adept at sorting out omens, and none was more spectacular than the mystery of the rat. Shortly after Wind In His Hair announced that he and several Hard Shields were going into Mexico and any able-bodied men could join them, a dead rat, its entrails bulging through an opening in its stomach, appeared one morning in the center of the village as if it had dropped from the sky.

Wind In His Hair thought the rat had been dropped somehow by a hawk or owl passing overhead, an explanation readily accepted by Dances With Wolves and the rest of the Hard Shield membership. Ten Bears peered down at the rat and wondered if it hadn't disemboweled itself in a freak accident. Kicking Bird dismissed the rat as a trivial matter, not worthy of thought. But talk persisted and theories of one sort of another fluttered around the village like scattering birds.

The rat's corpse was snatched up by one of the camp dogs before Owl Prophet could examine it, but that evening he hired a crier to circulate through the village, inviting all who desired information to assemble in front of his medicine lodge at the falling of night's first star.

Many eyes watched the sky that night and when the first star flared and died, a crowd gathered at the appointed place. Oddly, there was no fire inside the lodge and people began to grow restless, wondering if Owl Prophet was even inside. Suddenly the tent flap flew up and he stepped out. The crowd was silent. They could make out the outline of the famous owl perched upon his head. A few people gasped as the owl's head swiveled.