Michael Blake - Dances With Wolves

Once the invitation to dinner was made, the medicine man turned abruptly and left, Stands With A Fist following him.

As he watched them go, Dances With Wolves was surprised to feel his depression evaporating. In its place was a feeling of elation. He didn’t feel small at all. He felt bigger.

Kicking Bird’s family would be under his protection, and the idea of serving them in that role was one he looked forward to instantly. He would be with Stands With A Fist again and that, too, gave him heart.

The war party would be gone for some time, thus giving him the opportunity to learn a lot of Comanche. And in learning he knew he would be picking up more than language. If he worked very hard he would be on a whole new level by the time his mentors returned. He liked that idea.

Drums had started up in the village. The big send-off dance was beginning and he wanted to go. He loved the dancing.

Dances With Wolves rolled off the bed and looked around his lodge. It was empty, but before long it would hold the slim trappings of his life, and it was pleasant to think about having something to call his own again.

He stepped through the lodge flap and paused in the twilight outside. He had daydreamed his way past dinner, but the woodsmoke from the cooking fires was still thick in the air and the smell of it satisfied him.

A thought came to Dances With Wolves then.

I should be staying here, he said to himself, it’s much the better idea.

He started off toward the sound of the drums.

When he reached the main avenue he fell in with a pair of warriors he knew. In signs they asked him if he would dance tonight. Dances With Wolves’s reply was so positive that it made the men laugh.

Once the party was away, the village settled into a life of pastoral routine, a timeless rotation of dawn to day to dusk to night that made the prairie seem the only place on earth.

Dances With Wolves fell quickly into step with the cycle, moving through it in a pleasant, dreamlike way. A life of riding and hunting and scouting was physically taxing, but his body had adapted well, and once the rhythm of his days was established he found most activities effortless.

Kicking Bird’s family required much of his time. The women did virtually all of the work around camp, but he felt obliged to monitor their day-to-day lives and those of the children, the result being that somehow his hands were always full.

Wind In His Hair had presented him with a good bow and a quiver of arrows at the farewell dance. He was thrilled with the gift and sought out an older warrior named Stone Calf, who taught him the finer points of its use. In the space of a week the two became fast friends, and Dances With Wolves showed up regularly at Stone Calf’s lodge.

He learned how to care for and make quick repairs on weapons. He learned the words to several important songs and how to sing them. He watched Stone Calf make fire from a little wooden kit and saw him make his own personal medicine.

He was a willing pupil for these lessons and quick to learn, so quick that Stone Calf gave him the nickname Fast. He scouted a few hours each day, as did most of the other men. They went out in groups of three or four, and in a short time Dances With Wolves had a rudimentary knowledge of necessary things, like how to read the age of tracks and determine weather patterns.

The buffalo came and went in their mysterious way. Some days they would see none at all, and some days they would see so many that it became a joke.

On the two points that counted, the scouting was a success. There was fresh meat for the taking and the countryside was devoid of enemies.

After only a few days he was wondering why everyone didn’t live in a lodge. When he thought of the places he had lived before, he could envision nothing but a collection of sterile rooms.

To him the lodge was a true home. It was cool on the hottest days, and no matter what sort of fuss was going on in camp, the circle of space inside seemed filled with peace.

He came to love the time he passed there by himself.

His favorite part of the day was late afternoon, and more often than not, he could be found close to the lodge flap, performing some little job like cleaning his boots while he watched the clouds change formation or listened to the light whistle of wind.

Without really trying, these late afternoons by himself shut down the machinery of his mind, letting his mind rest in a refreshing way.

It didn’t take long, however, for one facet of his life to dominate all the others.

That was Stands With A Fist.

Their talks began again, this time under the casual but always present eyes of Kicking Bird’s family.

The medicine man had left instructions to keep meeting, but without Kicking Bird to guide them, there was no clear-cut direction for the lessons to take.

The first few days consisted mainly of mechanical, unexciting reviews.

In a way, it was just as well. She was still confused and embarrassed. The dryness of their first one-on-one meetings made it easier to pick up the thread of the past. It allowed her needed distance in getting used to him again.

Dances With Wolves was content to have it that way. The tedium of their exchanges was measured against his sincere desire to patch up whatever had damaged the link between them, and he waited patiently through the first few days, hoping for a thaw.

The Comanche was coming well, but it soon became apparent that sitting in the lodge all morning placed limitations on how fast he could learn it. So many things he needed to know about were outside. And family interruptions were never-ending.

But he waited on without complaint, letting Stands With A Fist skip over words she couldn’t explain.

One afternoon just after the noon meal, when she couldn’t find the word for grass, Stands With A Fist finally took him outside. One word led to another, and on that day they didn’t return to the lodge for more than an hour. Instead, they strolled through the village, so intent on their studies that time ran out with little thought of its passage.

The pattern was repeated and reinforced in the days that followed. They became a common sight, a pair of talkers roving the village, oblivious to all but the objects comprising their work: bone, lodge flap, sun, hoof, kettle, dog, stick, sky, child, hair, robe, face, far, near, here, there, bright, dull, and on and on and on.

Every day the language took deeper root in him and soon Dances With Wolves could make more than words. Sentences were forming and he strung them together with a zeal that caused many mistakes.

“Fire grows on the prairie.”

“Eating water is good for me.”

“Is that man a bone?”

He was like a good runner who falls every third stride, but he kept hacking at the morass of the new language, and by sheer force of will he made remarkable progress.

No amount of failure could flag his spirits, and he scrambled over every obstacle with the kind of good humor and determination that makes a person fun.

They were in the lodge less and less. The outside was free, and a special quiet was now in place over the village. It had become unusually peaceful.

Everyone was thinking about the men who had gone out to face uncertain events in the country of the Pawnee. With each timeless day relatives and friends of the men in the war party prayed more devoutly for their safety. Overnight it seemed, prayers had become the single most obvious feature of camp life, finding their way into every meal, meeting, and job, no matter how small or fleeting.

The holiness that shrouded the camp gave Dances With Wolves and Stands With A Fist a perfect environment in which to operate. Sunk as they were in this time of waiting and prayer, other people paid little attention to the white couple. They moved around in a serene, well-protected bubble, an entity unto themselves.