The Growing

THE GROWING

Written by: Susanne Beck and Okasha

CHAPTER THIRTY ONE

The shape emerges slowly under her hands. A chip here, a shaving there, a deeper cut with the tip of the knife to define the hollow of an ear, the pupil of an eye. Dakota’s profession has made her precise with a blade, and the rounded end of the fallen oak branch grows steadily into the recognizable likeness of a wolf.

The quiet of the morning deepens around her as she works, finding its way into the sure movements of her hands and the stillness of her mind. The early light slants down through the sycamore leaves to dapple the stream with flecks of gold, rippling and twining with the swift movement of the water over the rocks beneath. The wet earth at the verge bears the heart-shaped marks of deer hooves and the flat-footed prints of skunk; further down, where she found the branch she is now carving into a spirit-keeping stick for Wa Uspewikakiyape, Koda had seen the blunt, rounded marks of a large bobcat. This will be a good place to release Igmú when the time comes. She is almost ready for her freedom, the fur grown back over her injured paw except for the thin line of a scar; almost ready, too for a mate.

A smile pulls briefly at her mouth at the thought. It is the season, not only for Igmú but for herself.

She had waked early, the dawn light glancing across her eyes through the low window. Her dream had faded gently into the soft haze of the morning, leaving her clear-minded and unsurprised at the warmth stretched beside her on the quilt. She had opened her eyes to meet Kirsten’s own, green as a mossy pool in deep woods, shadowed by long lashes that lay like cornsilk on her cheeks when she dropped her gaze and her mouth sought Dakota’s own. The kiss had been long and slow and sweet, and when Kirsten had looked up again, Koda had asked, “What will you have for your morning-gift, Wiyo Winan?”

Kirsten had trailed a hand through the fall of hair across Dakota’s shoulder, bringing to rest between her breasts. Koda felt her heart beat against the touch. “This,” Kirsten said.

“Only this.”

Koda had kissed her again. “And what will you give me in return?”

Gently Kirsten guided Dakota’s hand to the pulse that throbbed strongly beneath the cage of her collarbones. “This. All of this.”

For answer, Koda had simply gathered Kirsten to her, feeling the smooth skin and hard muscle, the warm strength of her all along her own body. After a time, she stretched her legs straight beneath the quilt, feeling the drowsy hum of her blood as the light grew brighter, falling across Kirsten’s face at a sharper angle. “Canske mitawa, we have to get up.”

“No,” said Kirsten.

“Yes,” Koda answered, a thread of laughter running under her voice. “If for no other reason than that Dad will be here soon, with Manny and Tacoma following in hope of a hot breakfast. And someone’s going to have to let Asi out soon. He’s been a perfect angel all night.”

Slowly they had laid back the quilt and stood. In the morning light, Kirsten’s skin gleamed, her hair like a spill of molten gold. A shiver ran over her skin. “God, I hate the thought of a cold shower.”

“You take Asi out for a few minutes. I’ll put some water on the stove.”

Kirsten padded away to her small room at the end of the corridor, while Koda gathered the quilt and laid it across a chair in the bedroom. From the hall came the thump and scramble of paws on the floorboards, followed by a high-pitched yelp from Asimov. Another sharp bark was followed by Kirsten’s voice. “All right, boy. All right, I’m coming.”

Wrapping her robe around her, Koda made her way to the kitchen, setting the coffeemaker to brew and two large stew pots to boil. It was no substitute for a working water heater, but the bath would at least be warm. From outside, Asi bayed like the hound of the Baskervilles, and she turned to look out the kitchen window just in time to see a squirrel scramble up an oak, just leafing out, to perch just out of the big dog’s reach, chittering and jerking his tail in outrage. “Watch the sign language there, bro,” Koda murmured as Asi took up station at the base of the tree, apparently content to watch. Kirsten, her head thrown back, laughed at his pretensions—“Some hunter, oh yeah,” and tugged gently on his collar to distract him.

When the water boiled, Koda drew half a cold tub full, poured in a potful and added a handful of lavender bathsalts. Steam rose briefly, its sharp sweet scent dissipating in the cool air. Setting the other pot and its hot water on the tile floor, Koda dropped her robe and stepped into the tub just as the door flew open and Asi pounded into the kitchen in search of his bowl. Kirsten’s steps followed, more quietly as she called, “Dakota? I’m back.”

“In here,” she answered. “Come on in. The water’s fine.”

In this spring wracked by the aftermath of destruction and wanton death, Koda knows that a small green shoot has pushed its way up out of her own grief, growing toward the light. Igmu will soon return to the ways of her kind, hunting free to sustain herself and, by summer’s end, her kittens. The coyote they will release near the place where Manny and Andrews found him; he is a social creature and will rejoin his pack. The mother wolf and her cub are a more difficult problem. Their former shelter is now a tomb, and Wanblee Wapka and Tacoma have gone this morning to build Wa Uspewikakiyape’s burial scaffold nearby. Somewhere near the river, perhaps, or closer to home, near Wanblee Wapka’s village. His folk will respect them.

The shape of the wolf grows clearer as Dakota narrows the snout, cutting shallow lines for whiskers, notching the natural curve of the stick just below the ears to show the ruff. She turns the carving in her hands, letting the clear light flow over the smooth length of the branch where she has stripped the bark. No one would ever mistake her whittling for sculpture, not even connoisseurs of “primitive” art, if any are left. But it is clearly a representation of a wolf, and it is made with love. And that is all that matters.

Gently she rubs a thumb over the muzzle. I will miss you, my friend. Yet the grief has lost its sharpness; the pain no longer tears at her, no longer threatens to plunge her into that echoing void that had swirled about her when she had found him dying. For the next year she will be the keeper of Wa Uspewikakiyapi’s spirit, offering her strength to him as he makes his journey along the Blue Road, treading the path of stars. In the back of her mind, only half-acknowledged, lives a small, selfish hope that he will choose to turn again to life on Ina Maka. For me, yes, but not just for me. For Ate and Fenton and Maggie and Tacoma and Kirsten, and for the folk who aided her on her way. For all of us who must somehow remake the world without a pattern. Especially now, for Kirsten.

A frown settles between Koda’s brows. The world had intruded on them too soon, too insistently. There would be no honeymoon in the Greek Isles this time.

Kirsten’s happiness this morning had lit her from within, her eyes bright, her skin almost translucent. When the warm water turned first tepid and then cool, she clung to Koda as they both stood under the still-frigid spray of the shower, burying her face in Dakota’s breasts and muttering something about “mountain runoff.” Ambushed for the second time by Kirsten’s sense of humor, they laughed and pressed even more closely together “just so we don’t get hypothermia.”

The mood held through breakfast. She and Kirsten had bacon frying and eggs ready to tip into the pan when the men arrived as predicted, Wanblee Wapka trailed hopefully by Tacoma and Manny. If she had not been watching for it, she would not have caught the sudden light in Wanblee Wapka’s eyes when he stepped over the threshold and saw them standing side by side, doing nothing, really, more intimate than rolling and cutting biscuits. Yet that was enough. Kirsten, too had seen. She had blushed and become suddenly absorbed in greasing a baking sheet, and Wanblee Wapka’s eyes had danced..

The conversation when they sat down to breakfast ranged from Base politics to horse breeding, carefully skirting anything more intimate. Wanblee Wapka said casually, pushing scrambled eggs onto his fork with half a biscuit, “Chunksi, if it’s all right with you, I’d like to try Wamniyomni with one or two of Wakinyan Luta’s fillies this spring. Unless you want to breed them back to their sire?”

“The big black? Sure, that ought to work out well.” To Kirsten she added, “His name means ‘tornado.’ He’s that fast, and just about as sweet-tempered.”

“He’s not mean,” Tacoma observed, “just--independent.”

“And how many times has he tossed you? Just out of good-natured high spirits, of course?”

“We’ve come to terms.” Tacoma smiled, including Kirsten. “He’ll never be a ‘ladies’ horse,’”—his long fingers made mocking quotation marks in the air—“but then, there aren’t any ‘ladies’ in our family. Thank the gods.”

Dakota had swatted him with her napkin, “And if you ever call me that,”(swat again) “I’ll have” (swat) “ your hair.”

“Ow. Kindly remember I’m a wounded hero, here.” Tacoma raised an arm to defend himself, laughing. “Kirsten, save me!”

“And have you call me names? Hit him again, Dakota.”

“Kirsten, have you ever had a horse of your own?” Wanblee Wapka interrupted the horseplay, his eyes crinkling. “I’ve got a grey filly coming up, one of Wamniyomni’s, that would suit you.”

Manny, oddly silent, had been following the conversation like a spectator at a tennis match, his head turning from side to side. A long, hard look at Tacoma brought no help, only his cousin’s increased concentration on his plate. His brows knitted into a frown, he finally said, “I don’t get it. You look like the cat who ate the canary, Leksi.”

Wanblee Wapka regarded him mildly. “You and Tacoma are the cats, Tonskaya. And this,” he said, spearing a bite of ham with his fork, “was a pig.”

Half an hour later, Kirsten had returned to the endless coil of binary code streaming across her computer screen, running now on batteries as much as possible, the lilt gone from her voice and her step. For the first time, Koda allows herself to wonder what they will do if the code is not there at all. If it is nowhere to be found.

And the answer to that is what they have to do, beating the druids back and back again until they have no more strength and no more resources. And then what?

But she refuses to follow the thought. For all the dead; for Wa Uspewikakiyapi; for the living yet to come, failure is not an option. She runs her fingers again over the carving in her hand. It is as finished as she can make it. Rising, she lingers for a moment in the glade, absorbing its peace, its faint hint of Kirsten’s presence. Then she makes her way back toward the clinic and the hard parting still facing her this day.

*******

The clinic for once is quiet when Koda returns. Behind the desk, Shannon is occupied in updating files on a manual typewriter scrounged from who knows where, pecking away at the keys in an uncertain rhythm broken by the sluggish response of the mechanism. “That thing needs to be oiled,” Dakota observes as she pauses to check the morning’s sign-in sheet; no patients waiting, one drop-off to neuter. “Give Kimberly a call and see if the quartermaster has anybody who can break it down and give it a cleaning.”

“I’ve already—damn!” Shannon breaks off to examine her right hand. Her fingers are still smudged from an apparent struggle to feed in the red-and-black ribbon. “Second nail this morning. There’s supposed to be an old guy in town who used to be a typewriter mechanic. Colonel Grueneman’s got an airman out looking for him.”

“If he shows up, see what else he can work on. We’re eventually going to need all the maintenance people we can find, and not just for the clinic.”

“Doctor?”

Koda stops on her way back to her small office and the wards. There is a plaintive quality in the young woman’s voice. “What is it, Shannon?”

“It’s not going to get better, is it?”

Very gently she says, “It’s not going to be the same, no. In some ways, it may be better. Or there may be no one left to care. We just don’t know yet.”

Shannon’s color goes from the pink flush of annoyance to dead white. She manages, though, to muster a crooked smile. “Thanks. I think.”

Dakota returns it. “You’re welcome. I think.”

Leaving Shannon to her uncertain typing, Koda checks her patients for the second time since dawn. Sister Matilda and her kittens have gone home to general rejoicing in the Burgess household. The Scotty, sadder and with luck wiser, has recovered from his unfortunate encounter with the porcupine. The rabbit with the infected eye, though, is not progressing as well as he had done initially. The inflammation has faded, and he quietly munches his alfalfa pellets as she runs her hand down his back. The infection persists, though, evident in the thinning flesh over his ribs and the pale color of exposed skin and membranes. She makes a note on his chart to add a second antibiotic to his evening dose; penicillin and sulfa together will still take almost anything bacterial. If that doesn’t do the job, they will have to go to an antiviral, and supplies are short.

Not for the first time, a cold chill trickles down her spine. This rabbit may have a constitutional idiosyncracy or underlying condition that leaves him more vulnerable than most. Conditions are ripe, though, for the spread of disease of all sorts. Winter has held most infections in check, save for the usual bronchitis and colds of the season. With the return of the sun, the melting of corpses buried under a meter or more of snow, the likelihood of epidemic will soar. And there is no more public health service, no more Center for Disease Control, no more pharmaceutical companies to mount an emergency campaign for an effective drug or vaccine.

For much of the rest of the afternoon, she inventories the clinics’ supplies, making lists of drugs to search for or attempt to find on the black market that is rapidly springing up. Or rather, the open market; looted or not, merchandise is moving again, paid for in trade goods or services. If they are not already, medications will be at a premium. The unpleasant thought comes to her, not for the first time, that it may become necessary to reinstitute taxes on a population that is barely surviving.

At midday she returns home for a quick lunch and a quicker walk with Asi. Kirsten has gone into Rapid City for the afternoon session of the rapists’ trial. Testimony is almost finished, and closing arguments will begin soon. As the only surviving national symbol of law, Kirsten must be present when the verdict comes in. A smile touches Dakota’s mouth for an instant, and is gone. Kirsten’s strength is beyond question, but she has never faced the cold responsibilities of power before, the chill that must stiffen the fingers of any but the most brutal authority scrawling a signature across a death warrant.

Leaving Asi to his nap on the hearth, Koda returns to the clinic. The neutering surgery goes well, and the Basset mix starts coming out from under the anaesthesia before he is well settled in the hospital ward. The mother wolf and her cub lie stretched out in the sun, sleeping so soundly that they never stir as she passes. Igmú, becoming ever more restless as spring deepens around her and the call of her blood becomes more insistent, bats her ball about her enclosure with increasing fierceness; Coyote, more relaxed, wags his abbreviated tail and whines, thrusting his slender nose through the mesh of the fence for a pat and a scratch.

As the sun stands down toward the horizon, Dakota sets aside her work. In the storeroom, she lays out the buffalo hide robe her father has brought from home and unfolds it on the worktable. Unlocking the freezer, she gently removes the frozen body of Wa Uspewikakiyapi, setting aside its heavy plastic wrappings. She performs each movement deliberately, holding apart her anger and her grief. For a moment she rests her hand on his broad head. This will not happen again, she swears to him silently. Never again. Your people will be free, and safe.

With a pair of surgical scissors, she snips a lock of fur from his mane, where it is untinged by blood. She takes a second from the plume of his tail. These she affixes with a leather thong to the spirit stick, making a mane about the head and throat of the wolf she has carved. With it, she will undertake to remember and honor him as a beloved member of her family for the year of formal mourning and to host a give-away at its end. It does not matter that he is of another nation. He has been closer to her than any not of her blood, save one. Kola mitawa. My friend. My teacher.

And now there is another. As if summoned by the thought, a light step sounds in the corridor, followed by a tap on the door. “Dakota?”

“Come in.”

Kirsten opens the door, moving quietly. She pauses a moment, taking in the wolf’s body,

the fur still in Dakota’s hand, the buffalo robe. Silently she crosses the floor and steps into Koda’s arms. Koda holds her tightly, not speaking, merely resting her cheek atop the silken softness of the fair head. After a moment, Kirsten says, “I wanted to be with you when—that is, for the ceremony.” She steps back a fraction and raises her face questioningly. “If that’s all right?”

Koda lays her palm against the other woman’s cheek. “Of course it’s all right. You’re family now, to both of us. All of us.”

Deep beneath their searching concern, a spark of joy lights the green eyes, and is gone. “Let me help.”

Together, then, they wrap Wa Uspewikakiyape’s body in the buffalo robe, tying it in place with long strips of braided sinew. Into one knot, Dakota ties a medicine hoop fashioned of a supple willow branch, with small patches of cloth—white, yellow, red and black—tied at the quarters and leather thongs running at right angles between them. Into another she fastens an eagle feather and two pinions from a redtail’s wing. “Because,” she explains, “he was a chief of his nation.”

When they are done, they wait quietly by the honored dead, their hands joined.

*******

“If he shows up, see what else he can work on. We’re eventually going to need all the maintenance people we can find, and not just for the clinic.”

“Doctor?”

Koda stops on her way back to her small office and the wards. There is a plaintive quality in the young woman’s voice. “What is it, Shannon?”

“It’s not going to get better, is it?”

Very gently she says, “It’s not going to be the same, no. In some ways, it may be better. Or there may be no one left to care. We just don’t know yet.”

Shannon’s color goes from the pink flush of annoyance to dead white. She manages, though, to muster a crooked smile. “Thanks. I think.”

Dakota returns it. “You’re welcome. I think.”

And now there is another. As if summoned by the thought, a light step sounds in the corridor, followed by a tap on the door. “Dakota?”

“Come in.”

Kirsten opens the door, moving quietly. She pauses a moment, taking in the wolf’s body,

Koda lays her palm against the other woman’s cheek. “Of course it’s all right. You’re family now, to both of us. All of us.”

Deep beneath their searching concern, a spark of joy lights the green eyes, and is gone. “Let me help.”

When they are done, they wait quietly by the honored dead, their hands joined.

***

The knock sounds softly against the service door. “Tanksi?”

Dakota opens it to find Tacoma on the landing, Wanblee Wapka’s pickup backed up to the loading ramp. Her brother is in civilian clothes again, jeans and a deep blue ribbon shirt, his hair caught back at the nape of his neck. His gaze slips past her to Kirsten standing by the table, back again. “You’re ready?”

For answer she nods, and together the three of them carry the body of Wa Uspewikakiyape to the waiting vehicle. Though Tacoma still limps heavily, he has set aside his crutches. He moves awkwardly but surely as they sidestep across the landing and Koda carefully lowers herself, her hands never losing their hold on their chill burden, into the truck’s cargo space. A drum and beater occupy one corner, together with a long, narrow bundle Koda recognizes as her father’s canupah, his ceremonial pipe. A fringed bag, worked generations back in shell beads and porcupine quills, contains his herbs and other holy things. Kirsten and Tacoma follow her down, and they lay Wa Uspewikakiyapi on the spread deerhide that covers much of the truckbed. Bracing himself on the wheel housing, Tacoma folds down gradually until he is perched beside the drum, then lifts it to sit between his knees. Kirsten moves hesitantly as if to offer a hand, and he shakes his head almost imperceptibly. “Thanks. I got it.”

Koda steps over the side and lets herself down in a single drop; Kirsten follows via tailgate and bumper. Manny swings open the door to the back of the cab, and Kirsten climbs in, followed by Koda. Wanblee Wapka glances into the rearview mirror, checking his passengers. “Everybody settled?”

“Good to go, Leksi,” Manny answers, and Koda follows his gaze as he tracks from Tacoma in the cargo bed to her hand joined with Kirsten’s on the bench seat. His eyes go wide for a second, and he mimes thumping his head against the metal frame of the window to his left. “Everybody but me, right?”

“Not everybody,” Koda says.

The light moment passes as Wanblee Wapka pulls the truck out into the street, and from behind them begins the deep heart throb of the drum, beaten slowly. There is little traffic, vehicular or pedestrian, but here and there a uniformed soldier stops to stare at them as they pass. One or two, recognizing Kirsten’s profile where she sits by the right window, salute; yet another, whose high, broad cheekbones and copper skin bespeak her Cheyenne ancestry, removes her cap and bows her head. The guards at the gate snap to attention and pass them out with looks of puzzlement on their earnest faces, but make no demur. Once off the Base they turn toward the county road that leads into the foothills, the big truck taking the ruts with ease as they begin to climb toward the ancient streambed and its treeline, the place where Wa Uspewikakiyape had lived and died. For the most part they travel in silence, Koda lost in remembrance and a growing feeling of relief, anchored in time and place by the strong, small hand folded in her own.

Wanblee Wapka wrestles the truck up the slope of the rock outcropping that shelters the sealed den. Sliding to the ground, Dakota’s eyes run along the line of trees, the dry course of the ancient stream that once cut its way down through limestone to create the shallow drop from the narrow remnant of wooded meadow with its march of trees. Among them now stands a scaffolding made of strong, straight limbs and rope, its platform six feet above the grass. Boughs of pine and larch cover it, interspersed with the slender trumpets of scarlet madder, the blue stars of anemone. From each corner hangs a leather thong strung with white chalcedony and striped agate, porcupine quills and a falcon’s feathers. A circle of river pebbles makes a wheel about the scaffold, flat, larger stones set at the four quarters. This is a chief’s burial. “Washte,” says Koda. “Thank you, Ate.”

Manny and Wanblee Wapka lift down the body of Wa Uspewikakiyape and lay it by the scaffold. Tacoma sets the drum by the south upright and takes up his station before it. From his pouch, Wanblee Wapka takes several braids of herbs, sage and pine and sweetgrass, a smaller leather bundle that Koda knows contains pollen and another of cornmeal. Finally he unwraps his pipe. To Kirsten he says, “This is what we do for family when they go to walk the Blue Road. Everyone participates.”

Dakota watches as the meaning of his words sinks in, and Kirsten nods solemnly. Wanblee Wapka hands her the packet of cornmeal. “When the time comes, rub some of this on each of the posts of the scaffold. Then on Wa Uspewikakiyape’s wrappings. I’ll tell you when, okay?” She nods again, holding the folded leather as if it were the most precious thing in the world. In this light, her eyes are the wide clear green of the sea.

To Manny he gives a rattle made of turtle shell and antler. “Translate for her, will you?”

Finally he goes to stand beside Tacoma and the drum. “Everybody over here, please.”

As they form a tight circle about him, Dakota feels peace begin to well up inside her. Part of it, she knows, is the coming end of the wrongness she has felt ever since finding that Wa Uspewikakiyape’s body had not been left in dignity. Another part is the strong presence of her father, center of the compass of her world. Part is the warrior’s honor that surrounds Tacoma, body and spirit. Yet another is the energy her cousin Manny carries, the spirit of thunder that can break forth as the humor of a heyoka jester or as the death-dealing lightning.

And at the center of her heart is Kirsten, love returning again and again through the cycles of the sun and the turning earth.

Eyes closed, she hears the small sound of flint and pyrite struck together, smells the fragrance as the spark takes hold in a braid of sage. As Wanblee Wapka holds it out to her, Dakota waves the smoke toward her, washing it over her head and hands, over all her body. Awkwardly at first, then with more confidence, Kirsten follows her example; then Manny, Tacoma, Wanblee Wapka himself. He smudges the platform behind him, the drum, the buffalo hide that enfolds Wa Uspewikakiyape. As Tacoma once again begins the low, steady beat of the drum, punctuated by the rattle in Manny’s hands, Dakota carries a braid of sweetgrass around the circle, lifting it to the sky, lowering it to the earth at each of the four quarters, invoking Inyan the Creator, Wakan Tanka, Ina Maka. She feels Kirsten’s eyes on her as she paces the circuit, the calm touch of her thoughts.

When she returns to the center, Wanblee Wapka unwraps his pipe. It is a beautiful thing, made a hundred years ago and more. The bowl, carved of red stone in the shape of a buffalo, surmounts a length of hollow wood. Where it joins the stem, three eagle feathers hang by a leather thong strung with shell and turquoise. A spike just beyond it, to hold the pipe upright in the earth. Raising it to the east, Wanblee Wapka begins to pray:

“Ho! Wanblee Gleshka!

Spotted Eagle, Spirit of the East,

Hear us!

Speak to us about giving thanks.

Speak to us about wisdom.

Speak to us about understanding.

Speak to us of gratitude

For the life of our brother,

Wa Uspewikakiyape, who has gone

To walk the Spirit Road with you.

We give you thanks for him.

We thank you for the past,

The present and the future.

We thank you for all who are gathered here.”

He pauses, and Koda answers, “Han; washte.” Taking the offered pipe from his hand, she steps to the south quarter and raises it.

“Ho! Ina Mato!

Grandmother Bear, Spirit of the South!

Hear us!

Speak to us about fertility.

Speak to us about children.

Speak to us about health.

Speak to us about self-control.

Speak to us about creating good things for all people,

About the creations of our brother

Wa Uspewikakiyape who has gone

To walk the Spirit Road with you.

Give us fruitfulness in all we do.”

Again, the soft murmurs of “Hau! Waste!”and from Kirsten, “Han!” Receiving the pipe again from Dakota, Wanblee Wapka steps to the western quarter and raises it.

“Ho! Tatanka Wakan!

Sacred Buffalo, Spirit of the West!

Hear us!

Speak to us about purification.

Speak to us about self-sacrifice.

Speak to us about renewal.

Speak to us about the Thunder.

Release us from those things

Which are past.

Speak to us about the gifts of our brother,

Wa Uspewikakiyapi, who has gone

To walk the Spirit Road with you.

Give us freedom from weariness in all we do.”

Dakota takes the pipe once again, stepping to the north. She raises it and prays:

“Ho! Tshunkmanitu Tunkashila!

Grandfather Wolf, Spirit of the North!

Hear us!

Speak to us about rebirth.

Speak to us about winter passing.

Speak to us about the seed beneath the snow.

Speak to us about life returning.

Speak to us about our destiny.

Speak to us about the destiny of our brother,

Wa Uspewikakiyapi, who has gone

To walk the Spirit Road with you.

Give us freedom from fear.

Koda hands the pipe to her father for the last time. Standing by the burial scaffold, he lowers it to the earth, then raises it again to the sky. Finally he holds it before him at the center. He chants,

Ho! Ina Maka, Wakan Tanka, Inyan!

Mother Earth, Great Mystery, Creator!

Hear us!

Our brother, Wa Uspewikakiyapi

Has gone to walk the Spirit Road with you.

Make his steps sure as he comes to you.

Make his eyes bright when he looks upon you.

Make his heart glad when he dwells with you

In the Other Side Camp,

Among the Star Nation.

We hold his memory,

His friends, his student,

His mate and children.

We praise and thank him

For all he has given us.

Give us his courage,

Give us his strength.

Give us his wisdom,

So that one day we may join him

And come safely to you.

The soft murmur runs around the circle again, and Wanblee Wapka thrusts the long spike of his pipe into the earth beside the scaffold. The drum and rattle beat steadily. Following his direction, Kirsten steps forward and rubs a pinch of cornmeal on each of the four poles, sprinkling the remainder on the buffalo hide that wraps Wa Uspewikakiyapi. Then Koda and her father lift the bundle into place on the platform, and the ceremony is done.

As Manny and Wanblee Wapka gather up pipe and pouch and drum, stowing them again in the truck, Koda drifts apart from the group, leaning against the straight trunk of a young birch. The sun poises just on the edge of the horizon, the sky above it shot with crimson and gold. A breeze stirs the leaves above her head, cool with the coming of evening. Quietly, Kirsten comes to stand beside her, saying nothing, offering her presence. Dakota extends her hand in silence, and Kirsten takes it. Peace settles around her, sweet and deep. After a time, she stirs. “They’re waiting for us.”

“Yes,” Kirsten answers.

“You all right?”

Kirsten murmurs something in assent, then says, “You?”

“Better.” Koda turns, her hand still in Kirsten’s. Together they descend the slope, take their places in the back seat of the truck.

Together. Going home.

*******

This brings us to the end of another episode of The Growing. We hope you enjoyed. Feedback is, as always, much welcomed (if my email doesn’t eat it first, that is!). You can reach us at swordnquil@aol.com. Until next week.

Continued - Chapter 32

Return to The Growing Main Page

Return to The Bard's Corner