Joseph M. Marshall III Read Online Free Page B

grandmothers. More playmates meant more interesting adventures.
    Light Hair was fed when he was hungry, his scrapes and bumps treated and healed, and his disappointments and losses softened by the indulgent attention of the females in his extended family. His father, Crazy Horse, and the other males of the family were always there on the periphery of his world, but they were busy working to provide and protect. As yet Light Hair was not fully aware that their path would be his, only that as he grew older he felt more inclined to seek his father’s approval and was becoming more and more curious about him. It was a subtle change that the women allowed, albeit a little sadly, because the carefree boy was beginning to leave their world. He was taking the first hesitant steps onto the path he would follow for the rest of his life. His mother and all the grandmothers had done their part by teaching him the strength he would need to travel that path. Since before anyone could remember it had been said “a boy will learn the way of the warrior from his fathers and grandfathers after he learns courage from his mothers and grandmothers.”
    So the women, in their way, gave the boy to his father and grandfathers. There was no definable moment in which the next phase of the journey came, as much as a traveler doesn’t know that it is a certain place at which he must go from a walk to a trot—only that it is time to do so. The men in the family simply began to give the boy more and more attention.
    There came a day when someone handed Light Hair a bow and a quiver of arrows suited to his size and strength. It was the first tangible sign of the life that lay ahead, and his mother smiled because she was proud her son would follow the path of the hunter and warrior.
    After the gift of the bow came the gift of knowledge. Light Hair instinctively knew what to do with the bow. Every child, for that matter, understood the bow was a weapon, significant enough that every man, young or old, carried one or always kept one within easy reach in every household. Light Hair was not left solely to his boyish whims to form his relationship with the weapon, however. It was that significant to the life of the Lakota. So, beginning with his father, various adult males taught him the proper way to carry it, care for it, and shoot it effectively. Careful and patient instruction from the knowledge and experience of seasoned hunters and warriors turned the gift of the bow into the gift of change. Light Hair couldn’t look at the process in those real and figurative perspectives, of course. For him the immediate impact was in ownership of the bow and the connection it had with the adult males in his family and in the community. Something important was happening and he felt good, he felt different.
    The words “He is yours for the first few years of his life” must have seemed to his mother to have been spoken only days earlier. Those first few years passed much too quickly for her. Her son, her only son as it would turn out, was no longer exclusively hers. Perhaps she sensed that she would not be there to see him fulfill his life’s path.
    Change came into Light Hair’s life in yet another way. She who gave him life lost her own. In the perception of a child time can often be irrelevant, especially in a culture that was not given to measuring it. He was too young to understand that death is a part of life. Later he would realize that his mother’s time on Earth had been much too short.
    Perhaps Light Hair could not comprehend what had happened to his mother, but he could certainly perceive that all of the constant realities that were his mother—her voice, her reassuring touch, her busy hands at work, her physical presence—were suddenly no longer part of his daily routine. Perhaps he wondered at the sudden attention directed at him and his sister and their father and about the inordinate amount of weeping among adults. Something had happened that