RavenShadow Read Online Free Page A

with the shininess of his feathers and the cold brightness of his eyes. When he flaps his wings and the black feathers catch the sun, somehow they are wild, mocking laughter. It speaks poetic of the body dead and moldering. I am a-wing, and you are arotting .
    Raven makes me shudder.
    This time Raven gave a great flurry of wings on the hood and opened and closed his big beak without a sound. He cocked his head sideways, peered at me through the windshield. He flapped his wings but didn’t lift off. He was so big and ominous that for a moment I thought he was an ordinary raven, instead of Raven.
    Then suddenly he was sitting on the steering wheel, beak in my face.
    I flung an arm at him, and he backed off. Morphed backward through the windshield and sat on the hood.
    Raven was a comfort in a way. Instead of pretending to be afraid of unemployment, poverty, and degradation, I could just go for the big one and be afraid of death.

And How Do You Like Your Blue-Eyed Boy Now, Mr. Death?
    T hat afternoon I drank. If you’re gonna see things, you might as well be drunk . And I played a game. How do you drink just enough to keep you going? Going from bar to bar, as you drive south through the Black Hills from Rapid to Hot Springs? Going from drink to drink instead of drink to jail? How do you stay sober enough to drive but drunk enough to forget Raven?
    This is a white-man game, this management of inebriation. White folks are good at it—teeter but don’t dodder.
    I’m not that kind of drinker, and not many Indians are. We don’t want to play around the edges. Maybe this is because of our traditions—we make a place for altered states of mind, whether reached by trance, Father Peyote, firewater, or even seizure. Anyhow, we are binge drinkers. I am a binge drinker. When I tipple, I don’t want to get a pleasant little buzz. I want to get barbarically drunk.
    So I had a problem. I was determined to drink until the sun went down and then meet Sallee Walks Straight in Hot Springs, at the south end of the Hills. I had been pursuing Sallee for a month, no luck. Had a hot date tonight to celebrate something special, I told her. Didn’t tell her I hoped to get luckyin a meadow, pass out with a blanket wrapped around us, and wake up a free man—no white-man job! Free in the center of Black Hills, Paha Sapa, our sacred lands.
    You white people don’t understand how special the Black Hills are to us. Since before the memories of the grandfathers of the oldest men, my people have sought their visions in Paha Sapa. Our ancestors, since before the memories of the grandfathers of the oldest men, have been buried there. The Hills give us all things good—poles for our tipis, meat, berries, grass for the ponies, clean water. Most important, and seldom told, is that the Hills mirror the stars, and by traveling in a sacred spirit through the Hills on a certain route, we align ourselves with the heavens themselves. The Hills mirror what we call the Racetrack Constellation, which you call Capella, Pleiades, Rigel, Sirius, Procyon, Castor, and Pollux.
    A hundred years ago Yellow Hair, George Armstrong Custer, came along and hollered in print, “Them thar Hills are full of gold.” Prospectors flooded in, followed by miners, followed by bartenders, whores and gamblers, followed by preachers, teachers, and the whole gamut of your so-called civilization, which has about killed us. The final insult was for you to name a town after Custer in our Hills.
    But my date with Sallee was for about dark, Indian time, which means any time in the evening. I had all day to tipple and not pass out.
    I remember puttering along south through the Hills. I had a few in Rockerville and went over to Keystone to find Emile and thank him for the help, but he wasn’t at home. I checked out the taste of beer in Hill City, and in Custer, where I stood in the parking lot, pretended a handicapped parking sign was Custer’s grave, and pissed up at it. I think I remember