Winter Count Read Online Free Page A

but it had no name. Now it is called Thatchtop Mountain.
    During the time the buffalo climbed they did not stop singing. They turned red all over; their eyes became smooth white. The singing became louder. It sounded like thunder that would not stop. Everyone who heard it, even people four or five days’ journey away, was terrified.
    At the top of the mountain the buffalo stopped singing. They stood motionless in the snow, the wind blowing clouds around them. The Arapaho men who had followed had not eaten for four days. One, wandering into the clouds with his hands outstretched and a rawhide string connecting him to the others, grabbed hold of one of the buffalo and killed it. The remaining buffalo disappeared into the clouds; the death song began again, very softly, and remained behind them. The wind was like the singing of the buffalo. When the clouds cleared the men went down the mountain.
    The white people at the 1911 meeting said they did not understand the purpose of telling such a story. The Arapaho said this was the first time the buffalo tried to show them how to climb out through the sky.
    The notes of this meeting in 1911 have been lost, but what happened there remained clear in the mind of the son of one of the Indians who was present. It was brought to my attention by accident one evening in the library of the university where I teach. I was reading an article on the introduction of fallow deer in Nebraska in the August 1955 issue of the Journal of Mammalogy when this man, who was apparently just walking by, stopped and, pointing at the opposite page, said, “This is not what this is about.” The article he indicated was called “An Altitudinal Record for Bison in Northern Colorado.” He spoke briefly of it, as if to himself, and then departed.
    Excited by this encounter I began to research the incident. I have been able to verify what I have written here. In view of the similarity between the events in the Medicine Bow and those in Colorado, I suspect that there were others in the winter of 1845 who began, as the Arapaho believe, trying to get away from what was coming, and that subsequent attention to this phenomenon is of some importance.
    I recently slept among weathered cottonwoods on the Laramie Plains in the vicinity of the Medicine Bow Mountains. I awoke in the morning to find my legs broken.

The Orrery



N ORTH OF TUCSON AND east, beyond Steadman, is a place hardly accessible by car called The Fields. I do not know how it came by this name. I was told by someone, a lifelong resident, that the name grew up after an attempt to irrigate and sell some of the land had failed, that the reference was cynical. The person who tried to sell the land was from Chicago, he said. I think I was told this because I seemed to be traveling through.
    The valley is called Tifton on USGS maps. It is flat and dry, covered with creosote bush and ocotillo. Along the washes are a few deep-rooted paloverde and mesquite trees and, very occasionally in a damp draw, there is a Frémont cottonwood. Tall saguaro cactus are thinly scattered. Closer to the ground are primrose and sand verbena. The brittle soil is a reddish-brown mixture of clays and dry, sedimentary debris. The effect, looking across the valley into the surrounding barren mountains, is bleak, foreboding. In spite of this, I remember the valley by the first name I heard, The Fields, and think of a field of alfalfa like ocean water with the wind rolling over it. Crawling through green, wind-blown alfalfa is one of the earliest memories of my childhood.
    I came here first in 1956 on a trip with my father, who was an amateur horticulturist. He was looking for a kind of cactus he had deduced from someone’s anthropological notes was growing here. (He found it and it was later named for him: Cephalocerus greystonii. ) What I remember most from the first visit, however, was neither the dryness nor the cactus but the wind. When I was a child in California the Santa Ana