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sunlight made cornmeal look like gold dust on Maggie’s hands and arms.
Graciela did as she was told, but she was both annoyed and uneasy. The boy wasn’t sick; he had no fever. Why waste good cornmeal, when it was attention he wanted, anyway?
Transition From one mind to another. Third pers. Omniscient
the place the whites want to put them,
the places the white men wanted to put them.
Kicking Wolf could watch a horse graze for a few minutes and know whether he was watching a good horse.
They know that if they kill all the buffalo we will starve—then
an old horse slowly dying for lack of teeth. That was the way of old horses, just as shaky hands and wavery eyesight was the way of old men.
He wanted to reach Black Mesa, to sing his way into death among the black rocks that were the oldest rocks. Some believed that only in the black rocks were the spirits that welcomed one into death.
The old horse was so weak now that he was only stumbling. For a time Buffalo Hump dismounted and led him, a thing he had not had to do in his long life as a horseman.
But the fact was he had chosen the old black horse to be the horse that would carry him to the place of his death. For him, Buffalo Hump, there would be no more horses; he had to do what he could to get the old horse to take him where he needed to go. It would not do to abandon him, which would leave him afoot in the spirit world; he did not want such a thing to happen. If it did he would be disgraced; all his victories and conquests would be as naught. Where the black horse died, he would die; and he wanted it, if possible, to be where the black rocks were.
What Buffalo Hump knew was that he must not leave the black horse; their fates were now linked.
As the horse rested he began to sing again the high songs of the war trail. For a time the old horse did nothing. Then he lifted his head and pricked up his ears, as if hearing again his own hoofbeats from the time of warring.
the horse smelled the water from the little spring and became excited.
If he had dismounted and led the horse again they might have made it a few more miles into the country of the black rocks. But now it was too late: the horse was dead, and the place where he stood was the place he would die.
he would have to make the best death he could on the spot where his horse had fallen.
he began to remember bits and pieces of his life, scraps of things that had been said to him by various people.
The owl had merely come to tell him to get ready to let his spirit slip away from his body, as the little moths slipped away from caterpillars.
All night Famous Shoes sat listening. He heard the plover cry several more times, and rejoiced. Men lied often, but the plover only lied when it had eggs to protect; if the plover’s nest was near, then water, too, was near. In the morning they could drink.
the sadness of knowing that the old ways were gone.
Once again he had to carry with him, on a long trip home, a sense of incompletion.
