A Long and Winding Road by Win Blevins

Author:Win Blevins [Blevins, Win]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780765305770
Goodreads: 1073056
Publisher: Forge Books
Published: 2007-11-27T00:00:00+00:00

Sam wished he didn’t remember Owl Woman, and wished he didn’t respect her. She was a village grandmother who had the ability to see beyond, and that made her influential. What she saw in one vision was that white people were death to the Crow nation.

A decade ago she spoke against Sam to other villagers. Finally, through Bell Rock, he asked her to explain why she didn’t want him in the camp.

Her explanation was eerily powerful. She spoke of a vision, or dream. In it she was alone and lost in the Yellowstone country. Her husband, children, friends, the entire village, all the Crow people, she couldn’t find anyone.

She wandered and came near a place she knew, a lake which emptied at one end into the big-water-everywhere to the east and at the other end into the big-water-everywhere to the west. Sam knew such a lake.

Now she began to hear the people—they were crying and moaning, but she couldn’t find them. She walked on toward the lake.

Riders began to pass her, white people on horses. They didn’t look at her because they had no faces. Their visages were blank, and turned toward a horizon far, far away, beyond where the sun sets. Silent, faceless, they rode past her.

Then Owl Woman came to the lake and saw. “On the pond were lily pads. Except that the lily pads were faces, the faces of the Absaroka people under a film of water. The faces were dead, the people were dead. In rows many, many of them, they lay dead. Their countenances were ghastly white, their eyes frozen open, their lips vermilion.

“I stood by the side of the pond and looked at the faces of all my people, dead. The white people marched by on their horses, never noticing. Forever they went on, forever and forever. And the people’s death went on forever.”

Sam would never forget her voice as she said these words, and the power of her vision. She told him then that the only way for the people to live was to avoid the white people altogether. Though she knew most Crows welcomed the fur trappers and were friends to them, she thought that was a terrible mistake.

Sam told her that night how mistaken she was. White people, he said, would never come to this country. It was not the kind of place they liked—they wanted flat country they could plow and plant. They wanted big, thick rivers that could turn their mill wheels and make steam for their factories. The Rocky Mountains were too dry, too mountainous, too cold—white people would never want such a place.

He would tell her the same now.

But she was set against him, and had set her husband against him, and he might not get the chance.

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