Resistance by Barry Lopez

Author:Barry Lopez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307427472
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

In the morning I could again recall no dream.

Virgil was sitting in the cottonwoods when I spotted him, and birds flew from the cover of their leaves as I approached. He had half a smile. I gave him a weighted nod, as if I had something important to say, despite my too-brief stay up the creek; but we saddled our horses without saying anything.

The plains grizzly I’d seen that night on the Hi-Line, the image of it, had been heavy on my mind as I walked back down the creek. It could easily have come up off the Fort Belknap Reservation. I asked Virgil whether he thought it was likely that a rare animal like that might be safer on Indian land. Some Indians, I knew, making their own difficult transition from that culture to this, were as likely to kill the bear as any wide-eyed white boy.

“The difference between us is that what you are able to forget will not leave us alone,” said Virgil. He was answering a deeper question, and I assumed he was including the bear in his “we.” His tone was as close as he ever came to exasperation.

He’d seen a few plains grizzly in his life, Virgil said after a bit, one over around Boxelder Coulee and another in the Smoke Creek drainage. Both these places are on the Fort Peck Reservation.

“They’re around,” he said. “Everything, even the buffalo, is still around. You get to believing they’re hunted out or starved out, or maybe they’ve run off, but as long as people are telling stories about them, as long as people keep them in their minds, they’ll stay around. You have to keep telling the stories, though, calling up the memory of them. They come back in your dreams at night. They come along when you’re off somewhere, walking by yourself. They’re asking you why. That’s their question. Why.”

“My question,” I tried, “would be, Why did you bring me here again?”

He didn’t answer.

“I failed the first time, I failed this time.”

He ignored me.

“You know what it is, Virgil? I’m a man thinking all the time. I’m a thinker. I never really stop, so most of the time whatever you’re trying to teach me or show me, it can’t get in.”

“That’s right.”

“I can’t be like you, Virgil.”

“No, you can’t. But you can answer the bear’s question.” He pulled his horse around to face me. “The bear is coming to you because you say you want to help, and it’s you he’s asking why. He’s speaking for all of them out there, every animal. Why are you trying to kill me?”

“It’s not me.”

“You need to stop hearing your own name, Edward, whenever someone speaks.”

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