Four Fields by Tim Dee

Author:Tim Dee
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619025073
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2018-04-27T00:00:00+00:00

There are other Indians. I wanted to meet some who had taken a different path through the grass after it was fenced. Back in Montana and thanks to Tim McCleary, a white man who teaches Crow students at Little Big Horn College and speaks Crow and knows more Crow lore and history than most Indians, I met Bill Yellowtail of the Crow tribe in a Dairy Queen in Hardin. Bill is a cowboy Indian – a rancher, among other things. He opted for a caramel ice cream, Tim chose a more lurid event streaked with red and paved with a rainbow of hundreds and thousands. I’d eaten a buffalo burger for lunch so was off all solids and sucked instead at a bucket of lemonade. Our talk between mouthfuls and friendly laughter was however, as it might have been in Pine Ridge, of the end of a people.

Bill was heading away from the Crow Reservation the next day but ten minutes after our meeting he had invited me to travel with him that evening to his ranch home tucked into the first hills of the Big Horn Mountains at the head of Lodge Grass Creek, a tributary off the valley of the Little Bighorn River. He drove and we talked and then we sat at the house he is building on his family’s land and talked some more. We slept and then he shepherded me up a small mountain on what he called a ‘Japanese Quarter Horse’. A first-timer on a quad bike, all I had to do was follow the old-timer on his, but still I crashed the gears, my beast bucked and I unwisely allowed the steering to decide its own route, twice having to be rescued when I thought the angle I was climbing was untenable. Bill was smilingly patient throughout. My day with him was full of jokes. He laughs like Yogi Bear.

The view from the top was good. For a thirty-mile spread, dry deer-brown grass flowed below us in rippling warm plenitude. Far away across the green gash of the Little Bighorn the land rose again on a blue horizon to the lone hill of the Crow’s Nest where Custer scouted ahead and misread the scene in June 1876. The entire country of a people was laid out there, every feature holding a story from the past and Bill, though he half-pretended not to, knew them all. Coming down was harder than going up. I became attentive to Bill’s waistline. By concentrating on his jeans and hugging close to his bike I managed to stay on mine, follow him and stay alive as we controlled our fall down the mountainside. No forty-four-inch-waist Levi’s could be more inspirational.

Bill is an unusual Indian. ‘I choose to identify myself as a Crow though it would be altogether easier not to be an Indian.’ His father was Crow and his mother Scots-Irish. He graduated from Dartmouth College. He was a Montana State Senator from 1985 to 1993. He has served on the board of the National Audubon Society.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.