to where the Plains Cree were, west to the Gros Ventre, and southwest to the Crow. Assiniboine, Virgil’s people were called, Stony to some. Mother said he knew that country, twig and dirt, the way she knew me: what it liked and didn’t like and how all its known parts—the colors of the sky or chinook winds coming east to cross up a hard winter—could never together explain the mystery of what it was.
The country was broad and open to the Assiniboine, reeling plains of short grass and river breaks, wrinkling here and there into low hills and buttes. Buffalo country. When western Canada and the Louisiana Purchase were laid out, the dividing line ran straight through Assiniboine country.
“You could choose Canada or the U.S.,” Virgil said one time. I’d been trying to get him to talk about how it felt, being closed in on a reservation. “George III or Thomas Jefferson, you could take your pick.”
“You could?” I said, taken aback by the point in law but buying it anyway.
“Yeah,” he deadpanned, “some of us are still working on it.”
Virgil’s way with broken treaties, land grabs, assimilation, and the rest was to move on, regardless, like the big prairie rivers in spring melt, the Milk or the Poplar, a quiet, heavy flow, nearly out of sight beneath the cutbanks.
He treated designing whites like a series of bad storms he had to weather.
When I was born he took me into his life as though I were a grandson, a relationship my father was never easy with. Still, summers I got to stay with Virgil. We’d ride up into Canada together. He taught me to hunt. Over the years, I got to know most everyone on the Fort Peck Reservation.
Virgil’s place was on upper Porcupine Creek around Larslan. We lived off the reservation near Four Buttes, about forty miles away. My father moved us down to Wolf Point when I was about ten, when he quit ranching and went into real estate. I was back east at college when he moved everyone south to Miles City. My mother was killed there a couple of years later, a freak accident in a horse chute. My father was seeing another woman at the time. The first thing he did was clear the house of all the books my mother had bought and read, books she had impressed on me when I was young, and which had been for me a refuge from my father’s scorn for ideas.
My brothers and sisters later moved out of state. My father married the woman. He now lives with one of her children in Cheyenne. When Virgil asked if they could bury Mother in those hills up around him my father said no.
Wherever I went with Virgil, he would teach me about concrete and practical things—finding water, tracking animals, which cactus fruits were okay to eat. He never ignored my questions or made me feel embarrassed. When I was fifteen, Virgil rode us up north of where Willow Creek comes into Porcupine Creek and left me there alone for four days to fast and dream, to find out who I was and what I was to do. I was eager for a vision and tried hard to find my way inside all that Virgil had told me about, describing the country right in front of me where animals moved around like people, walking up to you like they had something to say. But that whole time fasting I just felt scared and dumb. No vision came.
After law school I moved back to Havre and began to practice. I handled mostly treaty cases from the Fort Belknap, Rocky Boy, and Fort Peck reservations. It was what I believed in. Sometimes I’d go over and spend a week with Virgil. He was in his seventies by then. I’d always feel around him that our business wasn’t finished.
Driving the Hi-Line back to Havre from Virgil’s one night, I ran off the road trying to miss a bear. I got out of the pickup, stuck pretty good in the borrow ditch but no great damage, and climbed back up to the highway. I’d pumped a rifle cartridge into the chamber of my old Colt .38-40, a slug that would knock a horse sideways. I saw the bear two hundred feet away, still standing the
The country was broad and open to the Assiniboine, reeling plains of short grass and river breaks, wrinkling here and there into low hills and buttes. Buffalo country. When western Canada and the Louisiana Purchase were laid out, the dividing line ran straight through Assiniboine country.
“You could choose Canada or the U.S.,” Virgil said one time. I’d been trying to get him to talk about how it felt, being closed in on a reservation. “George III or Thomas Jefferson, you could take your pick.”
“You could?” I said, taken aback by the point in law but buying it anyway.
“Yeah,” he deadpanned, “some of us are still working on it.”
Virgil’s way with broken treaties, land grabs, assimilation, and the rest was to move on, regardless, like the big prairie rivers in spring melt, the Milk or the Poplar, a quiet, heavy flow, nearly out of sight beneath the cutbanks.
He treated designing whites like a series of bad storms he had to weather.
When I was born he took me into his life as though I were a grandson, a relationship my father was never easy with. Still, summers I got to stay with Virgil. We’d ride up into Canada together. He taught me to hunt. Over the years, I got to know most everyone on the Fort Peck Reservation.
Virgil’s place was on upper Porcupine Creek around Larslan. We lived off the reservation near Four Buttes, about forty miles away. My father moved us down to Wolf Point when I was about ten, when he quit ranching and went into real estate. I was back east at college when he moved everyone south to Miles City. My mother was killed there a couple of years later, a freak accident in a horse chute. My father was seeing another woman at the time. The first thing he did was clear the house of all the books my mother had bought and read, books she had impressed on me when I was young, and which had been for me a refuge from my father’s scorn for ideas.
My brothers and sisters later moved out of state. My father married the woman. He now lives with one of her children in Cheyenne. When Virgil asked if they could bury Mother in those hills up around him my father said no.
Wherever I went with Virgil, he would teach me about concrete and practical things—finding water, tracking animals, which cactus fruits were okay to eat. He never ignored my questions or made me feel embarrassed. When I was fifteen, Virgil rode us up north of where Willow Creek comes into Porcupine Creek and left me there alone for four days to fast and dream, to find out who I was and what I was to do. I was eager for a vision and tried hard to find my way inside all that Virgil had told me about, describing the country right in front of me where animals moved around like people, walking up to you like they had something to say. But that whole time fasting I just felt scared and dumb. No vision came.
After law school I moved back to Havre and began to practice. I handled mostly treaty cases from the Fort Belknap, Rocky Boy, and Fort Peck reservations. It was what I believed in. Sometimes I’d go over and spend a week with Virgil. He was in his seventies by then. I’d always feel around him that our business wasn’t finished.
Driving the Hi-Line back to Havre from Virgil’s one night, I ran off the road trying to miss a bear. I got out of the pickup, stuck pretty good in the borrow ditch but no great damage, and climbed back up to the highway. I’d pumped a rifle cartridge into the chamber of my old Colt .38-40, a slug that would knock a horse sideways. I saw the bear two hundred feet away, still standing the
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