Free Murder at Medicine Lodge by Mardi Oakley Medawar Page B

lying open and helpless. Overnight, snow as deep as a man is tall can shroud every mile of the plains. On the other hand, this same wallowing, near-treeless expanse is subject to blasts of warm air from the south. When the warm winds come, the snow melts, turning the prairie into a bog. If, however, there is no offering from the south, then the snow has been known to stay put for a span of days, sometimes weeks. When Indian people became tired of living with all that snow, they turned their faces to the south and prayed for the north wind’s enemy, the south wind, to come out and fight.
    The winds from the north and south have fought an ageless war, a war so old that during the days when my grandfather was a boy, he heard the ancient wise men of his youth talking about the north and the south winds battling it out over the prairie. The fighting can be so severe that it wakes up the Great Hind Leg, the swirling cloud known to whites as a tornado. To the Kiowa, it is known as Hind Leg of the Great Horse because when the first horse was found by my people, they didn’t know what it was. Not recognizing its value, they threw it away. This angered the Creator because He had sent the horse as a gift. Having that gift shunned was an insult, so, from the hind leg of that horse, He made the tornado, and sent it to tear up the villages of His ungrateful children. That taught them a big lesson and soon after that, whenever they found a horse, they kept it.
    When they discovered just how useful the animal was, they began to steal more, eventually learning how to breed them. But still the damage against the Creator’s pride was not appeased and since those days, the hind leg of the first horse has continued to rampage the earth. Sometimes it isn’t just the hind leg that appears. During one really bad storm I once saw all four legs running and great shafts of lightning spitting out from the huge black body. It was a thrilling sight, I watched that storm for as long as I could before having to run away.
    Now, some young men never run away. To prove their courage they chased the storm, throwing lances at the hind leg. Older, wiser men, offered up shredded tobacco to the whirling cloud, apologized for the ignorance of their fathers, and for the arrogance of the young men too anxious to be called heroes for chasing the danger away from the people.
    One young man I knew a long time ago, payed dearly for this arrogance. That was during the time three bands of us were in the Texas Panhandle. That’s a bad place to be during a tornado. Too much sand. That young man didn’t care about that, either. He had wanted more than anything, even more than his life, to be a hero and have great songs sung about his courage. With four other warriors who were also in a hurry to prove themselves, he mounted up, waved his lance around, and said, “From this day, Little Bluff himself will say my name with great respect.”
    He was disappointed by the general lack of interest in his defiant pronouncement, for while he was declaring it, the entire camp was scurrying in all directions, more intent on finding shelter than standing around listening to a young man puffing himself up. The last words anyone heard him say were, “I’ll show all of you.” Then he kicked his horse and rode out after the storm.
    For a while, he and his friends were doing a fine job of chasing the leg away, but then, it turned. The young man was farther out in front, so while the other four were able to pull up, turn around and flee, the unfortunate man couldn’t. That leg was on him before he could do anything. The others bore witness that that young man and his horse were sucked up inside that leg—a leg made black by all that terrible brown sand.
    He was found a day later, his dead and broken body completely scoured. Everybody cried and carried on about him being dead, but as a doctor, I felt that his being killed was the best thing that