Free Resistance by Barry Lopez

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.”
    When we got back to the truck we grained and watered the horses. After we closed up the trailer Virgil turned to me. I could see he was anxious, but his voice was so even he could have been reading a grocery list.
    “That little place up there, the divide between the creeks, seems empty of spirit to you, but it isn’t. You’re afraid. One day I hope you go back. Maybe something will be waiting for you.”
    “I’m doing the best I can, Virgil.”
    “The bear’s holding the door open, Edward. A very patient animal.”
    On the way back to his place, Virgil pulled over to look close where coyote tracks crossed the road.
    “See here,” he said, “how the front feet are digging in? He’s carrying something.”
    I agreed.
    “Looks like he crossed last night.”
    “Yeah.” He scanned the whole of the bare blue sky, from the horizon in the east to the one in the west, before he got back in the truck.
    It would be another six years before I went back up on Porcupine Creek. By then, Jill and I had two children and Virgil was in his last days in a hospital in Great Falls. I stayed in my same camp above the dry creek bed, until the voices that had so long debated the future within me grew silent, and I stepped through the door.
    Edward Larmirande, member, Métis
Nation Council, attorney, author,
The Numinous Experience and the

Suicide Meriwether Lewis,
on leaving
Winnipeg, Manitoba
     

The Walls at Yogpar
    I was a compulsive student as an undergraduate. After completing my studies in Mandarin Chinese I went straight to graduate school, wanting to obtain a broad-based knowledge of—if not actual fluency in—the many other languages spoken in China, a nation oceanic in its geographical and historical reach. During those years of completely devoted study—with the Tai languages of the Southeast, the Tibeto-Burman languages of the Southwest, the Turkic languages of the Northwest, and the Mongol languages of the Northeast—I experienced bouts of disassociation and a feeling like seasickness. I could not make sense of even an advertisement on the side of a bus. But I also knew moments of vast, almost chilling comprehension, when I could easily grasp one concept—“family,” let