Free Neither Wolf nor Dog by Kent Nerburn Page A

the table and returned it to the bedroom. From the half darkness of the back room I could see her looking at me. She raised her hand to her lips, as if to say, “He’s had enough.”
    The old man’s exhaustion was palpable. He seemed to be turning to stone before my eyes. His stare did not vary and he didn’t move a muscle. It was as if he had gone inside to a place of tears and memory.
    â€œI’ll come back tomorrow,” I said. Wenonah nodded, obviously pleased that I had understood her message. I took one last look at the old man as I pushed open the screen door. Wenonah was standing behind him, stroking his hair with the side of her hand and humming softly like a mother hums to a child.

CHAPTER
FIVE

A LAND OF DREAMS
AND PHANTASMS
    I t had been several weeks since I arrived on the reservation. The weather was starting to take a slight autumn turn. Great roiling cumulus clouds rolled like tumbrels across the sky. The light seemed filtered, the ground animals more industrious.
    As a child of the woodlands, I had never had much of a sense for the plains and the prairies. But now, as the days passed, the hypnotic power of the land had overtaken me. I felt like a man on an inland sea. The billowing, waving prairie grasses were symphonic in their ebbs and swells; the marching cadences of the passing clouds transfixed the eye. Sound was magnified, as if echoing against some vast, celestial vault. Thunder would roll in from beyond the horizon; the buzzing of insects would seem to be inside your head. Itwas equal parts peace and dread — a land of dreams and phantasms.
    Sometimes at night I would spread out a sleeping bag in my pickup bed and watch distant flashes of lightning illuminate the inside of giant, looming thunderheads six or seven miles high. The earth itself had ceased to be the prime element in my consciousness. This was a land of the sky, and every turn, every action, lifted the eye upward.
    Dan had noticed my growing fascination. We had taken to visiting his favorite hilltop almost every day. He never said anything, but I could see him watching me as I would stare out over the plains. We would sit for hours, oftentimes without speaking. The only sound would be the endless rushing of the wind and the rustling and snuffling of Fatback as she burrowed around in the tall prairie grasses.
    Sometimes the old man would make a passing comment, like the time he told me that his father had brought him to this spot when he was a child, and many things had happened to him here that he couldn’t talk about. Other times he would begin singing, keeping his song low and private, as if meant for no one to hear. One time he looked at me and nodded. “Your eyes are different, Nerburn,” he said. “You are looking farther.” He didn’t elaborate or say another word, but that phrase, with all its cryptic meaning, buoyed me like nothing else he had ever said.
    When we were on the hill, I would pass my time thinking of my family, or wondering about God or any number of other topics that fill the mind when confronted with vast, empty spaces. Never having been much for examining flora or fauna, I found little of interest in the profusion of tiny flowers and plant life that seemed to occupy so much of Dan’s attention. For me, this was a land of poetry — sparse, singular, with lyricism written on the wind.
    One day Dan startled me with a full sentence. “You’re getting better with silence,” he said.
    â€œI am?”
    â€œI watch you.”
    â€œI know.”
    â€œYou’re learning. I can tell because of your silence.”
    I sensed that he had something to say. Dan did not make small talk when he was on his hill.
    â€œWe Indians know about silence,” he said. “We aren’t afraid of it. In fact, to us it is more powerful than words.”
    I nodded in agreement.
    â€œOur elders were schooled in the ways of silence, and they passed that