Crow Country, Montana

Black Cloud Follows thundered across the dawn silence of a frost glazed Little Big Horn basin, out of Crow Agency, under highway 90, and into the gravel parking lot of Wiley's Food and Gas. A seventy-seven ocher-colored Olds Cutlass rattletrap diesel, Black Cloud Follows stopped, coughed, belched, and engulfed itself in a greasy black cloud of exhaust. When the cloud moved on, wafting like a portable eclipse through the golden poplar and ash trees on the Little Big Horn's banks, Adeline Eats stood by the Cutlass twisting the baling wire that held the driver's door shut.

Adeline's blue-black hair was layered large and lacquered into a flip. A hot pink parka over her flannel shirt and overalls added a Michelin Man concentric circle symmetry to her oval shape. As the Cutlass chugged and bucked -- the thing that refused to die -- Adeline lit a Salem 100, took a deep drag, then delivered a vicious red Reebok kick to Black Cloud Follows' fender. "Stop it," she said.

Obediently, the car fell silent and Adeline gave the fender an affectionate pat. This old car had been indirectly responsible for getting her a husband, six children, and a job. She couldn't bring herself to be mean to it for long.

Walking around to unlock the back door, she noticed something lying in a tuft of frost-covered buffalo grass: something also frost covered, that looked very much like a body. If he's dead, she reasoned, he can wait until I've made some coffee. If he ain't, he'll probably want some.

She let herself into the store and waddled around turning on lights and unlocking doors, then started the coffee and went out to unlock the laundromat, another of the cinder-block buildings in the Wiley's food and gas complex, which also included an eight room motel. Crunching back through the grass she looked at the body again, which hadn't moved. But for the frost, Old Man Wiley would have been out at dawn setting gopher traps all over the grounds and would have taken care of the body problem. He would have also given Adeline no end of shit about Black Cloud Follows, which he had been doing for fifteen years.

It had been Wiley, a white man, who had named the car in the first place. It was not the Crow way to name cars or animals, but Wiley missed no chance to get in a dig at the people from whom he made his living. Maybe, Adeline thought, a morning of peace was worth dealing with a body.

When the coffee was finished, she filled two large styrofoam cups (one for her and one for the body) and poured a generous amount of sugar in each. The body had long braids, so she assumed he was Crow and would probably take sugar if he was alive. If he was dead Adeline would drink his, and she definitely wanted sugar.

Back in the buffalo days, the Cheyenne prophet, Sweet Medicine had seen a vision of men with hair on their faces who would come bringing a white sand that was poison to Indians. The prophecy had come true, the white sand was sugar, and Adeline blamed the white man for poisoning her right up to two-hundred pounds.

She took the coffee, butt-bumped through the back door, and crunched through the grass to where the body lay. He was face down and his Levi jacket and jeans were crystalline blue with frost. Adeline nudged him in the ribs with her foot. "You froze?" she asked.

"Nope," the body said into the ground; a little dust came up with the steam.

"You hurt?"

"Nope." More dust.

"Drunk?"

"Yep."

"You want coffee?" Adeline sat one of the cups by his head. The body -- she was still thinking of him as the body -- rolled over and she recognized him as Pokey Medicine Wing, the liar.

Creaking, Pokey sat up and tried to pick up the coffee, but couldn't seem to get his frozen hand to work. Adeline picked up the cup and handed it to him.

"I thought you was dead, Pokey."

"I might have been. Just had me a medicine dream." As he raised the cup to his lips the shakes set in and he had to bite the edge of the cup to steady it. "I died twice before, you know..."

Adeline ignored the lie and pointed to one of his braids which had fallen into his coffee cup.

Pokey pulled the braid out and wiped the beaded band around it on his jacket. "Good coffee," he said.

Adeline shook a Salem out of her pack and offered it to him.

"Thanks," he said. "You gotta offer a prayer after a medicine dream."

Adeline lit his cigarette with a Bic lighter. "I'm a Christian now," she said. She really hoped he wouldn't use the cigarette to carry a prayer. She'd only been a Christian for a few weeks and the old ways made her a little uncomfortable. Besides, Pokey was probably lying through his tooth -- he only had one -- about the medicine dream.

Pokey squinted up at her and grinned, but did not pray. "I saw my brother Frank's boy, the one with the yellow eyes who threw that cop off the dam. You remember?"

Adeline nodded. She really didn't want to hear this. "Maybe you should tell a Medicine man."

"I am a Medicine man," Pokey said. "Just no one believes me. I don't need no one else to tell me about my visions. I saw that boy with Old Man Coyote, and there was a shade with 'em that looked like Death."

"I got to go to work now," Adeline said.

"I need to find that boy and warn him," Pokey said.

"That boy's been gone for twenty years. He's probably dead. You was just dreaming." Pokey was a liar and Adeline knew that there was no reason that she should let his ravings bother her, but they did. "If you're okay, I got to go to work."

"You don't believe in Medicine, then?"

"Mr. Wiley will be coming in soon. I got to open the store," Adeline said. She turned and started back toward the store.

"Is that a screech owl?" Pokey shouted after her.

Adeline dropped her coffee, fell into a crouch, and scanned the sky in a panic. In the old tradition the screech owl was the worst of omens; vengeful ghosts lived in screech owls; seeing or hearing one was like hearing the sound of your own death. Adeline was terrified.

Pokey grinned at her. "I guess not. It must just be a hawk."

Adeline recovered and stomped into the store, praying to Jesus to forgive Pokey for his sins, but adding to her prayer a request for Jesus to beat the shit out of Pokey if He had the time.

COYOTE MAKES THE WORLD

A long time ago there was water everywhere. Old Man Coyote looked around and said, "Hey, we need some land." It was his gift from the Great Spirit that he could command all of the animals, which were called The Without Fires Clan, so he called four ducks to help him find land. He ordered each of the ducks to dive under the water and find some mud. The first three returned with nothing, but the fourth duck, because four is the sacred number and that is the way things go in these stories, returned with some mud from the bottom.

"Swell," said Old Man Coyote. "Now I will make some land." He made the mountains and the rivers, the prairies and the deserts, the plants and the animals. Then he said, "Guess I'll make some people, now, so there will be someone to tell stories about me."

From the mud he made some tall and beautiful people. Old Man Coyote like them very much. "I will call them Absarokee, which means Children of the Large Beaked Bird. Some day some dumb white guys will come here and get the translation all wrong and call them Crow."

"What are they going to eat?" one of the ducks asked.

"They have no feathers or fur. What will they cover themselves with?" asked a second duck.

"Yes," said a third duck. "They're pretty, but they won't be able to stay out in the weather."

Old Man Coyote thought for a while about how much he disliked ducks, then he took some more mud and made a strange looking animal with a thick coat and horns. "Here," he said. "They can get everything they need from this animal. I'll call it a buffalo."

The fourth duck had been standing by watching all this and smoking a cigarette. "It's a big animal. Your people won't be able to catch it," he said, blowing a long stream of blue smoke in Old Man Coyote's face.

"Okay, so here's another animal that they can ride so they can catch the buffalo."

"And how will they catch that one?" asked the fourth.

"Look duck, do I have to work out everything? I made the world and these people and I've given them everything they need, so just back off."

"But if they have everything they need, what will they do? Just sit around telling stories about you?"

"That would be good."

"Boring," said the duck.

"I'll make them a bunch of enemies. They'll be hopelessly outnumbered and have to fight all the time and do all kinds of war rituals. How's that?"

"They'll get wiped out."

"No, I'll stay with them. The Children of the Large Beaked Bird will be my favorites, although some of their enemies can tell stories about me too."

"But what if the buffalo animals all get killed."

"Won't happen. There's too many of them."

"But what if they do?"

"Then I guess the people are fucked. I'm tired and dirty and cold from standing in all that water, I'm going to invent the sweat bath and warm up."

So Old Man Coyote built a sweat lodge out of willow branches and buffalo skins. He heated the rocks in a fire and put them in a pit in the middle of the sweat lodge, then he and the ducks crawled inside and closed the door making it completely dark inside.

"Hey, put out that cigarette!" Old Man Coyote said to the fourth duck.

The duck threw the cigarette on the hot rocks and smoke filled the lodge. "That smells pretty good," Old Man Coyote said. "Let's throw some other stuff on the fire and see how it goes." He threw on some cedar needles and they smelled pretty good too, then he threw on some sweetgrass and some sage. "This stuff will be part of the sweat ceremony, too. And some water, we need some water so it will really get hot and miserable in here."

"And we can get truly purified and clean?" asked the third duck.

"Right," said Old Man Coyote. "First I'll pour four dippers of water on the rocks for the four directions."

"And the four ducks."

"Right," said Old Man Coyote. "Now I'll pour on seven dippers for the seven stars of the Big Dipper. Then ten more because ten is a nice even number. "

He handed each of the ducks a willow switch to beat their backs with. "Here, wail on yourself with these."

"What for?" asked the second duck.

"Tenderize ... er ... I mean ... It brings up the sweat and purifies you."

Then when the ducks were beating their backs with the willow branches Old Man Coyote said, "Okay, now I'm going to pour a whole bunch of dippers on the rocks, I'm not even going to count, but we are going to be really hot and really clean and pure." Then he poured and poured until it was so hot in the lodge that he could not stand it and he slipped out the door leaving the ducks inside.

Later, after he had plunged into the river to cool off, he ate a big meal and laid down to rest. "That was plum swell," he said to himself. "I think I'll give the sweat to my new people. It can be their church and sacrament and they can think of me whenever they go in. It is my gift to them. I guess no one really needs to know about the ducks." Then Old Man Coyote picked up a willow twig and picked a bit of duck meat from between his teeth. "The sage gives them a nice flavor though."