The Holy Road

Chapter LXV

Two years later, upon their release from an old Spanish prison in the humid place the whites called Florida, Smiles A Lot, Hunting For Something, their firstborn child, and Rabbit came back to Fort Sill. Some, like White Bear, never returned, dead from the shaking fever.

In their absence the reservation had lost all vestige of rebellion. Some of the people were living in white man houses and all of them were at least partially clad in white man clothes. The old ways were still being practiced but otherwise there was little to remind the returnees of the free life that had once been.

When a lodge had been erected for them Hunting For Something, her infant son, and Rabbit went off for a round of visiting while Smiles A Lot rode to the great Medicine Bluff on a borrowed pony.

He climbed the bluff as he had done before, in what now seemed a long-ago life. This time he would have no visions, for, as he stood on the crest and looked over the country, the view had changed. Spread before him, plain on the knolls of hills and partially visible in the thickets along the creeks, were the impoverished camps of subjugated people.

Smiles A Lot turned and looked to the west. It was blazing with light as the sun flattened on the horizon. The country was still there, limitless and empty save for the bones of warriors and buffalo and his beloved horses.

He gazed down the scarred face of the cliff and thought for an instant how little effort it would take to step into space.

Then he lifted his eyes once more and searched out the lodge that was his new home. The wide world had once been his domain but all that remained to him now was one of the many poor shelters scattered around the soldier fort. The idea that he would be returning to the same place over and over again seemed inconceivable to him, but he would return to it soon.

There was no place else to go.