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I {the countryside}
Any navigator will see on a map that Montana state has a face along its western side. Leaving Idaho we emerge through Montana's forehead, a valley of grasslands, earthy potato ranches, dung-musk of cattle. From there we angle south towards Bozeman, but do not mistake “south” for “downward.” We make the long climb into the mountains, heading southeast, against the current of destiny, manifested. The ranchers have silent faces.
Though it is Summer, there are still patches of snow up here in the peaks, and we can see miles down into nothing but open land. The clouded swirl of bright grey sky gives of a platinum sharpness to the dark green bushes and dehydrated weeds that grow along the precipices. We climb up and up, little sprinkles of mist, yet only just cold enough to remind us we have nerves. We are in t-shirts.
In the mountains now, it is mid-afternoon, and while the blue-less sky is bright and awake, the radio tells us a small storm has been following our tracks and we speed up a bit, to get off this colossal range before dark. As the road begins to turn east from a southeast angle, we begin our descent near Three-Forks, still high up but no longer breaching the sky of the north. The lodgings are sparse but beautiful, log cabins of dark rich wood, stout and spacious with stone chimneys hinting at their own stone fireplaces warming animal furs. We sleep.
Continuing down the next morning, the land becomes flatter, yellower, warmer. The land smells of cricket song, the people dressed in less, notably fatter. More Targets and Taco Bells, Walmarts and car lots as we pass along the outskirts of Bozeman. More 18-wheelers to navigate past, more sun to evade by downing all the windows or hiking them up and cranking the A-C.
II {the town}
Within sight of the raised freeway is the town square, where a handful of kids play on the small playground and rundown basketball court. The hot sticks to us, reminds us of a ghost story in sweltering summer midnights told to children by mischievous grandmothers, grandfather, sweating through his undershirt, chuckles at their fright.
Immediately off the freeway there is a gas station, the only public shop on Makawasha Ave with air conditioning. Step inside and you can almost smell the coolness, the lack of dust and flies, of sterility and soft drinks. Back outside, lining the square where the grass is dead are a handful of Indian women, they sell shirts of Indian men superimposed over lightning, waterfalls, buffalo or wolves, with prayers and names along the edge of the graphics in heavy metal fonts. Some of the women selling their wares are camped behind fold-away tables, others from lowered truck-beds or the trunks of dirt-coated SUVs.
The sleepy town reminds us of Central American villages.
Trash collects between resilient weeds in the gaps between houses, rusted chain-links and home-made, painted wooden signs above the local grub shacks. But there are no banana plants, no lush leaves of tropical bushes, no overhanging trees, except for dried-out Douglas firs.
If you believe the welcome sign, here the Crow have agency.
III {the battleground}
His name was Closed Hand.
'A Cheyenne warrior fell here on June 25, 1876 while defending the Cheyenne way of life.'
Visitors laid quarters and dimes, Sacagawea dollars and paper bills as tribute on top of the grave markers. Remember the names:
Sitting Bull, Limber Bones, Old Bear, Little Bird, Sounds-the-Ground-as-He-Walks.
Ité Omághažu, Thašúngke Witkó, Khangí Yátapi,
Hunkpapa Lakota.
Minneconjou Lakota.
Sans Arc, Oglala, Two Kettles Lakota.
Arapaho, Cheyenne and Wahpekute (Dakota).
These are the names, these are the sounds we can make, guttural or not, that whisper of old worlds and fires and threats among the plains. Of hominy stew and the smell of tipi leather. Of the sound of horses being shot.
"These are seeds that beseech the leaves for cover."
On the north face of the parched hill where General Custer fell, many markers spill alongside him. White crosses and red marble stones rise up from the flowering weeds and alfalfa, standing sentinel watch over the ocean of dry-grass, the pasture that ripples over the hills and towards far-off trees. The breeze lulls us into Summer stillness, and we flit between awareness of the blood that has long dried into dust around us, and the warm Montana serenity, where the simple, people-less prairie is all we can see.
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