Sweet Medicine Brings the Sacred Arrows

He is born in an unusual way, and unusual births mean unusual lives.

The village knows Sweet Medicine is different from the beginning. He is too quick, too clever, too willing to speak to elders the way only equals speak to each other. When he is still a young man he kills a buffalo in the chieftain’s circle without permission — a violation of the hunting law — and is beaten for it. He leaves the camp in anger. This is the first of his exiles, the first of the long absences that will structure his story.

He does not return for years.

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He travels north and east until he reaches the mountain the Cheyenne call Noahvose — Bear Butte, the sacred mountain that rises from the plains of what is now South Dakota, a single peak standing where there should be no mountain, visible from an enormous distance, drawing him forward. He enters the mountain.

This is not metaphor. He goes inside.

The Maiyun — the sacred powers, the beings who live in the mountain — receive him. They teach him. They teach him the structure of a people: how the Council of Forty-Four chiefs should be chosen and how long they should serve, how the warrior societies should be organized, how the Medicine Arrows should be made and kept and renewed in the great ceremony of the Arrow Renewal. They give him the four sacred arrows: two that have power over men, two that have power over buffalo. They give him everything a people needs to live together with the understanding that living together requires structure, and structure requires ceremony, and ceremony requires something at its center that is older than any living person.

He is in the mountain for four years.

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He comes back carrying the Mahuts — the Sacred Arrows — wrapped carefully, the most sacred objects the Cheyenne will ever hold. He walks back into the camp he left and calls the people together. He is a young man still, but the people see immediately that he is not the same young man who left. Something in him has been changed by the mountain.

He teaches them everything the Maiyun taught him. He teaches for a long time. Then he teaches what he saw of the future.

He says: there will come beings on strange animals, beings with hair on their faces, whose skin is a different color. They will bring things you have never seen. You will want these things and take them and they will change you. The buffalo will disappear. The earth itself will be cut and fenced. The old ways will be very hard to hold.

He does not say what to do. He says: remember who you are. Keep the arrows. Renew the ceremony. The ceremony is what holds the people together when everything else has been taken.

He lives to be very old. When he dies he is asked for final words. He says: do not forget what I have taught you. He dies in the certainty that they will partly forget, and in the equal certainty that the ceremony will survive the forgetting, as it has survived everything else.

The arrows are still held.