Shoot First, Ask Questions Later
Chapter 1
by
Barbara Metzger
Author's Note: Here's some general background for you. Logan is rumored to be born in the late 1800's in a Canadian frontier town. He was also supposed to have had an Indian lover by the name of Silver Fox about 100 years ago. I used to be an Assist Curator of a Tribal Museum. The story is well researched and many of Elma's feelings hit close to home...haha...
It is often said that we take our cues about what constitutes behavior from the people around us. I do not believe this. I say that we are participants in a great natural order of life, related in some fundamental manner to every other living species...and stories are key to our understanding.
My name is Elma Shoots First and I am Siksika. Blackfoot...of the Siksika Nation, a part of the Blackfoot Confederacy. As our tourist board would say, 'We're just 1 leisurely hours drive east of the city of Calgary and just south of the great Trans Canada Highway #1.' Like we need more tourists. They crawl all over touching and defacing our petroglyphs and pictographs. I work in our local cultural museum to protect what precious little we have left to our ancient art. It pisses me off when I find whole areas chipped away for private collections...but enough on that subject. It's an ever-increasing pet peeve on my shitlist.
I'm rather anti-social. Although, for some reason, children don't irritate me as much as adults do. Maybe it's because they haven't had the time yet to absorb modern social graces...and they are, for the most part...honest.
What I do to pay the bills is teach. I'm actually Assist Curator/Head of the Education Department/Secretary/Gofer and all around 'do-it-myselfer' because our museum board doesn't have the funds to hire another person to friggin' help me out sometimes. But for the most part, I consider myself a teacher. I also work with tribal children through the museum to help preserve oral traditions...legends. One legend in particular has always held interest for me, but it's not a legend that I share with the children. It's only told to the daughters in our family, and to their daughter's daughters. I can't share it with you but what I can tell you is...it's about a boy who had been cast out by his people and wandered the earth to be found and raised by a family of Wolverines. Stories are life itself. They keep the world in balance. My great-grandmother told it to me. Her name was Silver Fox.
I'm told, I'm a lot like her.
* * * * *
The night was clear and full of stars. The plowed road was lifeless and the moon cast an ethereal glow on everything below. Logan stared at the great trees all around him, took a deep breath then took a Cuban from his inside front pocket to his mouth. The taste of the unlit wrapper was almost salty in his mouth as he struck a match to light it. He allowed himself a weary sigh and slumped down on his bike. His bike. The picture of Scott's jaw ticking over the missing bike brought a grin. He took a satisfied draw.
He sat silent and still for almost half an hour. From a distance he blended into the landscape like a native rock. The red glow from the cigar was the only unnatural light for miles. The moon was rising. Even if the night was in complete darkness, his heightened sense of sight would have noticed how the trees rose and fell over earth forms beneath them, then rose dramatically, as if he were looking up from the bottom of a fishbowl. For a moment, he thought he smelled a familiar scent, but it disappeared before he could identify or pin point it. He looked around again and couldn't help shake the feeling that he'd been here before. This is what a homing pigeon must feel like the closer to home he gets. With quiet determination he started up the bike. As he gripped the bars he looked at clenched reminders of his fucked up life, spit the glowing stub onto the ground and peeled out on the road.
The cigar lay glowing on the ground, creating a small melting of snow near the heated tip. Before the deepening wetness could put out the glow, a large, hooded figure stepped from out of the trees. With a clawed hand, the figure brought the still lit cigar to it's mouth, smiled the kind of smile hunter's get when they spot their prey after stalking for hour upon fruitless hour, and took a long draw.
* * * * *
At a little before 7 o' clock that morning, Elma stood outside of her front door, holding a steaming cup of coffee. She looked up at the beautiful morning sky and closed her eyes for a moment. This will be the calmest, the most invigorating moment of the day, she thought. Today she had a 1 1/2 hour lecture tour comprised of 60 elementary school age children on a field trip to the museum...and her volunteer assistant had just called in sick. Normal museum policy was 30 children per tour guide. Yes. This was sizing up to be a bitch of a day.
Fortunately, it could be salvaged after lunch. She was going to check out and record a new rock art site discovered by Dr. Jack Jefferies, a visiting friend and colleague, from the San Diego Museum of Man. He was a trusted friend and most importantly, he had friends in high places that would come in handy for repatriating ancient burial effects held by a certain museum in Calgary.
She watched the sun gleam over the snow-laden tree branches, and the drip, drip of icicle melt. Elma turned her wrist to check the time and exclaimed the foulest curse known to man as she dumped the contents of her morning mug on her nightshirt. Men's, XL, long sleeve plaid. Loved the damn thing. Didn't even like coffee. Just the smell of it, and she was getting plenty of it. She reeked of grounds.
* * * * *
'Then he started to climb'
'Ho?'
'Hey!'
'He climbed higher, and higher'
'Ho?'
'Hey!'
He climbed so high'
'Ho?'
'Hey!'
Logan lifted a brow and glanced over at the herd of cattle and counted nearly 50-60 screaming children. All he wanted was a damn coke out of the vending machine.
'That the people looked like ants'
'Ho?'
'Hey!'
He looked back at the machine and it's blinking light. This is ridiculous. He gave the machine one big shove, startling some of the closer herd, and earning him an evil eye from the frazzled tour guide.
Click. Clink. Clunk. A root beer.
He rolled his eyes upward for a second before popping the tab and sat on a bench to watch the show.
'Ms. Bang Bang! Ms. Bang Bang!' Elma could kill herself for asking the kids to call her that. She thought it would be cute. She thought a little humor would brighten this experience. 'Ms Bang Bang, I hafta go to the bathroom!'
Several of the children in the back started running around with their index fingers pointed and thumbs straight up pretending to shoot one another. She noticed the WWF vending machine guy watched the whole thing with an amused smirk on his little face, then got up to enter the museum exhibits.
She needed a 'get out of jail free' card. She needed a sure thing. She needed to whip out her storytelling skills and lay them all to the ground.
She looked around and sighted a chair. She dragged it at the head of the fidgeting group and stood up, high and straight, on the seat. With a grand sweep of her arms, she whispered...for silence... so that the words of a story could come to their ears.
They all kinda looked up in awe...slightly vacuous, like lemmings ready to jump a cliff, and, magically, silence did come to the room. It always amazed her how children could selectively hear what they wanted.
* * * * *
Logan couldn't help but chuckle at the sight before him. A small girl turned at the noise and flashed a smile to make her orthodontist proud. His movements were purely out of habit as he rose to leave the potentially social scene.
He rose and headed for the main exhibit hall. He didn't normally indulge in leisurely cultural pursuits, but he didn't really know where the hell he was off to anyway, and for some reason he felt compelled to have a look around...he always trusted his instincts.
'The young wolverine opened it's eyes after sleeping well for six hours to discover that the air was ten degrees below zero. After stretching and arching his back, he scampered out of his den into the crisp morning air to search for food. He was always hungry.'
He could hear the woman's story from where he stood in the next room. He singled in on her voice when he heard her make reference to a Wolverine. Her voice took on a rich cadence and he could imagine her face paralleling the subtle change of timbre.
'He went to his usual food stash, a tree stump about 5 feet away from the opening of his den. In his hunger the wolverine failed to notice the difference in his food stash. The two rabbits he had killed the day before were moved from inside the tree stump to the edge of the tree stump. As the wolverine ran up to his rabbits, a loud snap filled the air.'
He heard a collective gasp as the woman loudly smacked her hands together. 'The wolverine's foot was caught in a trap. He felt excruciating pain and began thrashing around, tugging to free his foot. Finally, he pulled himself free from the trap leaving part of his foot behind. At first he wondered what had happened. His foot was bleeding and hurting more than it had ever hurt before.' 'Ouch,' he said to himself as he remembered painful memories of his own.
'He howled and whimpered as he went back into his den to nurse his wound. It took three days before the wolverine could walk out of his den and find some vegetation to eat. After a couple of months, the wolverines partially amputated foot healed and he was able to hunt again. But, for the rest of his life the wolverine carried around the remembrance of that day that he was not alert.' Logan subconsciously felt for his dogtag even though he hadn't worn it for a year.
As her story came to an end, his eye caught a picture of a pictograph display in the corner of the room. The pictures were protected under Plexiglas and painstakingly humidified next to detailed replicas.
He strode over and stared unbelievingly.
WOLVERINE CANYON ROCK ART
The wilderness area in and around the Siksika reservation is well known for the elaborate body of Native American mural art found along its deeply entrenched canyons. Amidst the splendid colorful paintings, one very different rock art site stands apart. Wolverine Canyon is the only large petroglyph site yet discovered in this region, its abstract designs in many ways more enigmatic and mysterious than the paintings. Known to rock art enthusiasts since 1938 when Colby Forrester (Forrester and Whitcastle 1967) and B. C. Metzger (1938) recorded it for posterity, Wolverine Canyon yielded more of its secrets when the Rock Art Foundation, Inc. (RAF) sponsored detailed photodocumentation and mapping of the site in 1991. A cluster of over 100 buried glyphs were unearthed, bringing the total number of individual designs to...
A flash of memory hit him. He found himself surrounded by greyish shapes, his mind reeled. The familiar scent of his own blood fell around him. He looked down and saw a deep gash cut across his abdomen. The scene nearly knocked his feet out from under him as he gripped the exhibit case for support. His palms started sweating.
Wolverine Canyon presents a number of interpretive obstacles. With the exception of two clusters of glyphs, no storyline or coherent relationships leap to meet the eye. The few realistic figures are lost amid a swarm of abstract designs whose meaning is not immediately apparent to the modem viewer.
He brought his hand up next to the photograph as if he was making the universal sign to stop. Then brought his fingers to his palm. The only difference between his hand and the picture was the addition of 3 long, lines coming from the drawing's knuckles. As far as he knew, most Blackfoot Indians didn't have claws.
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