Sleeping Buffalo (Spring Equinox 2018)

Sleeping Buffalo - a reading (on Google Drive)

An hour outside of Billings the marchers gathered, before the lines were drawn and crossed, before our cartridges became offerings of blood. Red blood on red skin never bothered anyone. The sight of blood on snow, however, was intolerable. Even if it was their women, their children we protected as much as our own. Protected from their men and boys who thought that shouldering a rifle made them soldiers. Our great grandfathers had fought to hold this land long lost. Our fathers and grandfathers fought in their conqueror’s wars out of necessity and pride. We were the Sleeping Buffalo. We fought for ourselves, for the ideals we’d embraced against our fathers’ wills, or despite them. But in the old ways, our numbers grew as we adopted those who adopted us. Ours is not a race, it’s a culture.

Like our grandfathers before us, we knew every inch of this land. We’d walked it, we’d ridden it, we’d flown it, we’d driven it. We’d taught the names of every gully and outcrop to our children. We’d lived in it and with it, not on it. From the canyons to the quarries each swell and curve of this terrain was a sanctuary, each rock and stone a reservation of our sacred cause. A cause our fathers and uncles urged us to win through the courts by using our enemy’s strength against them. The time for courts vanished when they reinvaded what remained of our lands, closing the only places we made money because we’d beaten them at their own game by earning more than they did. They seized the only assets we had left and then desecrating our holy places with their mines and pipelines.

Our service in their military adventures had taught us exactly how to exploit the situation just as other desperate men in other desperate climates had exploited ours. We knew their weaknesses from the inside. We’d learned their ways better than they’d learned ours. For centuries, we’d fought on the wrong side of too many of their wars. Fighting on the right side earned us no better. With little left on our lands but poverty, oppression and injustice, their ironic populist nativism had never taken root. Early on, we had more recruits than rifles. But enough of both to hit them where they’d feel it most, squarely in the economics. Minerals, raw materials, rare earths, energy, they’d transformed our ancestral lands into a target rich environment. Seeking to snuff out our insurrection like a solitary candle, their troops only provided the bellows as their bodies fueled our flame. Embers carried. Soon the high plains smoldered with dissent, from the great river to the mountain passes we made impassable by avalanche or other means.

Predictably, their strategy turned punitive. Mechanized Black Hawks and Apaches hunted the basin for their adoptive namesakes, mistaking once-friendly horsemen and hikers for their prey. Their lies and prejudices could not contain the truths of those illicit slaughters. Our numbers swelled. Million man protests became weekly occurrences until they tried to silence our right to congregate and speak. We used the precedence they’d set against them, seizing control of their parks, their research stations, their grazing lands as a bullhorn for our cause. Soon we taught them to fear the well-regulated militias they’d once touted as their God-given right. When the nighttime raids began against their own people’s homes and businesses searching for our well-concealed stockpiles, we evolved our tactics from terrain denial to asymmetric ambush. We rearmed ourselves from their abandoned armories, unguarded depots and interdicted supply lines. After the massacre at Billings, we traded our sepia-toned horses, lances and leathers for the technologies of modern war.

From uprising to intifada, insurrection to insurgency, their repression transformed revolt into native revolution. Whole units defected to our cause. Emboldened by our success, we declared Cheyenne our provincial capital. We laid siege to Colorado Springs. Our reversal was as swift as it was inevitable. Their repression curdled into reprisal. The victories that had eluded them on the battlefield they garnered through treachery and Machiavellian schemes. Poisonous, pinprick operations like a black-masked spider dancing around a brightly bicolor caterpillar ten times its size with no way to consume it. After a long, stinging march in retreat, we found ourselves back where we’d started, an hour outside of Billings. There, we awakened, boiled down to an elite corps replete with élan. We struck back quickly by transforming their flyover country into a no-fly zone, an aviation graveyard as they ferried in fresh troops. Hidden in caves known only to ancient bruins, our launchers lurked like meteors poised to set the night ablaze. The burning kept us alive.

Our recession was sharp but temporary. Within a handful of short seasons, we had hollowed out their will to win. Our undaunted example stoked the coals long banked between the nation’s flanking ranges. The center did not hold. Our revolution spread across the plains like a brushfire while our martyrs in the mountains rode shotgun down the avalanche of its collapse. From the Gateway to the West to the Golden Gate, whole communities went up in flames. We isolated stubborn pockets of resistance like encircled homesteaders. Opportunists, invaders and collaborators were all that remained unscathed. Ashes drifted. Glowing worms along their edges alighted to earth and took root. By halves and quarters, eighths and sixteenths, our ranks grew resurgent. Every drop of red was welcome. This time we trusted only blood. Like a phoenix rising from an ashen grave.

In numbers unseen in since the buffalo age, our scouts and snipers ran wild through the grasslands, as uncontained as tendrils of a prairie fire. After generations, scattered groups once again linked arms, avenged. Like fertility after a conflagration, green shoots emerged. Like wildflowers, everywhere overnight. Our struggle had ended. The war had been won. Or so we’d thought. Like their ancestors before them, our enemies thrived through attrition. They had no qualms in starving and sacrificing as many of their own as it took to reduce our side in kind. We remained too few to fully exploit our situation, our numbers too fragile to embrace their tactics. Unlike them, we refused to win at any cost. So when they finally unleashed their four-horse cavalry, the coasts remained tantalizingly beyond our reach.

And so, after our brief but vibrant spring began our violent, Icarian fall. In the soft summer sunlight, the Sleeping Buffalo had awakened only to discover arrows embedded in its side and a lance buried deep within its neck.

© 2018 Edward P. Morgan III