A few feet away there was a little grassy opening in the grove of trees, no more than fifteen or twenty feet across. There was a jumble of rocks just up the low hill. Debbie sat down near the middle with her legs crossed, and Danny nearby.

"I really don’t know where to start," she told him. "Maybe just to get in context, the best thing is to go back three years ago last winter, when Brenda was wearing her handcuffs. I had some problems, then. I was lonely, I didn’t have much direction to my life other than getting up in the morning and going to work, I was eating too much and I was starting to drink too much. And I knew it. Well, maybe not too much at that point, but more than I should have and I wasn’t caring too much about where it was going. Now, this isn’t something that I realized overnight, it came to me slowly, and mostly it came to me because Brenda realized she had similar problems and was trying to do something about them. You’ve read Wendy’s story about how Brenda wearing the handcuffs changed her life, you’ve heard me talk about it, and you’ve probably heard your mother talk about it. It was a little distressing to me to watch her take hold of her life like that, because I couldn’t do it."

"You said that the big thing it taught her was that she had to learn to accept what had happened to her and get on with things," he nodded.

"I did," she nodded. "Danny, since you never saw Carole or Brenda wearing handcuffs in those days, I don’t think you can imagine just how incredibly stupid it looks. But Brenda adapted to it, they both adapted to it, to the point where Carole was actually addicted to wearing them and Brenda was getting that way a little. That’s how much they accepted it and got on with their lives. Now, I didn’t just watch, I spent time talking with Brenda about it, we all did, mostly at lunch at the paper, but other times, too. Learning to accept the reality wasn’t something that came overnight to her. It took her every bit of that two months, and we talked about it several times. But at the end of that period, she came out a stronger and better person for her self-inflicted ordeal. She didn’t have to wear the handcuffs, she had them put on voluntarily and she could have had them taken off, but she was looking to learn what they had to teach her, so she put up with them. And, like I said, it worked for her, and the big lesson that both she and I took out of it was that we have to accept what happens to us and get on with things, just like you said."

She stopped for a second, reaching for what she wanted to say, then took a deep breath and continued. "Danny, by the time it was over with I would have been willing to wear handcuffs for a while to get the same kind of control over my life that she managed with hers. But I knew it wouldn’t work that way for me. That was a unique situation, a three-way dynamic between Brenda, Wendy, and Carole. My problems were a little different, and mostly they were related to the fact that I’m an Indian. The real piece of wisdom I took out of that was that I had to accept the fact that I really was an Indian, not just a white person with a darker skin and drunken relatives. I had no idea of how to do that, in fact, I hadn’t been over here to the reservation for quite a while, a couple of years, probably. But while I was thinking about it one night, it struck me that I’d met a woman who seemed to know what it meant to be an Indian. I think I told you that kataras aren’t always held in high regard, since we’re often seen as conservative stick-in-the-muds more interested in the old ways than the new, and I pretty much felt that way at the time. But it seemed to me that the new ways of being an Indian weren’t working for me, so maybe I ought to find out a little bit more about the old ways. So, two or three weeks after Brenda took off her handcuffs, I came over here on a Saturday and hunted up this woman, Ellen Standing Bear."

"And you started to learn what it was all about?" Danny asked.

"A little bit," she nodded. "I sat down with Ellen and her older sister, Ruth. I told her about my troubles, and about Brenda and her handcuffs. We spent a couple months of occasional evenings and weekends, just talking, exploring some of those things, and she started to show me a little of how to reach into who I was to find the strength to do what I had to do." She let out a sigh, shook her head and continued. "I wasn’t making much progress at first. I was trying to do it on the strength of head knowledge, not heart knowledge, if you know what I mean."

"Sort of," he nodded. "You were trying to approach it intellectually, and you needed to feel it in your gut, not just go through the words. Some of that intellectual stuff was conflicting with what you had to feel to understand it."

"That’s a real good description," she smiled. "Ellen and Ruth could see it was a problem, and I could, too. After a while, it came down to the fact that we all could see there was a barrier I had to break through if I was going to make any progress in really understanding what it means to be an Indian. Danny, do you know what a vision quest is?"

"Yeah," he said, a memory of those books he’d read years before coming to his mind. "I think so."

"Just to be sure that we’re talking about the same thing, could you describe to me what you think one is?"

"I can’t talk about your people," he told her. "What I know comes from those books about the Lakota. In real simple terms, a man, once in a while a woman, heads out into the wilderness seeking a vision. Usually they find a sacred spot, stay for several days, praying and fasting. In some tribes, they dug a pit and stayed in that. Usually, but not always, vision quests came about the time the person was entering adulthood, but older people might do it if they had what they thought was a good reason."

"That’s not a bad description of what they are," she told him. "The why is a little more difficult. Usually they were taken to seek the spirits, seeking counsel or a vision of themselves or their problems or their future, or whatever. It has a very deep spiritual and religious and natural context. To an Indian, those are often the same thing, or so closely interrelated that they can’t be separated. That’s especially true for a katara, which is why I’ve had trouble describing this to you."

"That makes sense, from that viewpoint," Danny said. "That gives a lot more depth to the idea of a vision quest."

"It sure does," she said, leaning back and stretching a little. "Danny, vision quests are a very old thing, and they were once very widespread among Indians. There are tribal people in Siberia that have similar practices. Several things about their approach to spirituality are similar to the way North American Indians believe. That just about means that the tradition of the vision quest goes back at least as far as The People coming over the land bridge from Siberia ten thousand years or more ago, probably at least fifteen thousand years. In addition, vision quests in one form or another are known in other parts of the world, so they could be almost as old as when man began to recognize spirits. Now, I know you’re not very religious, but do you remember the story from the Bible of John the Baptist living out in the wilderness, eating wild oats and honey? And Jesus going out into the wilderness for forty days and forty nights after he was baptized to pray and seek the voice of God?"

"A vision quest, huh?"

"It reads like that to me. Danny, you see those roots in virtually every religion in the world. Jesus went into the wilderness to seek a vision. So did Moses. So did Mohammed. So did Gautama Buddha. A lot of the old Taoists, and so on. I don’t want to say that the Indian way is the true way, because in a sense it’s not any more of one than any other religion, a way to seek God. Danny, I’m at least nominally Christian, that goes back to the French Jesuit missionaries three hundred years ago. I never have been much of a practicing Christian but since I’ve become a katara I notice the crossover and don’t see much conflict." She looked down the hill into the distance for a moment, obviously thinking, then continued, "Danny, I’m not an expert on this and you’re getting a dose of my personal opinion. The white man’s way is the white man’s way and it may be the right way for Indians and it may not be, but I don’t want to debate it because it’s a personal decision, but in general terms, many cultures have many different ways to approach God."

"And everyone thinks their way is the only way?" he nodded a little cynically.

"That’s not as true as it once was, but there have probably been more wars fought in the name of God than there have been for any other reason. But, what I was trying to lead up to was not the differences but the unity, just to make an observation about a contact point between the Indian view of things and the Christian," she told him. "Now, virtually every religion accepts the reality of spirits. You are familiar with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, right? And it’s obvious from the Bible that there are other spirits, right? Angels, demons, saints, a whole range of supernatural beings that you pretty well have to accept if you accept the Bible, but that are in practice usually regarded by most modern day white people as not quite real?"

He shook his head. "Debbie, you’re starting to get near the limit of my understanding." he told her.

"Good," she laughed. "I say good, because beyond understanding, you have to accept things on faith. Danny, three years ago, I did not understand that. It was the barrier I had between what I wanted to do and what I had to believe to do it. Somehow I had to knock that barrier down."

"So, you did a vision quest?"

"Yes, I did," she admitted. "They have become rare among The People anymore. As you described, they used to be common for a child coming to adulthood, but few people that age follow the old traditions these days. I certainly did not. To do it in the pattern that you discussed a few minutes ago requires that you begin with some degree of spirituality, belief, and faith that I did not have three years ago. I mean, I could feel myself reaching for it, but I could not believe in it. By then, I knew a little about the spirituality, head knowledge, but no heart knowledge. The idea of doing a vision quest wasn’t one that sprang up all at once, it came slowly over a period of a couple months, from talking with several kataras. I found out later that they talked about the idea of my doing one among themselves quite a bit, probably more than I talked with them about it. By that point, I was reaching, I felt the need, and I guess I needed to get kicked in the ass pretty good. I’d told the old kataras about Brenda and her handcuffs and her white person’s version of a vision quest, and they could see it had impressed me. The old kataras were wise enough to recognize that I needed more than to just go out in the wilderness to hear the spirits, I needed an ordeal to force me to."

"Ordeal?" Danny frowned.

"Yes, but they didn’t tell me that – well, not clearly, they just said it was going to be strange and hard and uncomfortable with no guarantee of success, but worth a try. Like I said, I found out later they talked it over and decided to push me harder than the tradition of our people is in these things. I can look back now and see that it was the right move although I sure had my doubts while it was going on."

Over the course of the next few minutes, Debbie told him about how it started, and he realized that he just needed to sit back and listen. She was telling this story in her own way.

She really had been told little of what to expect, only that it would take several days and much of it would be uncomfortable, although she probably would come to no harm. She took three days of her vacation time from the Record-Herald, and drove over to Ellen and Ruth’s after work. "I figured we’d eat dinner or something, we usually did, but no," she said. "We sat around talking for a while, but it was talk about spirits speaking to us, how there is a spirit in everything. Things like how the white man seems to think that he is at war with nature, but the Indian can’t be because the Indian sees himself as part of nature, part of the earth, part of the whole. Most of it was things they’d talked about to me before, but different somehow. I could see that it was preparation for what was to come, whatever it was."

Just about the time the sun was getting low, Ellen and Ruth told Debbie to come with them. They all piled into a pickup truck that Ellen must have borrowed from someone, and drove out to where the Tracker was parked now. "There’s a little flat spot down by the stream, just below where we parked," Debbie explained. "We got out of the truck and went down there, and we found a couple of other woman kataras waiting for us. It was all women, Ruth didn’t even bring Toby. Now, very little was said. As we arrived, one of the other kataras took a firebow and started a fire."

"Firebow?" Danny frowned. "What’s that? Is that where you take a bow-looking thing and loop it around a stick to twist the stick back and forth, so the end catches fire?"

"Yes," she nodded, obviously just a little irritated at being interrupted. "It would have been easier to use a match or a lighter, of course, but everything was natural, done in the old ways as much as possible. The People have been making fires like that for close to forever, at least from what we know. Anyway, to get on with the story, we all sat down around where this katara named Dorothy got the fire going. Just a little Indian fire, mostly small twigs and of green, sweet cedar. I’m sure you know what the magic of a campfire is, Danny. You have to be a pretty insensitive person to not understand. This one though, was rather smoky, with that burning cedar smell floating around. It’s a pretty wonderful smell. Again, not a lot was said. As it was getting dark, one of the kataras got out a pipe, not one of those peace pipe things you see in the gift shop at the casino, but a simple corncob pipe with a reed stem, again, all handmade and natural." She stopped and let out a sigh. "Danny, you have to remember that I didn’t know at the time about this tradition, like a lot of traditions. I was a pretty lousy Indian, I thought that peace pipe stuff was all Hollywood bullshit. It’s not, and Ruth told us that the spirits gave tobacco to the Indian thousands of winters ago, and it’s a way that we honor the spirits. Someone lit the pipe with a brand from the fire, and got it going. She took a puff of the smoke, and said something in Shakahatche. I didn’t know what it was but I recognized it as a prayer. She passed it to the next woman, she took a hit, and made a prayer, and so on till I got to me. I didn’t smoke then and don’t now except for pipe ceremonies, which I don’t do often. Ruth told me one time later that tobacco was one of the revenges the Indian had on the white man, but too many Indians abuse it too, like alcohol. The tobacco in that pipe was strong and it would have knocked me on my butt if I hadn’t already been sitting on it. I got real lightheaded, and I couldn’t speak in Shakahatche, of course, but I just said in English, ‘Spirits, show me what you will,’ and passed the pipe on. I mean, I said it, but did I mean it? I don’t know if I did or not."

She took a long break, to gather her thoughts or recollect them, or whatever. "What did you think?" he asked, daring to speak softly. "Pretty weird?"

"Pretty weird, yeah," she sighed. "It was pretty intense, though. I mean, I didn’t know what to think, in a way it was, well, I couldn’t believe this was really happening, that it wasn’t some sort of act, but I knew that the kataras I was with believed what they were doing whether I did or not. And, Danny, I was trying to understand, so I followed along, hoping that understanding would come. Anyway, the pipe went around seven times, and each time I was the only one that spoke in English, until the last time, when Ruth, she was the last one in the circle after me, said a prayer in Shakahatche, and then said to me in English, ‘Debbie, you are asking the spirits to show you a vision. Whether you have a vision will be up to the spirits, not you or me. However, it is unbecoming to beg the spirits for a vision, so from now until you are told otherwise, you may not speak again, for any reason. We will speak to you as little as possible. Do you understand?’ I just took her hand and squeezed it and nodded yes. She said, ‘Very good. Go with the spirits.’"

Debbie leaned forward and looked down at her feet. "Ellen motioned for me to get up and follow her. She led me up the river a ways, maybe a couple hundred yards, to where there was a little flat spot on the bank, and she gave me a thick wool blanket. ‘Sleep well,’ she said. ‘I will come for you.’ Well, I sat down and curled up in the blanket, and started to think. I mean, I thought this was the start of the vision quest, but it turned out we were still only preparing."

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