Heart-Spirit
“No Pa! I won’t do it anymore! I promise! I won’t!” The young boy struggled as his father pulled him along, his long plaited hair coming undone and letting strands flutter wildly in the wind. Digging his heels into the dirt, the child tried to stop as he pulled back on his father’s arm, but the older man kept the boy in tow.
As they walked further into the woods, a wigwam appeared between the trees. The bark that had been used to cover the bowed bones was gray and sagging, greasy with a natural veneer it had been coated with. The grass near the edges of it was limp and brown like sun-burnt corn silk, if there was any grass at all. Long ago, in the boy’s great-grandfather’s time, the hut had been used by women to wait out their monthly time of “impurity” but now it was just used to store things that didn’t belong anywhere else – a broken hose, lop-sided chairs, the old sign from the front of the reservation.
“Now Mox,” The boy’s father said sternly, “Don’t you leave or the old spirits will come after you.”
“But Pa!” the child was almost to the point of sobs; tears leaked out of the corners of his eyes no matter how hard he tried to prevent them.
“Hush now. Stay here.” And with that, the little boy was left alone to his own comfort.
~*~
A sweet musk scent coming from the midst of all the smoky ones woke the young boy up. Rubbing the grains of sleep from his eyes, he sat up and bemusedly looked around. A wind had caught up the cloth door of the wigwam and was murmuring to him, coaxing him to come out. Crawling over, he carefully poked his head out, hoping the spirits wouldn’t mind too much if he just took a peek. The refreshing smell of trees after a fresh rain and rejuvenated soil greeted him warmly. He could hear the scamperings of a rabbit in a bush nearby and the gossiping of the brook with the shore rocks.
Not too far in the distance, Mox could hear a soft jingling and the soft tread of moccasins. A furl of green cloth and a glimpse of long ribbons of hair disappearing behind a tree and not reappearing on the other drew his curiosity out further. He clambered out of the tent, following after the sparkling noises. His bare feet padding quietly against the soft earth, he followed the sounds deeper into the sun-dappled woods.
The noises were fleeting however, disappearing almost as suddenly as they had come. Crashing into a clearing, Mox looked around wildly, even turning in circles in vain attempts to figure out where the noise, and the person making them, had gone. Sighing in disappointment, the young boy flopped down and sprawled out in the warm grass. No sooner had he shut his eyes then something blocked the sunrays coming through the parted leaves. Easily startled, and reminded of the fact that he was suppose to stay put in the old wigwam, Mox sprang up and whirled around to face whatever had gotten in the way of the sun.
Blinking his large goldenrod-hued eyes, a young man stood over him. He wore traditional doe-skin leggings and ornately designed moccasins, with glass beads of every color in the green spectrum. Around his waist was tied a green sash, strung with gold coins that jingled in a fluttering wind and tucked into the sash was a wooden flute, painted with red and blue designs, His chest was bare and darkly tan. There were a few simple green tattoos on his arms, and one of a deer’s hoof over his heart. His wildly free-flowing blackberry hair cascaded down over his shoulders and to his waist and was strung with glass beads and bits of a leather thong. But what made the young Mox gasp, was the set of breathtaking antlers that rose out of the man’s hair – just like the tiny buffalo horns that protruded out of his own hair.
“Y-you’re different,” the child stammered, “just like me…” A smile easily formed on the deer man’s lips.
“The Great Spirit resides in all of us young brother.” He said with the caress of gentle grass, “We are no different then all other things on this Mother Earth”