The Way to Rainy Mountain
by N. Scott Momadaypath是什么意思
A single knoll ris out of the plain in Oklahoma, north and west of the Wichita Range. For my people, the Kiowas, it is an old landmark, and they gave it the name Rainy Mountain. The hardest weather in the world is there. Winter brings blizzards, hot tornadic winds ari in the spring, and in summer the prairie is an anvil's edge. The grass turns brittle and brown, and it cracks beneath your feet. There are green belts along the rivers and creeks, linear groves of hickory and pecan, willow and witch hazel. At a distance in July or August the steaming foliage ems almost to writhe in fire. Great green and yellow grasshoppers are everywhere in the tall grass, popping up like corn to sting the flesh, and tortois crawl about on the red earth, going nowhere in the plenty of time. Loneliness is an aspect of the land. All things in the plain are isolate; there is no confusion of objects in the eye, but one hill or one tr新岛八重
ee or one man. To look upon that landscape in the early morning, with the sun at your back, is to lo the n of proportion. Your imagination comes to life, and this, you think, is where Creation was begun.
tom jones
I returned to Rainy Mountain in July. My grandmother had died in the spring, and I wanted to be at her grave. She had lived to be very old and at last infirm. Her only living daughter was with her when she died, and I was told that in death her face was that of a child.
I like to think of her as a child. When she was born, the Kiowas were living the last great moment of their history. For more than a hundred years they had controlled the open range from the Smoky Hill River to the Red, from the headwaters of the Canadian to the fork of the Arkansas and Cimarron. In alliance with the Comanches, they had ruled the whole of the southern Plains. War was their sacred business, and they were among the finest hormen the world has ever known. But warfare for the Kiowas was preeminently a matter of disposition rather than of
survival, and they never understood the grim, unrelenting advance of the U.S. Cavalry. When at last, divided and illprovisioned, they were driven onto the Staked Plains in the cold rains of autumn, they fell into panic. In Palo Duro Canyon they abandoned their crucial stores to pillage and had nothing then but their lives. In order to save themlves, they surrendered to the soldiers at Fort Sill and were imprisoned in the old stone corral that now stands as a military muum. My grandmother was spared the humiliation of tho high gray walls by eight or ten years, but she must have known from birth the affliction of defeat, the dark brooding of old warriors.
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雅思住宿班Her name was Aho, and she belonged to the last culture to evolve in North America. Her forebears came down from the high country in western Montana nearly three centuries ago. They were a mountain people, a mysterious tribe of hunters who language has never been positively classified in any major group. In the late venteenth century they began a long migration to the south and east. It was a journey toward the dawn, and it led to a golden age. Along the way the Kio
was were befriended by the Crows, who gave them the culture and religion of the Plains. They acquired hors, and their ancient nomadic spirit was suddenly free of the ground. They acquired Tai-me, the sacred Sun Dance doll, from that moment the object and symbol of their worship, and so shared in the divinity of the sun. Not least, they acquired the n of destiny, therefore courage and pride. When they entered upon the southern Plains they had been transformed. No longer were they slaves to the simple necessity of survival; they were a lordly and dangerous society of fighters and thieves, hunters and priests of the sun. According to their origin myth, they entered the world through a hollow log. From one point of view, their migration was the fruit of an old prophecy, for indeed they emerged from a sunless world.
Although my grandmother lived out her long life in the shadow of Rainy Mountain, the immen landscape of the continental interior lay like memory in her blood. She could tell of the Crows, whom she had never en, and of the Black Hills, where she had never been. I wanted to e in reality what she had en more perfe四川2012高考分数线
ctly in the mind's eye, and traveled fifteen hundred miles to begin my pilgrimage.
luciferaYellowstone, it emed to me, was the top of the world, a region of deep lakes and dark timber, canyons and waterfalls. But, beautiful as it is, one might have the n of confinement there. The skyline in all directions is clo at hand, the high wall of the woods and deep cleavages of shade. There is a perfect freedom in the mountains, but it belongs to the eagle and the elk, the badger and the bear. The Kiowas reckoned their stature by the distance they could e, and they were bent and blind in the wilderness.
pretenders
Descending eastward, the highland meadows are a stairway to the plain. In July the inland slope of the Rockies is luxuriant with flax and buckwheat, stonecrop and larkspur. The earth unfolds and the limit of the land recedes. Clusters of trees, and animals grazing far in the distance, cau the vision to reach away and wonder to build upon the mind. The sun follows a longer cour in the day, and the sky is immen beyond all comparison. The great billowing clouds that sail upon it are shjuly几月
www 900game netadows that move upon the grain like water, dividing light. Farther down, in the land of the Crows and Blackfeet, the plain is yellow. Sweet clover takes hold of the hills and bends upon itlf to cover and al the soil. There the Kiowas paud on their way; they had come to the place where they must change their lives. The sun is at home on the plains. Precily there does it have the certain character of a god. When the Kiowas came to the land of the Crows, they could e the darklees of the hills at dawn across the Bighorn River, the profusion of light on the grain shelves, the oldest deity ranging after the solstices. Not yet would they veer southward to the caldron of the land that lay below; they must wean their blood from the northern winter and hold the mountains a while longer in their view. They bore Tai-me in procession to the east.
