‘Eventually one gets to the Medicine Wheel, to fulfill one’s life.’
Old Mouse, Arikara
Sulfur. We ate hurriedly before dawn. Crackers, shaped like the animals in our first destination. We had a wheel that would take us from here to there; they had a wheel that would take them from there to the stars.
Robyn and I rescued the leftover Winchester steak from the fridge three creaky hallways away, and humped our packs down Buffalo Bill’s groaning Occidental stairs, to the wagon.
Coral cotton fingers, bottom lit by streams of gold, drew the black predawn Wyoming silhouettes onto a mauve highway, through olive grassland and dark green camouflage mountain pie, smothered in grey meringue and powder blue filling. There were pronghorns, and the stink of dead skunk in the middle of the road.
“I hope it’s not the meat.” Said Robyn. We needn't have worried, for there would have been more in the next town. Steak night tonight. “Every night is steak night in Wyoming.” I said. We pulled into Ranchester for gas. Cowboy State Bank. A bearded beer belly with a baseball cap was asleep on one of the verandas of the Tongue River Apartments. The sultana on his T-shirt spoke of his devotion. Happiness is raisin kids.
Robyn began to find the route more exotic than her Antipodean upbringing could accommodate.
“Wombat?” She asked, about the next smudge of roadkill.
“Porcupine.” I said.
“I never imagined Wisconsin would be like this.” She said.
“Wyoming.” I said, as we drive by the Branding Iron Restaurant and the Crazy Woman Saloon, in Dayton.
The mountains we ride past will outlast everything we know. Robyn and I ascended the Bighorn Range switchbacks, to white limestone and conifers climbing into sagebrush, lodgepole pines like sentinels on the cliffs, turning into stepped mesas protruding from undulating hills, and then hoodoos, until the Bighorn National Forest highway turnoff, at the top of the world. We could reach up here only two months of the year, around the summer solstice, when enough snow had melted.
The air was ten thousand feet thin, thinner than the ribbon of deserted desert that wound upwards, between the desolate grey pink hills, through their quarry dust to our destination quarry. As we started our uphill hike, another two and a half kilometers, the mountains and forests of the Bighorn came up with the sun to meet us on our right, threatening to push us off the earth’s curvature and the plains far below, to our left.
“I’ve never been where you can feel such an expanse.” Robyn said. Large-eared pikas bolted into rock crevices along our path, signalling to each other. Beeep…Beeep… The chipmunks were less afraid, more inquisitive, almost courageous. They had said their prayers, and perhaps there was something in it for them, the spirits of the warriors from before. There were ink-spotted plantain lilies. That's what I would have called them anyway. We came past a copse of tall skinny pines in a field of crumbling stone chess pieces pervaded with fine red filigree, onto a convex rise of loose white rocks, broken like the continuity of what was supposed to be forever here. Our elders teach us that there is a model of the universe inside ourselves.
There was a modern spherical astronomical observatory on the far horizon, and a more proximal plaque, courtesy of the conquerors. Medicine Wheel/Medicine Mountain…This site possesses national significance in illustrating the history of the United States of America.
“That's one way of putting it.” I said. It looked like a wagon wheel, lying on its side.
“What is this thing with you and cartwheels?” Robyn asked.
“Pattern recognition, I guess.” I said. We looked over a mound, an eighty foot wide wheel of stones, over two hundred feet in circumference. The hub was a doughnut shape cairn, a dozen feet in diameter and two feet high, connected to the rim by a monolithic radiating footprint of cobblestone lines.
“How many spokes are there?” Robyn asked.
“Twenty-eight.” I said. “The same number as the days in their lunar cycle. The same number of rafters as the Lakota used in their Sundance lodges.”
“It's a calendar.” Said Robyn.
“It's a calendar.” I said. "And an observatory of the vanquished. You see the spokes with the stone cairns, extending out beyond the tipi ring tent-peg foundation stones, on the rim of the wheel?" She nodded.
“They're aligned to the horizon positions of sunrises and sunsets on the first days of the four seasons.” I said. “The dawn rising of a star is important because it can pinpoint an exact date. This is the day a star is first seen, just before daybreak, after it has been behind the Sun for an entire season. The wheel's star alignments are most accurate for around 1200 AD, so that's how we know when it was built. Since then, there have been slight changes in the Earth's orbit that have caused perturbations. These heliacal stars formed the animal constellation of the Lakota. They marked the summer season as precisely as they could, for their time and technology. The star Fomalhaut rose 28 days before the Summer Solstice, Aldebaran during the 2 days just before the solstice, Rigel 28 days after the solstice, and Sirius 28 days after that, at the end of August, marking the end of summer and the time to leave the mountain.”
“It's more than that, though, isn't it.” Robyn said.
“It's more than that.” I said. “It's a sacred hoop, a symbol of the never-ending cycle of life. Or at least, it was. It had no beginning and no end. Or at least it wasn't supposed to. Different tribes had unique spiritual definitions of the place, and interpreted the significance of the medicine wheel differently. The four directions also represented the four seasons, the four stages of life, the four elements of nature, the four sacred animals, the four sacred plants.” Eagle, Bear, Wolf, Buffalo… Tobacco, sweet grass, sage, cedar.
“And prayer offerings are still left here, even now.” She said. We looked around the mound, over the rocks among the grass, and the hundred of bits of coloured rag and cloth, strips and pompoms and bouquet garni, invocations inside, tied to ropes between the posts around the perimeter, flying in the thin air like a sacred hoop of Tibetan prayer flags. Their pleas and petitions, like those on the wind in Tibet, were leaving too late. Heaven, instead of calvary, could only send condolences.
Robyn and I took some time to examine the other individual offerings and oblations tied to the rope rim of the Medicine Wheel. There were buffalo jawbones, hanging webbed dreamcatchers, eagle feathers, and braided and beaded leather wristbands and belts. One of them had a design with a diamond, a heart and a club, and a spade. Poker is a science; the highest court in Texas has said so… Trust everybody in the game, but always cut the cards.
Of all the hanging agony on the ropes of ruin at the Bighorn Medicine Wheel, the one that got us with a club in the heart in spades, was the diamond of desolation, a plaster death mask with fur pelt hair, small green triangle in the middle of her forehead, tears streaming from her left eye socket, bloody lacerations cut diagonally under her right, and smashed nose and pink painted lips.
“They were here for seven thousand years.” Robyn said. "But a sad soul can kill you quicker than a germ."
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