Many Gray Horses: Inward Dwelling Tales, #1

By Jeremiah John Jackson

A stream runs out of the mountains and races through a small town by the Montana border. On its banks two teenage boys - one white, one Native American - watch and talk and take in the stories about the stream's source, a mysterious canyon high in the Rockies where glaciers feed the turquoise waters.

Meanwhile the boys have stories of their own - about how the earth came to be, and the mountains, and the tribes, and the bears and the warriors. And they have other stories too - about a crippled brother, and the hard deaths of a father and a mother, the bullets and blood of the 1973 Wounded Knee Uprising, about a girl more beautiful than moonlight.

Sometimes it's difficult to separate the myth from the real.

A trek to find the source of the mountain stream could set everything right. It could bring the healing, and understanding, and the connection to all things natural, supernatural, and spiritual the boys crave. If only they can finish the journey. If only the truth can find them when they do.

• Language: English
• Publisher: MillerWords, LLC
• Release date: Dec 3, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386125099

Jeremiah John Jackson

Jeremiah John "JAX" Jackson lives and writes in the U.S. He divides his time between Montana and the American Southwest. He has also traveled to many parts of the world including the UK, Europe, the Middle East and Asia and he hasn't done it as part of a tourist package. His keen interest in Native American culture has taken him across America as well. Story telling is at the heart of what he does and he uses it to explore the clash as well as the connection between the various peoples of the North American continent. Many Gray Horses is his first work of fiction.

Book preview

1

The Creek

July burned your skin like a fire can burn you and that’s the way it always was under the purple mountains once the June rains were done. The grass was brown before summer was halfway through unless you spent two or three hundred dollars watering it. The snow covered it in November and December but until then brown was what you saw for miles stacked on top of miles. Even the white came and went during the winter because the snow came and went with the big warm winds called Chinooks that blundered over the mountains from the Pacific. So you got brown and white and brown and white and finally green again in May and June when the clouds were big fists that squeezed out blood and water.

All the dark rain came at one time, it was never laid out so that you had rain once a week or a half dozen times a month, it came in a few hard days and lashed the poplars and cottonwoods and made the rivers and streams boil. Houses were flooded, streets and towns and square miles of cities, and sometimes people were swept away and they never found them until the waters had gone down and the flowers had opened and the lawns and bushes were lush.

Our creek was a fury one day and rolled and broke like a sea and uprooted trees massive and black came heaving like boats. Another day it was itself and walking steadily down out of the hills, not too fast, coming in careful measured sliding steps, skin and nails clean and gleaming as the silt settled, jade and glass making a window on the baby trout and the slipping mink and arrowing beaver, and the etched bark logs settled against boulders rooted to the earth’s deep core but which the creek could move and toss anytime it wanted.

Where does it come from, Dad? I asked in the days we caught small trout in buckets and water snakes in our hands.

God knows.

Where?

Dad sat on the creek bank and never put his cigarette mouth, he just let it burn out between his fingers.  "Up in the Rockies. The British Columbia side. Maybe a piece of it

comes from Montana. You hear things."

What things?

Fed by a glacier up high. Comes out of a hole in the ground and the hole in the ground goes right to the center of the earth.

Does it?

I don’t know.

Can’t we go up there and find out? I asked.

When you’re older, Zipp, Dad said.

My brother Wick had more to say. Big Roaring Man had come out of the ground and laid everything low to left and right with his hatchet in the one hand and war club from the Sky Chiefs in the other, just like the stone clubs you see at the museum at the Little Big Horn that can crack a man’s head like a nut. He hewed rivers and lakes with his weapons and his hands but he made the creek with the finesse of Binding Wounds Woman, using just the sharp tip of his hatchet and slitting rock from peak to foothills and beyond out through the grasslands to dip his iron in his rivers so the creek could run with the big water all the way to the cold sea and Ice Bear. When water first came into the cut he had made it walked like a ghost and under Sun Warrior and Moon Woman it was silver by day and grey by moonlight and the Elders On The Other Side Of The Sky named it Manygrayhorses. Woman Who Gives Birth To Wonder lay in it and washed her shining skin and streaming hair and the first children of the Earth came from the love she had with I Am Under The Waters. The children slipped down the mountain and out along the plains to the great north sea and wherever they touched the creek banks foxes sprang up and wolf willow and wild rose and jackrabbits but they had different names for them then, the names are so far away Blackfoot does not know them or Crow or Sioux or Cheyenne or any words the People brought with them over the path between worlds when they crossed the seas by foot back when Fire Maker was lighting the stars.

So the People called the water Manygrayhorses and then the ones with skin like Ice Bear named the town after the water. But before that our family had the name because we had our lodges here and made the arrows and slew the buffalo when they came to drink.

Is this what the elders say on the reservation in Crockett? I asked.

Wick was lighting one cigarette with another and a trout made perfect rings in the green and silver as it took a mosquito. You'll never hear it that way from them.

You made it up.

They made it up. So I can make it up.

How'd you get a piece of white trash for a brother? a Blood Indian had laughed at school and Wick slammed the Blood's head into the Coke machine and got expelled. I got expelled too for being the white trash that was standing beside him. For years no one had bugged either of us about him being Piegan Blackfoot and me being white but as soon as we hit high school it all changed and the native gangs wanted Wick to dump me and he wouldn't do it. Plus the Blood Indians hated the Piegans. The Coke machine was the first fight in Grade Seven and there was half a dozen more after that in Grades Eight and Nine but the school only found out about one of them, when Wick dislocated Billy One Owl's shoulder. Every time I tried to fight beside him Wick would