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             Northwest of Pryor, bordering the town of Billings, Montana, rises an arid, rock-ribbed expanse called the Rims.  There was something inside the old weathered fortress that beckoned.  You’d end up spending day after day hiking on its ledges and exploring its caves.  If your eyes lacked the sight to hear the wild, racing hoofs pounding on the valley floor, they surely could hear a muscular, humpbacked buffalo or two snorting in the boulders here and there.  And if you climbed to the top ledge and listened to the howling of the wind through the pile of rocks just east of the Devil’s Kitchen cave, you believed the stories were true and that Indians haunted the Rims.  Arrowheads were embedded in the earth.  Indian carvings were on the rocks.  And on the eastern edge of the Rims, there rose Sacrifice Cliff, every inch of which was inhabited by ghosts of warriors past.
 

SACRIFICE CLIFF

 It was the Moon Of Heat Waves
 and all the creeks were dry.
 Big black birds were gliding,
 riding downdrafts in the sky. 
 The warriors rode toward the cliff-- 
 the children of the long-beaked bird-- 
  in Indian tongue, the Apsaalookes;  
  Crow, the white man's word.  

The Sun God soon, would ride off west,  
packing up his golden light;  
but they’d be dead before the dog-star  
climbed into the dusky night.  
Every breeze brought whiffs of pine  
and pungent scents of gray-green sage.  
None of it could ease their pain,  
or stem their bitter rage.

Prairie dogs and sage hens  
still scrambled wildly on the range;  
but piles and piles of buffalo skulls  
spoke loudly of the chilling change.  
No medicine could conjure back  
the herds of buffalo,  
that always had provided food  
and clothes and shelter for the Crow.  
 

Their hunting days were over
and the life they knew was done.
The Crow would have to start anew.
A new day had begun.
The Crows could fight the soldiers
and the bullets they possessed….
but they couldn’t fight the pox-fire
the white men brought out west.

Their village had been scourged by pox
and nearly half had died.
Montana had been washed by blood.
Grief had swept the country side.
Blood had seeped into the soil
where now the sagebrush grew;
and blood had stained the memory
of every lodge they knew.
 

There was blood upon the prairie;  
and blood upon the sun.  
Tears flowed deep inside them--  
but their ride was almost done.  
The One Who Had Made Everything  
was angry with the Crow.  
The tribe owed him a sacrifice   
before He’d ease their woes.  

The warriors gathered on the Rims  
around a rocky bluff.  
Perhaps the sacrifice they’d give  
that day, would be enough.  
With blindfolds on their ponies  
down off the cliff they plunged--  
their sacrifice completed  
and their tribal debt expunged.
 
* * * * * *

The long-beaked birds were clustered  
near the cliff on scraggly trees--  
gliding, riding downdrafts…  
cutting circles in the breeze.  
It was The Moon Of Heat Waves.  
The grass was brown and dried.  
But the grass turned black   
 with long-beaked birds,  
the day the warriors died.  

Bette Wolf Duncan
Copyright 1998
       IMAGES:
   CONJURING BACK THE BUFFALO  by Frederick Remington, 1892
   THE OUT POST  by Charles M. Russell, 1901