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Bozeman Trail

"Understand this," Little Soldier said, sitting across the table from me in his small cabin on the Dakota plains, "and you will understand it all. You do not understand it now. It is too simple. Pray for understanding." He placed his fist upon the table between us and unrolled his fingers to reveal a small stone. And he handed me the stone, which I looked at and held and studied, then slipped into the pocket of my jeans. A few minutes later Sam Moves Camp, who was there to help Little Soldier prepare for a vision quest, handed me feathers from a spotted eagle, still bloody where they were joined at the quills. "Prayer feathers," he said, and I took them too. Later I placed the rock and the feathers with other gifts collected over the years in a wooden box in the attic of a house where I once slept.

In that box, too, were items picked up along the Bozeman Trail, the route used by settlers as they navigated passage through Indian country. Mark Badgett gave them to me -- a horseshoe, a handful of square nails and a few buckles from saddlebags and belts. Each summer Mark and his donkey walked amid the rattlesnakes along the Bozeman Trail and he found some good stuff. He gave me these things a few nights before I moved from Wyoming to Indiana. They are brown, rusted, good to the touch.

I had, too, an old guitar string, though I never played guitar, and the tooth of a polar bear I picked up on Ellesmere Island in the High Canadian Arctic, and a set of rosary beads, blue, blessed by Pope John XXIII. These things and others -- a cow skull from the banks of Red River; some baseball cards; the little toy soldiers I'd played with as a kid; brittle, curling photographs; a sheaf of poetry I'd written in my teenage years -- made up the medicine bundle of my life. They had become the talismans from which I sipped the holy, drew the breath out of my past.

There were times I'd go the attic, put some old records on, revisit my younger self, trace the lines of meaning and continuity, remember where I'd been, bring parts of me forward to keep the older me in touch with who I am. I'd set up the little warriors, sift through my baseball cards, smile and cringe at things written when I was young and dumb and idealistic. Refuge and retreat. Comforters and quilts pulled to the chin.

It is probably best to travel light. I went backpacking once and never made it back to that attic. I let go of a lot. Almost all of it irretrievable. My father's tools. A little basket one son had woven for me in Cub Scouts. A little blue bear with a broken nose given me by the other. The Nativity scene from the Holy Land, carved of olive wood and given me by an old family friend when I was in high school.

I have wondered at times how it is that inanimate objects gain a spirit of their own, acquiring character with age. I have grown to love a pair of hiking boots. I sometimes have trouble parting with a favorite pair of jeans, an old flannel shirt, the blue jean jacket my parents gave me when I was a freshman in high school. These things go down the road with us, somehow become companions then friends.

Some things come by way of gift. They tell stories of people and times and memories. They act as a hedge against the Swiss cheese of remembrance. Sometimes better than photographs because they are real, tactile; they put weight in your hand. Stones -- hard and smooth as bone -- have a heft to them, a feel, that only a baseball may rival for rightness. Feathers and stones.

I have always stuffed things into my pockets. A military compass found here, a pocketknife found there. A rock that catches the eye. I bring these things along. Call them souvenirs, mementoes, amulets. Talismans. They form the medicine bundle of my life. An old board slat from a crate; I picked it up near Bayou Pierre. It reads in black ink on grainy wood: "Sardines." The fine texture of driftwood. I was 17.

It is probably best to travel light; you can't take it with you. "Show me where your treasure is and there will also be your heart." I don't get too excited about most things. A wardrobe, a car. Gadgets and devices. The kinds of stuff you see in catalogs and malls. But it is wrong to say I don't put much stock in things. I do. I pick them up as I go along; still do. Mostly old stuff, things from the earth. Quartz crystal from the Black Hills. A big steel highway sign, black letters on a field of yellow gold: "NO OUTLET." Somehow the thing and its Zen, its soul are one.

Sometime in the middle of my life, about the time I left the attic and most of its stuff behind, I moved alone into a small place. It essentially had two rooms. One friend gave me a squeaky old single bed, lumpy, with noisy springs. Another gave me some dishes, still another some pots and pans. It was good in some ways, starting over, in a place with no TV. No stuff. Just my dusty camping gear. An old rocking chair that had been with me for quite a long time. My parents sent me the cowboy-and-Indian bedspread I'd had on my bed as a kid, and the old down quilt my grandmother had made that I snuggled under during cold winter nights when I was little. It was good reducing things down to the simple stuff again. You learn some about things and your life and yourself.

Of course, there was stuff I wanted and missed. But in time I learned to let go. Anyway, when I stand on the brink of the next horizon, I will be there alone, pockets empty, maybe naked. Traveling trunk left behind. I don't think the Lord lets you bring your stuff along to show him what you've made of your life, to put you in good standing, or as barter goods to get you into heaven. Just a body and what it carries inside.

Little Soldier gave me a rock once and told me it said it all. In time I have learned to understand, to see what it is that lasts, that endures, that survives to watch the millennia pass one to the next. I also know now it is the spirit of things, the breath that stirs inside -- that is what matters. The immanence of life and spirits moving, connecting things heart to heart.

About a year ago my wife and I found a new place to live -- someplace a little larger, more yard, no more renting, a place to call our own. We had not really been looking at houses; we wanted to find a home. And it now, too, is gathering stuff unto itself, though slowly, one good thing at a time. Her grandmother's rocking chair. An old Amish bench. A few new things made and given me by my sons. My sister's dream-catcher with new prayer feathers attached. A 1957 Mickey Mantle my wife gave me last Christmas, a long-buried treasure that speaks of her affection and a search like that for the Holy Grail. And a painting she did of Wyoming's Bighorns, my favorite place on earth, a vision resplendently shining through the canvas and colored oils.

My baseball cards and old record albums eventually made safe passage here, bringing us music and the cardboard incarnations of the gods of my boyhood dreams. Things matter. They tell stories. They put us in touch with what's good. But I've learned that somehow they can do this, too, even when lost or given away.

The last time I saw Little Soldier, when my wife and I stopped by on our way back from the Bighorns, I gave him a stone from the summits there and thanked him for his gifts. Twenty years had passed since we first talked and his things were still meager, minimal and in disarray. But when I handed him the rock (smallish, smooth and opaque), a smile came over his face and I figured by the glint in his old-man eyes that he and I understood.

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