Watching Eagles Soar (36 page)

For all of my stories and novels, I start with questions of What If? For
The Story Teller
,
the questions were, What if a complete Arapaho ledger book on the Sand Creek Massacre were found? What if the Arapaho tribe wanted to reclaim the book as part of their cultural and historical heritage? What if someone else wanted possession of a book worth a million dollars? Out of the answers to those questions came the plot for a novel that wove the importance of the ledger books to our knowledge and understanding of past events like the Sand Creek Massacre.

I remember standing at the granite stone marking the grave of Sacajawea on the Wind River Reservation and asking myself, What if Sacajawea had found her way back to her people after the Lewis and Clark expedition and lived to be a very old woman, as the Shoshones and Arapahos believe? What if she had dictated her story to the wife of the government agent, who wrote the story in a notebook, as historical records say had happened? What if the notebook had been rescued from a fire at the agency, instead of destroyed? What would Sacajawea's account of the expedition be worth today? The answers became
The Spirit Woman.

All of my other novels,
Wife of Moon
,
Killing Raven
,
The Shadow Dancer
,
The Lost Bird
,
The Thunder Keeper
,
The Dream Stalker
,
The Ghost Walker
,
and the novel that I'm currently writing are rooted in the past. With fiction, I'm no longer limited to narratives of what might have happened. I can plumb the meaning and imagine how a past event might continue to affect individuals and families. In all that imagining, I believe every fiction writer would agree, it is astonishing how often we hit upon a kernel of truth and how often readers say: “How did you know that's how it was? How did you know we felt that way?” After publication of
The Lost Bird
,
which dealt with the crime in the recent past of infants being stolen from reservations and sold on the black market, I received a call from an Arapaho woman. “You wrote my story,” she said. “How did you know my story?” I didn't know her story. I had imagined how such a crime would affect everyone involved.

The stories that I imagine keep me moving between the past and the present: the past of the Arapahos on the plains and their life today on the reservation. I spend part of every summer visiting the reservation, catching up with friends, talking with people, and, most of all, listening to what they have to say and the way in which they say it. George and I have driven the roads that my characters drive; we've visited the sites that I write about—the towns and community centers, the rivers and bluffs and petroglyphs. We've gone to the powwows and the rendezvous; we've taken part in the sweat lodge; we've sat and listened to the elders. We've attended the Sun Dance, and in all of this, we've touched a past threaded through the present.

I remember the July day we came over a rise on Ethete Road on our way to the Sun Dance. Spread through a scattering of cottonwoods on the Sun Dance grounds below were several hundred tipis, white and gleaming in the sun. We stopped the Blazer and got out, struck by what we saw. We could hear voices carried on the breeze, the sound of infants crying. People were moving about among the tipis, ducking in and out of the brush shades where food would be constantly available. In the center was the Sun Dance lodge, the sides fashioned of willow branches that the men had cut in the riverbeds and the sacred pole rising overhead, rainbows of cloth offerings tied to the roof poles and billowing against the blue sky. We might have been looking down at an Arapaho village in the Old Time about to begin the holiest of ceremonies, the Sun Dance.

As the Arapahos would say, the ancestors are always with us.

CREDITS

“Bad Heart,” signed special limited edition with introduction by T. Jefferson Parker, Arapaho Commandments Series, ASAP Publishing, 2004.

“The Birth of Stories” first published as “Anatomy of a Story” in
An Elevated View: Colorado Writers on Writing,
edited by W.C. Jameson, Seven Oaks Publishing, 2011.

“Day of Rest,” signed special limited edition with introduction by C. J. Box, Arapaho Commandments Series, ASAP Publishing, 2005.

“Dead End,” signed special limited edition with introduction by James D. Doss, Arapaho Commandments Series, ASAP Publishing, 1997.

“Hole in the Wall,” signed special limited edition with introduction by Edward D. Hoch, Arapaho Commandments Series, ASAP Publishing, 1998.

“Honor,” signed special limited edition with introduction by Jan Burke, Arapaho Commandments Series, ASAP Publishing, 1999.

“An Incident in Aspen” in
Murder Here, Murder There,
edited by R. Barri Flowers and Jan Grape, 2012.

“Lizzie Come Home” in
How the West Was Read, Vol. II
,
audio book edited by Robert J. Randisi, 1997.

“The Man in Her Dreams” in
More Murder, They Wrote
, edited by Elizabeth Foxwell and Martin H. Greenberg.

“The Man Who Thought He Was a Deer” in
Wild Crimes
,
edited by Dana Stabenow, 2004.

“Molly Brown and Cleopatra's Diamond” first published in
Watching Eagles Soar: Stories from the Wind River and Beyond,
ASAP Publishing, 2011.

“Murder on the Denver Express” in
Crime Through Time, Vol. III
,
edited by Sharan Newman, 2000.

“My Last Good-bye,” signed special limited edition with introduction by Nancy Pickard, Arapaho Commandments Series, ASAP Publishing, 2002.

“Nobody's Going to Cry,” signed special limited edition with introduction by Craig Johnson, Arapaho Commandments Series, ASAP Publishing, 2006.

“Otto's Sons” first published in
Watching Eagles Soar: Stories from the Wind River and Beyond,
ASAP Publishing, 2011.

“Santorini” in
Dry Spell: Tales of Thirst and Longing
, a selection of short stories by members of Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers, 2004.

“St. Elmo in Winter” in
Ghost Towns,
edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Russell Davis, Kensington Publishing, 2010.

“Stolen Smoke,” signed special limited edition with introduction by Marcia Muller, Arapaho Commandments Series, ASAP Publishing, 2000.

“A Well-Respected Man” in
Women Before the Bench
, edited by Carolyn Wheat, 2001. Reprinted in
The World's Finest Mystery and Crime Stories
,
edited by Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg, 2002.

“The West of Ghosts” first published in
Hot Coffee and Cold Truth: Living and Writing the West,
edited by W.C. Jameson, University of New Mexico Press, 2006.

“Whirlwind Woman,” signed special limited edition, Arapaho Commandments Series, ASAP Publishing, 2007.

“The Woman Who Climbed to the Sky,” signed special limited edition with introduction by Tony Hillerman, Arapaho Commandments Series, ASAP Publishing, 2001.

“Yellow Roses” in
A Dozen on Denver
:
Stories to Celebrate the City at 150
,
edited by Sandra Dallas, 2008. Published in
The Rocky Mountain News
.