Winter Count (9 page)

In late June 1844, after Foster had begun to despair of ever understanding either the fact or the meaning of the disappearance of the river, after a time of ritual cleansing and dreaming, perhaps agoraphobic or maddened by the interweaving of literalisms and metaphors and forms of proof, Foster began throwing his manuscripts into the river. According to a Pawnee called Wolf Finger, who spoke with the historian Henry Lake, Foster would go down naked in the afternoon, wade out into the Niobrara and hurl a fistful of pages into the water, or from the shore he would skip a journal across the surface like a stone. Eventually he threw everything he’d ever written down into the Niobrara River, turned the pack mules out with the Pawnee horses, and left. He went away to the north, “like a surprised grouse whirring off across the prairie.”

What was left of these documents came into my hands through my father, a tax assessor. He found them in a barn near Lusk, Wyoming, in 1901. Among them—there was about enough to fill one cardboard box—was the first page of an essay entitled “Studying the Indian.” I have no idea of the date. In the first paragraph Foster says, “I have been among the Absarokee when they left the battlefield like sparrows. I have watched Navajo men run down antelope on foot and smother their last breath in a handful of corn pollen. One bad summer in the Desert of the Black Rocks I saw Shoshoni women go out at sunset and because they were starving call in the quail. I have heard the soft syllables of the Arapaho tongue and the choking sound of the Kiowa and the hissing Cheyenne sounds. A woman called Reaches Deep taught me how to dance, and once I danced until I entered the sun. But already in the fall of 1826, in Judith Basin, a Piegan called Coyote in the Camp had told me I was learning everything wrong….” Foster goes on, a few words, the rest is washed out and sun bleached.

In an attempt to understand what little Foster had written down about the disappearance of the Niobrara (and with a sense of compassion for him), I visited that part of the state in 1963. I stayed in a small hotel, the Plainview, in the town of Box Butte. I had with me all of Foster’s water-stained notes, which I had spread around the room and was examining again for perhaps the hundredth time. During the night a tremendous rainstorm broke over the prairie. The Niobrara threatened to flood and I was awakened by the motel operator. I drove across the river—in the cone of my headlights I could see the fast brown water surging against the bridge supports—and spent the rest of the night in my car on high ground, at some distance from the town, in some hills the name of which I do not remember. In the morning I became confused on farm roads and was unable to find my way back to the river. In desperation I stopped at a place I recognized having been at the day before and proceeded from there on foot toward the river, until I became lost in the fields themselves. I met a man on a tractor who told me the river had never come over in that direction. Ever. And to get away.

I have not been back in that country since.

Barry Lopez (b. 1945) is the author of thirteen works of fiction and nonfiction including his landmark study of the Far North,
Arctic Dreams
, and several collections of essays and short stories. He writes regularly for a variety of magazines including
Harper’s
and
National Geographic
, and his work is frequently anthologized in such collections as
Best American Essays
,
Best American Non-Required Reading
,
Best Spiritual Writing
, and the “best-of” collections periodically issued by
Outside
, the
Paris Review
,
Orion
, the
Georgia Review
, and other publications.

He is a recipient of the National Book Award, the Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the John Burroughs Medal for natural history writing, the Christopher Award for humanitarian writing, the Friends of American Writers Award in fiction, and major awards from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, the Association of American Geographers, and the New York Public Library. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, the Lannan Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Parents’ Choice Awards. He is an elected Fellow of the Explorers Club and serves on the honorary boards of Theater Grottesco in Santa Fe, the Mountain Lion Foundation, Cities of Refuge, and Reader to Reader, among other groups and institutions.

Lopez grew up in agricultural Southern California and New York City, attended college in the Midwest, and has lived in rural Oregon since 1968. His work has taken him to nearly seventy countries and he has spent long periods of time in the field with research scientists and traditional hunters in such places as the interior of Antarctica, northern Kenya, the Canadian Arctic, and the Northern Territory in Australia.

Lopez is often described as a travel or nature writer but his work is difficult to categorize. His principal concern in nonfiction is the relationship between human societies and the places they occupy; in his fiction, his characters deal most often with issues of personal identity and intimacy. He has also been described as a philosopher and social critic.

In both his fiction and nonfiction, Lopez draws heavily on the thinking of indigenous peoples, most often Native Americans, Eskimos, and Aborigines. His
New York Times
bestseller,
Crow and Weasel
, an illustrated fable, is steeped in indigenous North American tradition, and his pioneering work on wolves,
Of Wolves and Men
, a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a finalist for the National Book Award, devotes several chapters to Native American and Eskimo perceptions of
Canis lupus
.

After a benign encounter with a polar bear in the Chukchi Sea in 1981, Lopez, who until then had been a landscape photographer and writer, put his cameras away. (He explains why in an essay called “Learning to See” in
About This Life
.) He has continued, however, to work with a loose-knit group of photographers, composers, painters, playwrights, and other artists and artisans on a range of projects. He collaborates regularly with book artists, for example, on fine-press limited editions of his writing, and recently worked alongside ceramist Richard Rowland to design a reconciliation ceremony between the Comanche Nation and Texas Tech University. (He wrote about Rowland in an essay called “Effleurage,” also in
About This Life
.)

Although he rarely teaches, Barry Lopez has been, the distinguished visiting scholar at Texas Tech University since 2003, where his papers are archived in the Sowell Family Collection in Literature, Community and the Natural World. He works regularly with graduate and undergraduate students there, both in class and on field trips. In 1989, he was the W. Harold and Martha Welch visiting chair in American studies at the University of Notre Dame, and in 2006, he was the Glenn distinguished professor at Washington and Lee University.

In recent years, Lopez has turned his attention increasingly toward the plight of humanity in various parts of the world and to the impact of globalization, war, and climate change on the spiritual and social lives of both modern and traditional peoples. He is currently at work on a book about his travel experiences.

Learn more about the author at
www.barrylopez.com
.

Lopez in 1948 in California’s San Fernando Valley. The rider third from left is his mother, Mary, who, incidentally, made the shirt he is wearing.

Lopez at Christmas circa 1951. From left: family friend Grace Van Sheck; Lopez’s younger brother, Dennis; their mother, Mary; and Lopez. Grace’s husband was Sidney Van Sheck, who had been Mary’s first husband. The Van Shecks befriended Mary and her sons after Mary divorced the boys’ father. (Photo courtesy of Sidney Van Sheck.)

Lopez as a junior at Loyola School, a Jesuit preparatory school in New York City, in 1961.

Lopez as a junior at the University of Notre Dame, having dinner at the home of Odey and Nettie Cassell with his roommate Pete Lewis in February 1965. This was one of several visits Lopez made to the Cassells’ farm near Cass, West Virginia, which he later wrote about. (Photo courtesy of Pete Lewis.)

Lopez (right) with Alaska Department of Fish and Game wolf biologist Robert Stephenson, radio-collaring sedated wolves in Nelchina Basin, Alaska, in March 1976. (Photo courtesy of Craig Lofstedt.)