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Soldier Creek | John Wickersham"These women had run, carrying their babies, until they were exhausted, and had then sat down here to rest and to get their breath, and had been overtaken by the soldiers and killed as they sat." G. B. Grinnell
The brook trout in the pools of Soldier Creek
School in their predatory ranks, and rise
And plane, arcing into the suffocating air,
Where mayflies shed their gauzy, silken husks,
And briefly pause to dry their wings and die.
Across the ridge, up on the Middle Fork
Silvery rainbows cruise the mossy depths
Of rearing ponds abandoned long ago
When Washington withdrew the cavalry
From old Fort Rob. That was 1939, and
The Indians no longer seemed a threat.
This isn’t the sort of country you’d expect
Would hold such robust trout, three different kinds
Counting the little browns that dart and dive,
Scattering through the riffles and the runs.
The ponderosa and the bluffs suggest the West,
And Wyoming is but twenty miles away.
Once, there, we "killed ‘em" (as my son and I
describe a fisherman’s day), though nothing died.
For, truth be told, we freed those lovely fish
With careful hands back into the cold creek,
Laughing and yelling at them to go on home.
The last hole we fished, and it was by far the best,
Lay upstream above our camp about a mile.
Thus, in the gathering late November dusk
Under the omen of a hunters’ moon,
We worked our way back down the Indian trail
Toward the grove of cottonwoods where we
Had made our camp. Already the deepening cold
Was settling in, and our lines were frozen tightly
In the guides. I said, as if I were thinking aloud,
That truly this was as wild and lonely a place
As one might hope for, and beautiful as well.
The paradox of campfires on wintry nights
Is that you can’t be too near or too far away.
The best you can have is delicious misery
From a frozen back and pants too hot to touch.
Thus, when supper was through, the dishes done,
And the food sack hoisted over a sturdy limb
To put it out of the reach of porcupines,
We luxuriated ourselves in the pleasant rite
Of lying to each other about the events
Of the day, though both had seen the very things
That we plumped up so in our quixotic tales.
With firewood gone and the night too cold to bear,
We zipped the tent and burrowed into our bags.
But later (I tremble now as I tell you this),
I sat upright with a start in my sleeping bag
And blinked in the frigid blackness of the tent.
(I cannot say if I was asleep or awake.)
My watch told quarter-past-twelve, and the greenish glow
From its bezel fell like a pall on our rumpled gear
And the sleeping form of my son. I lay back down
In the dark, still trapped in that layer of consciousness
Where betimes one can pass over and back from dreams.
I heard the booming Springfields, the barking Colts,
And the hooves of the troopers’ horses in the ford
Below our camp. And I saw their sabers, too,
Famished for flesh, flashing by starlight through
The crystal air. Was this a dream, or was
I witness through some mysterious slant of time,
To the cries of anguish and the terror of flight?
Were the keening and wailing of women, the
Screams of children, the guttural grunts of men
Locked in death struggle some preternatural vision,
Or was I there then, here now? I cannot tell.
The morning sun topping the sandstone bluffs to the east
Warmed the tent and scattered the remnants of dawn,
And scattered, as well, the phantasmagoric forms
That had seemed so real in the altered world of night.
I prodded my son in the back and chided him for
The sleepyhead he has been all his life, which was
How we always greeted the morning in a tent.
I asked how he’d slept, not really expecting reply.
"Not well," he said. "At midnight I saw the Cheyenne
Slipping like wraiths through the cottonwoods under the moon,
And mounted soldiers shouting and shooting them down."
We broke our camp at midmorning, shouldered the packs,
And hiked in silence the several miles to the car.
For years I’ve struggled to understand that night,
And our shared vision. To this day I truly don’t know
What I saw, what I heard, nor does my son understand.
From the trailhead one can see Fort Robinson well,
And the path the Cheyenne took the night they broke out
In their terrible try to return to their ancestral home.
It wends along the valley and into the hills,
Past the place where we camped. This much I do know:
There are brook trout in the pools of Soldier Creek.
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