The Legend of Black Wolf - Sully's Journey Home

Chapter Seventeen

        More and more, the tribe began to let him in. Sully couldn't tell at first because of the language barrier. Cloud Dancing would be the one to come and tell Sully of tribe members who had spoken to him about the white man, asking various questions or suggesting certain things. One of the stories was about a woman named Little Flower who had offered to help make Sully some more traditional leggings so he would feel more at home with the tribe. Thankfully, Cloud Dancing told her that the white man would be more suited to pants. In little ways like this, a few members were trying their best to live by the chief's wishes in accepting the white man, Black Wolf, as one of their own. Cloud Dancing was having no luck getting anyone to call him Sully, so, for the time being, the Indian name stuck.  

        One afternoon, the two had been walking and came to the grove where Sully had seen Abigail and Hannah. Cloud Dancing hadn't heard mention of Sully's wife and child since that day and he wondered if today might be a good time to meditate there and have some prayer over the quiet days that Sully had been enjoying. He had been trying to show Sully that prayer to the Great Spirit in all things was good for a member of the tribe.

        Cloud Dancing sat on the ground quietly while Sully wandered around. In his buckskin shirt and old cotton pants, he looked half Indian and half white. His hair was becoming unruly, he had a beard coming in, and everything gave the appearance of a lost dweller of the mountains. But he still hadn't mastered how to walk silently through the woods and his speech and manner were so gentle and kind that Cloud Dancing had to wonder if he'd ever be able to have the fight of a warrior again. The white man's war had most certainly changed him.

        "Your heart asks you to sit and pray." Cloud Dancing said. Sully turned and looked over at him.

        "You keep bringing that up..." He began, then turned to look at the trees. "...but I just don't know what to say." What Sully's mother had taught him long ago about praying to God was fuzzy, and what he had prayed for in recent months was from a dark place in his heart. Now that things were more settled and peaceful in his life, Sully didn't know what he should keep asking for.

        "Prayer is talking sometimes. But prayer is listening. Yes?" Cloud Dancing said, resting his hands on his knees and looking up to the sky. The trees canopy was filling in and soon, only a small patch of Father sky would be seen. Sully looked up at the sky from where he stood.

        "What am I listening for?" He asked, straining to hear a bird's cry, or maybe thunder. He felt that he was supposed to hear something dramatic, something big that a spirit would use to communicate.

        "Nothing." Cloud Dancing said, closing his eyes and smiling up at the sky.

        "How am I gonna hear prayer if I don't hear nothin'?" Sully asked, confused.

        "How do you hear anything when speaking?" Cloud Dancing asked back without moving or opening his eyes. With a frustrated sigh, Sully picked a bed of moss and sat in it. He crossed his legs and tried to quietly look around him. As he started to take in how small he was amid the giant trees surrounding the clearing, he recalled the feeling he had when he saw his wife and child in that same place. He focused on that happy feeling and stared at the place where they had appeared to him, thinking maybe that was what he was supposed to do. But there was nothing but the songs of the birds, and far off distant voices of the tribe as they went about their day.

        "Everything has a voice." Cloud Dancing suddenly said, his deep voice sounding very relaxed. "To hear it, you must hear what it does not sound like. Then you will know what it does sound like. In silence, you separate each voice…to better hear…each prayer." Closing his eyes, Sully tried to focus on the sounds around him to separate out what he could hear. He had been thinking that Cloud Dancing would start teaching him this history of the Cheyenne and what they believe, but the medicine man kept holding back a lot of his personal culture to talk to Sully about more basic things. Sully understood that he wasn't going to instantly become an Indian, but for his first real Indian friend, Cloud Dancing, to hold back bothered him a bit. The medicine man's cryptic words frustrated him further.