Linda HoganDeer Dance
This morning when the chill that rises up from the ground is warmed, the snow is melted where the small deer slept. See how the bodies leave their mark The snow reveals their paths on the hillsides the white overcrossing pathways into the upper meadows where water comes forth and streams begin. With a new snow the unseen becomes seen. Rivers begin this way At the deer dance last year, after the clashing forces of human good and evil, the men dressed in black, the human women mourning for what was gone the evergreen sprigs carried in a circle to show the return of spring, That night, after everything human was resolved, a young man, the chosen, became the deer. In the white skin of its ancestors, wearing the head of the deer above the human head with flowers in his antlers, he danced, beautiful and tireless, until he was more than human, until he, too, was deer. Of all those who were transformed into animals, the travelers Circe turned into pigs, the woman who became the bear, the girl who always remained the child of wolves, none of them wanted to go back to being human. And I would do it, too, leave off being human and become what it was that slept outside my door last night, rested in my sleep. One evening I hid in the brush south of here and watched at the place where they shed their antlers and where the deer danced, it was true, as my old grandmother said, water came up from the ground and I could hear them breathing at the crooked river The road there I know. I live here, and always when I walk it they are not quite sure of me, looking back now and then to see that I am still far enough away, their gray brown bodies, the scars of fences the fur never quite straight, as if they'd just stepped into it.
Linda Hogan is a Chickasaw writer. She is the author of several books, including Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Natural World (W. W. Norton, 1995), a novel entitled Power (W. W. Norton), as well as the novels Mean Spirit, New York Times Notable Book Solar Storms (Simon and Schuster), and Power (W. W. Norton). Mean Spirit was a finalist for a Pulitzer. The Book of Medicines, one of her collections of poetry, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her most recent books are The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir and Sightings: The Mysterious Journey of the Gray Whale. Hogan has received numerous awards including a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Guggenheim fellowship, a prestigious Lannan Foundation award, the Five Civilized Tribes Museum playwriting award, and in 1998, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas.
