Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, APAUKEE, THE HALF BREED, by CALE YOUNG RICE


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

APAUKEE, THE HALF BREED, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: Apaukee, the half-breed, rode on the edge of the canyon
Last Line: And claws of the coyote could not defile it.
Subject(s): Ancestry & Ancestors; Fate; Love; Native Americans; Tears; Destiny; Indians Of America; American Indians; Indians Of South America


Apaukee, the half-breed, rode on the edge of the Canyon.
His pony, a gray beast three years old, was swift and lean
As a coyote after months of winter roving.
The gut of the Canyon purged by the Colorado's muddy cathartic,
Which the Great Spirit had given a million years, without end,
Was dark now, and growing black faster; for the sunset
Was dulled behind a cloud-wall of red copper, fire-plumed,
Like the war-feathers of a Ute brave.

Apaukee felt but his Indian blood as they gray beast
Footed the trail back to the camp of his tribe, to the tall tepees
Of cross-poles and buffalo skins the Utes had coned yesterday
On a lower flank of the Great Gorge, pinyon-fringed.
Apaukee felt puma-bodied, lynx-eyed, and straight as the wind:
The thoughts and dreams of the white man, for two years damming the flow
Of Indian freedom in him, while he went to the school at Boulder,
Were motes now in the distance, small as vultures that had swung all day
Over the vast crack of the world he rode along.
Wild moods had purged him of his white father,
A stranger, never known to him, who had wed his mother,
A full-blood girl of the Utes betrayed by him,
Rather than suffer the stake's embrace and faggot's flame,
The tribe, painted with war-hate, had prepared for him.

The wind sang: purple shadow-cataracts fell
From tops of the mesas, down the ledging canyon-walls,
And lay in darker pools of awe and mystery there.
The wind sang, and caught a chant from Apaukee's lips

And blew the sounds apart and sent them swiftly dissyllabled
To nothingness and space. The little gray beast trembled,
And whinnied clear, as if her withers were joy-wrung,
But flexed herself as the trail began its screw descent
To the tepees by a small trickling canyon-spring where Apaukee
Had left three hours before his eight-months bride --
Apaukee deserted at birth by a white father,
As a red mother died in pain giving him breath.

A last swerve brought the sharp smoke of the camp-fire,
Cutting his nostrils. Wild meat was roasting.
The scent of it was a thousand years old to Apaukee
Who had made his choice to follow the fires of the red man
And empty whiteness out of him, palefaceness,
And the ways of the palefaces grasping and devious:
Moccasins, beaded hunting-shirt and eagle plumes,
These henceforth were to be his herital portion.

The wind sang. Apaukee thought of his bride,
Daughter of scarred Kutowaw, medicine-man, rain-maker,
And stronger with his tribe than dead Chief Uray who had seen wisdom
In the point of the plow the white man digs the earth with.
For the Great Spirit, Uray said, is not the wind, not the thunder:
He is the Voice who speaks to the seed in the dark earth
And bids it shoot up harvest into the air,
Arrows of grain to slay the hosts of hunger and famine.
Apaukee thought of his eight-months bride, Wautona,
The one flower that had grown from the iron veins of Kutowaw,
And he sang in his heart expectantly:
"Moon-maid, Wautona, beader of love's garments
With turquoise and wampum; Wautona, willow-wand;
Wautona, weaver of peace into my blankets;
Builder of camp-fires for my weariness
After the hunting; finder of springs in the parched lands;
Your beauties are sent flying through my heart's height
As wild geese are sent on the skies to southward!"

So sang he. Then out of the pines to the trail's end
He came to sight of the camp by a rain-born streamlet,
But stopped... suddenly stricken by what he saw there.

For Fate had blown,
Fate the foulest wind from beyond space and time,
Fate that stinks of eternity and of grief and despair,
Fate, that made his heart a muscle-terror
And pressed Indian wildness from him and left only
Weak things that his white blood had taught him,
Tender things that had made Wautona more beautiful
Than a squaw should be to the eyes of any brave.
For Apaukee saw a bier beside his tepee,
Apaukee heard a child new-born crying
In the wrinkled arms of withered old Shushonee the oldest squaw
Who had ever given pap to a Ute since time was;
And by the squaw stood Kutowaw, motionless,
A red pillar, stronger than winds, and deep-scarred
By storms of medicine-making and demon-scourging.
Apaukee fell to the earth, his pony quivering.
The camp-fire licked a red tongue at the twilight
As if tasting the darkness of the spirit-land,
Where Apaukee knew that his bride Wautona had gone.
Apaukee rose as the dead rise and went to the bier,
Pale, with the stench of Fate choking his soul.
Kutowaw and the squatted braves awaited;
The new-born wail in Shushonee's arms waned to silence.
Apaukee paused at the bier, as if grief-craven.
The Red blood in him fought the gentler White
And blocked a torrent rush of tears behind his eyes:
They must not fall, his eyes must be stern granite:
A half-breed weeping over the death of his squaw
Would fold contempt in his blanket ever after, the scorn of every Ute
Whose sires had won their women fiercely in war-raids.
The bloods fought in Apaukee and the White lost;
Though the battle would be again and yet again, he knew,
Across the burning fields of his flesh and his bone's marrow
'Til the ghost-trail should call his feet to Wautona.

Meanwhile Kutowaw spoke, thus smoulderingly:
"The ninth month was near for her, but not come.
The Great Spirit had only filled the moon's belly
With fire eight times... white-blood seed in Kutowaw's daughter
Was too weak to endure the full time of birthing.
So... too soon... she has borne a paleface,
A girl-child, crushed from the womb, no son:
Crushed forth by angry powers: for the Evil Spirit
Flung Wautona down, from the rock she sat on, weaving a song,
To child-birth and death." He ended stonily.
The words dragged Apaukee's eyes from the pine pier
To Kutowaw's beak-face. He knew, he knew now
What midwife had brought his child birth, his wife death, --
The rock on which he had wooed her to him had done it!
Perhaps Wautona had waited on its peak looking for him
When the Powers in it had brought the birth-pains that flung her down.
He would have spoken, but the feast awaited.
And back of Kutowaw now the moon came walking
Between dark walls of the Canyon, ghost-footed,
As if she were Wautona seeking her child.
Apaukee looked at old Shushonee hushing the mite
And turned to the fire-circle where the braves smoked.
A young deer was the feast, flavored with wild rice and herb-ends...
Apaukee had called Wautona his young deer,
Slender of flank and swift to do his willing,
Though eight months had weighted her, waxing and waning.
Apaukee's throat became a thong that strangled the food back,
He could not eat of dead beauty by dead beauty.

"Give him the child," a young squaw, seeing, said to Shushonee,
Crooning low savage hush-songs by the teepee,
"The breath of his bride is in it." But old Shushonee maundered,
"A man child will make a man forget.
A girl child will fill his heart with remembrance."
And yet she tottered across the glow toward Apaukee, --
While the moon still like Wautona's spirit walked the Canyon,
While shadows stood around like dead braves shrouded, --
And would have handed the little flesh to the father of it,
Had not Kutowaw, suddenly rising, thrown a glance
Of cold between like a stone veil and stayed her, saying:
"Wa! woman, awa! The Indian way
And the way of the Utes is not the way of the white man.
The dead of the paleface go to the spirit-land
With no weapons, no food buried beside them.

Nor does the woman, dying of birth, take her child there:
It is left behind in the lodges.
But long enough has the white man's law compelled us."
He towered tall as a totem and his words towered;
They opened gulfs at the feet of thought, for had not
The old custom lapsed for years while Uray ruled,
The child-burial rite abhorred by the white man?
And now did Kutowaw, loving his daughter, though she had mated
A half-breed, mean to revive it despite the Law
Forbidding its use from Great Water to Great Water?
Apaukee stunned gazed upon Kutowaw
And did not take the little flesh in his arms' cradle.
But the bloods began their battle again within him,
The ghostly generations of the White,
Inheritors of a Child born in a Manger,
Against the primitive ages of the Red.

"Kutowaw," then at length he ventured, "is wiser maybe
Than the strong gods who give our land to the paleface,
Driving the Indian out from under the sky's lodge.
Kutowaw for the Utes has made much medicine:
He has sent the wind for the rain-cloud and brought it up,
He has made the rains plow the earth and give us harvests.
He has flung spells against fever, 'til there was body-coolness.
But the old burial ways --"
He did not say more,
For the new-born whimpered suddenly there on the bones
Of bosomless old Shushonee, whimpered weakly against
The darkness of the world it had sadly come to.
And in the whimper Apaukee heard another voice, Wautona's speaking,
Wautona, his beloved; and suddenly out of his eyes,
Breaking the granite of his will, the tears gushed,
A torrent fearless of shame. Turning he flung himself
On the body of his dead squaw and called her name and her name
'Til the night-canyon ached with unseen wraiths of her.

Kutowaw heard, contemptuous, and spoke again,
As the soul of the fire sent sparks praying upward:
"The Utes will shrink no longer from the old way, disgrace is on us.
When dawn comes and the burial rites, Apaukee shall lay
The child in the mother's arms. On the long journey
Wautona shall have its lips to draw the pain from her breasts,
As her mother had and the tribe women before her."

But Apaukee springing up quickly,
The bloods in him warring fiercer -- the white flow
With horror now against the red -- cried, "Ute braves,
Wautona is the daughter of Kutowaw,
But a child left to the cold knife of the night-wind
Is a child murdered; many peoples have said it,
Peoples beyond the Great Waters east and west,
Many peoples mightier than the Utes are.
Wautona was the fire within my heart,
Wautona was the magic in my bow's strength.
Gone to the land of the spirit she is dearer to me.
But the cold weight of a murdered child upon her breast
Would cause her spirit returning to curse our camp-fires."

Then wraths worked across Kutowaw's warped face
As shuttles across tangled threads of a loom,
Though his voice came as cold as the north wind far-off:
"Apaukee has drunk poison talk at the white man's lodges,
But I have made medicine as your chiefs have
By secret wisdom old as the buttes and rivers.
The Indian gods are your gods. Let one of you take
The child from old Shushonee and lay it naked to die
On the rocks, that Wautona's spirit may not lack it
And turn revengeful back to waste our hunting."

A silence hung. Apaukee waited. The braves sat
Blanketed in the red ring of the camp-fire.
The moon was gone to her lodge beyond the Bad Lands,
The Great Spirit in starry wampum brooded impassively.
The River purged the Canyon down in the darkness.

"Awa!" a brave cried then, suddenly leaping war-like
From the red circle, "When were the Utes cowards?
The child of a dead woman belongs to the woman;
Another who gives it pap steals from the dead,
And famine is the price the dead will exact for it."
He wrenched the little pale one from Shushonee's arms,
Where pitifully it nuzzled at her nipple,
And would have stripped it instantly of body-swathing,
To lay it out in the night wind on the cliff,
Had not Apaukee, swifter, seized it and flung the brave
Backward and turned and fled toward the night-dark
As if it were Wautona upon his bosom.

There was outcry, springing to feet and grasping of bows.
The only weapon the law of the Whites had left the Utes,
Then twenty arrows sang -- Kutowaw's loudest --
For the blood of the tribe's traitor; and Kutowaw's found him.
They brought Apaukee back, pierced as the child was by a flint head,
And the squaws laid the birthling on Wautona's breast.
Then in the Council Kutowaw's voice stood up and said:
"Who asks what shall be done with the flesh of Apaukee?
The deep canyon shall be his grave: and the white man
May find him and come questioning us: but not before
Our friends the vultures gnaw away the name of him."

And so it was. And so the red dawn came
And poured new sacrificial blood on the earth's altar.
Then Kutowaw, and the braves with him, bore Wautona,
The little halfpaleface on her heart like a death-bud,
Into the pines and scratched a shallow grave there
And chanted their rites and moaned their tribal wails
'Til the night came and stilled their tongues with stars.
But Apaukee's grave was a rock-cleft so deep and dark
That the wings and beak of the vulture hovered vainly
And claws of the coyote could not defile it.





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