Light Action in the Caribbean by Barry Lopez Read Free Book Online

one of the guards had an outside library card, and he started bringing the books in so Emory could study them.
    For a couple of months, a long time, really, it went along like this. People wanted to tell their own stories in the beginning, about hunting deer or seeing a mountain lion once when they were camping. Emory would let them talk, but no onehad the kind of knowledge he had, and that kind of story faded away. The warden knew what Emory was doing and he could have shut it right down, but sometimes they don’t go by the book in prison because nobody knows what reforms people. Sometimes an experiment like this works out, and the warden may get credit. So he left us alone, and once we knew he was going to leave Emory alone our wariness disappeared. We could pay attention without being afraid.
    That tension came back only once, when Emory asked if he could have a medicine pipe sent in, if he could share the pipe around and make that part of the ceremony. No way, they said.
    So Emory just talked.
    Two interesting things were going on now. First, Emory had drawn our attention to animals most of us felt were not very important. He talked about salamanders and prairie dogs the same way he talked about wolverine and buffalo. So some guys started to identify with these animals, like garter snakes or wood rats, and not with wolves. That didn’t make any difference to us now.
    The second thing was that another layer of personality began to take hold on the cell block. Of the one hundred and twenty of us, about sixty or sixty-five listened to Emory every day. We each had started to gravitate toward a different animal, all of them living in this place where Emory grew up in Montana. Even when we were locked up we had this sense of being a community, dependent on each other. Sometimes in our cells at night we would cry out in our dreams in those animal voices.
    I identified with the striped skunk, an animal Emory saidwas slow to learn and given to fits of anger and very independent in its ways. It is a nocturnal creature, like me. When I began dreaming about the striped skunk, these dreams were unlike any I had had before. They were long and vivid. The voices were sometimes very clear. In most of these dreams, I would just follow the skunk, watching him do things. I’d always thought animals like this were all the time looking for food, but that’s not what the skunk did. I remember one winter night (in the dream) I followed the skunk across hard crusted snow and along a frozen creek to a place near a small treeless hill where he just sat and watched the stars for a long time. In another dream, I followed the skunk into a burrow where a female had a den with two other females. It was spring, and there were more than a dozen small skunks there in the burrow. The male skunk had brought two mice with him. I asked Emory about this, describing the traveling and everything. Yes, he said, that’s what they did, and that’s what the country he grew up in looked like.
    After people started dreaming like this, about the animals that had chosen each of us (as we understood it now), our routine changed. All the maneuvering to hold positions of authority or safety on the cell block, the constant testing to see who was in control, who was the most dangerous, who had done the worst things, for many of us this was no longer important. We’d moved into another place.
    Emory himself didn’t make people nervous, but what was happening to the rest of us now did. The guards, just a little confused, tried to look tougher, figure it out. Any time you break down the tension in prison, people can find themselves. The gangs on our block, except for the Aryan Brotherhood,had unraveled a little by this time. People were getting together in these other groups called “Horned Lark” and “Fox” and “Jackrabbit.” Our daily schedule, of course, never changed—meals, lights out, showers—but all through it now was this thing that had gotten into