Thičhóka kiŋ él heȟáka waŋ onáȟa s’e nážiŋ čha, waŋyáŋke.
“Heȟáka oyáte kiŋ ówapȟa kte,” eyíŋ na iyáye.
An elk hung in my barn for the winter. Upside down with a hook through her ankle, swinging gently in the wind like something restless. I must have jumped three feet in the air the first time I saw her. No one had told me she was spending her time there, dangling precariously from the dusty, nest-ridden rafters until it was warm enough to butcher her.
I thought she was a horse. I remember feeling bile rise in my throat at that notion. How cruel to display a horse like a trophy— undignified and abandoned— after everything they have given us, all the years we've weathered together. But it wasn’t a horse, only an elk.
Only an elk. It feels disrespectful to write. As if this elk wasn't once a conscious being. As if her large dark eyes were not once wet and glossy, as if breath did not once exit her velvet nose as puffs of white steam in the cold air. I felt guilty the moment the thought had crossed my mind.
Šúŋkawakȟáŋ líla óta wičhúŋyuhapi.
I edged my way around her, afraid to touch for reasons I still can't explain. I was there to see the horses after all. They were waiting for me at the gate, huffing and snorting while they watched me grab fistfuls of grain. I fed them from the palm of my hand, laughing when their scruffy whiskers tickled my wrist and cringing when they covered me in saliva. I wasn't wearing a jacket or gloves, but the heat of the horses crowded around me was enough to keep me comfortable. Their warm breath kept my fingers from turning blue.
When I was a kid, I used to tell the horses all my secrets. I pretended that they were speaking back, using silly voices to make myself feel better. The rafters were never silent back then, something small and feathered was always moving above us. These days, I hate the oppressive quiet of the barn. I wished the horses would speak now— tell me everything was okay, that the elk at my back wasn't real. They didn't. Instead, they glanced over my shoulder every few minutes and pawed at the ground impatiently for more grain.
I wonder if they knew that the elk was not one of them. She had the same long legs, thick neck, and soft nose. Could they tell the difference from their vantage point in the pen? Did they fear that they would one day hang from the ceiling too? Maybe they didn't care, and I'm projecting emotions they just don't possess. Do horses contemplate mortality? Does an elk?
I left the barn in tears when I couldn't bear the weight of the elk's dull gaze anymore, but I wiped my eyes and smiled when my father greeted me inside the house. He didn't kill her. She was simply our winter meat supply; a gift from a family friend who hunted more than they needed. I pushed down the quiet resentment. We didn't talk about it. I don't think we ever will.
Ptaŋhá-ašké-iyúwi úŋ.
I am a hypocrite. I have never claimed otherwise. It’s hard to live in a modern world with a Lakota heart. We are taught to value all life, to thank the animals we eat, never to waste any of it, and certainly never kill without reason. Yet I walk through my house and don’t blink at the dead things decorating the space. A beaded coyote skin hangs on the wall in our kitchen. Sometimes I catch myself brushing my fingers through its fur, dusting it off the same way you might clean a rug, and only afterward remember that it was once alive.
Two golden eagle corpses live in our spare room. Their feet rest on our bread counter, next to my mothers rock collection. Papa says he’ll use them in his regalia someday, but the years drag on, and they’ve begun to feel, to me, less like sacred medicine and more like something forgotten.
Buffalo skulls— more than I can count on one hand— fill our home. They even hang from the back porch, staring at the prairie as though keeping watch. I usually stroke their foreheads when I go outside, whispering my hellos, burning sage when I remember. Their empty sockets still manage to look back at me, warm, like an old friend who refuses to leave.
Our house is full of bones, teeth, pelts, horns— merely tokens of life. Reminders of death. Sometimes I wonder if we keep them out of reverence, or if we are only fooling ourselves. Pretending that by keeping their remains near, we’ve kept something else alive too.
And I tell myself again: it’s hard to live with a Lakota heart. Harder still to decide what that means in a house so full of ghosts.
When I was a small child, my first “pet” was the pelt of a river otter. I named him Ollie. He resided on my bedpost, my silent protector. His glass eyes looked after me throughout the night, and when I’d wake up from nightmares, his soft fur would dry my tears. I have never mourned him. Never even considered it. Sometimes I worry that it makes me a bad person.
Wičhúŋt’e kiŋ waŋgláka čha íč’ilowaŋ.
Behind the barn lies a pet cemetery so crowded that I’ve forgotten where each animal is buried. Horses, dogs, cats, even lizards. Next to it, forgotten and left to the elements, are cow skeletons that have been there for well over twenty years. Our aussies used to dig them out of the dirt and bring them inside. I always laughed. Dogs will be dogs.
There’s a post on the edge of the ranch where you can almost always spot a bald eagle. They scout year-round for rabbits and prairie dogs. They’re fat with success. They eat the ones my family hits with their cars in the morning when we leave the driveway. Mama always frowns when she feels the thump under the tires, but the guilt passes as quickly as it comes. She forgets about it by the time she comes home.
I’m trying to make a point, but I’ve lost my way. I lose my way a lot on the ranch, not because I don’t know the land— I can pretty much see all seventeen acres at all times— but I am a chronic overthinker. My mind pulls me sideways. The bottoms of my feet are scarred from cactus spines I never noticed until it was too late.
The point is this: Death has always lived easily on the ranch. So why did the elk feel different? She wasn’t roadkill, she wasn’t buried, she wasn’t a skull; she was whole, and she was hanging in front of me. Maybe it was that wholeness that wouldn’t let me look away.
Wayázaŋ kiŋ t’é.
Sybille Canyon has a wildlife research facility on the right side of the road when you’re headed to Wheatland. Elk wander inside the tall fence, standing in the shade, drinking from troughs. Without their antlers, they really do look like horses.
When I was young, I didn't know why they were there. Sometimes I wish I could go back to that kind of ignorance, the soft kind that doesn’t demand you think too hard about the truth.
The truth is this: they are tested there. Infected with lethal diseases, studied until they die. The lab says it’s to save the species, but the thought leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. And I wonder if that’s part of why the elk in the barn unsettled me, because I’ve seen what happens when they become experiments instead of animals. Because every time I looked at her, I thought about all the elk gathered behind fences, their lives already measured out in advance.
Mama used to work at the state microbiology lab located upstairs from the state vet lab, where they did the same thing to cattle and buffalo. They weren’t kept in nice forest fields in a large canyon. They spent their final weeks, sick and suffering, rounded up in a small pen next to I-80.
Maybe elk unnerve me more because I’ve known them less. Because their deaths aren’t yet routine.
In my lifetime, I have seen the land change, the migration patterns break, the seasons tilt. I’ve never been able to face the temporality of the world around me. I couldn’t think too hard about where Ollie came from, or the coyote in the kitchen, or the buffalo skulls, or anything else that haunts my home. I can’t dwell too long on what’s vanishing, and maybe it’s because I think too much about my own impermanence. Maybe that’s why seeing the elk with her life-thread so freshly cut by the Fates felt like a stomp on the foot. Or perhaps more like a bullet to the lung. Maybe it’s because some part of me knows that, like the elk, I am only passing through.
All that, and I still don’t know if an elk contemplates mortality.
Ičápšiŋpšiŋčala ikpíša kiŋ waníl áyapi.
When I was a kid, I used to pick up fallen baby swallows with rubber gloves and have my father put them back in their little mud nests that covered the space made by the overhang of our roof. They kept the swarms of mosquitos at bay every summer. Their chirps were a staple of my childhood. A couple of their huts have stayed glued to the house, but I haven’t seen a swallow in years. I keep telling myself it’s hard to live in a modern world with a Lakota heart, but maybe what I mean is that it’s hard to live with a heart at all.
