"In the Pawnees' opinion the whites were headed for the big trading post that was being built on the Arkansas -- so that was where Greasy Lake decided to go. There was always the likelihood of finding interesting goods around a new trading post. The whites were always inventing useful things. Though Greasy Lake had no money he could sometimes get the whites to exchange goods for prophecies. Usually he just made simple prophecies, informing them of the location of a nice buffalo herd he had happened to pass. This kind of information might even earn him a new gun, if the whites were in a generous mood.
The sight of the lost balloonist, drinking muddy water from a puddle when there was a fine spring in plain sight, reminded Greasy Lake that there was really no predicting the eccentricities of whites, and no exaggerating their ineptitude. For one thing they kept producing watches and clocks, instruments that were supposed to measure time and break it into units, when common sense should have told them that the notion that time could be cut up, like a buffalo shank or a fish, was simply absurd. Time lay all one, open and eternal, infinite like the sky. Of course, there were seasons, the moon waxed and waned, the geese flew south or north, and yet all the while time remained unaffected and unchanged."
-- Larry McMurtry, By Sorrow's River
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