Chapter 2

The hospital  was dark, it was the middle of the night. The  doctor sat on the end of the patients bed watching her. She was very old, the wrinkles on her face made her look beyond age into something further away. And she was dying. Clearly the old woman’s friend, pneumonia was taking her this cold dark winter night and she was leaving. Her family sat by her bedside, frightened and crying. The cold impersonal room, with it’s aseptic white walls, no pictures, machines fro oxygen and tubes was as material as it could be devoid of spirit. The doctor has tried all his tricks but in this primitive hospital  with almost no lab x-ray, no electrolytes or culture facilities his western medicine tricks were minimal at best. She had two IV’s for fluids and antibiotics, and she was dying. The doctor knew that from experience of years in hospital in big cities with alcoholics brought in from the snow in much the same condition.

The doctor heard a voice. “Call me.” What was that? He did not know. The voice was around him not somewhere, it seemed to come from the sky and earth and filled the room. He closed his eyes and felt something huge, he felt a giant bear behind him and then, as quickly as he felt it, it disappeared. But the voice continued. “Tell the family to call tall bear now.”  The doctor called the nurse, he did not speak Denai, and told her to tell the family to call tall bear.

The family looked even more frightened and worried now. It looked like they did not understand why a doctor would ask for tall bear and maybe more. The nurse could see they were not going to call, so she called for them. The doctor heard her speaking  in Navaho and she hung up.

The door opened and a man  came into the room. Suddenly the room was filled with a strange light. The light came from everywhere it had no one source and the room was different. It was as if the room suddenly become spacious, the walls seemed to evaporate or move outward at once, the ceiling raised and the floor dropped. The windows become like eyes to infinite space and it seemed to the doctor that it was now not night or day but out of time. The doctor looked at the man or rather tried to look at him and found he could not look directly at him, he had to look to one side and then the other and then move his eyes back and forth quickly from side to side and only then could he actually see him. The man was dressed in simple street clothes without adornment. He was very old, wrinkled like the old woman, he carried a canvas tote bag. He nodded to the family. The doctor could see nurses looking in from the small window in the door to the room. This had never happened before in the Indian Health Hospital, no one had ever called a medicine man to see a patient.

The man opening his bag and took some things out. He took out  drum, some sage, some feathers, a rattle, some tobacco. He took out a headdress of feathers, and put it on. He moved over to the woman in bed. She was unconscious and did not open her eyes but somehow her face changed completely when her reached her side. The room slowly become darker and darker and now it was hard to see and make out details. Through the haze of darkness or of something, the doctor could barely make out what was happening now. Then, the doctor heard a voice. “Thank you for calling me. This is for you. Watch carefully all that is going on. This is school. I  will change  you life now as I do the healing. Watch me.”

The doctor watched the scene, he could watch the man. When he looked at him he was out of focus and blurry and his borders indistinct. The man took out the rattle and started to rattle over the woman. The old woman had now disappeared and become more indistinct than the medicine man, she was now a shimmering shape moving in and out of reality. The medicine man started rattling and chanting in Navaho. The song was a lilting prayer like song that rose and fell like a dream song. As the doctor looked at the medicine man, the man disappeared and instead the doctor saw a huge indistinct bear, moving in and out of reality with lights around it. As the medicine man chanted and rattled a smoke like darkness arose from the woman’s blurry shape and rose and left the room through the window. The woman suddenly sat up in bed fully, looked directly at the medicine man and the room just as suddenly was back to the way It was. The woman, the light, the medicine man the nurses at the door were the way they were before. It was a hospital room in Indian Health. The lights above her bed were dimmed for the night. The family sat on plastic chairs near the wall, but the woman was now totally different. She had sat up, and she talked in Navaho to the man and then to her family. She looked many years younger, the wrinkles in her face had softened. She was relaxed and to the doctor surprisingly calm.

The medicine man took off his headdress and put the rattle and wing back in his bag. He turned and nodded to the family and then to the doctor and simply left the room. The doctor had no idea how long this took in real time or what had happened. It was not until many years had passed for the doctor to even realize and remember any details, then, it was only a fog moving and undulating like the mother’s breath.