where the buffalo roam; any

[mandan]

He is alone; stands aloof in his contemplation but prominent upon a knoll at the meadow’s edge. The trees sway and swish nearby in the spring gales that blow warm breath down upon the land, awakening the grasses green and the flowers sweet and nodding still caught up in their winter sleep. He sees it, but the beauty of it is momentarily lost upon him because he is too brutish to heed the blossoming meadow and her sweetness. Maybe it is that he has no care for it, except for the long sweep of grass that beckons to him and starts an itch in his feet that causes them to knead the top of the knoll in angst - he wants to run, but restrains himself, the muscles bunching beneath the simple brown of his flesh, then relaxing as stillness finds him again. He can remember the last time he was here; but a foal and at his mother’s side, so alike to her as to have been a twin more than a son, and though the medicine-hat mare never coddled any of her foals, she might have paid him more affection than all the others, for he was like her - not ageless, but not like them either, wholly horse but something else altogether. His uniqueness only ran so far as the horns atop his head, three twists to them and about thirty-three inches long and heavy, so heavy! He has grown used to their heaviness though, and distant is the gaze beneath them that searches long for something he has no name to. It could be a sense of belonging that he lacks, whether to land or someone, for all he has ever belonged to was himself and before that, Scalped, the mother with the long puckering scar over her red-shielded breast. Mandan though, can feel the grass calling to him again and before he knows it, - for he is but stallion flushed with the vigors of all that youth and muscle! - he is running, a full gallop that sweeps him round and round the meadow’s edges, hemmed in by the forest and the trails that branch off here and there, none of them the least bit enticing to him because he is too deep in the throes of running to see all else but blurs and the vastness ahead of him into which he speeds headlong and brash, his addax horns spiraling back from the flyaway strands of black mane that flap out sideways like crow’s wings.