NARROW VALLEY
R. A. Lafferty
This man Lafferty, who lives in Tulsa, surely must have the most fertile, original, and altogether bizarre mind in all the northeast Oklahoma, at the very least. Who but Lafferty could fit 160 acres of good farmland into a five-foot gully? Who but Lafferty could dream up so ingenious a story to go with that extraordinary situation? Why, no one could ... no one but Lafferty, and, luckily for us, Lafferty did. In the year 1893, land allotments in severalty were made to the remaining eight hundred and twenty-one Pawnee Indians. Each would receive one hundred and sixty acres of land and no more, and thereafter the Pawnees would be expected to pay taxes on their land, the same as the White Eyes did.
“Kitkehahke!” Clarence Big-Saddle cussed. “You can’t kick a dog around proper on a hundred and sixty acres. And I sure am not hear before about this pay taxes on land.” Clarence Big-Saddle selected a nice green valley for his allotment. It was one of the half dozen plots he had always regarded as his own. He sodded around the summer lodge that he had there and made it an all-season home. But he sure didn’t intend to pay taxes on it.
So he burned leaves and bark and made a speech:
“That my valley be always wide and flourish and green and such stuff as that!” he orated in Pawnee chant style. “But that it be narrow if an intruder come.”
He didn’t have any balsam bark to burn. He threw on a little cedar bark instead. He didn’t have any elder leaves.
. . .
