A HORSE WITH NO NAME

"Take the horse trail behind the last house" directed the Indian Health Service doctor while handing me a ratty pair of high-top Converse sneakers. "It's probably about 8-miles through the hills to the trail back to Lame Deer."

Take it I did, jogging along the dusty track up through the cedars in the smoky late afternoon haze from the Yellowstone fire two hundred miles due west of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. The problems of the day's patients were brushed off, one by one, by the pungent sagebrush growing out over the path as it steepened and narrowed. Ten-year-old Kayho Magpie with his long braids was defiant toward this red-bearded white man until a gentle tug on his ear and jaw to go with amoxicillin relieved his earache. Cyrus Biglefthand's right elbow had hurt since the piercing ceremony had welcomed him home to the res. A radial head thrust had restored normal movement and started to relieve his pain. Maggie Means' taut shoulders carried the stress of being on the Tribal Council until myofascial release relaxed the tight muscles along with the crow's feet beside her eyes. These were the first osteopathic treatments experienced by the people whose grandparents had followed the buffalo and driven the U.S. Cavalry into the earth with bows and knives at the Little Big Horn.

Soon I emerged onto a high plateau rimmed by the graceful slant of scattered ponderosa pines. The trail spilled into a wide dirt circle, each footfall swallowed by a little puff of dust. Stopping in the middle of this odd high-desert bowl, I pondered my own lost trail. The fields I had been drawn to in the classroom hadn't borne out with rotations. Psychiatry, at first seductive with personality disorders and dysfunctional families, spurned my interest with it's requisite pushing of pills in state mental hospitals. Preventive Medicine sounded good, but, in practice, favored populations over people. Family Medicine had been my fall back until every ventilator patient became my father struggling for air after a botched pneumonectomy that I had steered him into. The way forward was unclear, and the sun was going down both for my residency application deadline and the big Montana sky. That's when my immediate situation hit me like the wet cow pie by my big left foot: Lost trail, free range reservation, bison herd, manure pile. I was standing in the middle of a buffalo wallow at sunset with no idea of which way to go.

A "garumph" over a little rise made me jump. Then I tiptoed slowly toward the sound. Peeking over, I startled a lone black stallion who bolted away through a small break in the pines. I followed and found myself galloping downhill in the languorous prairie dusk, rolling into Lame Deer as darkness finally fell.