The Old Woman and the Black Dog

A Lakota Story From the Edge of the World

Somewhere on the edge of the prairie where it rises and falls into the broken lands of Makošíča, the Badlands, there is a place no map shows. Not a soul alive remembers how to find it. Roads have come, and tourists, and satellites in the sky, but still, no one sees this cave. It is hidden by time. It hides because it must.

Inside the cave lives an old woman. She is older than memory, older than the bones of the land. Her skin is creased like a dried-up walnut. She wears the dress of the ancestors, braintan buckskin, buttery soft with age, marked with the smell of smoke and earth. She does not speak. She does not leave. She has been here for generations beyond counting, sitting by the fire, working on a blanket strip made of dyed porcupine quills.

She flattens the quills with her teeth, as her grandmothers did long before the coming of glass beads and iron kettles. Her teeth are worn to nubs, but still, she bites, presses, and threads.

Beside her lies Šúŋka Sápa, the Black Dog. Massive, silent, always watching. He never sleeps with both eyes closed. He sees the old woman, her fire, her work. And he waits.

A few steps away from where she sits, an everlasting fire burns. She lit it when she came to this place, and she has kept it burning ever since. Over it hangs a great, handmade clay pot, ancient. Inside, wóžapi, a mashed berry soup, simmers and bubbles. But this is no ordinary soup. In it are the seeds of every plant, every medicine, every food that has ever grown. It is the belly of the Earth, stirring life.

Now and then, the old woman sets aside her quills. Slowly, she rises and shuffles over to the fire. Her steps are stiff. Her back bent. She stirs the soup with care, for if it scorches, the seeds may die, and who can say what will happen then?

While she stirs, Šúŋka Sápa moves quietly to her blanket strip. With his teeth, he pulls at the quills, just a few at first, one thread here, another there. And soon, what she has worked so long to create begins to unravel. By the time she returns, the design is changed, undone, and scattered across the floor.

She never scolds. She never chases him away. She only looks for a long while, taking in the tangle. She picks up a single quill, studies its color, and sees something she had not seen before. A new pattern. A new vision. Something even more beautiful. And so, she begins again.

Some say the old woman weaves the world. That every tribe, every creature, every mountain and river is stitched into her blanket. Some say that if she ever finishes her quillwork, with the final quill in place and the design complete, the world will come to an end. Everything will stop.

But she does not finish. The black dog sees to that.

And so it continues, creation and unraveling, vision and loss, the dance of fire and fiber, of soup and thread. This is the rhythm of time.

And maybe this is the teaching:

That the world is never finished.

That even ruin has beauty.

That something must always stir the soup.

And someone must always begin again.