The first flute

At a Glance

• Central figures: A young Lakota man, unnamed in most tellings, who is grieving after being rejected by a woman he loves; a woodpecker whose pecking hollows out a cedar branch; the wind, which speaks through the hollowed wood and teaches the young man to play.
• Setting: Lakota tradition (Northern Plains); the story takes place in open prairie and along a wooded creek, in the time before the Lakota had any musical instrument for courtship.
• The turn: Alone and sleepless on the prairie, the young man hears a sound he has never heard before - the wind passing through a dead cedar branch that a woodpecker has drilled with holes - and he follows it.
• The outcome: The young man takes the branch, learns to shape the holes and control his breath through it, and creates the first siyotanka - the Lakota courting flute. When he plays it at the edge of camp, the woman who had refused him walks out to find him.
• The legacy: The siyotanka became the instrument Lakota men used to court women, played at dusk outside the camp circle; its sound was considered so powerful that some elders warned young men not to play it carelessly.

He could not sleep. He had not slept properly in days. The young man lay on his back in the grass with his eyes open, watching stars slide across the sky, and what kept him awake was nothing noble - just a woman who had looked past him as though he were a dog standing near the fire. She had smiled at someone else. He had walked away from camp because he could not stand to be near her lodge, hearing her voice carry through the hide walls while she spoke to her mother, to her sisters, to anyone who was not him.

He walked until the camp was a cluster of small fires behind him. The prairie opened in every direction, and there was no comfort in it.

The Sound in the Creek Bottom

Sometime after the moon set, he heard something. It came from the line of cottonwoods and cedar along the creek to the south. It was not a bird. It was not a coyote. It was a sound he had no name for - low, then high, wavering, almost like a voice singing without words. It stopped when the wind dropped. When the wind rose again, it returned.

He stood and walked toward it. The grass was wet. He could hear the creek now, running thin over stones, and the sound was louder here - coming from somewhere in the trees, up off the ground. He stopped and listened. The wind pushed through the branches overhead and the sound came again, five or six notes that rose and fell and then trailed into silence.

He waited. The wind came back. The sound came back.

He began to move through the brush, feeling with his hands, looking up. In the half-dark he could make out the shapes of branches against the stars. He followed the sound to a particular tree - a cedar, dead, with its bark peeling in long strips. One branch stuck out at an angle, pale where the wood had dried. And he could see, when he got close, that the branch was full of holes. Small, round holes punched into the wood in a rough line.

A woodpecker had done this. He had seen their work a hundred times. But he had never heard wind pass through it this way - the holes were spaced so that the air sang through them, each one a different pitch, the whole branch moaning and whispering when the wind moved.

He broke the branch off. It was light and dry. He held it up and the wind caught it and the sound poured through his hands.

The Breath

He carried the branch back to his place in the grass and sat with it across his knees. The wind had died. The branch was silent. He turned it over, studying the holes by touch. Six of them, drilled clean through. The inside of the branch was hollow where the heartwood had rotted or been eaten out.

He put one end to his lips and blew. A rough, breathy noise came out - nothing like what the wind had made. He tried again, softer. A faint tone. He covered some of the holes with his fingers and blew again. The tone changed. Higher. He lifted a finger. Lower.

He sat there for a long time, blowing into the dead wood, covering and uncovering holes, learning what each combination did. His breath was not the wind. The wind was steady and patient and could blow for hours. His breath came in short pushes and his lips got tired and the sounds he made were clumsy. But somewhere in the clumsiness there were pieces of what he had heard in the trees - those wavering, rising notes.

By the time the sky began to gray in the east he could play four notes in a row that sounded like something. Not a song. But a shape that a song could fill.

The Shaping

Over the following days he did not return to camp. He stayed along the creek, eating what he could find - chokecherries, a rabbit he snared, creek water. He worked on the branch. He used his knife to clean out the bore, scraping the soft rotten wood until the hollow ran true from end to end. He trimmed the holes wider and more even. He carved a flat on the top surface for his lower lip to rest against, and he notched a slot near the blowing end to direct the air.

He was not a craftsman. He had no teacher. The woodpecker and the wind had made the first version and he was trying to understand what they had done. Some changes made the sound better. Some killed it. He ruined one branch entirely and had to find another dead cedar limb and start over, drilling the holes himself this time with the tip of his knife, spacing them the width of a finger apart because that was what the woodpecker had done.

The second one was better. The sound was clearer. He could play a line of notes now that moved up and came back down and that sounded, to his own ear, the way he felt - not angry, not desperate, just open. A question with no answer in it. A voice saying: I am here.

At the Edge of Camp

He cleaned himself in the creek. He braided his hair. He walked back toward camp in the late afternoon, and when the sun was going down and the cook fires were lit and the shadows were long, he sat on a rise just outside the circle of lodges and he played.

People stopped talking. Dogs turned their heads. Children stood still. The sound of the siyotanka carried across the camp, thin and clear in the evening air, and no one had heard anything like it. It was not drumming. It was not singing. It was one person’s breath turned into something that moved through the air on its own, finding its way between the lodges like smoke.

The woman came out. She stood at the entrance to her family’s lodge with her hand on the hide flap, looking toward the sound. She did not know who was playing. She walked out past the fire, past the horses, past the last lodge, and found him sitting in the grass with the cedar branch at his lips.

He stopped playing. She sat down next to him. Neither of them spoke. After a while he played again, quieter, and she stayed.

The Flute’s Power

The old men in camp examined the instrument the next morning. They passed it hand to hand. A few tried to blow through it and got nothing but air. The young man showed them how to shape the breath - gentle, not forced, the way you blow on an ember, not the way you blow out a fire.

Other young men began to carve their own. They used cedar when they could find it, sumac or ash when they could not. The shapes varied. Some were longer, deeper in pitch. Some had five holes, some six, some seven. But the siyotanka was always played for the same reason: a man alone, at the edge of camp, in the last light, sending his breath out toward someone who might or might not come to hear it.

The elders said to be careful with it. The flute’s sound could reach into a person and make them feel things they had not chosen to feel. That was not a small power. A man who played without honest feeling was using the flute as a kind of trick, and the sound would know, and it would turn hollow in his hands.

The young man kept his first siyotanka - the rough one, the one the woodpecker had started and the wind had played and he had finished. He never carved a better one. He did not need to.