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CASTING OUT FEAR
In Washington, I discovered that I was fearful of one of my superiors, a man with whom I had had conflict in the past but was now on a friendly basis. Indeed, he had played a central role in promoting me to run The New York Times's Washington bureau and was supportive, even solicitous, in every way. Yet I feared his condemnation.
It made me embarrassed to be in my late forties and to be fearful of another man. I did not share this with anyone. But I fell into a habit. Every morning when I got to the office, I took a piece of adhesive note paper and wrote on it this sentence: "It is a good day to die." I then stuck this piece of paper beside the intercom through which I talked each day with this person.
"It is a good day to die" is, of course, the battle cry of the Dog Soldiers, the warrior class of the Cheyenne Indians and the most feared fighters among the Plains Indians.
One day, Ferne Horner, the office manager in the Times Washington bureau and the only woman I know personally who has been a paratrooper in the Israeli army, came in and pointed to the note. "I know what you're doing," she said.
She remarked that Crazy Horse, the greatest war chief of the Oglala Sioux, had borrowed this cry from the Cheyenne and used it to prepare the confederated armies of the Plains Indians for the battle at Little Big Horm. "It works," she said.
"I know," I said.
And it had. . . .
[Sometime later,] I went to the canyon . . ., hiking carefully up the rock-boned shore and casting carefully into each promising eddy. I fished alone from morning until great shards of black shadow lay across the walls and the Gros Ventre in its rushing down became opaque, indifferent, and a little dangerous-looking. Beside those waters, the death song of the Cheyenne entered me, filled me up, and I knew that it was a good day to die. And I understood, on the stroke of that moment, that the cry of the Dog Soldier is not about fatality but about freedom.
