His mother thinks Patrick Grass will be himself again by the Sacred Hoop Run around the Black Hills — running is his medicine. When he ran the Sacred  Hoop as a boy, two buffalo came to him in a vision, told him he’d be the fastest runner around. And this: Don’t lose yourself. 

Part 2 of 4 — see parts 1, 3 and 4

BY COLLEEN KENNEY | Lincoln Journal Star

PINE RIDGE, S.D. - Two buffalo closed in on the boy.

One was white. One was brown. They made him stop and breathed on him.

The white buffalo spoke words the boy didn't understand. Lakota words. The brown one interpreted.

Patrick, you are going to be the fastest runner around.

The boy was in the sixth grade the year he had the vision. It was his first year in the Sacred Hoop Run, a 500-mile relay around the Black Hills. The run is a spiritual journey, not a race, that begins and ends on the northeast side of the Black Hills at Bear Butte, the most holy spot to the Lakota.

Many boys run the hoop at least once. As they run, they pray. About the good and the bad in their lives. About family struggles. Their own confusion and fear about being young and Lakota.

The boy was fast enough to run with his big brother and the other boys of Pine Ridge High. They took turns running with the team's sacred staff, a long, wooden stick tied with eagle feathers and strips of cloth in the sacred colors: red, white, yellow and black.

The day of the vision, an older boy had dropped the staff. So a medicine man gathered the boys in a circle, closed his eyes and spun around, holding the staff. When he stopped and opened his eyes, there was Patrick.

He was holding the staff when the buffalo came.

Someone may curse you. But always remember this…

He tried to run away. But the white one and the brown one caught up. The white one blew mucous on him, covering his face and arms and legs.

You are a real good boy, Patrick. Keep it that way. Don't lose yourself.

v v v

His 10-year-old niece carries the plaque around the duplex.

She finds an empty nail on the wall near the dining room table and hangs it there, under a dozen 8-by-10-inch class photos of smiling kids.

Male Athlete of the Year, Patrick Grass.

Patrick, just a junior, won the award this morning at Pine Ridge High's graduation ceremony.

He stared straight ahead as people applauded. There was a blank look in his eye. It's there now as he stares at the TV.

He's been slouched on the couch for hours, watching the Disney Channel, with all the little nieces and nephews coming in and out the front door.

"Everyone is so proud of him," he hears his mother, Rose Cottier, say. "All the young boys in Pine Ridge come here to visit him. They ask him, 'What kind of pills do you take to get so fast?'"

Older boys come here for Patrick, too.

They take him to parties. They used to be nice boys, she says. Now they do drugs and run around town in gangs.

"Right, Patrick?"

He looks over but doesn't say anything, turns back to the TV.

"I tell him, 'You need to stay away from those boys. The ones who can't run are making you do it because they're jealous.' They really mess him up, those boys."

Patrick used to sneak out his bedroom window at night to drink beer, his mother continues. He stopped a few months ago. Said he didn't want to end up like his father, drinking and sleeping down the road in Whiteclay.

The gang boys knocked out the front windows of the duplex with a bat. They dented his mother's new pickup.

Then one night a few weeks back, they pulled him out his window.

His mother sits at the table. She stares out the window at a place beyond the smudged dirt. Her fingers turn a pencil end over end over end.

His older brother, Wes Cottier, a former Pine Ridge police officer, sits there, too, holding one of his babies.

They can't figure it out. Patrick was always quiet. But never like this.

"Yesterday we were playing horseshoes, and he didn't say nothing," the brother says. "I'd ask him the score, and he'd give me two fingers. Then when he does talk, you have to have him repeat it. You have to get close to him to hear it."

The other day, Patrick missed the state track regionals. The coach came by with the van of runners. Patrick stayed in his room, said he wasn't feeling well.

His mother is rearing four of her children and most of her oldest daughter's seven in this three-bedroom duplex, weeds and dirt for a front yard, front windows still broken because she can't afford new ones.

The kids track in dirt, grind it into the linoleum. Dishes and plastic bags full of trash pile up in the kitchen.

If you put your trash outside, his mother explains, the rez dogs come in the night and chew open the bags.

She used to mop floors at the Pine Ridge hospital. She worked nights, coming home in time to fix breakfast. Then her washing machine at home broke about a month ago. Maybe she broke, too, she says. She quit her job.

She plays bingo now. She drinks sometimes, too.

Patrick's father doesn't have a job, either. Clifford Grass sleeps here sometimes when he's not drinking in Whiteclay.

His older brother has been staying here since his wife kicked him out, telling him his family is bringing him down and making him drink.

Nike once featured Wes in its "Why Do I Run?" national ad campaign when he was about Patrick's age. His hair was long then. He held a staff. In the caption, he talked about being tired and hungry but not giving up in the sixth leg of the Sacred Hoop Run.

He had a cross country scholarship to a college in Albuquerque. He stayed in the dorm most of the time, afraid of the city.

He smiles. "I only lasted a month. Rez life - it's hard to get away from. You get so used to it."

But Patrick has more talent than he ever did, Wes says. More doors are going to open for him, if he can shake off this strange shadow. If he wins state cross country again, he'll have scholarship offers from many schools.

Maybe he needs to return to the path of his hero, Billy Mills, another distance runner from Pine Ridge who went on to win a gold medal in the '64 Olympics in Tokyo.

On his bedroom wall, Patrick has a photo of himself, about sixth grade, standing with Billy Mills. Patrick has just won a race. He's smiling.

His hero's arm is around him.

Always follow your dreams, Patrick, he wrote on the photo.

A few years ago, Patrick changed his last name from Cottier to Grass to honor his father, Clifford Grass, a great Lakota runner who used to run alongside the horses on his grandfather's ranch.

He had "GRASS" tattooed in big letters down his right arm.

The other day, his mother says, Patrick told her he wanted alcohol treatment. Maybe he thinks if he does, she says, his dad will, too.

Maybe Patrick needs less pressure on him to run.

Maybe he needs to just will himself away from that couch and cartoons and go run the roads for miles, like he used to.

Running is his way off the rez, he's told people, his way to college.

"The Sacred Hoop Run is later this month," his mother says. "The Sacred Hoop Run really helps him. It'll help him build himself up again."

She calls Patrick over to the table.

He sits down and stares out the window, to the grassy alley between the rows of duplexes. A 5-year-old nephew plays on a jungle gym.

The other day, the nephew, Tyler, caught a big spider in a jar. He kept putting it on his arm so it would bite him. He wanted to turn into Spider-Man.

Two teenage boys walk past the jungle gym now. They look drunk. Trash is strewn about. Papers, cans. An empty Swanson's dinner box. A running shoe.

Patrick tries to get the words out. He takes up the pencil, tries to draw a picture.

"All scattered… I don't know… I'm depressed… in my room… I drink a lot."

Something happened to him, he says.

"I saw myself… I saw myself…"

Later that night, an ambulance takes him to a hospital in Rapid City, an hour and a half away, on the east side of the Black Hills. He's still there three weeks later.

For the first time since sixth grade, he doesn't run the Sacred Hoop.

v v v

The white one and the brown one also told the boy this:

If anything ever happens to you, call to us.

Reach Colleen Kenney at 473-2655 or ckenney@journalstar.com.