CHARLESTOWN -- As a young hunter in the Connecticut woods, Lloyd Wilcox knew instinctively where to find deer, even in the thickest stands of laurel.
He got that ability, he says, from his father, a medicine man for the Narragansett Indian tribe.
Instinct, magic, or something else -- it doesn't matter what you call it.
"I don't believe in miracles," Wilcox says. "But there is an inner feeling. Somehow, things come unbidden."
The third-generation medicine man, whose Indian name is Running Wolf, has been relying on that feeling for 35 years to guide the tribe through ancient ceremonies and modern political battles alike.
He felt it in 1975, when he and other Narragansetts sued for the return of their aboriginal lands. "I had no doubts," he says.
Wilcox still relishes a good debate. A lifelong reader, he draws on seemingly unrelated topics -- Egyptian burial rites, Longfellow's poem "Hiawatha," or the catastrophic origin theories of Immanuel Velikovsky -- to make a point or question his own assumptions. His arguments branch off, somersault, circle back. "No straight lines," he says.
But at 71, Wilcox stoops slightly. A silver bolt runs through his dark hair, parted in the middle and tied in the back. His left eye, behind gold-framed aviator glasses, is scarred by glaucoma.
He buried his traps long ago, after the mink he and his father once sold for $36 a pelt became scarce. He still owns a favorite rifle, but he hasn't hunted deer for years -- the old woods are gone, replaced by houses.
"There have been massive changes in my short life, from a dirt road and a horse and buggy to a space shot, and people have changed with it," he says.
Although Wilcox has no immediate plans to step down, that day will come, just as it did for his father and grandfather. The tribe will need a younger medicine man, one who can bridge the gap between the tribe's elders and its youth.
Wisdom alone is not enough, Wilcox says. "When you train a medicine man, you're training someone who can span the generations."
LAWRENCE WILCOX taught his son to trap, hunt and fish in the thick woods and streams around Putnam, Ct., a mill town near the Rhode Island border.
In the summers, the elder Wilcox, called Lone Wolf, packed his father's medicine pipe with tobacco and led his tribe in ceremonies older than the nation.
Lloyd watched and learned. But he also tested his father's spiritual beliefs against the scientific theories he learned in public school. Key principles in ecology, biology and chemistry all meshed with his father's lessons about nature, Wilcox says.
The youngest of four brothers, he wasn't expected to become the tribe's medicine man; that role usually went to the oldest brother.
Also, Wilcox had other dreams.
As a boy, he had been fascinated by the gleaming DC-3s that flew high above a cedar tree next to his 17th-century house, a wood building without plumbing or electricity.
So when he left the Army in 1955, Wilcox used the GI bill to study algebra and physics at a Connecticut technical school.
Afterward, he applied for a federal license to work on commercial jet engines. His girlfriend, Alberta Stanton, a Narragansett Indian and a nurse, helped him study. On the bank of Potter Pond, she called out test questions and Wilcox answered them.
He got a job with American Airlines, working the midnight shift. From hangar 5 he serviced commercial jets at New York's LaGuardia Airport.
He was 150 miles from the Putnam woods -- and loved it.
"For a country kid, there was no better experience" than to taxi a jet out of a hangar "or to stand on a corner in Flushing, New York, with a T-bird behind you and a wad of bills in your pocket."
The euphoria lasted eight years. During much of that time Wilcox focused on the Lockheed Electra, a turbo prop plane with a 99-foot wing span. Despite his experience, he saw other men -- white men -- promoted ahead of him. Then his father had a stroke. Alberta, his future wife, was back in Rhode Island.
"I was torn between two worlds," he says.
The world of his ancestors won out.
BACK IN SOUTHERN New England, Wilcox set aside his jet engine tools to build stone walls, chimneys and foundations, a traditional Narragansett trade his father taught him.
The elder Wilcox, weak from his stroke, now had something else to pass on.
"When the finger was pointed at me to be the medicine man, I already knew most of the ceremonies and teachings," says Wilcox, who was in his mid-30s at the time. His three older brothers, changed by combat in World War II, did not want the job.
Nor did Wilcox, initially. "I didn't feel worthy," he says.
But the tribe's elders urged him to reconsider. It was an obligation -- and an honor, they said.
Wilcox met with his father. "I told him I'd do my best. It's as simple as that."
IT WAS A CRUCIAL time for Native Americans. Nationwide, they were protesting the loss of their land and fighting for self-determination.
A group of Indians occupied Alcatraz Island in 1969. Two years later, activists occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington. "They were raising hell," says Wilcox.
In Maine, lawyer Thomas Tureen helped the Passamaquoddy and Penobscot Indians sue the Interior Department for millions of dollars and the return of thousands of acres. Tureen argued that all of the early treaties with New England's Indians were illegal, and looked for other tribes with similar histories.
Encouraged by Tureen and other lawyers, Wilcox and a dozen other Narragansetts gathered in the low-slung longhouse and launched a two-pronged effort to win federal recognition and recover tribal land.
"For me, it all started in the longhouse, with one bulb hanging down," says Wilcox. "It was the citadel, so to speak."
In 1975, the Narragansetts sued the state and several private landowners, seeking the return of 3,200 acres. After a bitter three-year fight, they settled for 1,800 -- "a happy medium," says Wilcox, who was a tribal councilman in the '70s and '80s, as well as medicine man.
Five years later, the federal government recognized the tribe. It was a sweet win, Wilcox says: the Narragansetts used the state's own records to prove they had been a tribe for 300 years.
Wilcox fought for other tribal rights in the '90s. In 1994, he helped negotiate a casino deal with then-Gov. Bruce Sundlun. He did it quickly and fairly, says Sundlun, now a Narragansett casino advocate. "He is an honest and an honorable man."
The state Supreme Court later ruled the compact was illegal -- but not before the two men smoked a peace pipe in the governor's office.
In 1996, Sen. John Chafee successfully introduced an amendment to the federal budget that restricted gambling on Narragansett lands. Wilcox and First Tribal Councilman Randy Noka flew to Washington to protest.
Speaking before a House committee, Wilcox was brief but pointed.
"This is about control," he told Chafee and other high-ranking congressmen. Rhode Island lawmakers want to ensure that the Narragansetts "have no hand in controlling their own destiny."
WILCOX NO LONGER testifies before Congress, or flies to Nantucket on a GTECH helicopter, talking gambling software with company officials. But he remains a key figure in tribal politics, as an adviser to Chief Sachem Matthew Thomas.
On Friday mornings, the chief drives to the Four Winds Medical Center, where the medicine man keeps an office.
Sometimes the two men discuss the tribe's latest casino effort. But they also talk about clan disputes, family problems and cultural matters.
Often they chat outside, so Wilcox can smoke.
He's cranky if he can't smoke. And he can be cryptic, Thomas says. But after reflection, his message usually becomes clear.
"I learn a lot from him," says Thomas. "He has to, in a sense, get me ready for war."
Colonial writers attributed great powers to the medicine men, or pawwaws: They could cast spells, sink ships by swimming beneath their hulls, and resist arrows and musket balls.
Wilcox, who drives a rust-eaten blue truck and wears buttoned-down shirts, sees his job in more prosaic terms.
"The more unobtrusive I can be, the better," he says.
Part of his role is to help tribal members solve personal problems, often through tough practical advice. His method is to suggest several scenarios, leaving the solution to the individual.
"Tribes are a depressed people," he says. "Sometimes I can help and sometimes I can't."
Wilcox doesn't preach or save souls.
"I can't lead someone to the Great Spirit," he says. Each Narragansett must find his or her own way.
Some find their way through the rituals practiced by the medicine man and others.
"The ceremonies are important," Wilcox says. "They are a continuation of what we once celebrated before were intruded upon. They keep the dream alive."
It is the fundamentals that matter: Earth. Fire. Water. Air.
"AS LONG AS there is a need for a people to be a tribe, there will be a need for a medicine man," Wilcox says.
The role is often handed down from father to son or mother to daughter, but can also be passed on to another relative.
Wilcox, who has no children, long ago invited his nephew John Brown III to be his understudy. He's been training him, off and on, for some 20 years.
"He's quite sensitive to things beyond the five senses," Wilcox says.
Brown, 46, had dreams and visions even as a child. "I could see a day or two ahead," he says. "Things that seem to have no apparent connection -- I see how they connect. I see beyond the curve."
Growing up in Ashaway, Brown learned about Narragansett culture from his mother, Ella Sekatau, the tribe's genealogist and Wilcox's sister.
"All his life he has been in training," says Sekatau, adding that her family line, made up of medicine men and women, has been entrusted with keeping the tribe's stories alive.
As the tribe's historic preservation officer, Brown protects early villages and burial sites from development. He's retrieved thousands of Indian artifacts from Brown, Harvard and other universities.
"Anywhere you walk in Rhode Island, you walk upon the bones of the Narragansetts," he says. "Many of your modern cities are built on our ancient homes, roads and trails."
Too often, he says, non-Indians "have little tolerance for history unless it's their own and they can glorify it . . . But when you strip away the glory and are left with the absolute past, some of it is not glorious and some of it is very ugly."
At 6-feet-4 and 260 pounds, Brown can be intimidating. He admits he is gruff, and that his manner has rubbed some developers, officials and even tribal members the wrong way.
There are two sides to John Brown, he jokes: The right side and suicide.
But, he says, "If you deal with me straight, I have no problem."
Wilcox says his understudy will make a good medicine man -- if he can tame his arrogance.
Brown shakes his head. A long time ago he might have been arrogant, he says. "But it takes too much energy now."
And don't forget, Brown adds, the young Wilcox was also called arrogant.
"He's always been one of my heroes. To be able to weather the storm as long as he has is admirable," Brown says. "It's not arrogance. It's self-assurance . . . the ability to wade into the deep waters while others stay on the shore."
THE AUGUST SUN burns through the morning haze, thick as a blanket over the tribe's ceremonial grounds in the Charlestown woods. An advertisement calls the two-day powwow the tribe's 328th, but some say the gathering is older than time.
Wilcox asks his apprentice to join him in the medicine circle, near the Narragansett church.
Wearing an electric-blue headband and a leather vest with a wolf's head design, the wiry Wilcox, his body bent into a C, lights a small fire. Towering above, in jeans and a white Narragansett tribal T-shirt, the bear-like Brown peers at his mentor through shiny sunglasses.
For a moment, nothing happens. Then the fire crackles; the wood smoke mixes with the piney smell of fresh-cut tree limbs.
Like his father and his grandfather before him, Wilcox draws smoke through a carved pipe filled with white willow, bear berry and tobacco root. He faces the four winds -- north, south, east, west -- and points the pipe in each direction.
His face turned upward, he acknowledges the spirit world and seeks a sign that the day will be a good one.
