Von Miller's Great Pilgrimage, and the Iron Star He Now Wears

By my troth, I have seen a great binding-over today, and though I do not have the learning to say what was bound to what, I set it down true, as is my labor.

The criers of this land — for they have criers here, though they do not stand in the square and shout, but speak instead from a box with a face in it, a marvel I will not attempt to explain twice in one dispatch — did proclaim that a mighty champion named Von Miller has forsworn his old lord, one called Denver, of the Broncos, and sworn fealty instead to a new and glittering house: the Dallas Cowboys. And he himself did say, and I have this from the criers direct, that it is "a dream within a dream." Which is a fine thing for a man to say of his own life, and I do not doubt him, though I confess I have had that same dream myself of a night, usually after bad cheese, and it did not end so well as his appears to be ending.

Now I must tell you plain: I do not know what a Cowboy is in this contest, save that it cannot mean what it means in my own country, where a cow-boy is a lad of nine set to keep the beasts from the turnip field with a stick and a great deal of shouting. I saw no cattle. I saw no turnip field. I saw instead a vast bowl of a place, bigger than any manor I have known, ringed about with more souls than attended the whole of the Michaelmas fair in the good years before the pox thinned us, and every one of them roaring as one throat. I asked the man beside me — a kindly stranger who did not understand my speech but was patient with me regardless, as one is patient with a man who has plainly wandered in from somewhere very far off, which by my reckoning I have — what manner of beast the Cowboys herded, and he laughed and gave me a meat-tube in a little bread trough and told me to watch the field. I have not yet worked out if the meat-tube was payment, sacrament, or simple charity, but I ate it, for I was hungry, and it was very good, and I have decided it is the finest thing this age has yet shown me, better even than the great glowing tapestry that hung above the whole affair displaying numbers no man could account for.

Of the man Von Miller himself I saw little, and here is where my report must be thin, for which I ask pardon. I am told he plays a position most fierce — I believe the word given me was that he "gets after the quarterback," which I took at first to mean a kind of tithe-collector, a man sent round to harry some lesser official until he coughs up what he owes the crown, and I confess I still half believe this, for I saw men in similar dress running very hard at one fellow in particular as though he had shorted them a bushel of wheat. If that is not what a quarterback is, I am sorry, for it is a fine enough guess and I intend to keep it.

He was, they say, a Bronco before, and is a Cowboy now, and I understand this the way I understand a man leaving one manor's service for another's — a better lord, better land, a hall with a bigger fire — save that here there is no lord at all that I could find, only a great deal of shouting and a document, which I am told is called a "contract," a word I know well enough from my own dealings with the miller, who is a cheat, though I do not say the Cowboys are cheats, having no evidence of it, only having learned young to distrust any man who asks you to put your name to a paper. Von Miller signed his gladly, by all report, and wept, or near did, which I understood better than anything else all day, for a man leaving one service for another, even a grander one, always weeps a little at the gate, whatever face he shows the crowd.

I will tell you what I understood best, and it was not the game. It was the beast. There came out onto the field, at some pause in the proceedings whose purpose I could not divine, a great painted ox, walking upright on its hind legs as no ox of my acquaintance has ever managed, and it danced, and threw small soft stones into the crowd, and the crowd caught them and were glad. I watched this ox for a very long while. I do not know its office. It tended no plow, herded no beast, ground no corn. It simply danced, magnificently, and asked nothing of anyone, and I confess that of all the sorceries I witnessed in that great bowl — the tapestry of light, the abacus worked by unseen hands that ticked the numbers ever upward, the moment near the end when the players on the glowing tapestry all seemed to run backward at once, which I take to be some working of time itself turned against its own current, a thing no priest of my village would sanction and yet no one round me so much as blinked — of all these, it is the dancing ox I understood most completely and loved most well. A creature that exists only to be joyful in front of a crowd. We had nothing like it at home. We should have.

Von Miller, they tell me, has now what he calls his dream. I hope the house he has entered feeds him well and does not work him past what a man of his years should bear, for I gather he has given long service already to his old lord and this is by rights a kind of retirement into finer pasture, though a fierce one — I am told the Cowboys are accounted a great house indeed, storied and much watched, the sort of hall a wandering man hears sung of even from very far away, even, I daresay, from a hedgerow in the old country, though I confess I had not heard the song myself until this very day, on account of the hedgerow being some five hundred years and an ocean off, more or less, by my poor reckoning of these things.

I did not see who won. I am ashamed to say it but I did not think to ask, being occupied with the ox, and then with a second meat-tube, and then with the great procession of carts that left the bowl afterward all in a line with their own small suns burning at the front of each one, which I took for a fleet of will-o'-the-wisps tamed to harness and am not eager to be corrected on, as it is a comforting thought and I have had few of those today.

The light is going now, or would be, if I could find where the sun keeps itself in this loud country, and there is a field somewhere waiting on me still, though I could not tell you which one, or how far, or whether it is even still there. I must away regardless. That is the work, and I do it faithfully, whether or not I understand a word of what I have seen.

God keep the ox, and God keep the man who now wears the Cowboys' star, wherever a star may sit upon a shoulder such as his.

— Hodge o' the Field, who saw a great binding-over and understood the ox best of all