Little Big Man (11 page)

In those first days I was dependent on what the other boys would lend me: bow, arrows, and the certain type of stick they ran with between their legs as if it was a pony. But when it came to war games under Younger Bear’s direction, off they’d ride, even Little Horse, leaving me behind with the girls and the littler kids who were supposed to be the babies of the play camp. Now after them boys did that until it got to be a habit, they started to call me “Antelope Girl,” because there I was, helping to dismantle the toy tepees, which is women’s work.

The sun dance was another adult pursuit the children mimicked in play camp. The boys would drive thorns in their flesh, tie strings to them, and drag around prairie-dog or coyote skulls. I might have got desperate enough to try it myself, had I not already at that early age worked out the following proposition: a white man is better than a redskin, who is a savage. Why is he better? Because he uses his wits. Centuries earlier the Indians had learned you could move heavy objects by rolling logs under them, yet still by the time I lived among them they had never cut a cross section through one of them logs to make a wheel. You can see that as either invincible ignorance or stubbornness; whichever, it’s just barbarous.

I did go behind one of the play-tepees and experiment with a thorn, but no sooner than the point touched my flesh I turned yellow. I never could get interested in hurting myself. So I got an arrow, stole a real one with an iron trade point, and wore it in two with a jagged rock. Now the Cheyenne make a chewing gum from the evaporated juice of the milkweed. Buffalo Wallow Woman give me some, but I put it into my belly button rather than my mouth, and stuck in it the end of the arrow shaft that ends with the feathers. The other part, that with the iron head, I fixed so it appeared to
issue from the cleft of my arse, the breechclout being drawn aside in accommodation. It looked as if I was fairly skewered through the middle, at an angle of forty-five degrees. When I was all prepared, I come out from back of the lodge, walking funny with my rump cheeks tight, and secretly supporting the feathered end with a hand to my gut as if to catch the pain—that was an infraction of the rules, for the idea is to show a manly indifference to the hurt, but I figured the act would be spectacular enough to cover up an incidental.

I was right. The girls saw me first and slapped their mouths so hard it’s a marvel their front teeth stayed tight. And then the boys, with their miserable little thorns and them tiny animal skulls. In chagrin Coyote ripped his out of his back and throwed it away, and the blood streamed in scarlet ribbons down to his rump. Little Horse began to dance about and boast how he was my friend. Poor old Younger Bear, he just turned and trudged away, the little skulls trailing along the ground behind him, hopping when they struck a rough, and when one of them caught under a sagebush the rawhide line broke rather than his skin.

From here on I was on equal terms in the war games, and before long Burns Red in the Sun made me a little bow. Burns was Old Lodge Skins’s son by one of his earlier wives now dead. My own position turned out to be orphan attached to the chief’s lodge, which gave me the right to benevolent consideration from the whole family just as if I was related to them by blood. Almost every tepee had a similar lad, though the rest was pure Indians. The women were obliged to give me clothes and food, and the men to see I grew up into a man. I don’t recall my race being held against me while I was small. Caroline, for example, was never referred to—for one reason, because it was a great shame to Old Lodge Skins that he had smoked a pipe with what turned out a female. In the very old times the Cheyenne would not smoke when a woman was even in the tepee; they tied up the door to keep them out.

Another reason why it was easy for me to melt into that tribe was that none of the Indians wanted to think about the incident of the wagons. As we have seen, my brother Bill never reported the massacre to Fort Laramie, and the soldiers didn’t come, so the Cheyenne had no worry about that. What bothered them was that while drunk they had nearly killed some of themselves; that’s the worst thing a Cheyenne could do: kill another Cheyenne. Being drunk is
no excuse. It is always regarded as murder, and the murderer rots inside his guts, giving off a stink to other members of the tribe, soiling the Sacred Arrows, and driving the buffalo away. Such a fellow cannot smoke the pipe, nor will anyone eat from a dish he has touched; he is generally run out of camp.

Now I know at this point you figure you have one on me. The way I described the whiskey fight, it looked as if some of the Indians
were
killed: for example, I surely said Pile of Bones blew off the back of White Contrary’s head and the latter’s brains run out. I swear that insofar as anybody could have told on the spot, that is what happened. But imagine my surprise when on that first morning in the Cheyenne camp, directly after the bath we boys took in the creek, who should show up waiting for us to take him to his horse but White Contrary, big as life and twice as ugly, and showing in no particular that he had ever been hurt. I trailed along behind him, taking a special interest in the back of his head, but if there was a hole in it, you couldn’t prove it by me. I saw a louse or two crawling along the part of his braids, but not even a crust of dried blood. And it was White Contrary, all right, for he had an unmistakable wart on the left flange of his nose.

Maybe you are beginning to understand, when I pulled the arrow-out-of-arse trick, why it didn’t occur to none of the children that I was hoaxing them. That is because Indians did not go around expecting to be swindled, whereas they was always ready for a miracle.

CHAPTER
4
Pronghorn Slaughter

IT AIN’T BAD
to be a boy among the Cheyenne. You never get whipped for doing wrong, but rather told: “That is not the way of the Human Beings.” One time Coyote started to laugh while he was lighting his father’s pipe, because a horsefly was crawling on his belly. This was a serious failure of manners on his part, comparable to a white boy’s farting loud in church. His Pa laid away the pipe and said: “On account of your lack of self-control I can’t smoke all day without disgusting certain Persons in the other world. I wonder if you aren’t a Pawnee instead of a Human Being.” Coyote went out upon the prairie and stayed there alone all night to hide his shame.

You have got to
do things right
when you’re a Cheyenne. A baby can’t cry just for the hell of it—the tribe might be lying in concealment at the moment and the sound would give away their position to the enemy. Therefore the women hang them cradleboards on bushes some distance from camp until the youngsters inside develop the idea that crying don’t do no good, and get the habit of quiet. Girls need to be trained to control their giggle. I seen Shadow That Comes in Sight line his little daughters up before him and tell them funny stories at which they was supposed to restrain laughter. At first they all flunked, shrieking like birds; then they got so as to only smirk and simper; and finally, after many sessions, they could hold a stony look towards the most hilarious joke. They was free to enjoy it but not to make a demonstration. At the proper time they could laugh their guts out, for an Indian loves his humor and Shadow That Comes in Sight was a great wit.

Other than for that special instruction, the Cheyenne didn’t run a school. They never read nor wrote their language, so what would be the purpose? If you wanted a point of history, you went and asked
an old man who kept it in his mind. Numbers got boring when you run out of fingers, so to report the size of an enemy war party you had spotted would go something like this: “The Ute is near the Fasting Place Butte. They are as many as the arrows that Sticks Everything Under His Belt shot at the ghost antelope in the time when the cherries was ripe.” This being a famous story, everybody in Old Lodge Skins’s crowd would know within one or two the number of Ute referred to—and in a moment of emergency, when a person tends to fear the unknown, they could connect it up with something familiar.

A Cheyenne believed his animal was also Cheyenne and knew it. “Tell your pony,” Burns Red would say, “that the people will talk about his bravery all over camp. Tell him stories about famous ponies and their exploits, so that he will try to do as well. Tell him everything about yourself. A man should keep no secrets from his pony. There are things he does not discuss with his brother, his friend, or his wife, but he and his pony must know everything about each other because they will probably die together and ride the Hanging Road between earth and heaven.”

The trouble with me was that I felt like a damn fool, speaking to a dumb beast. That’s the difficulty in being white: you can’t get away with much. Nobody expects more of an Indian; with him fool things are, so to speak, normal. You’d be disappointed in an Indian if he
didn’t
talk to horses, the way I look at it, for he is born crazy. But being white, I knowed too much even at the age of ten.

You understand that I can’t give no day-to-day account of my upbringing. It must have took a couple of months to learn to ride without being tied on, and longer to get real proficient with the bow and arrow. But now I got to go back to that very first morning and wake up Old Lodge Skins, who we left dead to the world. That Indian got up intending to fast for twenty-four hours. He had had another dream about antelope. Coming on top of the one of the day previous, it meant he had to get to work.

In the afternoon the chief went up the creek maybe three hundred yards and just beyond the brush erected a little tepee about the size of the play-lodges we kids had, just big enough for him to sit in. He went inside at sunset and did a number of secret things till dawn the next day.

While he was in there, throughout the night certain other Cheyenne would go and beat upon the outside of the tepee cover. What
went on here concerned the preparation for a gigantic antelope surround. If when them other men pounded on the lodge skin any quantity of antelope hair fell off the cover, the hunt would be successful.

While this was taking place, a party of Ute run off the whole horse herd, and next morning the only Cheyenne ponies left was the few that their owners had tethered right outside their tepees. However, quite a mess of antelope hair was laying on the ground about the medicine tent, so the lookout was good.

Old Lodge Skins emerged from the little tepee next morning. He looked somewhat different from usual in that his eyes seemed to be focused miles away in whatever direction he turned. He was carrying two short black poles, each with a hoop on its end and decorated with raven feathers, and when he walked into open country, the whole camp trooped along behind—men, women, children, and dogs. I have told about antelope as we encountered that little herd the day before at the buffalo wallow: they can run a mile in one minute and will stampede on a change of wind.

This quick beast has one flaw against living to old age: he is nosy. Show an antelope something that flutters and he can’t resist it. That is the practical side of those poles-and-wheels that Old Lodge Skins was carrying: the Cheyenne called them antelope arrows, and they were deadlier than if equipped with iron points, for they made the skittish beast so curious he would run himself and his kin into suicide for a closer look. Admitting that, there was still a lot to a surround that made no sense except as magic.

I suppose we must have walked three miles out in the prairie—everybody except one decrepit old woman and a warrior who stayed behind because he had the sulks. At a certain point on a space of flatland we stopped, and Old Lodge Skins set down on the prairie. He had left behind his plug hat, and wore two eagle feathers braided into his hair. Now the unmarried women come up before him, and he chose the stoutest two by waving the antelope arrows at them, sort of charming them into sitting alongside him. One girl was average fat, but the second was so chubby it took a keen watch to find the features of her face; her eyes was like little seeds.

Set a fat girl to catch fat antelope, was the idea.

Them braves that still kept their horses now mounted, and the rest of us fell in on either side of the chief and the fatties so as to make a half-circle with them in the middle. Two other girls, skinnier
people, suddenly grabbed the antelope arrows from Old Lodge Skins and dashed away on diverging tracks like the legs of a V with him at the point. Off go the horsemen in pursuit, the two leaders overtaking the girls and swiping the medicine sticks, then riding on still along the V legs, holding up the little wheels with the raven feathers fluttering. Now a single antelope come into sight on a roll of ground about a quarter mile ahead of the riders, in the exact center between their two files, on a dead line with Old Lodge Skins’s position. Like men, grazing antelope put out sentries. These here signal the herd by putting up their white tails like signal flags. What would you think a pronghorn scout might do when he saw twenty Cheyenne galloping on either flank and a bunch more standing in the midst of the prairie around an old Indian and two tubby maidens?

Well, this one stared so hard you would have thought his ears might shoot off his head. Meanwhile the riders was reaching his lateral. He looked left and he looked right, but them equal forces emanating from the flanks sort of compressed his attention back to the middle, and even at the distance you. could see him quiver from the haunches though his yellow cheeks and black muzzle was froze in wonder.

Old Lodge Skins set within the red blanket, the white plumes on the ends of his two feathers blowing in the soft wind. The two fat girls was still as mounds of earth, nor among the pack of dogs did one cur so much as show a tongue; they was also Cheyenne.

That scout moved forward, placing each dainty hoof as if it was a separate decision, his white neck-bands puffed out like a collar of shirring. Along the crest behind him appeared a margin of little horns, followed at length by little tan heads, staring our way. The forward horsemen gained the rise and went over, the funnel they made ever widening, with its neck pointing to Old Lodge Skins sitting way back here in the crescent of his tribe. There was only enough riders to indicate the lines of flank, with full space between each Indian to let through a nation of antelope, but these beasts, being charmed, had no mind to escape.