Little Big Man (41 page)

“You are worried too much, my son,” he said. “Your hand slips upon the pipe. Give me the brand. I will light it myself. Then we shall smoke, and your worry will lift and fly away like the little buffalo bird.”

I didn’t think I’d ever regain the use of my right hand, so I brought him a glowing coal in my left. By now the shooting outside was coming back in our direction. What I had intended to do with that blow, you see, was to knock him unconscious and carry him to the river. I now considered cold-cocking him with my rifle butt, but it was likely his head was even harder than his jaw, besides being padded with that coarse, thick hair.

He puffed on the pipe and offered the usual smoke clouds to East and West,
etc.
By God, I thought, he is sticking to it, he is an Indian to the core. You know how you think about foreigners, savages, and so on, that in an emergency they’ll be just like yourself, even to talking English. But it was me who had to become Cheyenne here.

I got the eloquence of desperation. “The river is part of the great circle of the waters of the earth,” I says in the highest, squeakiest voice I could imagine, in mimicry of the falsetto of classic Cheyenne oratory. It seemed to work: Old Lodge Skins come alert and put down his pipe.

“The sacred waters flow through the body of the earth as the blood runs within a man and the sap within a tree. All things are joined in this great current. O White Buffalo Spirit, hear me! Lead your children to safety by the river!”

I don’t want you to think I was mocking anything at this point. Get into a battle and see how derisive you feel. No, I felt the call then. It might have been an instinct for preaching inherited from my Pa, but I was right exalted.

Not so much so, however, that I failed to see Old Lodge Skins picking up a huge old muzzle-loader from where it had laid beside him. My God, I thought, he’s going to shoot me for trying to save him, the crazy old galoot.

Then I heard a noise at the door and turned, and a soldier crouched there, thrusting in a pistol and trying to see through the dim light.

“Barroooom!”
I never heard a louder report than that made by Old Lodge Skins’s piece. It must have been double-charged to make such a noise, spitting fire and smoke halfway across the tepee circle,
and when the ball hit that soldier boy he was flung out the door like an empty suit of clothes.

The chief set up from where he had laid back with the five-foot barrel between his moccasin toes. He had sighted on sound.

“Go get his hair, my son,” said he. “Then we will talk some more about the river. Maybe I will go there.”

“It’s probably too late already,” I says. “Now they will come like coyotes to a rotting carcass. I won’t argue with you any more.”

I took an arm and pulled him to his feet. He never resisted in the slightest. I reckon he had decided to go: otherwise I’d never of moved him, I’m sure of that. I slit the tepee cover with my knife and prepared to lead him out.

“Wait,” he said. “I must take my medicine bundle.” This was a sloppy parcel about three foot long and wrapped in tattered skins. Its contents was secret, but I had once peeked into that of a deceased Cheyenne before they put it with him on the burial scaffold, and what his contained was a handful of feathers, the foot of an owl, a deer-bone whistle, the dried pecker of a buffalo, and suchlike trash: but he undoubtedly believed his strength was tied up in this junk, and who was I to say him nay. So with Old Lodge Skins. I got his bundle from a pile of apparent refuse behind his bed.

Then we started out again.

“Wait,” the old man said. “My war bonnet.” He never wore this item since I knowed him, because I think I have said that Cheyenne chiefs did not go in for display: they was generally the plainest of the men you’d see. He kept his in a round rawhide case hanging from a tepee pole.

“Perhaps you would like to see it?” he asks. “It is very beautiful and a reminder to me of my fighting days as a young man.” He actually starts to undo the case.

“Some other time, Grandfather,” says I, hanging it on my shoulder by its leathern string.

About that time, a number of carbines begin to pour lead into the tepee; it sounded like we was in a beehive. But do we leave? No, Old Lodge Skins has first to get his sacred bow and quiver of arrows, and then a special blanket, and of course his powder horn and shot bag, and his pipe and tobacco case. I am loaded down with this crap, and the United States Cavalry is blowing out the front of the lodge.

I commence to curse in English and howl in Cheyenne, and try to push him through the slit I cut, but no use, he stands embedded like a tree and puts on the rest of his jewelry: bracelets, bear-claw necklace, breastplate of tiny bones, and the lot.

Now the soldiers set fire to the face of the lodge. I guess that’s when I might have started to cry. I didn’t care about being killed no more, would indeed have welcomed death, I think, if I could have got the suspense over. I say crying; it might have been laughter. Whatever, it was hysterical.

“Come, my son,” he says. “We cannot stay in this tepee all day. The soldiers are about to burn it down.”

So after all that, it is him who leads me out, my legs like tubes of sand. Now of course not even the cavalry was so dumb as to assault only the tepee door. They was around back, too. We stepped directly into the reception of three troopers, and they fired pointblank, so close I don’t know why our hair didn’t burn from the flash.

All I can testify to is that they missed, and while the fearsome reports was still reverberating through my tortured eardrums, I heard Old Lodge Skins say: “Pay no attention to them, my son. I have now seen that it is not our day to die.”

If you have any sense, you won’t believe the following account of how we gained the river. I don’t, myself. But then you have to find another way to explain it, for here I am today and therefore I must have survived the Battle of the Washita in 1868.

Old Lodge Skins give me his rifle and he lifted that medicine bundle up before him in his two hands and started to sing. I saw then that the eyes of them troopers was not focused upon us, and we walked right past them while they fired again into the rip we had come out of. I heard one of them say: “We got them all, boys. Let’s have a look.” But another believed they should give it a few more rounds, so they went on pouring lead into that empty tepee.

The chief walked slowly on, in a dead line for the river, singing and holding high his medicine bundle. The soldiers was everywhere among the village now, mostly afoot but some still mounted, but neither kind made no difference to us. We walked right through them without incurring their interest of eye or ear, though the chief’s voice was loud, ranging from the heavy guttural to the piping falsetto, and in appearance we must have been a novelty, even in
a Cheyenne camp: first, Old Lodge Skins, his blind eyes shut, and then me, with black-streaked face and sandy hair, leggings and blanket, and carrying all that rubbish and two empty rifles.

Now we approached the rear of a line of skirmishers firing at the Indians defending the riverbank, the whole action having moved downstream some from where I had first seen them, as the Cheyenne retreated slowly along. The main party of women and children was gone from sight, though some stragglers waded here and there in the cold Washita.

Well, he had kept it up so far, and I didn’t know why we wasn’t seen and shot down except maybe because the sheer audacity of the stunt made us invisible to the soldiers, but would he march through them skirmishers and into the crossfire?

He would and did, and we went untouched though, as if in accompaniment to his song, I heard much whistling of lead about my ears. But one thing happened: the Indians stopped shooting till we reached the bank.
They
saw us all right, and I think their so doing is the only thing that kept me from being permanently warped by that experience. That, and the shock of jumping waist-deep into the frigid water, which felt like I had been skinned from toe to belly-button.

Once me and Old Lodge Skins was in the Washita, the other Indians pushed us downstream after the women and children. Someone said: “Leave the river at the big bend, where the depth is over the head from shore to shore.”

I reckon they took me for the chief’s personal nurse in his blindness. I was reluctant to go, what with Sunshine and Morning Star still hiding beneath the robes in our tepee, so far as I knew. But I couldn’t do no good for them. The soldiers now had complete possession of the village and was already herding together such women and children as had neither resisted nor run. They’d no doubt soon find my two and add them to the captives, and all I’d accomplish by making an attempt at this time to liberate them would be to get myself executed as a renegade, if not shot down before my identification was established.

So off we waded, the chief and myself, and now I led him rather than vice versa as it had been this far, for he had come out of his medicine spell on entering the water and was a blind old man—which I guess given his character was typical now that the worst of the danger was temporarily gone. He was his best when confronting
a menace. Keeping under the bank we was out of the line of fire, and made good progress, though after a time in that freezing element my body felt like stone.

We waded for about three-quarters of a mile when we overtook the women and children what had gone on before, they being slowed by the smaller kids, some of whom was in up to the neck. I dropped that junk I carried for Old Lodge Skins, including both our rifles, and seizing one little boy, put him upon my shoulders. In this fashion we did another good mile to the horseshoe bend, and then all left the water to avoid that deep section, with a purpose to cut across the intervening tongue of land and re-enter the river below.

The air was ferocious upon my wet clothes. I swung that boy to the earth and he rejoined his mother and her other children, but we hadn’t got much farther when that woman set down and begun to tear strips from her dress and bind them about the feet of her offspring, which I reckon was about to freeze off though the kids had not made a sound.

That was when a party of cavalry rode up on our rear. I realized later that this was the detail commanded by Major Joel Elliot, who Custer sent downstream to strike a large concentration of Cheyenne on the south shore, below our family group. We had three armed braves with us, traveling as guards, and a man called Little Rock who had a muzzle-loader stopped and shot a horse from under a trooper, and the instant after, himself fell dead from the answering fire.

The women and children hastened to get back into the river, and I must say I went along with them. There was a moment there when Little Rock fell that I thought I should go pick up his gun and perform a manly role, but another of the remaining two braves beat me to it.

Well, the women and children was almost all into the water, below the bend, and me and Old Lodge Skins was just climbing down the steep bank to join them when a man shouts down from above: “You can come back. We have surrounded them.”

So I push Old Lodge Skins up again, and he is seemingly lighter to move than when we was on the downslope.

He says, right lively, handing me his medicine bundle, “Give me my rifle. I want to rub out some soldiers before the young men get them all.”

“I left it over there,” I says and takes that opportunity to slip
away. There was plenty of women around to help him from now on, and a great body of Cheyenne was running up from the south, while others had got between the cavalry detachment and the river, driving them into the tall grass of the rising ground towards the bluffs.

The trooper unhorsed by Little Rock’s shot had earlier dropped off to take captive the woman who was binding her children’s feet. She had delayed till he was surrounded. Now I saw the rush that overwhelmed him, and when the Indians cleared away, he was stripped naked and lay red upon the trampled snow.

Elliot’s command dismounted and let go their horses, which run wildly down the valley and the soldiers lay in the high grass, where they was concealed except for the smoke of their carbines. They kept up a steady fire, but it was panicky and unaimed, most of it straight up into the winter sky, and when the Indians saw that, they didn’t bother to creep up no more but those that was mounted rode right in and commenced killing them like chickens, and the women and children come up to watch. The fight lasted maybe twenty minutes, and at the end all you could see was the swarm of Cheyenne backs as they bent to take coup and butcher.

I don’t know if you ever seen carnage in winter. It ain’t pretty at no season, but in the cold the blood soon freezes and a body stiffens up before you know it. If you wait too long, you have to break its limbs to get its shirt off.

I mention this not to be ghoulish but to list my motive in hastening into the grass: I needed one of them uniforms. There was forty-fifty Indians and only fifteen bodies to be shared among them. I had a bit of luck: I run into Younger Bear, on his knees and at work with a knife. I realized now that he had been one of the two or three braves who had first rode in among the soldiers. He was wearing a big war bonnet that I hadn’t recognized. His left shirt sleeve was reddened and drops of blood was dripping from the fringe onto the nose and lips of the corpse he was scalping. He was also sweating profusely, for I guess his knife was dull and that left arm didn’t have no strength to pull the hair away as the skin was severed.

However, he was quite calm as to mood. He noticed my leggings alongside him and said without looking up: “You pull while I cut.”

So I did. I knelt and took hold of them light-brown, rather fine-textured locks of the dead white man. I think he was right young. His mouth was strained open as if in a silent cry. I endeavored not
to study him, for he might have been somebody I once knowed, and there wasn’t anything personal in what I was doing. So at length his skull cover come free, and I was obliged to Younger Bear for taking it quickly from me.

“I saw you charge in to take coup before,” I says. “That was brave.”