Текст книги "LITTLE BIG MAN"

Автор книги: Томас Бергер (Бри(е)джер)

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 35 страниц)

CHAPTER 13 Cheyenne Homecoming

I WASN’T in no particular hurry to come on out of there; and when I did issue forth I did not care to do so at the feet of them Indians. As to the latter, I had no choice, however, for they was on the other side of the wagon also and at both ends.

So I crawled out and stood up soon as I cleared the edge of the wagon box, and it was sure enough the face of Burns Red in the Sun that I looked into. Painted heavily, it went without saying, and just as well for otherwise I should not have recognized him.

I oughtn’t to omit to say that while I was rising, two other Indians seized my arms and lifted my pistol and knife. This bunch was not on a friendly mission. They continued to pinion me, and without making a fuss over it I was able to observe that my company of mule skinners stood or lay all around in various states of captivity, though it was not apparent that any struggle had took place.

Even with my credentials I found this a delicate moment. Burns Red was not being exactly quick to make me out. I had forgot, too, that if you encounter it of a sudden, face paint will scare hell out of you.

I had dropped my sombrero, so Burns had a fair shot at my features. I had got a year or so older since we had last been together and I had the beginnings of a mustache, though they wasn’t enough to put off anybody.

Still, he was right cold when he spoke. His eyes showed unsympathetic out at me over vermilion cheeks and on either side of a nose with a white line down the bridge. He wore a full bonnet of eagle feathers tipped with down.

“Why,” he asks, of course in Cheyenne, “did you steal my father’s horse?”

It was then I noticed that nearby another Indian was holding the halter of that pinto I had bought in Denver. This man was an old acquaintance, Shadow That Comes in Sight, who had led my first raid against the Crow, you might recall, on which I had made that name for myself. However he was looking sullen at present.

“Brother,” I says to Burns with some urgency, “don’t you know me?”

You would have thought he might consider how I happened to speak fluent Cheyenne. Not him.

“You white men,” he said in great disgust. “We took you in and fed you when you were hungry and lost because dreams of the yellow dust had made you crazy. Then you steal our horses. You are all very bad men, and we don’t want to make a treaty with you.”

The others roundabout muttered peevishly in agreement with them sentiments. I couldn’t make head nor tail of his complaints, however, so I just explained where and how I had got the pony and said that regardless of that, he could have him on general principles, being my brother.

I had now used the word “brother” a couple times, and it was beginning to penetrate Burns’s eagle feathers and the thick skull thereunder. So after denouncing white men some more and gesturing in an unpleasant way with his rifle-on which occasions them two holding my arms would give me a good agitating and the rest of the Indians would glower and mutter at my mule skinners, who though ordinarily the typical, uncouth, foul-mouthed swaggering bunch that follows that profession, was now paralyzed in fear-after a long time, during which I almost give up hope, for even though you’ve lived with Indians for five years they can be quite damaging to your peace of mind, he at last said in personal irritation, as contrasted with the racial charges he had been making:

“Why do you keep calling me ‘brother’? I want you to stop doing that. I am not your brother. I am a Human Being.”

And the swarthy fellow holding my right arm, who wore a belt full of scalps one of which was blond as corn and never come from no Pawnee, said: “I think we should kill him first and then talk.” I did not know this man, but among the others I recognized Bird Bear and Lean Man and Rolling Bull, the latter restraining my left arm.

“Well,” I says boldly, “it seems the Human Beings cannot be trusted any more than the white men who did you wrong. Only two snows ago I was your brother, lived in Old Lodge Skins’s tepee, hunted and fought with the Human Beings and on one occasion at least almost died for them. I suppose you will say with your tongue-that-goes-two-ways that you never heard of Little Big Man.”

Burns Red in the Sun said: “He rode beside me at the Battle of the Long Knives, where the white men did not know how to fight. He was killed there after rubbing out many bluecoats. But the white men did not get his body. He turned into a swallow and flew away across the bluffs.”

“I tell you,” I cried, “that I am Little Big Man. How would I know about him otherwise?”

“All people know of him,” said Burns Red in that stubborn redskin manner. “He is a great hero of the Human Beings. Everybody knows the Human Beings, so everybody would know of him. I shall not talk of this further.” He shifted his rifle to the left hand and put his right upon the handle of his scalping knife. “In addition to being a horse thief you are the biggest liar I have ever heard,” he went on. “And also a fool. I tell you I saw Little Big Man fall and turn into a bird. Therefore you cannot be he. Besides, you are a white man. Little Big Man was a Human Being.”

“Look at me,” I said.

“Oh,” said Burns Red, “Little Big Man may have had light skin, but that does not mean he was a white man. Besides, what you are showing me is you and not him.”

Well, there you have it. There ain’t nothing in the world, not the most intractable mule, that is so obdurate as a goddam Indian. I figured I was a goner at this point, especially since Burns said he was going to cut out my tongue for telling lies, at which that especially mean fellow on my right arm was considerably cheered. He was no more than a kid, about my age when I killed the Crow. I have said I didn’t recognize him, but suddenly I did.

He was Dirt on the Nose, growed up some from that young boy to whom I had give a pony after the exploit in which I got my adult name.

Burns Red drawed his knife. I looked at Dirt on the Nose. Hell, it was worth a try.

I asked him: “You still have that black I gave you up on the Powder River?”

His ferocious look disappeared, and he answered: “No, the Pawnee stole him when we were camped at Old Woman Butte two snows ago.”

“Did you hear that?” I asked Burns Red in the Sun.

His face went blank, insofar as you could say behind that paint.

“It is true,” he said, “that there is a thing here that I do not understand.”

I proceeded to rapid-fire a number of other detailed reminiscences at him, but he was not further impressed. He put away his knife, though. It was that particular about the horse that saved my life, or at least my tongue. People came and went in them days, but horses was serious.

So them Indians decided to take me to their camp and let the older men adjudicate the matter. I was no longer physically constrained, but neither had they reached the point of returning my weapons. They left a guard upon the mule skinners, who I told to accept this inconvenience in good grace; not that they had any choice.

The Cheyenne party had left its own horses in a basin half a mile off in the charge of two younger braves. Shadow continued to lead that pinto, but I figured it would not be my place to mount the animal at this time; and my extra horse was back at the wagons.

“What am I going to ride?” I asked Burns.

That was a real problem for the poor devil. Now that his stubbornness had been challenged on the matter of my identity, he didn’t know quite what to think about anything.

He looked at me with his face all screwed up.

“There is a pain,” he said, “between my ears.” He reached back between the feathers of his bonnet and rubbed his scalp. It occurred to me then for the first time how dumb he was. As a boy I had thought Burns Red a brilliant fellow for his knowledge of the bow and arrow and riding, in which he trained me. I guess he knowed them things all right, but otherwise he was pretty stupid.

“I won’t walk all the way,” I said. “I can tell you that.”

You could see he was kind of wistful that he hadn’t been allowed to cut my tongue out, not because Burns was unusually cruel but rather because it would have kept this difficulty from arising.

“Ride behind me,” said Dirt on the Nose, who trusted me about seven-eighths since mention of the horse I had give him. So I leaped up behind and took ahold of his belt, for I didn’t dare to dig those Spanish heels into the animal, and we moved off, going north for two hours, and fetching up along a tiny creek that for poverty of water didn’t have its match.

There on the farther bank stood the tepees of Old Lodge Skins’s little band, which seemed about the size it had always been, but Jesus God, I thought, had they always been so seedy? And it is a queer thing that the stench affected me more now than it had as a boy of ten, entering that first encampment with my sister Caroline. To tell you how powerful this general smell was, even when diffused through the air in the smart wind that was blowing at the time, it overcome for me the personal odor of Dirt on the Nose, who was right strong on the nostrils being I was close to him.

Up we go to the familiar tepee of the chief, which had been my home for five years, with its faded scratch-drawings and sewed-up places and tattered flaps. From the look of things I figured Old Lodge Skins must have been enduring another of his long runs of bad luck. The dirty kids come running and the barking dogs, and most of the adults in camp at the time was in cluster, for our party had returned as usual in bits and pieces, the firstcomers having apprised the other Indians of the matter at hand.

I begun to get nervous then, for though among Americans you tend to find people the less frightening the better you know them, the same wasn’t true of Indians in my experience, with whom prolonged relations only led to the awareness that they was capable of anything. My knees had been steadier than when Dirt on the Nose and me dismounted.

Among a group of braves, I ducked in through the tepee entrance. Inside it was darker than of old, for no fire was lit and my eyes hadn’t been accustomed for some time to coming into gloom out of burning sunshine. We turned to the right and paused for a minute, as was the proper manners, and the guttural voice of Old Lodge Skins come out of the twilight ahead.

“I wish you would go outside,” he said to them Indians, “and let me talk to the white man alone.”

They left and I went around the circle to where the old chief was setting. You might think it would have made more sense to cut straight across the diameter, but this was never done: a person traveled circumferentially in a lodge.

It was a while before my eyes was adjusted and I could make him out. Meanwhile he just set there quietly. I noticed he was bareheaded, and remembering how I had thrown away his loaned hat at the Solomon battle, I felt right bad about it. Now I was carrying my Mexican sombrero, which I had fetched along and worn on the ride. It was a real pretty thing with its band of silver medallions and embroidered brim.

“Grandfather,” I said, “I brought you this present.” And handed him the hat.

Now I had done my limit. If the Cheyenne was determined to put me to death as an impostor, there wasn’t nothing more I could do about it.

“My son,” said Old Lodge Skins, “to see you again causes my heart to soar like a hawk. Sit here beside me.”

That was some relief. I took a seat upon the buffalo robe to his left, and he leaned over and embraced me. I tell you I was right touched by it. Then he took the sombrero, quickly cut out the crown with his knife, stuck a single eagle feather into that silver band, and put it on his head.

“Is this the same hat that I used to own?” he asked. “Which grew soft of skin and fatter?”

“No, Grandfather, it is another.”

“We must smoke your return,” he said, and went through the rigamarole of filling the pipe, lighting it, offering it to the four points of the compass and so on, so it was quite a while before I got a drag of that spicy mix of red-willow bark.

“I saw you in a dream,” he said after a time. “You were drinking from a spring that came out of the long nose of an animal. I did not recognize the animal. Alongside this nose he grew two horns. The water that gushed from his nose was full of air.”

I don’t care if you believe me or not, but you might reflect that if I was going to make up something out of the whole cloth, it’d probably be more ambitious than that. What he was talking about was of course that elephant-head soda-water fountain in Kane’s establishment. I can’t explain it.

We set there maybe an hour before getting around to what was to me the important issue, but you can’t rush things with an Indian.

Finally Old Lodge Skins said: “Do not be angry with Burns Red in the Sun and the others. They had unhappy experiences last year with some white men they found wandering, sick and hungry, in a place without water. These white men had lost their minds in the search for the yellow dust, and our people took pity on them, fed them and treated them for the illness of the mind, and then when they were well, these white men stole twenty-six of our horses and the rifle of Spotted Dog and ran away during the night.”

Old Lodge Skins calmly dragged on the pipe and let the smoke waft from his mouth and nostrils.

“What particularly annoyed some of the Human Beings,” he went on, “was that we had come down here to attend the peace conference at the fort of Bent, which the Father of the whites asked us to, and that is why we are dressed in our good clothing, and then Burns Red in the Sun and the others came upon your mule wagons and saw the pinto which had been among those stolen last year.”

I took the pipe from him. “I don’t understand why they did not recognize me.”

“Yes,” said Old Lodge Skins. “Do you want to eat?”

He never said anything lightly, so I knew I was supposed to take refreshment at this point by the etiquette and said yes, and in come Buffalo Wallow Woman who started the fire and boiled some puppy dog and served it up in bowls with the little paws sticking out over the rim as a mark of special distinction. Still, she kept her eyes down, and we never greeted each other, for Old Lodge Skins had not yet pronounced his O.K. of me to her. By time this was finished, it was nigh evening.

The chief wiped the grease off his mouth with the brim of the sombrero. This was not a case of slovenliness, however: after several meals, that piece of headgear would be so impregnated with fat that rain could never soak it.

He took up the conversation just where it had left off.

“I do not understand exactly what happened to you at the Battle of the Long Knives, at which the horse soldiers did not know how to fight properly,” he said. “We all went away on account of the wrong medicine. But when the Human Beings collected again and you were not there in your own body, we saw a swallow who flew above us for a long time. It was natural to assume that was you. It was also pleasant to think so, for you were a man for whom the Human Beings felt honor and affection. Later I dreamed about the long-nosed animal that gave you a drink in the village of the whites, but I did not tell anybody because it might have meant bad luck for you to do that.

“Therefore,” he said, “Burns Red in the Sun cannot be blamed for his ignorance.” He got up from the robe and, indicating I should follow, went out in front of the tepee, where the whole camp had been waiting all this while. The sun was setting across the infinity of prairie to the west, in streaks of orange, vermilion, pink, and rose, and this light give a glow to all the colors on the people there.

Old Lodge Skins looked right smart in that sombrero. Standing there in his red blanket, with me alongside, he give quite a harangue, as you might expect. I won’t go into it, except for the conclusion.

“I have thought and talked and smoked and eaten on this matter,” he said. “And my decision is that Little Big Man has returned.”

He went back into his lodge and the rest of the camp come and greeted me dear as I ever experienced, with embraces and compliments and every type of affectionate chatter, and I had to eat five or six times more and talk for hours, and I reckon I was affected by this, for I knowed nonetheless that I could never be an Indian again.

Well, I got filled in on what those people had done since that Solomon battle: just about what they had been doing from time immemorial, been up north as usual during most of the year and come down south for the tribal get-together both summers since. Hadn’t had no more trouble with the soldiers, for they had kept out of their way. And it seemed they was still acceptable to the main tribe, which meant that Old Lodge Skins hadn’t got his hands on anybody else’s wife.

What an Indian chooses to characterize a whole twelvemonth is something like: “That was the time that Running Wolf broke his leg,” or, “During the winter a cottonwood tree fell on Bird Bear’s tepee.” Insofar as they kept a mental diary, it was events of that sort that filled it up, and there might be no remark whatever of something real important. For example, that Solomon retreat was only mentioned to me by Burns Red and Old Lodge Skins; everybody else had forgot it soon as possible. If you’d have asked a Cheyenne what he did that summer that was notable, he might have said something like: “My chestnut won a race against Cut Belly’s black.”

As Old Lodge Skins had said, they was in this area now because of the peace-treaty conference called by the Government at Bent’s Fort. The Indian Commissioner himself had promised to show up, so I gathered, and this impressed the chief no end. He expected to get another medal and maybe a new plug hat. Beyond that, however, he was undecided on the prospects.

One of the many meals of celebration give for me was in the tepee of Hump, who was still war chief and hadn’t changed at all.

“Welcome, my friend,” he says to me when we met. “You wouldn’t by any chance have brought me a gift of powder and shot?” So I presented him the extra paper cartridges and percussion caps I carried for my Dragoon pistol, retaining only the loads already in the chambers. I could have been hanged for doing that if the Army found out, I reckon.

“Come and eat,” says he. Old Lodge Skins was also invited, and Shadow That Comes in Sight, Burns Red, and several others of my old friends, and that is where we talked about the treaty.

“I do not know,” said Old Lodge Skins after we finished the boiled buffalo tongue, “whether it is right for a Human Being to become a farmer, though Yellow Wolf had that idea, and he was a wise man.”

Hump said: “Yellow Wolf was a great chief, but the white men put him under an evil spell or he would never have got that idea. He loafed around the forts too much”

“I want to speak now,” said Shadow That Comes in Sight. “I think I would rather die than plant a potato.”

Burns Red in the Sun was still sore about the dirty deal he got from them gold hunters. He said: “No matter what we do, the white men will cheat us. If we plant potatoes, they will steal them. If we try to hunt buffalo, they will scare the game away. If we fight, they will not make war properly.” He didn’t come to no conclusion, but fell into one of them depressed moods that stayed with him for the rest of the day and next morning, during which he set right there in Hump’s tepee, never speaking nor drinking nor eating, and Hump’s family let him alone, walking around him.

“That may be so,” said Old Lodge Skins. “On the other hand, the white men are coming in ever greater numbers and building permanent dwelling places. If they do not find wood, they cut bricks from the earth or burrow into the ground like prairie dogs. Whatever else you can say about the white man, it must be admitted that you cannot get rid of him. He is in never-ending supply. There has always been only a limited number of Human Beings, because we are intended to be special and superior. Obviously not everybody can be a Human Being. To make this so, there must be a great many inferior people. To my mind, this is the function of white men in the world. Therefore we must survive, because without us the world would not make sense.

“But to survive if the white men drive away the buffalo will not be easy. Maybe we should try this farming. Other red men have done so. When I was a boy a people called Mandan farmed along the Big Muddy River. It is true that the Lakota were always attacking their villages and killed a lot of them. And then the Mandan caught smallpox from visiting white traders and died every one. There are no more Mandan.” Old Lodge Skins raised his eyebrows. “Perhaps they were not a great people.”

“I never heard of farmers who were,” said Hump. He then asked me: “I suppose you have a lot of powder and lead in your wagons?”

I didn’t answer, not wanting to get into that. Which was all right, for I was getting ready to make a speech myself. I ranked pretty high in these quarters, not because I was important enough to lead a wagon train-the Cheyenne didn’t care about that, nor had they asked me how I spent the time since we had last seen one another-no, I was influential here because though I had apparently been killed on the Solomon’s Fork, I had returned.

Here’s what I was thinking: Old Lodge Skins had spent more than seventy years on the prairies and what did he have to show for it? Indians loved their land, but the peculiarity was that the most miserable cabin of a white man had a relation to the earth that no nomadic redskin could claim. One way of looking at it was that in any true connection, each thing being joined makes a mark on the other: a tree, say, is fastened to the earth, and vice versa. In Denver they was erecting buildings now with foundations: not only on the ground but in it; so that if one day the whites left that place again, it would still bear their brand for a long time. I never heard of a natural force that would tear cellar walls from the earth.

Maybe white men was more natural than Indians! was what I had got to thinking. Even prairie dogs had fixed villages.… Now I know that every living thing is neither more nor less of Nature than the next, but I was young then and them distinctions bothered me, what with the conflicting claims: Indians believing they was more “natural” than white men, and the latter insisting they themselves was more “human.”

Whatever the judgment on that, I knowed right then that the Cheyenne way was finished as a mode of life. I saw this not in the present camp, but back in Denver; for truths are sometimes detected first in a place remote from the one to which they apply. Think of how if you was standing in China when gunpowder had been invented, you could have known that thousands of mile away stone castles and armor was finished.

So what I said in that speech of mine had practicality as its point of view. I stood up in Hump’s tepee. I wore Burns Red’s best red blanket. We had exchanged gifts, and he in his Indian way give me his finest possession.

“Brothers,” I says, “when I sit among you, I think of the beautiful Powder River country where we did so many happy things when I was a boy. Do you recall the time Little Hawk was sleeping in his tepee and suddenly was awakened by the smell of beaver-gland perfume and raised the lodge cover and saw a Crow stealing his horse and killed him? And when Two Babies returned from his lone war trail against the Ute, after staying away a whole year, his belt full of scalps and singing the song an eagle had taught him as he lay wounded in a dry wash.

“Do you remember how lovely Cloud Peak looks with its cap of white and shoulders of purple and blue? And think of the clear, cold water of the Crazy Woman’s Creek, which runs fresh all summer from the melting snows of the mountains. The forests full of lodgepoles and firewood, the elk with his great antlers, the bear in his coat of fur.…

“I think it is better up on the Powder River than it is here in this place.

“I know nothing of this treaty, but I do I now that more and more white men will come through this place where we are now camped, because it is as the bird flies from a white village called Denver to a big white place called Missouri. I have been to both of these places and I know that neither will go away but will rather grow larger. It is my opinion that as they do, they and the land between will be less and less pretty to the eyes of a Human Being.”

I took a breath; it ain’t easy to get supernatural when you are out of practice. “I had a dream,” I says, “after the Battle of the Long Knives. I flew above all this country and saw below me white men building square houses, but to the north, along the Powder River, I saw the great nation of Human Beings living happily, fighting the Crow and Mountain Snakes, killing buffalo and elk, and stealing horses.”

Old Lodge Skins spoke: “I believe that I have heard wisdom,” he said. “We had intended to talk of this treaty in support of our southern brothers. Black Kettle and White Antelope will go there, and they are great chiefs. I understand that the Arapaho, Kiowa, and Snake People will also talk. It is a very pretty sight to see all the tribes at a treaty conference with their countless ponies and in their best clothes. The Father of the whites gives presents to everybody. Just because you go to a treaty council, that does not mean you have to touch the pen.

“The Father wants to buy from the Human Beings and others the land where the yellow dust lies. Bent will be there and he is a good man who has married a woman of the Human Beings. I was willing to go and talk about farming because Black Kettle and White Antelope, who are wise men, have said the Human Beings must think about settling down.

“But dreams do not speak two ways, and there must be some reason why Little Big Man has been returned to us to tell of his vision.”

I hadn’t give him a new idea. Indians wasn’t necessarily fools about what they should or shouldn’t do. They sometimes just had reasons that a white would find difficult to understand. Old Lodge Skins was going to the council mainly to get another silver medal and to see the entertainments put on when all the tribes got together and showed off their prowess at riding and their best clothes so as to impress the Government representative. He might even have went so far as to sign the treaty without any intention of taking up farming as a result.

Now he had decided on my suggestion to forget about the whole thing and return to the north country. But I’ll tell you something: he never did that because of my “dream”; he did it because he knowed damn well I was white and knew what I talked about as to the situation in Kansas and Colorado.

So did they all, and if you’ll look again at the myth they had built around Little Big Man, you’ll see what I mean. It hadn’t aught to do with me personally, and insofar as I was to be identified with it, I had to live up to it rather than vice versa. If I did something that would not jibe with the legend, that meant I was not Little Big Man. By this means Indians kept their concepts straight and their heroes untarnished, and did not have to lie. I guess it wouldn’t work, though, for somebody who understood the principle of such things as money and the wheel.

After the talk in Hump’s lodge, my other foster-brother Little Horse, dressed like a Cheyenne woman, come in and entertained us with very graceful singing and dancing. It did my heart good to see he made such a success of being a heemaneh.

I stayed the night in Old Lodge Skins’s tepee. Next morning I met another old friend. I was coming back from a wash in the little creek when I saw an Indian who seemed to be either blind or deliberately walking through sagebushes and cactus on his route from one point to another. I decided after observation that it was the latter, for only by intent could he have found such a rugged course for himself. Eventually he reached the creek, where he proceeded to wash. But not with water, with earth from the bank.

I had recognized him straightway. It was Younger Bear. So when he had finished his curious ablutions, I went over to him. I didn’t know whether he still considered himself my enemy or not. It seemed so long ago that I never even thought of it.

At my greeting he turned, not unfriendly, but instead of saying the Cheyenne hello, he says goodbye. Then, the way a person who has just took a bath will sit upon the bank to dry, he goes into the creek and sets down in the water. I guess it made sense, seeing how he had just washed with dirt. I realized he was doing everything backwards, and understood then what he had become.

Later I had this confirmed by Little Horse, who put aside his beadwork and left the crowd of women he hung out with ordinarily to chew the fat a spell with me.

“That is true,” he says. “Younger Bear became a Contrary last year. He bought the Thunder Bow from White Contrary.”

I have to explain. You know the ordinary Cheyenne is a warrior the peer of which is hard to find. But a Contrary carries it even farther. He is so much of a warrior that all of life apart from fighting, he does backwards. He don’t walk on the trails, but rather through the bushes. He washes with earth and dries off in the water. If you ask him one thing, he does the opposite. He sleeps on the bare ground, preferably an uncomfortable bit of terrain and never on a bed. He cannot marry. He lives off by himself some distance from camp; and when he fights, he fights alone, not with the main body of Cheyenne. He carries the Thunder Bow into battle, which has a lancehead afixed to one end. When it is in his right hand, he may not retreat.

Well, there is a million other rules to it, I expect, and because it is so special, you’ll only find one or two Contraries around any camp.

“Then,” said Little Horse, “you remember Coyote. He was killed by the Pawnee. The Ute killed Red Dog.…” He went on with the news, which was fairly bloody. Then he said, looking somewhat arch: “I am thinking of moving into the lodge of Yellow Shield as his second wife.”