Текст книги "LITTLE BIG MAN"

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

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 35 страниц)

No, the idea I had was to let the Cheyenne come to me, so to speak, and therefore for two years I had drove them mules conscientiously and ate my grub at end of day and put up with Caroline, who never really got more sensible, and bedded down early in my little tent, waiting, just waiting for this time to come.

I don’t know whether anybody has ever pointed out the patience you need if you live a life of violence. It ain’t the action that takes the guts, but the minutes, hours, days, even months of interval between encounters. When the Indians finally did begin to hit the railroad, they seemed to avoid my immediate area of it and strike the grading parties further west or the track layers to the east. And though they run off stock, they never come near my mules, which I would tether close to my tent and then lay awake much of the night with a coiled lariat in my hand. Capture is what I intended for the brave what come close, not slaughter. I didn’t want his scalp, but rather the return of Olga and Gus, and needed to be in a bargaining position. But as I say, wherever I was the Cheyenne struck elsewhere; that’s what I mean about needing patience.

It had got well into the summer when I finally received my chance. End-of-track lay just beyond the old stage station at Lodgepole, and my work at present was with the graders on west of that, but I had gone down to Julesburg upon an errand and was about to start back when an engine stopped for water at the tank there and I saw it was pulling several freight cars loaded with Frank North and his Pawnee Scouts, who the Government had hired as protection against the hostiles.

“What’s a-going on, Frank?” says I, for I knowed him.

And he answers: “The Cheyenne have caused some trouble down at Plum Creek and we’re moving there to fight them.”

“All right if I come along?”

He allowed it was a free country, so I clumb on. I was armed with a .56-caliber Ballard rifle, along with a percussion Remington 44 in my belt. There wasn’t time for to go get my saddle horse, which was being newly shoed at the blacksmith’s, for that engine pulled away while the tank was still gushing water. I asked North if he could mount me, and he said the Pawnee might have an extra pony but that would take a special kind of horseman.

I just laughed to myself. I hadn’t told nobody thereabout of my years among the Cheyenne, who for obvious reasons weren’t none too popular a tribe at this point, and in them days people was suspicious of you if you spent any length of time with hostile Indians and come back alive.

While we was larruping down the track, a Pawnee staggered over to the corner of the car where I was sitting-I don’t mean he was drunk: that ride was so rough you practically had to crawl when you wanted to move-and commences to peer at me. Now the Pawnee used to fight white men along the Santa Fe trail, but they turned friendly after the traffic got too heavy to deal with, and also they was hereditary enemies of the Sioux and Cheyenne, so made common cause with the Americans sometime back. A Pawnee shaved his head on either side, leaving no hair but a high-standing scalp-lock, which you call a roach. Everybody has his own taste in Indians, and I didn’t care much for the way they looked. This was natural enough considering my upbringing. You recall how I had warred against them when a young fellow among the Cheyenne.

Well, this brave studies me for a spell, then moves over to North and converses in Pawnee. He had to shout, for the train noise was awful, but I couldn’t gather a word, not knowing the lingo.

Then Frank cups his hand at his mouth and says to me: “He claims he fought against you once on the Niobrara River, when you were a Cheyenne.… Don’t laugh or you will hurt his feelings.”

The warning wasn’t necessary: I wasn’t amused, for undoubtedly this sharp-eyed Indian was telling the truth. I remembered once that some Pawnee had raided our pony herd in broad daylight along that river, which we called the Surprise, and we Human Beings went after them. One Pawnee’s horse was hit, throwing him onto the prairie, and being closest, I sought to ride him down, but he kept me off with a rapid fire of arrows until a comrade come back and he swung upon the pony’s rump and yelling the Pawnee victory cry they made their escape untouched through a blizzard of our shafts and musket balls, in despite of our fast-running pursuit though we got the rest of the party and took their hair.

This man must have been one of them two which got away though what startled me was that he could recognize me these years later without paint and in American clothes. Well, I didn’t say no more till we reached the Plum Creek station and left the cars. I let North think it was a joke, for I didn’t want to explain, but while he and another white officer was going over the situation there, I went to that Pawnee and says, in the signs: “You had big medicine that day.”

This Indian’s name was Mad Bear. He says, without expression: “You were a Cheyenne then. Now you are a white man.” And then give the signs for “I don’t understand.”

“That is a long story,” I replies. “But the Cheyenne since then have stole my white wife and child, and I am going to fight them with you, and I don’t want that anything bad should stand between my heart and yours.” To which I adds, it being an Indian idea: “Everything changes except the earth.”

“And now the earth does too,” he signals, pointing to the railroad. He went on: “I believe you, but not because of what you tell me, for you look like a liar. I believe you because Pawnee Chief” (which was to say, Frank North) “says you are only a fool who drives a wagon. He asked me to protect you if we get into a fight.”

Before telling what happened when we had that fight, I ought to say first what the Cheyenne done at Plum Creek, for it was quite a success for them and never done before nor since to my knowledge. They derailed a whole freight train! Somehow they pried out the spikes and bent a rail up into the air, then give it a twist so when the next engine come along, why off it tumbled and the cars followed suit. I don’t know where them Indians had got so clever. Earlier there had been reports of Cheyenne braves who rode alongside trains and tried to lasso them, and this was believable, for a savage Indian wouldn’t have no sense of mass or magnitude when it come to a hunk of metal that big: and he would take the fact that a white man run it to signify that a red man could as well rope it.

We stayed at Plum Creek a couple days, and the Pawnee patrolled the country roundabout, finding it altogether clear of hostiles. North and his officers had just about decided to return to the end-of-track when a force of Cheyenne appeared on the south bank, coming back, I reckon, as an Indian will, to the place of their prior victory: remember they had hit Julesburg twice.

The Pawnee howled their war cries and headed for the bridge near the old stage station, which was too small to accommodate their whole force, so a good many went into the water and forded the stream, but coming up the other shore their horses stuck in the mud, so the scouts dismounted and footed it up the bank. This movement confused the Cheyenne, who had not expected resistance where before they had it so easy, and when the Pawnee delivered a murderous fire from their Spencer repeating carbines, making a half-dozen kills, the Human Beings turned and run for it despite their advantage of number.

I rode with North across the bridge. As I have suggested he had a low opinion of me, but when the action started he didn’t have time to take a mind of what I was doing and once we reached the other bank I galloped free on the borrowed Pawnee pony. It was a liberating feeling once again to have such a mount. I hadn’t rode pad saddle for many a year, but once you have been trained to the Indian style of riding you don’t forget it no more than you disremember to swim if dumped into the water after years away.

There we went, pounding along, us few whites and forty Pawnee, with maybe a hundred and fifty Cheyenne in full flight across a mile of prairie, with the roar of hoofs and Pawnee yells and the frequent crack of them Spencers, the Human Beings loosing a few futile arrows but mainly running in disorder.

The ground slowly ascended towards a line of hills. Now and again a Cheyenne dropped from his pony and a Pawnee sprang off to deal him the death-stroke if he still breathed, and lift his scalp. I hadn’t fired yet and never intended to except in self-defense, but that Pawnee, Mad Bear, kept lateral and eyed me, his roach blown flat from the rush of wind, so at length I squeezed one off from my Ballard, purposefully aiming midway between the two nearest Cheyenne. But I had little practice at firing from a running horse up to then, on account of not having had a gun in my pony days, and by a quirk of chance cut off a flying braid from the farther man. It was entwined with blue ribbon, for I saw it on the ground as I thundered over, and indeed it looked queer there.

Now we was reaching the slopes, and higher on could see the Cheyenne women and children with their camp baggage on the pony drags. They was fleeing too, but hardly so fast as the overtake, so their warriors flowed around them and turned and rode back against us, but the Pawnee broke the charge with their rapid-firing carbines. Then the Cheyenne dismounted, give their ponies to the women and children, who abandoned the baggage and run for it behind the barrier of their menfolk walking backwards.

They managed the retreat as well as Indians could with no discipline and no strategy, and was no longer in rout though steadily losing men. Seventeen Cheyenne was killed that afternoon and countless wounded, and it seemed for an hour or so that the whole band might be rubbed out by nightfall, for as usual they owned few rifles, and the Pawnee continued between charges to pour a fire from beyond arrow range and drop them one by one.

Then we outflanked them, being they was afoot and with their fleeing village spread across the hills and into the valleys between, and despite what North could do to prevent it, his men killed a few noncombatants, for the Pawnee medicine was great that day and fed by fresh blood, and to an Indian an enemy is fair game of whatever sex or size. I saw a Cheyenne woman get shot off her horse. She was fat and for some reason looked familiar to me, and I rode alongside while the Pawnee put his knife above her ear and carved. For a second I thought it Was my foster-mother Buffalo Wallow Woman-but no it wasn’t, and I galloped on.

However, it did give me a start, for this fight was another thing from the trouble in which Olga and Gus was carried off. I got no satisfaction in running with the Pawnee: having been raised to hate them. I felt right uneasy about the whole business and sure didn’t like shooting at Cheyenne who was defending their families. And suppose this very band was holding Olga and Gus: soon I’d find their bodies with the skulls busted in. I had been a fool to board that train at Julesburg.

Thinking in this negative fashion I continued to ride and before I knowed it had got separated from the Pawnee now charging the right of the Cheyenne line, which was ever falling back though stubbornly. I was on the left and descending the valley behind the first range of hills. Ahead of me and widely dispersed, the Cheyenne women and children was quirting their ponies, here and there pursued by Pawnee riders.

It was right dry, and clouds of dust climbed to meet those of gunsmoke, and then the wind spread the mixture as a thin fog across the country, filtering the sunlight, and the colors looked intense as they do at a certain hour of evening. I was about half a mile now from the concentrated fire, so that it popped rather than blasted or snapped to my ear.

To make these observations and to rest my frothing pony, I had pulled him up at the lip of a deep ravine. Bad place to halt during a fight, and being an Indian mount he knowed it, and strained to move on, tired as he was. And then he give a deep sigh and sunk beneath me, like I was sitting on a big bag of grain that had a small puncture out of which the grains leaked steadily. But I leaped free before he was all the way down, being horseman enough to realize he had took an arrow in his belly. Though I hadn’t heard its flight nor felt its entry.

There was a Cheyenne in the ravine. I lay just back of the margin thereof, waiting for him to appear, my horse gasping out its life nearby, and not another sound. I put my hat onto the muzzle of the Ballard and stuck it just over the rim, and thungg!come an arrow into the brim, passing through feathers and all, and in descending almost hit me though its power was spent. Then before I could withdraw my weapon, he had seized the barrel end with a grip so mighty that had I retained hold I should have been drug into the gulch atop him. I am a small man. I let go and lost my rifle, though managed to discharge it before my hand was tore from out the trigger guard, the ball puffing up the sand on the far bank, not hurting him except for the shock of passage, from which his brown fingers jumped as though burnt. Then the stock upended and slid out of view.

Well, it was single-shot and wouldn’t do him no good unless he carried a supply of .56 rimfires. So I pulled my pistol and hurled myself to the brink and had he been still up on the bank where he seized my rifle I’d of killed him straightway, but he had already slid to the bottom with the Ballard at his knees all fouled with sand and empty, and he knowed it and was out of arrows, and drawed his knife, and, standing up, began to sing of death.

I recognized this man. It was Shadow That Comes in Sight. I wish he done as much for me, for as I started down the bank, he come to meet me with unfriendly intent and that edged weapon.

CHAPTER 16 My Indian Wife

“HOLD ON, BROTHER,” I cried in Cheyenne. “Let us talk.” And then, with my attention so strenuously fixed upon him, I tripped on that steep slope I was negotiating and plunged directly towards him, my pistol firing inadvertently as my hands clenched.

He held up his knife, with his left fingers gripping the right-hand wrist, so as to give added support for the impact. Which is to say, I was about to be impaled just below the arch of my rib-cage. My accidental shot had gone into the air.

Well, I was only falling six feet, but the time consumed by any type of action is relative, and I recall hanging motionless there in space like the subject in a photograph or artist’s rendering. Shadow wore two eagle feathers, aslant one from the other. There was beads of sweat upon his brown shoulders. He wore a choker of horizontal porcupine quills divided by vertical lines of blue beads; and between his left bicep and elbow cavity, a copper armlet; between his legs a dirty breechclout of red flannel. The black points of his narrow-lidded eyes was fixed on the target of my upper belly, and his legs was braced for the collision. Vermilion was the predominant color of his face paint, with an overlay of yellow bolts of lightning.

Almost at my leisure I floated down upon the point of the knife, and when I struck it and thought sort of lackadaisically that I was sure disemboweled, time speeded up again, and I was tumbling over him at great speed and still unwounded, for without willing it I had somehow altered my style of fall and took the blade in my shirt between arm and ribs. It seemed warm there from the close call, from the threat unsatisfied; had I been cut, I would have felt nothing; that is the peculiarity of knifeplay. Well, roll we did through the sand and scrub brush, and he was a powerful Indian though fifty year old. I had lost my pistol, but he kept his knife. Still I sought to talk, but his thumb was into my throat box so far as almost to break through the floor of my mouth. Being small and limber I kneed him frequent in the lower belly, but his iron ballocks sustained these blows without effect, and I missed my chops at the paralyzing neckcord below the left ear.

Soon I was pinned between his thighs, like steel pincers from forty years of pony riding, and now I yearned for the knife to plunge and free me from that compression which had caught me on an exhale and my vision was turning black.

He lifted high the blade, a Green River butcher weapon without a guard, and I won’t forget its slightest property. And then a little hole sprung beneath his chin, and blood begun to burble out of it. He swallowed twice, like to get rid of a little bone that got stuck in his throat. Only then did I hear the shot. His shoulder jerked as though pushed from behind: another shot. He dropped the knife and leaned towards me, the fluid running from his neck, yet his eyes was still open. Then I pushed him in the chest and back he went all the way, bending like rubber at the waist, for his legs was yet locked about my ribs and killing me, and locking my hands together into a kind of sledge, I smote him at the navel: spang!his thigh-grip loosened like a toy when you hit its spring.

Then down leaped that Pawnee Mad Bear from the bank above and putting the muzzle of his Spencer an inch from Shadow’s forehead, he gave him a third shot and a middle eye, and shortly ripped away his hair, which parted with a whap. He smirked at me, tore away Shadow’s breechclout and wiped the scalp upon the dead man’s private parts, saying something victorious in Pawnee.

He had saved my life, sure enough, but I reckon I knew how Younger Bear had felt when I did the same for him them many years before: I wasn’t grateful. Shadow That Comes in Sight had took me on my first raid, having ever been like an older brother or uncle. I was right fond of him. What caught me in the heart now was not that he had been killed, for we all will be sometime. Nor that it had been violent, for as a Human Being he would not have died another way. Nor even that in an involved fashion I had been the instrument of his loss. No, the sadness of it was that Shadow had never known who I was. He had fought me as an enemy. Well, that’s why I was there, wasn’t I, to fight the Cheyenne?

Goddam but he had powerful legs. I still could barely breathe. I got up and watched Mad Bear climb the bank and shortly reappear at its brink on his pony, smugly shake his rifle, and trot away. He hadn’t even commented on the loss of my horse, which had been borrowed from him.

I had not had time to wonder how Shadow happened to be down in this draw in the first place, but now, moving slow for I was mighty sore, as I scratched out a shallow grave for him with his own knife and covered him over, I considered there might be other Human Beings somewhere below among the brush and if they wanted to shoot me in the back, they was welcome to do so. I’d rather that than meet them face to face and see my old friends and brothers.

But I had just got the tip of his long nose covered over with sand when I heard a rustling in the bushes down a ways, and it is queer how my instincts for self-preservation arose without my conscious will, and I seized my fallen revolver and blowed and worked the action clean and replaced all the caps. This in an instant, and then snaked along the bottom of the draw. The brush was trembling, but whatever it could be was staying within. I lurked a moment, then parted the twigs and crept through pistol first, with my face just behind the hammer. I was looking into a clearing just big enough for one person, and that person lay upon her back. She was an Indian woman with her skirt pulled up and her bare legs stretched apart and between them she was giving birth.

The tiny brown head was already emerged, eyes closed and looking a mite peevish at its entry into reality, and now the little shoulders squeezed through. There was never a sound except where that one straining knee was scraping the brush, which I had heard. She watched what went on and bit from time to time into a wad of her buckskin collar; maybe her eyes winced out a drop of moisture, but there was no more commotion than that. She had been there all the while, and that was the occasion for Shadow’s presence and why he fought so hard.

Cheyenne women at such a time always go off by themselves into the brush, and when it is done, come out with the infant and return to work as usual. The only difference here was that she went into labor in the middle of a battle. But the little fellow had to come when he was ready.

I was embarrassed for a variety of reasons, giving birth being an occasion of unusual modesty for a Cheyenne, so much so that I reckon this woman would take Shadow’s death less heavily than my observation of her. Yet I was fascinated, for within half a mile from the soles of my upturned feet the firing had not abated, nor the yells concerning the great day for the Pawnee.… Out of her come the little cleft behind of the infant, tightly pinched together. She strained some more, and then the rest of him emerged smooth as a fish onto the blue blanket spread beneath, and she set up, bit off the cord, tied the baby’s end against his tiny belly, and slapped him into wakefulness, to which he come like a real Cheyenne: with a little start but almost no noise. I expected he already knowed a cry would bring the enemy down on his tribe, so he forbore from loose utterance, and always would. That was also the first and last slap he would ever get from his own kind, while moving into a life that otherwise would know every type of mayhem.

I backed on out of there and went down to the sand heap under which lay Shadow. In a minute she come out of the brush, walking strong and vigorous and matter-of-fact, the child’s head a-peeping from the blanket at her bosom. Eying me, she then went for her belted knife and I reckon might have been a tough customer with it in spite of her newborn. Only I put my revolver forward, which would seem brutal did you not understand by now that a Cheyenne, man or woman, has got a terrible thick skull when it comes to hearing white men.

“Now,” I says, “I am going to shoot you and your child if you don’t listen. Shadow That Comes in Sight was killed by the Pawnee. That was the shot you heard, and then you heard him ride away. If you are related to Shadow then maybe you have heard of Little Big Man, which is what I was called when I lived with Old Lodge Skins’s band. I was a friend of the Cheyenne until they stole my wife and son. That is why I am here now. I am going to take you along with me and trade you for them.”

She studies me through them dark eyes and says: “All right.”

“I don’t like to do this,” I says, “with your newborn and all, but I have no choice.”

“All right,” she answers and sets down, opens her dress under the arm, and puts the infant to feed.

“Look,” says I, “we had better get to open ground. A Pawnee might come upon us here unawares and kill you before I could explain.”

“He must eat first,” she tells me quietly and sets solid.

So I kept my watch upon the rim of the draw during the ensuing conversation. I didn’t know this woman-girl, rather, too young at the time I lived among them to take my notice, if she had been there. I figured her for Shadow’s wife, which accounted for his guarding, but it turned out she was rather one of them young daughters I have mentioned him training, way back, to control her giggle at his funny stories.

“Your husband been rubbed out?”

“By white men,” she says without apparent passion. She was a winsome Indian, when I noticed, having a plump face like a berry and large eyes in a slightly Chinee slant and with a sheen across the underlying tear-sacs; fine though short brow beneath the vermilion parting of her hair. Her shining braids was intertwined with otter-skin, and she wore bright beads, with brass circles in her earlobes.

I started to ask Where, instead of Who, for she probably wouldn’t have told his name, when I heard the pounding of at least three riders on the plain above: unshoed horses, signifying Indians but whether Pawnee or Cheyenne I couldn’t say, and so far as that went, I disliked the approach of either in equal measure. Not speaking Pawnee, I might not get time to use the signs afore they had shot down this woman. If it was Cheyenne, well, that is obvious.

I mention this because you might question what I did next: grabbed that girl and hastened her back into the brush, the infant still at her pap, and crouched there with her, holding her still though she made no resistance.

The Pawnee arrived, for so they were as I could tell from their talk, and apparently inspected the ravine bottom from above but did not come down. Shortly they rode off, after I believe, from the sound, one had voided his water right from the saddle down the bank.

Yet me and the girl stayed where we was for some time, and it came to me that sitting on her heels she leaned her firm body back against me, taking support from it, and unwittingly in clutching her I had got through the side-lacings of the nursing dress and that unoccupied left breast of hers, weighty with milk, lay against my hand. Now I gently cupped it, I don’t know why, for I surely wasn’t lustful in that circumstance. But me and her and the little fellow, who had now went to sleep with his tiny mouth still quavering upon the protruded nipple, we was a kind of family. I had protected them like a father should, and like I had failed to with Olga and little Gus.

She leaned her head back and placed her warm cheek against my forehead. She smelled of suck, that sweet-sourish fragrance, and then of all them Cheyenne things I knowed of old: fire, earth, grease, blood, sweat, and utter savagery.

She says: “Now I believe you. You are Little Big Man, and I will be your wife now to replace the one you lost, and this is your son.” She puts him into my arms, and he wakes briefly up and I’ll swear, small as he was, grins at me with them beady black eyes. I felt right queer.

She says: “I think we had better be going. They will probably collect at Spring Creek.”

“Who?”

“Our people,” she answers as if that went without saying. “The Pawnee had great medicine today, but next time we will beat them and cut off their peckers, and their women will sleep alone and weep all night.”

I was still holding the baby.

“You have a beautiful son,” she says, looking at both of us in admiration, then takes him back. “Do you have any baggage for me to carry?”

I was still sort of stunned and didn’t reply, so she fixes the baby inside her bosom, cinches her belt so as to secure his legs, then crawls up the bank to where my dead horse was laying, takes off the blanket from it and the pad saddle and my coat which I had took off and tied behind, and slides back down. She looked disappointed that that was all she had to tote.

“The wolves will eat my father tonight,” she says. “We should put him on a burial scaffold, but there is no timber here and it is too far to carry him to where there are trees.”

Then she steps back so I can take the lead as a man should. I guess it wasn’t until that moment that I gathered her intent.

“We can’t go back to the tribe,” I says.

“Do you think the white men will let you have a Human Being wife?” she asks. She had a point there, though exaggerated. It wouldn’t be a crime, but it would sure seem odd to Frank North were I to come back from that fight with a family I had suddenly acquired from the enemy. I could of course present this woman and child as legitimate captives, only then they’d be let in for considerable abuse from the Pawnee and later be turned over to the Army at some fort, to be held for exchange with whites taken by the Cheyenne. This was what I had had in mind earlier on, with an idea to control the trade and reclaim Olga and Gus. But right now, at a fairly outlandish moment, I got realistic. I had never received one word that my white family was still alive, and I had checked the forts along the Arkansas. And those along the Platte while working on the railroad.

Truth was, I had just about decided they was dead without admitting it.

I says: “In the mood they’re in at the moment, the Cheyenne will shoot me on sight.”

My woman answered: “I will be with you.”

So that is how I rejoined the Human Beings. I didn’t have no regrets, leaving behind only my horse with the blacksmith in Julesburg and my share in our little hauling business. As to my sister Caroline, I ought to say that just before I had went down to Julesburg, she told me Frank Delight, the whoremaster and saloonkeeper, had asked her hand in matrimony, and she was inclined to entertain the proposition favorably.

I won’t detail our route down the ravine to an intersecting one and then on, coming out behind a hill that obscured us from the Pawnee, no more of which we encountered. And continued mile upon mile of rise and fall, during which night overtook us, and that woman arranged some brush and roofed it with blankets and we slept therein, cheek-by-jowl against the chill you usually get at night upon the prairie, where the wind blows all the time.

The next day we reached Spring Creek and along it found a gathering of the tribe, with remnants like us still coming in. As I expected, I had a close call or two with some of the young Dog Soldiers, but my woman drove them off me like she said she would, for she had a fierce tongue and concentrated purpose.

Old Lodge Skins had got a new tepee since last I seen him, but I recognized his shield hanging before the entranceway.

“Wait here, woman,” I says, and she did as told, and I went within.

“Grandfather,” I says.

“My son,” he greets me, as if I had seen him last two minutes ago. “You want to eat?” He had the most equable temperament I ever knowed in a man.

He looked the same to me when I could make him out, except his eyes stayed closed. I figured he was dreaming, and sure enough he proceeded to paint a verbal picture of the incidents in that ravine.