Текст книги "LITTLE BIG MAN"

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

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 35 страниц)

I mention this to explain Caroline’s peculiar manner at that time. I think she was also humiliated at not having been raped.

“Well, Caroline,” said Ma, standing there in her long, washed-out dress and sunbonnet; she looked like one of them little dolls you can make out of a hollyhock blossom with a bud for its head. My Ma was small, not far over five feet, and I reckon my lifelong shortness is due to hers. “Well, Caroline, I expect we will have to go back to Laramie. I’ll tell the soldiers and they’ll come to fetch you.”

“I wouldn’t count on that,” replied Caroline. “Indins know all about how to hide their tracks.”

“Well, then,” Ma said, “you must drop a button now and again, or a piece of your shirt, to lay a trail.”

Caroline impatiently scraped the sweat from her forehead and wiped the hand on the butt of her jeans. She believed, I think, that Ma was trying to diminish her danger and self-concocted glory, and the direct result of that was the cooking of my goose.

“Maybe they won’t hurt me permanently,” said Caroline. “Maybe they’ll hold me for ransom. I don’t expect to be murdered, or why would they want Jack to come along, too?”

That awful whimper, I discovered after a bit, was issuing from my own throat. Hearing my name had set it off.

To her credit my Ma went up to Old Lodge Skins’s horse and begged him not to take me, on account of I was her youngest and only ten years old and skinny. He nodded with sympathy, but when she was done he beckoned to his followers, who rode in and tied all eight horses to our wagon as if the deal had been closed. Even then the subsequent events might have failed to transpire had not the Cheyenne hung around for a bit in the hopes they would get a cup of coffee! Indians simply never understood whites and vice versa.

“Bill will take one of the ponies and ride back for the soldiers fast as he can go,” Ma said, giving me a great hug. “Don’t think bad of your Pa, Jack. He done the best he could, given his vision. Maybe by taking you and Caroline, the Indians are trying after their own fashion to make up for what they done yesterday. I don’t think they’re bad people, Jack, or they wouldn’t have brung the horses.”

There you had it. Nobody thought to ask Caroline how she knew what the Cheyenne were up to without speaking their language. There was a time when I suspected my Ma actually wanted to get rid of us, because the soldiers never came; which was before I found out, some years on, that Bill rode back to Laramie, sold the horse, got a job with the traders, and not only never reported about us to the Army but also never rejoined the wagons. No, my Ma was well-meaning but ignorant. My Pa was crazy and my brother was a traitor. Then there was Caroline. They weren’t much of a family, I guess, but then I was not with them long.

Ma give us each a kiss, and Caroline mounted one of the ponies brought by the Indians, pulling me up behind. The other kids waved in silence, Bill with a dirty, scared grin. Old Lodge Skins, dawdling about nearby on his horse, grunted quizzically and covered his lips. I didn’t know then that this is how Indians show astonishment-their mouth falls open and they cover it so their soul can’t jump out and run away.

He thereupon gave evidence of wanting to make another speech, but Caroline motioned him to come on, dug her heels into the mount, which was skittish owing to its unfamiliarity with white hindquarters, and we went off like a cannon shot, heading north.

At top of the rise, she pulled in on the rawhide bridle and waited for the three Cheyenne, who weren’t in no hurry, I’ll say that for them. Then we rode on down to the river, which was yellow and swollen from the spring rains, and swam the ponies across, I holding onto the tail of ours and spinning behind like a lure on a fishline.

CHAPTER 2 Boiled Dog

ON THE OTHER SIDE of the river, Caroline fetched me up on the pony’s rump again, and said in a new sappy, romantic way that would have been pathetic were I not numb from fear and now swamped with the muddy water of the Platte: “Maybe, Jack, I’m going to be an Indin princess in feathers and beads.”

I never had rode horse much before, and already it was beginning to get me in the crotch and hams from jolting up and slamming down at every stride; and if I dug my heels into the beast’s yellow haunches, he would blow out his belly and try to shiver his arse out from under mine. I had not made a friend in that animal, which was a pity being as he was my sole means of support in a vast and alien land populated by savages.

One of the latter came up alongside us at that moment, namely Old Lodge Skins himself, whom the river crossing had changed as to personality. I later found he had a special feeling about the Platte, regarding it as the southern boundary of his territory and when on the other side felt foolish and irresponsible, whereas when north of it came back to normal, whatever that was. Anyway, once he rode in out of the water, he gave us a stern look from under his hat, pointed back over a bony shoulder protruding from his blanket, as if to say “Get behind,” and trotted his animal up the bank.

We followed, our horse making the bluff in a couple of tries owing to his double load-not that I was that much extra weight, but rather because he never lost an opportunity to let me know I was an imposition.

Now when Indians travel, they go every which way according to their personal taste. Them two braves who had come with the chief didn’t cross at the same place as us. One rode down a hundred yards and swum his pony over, and the other went upstream for about a mile, then the river took a bend and he went around it out of sight. I guess he knew a better place. We didn’t see him again for an hour, until we come over a rise, and there he sat on the earth, his mount grazing nearby. Old Lodge Skins passed him without so much as a look, and the brave returned the compliment. The latter started singing, though, in an awful moaning fashion that we could hear for a long time thereafter, when so far off he looked like a tiny bush.

After I had lived some time with the Cheyenne and learned their peculiarities, I remembered that incident and realized that the fellow had been in a “mood.” Something had offended him-maybe the river crossing he used had turned out to be full of quicksand or a frog on the shore called him an insulting name-and he moped along full of depression, and deciding to die, he sat down and began to sing his death song. In the old days before the coming of the whites, other than in battle Indians never kicked off except from shame. But the white men brought a number of diseases-like smallpox, which wiped out the entire Mandan nation-and that took the point away from dying for moral reasons, so it was cut out for the most part, although some willful individuals like our friend might try upon occasion.

Apparently it didn’t work this time because I saw the same fellow next day in camp, where he was peering into a little trade mirror and plucking out facial hair with a bone tweezer. His vanity had got the upper hand, so he must have recovered by then.

The riding got somewhat easier because the chief proceeded in a slow walk and every half mile or so stopped altogether, turned to us, and made certain hand signals accompanied by noises in his heathen tongue-communications which Caroline interpreted as statements of admiration for herself and suchlike rot. Then he would stare sadly at us for a minute and head on.

Now I better explain part of the secret at this point, as long as you understand what neither Old Lodge Skins nor me got the hang of it until quite a spell afterward. As to Caroline, well, it’s useless to speculate about what she thought she knew or what she imagined, because they was always all mixed together.

The main thing was that the chief had not made a deal to buy me and Caroline back at the wagons. What he done instead was make a long statement on the massacre, excusing the Cheyenne from any responsibility for it; but to be decent, because he liked white men still at this time and he also figured to get blamed when the story reached the troops at Laramie, he brought them horses to pay for the men that were killed.

So there we were, what with Caroline’s taste for romance and the gift for jumping to conclusions she inherited from our Pa, trailing Old Lodge Skins across the prairie under a terrible misapprehension. The chief thought we was following him to get more reparation and the speeches he made at them stops was to protest against the injustice of our hounding him like coyotes, who will sometimes follow you for miles.

Caroline stared at him in love, and that poor Indian interpreted it as the look of ruthless extortion. In later years I grew greatly fond of Old Lodge Skins. He had more bad luck than any human being I have ever known, red or white, and you can’t beat that for making a man likable.

As I say, none of us understood the situation, but me and Caroline was considerably better off than the chief, because we only looked to him for our upkeep in the foreseeable future, whereas he at last decided we was demons and only waiting for dark to steal the wits from his head; and while riding along he muttered prayers and incantations to bring us bad medicine, but so ran his luck that he never saw any of the animal brothers that assisted his magic-such as Rattlesnake or Prairie Dog-but rather only Jackrabbit, who had a grudge against him of long standing because he once had kept a prairie fire off his camp by exhorting it to burn the hares’ homes instead. Which it did, turning away from his lodges after coming so close the tepee-skins was scorched. Ever since that incident the rabbits all knew him, and when encountering him alone would stand up on them enormous hind legs and say: “We think bad thoughts for you.” They would also call him by his real name, which is as malicious as you can get, and go bounding off, showing white or black tail as the case may be, for both families had it in for that particular Indian.

And I’ll say this: I never in my life saw more examples of that animal than when in the company of Old Lodge Skins. Let the toe of his moccasin protrude from the tepee, and up they’d leap for miles about, numerous as sparks when you throw a horseshoe in the forge.

But the one defense a redskin has against the kind of harassment me and Caroline was, unbeknownst to us, dealing to our host is loss of interest. If an Indian can’t accomplish his purpose with reasonable haste, it bores hell out of him and he will forget it immediately. He is interested only in a going proposition. So with Old Lodge Skins, who after a bit tightened the scarlet blanket around him, which under a hot sun kept him cooler than had he exposed his naked back, and rode on as if he was the only living individual north of the River Platte.

The third brave (counting as second the fellow sitting back a ways under the illusion he was dying) specialized in being always a half a mile off, to the left, right, or ahead. I guess he was looking both for enemies and something to eat. At any given time the Cheyenne was over-furnished with the first and had too little of the second.

In such fashion we proceeded towards the Cheyenne camp, which I reckon to have been not more than ten mile, as the arrow flies, from the Platte in a direction north by northeast; but it took our little party three or four hours to get there, owing to the chief’s warped manner of navigating so as to discourage me and Caroline.

The sun still held itself a hand’s width above the horizon, but the prairie underhoof was slowly turning purplish. A person who knows that land can fix his look on a square foot of turf, never turning to the sky, and tell you the hour of day at any moment from the general cast of light upon it. I mean a white man. An Indian don’t keep that sort of time because he ain’t, in the white sense, ever going anywhere. You can imagine Columbus saying, “I better get started: it’s 1492 and I got to get across the ocean blue before midnight on December 31st or else America won’t be discovered till ’93,” but a redskin computes in another fashion. The sign-language term for “day” is the same as for “sleep.” Now, looking at a patch of earth, an Indian would see which animals had stepped there during the past two weeks, what birds had flown overhead, and how far it was to the nearest water-this in addition to a lot of supernatural stuff, because he does not separate the various types of vitality one from the next.

So if I say Old Lodge Skins went along in a coma, I mean as far as we were concerned. He knew where he was, all right, and at one point caught the attention of the scouting brave-whose name I might as well give: Burns Red in the Sun-pointed ahead to rising ground, and showed a hooked finger. Burns Red traveled in from the left flank and slipped off his pony, undoing the single rein of the rawhide war bridle from his belt and tying it to a lance which he drove into the earth. He dropped his blanket and stripped off his leggings. In his breechclout and carrying bow and arrows, he snuck up the long swell of which we others waited at the foot, flopping to his belly just before the point of divide. The grass hereabout had been trampled flat by a great herd of buffalo and not long before, it not having sprung back yet, and you could see him snaking all the way until his moccasin soles tipped up and disappeared.

Shortly there came on the wind, blowing from him to us, the thunnng, thunnngof two arrows leaving the bowstring, a rush of little hoofs, and then Old Lodge Skins trotted up and over, me and Caroline naturally hard behind. There, squatting at a buffalo wallow half filled with water, was Burns Red in the Sun. Alongside him lay a pronghorn antelope whose panting throat he was in the act of cutting, the animal having been felled but not killed by a shaft to the left haunch. The other shot had missed altogether; still, Burns Red had done a nice piece of work, creeping to within fifty feet of the little pack, the remaining four of which were now at the distance of a quarter mile and still going. That creature can run.

The next thing Burns Red did was to cut off that black and white rosette of tail from the antelope’s behind, which he would keep for decoration, it being a cunning little item. Then he slit open its chest at the division between the ribs, and plunging in his fist, he ripped out the gory heart, hot and still palpitating. This he shoved at me.

At the sight of that dripping offal, I shivered off, but Burns Red seized my nape with one hand and pushed the heart in my mouth with the other. That was actually a mark of preference, for he was mighty fond of fresh antelope heart himself, to which he owed his prowess as swiftest runner in Old Lodge Skins’s band, but of course I didn’t know that then. However, I was scared of Burns Red in the Sun, who had the peculiarity mentioned in his name, as many Indians do though some others are almost black, and to protect his cheeks he daubed them with a coat of clay that dried a wolfish gray-white, from which his eyes peered little and glittering like a serpent’s.

So I gnawed off a hunk of bloody heart, which was not the easiest work owing to the stringy vessels that run through it, and he relieved me of the rest and gulped it right down. My nausea disappeared once I fully swallowed the raw morsel, the taste of which I can only describe as live and fleet. Immediately the calf-muscles of my legs started to hum like plucked bowstrings and I felt I could have caught the wind had not we all mounted again, Burns Red with the antelope carcass leaking gore on the rump of his pony, where he toted it.

Old Lodge Skins had detected the beasts on the other side of the hill, though there was no way he could have seen them. He had a gift for that sort of thing, which was unusually acute even for an Indian. The way he knew was having dreamed it. He was dreaming as he rode along that day, right in the middle of the prairie. He didn’t need nighttime or even to fall asleep.

Not long after shooting the antelope we arrived at the Cheyenne camp, which had located on a little creek about as wide as a gunstock and was shaded by no more than three cottonwood, two of which were only saplings. We pulled up on the knoll above, so as to give them time to identify us as ourselves rather than Crow come to run off the Cheyenne ponies. Old Lodge Skins was full of such courtesies-which is what this could be called, because nobody around that camp was ever alert for intruders; at least once a week they were successfully raided by horse thieves from enemy tribes, sometimes in broad daylight.

What could be seen from the knoll was as follows: a couple of dozen hide tepees, pitched on the right bank of the stream. In the meadow beyond, a pony herd of some thirty head. In the water itself, a number of giggling, bare-arsed brown children slapping water at one another. A bunch of able-bodied young men sitting around smoking and fanning themselves with eagle feathers, a few others strutting up and down wearing finery before a group of womenfolk pounding something on the ground. A couple of young girls towing in from the prairie a buffalo robe full of the stacked dry dung of the same animal, the so-called chips used for fuel on the plains being there was little wood available. A heavy-set female chewing soft a hunk of hide. Others going for water and hauling bundles and mending lodge skins and making moccasins, sewing leggings, fringing shirts, marrowing bones, grinding berries, stitching beads, and the rest of the duties to which an Indian woman gives herself from dawn until she lies on her robe at night and her man mounts her.

As we come down to the creek nobody in camp paid the slightest notice, but when Burns Red in the Sun, who rode last, splashed across with the antelope slung behind, it created quite a stir among the women. I found out later that band hadn’t had a bite of meat for about ten days and was feeding on prairie turnips and old rawhide and considering the chewing of grasshoppers like the Paiutes, which to an Indian is about as low as you can get. This was in late spring, when in those days the plains were ordinarily hairy with buffalo, and if you recall, the grass on the hill near the water hole had been beaten down by a great herd. Yet Old Lodge Skins’s bunch hadn’t ate flesh for more than a week. That’s what I mean about their bad luck.

Now a special mention to their dogs. Little as the band was, they had thirty or more mongrels, the prevailing color of which was pus-yellow though every other hue was also represented, including a good many of the spotted variety. This crowd kept up a constant din at all times, snarling, barking, howling, quarreling among themselves, so that they were generally worthless as watchmen, even in the nights, which they would spend answering the coyotes who wailed from the bluffs while the Pawnee snuck in and cut out a dozen ponies without drawing a growl.

These dogs met us at the creek, swarming among the horses’ legs and jumping at the antelope’s head as it swung lifeless above them. But they was also wary of the rawhide quirt strapped to Burns Red’s left wrist, which he flicked negligently at them like a horse scattering flies with his tail, so though they clamored and snapped their fangs, they didn’t actually bite nothing. The secret to enduring an Indian dog is to ignore his noise; he hasn’t got much worse. I didn’t learn that right off, and had some bad times, as right now: there was one dirty white dog, with red eyes and a slavering mouth, who decided to give me his preference over the antelope carcass. He crouched below our pony’s left haunch, and while studying my face, slowly rolled back his upper lip at the same time as his lower jaw fell away, making all in all a very savage exhibition of yellow ivory. Caroline had to elbow me in the ribs so as to draw breath, I was hugging her that tight.

“Now don’t shame me before our friends, Jack,” said she, straining to smile at the Cheyenne women crowding round, none of whom however give us yet a glance. I believe at that point Caroline had already begun to lose her nerve. I don’t know what exactly she had thought she was getting into, but at the first sight of an Indian camp the stoutest heart is likely to quail. Without experience of them, you tend to think: well, I see their dump, but where’s the town? And the smell alone is very queer: it isn’t precisely a stench as white people know one, but a number of stinks melding together into a sort of invisible fog that replaces the air, so that with every breath you draw in all the facts of life concerning mankind and the four-footed animals. Right now it had a principal odor, owing to our pony staling under us at the very moment. Except in the case of such a particular event nearby, no smells predominated. You was just completely in another type of existence from the first minute your lungs filled with that atmosphere.

But, like anything else, living in it made it your reality, and when next I entered a white settlement, I missed the odor of what seemed to me life itself and felt I would suffocate.

Burns Red in the Sun dismounted and stalked proudly around camp, leaving the throng of women to dispose of the antelope, which they fell on and skinned in the time it takes to fill and light a pipe, and began to butcher with like speed. As to Old Lodge Skins, he walked his pony to a big but shabby tepee the cover of which, in between where it was patched, bore faded blue-and-yellow drawings-stick-men, scratchy animals, triangle-mountains, button-suns, and the like-got down, handed the single rein to a boy who was standing there in a leather breechclout and nothing else but moccasins, and ducking almost to his knees so his plug hat would clear and holding it besides, went in through the entrance hole.

“This here,” says my sister Caroline, “I believe, is home.” What I could see of her face when she turned in the saddle, looked definitely peaked. “But,” she went on, “would it be seemly for us to foller him indoors? That’s the question.”

“Caroline,” I answered, “I am raw and sore from this riding, and my Pa is dead and my Ma is far away, and that white dog is still alongside watering at the mouth. I am scared to get down.”

At that some of my sister’s spirit returned. “I sure won’t let a dirty little dog stop me,” she said with heat, and having flipped her leg over the saddle, raking me with a bootheel in the process, she dropped to the ground. The dog ignored her utterly. Taking her cue from the chief, she also give her rein to the Indian kid, who was staring at me out of his bright black eyes. For racial reasons I didn’t take to him, but I jerked my thumb at the dog, who was waiting for nothing in the world but my coming down where it could conveniently get at me.

Being a shrewd lad, he got the idea and fetched the cur a foot in the rump that sent it whining off. So added to my natural bias against him was that favor, and I hopped to the ground with my nose lifted and on the strength of spite trailed Caroline as she took a big gulp of air and entered the lodge.

It was marvelously dark in there, coming from the outdoor brightness of afternoon, and whatever you could see owed to the presence of a little buffalo-chip fire in the center of the floor and such light as fell through the smokehole at the top of the cone. Now if the outside smell was remarkably ripe, you could never recall it after one whiff of indoors a tepee, where it was like trying to breathe underwater in a swamp.

After a while I could make out a stout woman stirring a pot over the fire, but she didn’t lift her head at us. All round the circumference of the lodge were dark forms, their heads against the skin wall and feet pointing towards the middle, which closer inspection showed to be not persons recumbent but hairy buffalo robes. It was so dark we had to traipse from one to another, never knowing but that the next might be occupied by some savage who might take the intrusion very ill. We had half-circled the fire before locating Old Lodge Skins, whose bed was directly opposite the door. He was sitting silent there, and Caroline almost fell over him, catching herself at the last minute on a tepee pole from which was dangling a number of skin bags and bundles containing such few private possessions as an Indian owns.

The chief held a stone pipe which had a wooden shank a foot and a half in length and was decorated with a series of brass tacks that winked in the firelight. We just stood watching him, on account of having no place else to go. He filled his pipe bowl from a little leather pouch and then the stout woman put a stick in the fire until it caught and blew it into a burning coal, fetching it to him, who thereupon lighted up, sucking so hard his cheeks caved in like a skull’s. Owing to the length of the stem, it was powerful hard to keep one of them pipes going, but he got it to where he was satisfied, then all at once shoved it towards Caroline.

My sister, mannish as she tended to be, however had not smoked nor chewed her life long. She admired the pipe kindly and passed it back to Skins. The chief correctly supposed she didn’t savvy what was wanted, and indicated with his fingers she should sit down upon the buffalo robe at his right. Then Old Lodge Skins leaned across and placed the end of the stem in her mouth, while mimicking with his own lips the action of smoking.

Caroline accepted the mouthpiece and went to puffing according to Old Lodge Skins’s model. Of course, to her this, I believe, was a type of sexual ritual or the like. The chief, however, was muttering incantations against what he thought was her bad medicine directed at him, and the fact that she had taken the pipe encouraged him to believe that his charms would work, because an Indian holds by smoking above all things.

Old Lodge Skins finally took the device away when it got to where she was expelling only a thin vapor, and Caroline gasped and chewed awhile on her neckerchief. She was panting for a goodly time after, but never passed out and didn’t puke. Caroline was a pretty tough old girl.

The chief now loosened the ashes in the pipe bowl and poured them out on the toes of Caroline’s boots, so as to give her bad luck, only we didn’t know that at the time. Then he stoked up again from his beaded pouch with what was actually in small part tobacco, the rest being made up of red-willow bark, sumac leaves, the marrow from buffalo bones, and several other ingredients. Indians of course invented the habit of smoking, and almost nothing else.

By the time he had smoked his own bowl out, Old Lodge Skins changed his whole style. He grinned, he spoke a good deal of Cheyenne in an affable tone, and he said something to the woman at the fire that was apparently orders, for she left directly and come back with a fresh hunk of antelope from the carcass earlier referred to.

This moon-faced woman hacked up the flesh and throwed it in the pot with the mess already simmering there. I figure it was on account of the smell that while the meal was cooking a bunch of Indians began to show up at the tepee. First come that boy who took the horses, and then another stoutish woman who from the back was a dead ringer for the cook, and a tiny girl wearing not a stitch and a slightly bigger lad likewise; next appeared a fine tall fellow about twenty-five years of age; and finally Burns Red in the Sun, the breadwinner himself, still in his mask of clay, and just behind him a procession beginning with a slender woman with a great fall of loosely braided black hair and eyes soft as a doe. Three or four kids followed her, the oldest about six.

These people squatted around the circle of the lodge wall and had eyes for nothing but that pot. Most of them brought their own wooden bowls and some had spoons of the same or else horn. They never uttered a sound, and not once did they so much as glance at me and Caroline.

After a bit the cook ladled out a bowl each for my sister and me, and then the others gathered around and got theirs. Old Lodge Skins didn’t eat a thing, just sat there on his buffalo hides and looked grand.

Now it happened that I remembered how the redskins that had come to our wagons always said “How, how” when they ate biscuit and drank coffee. I still felt mighty uneasy about the whole situation, and though I was terrible hungry, that meal did very little for my peace of mind: it was pretty strong, I’ll tell you. The antelope chunks weren’t too well done. Indians don’t have a prejudice against grease, on the one hand; and on the other, they weren’t given in those days to using salt. Along with the meat was some chokecherries all cooked to a mush, and a root or two that didn’t have a taste until you swallowed it and it fell all the way to your belly and gave off the aftereffect of choking on sand.

But, as I say, I recalled that courteous remark and put it. I wanted them people to like me. They weren’t paying no attention to us yet, but I had seen how Indians could change. “How, how, how,” said I, right to Old Lodge Skins. It took a bit of nerve. Caroline give me a poke, but the chief was considerably pleased.

In fact, he shot it right back at me, “How, how,” and then spoke something that turned out, after I learned to parley in Cheyenne, to be my first Indian name: Little Antelope, which was Vokain that lingo and sounded like a cough. As a name it had no undue importance since I got several more in time, but was a start. At least I hadn’t been scalped for uttering the sentiment, which I had considered not unlikely, for you probably ain’t got no conception of what it resembles to be a boy of ten newly joined a pack of barbarians.

And Caroline got a favor, because while the chief was grinning at me, I saw her fish a big hunk of meat from her bowl and slip it outside under the tepee skin, where a dog could be heard to gnaw it up straightway, because you never find a nook or cranny in an Indian camp that don’t have a dog right at hand.