Текст книги "LITTLE BIG MAN"

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

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Therefore I answered Dirt on the Nose in this wise: “Killing one Crow does not yet make me the equal of the great warriors among the Human Beings. I shall still tend my own horses, but you are a good boy and I am going to give you that black I have been riding.”

Everybody said: “How, how.”

So none of us who took our life in our hands ended up a hell of a lot richer except in pride and honor, but a Cheyenne would die for them things any old day.

Younger Bear never showed up at the feast, I think the reason is obvious. It went on far into the night, and I ate a good deal too much of boiled dog, which was the fare: I had got a taste for that victual by now but had never developed an Indian’s capacity for gorging on the one hand, and then fasting on the other. After the shebang was finally done, I went out into the prairie and relieved myself and then set for a spell on a nearby rise. The moon was a hair skinnier than last night, but riding clear. Nevertheless, it would rain towards morning: you could feel that in your nose and through the soles of your moccasins against the old autumn grass and even through your haunches on the ground. Nobody ever told me that sort of thing. You learned it naturally living in our manner, like a man in town knows from the look of a storefront that they sell tobacco inside.

About a mile away, a coyote barked for a while, then yelped, then howled, then whined in several different notes. It sounded like a whole pack, but was just one animal, for they are natural ventriloquists. He was answered from the north by the long, sorry wail of a timber wolf-or Crow raiders imitating the same, for that is one of their specialties; but it continued off and on for an hour in the same location, so must have been the real beast.

After I had sat there long enough to warm the earth with my rump, a rattlesnake come crawling towards me, as they are ever cold and will move right into your bed if you suffer them to do it, for a bit of warmth. But I heard under the wind noise the slither of his dragging length, so counterfeited the flap of an eagle’s wing and he reversed himself.

So I, Jack Crabb, was a Cheyenne warrior. Had made my kill with bow and arrow. Been scalped and healed with hocus-pocus. Had an ancient savage who couldn’t talk English for my Pa, and a fat brown woman for my Ma, and for a brother a fellow whose face I hardly ever saw for clay or paint. Lived in a skin tent and ate puppy dog. God, it was strange.

That’s how my thoughts was running at that moment, and they was white to the core. Them kids I used to play with in Evansville would never believe it, neither would those with our wagons. They knowed I was always mean, but not that rotten. On the night of my great triumph, there I sat, thoroughly humiliated. Other than for my real Pa, the one killed at the wagons, who was crazy, you could seldom find a man back in town who didn’t think an Indian even lower than a black slave.

Right then I heard a sound that made me think the rattler had took a second thought and decided in his slow, stubborn way: what’s an eagle doing here in the night? and come back to try his luck again at getting near that warmth.

But it was Younger Bear, sitting down alongside. That shows how dangerous it can be to think white in the middle of the prairie. I hadn’t heard him coming. I could have lost the scalp that just was healed back on had it been an enemy.

He sat there some ten foot away, staring into the night and, I expect, thinking red. I didn’t say nothing. At last he looked in my direction and said: “Hey, come here!”

“I was here first,” says I.

“I got something for you,” he says. “Come on over here and get it.”

I wasn’t taking any of his crap now that I had saved his life, so I just turned away and directly he come crawling to me.

“Here,” he said. “Here’s a present for Little Big Man.”

I couldn’t see what he was holding behind his back, and leaned to look, and he pushed the big bushy scalp of that Crow into my face, laughing like hell.

“That’s a stupid thing to do,” I told him. “You are the biggest fool I have ever known.”

He dropped the hair and fell back on his arms.

“I thought it was a pretty good joke,” he says. “That is a beautiful scalp and perfumed with musk. Smell it if you don’t believe me. It’s yours. I took it, but it should belong to you. You killed him and saved my life. If you want me to do anything for you, I will. You can have my pony and best blanket, and I’ll tend your horses.”

I was still sore at that silly thing he did; although it was a typical Indian joke, it showed bad taste and worse will at this point. I wasn’t taken in for a minute by his apparent friendliness.

“You know,” said I, “that one Human Being don’t pay another for saving his life.”

“Yes,” answered Younger Bear in a deadly voice, “but you are a white man.”

There ain’t no curse words in Cheyenne and most of the insults take the form of calling the other guy a woman or cowardly, etc., and even in my anger I never thought of applying those to Younger Bear. Besides, he had a great argument. I had just been in the act of thinking the same thing. Yet you know how it is: there are women who will take pay for letting you on them, but don’t call them “whore.”

Now on the needle of this Indian, the worse fate I could imagine was not to be a Cheyenne. He had really hurt my feelings. What I should have done was to accept it the Indian way, go sulk and fast until he apologized, which he’d of had to if only on account of my high prestige in the tribe right then. Actually, Bear didn’t but half believe in his own accusation. He was jealous and so had thrown me the dirtiest insult he could think up. If I’d played it right it would have got him in the backflash: hewould have had to prove he was the Cheyenne, for I had done so.

Instead, I said hotly: “That’s right, you fool. Since I gave yours back to you, you owe me one life. And you can’t pay me off with that scalp nor a blanket nor all your ponies. Only a life will do, and I’ll let you know when I want one.”

He stuck the Crow scalp under his belt and got up.

“I heard you,” he said and went back into camp.

I had said that because I was mad and wanted to play it big. I didn’t know rightly what I meant. It was probably a kid’s bluff. Myself, I forgot it directly, though remembering Younger Bear’s dislike of me well enough for a while: then I forgot that too, for I didn’t see no more instances of it. He stopped shooting play arrows at me, put no more burrs under my saddle, in fact seemed to do his best to pretend I was as solid a Human Being as he had proved me not to be.

But the point is that he never forgot what I said on that rise up by the Powder River, and about twenty years later, and some fifty mile away from where we had been sitting that night, he paid me in full.

I have said I was getting interested in girls. Just about the time this began to happen, the situation changed so that I couldn’t get near any of the Cheyenne girls of my own age. They had started to get their monthlies and from that time on was kept away from the boys, being always in the company of their mothers or aunts and wearing a rope belt between their legs until they got married. (They wore it after marriage, too, whenever their husband was away.) About all you could do was to show off when the girl you liked was watching. That probably comes as a surprise: you may think an Indian goes at it like a jackrabbit, but not the Cheyenne with their own women unless they are married to them, and since the married men always swear off it before going to war, and we were most of the time fighting, the Cheyenne were pretty hard up for tail at any given time. That’s why they was such fierce warriors, or so they believed anyway. I never knew a man who didn’t have a special interest in his own member, but to a Cheyenne it was a magic wand.

After Younger Bear went away and I cooled down, I started thinking about a girl named Howaheh-which means, I ask you to believe, “Nothing.” When we were littler and played camp, I had frequently been forced to choose Nothing as my make-believe wife, on account of them other boys knew how better to go about getting the good-looking ones for themselves and I was left with this girl, who was fairly ugly. But here lately she had, as young girls will, of a sudden turned pretty as a buckskin colt, with big, shy eyes like an antelope and the graceful limbs of a doe. She always used to like me when I didn’t pay no attention to her, but as you might expect nowadays ignored me utterly.

Well, nothing I could do about Nothing right then, so I finally got up and went down into camp. There was a dog awake there, about to howl in answer to the coyote though he knew it was wrong because it might alert prowling Crow to our location, so I said to him: “That’s not the Cheyenne way,” and he closed his chops and slunk off.

Everybody else was sleeping, the fires all cold. I found my robe, not far from the doorhole, and started to get into it when I realized it must be Little Horse’s, for he was wrapped in it, so I moved on to the empty one alongside, though I usually slept to his left.

But he was awake, and whispered: “This is yours.”

“It don’t matter none,” I says. “Stay there.”

“You want me to?” he asks, sounding disappointed.

And then I went to sleep, not thinking any more about it. If a Cheyenne don’t believe he can stand a man’s life, he ain’t forced to. He can become a heemaneh, which is to say half-man, half-woman. There are uses for these fellows and everybody likes them. They are sometimes chemists, specializing in the making of love-potions, and generally good entertainers. They wear women’s clothes and can get married to another man, if such be his taste.

Little Horse began to train to be a heemanehnot long after this incident. Maybe he got the beds mixed up by mistake that night and didn’t have anything in mind. Whatever, I personally didn’t find him my type.

CHAPTER 7 We Take on the Cavalry

THE CROW COME AFTER us on the following day and we had a good war, which was a stand-off as to who won. So we fought some more. And we fought the Ute and we fought the Shoshone, and after trading some horses with the Blackfeet, we fought them too. This fighting was pleasurable to the Cheyenne when they killed the enemy and very sad when vice versa. In the latter event you heard the wailing of mourners from morning till night. For while Indians love war, I don’t want you to get the idea they like to lose their relatives to it. They really like one another in the same tribe. And as to the enemy, they hate him for what he is but don’t want to change him into anything else.

When the Cheyenne gave the beating there was celebration. If it happened near our camp, the women and children went out and clubbed and stabbed the enemy wounded who was lying about and mutilated the dead, taking as souvenirs such items as noses, ears, and private parts. This was a real treat for them. If you seen as much as I did, you would have like me developed a strong stomach. Buffalo Wallow Woman was sort of my Ma, just a fine soul. I can’t count the times when I was small she hugged me against her fat belly, smiling down that moon-face with a sheen of grease on it; or give me a specially juicy piece of dog meat, tucked me in the robe at night, slipped me some Indian chewing gum, did beading on my clothes, and on and on. She was 100 per cent woman, like Old Lodge Skins was all man, and I don’t know that you could get near her quality had you boiled down a score of white females for their essence. But now what’d you think when you saw that sweet person ripping open some helpless Crow with her knife and unwinding his guts?

I’ll tell you what: after a while, I didn’t. The Crow and Ute and Shoshone never protested, on account of they did the same, so what the hell business was it of mine? You recall Old Lodge Skins’s attitude towards the whites: their ways were nonsensical to him but he figured they had reasons. I wasn’t going to let no Indian outdo me in tolerance. If Buffalo Wallow Woman or some tiny brown-faced kid came in from the field holding a piece of human offal, proud as can be, why I’d say the equivalent of “Swell!”

I had a bigger problem than that. I was still young but had killed my man, so if there was a war of any size I didn’t find it easy to beg off. I didn’t have no inclination to become a heemanehlike Little Horse, though that’s no criticism of him. There wasn’t any other alternative. What I did try, not being actually a Cheyenne, was to kill as few of whoever we was fighting as practicable; that is, I would go all out if it was a defensive action, but slack off if we was carrying the day.

I tried, that is, to retain some smattering of civilization while doing nothing to jeopardize my barbarian friends. A very thin line to walk. Neither was it always possible to avoid certain savage practices, if you know what I mean. Hell, I guess you don’t. All right, then: I didn’t go out of my way to do it, but I had to take hair now and again. So long as I’ve confessed that, you also ought to be told that in such cases the victim ain’t always dead or even unconscious, and your knife ain’t always sharp and sometimes there is an ugly sound as the scalp parts company with the skull. I kept it to a minimum, but sometimes Younger Bear was close by me on the field of battle, offering no choice. By the age of fifteen he carried so many scalps about his person and gear that at a certain distance he seemed covered all over with hair, like a grizzly.

I don’t want to overemphasize this practice. There was another, fortunately for me, that took precedence over it: I mean the making of coups, riding into the midst of the enemy and striking one with the handle of a weapon or with a little stick carried just for that purpose. It is a greater accomplishment than killing him because more dangerous for the practitioner, and if you had to reduce the quality of Cheyenne life to a handy phrase you might describe it as the constant taking of risks.

I could always try to count coups when I wanted to avoid bloodletting, and I often did, though not being among the foremost in that pursuit. To be outstanding at it, you had to be crazy. I held my own and never tried to compete with Coyote, who among the bunch of my age was champion and became a bigger hero for it than Younger Bear with all his hair. The Bear made valiant efforts but at the last minute he couldn’t help setting aside his coup stick for his hatchet and instead of touching he would hack. But Coyote rode unarmed into the press of the enemy and, slashing lightly with his little quirt, took coups more quickly than they could be enumerated, and though his adversaries made every effort to take his life, he would generally come back without a scratch, having great medicine.

Now I might go on for hours relating the incidents of war, but whereas they are every one different in the actual occurrence and never dull when your own life is at stake, they have a sameness in the telling. So I won’t wear them to the point where you think fighting is as routine as riding on a streetcar. Nor will I go into my numerous wounds, most of which I still bear slight traces of, like faded tattooing.

That same summer that we was up on the Powder, a colonel named Harney attacked the Brule Sioux in their camp on the Blue River, above the North Platte, and killed eighty. It almost goes without saying that these Indians was friendlies, otherwise the Army wouldn’t have found them; and put up no resistance, else they wouldn’t have been punished to that degree. Some of that figure was made up of women and children, on account of the warriors retreated from the cavalry charge. That sounds yellow but actually was ignorance. I’m talking about both Indians and whites. A coward kills women, but a soldier of that time at full gallop often couldn’t tell them from the braves, and the kids got it from the indiscriminate hail of lead.

As to the fleeing warriors, you got to know Indian ways to appreciate that. When they fight each other, one side charges and the other retreats; then they turn and reverse the situation. This makes for a nice contest in which everybody gets his chance. The Army didn’t fight by the rules and no doubt would not have if they knew them, for a white man gets no pleasure out of war itself; he won’t fight at all if without it he can get his way. He is after your spirit, not the body. That goes for both the military and the pacifists, neither breed of which is found among the Cheyenne, who fought because of the good it did them. They had no interest in power as we know it.

Well, up on the Powder River we heard about this incident even as it was happening, in the Indian way which I have already told you I can’t explain, so just accept it as I did. Red Dog mentioned it to me, and for all I know he got it from an eagle, for he was an eagle-catcher, which is a special profession among the Cheyenne. Within a minute or two it was all over camp. The chiefs didn’t hold any council this time, because for one thing no Sioux appeared with any project, and for another, it had just gone to prove Old Lodge Skins’s wisdom in staying away from white men and thus giving them no opportunity to break any rules.

We stayed the rest of the year up in that territory, which was prettier country than along the Platte, nearer to lodgepoles, firewood, elk, and bear, for the Big Horn Mountains rose fifty-sixty mile to the west with their purple base climbing to a silver crown, and they was rich in timber and game and kept the watercourses fresh through the summer from their melting snows. When winter come, we left off fighting on the larger scale, though now and again you might encounter little enemy parties trapping buffalo in the drifts while you was out doing the like, and the whiteness might end up splashed here and there with red.

But sometimes it was just too cold, with the snow up to a bull’s shoulders, and I recall once when four of us coming back from an unsuccessful hunt ran across six Crow in a blizzard, we reached wearily for our slung bows, but they signaled: “We’ll fight when the weather gets better,” and went on. That was a relief: you could hardly see them.

When it got real fierce, when your very speech would freeze as it emanated from your lips and blow back in stinging rime against the cheeks, we hung close to the tepees and ate the dried meat taken the summer before and stored in rawhide parfleches, and pemmican, the greasier the better on account of a bellyful of melting fat will warm you sooner and stick longer than most anything I know. The value of stout women also went up in the snowtime, and I believe it was that winter that that enormous fat girl from the antelope surround ran the price for her hand up to six horses and other gifts too numerous to count (all of which went to her family) and was led to the bridegroom’s lodge.

One time when Nothing was outside her tepee gathering snow in a kettle to melt down for water, I slogged over to her vicinity and warbled like a bird, but she didn’t take any more notice than if I hadn’t been present, and soon her Ma come out and throwed a little bone at me and said go away, bad boy. That was the extent of my love life that winter.

By the thaw we was all, men and animals, pretty well trimmed down to basic muscle and sinew, with our tongues sharp for fresh provender. Spring was really something to look for in those days when you were lean and hungry and young. Old Lodge Skins wasn’t the latter by upwards of fifty years, but the sap rose in him before it did in the trees and he got his younger wife, White Cow Woman, with child again. I have previously mentioned only Burns Red and Little Horse as his offspring, because I was closest to them, but there was others around in various sizes, of which I didn’t take much notice of the little girls and was banned by custom from doing so with the females of my own age, they being so to speak my sisters; and more was dead.

Shooting Star, Burns Red’s wife, was also pregnant, and a lot of the other women after that season of lay-off from war. These new children would make up for our losses in battle, those that were males, that is, and if they grew up. At present there was five or six women to every adult brave. I’ve slipped by the subject of death as if we won all the time. We lost almost as often; mostly it was an even score in the long run. What made the Cheyenne special was that they were fewer than most of their enemies; always outnumbered but never outfought, as the saying goes.

As to the punishment we sustained, I don’t count wounds, and sometimes apparently mortal ones would be cured by the medicine men in the style I’ve described, but it might give an idea when I say that before the winter closed in, three of those five grownups I went on the raid with were dead: Cold Face, Long Jaw, and Yellow Eagle. Spotted Wolf, who if you recall was going to assault my white Ma when Caroline cold-cocked him, he was killed against the Pawnee in the spring before. These is just to mention some of the names you might recognize. We never at full strength could mount more than forty warriors.

For a long time I believed Old Lodge Skins’s bunch was the whole Cheyenne nation, then at least one of the main bands that constitute the tribe, but in fact what it turned out to be was one big family: most of these folk were related to one another by blood or marriage or adoption, and there was a few stragglers from hither and yon, now and then, but not enough to alter the complexion of things.

A Cheyenne won’t pass on shameful gossip about himself or his own. So it was a while before I found out why Old Lodge Skins’s camp kept to themselves.

Quite some years back, when Old Skins was a boy, his Pa had killed a fellow Cheyenne in a quarrel over a woman and been exiled from the Burnt Artery band. Him and his relatives took off and lived alone, and at length he died, but the kin had lived so long by themselves that they was leery about going back. They also bore that shame, and when they did run across other Human Beings would rest their chins on the chest and look out of the sides of their eyes if at all. They come to be known as the tatoimana, which is to say the Shy Folks.

Now Old Lodge Skins became their leader, having proved himself wise and brave and generous, and the time come when they was invited back to the Burnt Arteries on the occasion of the sun dance where all the tribe joins together. By God if that Indian didn’t get into the same kind of trouble as his Dad-a vein of horniness run right through the family-he swiped the wife of a man from the Hair Rope band and though he left two horses as payment the other fellow didn’t like the deal and come after him and in the set– to got an arrow through the windpipe and choked to death.

Skins didn’t bother to come back to that dance after that, but was joined by the rest of his family out on the prairie and they wandered by themselves again for years. Somewhere along the line they was reinstated. By the time I joined up, they could go to the all-Cheyenne get-togethers but was not encouraged to camp in the Burnt Artery circle. They stayed pretty shy for a long time.

But now that fat girl had got just about the last eligible husband in our camp, for the Cheyenne won’t stand for incest and we hadn’t picked up any new people since the coming of Yellow Eagle, who was now dead leaving two widows and a tepeeful of orphans which Shadow That Comes in Sight had to adopt.

I don’t think Old Lodge Skins can be condemned for deciding to move south again when spring got well under way, though it defied his intention to keep clear of the whites. We had to get some fresh blood before we could let some more, and most of the other Cheyenne was down below the Platte., There were Sioux up around the Powder, and they was our fighting allies, but Skins was quite the snob when it come to family connections. He never forgot that version of Cheyenne history which he mentioned to the Minneconjou: the Human Beings had horses when the Lakota was still using dogs. He didn’t spell it out, but I know he figured the Sioux as lower-class.

That was how the women come to strike camp and make travois of the lodgepoles, on which they packed the folded tepee skins and the rest of the gear, and did the same with the lighter articles onto the bigger dogs, including among the baggage certain small kids lashed atop it, and those of us with horses mounted them and some walked, and in a great messy caravan stretched for a mile, the warriors riding flank, we wended southward, leaving a wide trail of horse dung, wornout apparel, cleaned bones, and the ashes of many old campfires.

I was on the way to becoming a white man again, although I never suspected it at the time.

We traveled all the way to the Solomon’s Fork of the Kansas River, in the north of the present-day state of the latter name, and there in a great camp covering a mile or more of bottomland we found the entire Cheyenne nation, who except for us had wintered together the preceding season. That was a mighty assemblage, the biggest I had seen up to that point, and it made me proud: probably a thousand lodges in the configuration of a circle, with the tepees of each band making a little circle within the greater. And all the bands was there: the Hair Rope, the Scabby People, etc., which were hitherto known to me only in narrative, not to mention the military societies such as the Dog Soldiers, who acted as a police force, and the Contraries who do everything backwards.

Old Lodge Skins was sort of uneasy when we was riding in: I could see that, for an Indian’s face is as expressive as anybody’s when he is among his own, but nobody tried to stop us and nobody came up and asked: “Where are you going? What do you want?” which they would have done to someone who did not belong, and after a while I could see, beneath his chiefly dignity, that the old man was considerable relieved.

Shortly out come some headmen from the Burnt Artery band and greeted him like a brother, inviting our bunch to camp in their circle. The old crime had been washed out. So everything was perfect and they had taken buffalo on a big ritualistic hunt up on the headwaters of the Republican River, so we all had to eat six or seven consecutive meals that day because every Indian who saw you would pull you into his lodge and press a feast on you.

Then there was some speechifying by the orators and songs by the singers, and some dancing by the heemaneh-with whom Little Horse now definitely threw in his lot-which was very graceful and well received. And gossip was exchanged on every hand, Shadow That Comes in Sight told his jokes, and gifts were presented back and forth and it got to be a problem to remember what you had left to give the next guy without passing on something you had just received.

I was in the middle of all this. There were those among the new people who sized me up, and I expect some talk went on out of my hearing until they all got it straight, but I never had to undergo one embarrassing moment, except maybe owing to the excess of approval that was manifested after Old Lodge Skins, Burns Red, and Little Horse done their bragging about me.

Everything seemed to be swell, but after purely Indian matters had been pretty well gone over, up came the subject of the whites and that was like a storm sky obscuring the sun. The spring before, there had been a difficulty over four horses which the Cheyenne said were strays found roaming the prairie but the soldiers claimed as their own, so they killed one Human Being and put another into the post guardhouse, where he died. Then in the summer a party of young men came across a mail wagon and asked the driver for some tobacco, but he shot at them, so they put an arrow in his arm and the next day the troops attacked their camp, killing six Indians and stealing their horses. As the Cheyenne was fleeing from this assault, they ran across a wagon train, so they took revenge upon the whites and killed two men and a child.

There had been other troubles, with a chief called Big Head wounded while on a friendly visit to Fort Kearny. The Cheyenne felt especial put upon, for by their lights they had always been amiable to white men. Even after all these bad things, they sent a delegation to see the Government Indian agent and apologized. They also returned a woman they had captured. But you see the complication was this: Indians wasn’t ever organized. Them that come in to apologize wasn’t the same as what killed the whites. And them that the soldiers usually punished was never the ones who had committed the outrages. The white people on whom the Indians took revenge had no connection with the soldiers.

It was pretty early on that I come to realize that most serious situations in life, or my life anyway, were like that time I rubbed out the Crow: he spared me because I was white, and I killed him because I was Cheyenne. There wasn’t nothing else either of us could have done, and it would have been ridiculous except it was mortal.

Anyhow, the Cheyenne now had got to believing they might soon have to destroy all the white men on the plains, an idea that didn’t seem altogether preposterous when you saw the size of that camp. Even I got to entertaining the possibility: we could ourselves mount maybe fifteen hundred warriors, and we was now friends with the Kiowa and Comanche who lived just south, and our old pals the Arapaho would help and the Sioux from the north. I was making out all right as an Indian and didn’t figure on losing any sleep over what happened to my native race when I thought of how little they had ever done for me. Besides, there wasn’t any talk of invading St. Louis or Chicago-or Evansville-which is where white people belonged.

That was before I heard the oratory of the medicine men: two of them, named Ice and Dark. They had great powers. All they had to do was make certain motions towards the soldiers, and when the latter fired their guns the bullets would roll slowly down the barrels and fall harmless to the earth.