Little Big Man

by Thomas Berger

  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 Voka in that lingo and sounded like a cough. As a name it had no undue importance since I go
t 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.

  I figure it was the colorful aspect of the Indians, along with their cruelty, that she had been attracted by back at the wagons; but the longer we stayed with Old Lodge Skins, the more commonplace the life of a savage seemed. For it is true that an Indian can slaughter a person one minute and the next sit down to his grub as quiet as a clerk in the settlements. He don’t make the separation between the various endeavors that a white man does. Indians are altogether different from anybody you ever knew.

  Next thing, the chief said a word to the cook—because as he admitted later, his feelings towards us was really mixed: we would appear to him by turns benign and malevolent. Right then he was kindly disposed to us on account of our breaking bread, or rather antelope, in his tepee, which does an Indian so much honor that the host never takes a bite till his guests are finished; that’s the reason Old Lodge Skins himself wasn’t eating. As I say, the chief gave word to the cook and she beckoned to me to come along with her, which I did in some apprehension and passed while making the half-circle of the lodge all them Cheyenne chewing like goats. When we got outside through the door hole, the sky was about half along towards dark with great purple smears in the west, separated each from the next by streaks of vermilion.

  I’ll tell you I was not awfully interested in scenery at that age, and the reason I was looking to the sky could be laid to the reappearance, no sooner than my head cleared the tepee flap, of my enemy that white dog. I was trying to ignore him, but he seized my trouser cuff and proceeded to chaw on it, and he might have ate me up had not the woman looked back at that point.

  She was Buffalo Wallow Woman, Old Lodge Skins’s wife, and the other inside who favored her was her younger sister, White Cow Woman, who according to the Cheyenne practice had come along with her kin when the latter married and was obliged in the same degree as the proper wife to make herself available to the chief for all the purposes to which an Indian puts a female.

  Anyway, Buffalo Wallow Woman laughed, and pointing at the dog, put a question to me. Taking my tearful look as sufficient answer, she picked up the animal, who thereupon howled with anguish which availed him nothing. For directly Buffalo Wallow Woman carried him inside the tepee, where she busted his skull with a stone hammer, rolled him through the fire to singe his hair, chopped the carcass to a number of bleeding hunks, then into a kettle they went to boil. This was the work of as many moments as it takes to tell it, for she was a plump and powerful soul, and smiling all the while.

  Old Lodge Skins was looking proud enough to bust. There isn’t any better eating to an Indian than dog, and white dog is the very best of that. To show you how high they regard this victual, they had had no fresh meat for more than a week yet forbore from touching their dog pack.

  I’m afraid that me and Caroline failed to understand the honor we was being done at that juncture. My sister stood fast at the massacre of people, including her own Pa, but when it come to seeing that ugly dog butchered before our eyes, she began to sway on her crossed legs and try to swallow her fist.

  That was when Old Lodge Skins all at once looked at Caroline and sneezed so hard his plug hat slipped down over one eye. He sneezed again, and off it fell entirely. Twice more he spasmed in his big nose—it sounded like the barking of a fox—and his braids flew and his medal leaped up, falling back with a thunk against his breastbone.

  Now the whole pack left off stuffing grub down their gullets and gawked at us like they should have when we first appeared but I guess failed to because, having minds of one track, they was fascinated with the prospect of eating that antelope. The pretty woman with the doe eyes went so far as to come and set right on Caroline’s very buffalo skin and peer incessantly at my sister, who had all she could put up with just in trying not to vomit on account of the white dog, who you could already smell in the steam from the pot, sort of the odor of a wet overcoat hanging near a fire to dry.

  Shooting Star was that woman’s name and she was the wife of Burns Red in the Sun and had give birth to the several children she had brought to the chief’s tepee, including one tiny baby in a cradleboard hanging from a lodgepole, who had beady little black eyes like a bird. His contraption was arranged so he could water without being took out of the sling.

  The curiosity of Shooting Star served to take Caroline’s mind off the perturbations of her stomach, and she summoned her strength to say: “Right proud to meet you, Mrs.,” offering one of her big paws to shake on it. But what the Indian woman did instead was reach into the fork of my sister’s jeans and feel there, then the same with the chest of her shirt. Concluding which, she spoke one word to Old Lodge Skins: “Vehoa!” and clapped a hand over her own mouth. The chief followed suit and was joined by everybody present in the same gesture.

  Sooner or later an Indian will sneeze when he is near a white woman. Some say that is due to perfume or talcum powder, but I never saw my sister use anything on herself but yellow soap.

  However you want to explain it, that was the first time any of the Cheyenne knew Caroline for a girl.

  CHAPTER 3 I Make an Enemy

  THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN men and women is very important to the Cheyenne—more so than the distinction of the dead from the living, as a matter of fact—and they was satisfied to have established it insofar as my sister went. Besides, the antelope was all ate up at that moment and the dog wasn’t quite ready. So the rest of the Indians come crowding round us to exercise their curiosity.

  This was mannerly by their lights. They restricted themselves to peering, for the most part; and some handled our clothing, but never touched flesh. I believe could we have understood Shooting Star’s remarks, we would have heard her in so many words apologize to Caroline for the laying on of hands—which was justified by the facts derived from it. I mention this because, being white, it always seemed marvelous to me that savages was not inconsiderate except through ignorance.

  Particular attention was of course paid me by the kids. Little Horse, that boy who had cared for the ponies—I sure made a big hit with him from the first. As I have said, I did not take to him; but even at that age I was shifty, had to be, else I wouldn’t have survived a decade let alone more than a century, and so when I saw him admiring my boots, I stripped them off quick and offered to hand them over. But the thought of confining his feet in such fashion is one of the many things that scares an Indian, so he pretended not to get the purpose.

  The dog was served up directly. Fortunately it was a small animal and had to go around to many eaters, although as guests me and Caroline got the largest chunks. The Cheyenne proceeded to stay up to midnight, it must have been. When I say that, I mean various of them came and went, new individuals entered the lodge and inspected my sister and me, certain Indians rolled up in their buffalo robes and went to sleep right alongside groups of others chattering and laughing (for contrary to white opinion nobody is more sociable than a redskin when among his own). Some sort of activity continued for hours during which the fire continued to blaze: the women, for instance, went about their chores and Old Lodge Skins smoked four or five pipefuls with divers of his cronies. One of the latter was Hump, of all people, who other than a big scab on his nose looked very fit and grunted at me and Caroline in a friendly manner. I don’t know whether or not he recognized us from the day before, but he was very decent about not blaming us for his having committed rapine and murder—which is how an Indian would look at it.

  As to Caroline, she sat on her robe in pretty much of a daze f
rom the time of Shooting Star’s investigation and even ate her dog in the same spirit. Old Lodge Skins paid her no more attention at all. He wasn’t insulting, just not interested.

  At length the fire dwindled because Buffalo Wallow Woman wasn’t throwing any more chips on it, having gone to a well-deserved bed if I ever saw one. As I found out the next day, me and Caroline had hers, next to that of Old Lodge Skins; so she displaced one of her kids further on, and so it went around the circle like musical chairs until my admirer Little Horse was short man and had to go next door to the tepee of his brother, who was none other than Burns Red in the Sun.

  Eventually my sister and me was sitting there alone looking at the dying fire, from which the smoke clumb in a skinny thread to the hole at the junction of the lodgepoles and there met the night, a sky colored dark blue, rather than black, by virtue of a dust of yellow stars.

  Next to us, Old Lodge Skins was taking his murmurless rest, his hat dangling overhead from a rawhide line, the silhouette of his big beak pointing up in the perpendicular. You could hear a number of strong breathings but no snores, on account of Indians are trained from birth not to make noise when there ain’t a purpose to it. Also a faint sifting now and again as a last piece of buffalo dung dissolved into ash.