Little Big Man

by Thomas Berger

  It was queer to be there, but speaking for myself no longer scary. You may think the worse of me, away from my home such as it had been and my father killed and all, but I had begun to feel as thoug hit wasn’t so desperate. It was warm in that lodge and the people had turned out to be tolerant. If they hadn’t offered us violence that night, I couldn’t figure them doing it next day: you don’t feed a fellow by dark and then murder him next morning. On the other hand, though, you couldn’t get away from the fact they wasn’t white.

  “A penny for your thoughts, Caroline,” says I to the slumped figure of my kin, whose jaw was in her splayed hands and whose hat was way down to her fanned ears. She appeared very glum in the shadow, and her voice sounded in the same vein.

  “Savages ain’t much of a lot, Jack,” she answers, inconsiderately loud, I thought, with her hosts trying to catch their sleep. “See how they done in that little dog? Following which they was feeling me as if maybe I was next for the pot, though I never heard Indins was cannibals. I don’t think you can count on them, Jack.” With a grunt she struggled to get her soles to the ground, which ain’t the easiest thing when you have had your rump on it for some hours with your legs crossed.

  She repeated almost the same remark, with a significant difference that did not strike me at the time: “You better not count on them, Jack”; and stumbled stiff-legged towards the door flap—I figured, to go relieve herself before bedding down for the night. For myself, I determined to hold it till morning because of being scared of the roaming dogs outside.

  Well, that was the last I saw of Caroline for a time. She went over to the meadow, cut a pony out of the herd, rode away, and it was years before I ran into her again, which event we will come to in order. Meanwhile, you have to understand I considered her for a spell as missing and then forgot about her altogether. Nobody could say I owed her more.

  I probably could have heard the hoofbeats as she fled had I not fell asleep directly, there being little else in the way of wrapping so cozy as a buffalo robe when you get the hang of it. Though at first it tends to be stiff on the skinned side, whereas the hair on the other is rough as a brush, it soon cleaves to the body from your natural warmth and becomes as if you have growed it on yourself.

  Next thing I knowed, that young boy Little Horse woke me up in the dawn. “Come on,” he indicated; and shivering off the remains of my sleep, which wasn’t hard to do because of the cold of that time of morning, I followed him out to the field where the ponies was pastured. There was markedly fewer than when I had seen the herd the day before: Caroline’s theft of one was nothing to what some Ute had come and stole a little later on, or maybe it was the Pawnee this time. Anyway, unless Old Lodge Skins’s crowd went out soon and stole some horses back, they would all be walking.

  Little Horse already knowed, as an Indian would, that Caroline had run off and figured correctly that I was going to stay and be part of the tribe, having no alternative, and he had woke me to go with him because that was the duty of the boys of my age: tending the ponies first thing every morning. Which is to say, he knew more about me than I did myself at that moment, but his grin was in no wise mocking or mean as we left the tepeeful of sleeping Cheyenne grownups. Indians don’t rise especially early when nothing’s doing, except for the boys.

  Outside the dawn was blue, and chill to go with it. I hadn’t had one particle of my clothes off for a couple days, and not washed for the same space of time, enjoying my deficiency. I mention that because I recall thinking about it and feeling luxurious. Even as a small boy, a white man gets that sort of idea when he goes among Indians: What the hell does anything matter? I’m with savages, don’t have to wash, can go to the toilet right where I stand, and so on. My point here is that, on the contrary, a Cheyenne takes a bath every day in the nearest water, and even if they hadn’t observed that custom, there would have been another requirement to take its place. If you’re a human being, you can’t get away from obligations.

  On the route to the meadow, me and Little Horse encountered various other lads going to the same chore, aged eight to twelve; and on account of the thefts, there was so few ponies left that the herdsmen almost outnumbered the stock. Our job turned out to be leading the animals to the creek for watering. After which we took them to a new pasturage, for they had ate quite a bit of grass from the old one, and after all, the plains belonged to us far as the eye could see.

  Little Horse and the other boys did a lot of gassing and laughing among themselves, and for all I know it might have been at my expense. I was alone insofar as wearing pants, shirt, boots, and hat; but after we rehobbled the lead mare to keep the herd from straying and went back to the creek and stripped down to take that bath I mentioned, I was distinguished only by my skin, and when we come back out of the water—which was fairly cold to start with but warmed once you were in, especially because of the horseplay that Indian boys give a lot of time to—why, I left off all my duds except the wool pants. Gave everything away, in fact, which made me a lot of immediate friends.

  When we got back to the lodges, the recipients went inside and brought out Cheyenne stuff in return. That was when I finally took off the pants and got into the buckskin breechclout that one of the boys give me, and secured it with the belt I had from another. Also put on moccasins; and received a dirty yellow blanket from a tall kid named Younger Bear, who accepted my trousers and straightway amputated them for use as unjoined leggings, throwing aside the waist and seat. Nobody had use for the boots, which just laid there on the ground and were left behind in the same position when the camp moved away. If an Indian isn’t interested in an item he does not so much as see it, will stumble over it repeatedly without ever considering he might kick it aside.

  We never did get breakfast that first morning, for the simple reason that there wasn’t any food to be had. The antelope had been ate up totally the night before, and they couldn’t afford to do in no more dogs for a spell, seeing as how the ponies was fast disappearing and a certain number of pack animals was required when camp moved. Also Caroline had not returned—for I still thought she might be back at that point; though never once did I entertain the idea she might be killed—and I had nobody to jaw with in my own language.

  But before the sun had got far through the sky, I had learned quite a vocabulary of the sign lingo and conversed with Little Horse on such things as could be expressed with the hands. For example, you want to say “man,” so you put up the index finger, with the palm facing inside. Of course I was considerable assisted in learning the lingo by Little Horse’s habit of making the sign, then pointing to the thing itself. The motion for “white man,” a finger wiped across the forehead to suggest the brim of a hat, was somewhat difficult to savvy owing to Little Horse himself wearing the felt hat I had discarded. He kept running his finger along the brim and pointing at me, and I first thought he meant “your hat,” or “you,” before I got it straight. The sign for plain “man” naturally meant “Indian man.”

  For “Cheyenne” you run the right index finger across the left as though striping it, for the distinctive arrow-guides used by all Cheyenne was made of striped feathers from the wild turkey. By the way, in their spoken language Cheyenne don’t ever call themselves “Cheyenne” but rather Tsistsistas, which means “the People,” or “the Human Beings.” What anybody else is doesn’t concern them.

  After our bath, them boys fetched bows and we played war in and out of a buffalo wallow near camp, shooting one another with arrows that didn’t have no points. And then we did some wrestling, at which I was none too good and somewhat shy to try too hard, but after getting badly squeezed, I turned to boxing and bloodied at least one brown nose. The latter was the property of Younger Bear, and the event caused him to receive a good deal of jeering, because I’d say Indians are given to that trait even more than whites. I felt sorry for Younger Bear when I saw the ridicule I had let him in for.

  Which was a big mistake: I should either never have hit him in the firs
t place or after doing so should have strutted around boasting about it and maybe given him some more punishment to consolidate the advantage: that’s the Indian way. You should never feel sorry about beating anybody, unless having conquered his body you want his spirit as well. I didn’t yet understand that, so throughout the rest of the day I kept trying to shine up to Younger Bear, and the result was I made the first real enemy of my life and he caused me untold trouble for years, for an Indian will make a profession of revenge.

  The next thing I remember us boys doing was to go and play camp with a number of little girls. This game is a mimicry of what the grownups do. The girls set up miniature tepees and the boys act like their husbands, going out on war parties and having mock buffalo hunts in which one boy, playing the animal, carries a prickly pear at the end of a stick. The hunters shoot their arrows at this fruit, and are considered to have brung the buffalo down if they strike the target. Whoever misses, the buffalo lad gets to swat on the hind end with the prickly pear. You can see that whatever the Cheyenne do has a threat of pain in it, if not the realization thereof.

  In the earlier doings I had fell in on equal terms, but it wasn’t so when it came to play camp, and that I believe was due to Younger Bear, who was by common consent war chief of that establishment on account of he could shoot an arrow exceptionally well and he was very convincing when braining a make-believe foe with a nasty-looking war club he had fashioned himself. That’s the way a man gets to be a war chief among the Cheyenne: he can fight better than anyone else. He is a chief only in battle. For peace they have another kind of leader. You take Old Lodge Skins, he was a peace chief. The principal war chief of our bunch was Hump. These fellows got along fine, except you’ll recall at the whiskey fight as soon as they had a few in their belly, they went for each other. However, when Skins’s gun blew up, they forgot about it and went their separate ways.

  Anyhow, Younger Bear was at about eleven years of age already very well advanced towards his true profession, and he was a big tall fellow who walked with his chest arched out. I’ll say this about the fight I had with him: he could have killed me except that he knew nothing about boxing. But his ignorance wasn’t my responsibility; I ain’t never been big, but I’m shrewd.

  In those first days I was dependent on what the other boys would lend me: bow, arrows, and the certain type of stick they ran with between their legs as if it was a pony. But when it came to war games under Younger Bear’s direction, off they’d ride, even Little Horse, leaving me behind with the girls and the littler kids who were supposed to be the babies of the play camp. Now after them boys did that until it got to be a habit, they started to call me “Antelope Girl,” because there I was, helping to dismantle the toy tepees, which is women’s work.

  The sun dance was another adult pursuit the children mimicked in play camp. The boys would drive thorns in their flesh, tie strings to them, and drag around prairie-dog or coyote skulls. I might have got desperate enough to try it myself, had I not already at that early age worked out the following proposition: a white man is better than a redskin, who is a savage. Why is he better? Because he uses his wits. Centuries earlier the Indians had learned you could move heavy objects by rolling logs under them, yet still by the time I lived among them they had never cut a cross section through one of them logs to make a wheel. You can see that as either invincible ignorance or stubbornness; whichever, it’s just barbarous.

  I did go behind one of the play-tepees and experiment with a thorn, but no sooner than the point touched my flesh I turned yellow. I never could get interested in hurting myself. So I got an arrow, stole a real one with an iron trade point, and wore it in two with a jagged rock. Now the Cheyenne make a chewing gum from the evaporated juice of the milkweed. Buffalo Wallow Woman give me some, but I put it into my belly button rather than my mouth, and stuck in it the end of the arrow shaft that ends with the feathers. The other part, that with the iron head, I fixed so it appeared to issue from the cleft of my arse, the breechclout being drawn aside in accommodation. It looked as if I was fairly skewered through the middle, at an angle of forty-five degrees. When I was all prepared, I come out from back of the lodge, walking funny with my rump cheeks tight, and secretly supporting the feathered end with a hand to my gut as if to catch the pain—that was an infraction of the rules, for the idea is to show a manly indifference to the hurt, but I figured the act would be spectacular enough to cover up an incidental.

  I was right. The girls saw me first and slapped their mouths so hard it’s a marvel their front teeth stayed tight. And then the boys, with their miserable little thorns and them tiny animal skulls. In chagrin Coyote ripped his out of his back and throwed it away, and the blood streamed in scarlet ribbons down to his rump. Little Horse began to dance about and boast how he was my friend. Poor old Younger Bear, he just turned and trudged away, the little skulls trailing along the ground behind him, hopping when they struck a rough, and when one of them caught under a sagebush the rawhide line broke rather than his skin.

  From here on I was on equal terms in the war games, and before long Burns Red in the Sun made me a little bow. Burns was Old Lodge Skins’s son by one of his earlier wives now dead. My own position turned out to be orphan attached to the chief’s lodge, which gave me the right to benevolent consideration from the whole family just as if I was related to them by blood. Almost every tepee had a similar lad, though the rest was pure Indians. The women were obliged to give me clothes and food, and the men to see I grew up into a man. I don’t recall my race being held against me while I was small. Caroline, for example, was never referred to—for one reason, because it was a great shame to Old Lodge Skins that he had smoked a pipe with what turned out a female. In the very old times the Cheyenne would not smoke when a woman was even in the tepee; they tied up the door to keep them out.

  Another reason why it was easy for me to melt into that tribe was that none of the Indians wanted to think about the incident of the wagons. As we have seen, my brother Bill never reported the massacre to Fort Laramie, and the soldiers didn’t come, so the Cheyenne had no worry about that. What bothered them was that while drunk they had nearly killed some of themselves; that’s the worst thing a Cheyenne could do: kill another Cheyenne. Being drunk is no excuse. It is always regarded as murder, and the murderer rots inside his guts, giving off a stink to other members of the tribe, soiling the Sacred Arrows, and driving the buffalo away. Such a fellow cannot smoke the pipe, nor will anyone eat from a dish he has touched; he is generally run out of camp.

  Now I know at this point you figure you have one on me. The way I described the whiskey fight, it looked as if some of the Indians were killed: for example, I surely said Pile of Bones blew off the back of White Contrary’s head and the latter’s brains run out. I swear that insofar as anybody could have told on the spot, that is what happened. But imagine my surprise when on that first morning in the Cheyenne camp, directly after the bath we boys took in the creek, who should show up waiting for us to take him to his horse but White Contrary, big as life and twice as ugly, and showing in no particular that he had ever been hurt. I trailed along behind him, taking a special interest in the back of his head, but if there was a hole in it, you couldn’t prove it by me. I saw a louse or two crawling along the part of his braids, but not even a crust of dried blood. And it was White Contrary, all right, for he had an unmistakable wart on the left flange of his nose.

  Maybe you are beginning to understand, when I pulled the arrow-out-of-arse trick, why it didn’t occur to none of the children that I was hoaxing them. That is because Indians did not go around expecting to be swindled, whereas they was always ready for a miracle.

  CHAPTER 4 Pronghorn Slaughter

  IT AIN’T BAD to be a boy among the Cheyenne. You never get whipped for doing wrong, but rather told: “That is not the way of the Human Beings.” One time Coyote started to laugh while he was lighting his father’s pipe, because a horsefly was crawling on his belly. This was a serious failure o
f manners on his part, comparable to a white boy’s farting loud in church. His Pa laid away the pipe and said: “On account of your lack of self-control I can’t smoke all day without disgusting certain Persons in the other world. I wonder if you aren’t a Pawnee instead of a Human Being.” Coyote went out upon the prairie and stayed there alone all night to hide his shame.

  You have got to do things right when you’re a Cheyenne. A baby can’t cry just for the hell of it—the tribe might be lying in concealment at the moment and the sound would give away their position to the enemy. Therefore the women hang them cradleboards on bushes some distance from camp until the youngsters inside develop the idea that crying don’t do no good, and get the habit of quiet. Girls need to be trained to control their giggle. I seen Shadow That Comes in Sight line his little daughters up before him and tell them funny stories at which they was supposed to restrain laughter. At first they all flunked, shrieking like birds; then they got so as to only smirk and simper; and finally, after many sessions, they could hold a stony look towards the most hilarious joke. They was free to enjoy it but not to make a demonstration. At the proper time they could laugh their guts out, for an Indian loves his humor and Shadow That Comes in Sight was a great wit.

  Other than for that special instruction, the Cheyenne didn’t run a school. They never read nor wrote their language, so what would be the purpose? If you wanted a point of history, you went and asked an old man who kept it in his mind. Numbers got boring when you run out of fingers, so to report the size of an enemy war party you had spotted would go something like this: “The Ute is near the Fasting Place Butte. They are as many as the arrows that Sticks Everything Under His Belt shot at the ghost antelope in the time when the cherries was ripe.” This being a famous story, everybody in Old Lodge Skins’s crowd would know within one or two the number of Ute referred to—and in a moment of emergency, when a person tends to fear the unknown, they could connect it up with something familiar.