He had made his try at bucking McKenzie on McKenzie’s own ground. He had been soundly trounced, and the best thing he could do now was to get out of opposition territory as quickly as possible.
Captain Stewart looked his gray horse all over for damage, then mounted and rode off. He did not say “Thank you.”
Jim was relieved to see them go. Some of his young men had been thinking too, about the folly of returning good horses to men silly enough to lose them in the first place. Jim had had to call out his Big Dog soldiers to make sure none of them sneaked away to stage a second raid of their own.
That afternoon he sent the heralds around with word that their own camp was moving. That night the women packed, and at dawn they took down the lodges, lashed the poles, and loaded the travois. The village moved south into the Big Horn Basin.
They were calm, slow days. The village moved at the pace of the laden horses across a land of sky and mountain peaks, rivers and distance. Like a long, long snake it crawled, leather-colored against the leather-colored ground but set off from it by the splashes of crimson and yellow and blue and white that shone in the brilliant sun. Jim sent out scouts to watch for danger and settled into the creaking, dusty, peaceful rhythm. Cherry rode her white mare, heavy with embroidered trappings, and carried the Antelope’s shield.
It was a good life. Jim hoped it would go on forever.
SIXTEEN
It was summer, and the Crow were gathered for war and hunting.
The heralds had finished going through the camp, calling the young men to rise and bathe and dress themselves for battle. They had finished their speeches extolling the bravery of the most distinguished warriors of the Crow nation, and the warriors had paraded before the people, making their boasts and their promises. Now the chief Arepoesh stood on a great pile of chips and offered his shield in augury.
“If it falls this way, we will go. If it falls that way, we will not go.”
Four times he sang and made as if to toss the shield from him, while the watching crowd clapped their mouths and sang praise songs. The fourth time Arepoesh let go of the shield. It caught the air and flew a little way, then fell and rolled and wobbled to a stop, falling with the blazon up.
“I have said it,” cried Arepoesh. “We will go. Already I see the enemy lying dead. Already I see them slain.”
Some men hunting buffalo had cut the trail of a party of Blackfeet yesterday. The party was not large and Jim thought the fight would be an easy one. He was eager for it. The Blackfeet were mounted, which meant they were after hair, and that meant dead Crow sooner or later.
He rode out with Arepoesh and some thirty braves. Cherry and Little Jim, who was less Little Jim and more Black Panther every year, watched him go, their faces fierce with pride.
For half a day they traveled, in sullen heat that grew more and more intense while clouds boiled and blackened over the Big Horns. In early afternoon they found the enemy, fourteen Blackfeet dressed for war, riding in a long green hollow of the plain.
The two parties faced each other, in still air that glowed the color of brass. The feather pennons drooped on the lances. The sweated ponies dripped foam around the war bridles. Dry thunder rolled and cracked in the ledges of the mountains. Arepoesh looked at the Blackfeet. He was a great warrior, a great chief. He said, “Last year the enemy you see there killed my son. Since that day I have felt myself growing old. I do not wish to grow any older. Today I am going to die.”
All alone he charged the Blackfoot line, stabbing savagely with his lance.
All alone he fell, with an arrow through him.
Jim charged, with the rest of the Crow, but there was no time for battle. The Blackfeet ran, taking their wounded.
They fled at the full stretch of their horses’ speed, screaming triumphantly, and were lost in hissing veils of rain that rushed out from the mountain.
The Crow stood around Arepoesh on the ground. He looked up at them, thrust his shield toward Jim, tried once to speak, and died.
In beating rain, across dry channels leaping into flood, they took him home. Jim carried the shield, a sacred gift.
The Crow mourned.
They chopped off their fingers and gashed themselves with knives. They pierced their flesh with arrows. They cut off their hair. Even Long Hair allowed his medicine to be mutilated. The favorite war horse of Arepoesh was killed and others of his vast herd had their manes and tails shorn off. Bloody, gaunt, starved, and howling, the Absaroka paid respect to one of their most honored men.
They built the platform on a high place, the four-pole platform that gave man back at last to the sun and the four winds, and they laid Arepoesh on it, dressed in his war clothes, wrapped in his finest blanket and the softest of buffalo robes. They planted a long pole with scalps on it to wave over him like a flag. And they left him, alone under the enormous sky.
But that was not the end of it. There was never an end.
The wife and family and relatives of Arepoesh loaded a fine horse with gifts and led it up to Jim. Cherry and Muskrat were among the party, being clan connections of the dead chief. Both were ceremonially gashed, their faces painted with mourning paint. The widow of Arepoesh offered Jim a pipe.
He hesitated. If he took it it meant that he accepted two things—the horse with its load of gifts, which he did not need, and the duty of leading a war party against the Blackfeet to avenge the death of Arepoesh, which he did not want.
These terrible whirlwinds of mourning were hard on the nerves. Perhaps that was why he had a feeling that if he took the pipe he would be unlucky.
But he looked at Cherry and knew that he had no choice.
Again the heralds went through the camp, and the Antelope with fifty warriors rode north into Blackfoot country.
Everything went wrong.
The weather turned bad. They could find no game. They shivered in cold rains and grew feeble with hunger, and there were no Blackfeet. The men began to talk seriously of turning back. The Antelope’s medicine had become weak. The Ones-who-make-things-happen, whoever and wherever they might be, were angry for some reason. Even Young Bear advised Jim to go back. “This will not turn out well,” he said. “If you return home, that will be well.”
But Jim was mad. He had already come all this way. He could not go back to Cherry, to the whole waiting village, and say that he had failed. He was mad, and too white-man-ornery to quit.
The weather cleared. They killed a buffalo, gorged themselves and vomited, ate again and kept it down. They felt much better. And they found their Blackfeet.
It was a big party coming back from a raid on the Shoshoni, and Jim saw two scalps that had never grown on Indian heads, one reddish-brown, one sandy. Two more trappers had laid their bones beside the beaver streams. Now Jim was glad he had come. He laid his ambush well and caught the Blackfeet in a deep coulee, where less than half of them escaped. When it was over he had three men and himself slightly wounded, no one dead, and enough hair to wash the faces of the mourners clean.
“Who wishes to say now that the Antelope’s medicine is weak?” he asked.
Triumphantly, they took the long trail home.
Some of the lodges were still burning when they came in sight of the camp. They saw the smoke long beforehand, a thin and dirty smudge across the sky. They rode like wild men, but there was not really any need to hurry.
Jim flung himself off his pony. It stayed with its head down and its legs spread, groaning. The lodge was still standing. Only a part of the cover had burned and the flap was still in place, moving idly with the wind. The air stunk of scorched leather and other more dreadful things. Jim moved toward the entrance. He seemed to move very slowly and there was a shimmering over his vision as of a heat haze. He heard sounds, people crying out, wailing, moaning, but they were a long way off. The flap made a rustling in the wind. He put out a hand and lifted it and looked in.
“The men were not in the village,” someone was saying. “Long Hair called a buffalo
hunt. The men were killing buffalo, that is how it was. That was when the Cheyennes attacked us.”
Someone. Someone. Someone was talking.
“I saved the boy. He fought well. Even though young he fought well, like a Crow.”
It was hard to see. Jim reached out. He felt someone grip his arm and then some of the darkness lifted and he saw that it was Big Bowl, his face grimed with smoke and blood and streaked with tears.
“The boy’s mother,” he said, “did not wish to be a captive. Although a woman, she fought bravely. Her I could not save.”
“No,” said Jim. There seemed to be nothing else to say.
He built the platform for her in the ruined lodge where she had died, and everything that was in it he left with her. He suffered his hair to be cut and watched stonily as Black Panther gashed himself with an arrow point, thrusting it deep in his flesh. He endured the waiting until all the people were finished with their burials, and he only spoke once. That was to Young Bear. “You said to me that if I returned home it would be well. Your medicine was stronger than mine.”
Without the horses that the Cheyennes had run off, without the belongings that the Cheyennes had plundered, without all the women and children taken captive and without all those who remained behind in the death lodges, they moved the camp to a new place. And that year they held a Sun Dance.
Only a man who mourned very greatly and whose will was as strong as his wish for vengeance would pledge a Sun Dance in return for a vision. Muskrat had left behind in the death lodges not only his sister Cherry but his mother and father as well. Muskrat was the Whistler.
All the villages came in, to watch and share in the ceremony. The Antelope was part of it too. He was a Big Dog, and the Big Dogs were chosen to act as police. He was a distinguished warrior, and a relative of Muskrat, and there were duties and rituals for him to perform. He went through them in a kind of savage daze, desolate and full of hate, without a conscious thought in his head. The tide carried him, with singing and drumbeats, with the controlled frenzy of emotion that rose slowly toward explosion.
The massive detail attendant on the ritual had its own strange usefulness. It dragged out each separate action to its utmost stretch, so that the consummation was that much delayed, that much more anticipated. Muskrat, covered with white clay, his face painted with the tear streaks of the mourner, his body gaunt with fasting, danced on his knees in the preparatory lodge, blowing the sacred whistle made from the leg bone of an eagle, while the owner of the Sun Dance doll saw that all was done according to the vision handed down from the beginning, even to the stitching of the ceremonial kilt and moccasins. Muskrat, carrying the Sun Dance doll in its feathered hoop, led the procession to get poles for the Sun’s lodge, which had to be cut by chosen persons in a certain way. Chosen hunters went to kill the buffalo for the bull hides that would bind the poles, and each bull must be dropped cleanly with one blow. Chosen persons cut the hides into strips, and every gesture was four times repeated and every song four times sung. The sacred lodge went up like something in a fever dream, endlessly promised, endlessly postponed.
Muskrat entered the Sun’s lodge at last. The cedar post was set up according to the vision and the owner of the sacred doll hung the hoop on it so that Muskrat faced it, his head on a level with the doll’s head with its tiny crown of feathers and its painted eyes. From now on his fast was absolute. The singing and the drumming began. Muskrat danced, all covered with white clay, wearing the ceremonial kilt and the necklace of skunk skin, the whistle between his lips. Staring at the doll he danced, without food or water in the summer heat.
Outside the lodge other men suffered, caught up in the passion of sorrow and vengeance, seeking their own visions. From the lodgepole tips long ropes of rawhide dangled, and the end of each rope was skewered into the flesh of a man who would hang there, dancing, until the skewers tore loose.
The Antelope watched. The lower part of the Sun’s lodge was uncovered so that everyone could watch. The piping of the bone whistle sounded with every gasping breath as Muskrat danced. The singers sang and the drummers drummed. Close by the lodge a man walked dragging behind him five buffalo skulls tied with thongs to skewers through the flesh of his back. The dry white skulls went bouncing in the dust, clacking their horns together. The men danced at the ends of their ropes and the blood made bright patterns running down.
Into the parched blankness of Jim’s mind came a memory. Several white men sat in a paneled room, drinking port. He himself, very small, crouched on a stair landing in the dark, watching and listening, while his father talked with fellow soldiers about the battle of Stony Point.
“War is good,” Cirape told Old Man Coyote in the beginning of the world. “You have made a bad mistake. You have made all the people speak alike and understand each other. Hate they do not, fight they do not. Thus they are unhappy, they have nothing to do. If some spoke different languages it would be well. Then they could get angry, they could hate, they could be happy. Then they could have chiefs. Their warriors could have victory parades and flirt with the young women. At peace they are not content.” And First-Maker said to his younger brother; “Why, you are right. I did not think of that.” And he made his people happy.
The Whistler and the bleeding men danced, all praying for a vision of dead Cheyennes.
Up in the north Blackfoot women were mourning their dead and someone was bringing a pipe and a horseload of gifts to a war chief, asking vengeance against the Crow.
To the southeast the Cheyenne women were dancing over Crow hair, but the Whistler would get his vision. Cheyennes would die in earnest. Then their women would weep and cry for vengeance. And more Crow would die, and again a pipe would be brought.
War in the white man’s world was generally about something. Somebody won, somebody lost, something was decided and the war was over. Here war was its own cause and the idea of victory was unthinkable as a white man understood it. War was made because without it a man would have nothing to do.
Jim groaned. For all these days his mind had been like a thing asleep. Now it was waking, and it seemed that all the time it had been busy in its dark, secretive way, making decisions.
He knew that he would not lead any war party against the Cheyennes.
Rich was right after all. You could only be an Indian just so long, unless you were born to it. It wasn’t the savagery or the bloodshed. A white man could shuck off his town-made civilization overnight, reverting to the primitive as though it was his natural element. It was the uselessness. If you had been born and raised outside the pattern, sooner or later you would find you could not fit into it any longer, because your habit of mind said that a pattern had to get you somewhere and this one didn’t. It got you death, but the dying had no purpose. As well hate wind or lightning as the Cheyennes.
The man with the buffalo skulls came by. One of them had pulled out, leaving a tom place in his back. Blood ran down his left buttock and the back of his leg and dripped off his heel into the dust where the dry skulls rode. His face was ecstatic.
Jim turned and walked away from the Sun Dance lodge. He felt as though buffalo skulls were dragging at his heart. He loved these people. He did not want to go.
Toward the end of the Yellow Grass time Jim rode up to the fort, collected his pay from the American Fur Company, and took passage on a keelboat going down the river, back to the white man’s world. He told his people that it was only for a short while, that he would come back, certainly, perhaps in the Snow Falling time, or no later than the time of Green Grass when the ponies grew fat. He tried to believe that this was true. But on the way down the river he got drunk and raged through the boat like a wild man, so that half the crew took to the water to escape him.
He was mourning Absaroka.
SEVENTEEN
St. Louis had more streets now, more houses, more people, more business, more wharves and taverns and counting houses and brothels. To Jim’s nose, after fourteen years of prairie and mountain
, it smelled more. And it was noisier, with wheels and voices and the constant braying of mules.
There were other changes.
Strangers had the house at Beckwourth’s Settlement. The old owner was gone, back to Virginia. An officious slave told Jim this and ordered him off the place, eyeing his Indian garb with righteous distrust. Jim was sorry, and at the same time relieved. It was hard for him to remember sometimes that Big Bowl was not his true father. And yet he would have liked to see Beckwourth, to say to him, “This is what I have become.” Perhaps he would have been proud. Perhaps not. Perhaps in his father’s eyes a Crow chief would not count very high. In any case, Jim was still grateful for the rifle.
Sam Carson was dead, so his opinion could not be had either.
Of the opinion of Jim’s sisters there was no doubt. He had some little trouble finding them, and when he did they met him stiffly in their dowdy little parlor, in a narrow little house on a narrow street in the black quarter, looking at him as though he were some great gaudy disreputable bird of prey invading a hen roost. He hardly recognized either of them. He was not asked to sit down. He could see himself reflected all out of shape in the glass front of a cabinet—long hair, face weathered a deep bronze by a decade and a half of sun and wind, shirt of white buckskin, the last of all Cherry’s handiwork, handsomely embroidered with dyed quills, the fine blue blanket edged with scarlet. Behind him the distorted reflection showed a dun-colored wall and a window hung with fine lace curtains that were worn and carefully mended, hand-me-downs from the parlor of some white lady. He began to smile.
“I guess I made a mistake to come here,” he said.
The elder sister Mathilda said coldly, “You made a mistake to come back to this town at all.”
“Oh?” said Jim. “Why?”
“Why?” said Lou, the younger one, her eyes glittering with indignation. “You think everybody here don’t know what you’ve been up to, robbing white folks, threatening to kill them?” She gestured angrily at his clothing. “Suppose you think you can pass for an Indian now. Suppose you think everybody don’t remember what color you are, and what trouble you got into here before. You’re going to get yourself lynched, Jim Beckwourth.”
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