Slowly the puma’s hoarse wrawling fell away to a choked gagging sound.
Scarlet Plume gave the puma’s throat yet another powerful squeeze. “Today is your die day! Die!”
At last the puma went limp. Its head fell to one side, its big red mouth hung open, its popped eyes twisted up.
Scarlet Plume jumped up and back. He was free. His eyes, bloodshot, rolled wild. The knob of his aroused phallus gleamed with a silken purple sheen. He gave a whoop of joy at his marvelous escape. “Hoka-hey!”
Judith pitched forward from her kneeling position, her face landing in the sandy path.
Scarlet Plume saw that the puma still twitched. He grabbed a club from a pile of firewood near the door of their lodge and beat the puma over the head. He beat it and beat it until its brains poured out of its eyeholes like watery gruel. His phallus bounced with every swing of the club.
Judith rolled over on her back and looked up at him.
Scarlet Plume placed his foot on the chest of the puma and cried the death cry for the puma. It was wild, haunting. The cry hung quavering on the air. He cried large tears.
“Husband.”
Scarlet Plume picked up his knife and cut a slit in the chest of the puma and removed the heart. He held the puma’s heart up to the skies. “Like parts strengthen like parts!” He sliced up the heart and ate it raw, all of it. “Now the heart of the terrible cat lives within me.”
“Husband.”
Again Scarlet Plume knelt and quickly, deftly, skinned out the puma. He offered up the skin to the six great directions. He spread the golden-brown skin upon the grass to dry. When he finished he was sheathed in blood. He himself resembled a skinned puma. “I am all blood!” he cried. “Yet the great puma is dead. He-han! To that place that far!”
Judith closed her eyes.
There was a hoarse rutting cry and Scarlet Plume fell upon Judith. Blood touched her everywhere. His big phallus lay between them. He made a motion as if to break her neck with a big bite, as a puma might; instead restrained himself and bit her lightly. He tore the wolfskin from her.
“No!” she cried, gasping at all the blood. “No, no.”
He was full of biting. He play-bit her over the cheeks, on the nose, over the brows. He nipped her chocolate teats. He play-snarled in her ears. He pretended to eat her from head to foot. He was so wild his face was luminous.
“Don’t.”
His eyes closed over. Blood dripped from his neck over her white belly. He bit her lightly over her golden brush.
She jumped under his intimate biting, then bit him back in his torn neck. She bit him so hard she started fresh blood.
He cried aloud. He laughed crazily. He bit her in the belly.
Again she bit him in the neck, deep, drawing more blood.
He placed his hand on her tufted pubes and thrust in a finger, searching, deep. “He-han!”
“No, no,” she cried, yet pushing her brush against his strong hand, writhing and wriggling back and forth on the sandy path. “No, no.”
He bit her sharply in the neck under the ear.
“Don’t hurt me,” she cried.
He bit her under the other ear.
She was afraid. Yet she was wild with joy. “I am all blood with thee,” she cried. “We have overcome the terrible cat together.”
An urgent wrawling entered his crying. He took hold of her ankles with powerful copper hands, threw her legs apart. He knelt between her knees. He thrust in. Rutting grunts shook his hard belly. “He-han!”
“No, no,” she cried.
He clutched her about the hips. He bounced her on the ground.
There was no hurt. What he was impelled to give she was willing to receive. “Yes, yes!” she cried. In turn she bounced him in the air. They were all blood. She clasped his slippery body to her. “Yes, yes.”
His red belly strained against her white belly.
She loved him with her whole body and soul. A hunger as from protoplast times drew them together. They were joined again. There was no greater delight on earth than the delight of giving him an urgent quick go-up for his equally urgent strong go-down. There was no greater giving on earth than the lovely mutually urgent giving of fleshes, utterly. She had a hot ring of fire for his probing arrogant stalk of flesh. Her hot ring clasped catchingly as his phallus slid up and down into her, again, again, again.
“The Yankton man commands!” he cried.
“The Yankton woman entreats!” she cried.
Once more her womb became like an animal in her belly. Clutching joy returned to her. She rose, rose. Lightning darted through her brain. Then, once again, sudden knotlike spasms worked in her belly. There was no stopping them. They rode through her flesh. A blinding light rose out of her belly and lighted up her eyes on the inside.
The cry of fulfillment sounded from the two of them at the same time. “He-han!” “O Lord! My lord!”
He lay upon her, languid. She supported him, languid. Films of blood glistened on their bodies.
“When I am not in love I am nothing.”
They took the morning bath together, naked, in the running water below the pool. The stream ran pink.
She treated his wounds with herbs and scented venison lard.
He smiled in sleepy appreciation.
At last, finished, he picked her up by the neck and ankles and carried her into their lodge.
“We marry?” he said.
“We marry,” she said.
He laid her gently on the wolfskin. The morning sun shone through the door. He lay beside her. He nuzzled her. She kissed him.
Presently the knob of his phallus began to swell again and slowly it emerged from the folds of its foreskin. They made love once more, this time gentle. His flesh was firm and probing. Her flesh was delicate and yielding.
The sweet fit came upon them both at the same time.
“It wasn’t quite the same,” she whispered up into the sunlight. “But in a way it was even better.”
They slept the whole day through, skin to skin, red next to white.
She taught him to kiss.
Scarlet Plume thought it an outlandish custom. He preferred crying over one in the old way and stroking the hair. His heavy lips were almost an encumbrance to kissing. He saw how her clear blue eyes melted into milky love when she pressed her partially opened lips over his lips. Yet he felt no melting when he tried it.
“Come, brave husband,” she said, sliding her white leg over his red leg, dropping her sunned hair around his red-brown face in a rain of gold. “Try it the white-man way. This way. Kiss. See? Kiss, and in a moment you will see a falling star even in broad daylight.”
He laughed a wide laugh. “It makes the end of my nose hot.”
She laughed in turn. She gave his high nose a pull. She ran her fingertips along the edges of his exquisitely carven lips. “Yes, your nose is warm. Perhaps that is why your lips remain cold.” She took his hand and got him to touch her nose and then her lips. “Do you not see? My lips are warm and my nose is cold.”
“Even as a puppy’s nose is cold and its tongue is warm.”
“No, no. Come now. If you will think hard on it, your nose will turn cold and your lips warm, even as mine, and then you will see the falling star. Come now. Kiss. Kiss.”
“Let me cry warm tears on your brow while you k-isss warm touchings on my lips. Will it not be the same thing?”
“No, no. Come. Close your eyes and think of wonderful things. Let the warmth that is in your eyes go to your lips. This way.”
They murmured together.
She said, “Let it be this way.” She shivered. “Let the lips play with each other as though they were fingertips, full of tender touching, thy lips as well as my lips.”
She kissed him. His breath was sweet. She kissed him. She delighted in the full firm molding of his fleshen bronze lips. With the edges of her lips she could feel, clearly, the edges of his lips where they shaped off into the cheek at the corners. She coul
d not get enough of them. She also came to love the touch of his muscled cheeks and his broad jutting chin. They were hairless but the skin on them was taut and manly. She ran her fingertips around the curve of his jaw and up under his ear and around over his temple and then over his cheekbones. The cheekbones also fascinated her. It was as if he had a hard crab apple under each cheek. She wanted to bite them.
He smiled huskily in her ear. “If a woman we know by the name of Sunned Hair k-issses too much she will find that a warrior we know by the name of The Plume will have a warm nose in an unexpected place.”
“Come,” she said, “this way. Let us play at biting with the edges of our lips upon the other’s mouth. This way.”
“It is a strange place to bite another.”
“Can you think of a better place?”
“In the neck perhaps? If we are to bite as our brother the puma?”
“My scarlet lover.”
“Not all birds can sing.”
“What does my lover mean by that?”
“Every child knows that certain birds do not sing. Thus perhaps the red man’s lips were not made to touch the white man’s k-isss.”
“Let us try it.” She covered his mouth with her mouth, delicate pink upon elastic bronze. She kissed him tenderly sensual.
“M-mmm.”
“Is it not a good thing?”
“M-mmm.”
“When a Dakota speaks of a thing as being very good, what does he say?”
“A Dakota says a thing is scarlet when it is excellent. It is sha, he says.”
“Yes. Sha. Is this not sha?”
He held his head to one side as though to consider it as a grave chief might consider an offer of peace from the enemy. A faint smile lurked along the roots of his nose.
“Scarlet Plume is like a stubborn boy who will not eat meat even when it is sha.”
This he took seriously. A flick of sadness, even annoyance, twitched the bronze skin under each eye.
“Tell me,” she said, recalling something. “Why did you give me a wild swan with a broken neck? At Skywater before the massacre? Why did you not speak to me instead? I wish to know.”
“It was forbidden me to speak to the whites.”
“By whom? Whitebone?”
“By the soldiers’ lodge. Their rule, once made, cannot be broken until a new soldiers’ lodge is chosen.”
“Suppose my sister, the Good Book Woman, had not known what it meant to give one a white swan with a broken neck?”
He shrugged ever so delicately. “Then it was meant to be.”
“Tell me how it is among the Yankton young. What is the young man told to do by the old men when it comes time for him to woo the maiden?” With the tip of her forefinger Judith traced the edges of his thick lower lip. “Is he told to overcome her as the prairie cock does the hen?”
He smiled at her, close up, in a warm, musing manner. “He is told to approach the maiden as one would approach a very shy creature of the earth, gently, slowly, one step and one finger at a time, as one approaches a young antelope trembling in a cactus patch. Are not all shy hearts the same?”
“There,” she cried, “there. Kiss me now. Now. Just the way your lips were just then. Your heart was just then in your lips.”
“M-mmm.”
“Is it not sha? Very sha?”
“M-mmm.”
She sighed. “At last I’ve had my honeymoon.”
“Nnnh?”
Her eye caught movement on his body. She looked down. His testes were slowly stirring, first one, then the other, inside his scrotum. Their movement reminded her of moles working under a turf of grass, of a pair of little pigs caught in a sack and snouting quietly around trying to get out.
She slid her white limb up and down on his red limb. She pushed her knee high enough to touch the round wrinkly corms of his manhood. Above the corms, already tottering, stood a newly risen jack-in-the-pulpit. The three of them had a life all their own. She thrilled to the touch of the warm swollen flesh. She swooned to think of the delight of the fleshes they would soon have together again.
“Honey—moon?”
She explained what the white man meant by the word. With a soft, coy hand she took hold of his risen stalk of proud flesh. She delighted in the firm cylindrical supple feel of it. It reminded her of a suspension bridge. It arched across chasms of time. It was a root risen out of flesh and become stalk, and tipped with a glistening anther.
“Honey—moon,” he repeated, musing inwardly. “When the moon is sweet.”
“Yes. When the moon is very sweet. Also, honey does not spoil. Honey never turns sour.”
He gave her a lidded look. “Yet it is known that the moon turns dark each month.”
She skipped over this. “Honey never turns sour.” She did not want to think of his severe Dakota taboos, of the lonely wretched darkness she’d experienced in the separation hut. With a fingertip she touched the silken pink eye of his standing anther.
He mused. “The Dakota have a ceremony in which the newly married maiden is requested to think of sexual things. This is done so that the tribe may increase in number. It is held in The Moon When The Strawberries Turn Red.”
“In what manner are the maidens to think?”
He smiled a sly smile. “They must think of the squirrel who hides an acorn in the earth against the hungry winter. The squirrel does not know that when he hides the acorn for himself he is also planting for Wakantanka so that an oak may grow.”
She placed the flat of her hand on his broad bronze chest and stroked it back and forth. “And what does the warrior say in Dakota when he speaks of love to the maiden?”
“He says, ‘I have a fast hold on your heart. You have a fast hold on my heart. Let us run away on my swift pony and set up a tepee with our cousins in another band.’”
“Ah!” she cried. “That is what we call the honeymoon.”
Scarlet Plume went on. “‘You are my pretty woman, and a brave man likes to see a pretty woman who is modest and meant for him alone.’”
“This is what he says to her?”
“He also says, ‘Do you have the boiling stones ready? I am coming with the game.’”
She nipped his ear. She loved the smell of him after the morning bath. He reminded her of spring grass after a rain. “Tell me, how does the white man smell to the red man?”
He thought a moment. “That he does not bathe overmuch.”
“You do not like his smell when he sweats?”
He spoke frankly. “The smell of the white man when he sweats is like the odor of old deerhide after it has lain in a damp place for a long time.”
“But when he bathes? As I have done with thee?”
“Then it is sha. Sha.”
“Very sha?”
“Sha.”
She kissed him. “Tell me, what does my scarlet lover think of the k-isss now?”
“It has become sha. It is difficult to learn. Nevertheless after a time it becomes sha. As scarlet as the flying redbird.”
She kissed him. “Has not the time come for the squirrel to plant yet another acorn?”
They loved together.
“It is sha,” he whispered at last. “Very sha.”
Night came. They slept skin to skin under the wolfskin robe, their feet exposed to the fire. When the fire died out both instinctively drew their feet back in under the robe. The toes of themselves tucked the robe under, warmly.
PART FOUR
Camp Release
Scarlet Plume spoke firmly from the doorway. The sun had just dawned. “Hoppo! Up! I have caught us two tame horses. Are you ready to remove?”
Judith sat up. Lazy gold hair slid across her shoulders. “Horses? Where did you find them?”
Scarlet Plume looked broader and more formidable than usual. He had on a newly made buckskin shirt and a pair of fringed leggings. “I arose while it was still dark and made a cast about our camp. I found the horses at the springs above us. They were wh
ite-man horses and in need of a fresh drink. When I called them by their white names, they let me catch them.”
Judith hugged herself in the chill air. Her nipples rode like little pig snouts on her crossed forearms. She hoped her nakedness would divert him. “What names were these?”
“A blaze lay on the red horse’s nose. Him I called Old Paint. Gray and very fat was the other horse. Him I called Buckskin Belly.”
Judith smiled. “How does my husband know they are white-man horses?”
“They would not let me mount in the Yankton way, on the right side. Also, they were cut the white-man way.”
“But my husband, I have turned my mind around and do not wish to return to St. Paul.”
“It is time to go. The horses wait. Already I carry food in my legging sash.”
“But I do not wish to go back to the white cities.”
He looked quietly down at her. He crossed his arms slowly over his great chest. “I have already painted the horses in a sacred way. Now the arrows of the enemy cannot touch them.”
“I wish instead to go back to your people, the Yanktons. Do they not live in the center of the world? My heart turns black when I think of living again in the white cities.”
“Your white husband awaits you. He wishes to be father again. He needs a new baby to take the place of his lost daughter.”
Judith fought off weeping. She held up her slender arms to Scarlet Plume. “My husband, do not ask me to return to the whites. My husband, I like raw liver so much I want to live with your people. I want to go where you go. Your people are my people and your gods my God. When I die I want to be buried beside you in a little lost valley somewhere. Let The Great Master Of All Breath punish me, and more, if I let anything but death part us.”
Iron control settled over his face. “Woman, I cannot go against the vision. The vision is wakan. Also, Whitebone will surely kill us if you are not now returned to the whites. Come, the horses wait.”
She let her arms fall in her lap. She shivered in the chilly air. “Then you must come and live with me among the whites. I cannot live without you. You have made a woman of me. This I can never forget.”
“The round toes of the red man will fit poorly in the white man’s square dance.”
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