by Win Blevins
She had made up her mind.
In the new year, 1879, a couple of weeks after Smith’s piercing sacrifice, Raven and Lisette walked through the Cheyenne camp in Lost Chokecherry Valley, speaking quietly to each family in the various brush huts. They walked around about dusk, because people would be assembled at their homes preparing the evening meal, or eating, and the two could find nearly everyone. They didn’t walk together, but a little separately, Lisette behind. Raven would come into camp, and the man of the house would offer him the honored seat of the visitor behind the fire. Raven would decline the offer, speak a few more words, and move on. Lisette would step close a few moments later, and likewise speak a few words, and move on.
Raven said to each group of people, “Vekifs has—become Whistling Otter.” They nodded, and accepted this news with a calm that belied its magnitude. The words meant, the man we knew as Vekifs, the son of Dancer and Annemarie who turned into a white man, has learned by his sacrifice, and the powers have granted him a vision. He has laid down his old life and taken up a new one, a life right for a Human Being. I, Raven, declare him a new Human Being, Whistling Otter.
Lisette said to each group of people, “Whistling Otter will take Rain as his wife.”
These pieces of news quickened the people with hope. Though Whistling Otter kept his chest covered, they had all heard about his sacrifice and dared to hope that it went well. Perhaps it was a sign that the old powers moved among the people again. Even the name Raven had chosen, an otter calling lustily to his mate, suggested renewal.
The Sweet Medicine chief, Little Wolf, said nothing, but he thought maybe this one, schooled in the ways of the white man but deeply a man of the Tsistsistas-Suhtaio, this Whistling Otter might be cut out for leadership. In the transition to a new time, a time dominated by white men, Whistling Otter might be the best guide.
After dark, though, three of Red Cloud’s Lakotas came in from Fort Robinson. They went straight to talk to Little Wolf, and their demeanor told everyone the news was bad. Whistling Otter stood in the circle with the others and listened to the horrors. Half of Morning Star’s people were killed or wounded, the other half scattered across the plains and fleeing for their lives. No one needed to be told what this cold spell was doing to people who didn’t have adequate clothing, much less enough blankets.
Whistling Otter, known to the whites as Smith, gathered his family and told them simply and regretfully. He had to go to Fort Robinson to minister to the wounded and the frostbitten. He promised not to let the soldiers lock him up and keep him. His marriage to Rain would have to wait until he got back.
Then Whistling Otter borrowed a horse (he had given his mounts to Raven in return for guiding him through the sacrifice) and set out through the night alone. He did not even wait for the three Lakotas, who might go back tomorrow. He must get where he was needed. Later, he promised himself, he would ask the Powers to let him do his helping not all over the Great Plains but at home, at the post on Powder River at the mouth of the Little Powder. He said in his head, I’ll be home in the spring, Mother.
Chapter 4
Elaine held the account book. Her hand felt the texture of the canvas cover, but her mind was out on the frozen plains, beside a gully known as Warbonnet Creek. She was seeing the wounds and hearing the blood-choked cries of the Cheyennes who died there a few days ago.
She kept her fingers away from the tattered edges of the two bullet holes that ripped through the book front to back. They cried out too eloquently what had happened to the man who created the book, Little Finger Nail. Nail had been wearing this book strapped to his back when he was shot. Shot from the front, they said.
These items were his, the account book filled with his beautiful drawings done with colored pencils, the shell-core necklace, the bird he had worn in his hair. She picked up the bird. It had looked so alive on his head, alert and watchful, and possibly capable of endowing Nail with that sweet voice, as he thought it did. Now it was just a dead thing.
Captain Wessells had permitted her to look over the belongings the soldiers had taken from the dead. Nail’s book was going back to Washington City with Wessells’ report, as a document that spoke for the Cheyennes. The other items would be returned to relatives, if the dead owners could be identified.
Elaine set the bird down. She tried not to picture what had happened. Since they refused to go back to Indian territory, Wessells decided to force them into submission. He locked them up. Then he deprived them of food. Then of water. And when they broke out in desperation, headed into the January night without even decent clothing and blankets, he ordered them shot down. And then tracked down.
A man as stupid as Wessells didn’t deserve to live.
Elaine shook with rage.
She had to get out before Wessells came back.
She pegged out of post headquarters without even a word to the orderly. Vernon May’s new leg or not, it hurt. She imagined the orderly watching her walk from behind, laughing at the cripple.
She went down a few buildings, to where Lieutenant Hancock and his wife Ruth had their quarters. The door stuck. She grabbed the door jamb, balanced on her peg, and whammed the door with her good foot. Still stuck. She kicked it furiously again. It banged open, and she burst into tears.
Luckily, no one was home. She stumped over to a chair by the wood stove, half fell into the chair, and held her palms flat to the heat, bawling.
People here had been kind to her. They had understood that she was exhausted from her long trip, by train from Omaha to Sidney and then by stage to Fort Robinson. James Hancock and Ruth had been superb, offering her a place to stay. The post surgeon, Dr. Moseley, had been gracious and considerate. Even Wessells had been respectful. No one had asked her how in hell she could go so crazy as to marry an Indian, especially an Indian who was about to make war on the entire U.S. government. And unarmed.
But it was all so awful. About half of Morning Star’s Cheyennes were dead, half of one hundred and thirty human beings, and most of the others wounded or frostbitten. The post hospital was full, and more would die. The bodies of the dead were stacked outdoors, frozen, like cordwood. Hideous.
She had asked the living who was dead. Many she knew—Morning Star’s son and daughter, for instance, Nail, and the woman Nail loved, Singing Cloud. Many, she was sad to acknowledge, were only names to her. How could she have lived with them, traveled with them, fought the soldiers with them, slept beside them, and never learned their names? Never once touched them when they were alive, and warm?
She believed now that Adam was not among the dead. The living Cheyennes all said that he had gone with Little Wolf, who had made a hidden camp somewhere, no one knew where, because the soldiers couldn’t find it. Little Wolf’s band intended to go on north when they’d recuperated, to Powder River. So Adam was not exactly safe, but he was probably alive.
A great comfort, she thought bitterly, to be a divorcée, not a widow. She supposed she would have to make herself a divorcée in the white man’s legalities soon. Gay, brittle, awful word, divorcée.
She took control of herself. She must begin to write her report for Captain Wessells. She got up and fetched the pen and paper James Hancock was loaning her from the kitchen table. Wessells had asked her to write down her experiences with the fleeing Cheyennes, including whatever plea on their behalf she might want to put in. He would send it to Washington City with his reports, he said. She sat at the little kitchen table, reminding herself not to make a mess with the ink.
Good, she thought. Splendid. She intended to beat Wessells, the army, the Indian Service, and the entire Interior Department over the head with their own stupidity until they bled from their eyes and ears.
“Who’s asking?” challenged the orderly.
Whistling Otter resisted smiling to himself. “Dr. Adam Smith Maclean.”
The orderly nodded suspiciously. He surely didn’t know his mouth was hanging open. And he surely thought he was being mocked by the big I
ndian. Doctor, indeed. “I don’t know if Captain Wessells is here.” The orderly wheeled and disappeared into another room with a semblance of military snap.
Well, Whistling Otter didn’t look much like a doctor. He’d left his Prince Albert coat, gray trousers, and Jefferson boots at home. He was wearing a breechcloth, leggings, and moccasins, and his hair was greased. Breechcloth and leggings incensed the white folks because they showed a half-moon of ass cheek on either side. If you wore one, you were sure to get treated like a dirty savage.
The orderly held the door open and jerked his head at Whistling Otter.
“Yes,” said the man behind the desk. Captain Wessells, who ordered all the butchery, was a little man, and had the bland face of an anonymous functionary.
Whistling Otter stepped close, so he could tower over the officer. “I am Dr. Adam Smith Maclean,” said Whistling Otter in his best enunciation. Look at me, soldier, and you’ll see what I am. But Wessells kept his head down, like he was looking at his papers. “I am a Cheyenne. I was the physician at the Cheyenne-Arapaho Agency.” Now Wessells looked up at him suddenly. “I came north with the people of Little Wolf and Morning Star. I have heard that I’m wanted by the law. I didn’t do it, and I want to face whatever charges are out against me.”
“The Cheyenne doctor?” Wessells asked.
“Yes.”
“Your father was a white-man trader on the Yellowstone?”
“Yes.”
“Just a moment.” Wessells jumped out and scurried into the outer room. Whistling Otter heard his voice but couldn’t make out the words through the closed door.
Wessells came back into the room and stood behind his desk, awkward and uncertain. “I did have some papers on you,” he said, “but not anymore. What were the charges?”
Whistling Otter shrugged. “I heard kidnapping and murder. But the girl I’m supposed to have kidnapped is my daughter, and her father died of a heart attack.”
“In Kansas, is that right?”
Whistling Otter nodded.
Wessells got some papers out of a drawer and rummaged through them. He took a lot of time and didn’t seem to find anything. Either he was disorganized or he was stalling. Why would he be stalling? Whistling Otter wasn’t avoiding arrest.
At last the captain found a document he could read from. Eight names, he sounded off. Whistling Otter recognized Wild Hog, Tangle Hair, Left Hand, Porcupine, and Blacksmith. “Those men are being extradited to Kansas at the request of the governor. They will be tried for various crimes, including murder. They’re leaving tomorrow.”
Wessells looked Whistling Otter in the eye for a change. “Your name’s not here. These are the only men the governor thinks there’s enough evidence to get an indictment on.”
So. Whistling Otter took a deep breath and let it out. So. What else he saw was that little Wessells had no more appetite for blood. Too late, little man, too late.
“May I go? I want to examine the people in the hospital, and talk with them, and bring them some comfort.”
Wessells nodded slowly. Nodded again. He’s going to ask me where Little Wolf is, thought Whistling Otter. And I’m going to lie baldly.
Captain Wessells said, “Of course, Doctor. Would you wait in front of headquarters first, please? Someone wants to see you.”
“Ready to go now?” Ruth Hancock said from the front door. She was a bright, pert woman in her middle twenties, the sort of woman who lights up a room with her vivacity and is unaware of it. “Shangreau is ready, and I’ve brought the horses around.”
Elaine pushed her writing materials away and nodded yes. She wasn’t eager to go, her mood was too somber, but her mood wouldn’t change as long as she was at Fort Robinson. Ruth had suggested that Elaine might like to see where Crazy Horse, the great Lakota leader, had been bayoneted, and later died, and hear the story of how it happened. Elaine did want to see it before she left the Western country for good.
Elaine accepted a boost into the saddle from the half-breed scout who held the horses, the fellow named Shangreau. Elaine studied his face a little. She would never again look at a half-breed, or an Indian or a Negro, as though he were furniture, or livestock, or landscape, as she regrettably had done in her youth. At least Adam had given her that. Amazing, she thought, how much you put into a marriage, and how little you may take away from it.
They clucked to the horses and were off. It was Ruth’s idea that since Elaine was self-conscious about how she looked walking, she should ride everywhere, even a couple of hundred yards from quarters to the guardhouse and the adjutant’s office. “A lady’s got to make em look,” Ruth said saucily. Ruth did make em look. With her wooden leg and her hair hacked off at the shoulders, Elaine felt far past that point, and was painfully amused that Ruth would say it.
In front of the adjutant’s office, Shangreau recounted the affair. The winter after the Greasy Grass fight, where the Sioux and Cheyennes wiped out Custer’s men two and a half years ago, Crazy Horse had kept his people away from the soldiers. But it had been a hungry winter, the hungriest any but the old could remember, and in the spring Crazy Horse had felt he had no choice but to bring his band to Fort Robinson and surrender their arms in exchange for rations. His people were the last of all the wild Lakotas to surrender, except for Sitting Bull, who went to Canada rather than capitulate.
The following September, Shangreau said, the army asked Crazy Horse to help scout against the Nez Perces, who were then fleeing through Montana Territory toward Canada. Crazy Horse answered that he would fight the Nez Perces until the last one was dead. But the interpreter, Frank Grouard, mistranslated his words, reporting that he threatened to fight the white troops until the last soldier was dead. Some people thought Grouard made this mistake intentionally because he was afraid of Crazy Horse.
General Crook then ordered Crazy Horse arrested. When the chieftain came to Fort Robinson under assurances of his personal safety, the commanding officer, Colonel Bradley, ordered him put into the guardhouse, the little building Shangreau now nodded to. Crazy Horse was escorted toward the building under heavy guard, both soldiers and Indian police. Many other Indians were crowded around. The Indians were excitable. Crazy Horse had become a symbol among the Sioux. The young reservation Indians idolized him as the last representative of the romantic idea of the old life, of the buffalo days. To others he was a dangerous throwback, and still others were jealous of his influence. All groups were afraid something bad might happen now.
As they walked toward the jail, Crazy Horse’s arms were held fast by Indian police, and the troopers had their bayonets bared and pointed at him. When Crazy Horse saw the jail cells, he made a quick motion, grabbing for a concealed knife. Alarmed, the Indian police held him tight, and one of the soldiers ran him through from behind. He died that night, and his parents took his body into the nearby hills.
“I think he wanted to die,” said Shangreau simply. “I think he chose to die rather than live the new way, on the reservation.”
Elaine sat her horse with her head down. For the Plains Indians, these days, nothing but tragedy. Intentions, plans, good will, effort—everything came somehow, perversely, guided by a malignant fate, to tragedy.
Then she realized someone was calling her. “Mrs. Maclean,” shouted a voice. “Mrs. Maclean.” It was one of the orderlies from the hospital, trotting toward them and waving. “Captain Wessells says for you to come quick.”
Wessells? What for? Was he getting in a hurry for her report? Maybe she’d finally rouse the courage to spit in his face. Elaine kicked her horse to a lope—she rode much better now—and cantered back toward headquarters.
In front of the building stood Adam Smith Maclean, her husband. Former husband. Good Christ.
The first thought she was aware of was that this time she was glad she looked down at him, because looking up at him would shake her control. Her second thought was that he couldn’t see, beneath her skirt, that shed lost a leg. She reined her horse to a stop wit
h her legs on the side away from him so he wouldn’t get any idea. She wasn’t ready for this.
My God, Adam.
He wished desperately she would speak.
They stared at each other.
“Elaine,” he said. Feelings roiled in him, uncertain and contradictory—they surged, out of control. That little son of a bitch Wessells, not telling him, setting him up. I could have come and gone without her knowing.
“I love you,” he did not say. But it occurred to him. She looked magnificent, erect in her saddle, manifestly well healed, radiant, beautiful. She had cut her hair off to her shoulders in the traditional sign of mourning of Cheyenne women. With the hurt and dying in the hospital, and the dead stacked nearby, that gesture reached him, touched him nearly beyond his control.
Goose pimples ran down his arms.
He also did not say, “How is Sheriff Masterson?” He noticed the temptation to utter those mockingly bitter words and thought, The old Vekifs is still within Whistling Otter. And Vekifs is strong. Observe the humiliation you feel. Observe the gall. Observe that you do want to know where Masterson is, and why.
“Adam,” she said belatedly.
“Why?” was the question he did not ask—why anything. He smiled a little at himself. He was in heavy surf of thought and feeling, and he chose to hide it behind the mask of his face. It was inexpressible anyway. Yet he felt a tiny calm in the violent waters, an inclination for Whistling Otter to think how terrible life truly is, and accept that.
“You look grand,” he admitted.
She inclined her head graciously and smiled a little. That small smile wilted him.
He doesn’t know, she thought, amazed, outraged, bitterly glad. He doesn’t know or he would speak his regrets. She clung to that notion, her axis in crazy turmoil.
God, I’m humiliated. She composed her face deliberately—he must never know. He thinks I look grand—how delicious.
Adam looked more … Indian. Perhaps it was the breechcloth and leggings. Or perhaps it was a new maturity in his face, a gravity. Her mind flicked over what had happened to Adam in the last four and a half months, and she thought, Adam has finished growing up. Life will do that to you. She nodded to herself. It will.