Touchstone Season Two Box Set

by Andy Conway

  There was a hunting expedition arranged to the Black Hills to look for elk and they wanted to take Little Star, because a winkte would bring a brave good luck in battle and just as much on a hunt. He would not leave me behind, and they argued a great deal over it, every one of the 25-man hunting party having his say during a council meeting. They talked long and slow and considered every aspect. I didn’t understand, except for words like woman and bad luck.

  Sitting Bull’s adopted brother, Gall, who was a great warrior and one of The Men Who are Talked About, had entertained a notion to come on the hunting expedition.

  Little Star pointed to me and said again the word wakan, and another word I didn’t know: mithán.

  Gall laughed, stood up, brushed the dust from his moccasins and walked out. A few braves followed him as Little Star argued on.

  I thought the rest would leave, but they stayed. Lakota men are braves, not sheep, and they would always do what they thought best after hearing the arguments for and against.

  “Mithán,” Little Star proclaimed proudly, his arm around me.

  The braves nodded and smoked on the pipe some more.

  From Little Star’s smile I could tell he had won. I would go on the hunting expedition.

  “How did you persuade them?” I asked him, as we packed the horses.

  “I told them that if I, a winkte, will bring them luck, then you will too.”

  “How so?”

  “Are you not as much a twin-soul as me?” he grinned.

  “And what is mithán?”

  “Sister,” he laughed.

  It was only later, much later, I came to know the many different words for sister, depending on whether the sister was younger or older, and if it was a man or woman talking. Mithán was what a woman would call her younger sister.

  I was dressed up with the rest of them and given a horse. Little Star painted my face for luck, although by his giggling I sensed it might be for his own amusement and that of the braves, who all laughed and held their bellies.

  The Lakota had talked of the Black Hills in hushed tones, as if it was a magical place where the rivers flowed with honey and the grass was made of gold leaf, but I wasn’t prepared for how sudden the change would be. We rode south from the Tongue River for two days over dry, burned-up plains and then, as if we’d passed through a secret gate into a hidden garden, the air became cool and sweet, the grass knee-deep and emerald green, wild fruits and berries weighing down every bush and tree we passed, beautiful bright coloured flowers everywhere, streams flowing with fresh, clear water, thick with trout.

  I don’t know what the Garden of Eden looked like, but I can imagine it no better than the Black Hills that summer.

  Later, much later, when I could express such thoughts, I asked Little Star why we didn’t live there all year round. He smiled and explained that the buffalo didn’t live there, and we must follow them where they roamed.

  But I could see with my own eyes why the Lakota regarded this as their holy land, and why the white man had agreed, by treaty, that it was theirs alone and no white man should trespass there.

  We camped in five lodges and the elk were plentiful, and it seemed that both Little Star and I had brought them good luck in their hunt.

  But then a shadow passed over the land, as if the sun was never to shine again.

  After the second day of our hunt, we came across an enormous party of white soldiers. They wound through the Black Hills in a wagon train, like a giant white snake, a serpent in our Eden, and we counted over a hundred men. Most of them were blueshirts, but there were others too, men with picks and shovels and a few Arikara scouts — enemies of the Lakota.

  The men sat in a circle and talked. It seemed that every time a decision needed to be made, the men would do this. I ran from the circle to an outcrop where I could spy on the blueshirts approaching. Terribly close. Little Star explained the debate was over whether to kill them all right there for their trespass. Some were arguing that the Great White Father would allow it, as these invaders were reneging on the treaty that had been signed only a handful of winters ago.

  It was possible then to say that the white man would respect his treaties.

  Those who spoke against fighting won the day. The whites outnumbered us four-to-one and any attack on their wagon train was suicide.

  I ran from the circle to peek over the outcrop. The blueshirts were right upon us. It was too late to run.

  Little Star pushed me to the back of the group, and no one noticed, with my face painted black, that I was a white woman hunting with a Lakota party. Perhaps no one sees a thing they aren’t looking for, or a thing they don’t know is possible, and that made me invisible. But there was something else. I felt invisible, as if I had cast a cloak over myself so that no man saw me.

  Little Star greeted the blueshirts, and the braves smiled like they were meeting old friends. But death was thick in the air like smoke between us. I could taste it. The Arikara guides wanted to kill us, but the white officer leading the party bellowed out a few harsh words and they retreated like cowering wolfhounds, still snarling and growling.

  Our braves talked in as friendly manner as they could and — I learned later — lied and said they were from Red Cloud’s band, who had already surrendered to the white man and agreed to live on their reservation.

  They seemed to believe us because their general laughed with us, like a host welcoming us to his home. He wore a buckskin jacket and yellow neckerchief, with a drooping moustache, and his blonde locks fell extravagantly about his shoulders.

  They were talking about hunting, and the possibility of bears in this part. The general was eager to shoot one.

  I looked into his bright blue eyes and saw death.

  My hand crept to the knife at my belt, ready to slit his throat the moment his eyes fell on me.

  But I dared not breathe, in case the cloud of invisibility around me dissipated and they saw me.

  The braves pointed him along the valley and to a mountainside where they said they’d seen a grizzly.

  The general thanked us and the great wagon train passed on, leaving us behind, the Arikara scouts still snarling at us.

  Once they were gone, Little Star sneered dark curses about the charming general who’d spared us.

  “Pehi Hanska!” he cried.

  Long Hair.

  They all knew his name and spat on the ground as they said it. He was the general who’d massacred the Cheyenne at the Washita River.

  I knew his name too. Like I had known Sitting Bull’s name. As if it had been with me my whole life.

  Custer.

  We quickly struck camp and headed for home, our slaughtered elk trailing behind us across hupa poles. Although Long Hair had forbidden the scouts to attack us, we knew that come nightfall they would sneak away from camp, as all braves did, and seek us out.

  It was the most scared I had ever seen Little Star. He was shaking with fear and as we rode he would, every few minutes, utter a prayer to the spirits.

  “We must offer thanks to the spirits that they persuaded Gall not to come with us,” he said.

  “Why so?” I asked.

  Gall was a renowned warrior, and at that moment in time, I would have welcomed the presence of a fighter, just in case those Arikara scouts came at us from the shadows like a pack of wolves.

  “One of those scouts was Bloody Knife,” said Little Star. “I recognized him, though I thank the spirits he did not know me.”

  As we rode through the night as fast as we could, Little Star told me of their life long feud.

  “Bloody Knife lived with the Hunkpapa as a child, because his father was from our tribe while his mother was Arikara. But Gall had bullied him for his Arikara blood. When his parents parted, Bloody Knife gladly returned with his mother to the Arikara.”

  Something scuffled in the brush and I drew my knife with a yelp of fear.

  “He came back as a young man and tried to kick dirt in Gall’s face, but
Gall beat him up again and sent him away like a whipped stray dog. Bloody Knife’s heart turned bad and he became a scout for the blueshirts. And that was when he stabbed Gall at Fort Berthold, the white men’s trading post. Stabbed him three times.”

  “Three times!” I repeated, almost feeling the blade cutting into my stomach.

  “Would have shot him through the head too. But a soldier pushed Bloody Knife’s gun away the second he pulled the trigger.”

  A coyote moaned somewhere out there in the moonlight.

  “They will kill each other one day,” Little Star said. “But if Gall had come with us, today would be that day and we’d all be dead now. There is bad blood between them and it will come out one day. When it does, we need to be far away from them.”

  We left the Black Hills at dawn and returned to the tribe with the elk, and there was a great celebration of our hunt, but I could not smile along with the rest.

  I had looked into Custer’s eyes and seen nothing but death.

  I wondered if those braves who’d argued against taking me along had not been right all along, and that I’d brought a terrible catastrophe upon them.

  But I tell myself nothing could have changed what was to happen. It was written in history.

  And no one can change history.

  The Men who are Talked About

  TONGUE RIVER. 1874. While we ate elk meat and sat around the campfire, Little Star talked about his favourite subject: the men, the braves, the great warriors and chiefs of the various Lakota bands. He called them wicasa yatapika, and explained this meant The Men who are Talked About.

  Men like Sitting Bull, Gall, Crow King and Rain in the Face of the Hunkpapa, Little Big Man of the Oglala, Kill Eagle of the Blackfeet, Touch the Clouds of the Miniconjou, and even Two Moons of the Cheyenne, who were not Lakota but often came and shared camp with them.

  But mostly he talked about Crazy Horse.

  The Oglala hunted by the side of the Hunkpapa every summer I was with them, so I saw Crazy Horse many times. At first, I was disappointed, because he did not look like a man that everyone talked about.

  Little Star explained that when Crazy Horse was fourteen years old he had been given a vision that told him the white man’s bullets would never kill him as long as he remained humble. He certainly looked nothing out of the ordinary that I could see. Skinny, not tall, and not taken to flamboyant dress, like many of the Men who are Talked About. He wore his hair loose and I never saw him in a headdress, just one or maybe two feathers. Even when setting out for battle, he did not paint himself much: white spots, a lightning flash across his horse’s shoulder to give it the power of the storm. And he was quiet.

  The Lakota men make a speech before they scratch their neck. I never saw them do anything without a great debate beforehand. But Crazy Horse hardly ever talked.

  It was almost like he wanted only his actions as a warrior to be the things that defined him.

  That night, his face all crimson with firelight, Little Star told the story of the battle at Arrow Creek two summers ago.

  A band of warriors from the Lakota and Cheyenne had set off to fight the Crow, but on the way had found a camp of 500 wasichus.

  Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse had said to ignore the whites, whom we should only attack if they fired on us first. But some of the young braves crept out at dawn to attack them anyway. Because that is what the young men will do. They want to be Men Who are Talked About.

  One of them was shot dead and the whites threw his body on their fire. So Sitting Bull was forced to take part in a fight that he had forbidden.

  What he did next showed why he was not just the leader of the Hunkpapa but of all the Lakota tribes.

  He walked out into the open flatland between the whites and the braves and sat down. Four other braves sat with him while he filled his pipe — a slow ceremony that takes much time — and after making the customary prayers, he smoked and passed the pipe around, while the bullets of the white men whizzed and hissed by their ears and kicked up the dirt around them.

  When the pipe bowl was empty, Sitting Bull rose and walked back out of range.

  But now Crazy Horse wished to demonstrate why he was also a Man Who was Talked About.

  He rode out towards the soldiers and sped his horse along the half a mile of smoking guns, drawing their fire, daring them to hit him. Twenty times he rode the line. A thousand bullets were fired. None touched him. On the final time the soldiers shot their guns as one, so it sounded like the anger of the thunder beings, and his horse fell. But Crazy Horse stood up and ran back, with nothing but dust on his limbs.

  These were The Men who are Talked About, and shall be talked about forever more.

  These were the men that Long Hair thought to swat from the land like flies.

  If only he’d sat by that fire that night and heard the stories that Little Star told, he wouldn’t have spurred his horse on so eagerly to meet them two years later at the Little Bighorn.

  Surrounded

  BLACK MOUNTAIN. 1875. By the end of that year I was almost fluent in Lakotan and had begun to learn how to use their sign language, which was such a beautiful thing to see: almost like a ballet that accompanies their words.

  I don’t know that I had a good sense of smell before I fell from the sky and became a Hunkpapa, but while I lived among them I learned to find sweet smelling roots in the ground and learned to name so many herbs and grasses we used in our cooking or to wear about ourselves.

  I learned how to raise a tipi, and I had even seen a buffalo run; the braves riding among the stampeding herds and shooting their arrows into their flanks till they fell. Hoka hey! You have never seen such excitement, such glory.

  Sometimes I sat with the women and made the beaded leggings the men would wear, or the quilled shirts. But I never felt comfortable around the women. I sensed their suspicion of me, and I preferred the company of the men. Or myself.

  I never spent time around the children. They threw stones at me till I bared my teeth and watched them scamper. I don’t have any maternal instincts. If that makes me a bad person, to hell with it. I don’t care. The children that ran around the camp half naked would stay out of my way and that’s the way I liked it.

  That summer we heard the braves were preparing a war expedition on the Crow, and one warrior needed magic. His name was Surrounded.

  He came to our tipi and smoked for a while before getting around to the subject.

  “The spirits have deserted me,” he said. “I have no luck in battle and fear that the next war party will be my last.”

  Little Star nodded, like a doctor well familiar with the problem.

  “All the other braves know the spirits have shunned me. No one wants to ride with me.”

  “Bees,” said Little Star.

  Surrounded did not seem surprised by this diagnosis.

  “Their wings will aid you as you fly into battle. Their stings will arm you. Put the bees in your amulet bag, where you carry your birth cord.”

  Every warrior wore a pouch filled with special herbs or stones, or the wing of a bird, the claws of a bear, the teeth of a cougar, whose powers would pass to them.

  Surrounded thought about this, puffing on the pipe. “If the dead bees are gathered by a winkte, their power will be even greater, is that so?”

  Little Star nodded and bowed. But of course.

  “I will give you a horse.”

  Little Star said nothing, only glanced at me.

  “Two horses,” said Surrounded.

  “And a rifle,” said Little Star. “A Winchester repeating rifle, like the best braves have.”

  Surrounded shook his head. The price was too high, I thought, but then he said, “I traded a buffalo for the rifle.”

  Little Star nodded. Many braves acquired rifles by trading buffalo, and the buffalo were becoming more scarce. “When I give the spirits your favour, you will hunt another buffalo. Many buffalo.”

  “Very well,” said Surrounded, “but yo
u take the woman winkte with you.”

  Little Star smiled quietly. “Surely other braves have warned you that the presence of a woman will dispel any magic power, especially if she is bleeding?”

  “I do not listen to them,” said Surrounded, puffing up his chest like a great chief making a decision that would change the destiny of the entire tribe. “She fell from the sky. She has wakan. Perhaps even greater than yours.”

  “Then a rifle for her too.”

  Surrounded grimaced, like a Winchester had shot him in the belly. But he bowed and agreed.

  It was decided: Little Star and I would set out on an expedition to find a beehive. Surrounded would get his magic bees and change his fortune, and we would get two horses and a rifle each.

  As we rode into the foothills, Little Star explained that Surrounded was so desperate to change his bad luck that he would pay anything. Most braves would throw themselves into danger to change it. He’d seen this death wish many times. Sometimes the brave would survive, and was happy from then on that the spirits were on his side again. Sometimes, he died, and everyone agreed that the spirits had deserted him.

  Surrounded was so desperate he was even willing to pay for a white woman’s magic.

  But Little Star convinced me it would all be well. When Surrounded returned safely from the battle, he would pay a crier to call out the news through the camp, and he would feed whoever came to hear the tale of how Little Star and Bright Star Falling’s wakan had changed his luck.

  “You know he likes you?’” said Little Star.

  “Who?”

  “Surrounded.”

  He laughed as my mouth fell open. I had not seen the signals of courtship he had made to me.

  “That time he came to our tipi and held his blanket over the two of you? You didn’t know?”

  “That’s a proposal?”

  “It was his finest blanket, made by his ugly sister — the one with the face like a mongoose — and he was wearing his best beaded moccasins.”

  “I thought he was protecting me from the rain!”