by Max Brand
There was no noise of dogs behind him, now.
In the morning, the child cried again. It had cried before, during that long ride, from the misery of its hard position on the arm of its foster father. But now it was hungry, and another cow died that the boy might eat. While the Cheyenne rested his horses, he made a little contrivance of fence boards and bands of buffalo hide such as Indian mothers carried upon their backs, in his tribe, as a sort of portable cradle for their children.
Before he had finished, he could hear the wavering voices of a pack of hounds crying on the horizon, and he knew that the pursuit was creeping up on him again. So he placed the child in the new conveyance, strapped it across his back, and with saddle transferred to the strongest-looking of the three mares, and the other horses led by rawhide lariats, he began to follow the northern and western trail again.
Perhaps all would have gone well if he had had only to deal with such powers as men possessed on the prairies, but it was different in this region. The whole country had become alarmed, it seemed. He found excited little bands of hunters everywhere. Three times he was chased that second day, and three times a lucky shot from his rifle dropped a horse beneath a pursuer and made the others fall back. But it was a wretched day, for the child at his back wailed tirelessly all the while. And every cry was like death to Big Hard Face. Better for it to die, however, than for him to abandon the gift of the Sky People.
So he kept on his way, and as he rode, he saw the end of the cultivated fields, and before him began the broad edges of the prairie once more.
He gave thanks, like a sailor who enters upon familiar seas. No dogs ever bred could catch him now, and let the horses follow if they could! They would need more skill on the trail than white men were fabled to have!
For a week he rode cautiously, and twice a day he delayed his journey to lay elaborate trail problems, such as even the keen nose and fathomless wits of grizzly would have found it hard to unravel. But those who followed Big Hard Face must have worked at these things in vain, for he was troubled no longer. Yet he maintained a terrible pace for a week. And in that time he covered as much ground on these long-legged speedsters as he had covered in three times that number of days coming down the out trail.
For a terrible anxiety harassed him.
The child which had been so fat and rosy when he found it, was now thin and pale, and there was a crease between its eyes; its hands trembled and were almost transparent, and its lips quivered even in its sleep, and its voice wailed ceaselessly through every waking hour.
He killed what he could of mother antelope and deer and gave it to suckle. But the ardors of the long ride, perhaps, were what were killing the youngster.
A hundred times a day, Big Hard Face cast anguished eyes up to the sky, and the people who surely dwell there, asking them if they would take away the gift which they had so lately given to him? And then he would struggle on, riding the horses to the verge of death.
They had been sleek and gay when he found them; they were four stumbling skeletons when, on a day, he saw smoke rising out of the morning sky, and sent his animals at a staggering gallop over the hills and down toward his village. God had been good to him, and the tribe had not moved during all his absence.
A screaming crowd of boys, naked on their ponies, raced about him like sparrows before a swooping hawk. He heeded them not. He rushed on through the long street of the village to his own tepee and sprang to the ground.
There was his aunt, but she would not do.
Green Antelope stood gaping at the flap of her lodge, a baby at her breast. He strode to her, pushed her own child away, and gave her his gift from heaven.
“I have five horses waiting for you in my herd, Green Antelope. Will you keep this son of mine until his teeth can bite meat?”
Chapter Three
IF BIG HARD Face had been considered an eminent warrior and a wholly desirable member of the community before, he was now raised to the rank of the leading heroes of the tribe. In the eyes of the Cheyenne, it would have been hard to choose which point of the feats of December had been most admirable — the length of his solitary journey; the strange sights which he had seen and the narratives he could make of them which held even the professional story-tellers in awe; or the quartet of magnificent horses which he had brought back; or, finally, the man-child which he had brought to raise in his lodge until he became a warrior to fight for the Cheyenne nation!
All of these items were sufficiently miraculous, and by the common voice of the nation, it was decided that Big Hard Face was a man unquestionably under the protection of the Sky People. They had devised his wifeless and childless existence, just so that they could give him with their own hands a son of their own creation.
For such the white boy was felt to be, and great things were prophesied for his future. There was only one sour face and one ugly voice, and that was raised by White Crow, the aunt of Big Hard Face himself.
She looked with no favor upon the newcomer in the lodge when the baby was brought there after it had been weaned.
“A good name does not make a brave warrior,” she declared, “and though you name him Cheyenne, the color of his skin will always call you a liar.”
Big Hard Face was not a man of violence, but now he seized a stick, and shook it vehemently.
“She-coyote!” he called her. “You have snarled at me for many years. But if you snarl at him, the Sky People will tell me to break all your bones!”
So she held her tongue when she was before her stalwart nephew, but among the other women of the tribe her tongue would never stop wagging.
After all, the boy had mighty faults. He grew taller than his compatriots of the same age, and somewhat bigger, especially about the shoulders, but what is the flesh when the spirit is lacking? And it was greatly to be feared that the spirit in this child was not all that could be wished.
He was a crying baby, and he grew up into a tearful child. If he stubbed his toe, or barked his shins, or bumped his head, he would sit down in the dust and rock his sun-browned body back and forth and wail until his voice was singing like an echo in the farthest corner of the camp.
The chief medicine man was one day speaking with Big Hard Face — that was in the sixth year of the white child’s life — and he had been called in to help find a name for the adopted son of December.
“Look!” said Big Hard Face. “There he stands, yonder, and he is taller than all the others except for the son of Three Buffalo. Find me a good name for him, to help him to be a good man!”
The medicine man watched and said nothing until there was a sudden scuffle, and a lithe little Indian lad, gripping the son of Big Hard Face, rolled him head over heels in the dust.
The boy sat up and shook the dust out of his long black hair, howling enormously.
“Did you not get him in the time when the horses grow fat and there is thunder in the sky?” the medicine man asked.
“Yes,” admitted Big Hard Face.
“Then,” said the medicine man rather maliciously, “I should advise you to call him Thunder Moon, because he makes a great noise!”
This was an obvious stroke of satire, but nevertheless, though Big Hard Face was angered at the time, he was afterward delighted with the connotation of the name. It called up in his mind a picture of whole hosts of Pawnees fleeing before the dreadful hand of his white son.
“Thunder Moon!”
So would they flee before the thunder and the lightning of the Sky People!
Accordingly, he took the suggestion, though he denied its implications in the mind of the suggester. And “Thunder Moon” was the name ceremoniously bestowed upon the youngster.
Ordinarily, the names which parents choose for their children in an Indian tribe do not stick. But some witty nickname, or some piece of sarcasm will cling like tar in its place. For there is a considerable streak of sharpness in the nature of a red, and he likes the word which cuts. For that very reason the tribe was pleased to acc
ept the name Thunder Moon — not because of what it meant to the celebrated brave, Big Hard Face, but because of what had been in the mind of the medicine man.
And now, as the years went by, it was very clear that Thunder Moon was no hero, in the ordinary acceptance of the word. Neither was he a very clever lad. Before long, it was well known throughout the tribe that Big Hard Face had been given by the Sky People a fool to raise in his empty lodge, and there were many sarcastic smiles devoted to that subject.
We may add up the trying defects of Thunder Moon as they revealed themselves to the critical minds of the elders of the Cheyenne tribe.
Granting, in the first place, that the boy was big and well made, and promised to be still better proportioned when he reached manhood, yet he was astonishingly awkward, and what is strength without grace, in a race of horsemen?
He learned all things slowly.
Boys of six rode far better than he could at eight, and swam farther and faster, and ran more lightly and swiftly and with more endurance. He could not strike the mark with a play bow, and his efforts with a knife were simply pitiful to behold. He could not throw an ax, and when he strove to leap and imitate the war dance, the Cheyenne elders bowed their heads to keep Big Hard Face from seeing their smiles.
But worst of all, when it came to the mimic combat of wrestling, where boys should first learn to struggle as with an enemy, Thunder Moon was simply ridiculous. The agile young Cheyennes were able to lay him on his back before the game had well begun.
Still worse than that, he always resented his fall.
And when the boys laughed to see him down, he took it as a personal insult and would draw apart, to brood by himself. Indeed, as time went on, he led a more and more lonely existence. He was much with his adopted father, and he was much with the horses of his father’s herd.
They had grown into a tidy little band, by this time, most of them with a broad blaze of white on the forehead, like the stallion which was their ancestor, and the hearts of the other Cheyennes were sore with envy when they saw this clumsy boy on the back of some peerless charger, careering across the plains.
They scorned him all the more for it. Because he did not conquer his horses by hardy strength and daring and cruelty; he wooed and won them, and petted them until they trusted him, and then he would venture his precious bones on their backs. How much nobler, then, to see any other Cheyenne boy spring upon the bare back of an unbroken pony and ride it while it struggled as though to buck its skin over its head!
There was no nobleness in Thunder Moon. As he grew taller and more awkward, he grew also more shamefaced. He drew more and more apart. Even Big Hard Face began to have a few doubts, though he would never really admit a suspicion into his heart of hearts.
Yet it was most strange that the thrust of a splinter into his hand brought a cry from Thunder Moon, whereas even a three-year-old Cheyenne child would have scorned to utter so much as a whisper. And whereas the other children were already peeling off strips of skin from their arms and breasts as an offering to the gods of war, Thunder Moon could never be induced to submit to the knife.
“Let me show how easy it is, and how much it will please the Sky People!” said Big Hard Face, one day, and he deliberately ripped a strip of skin from his already scarred right arm.
His foster son covered his face.
“I shall help you!” said Big Hard Face.
But Thunder Moon screamed at the sight of the knife and wriggled away to find safety.
Big Hard Face was deeply distressed. He felt that this must be wrong, and yet in his heart of hearts there was that abiding faith in the boy.
The elders came to him, one day, and deliberately threw the shadow upon his mind, at the last.
For they said:
“We know, Big Hard Face, that the brave man sees all the world as brave. And the coward sees every man full of fear. And you, brother, cannot see well the thing that is nearest to you. You cannot look at your own chin. Neither can you look into your own heart. These things are hidden because of their nearness. So it is with your son. He is tall, and his shoulders are broad, and he rides horses worthy of the Sky People.
“But we have come to ask you to make sure that he is brave, Big Hard Face. Let him be tested. He is twelve years old. The other boys of such an age shoot arrows into trees and in play scalp even the stones. But Thunder Moon sits by himself and will not play with them. He will not ride a wild horse. And when he is wrestled down to the ground, he sits and weeps like a girl. No, there are no Cheyenne girls who would weep so!”
And they added: “Brother, be warned!”
How fatuous was Big Hard Face!
He pointed upward, and he merely said: “Do you judge the Sky People as though they were Cheyennes? Wait, wait! The hard winter brings the warmest spring!”
Chapter Four
“BIG TREES GROW slowly,” said Big Hard Face.
Thunder Moon remembered that saying. He took it into his heart and pondered much on it, and it was a comfort to him beyond all knowing. Sometimes, when he thought of his shortcomings, and of the misery and the shame in which he spent his days, he wished that it might all end suddenly in death, but when he looked to the ugly face of his foster father and considered the deathless faith which the warrior had in him, it revived his own courage a little. And he hoped that one day he would turn a corner and find himself a man, and worthy to be a Cheyenne.
He was thirteen, now.
And one day he laid aside the bow with which he had wandered out to practice at marks, and went down to the edge of the river in the heat of the morning to swim. On the verge, he paused. For here the stream had lost its current in a broad pool, and on the glassy surface he saw himself as in a great mirror. He had seen himself before, but never so clearly. And, as usual, he set about casting up the sum of the differences which existed between him and the other lads of the tribe. That matter of color — his sun-brown against their dark copper — was a small thing, for he had been weathered almost to their own hue, but there were other points of great dissimilarity. He was a little taller than the other boys of his age, but the distinctions did not lie in mere size.
His playmates, on the whole, were cast in one mold. Whether from riding, running, or swimming, their legs were well developed, lithe, and rounded. They were particularly large as compared with their arms; thousands of years of travel afoot had stamped these characteristics into the race. But the white man works with his hands and his arms, standing still at the carpenter’s bench, or the blacksmith’s forge, or bending in the furrow in the field.
Thunder Moon knew nothing about white men. No one had ever told him that he was of an alien race. But he could see that his legs were thinner, and his bones larger than those of the Cheyenne youngsters. His feet were smaller, his hips were narrower, his chest was deeper and his shoulders broader; there was a greater length and girth to his arms, and his hands were much bigger.
In the last year, he had begun to fill out; new blood was running in his veins, like spring sap in a young tree; new thoughts came to him. What had been very hard for him to understand the year before was now easy. He did not sleep so much, and waking was not such agony. His head was held straighter, there was more life in his step, and he could listen to the old men of the tribe without drowsing.
No other persons noticed the change, but Thunder Moon did. Because for many years, now, he had been acutely self-conscious. He was not like the others. He was slower and clumsier; he learned lessons with more difficulty; he forgot the command that was given to him the instant that he left the tepee, and in all things he could see that he was below the standard.
That he had other qualities of inward strength did not occur to him, and he would have been the first to agree with the others of the tribe, that the hours he spent in dreaming and thinking in solitude were worse than useless.
They had their use, but that usefulness would not appear at once. The metal that this boy was made of differed from that which comp
osed the other youth of the Cheyennes. Through sundry millions of generations there had been gathered into him a different capacity. The great question was: Could such metal be shaped into the sort of tool which would cut according to the Cheyenne pattern?
Now, regarding himself with his usual critical mind — a mind which had creased his young forehead with wrinkles which appeared on the brow of no youthful redskin of the nation — he shook his head once more.
Oh, for more suppleness! Oh, for lighter bones and greater grace!
He stood on a stone, gripping it with his toes, and prepared to make the dive as smooth and silent as possible. Oh, he knew lads of the tribe who could fling themselves from the highest bank, and yet disappear into the water with hardly a sound, while a long ripple rose and closed over the spot where their feet had disappeared. Marvels of grace they were, and as they flew through the air on their way to the surface of the pool, they seemed to be masters of the lightest element, also, like veritable birds.
Before he made his effort, he knew that he would fail. He knew exactly how it should be done. With the keen scrutiny of the backward man, he had studied in detail just how the best divers managed themselves. But he felt that he would never be able to apply the lessons which he had pored over.
Then, gritting his teeth, he sprang out and forward and down.
It was not a bad dive, as dives go, but as he struck the water, the force of it against his head, his breast, and all his body, told him that he had indeed failed ignominiously again.
Why, even the five-year-old girls of the tribe could dive far better than this!
He forced himself forward and down, swimming with long strokes, forcing himself ahead with a blind grimness. For whatever his weaknesses might be in other directions, at least, there was a reservoir of wind capacity in that deep chest of his. And he punished himself in this manner, until his reaching hands touched the bottom, the slimy, deep, soft mud.