“What’s a vision quest?”
“You go out by yourself,” he said, a mite annoyed to have to explain it to me. “You take no food. Only water. You stay long time—many days. You wait for dream. Vision. You see outside who you are.”
“I don’t much attend to spiritual things and such,” I said. “It’s enough to keep breathing out here.” He stared at me for a long time, then I said, “Go on. Finish the story.”
“A man must be worthy to hear about these things.” He sat back against the cottonwood and puffed on his pipe. He seemed to be finished with me.
“No,” I said. “Tell me. I’ll try to be worthy.”
He studied the bowl in his hands, then raised the canteen and drank a huge gulp of the whiskey. I asked him again to go on and tell me the story.
He said, “Stone Hands walk in mountains and in the hills. He follow the Yellowstone, he go across many rivers and climb to high clouds above water and earth.” The whole time Big Tree spoke he waved the pipe around, took quick puffs on it, pointed with it. I never seen him so animated. I felt relaxed and kind of privileged, if you know what I mean—like I was being gifted with something pretty well valuable and unusual to boot. “Stone Hands follow the backbone of the earth,” Big Tree went on, “and then go west a long, long way into evening. Then he make camp in highest place next to where white moon rises. He wait for a vision. Night and day. Nine days. Finally a raven come to him and speak.”
“A bird,” I said.
He nodded, but I could see he would not take a challenge to the facts. “The raven tell him to follow the trees along the big river until he see the blue tail of a cougar. The cougar will say to him what he must know.”
I’m a pretty skeptical fellow, and I think some of my natural doubt must of showed on my face. He looked hard at me for a second, then he said, “Stone Hands told me this.”
I didn’t say nothing. I wanted to be worthy.
“Stone Hands do what bird tell him and he walk for many days, and then he see cougar with blue tail. It walk in front of his eyes. It move fast, and secret. Stone Hands follow it, with no spear or bow. Only his knife and small bag of medicine tied around him. He move like cougar, silent, and stalking, through leaves and thickets. The cougar know Stone Hands follow. The blue tail grow longer, until it drag on ground in front of Stone Hands. He can reach down and touch it. Then Stone Hands say the cougar stop. The great cat turn around, the long tail still on ground in front of Stone Hands. ‘Pick up my tail,’ the cougar tell him, and he did. The tail was like hemp, and cold. Stone Hands want to drop it. It frighten him.”
“It would sure enough frighten me,” I said.
“The cougar tell him that before a new moon he would walk among the dead ones, blue and cold like long tail.” Now Big Tree took a stick and stirred the fire a little. I waited to see if the story was over. I got to admit it gave me a bit of a chill. He knocked the ash out of his pipe and took another swig of whiskey. Then he turned directly to me, leaning over so his hair almost draped over the fire. “Stone Hands come back to us on his horse. He was sad. A blue death is not a death in battle. It is from disease or freezing. He want to die in battle. He is a warrior.” It was very quiet for a while. Even the crickets seemed to listen. The fire hissed a little. Smoke curled up in front of us. Big Tree shrugged and sat back. “After that, Stone Hands will not dance. He will not eat or drink. A few suns after that, we find him under water of a swift stream. He is blue. His eyes stare up out of ice water. Small black stones.”
“How did he die?”
Big Tree shook his head. “The spirit leave him. He turn blue and fall in water. The water ice-cold.”
Now the crickets come back. I swear, it was eerie the way they seemed to listen to Big Tree, seemed to know when his story needed the quiet.
A little later that night, I set my bedroll next to the fire and laid down to sleep. Big Tree sat up at the base of the tree, sipping his whiskey.
Chapter 6
I’d heard almost nothing about Big Tree, and learned even less for the first few months I known him. I rode next to him in Theo’s train for four hundred miles or more, and he maybe spoke four words. I known from those words that he had no use for wasichus, and since I was one of them, he had no use for me.
But once we was traveling together, just the two of us, once he started sipping on that whiskey, he become a different fellow to me. It wasn’t no match at all between the man I known as Big Tree when I first rode with him and the fellow he become once we was comrades. We camped in the great collection of valleys and sagebrush-covered plateaus in Wyoming and the Musselshell country. We trapped a little and hunted a lot. We roamed on the open plains and rode up into the white-tipped mountains that always seemed to surround us. We spent so much time in them mountains, I begun to think of myself as a mountain man. We spent some time in the Gallatin valley in the west, and further east along the Powder and Tongue Rivers. I got to know the country far better than I ever could of learned it studying Theo’s maps, even though I was grateful for all the time I’d spent doing that. One season we went south as far as the Washita River just outside Fort Cobb. I don’t think we was too far from Fort Riley where I first come to this country. But most of the time we ranged north to the Missouri River in Montana, and all over Nebraska, and Dakota Territory, and even Kansas and Colorado Territory. We hunted in the Bighorn Mountains and the Black Hills. Folks have no idea how big and lonely wide-open this damn country is. We went sometimes for weeks without ever seeing another human soul. Then we’d ride up on a Indian camp and be honored guests for a night or two. We was always welcome if we rode right on in. Theo taught me that. Maybe Big Tree taught it to him. He rode in so natural and calm—like he belonged there. It is just true that no Indian will fall on a man and kill him if the fellow just rides on into a village, his arms at his side, a-smiling at the barking dogs and squealing children. It ain’t nothing but courtesy among them folks, pure and simple. They figure if you meant any harm you’d be coming in quiet and catlike, or hollering with war in your heart. Even the Sioux will leave a man alone if he just ignores the idea they might want to cut him up good.
Big Tree said the Sioux come from the north where there ain’t nothing but ice and snow. They come down on horses into the country of the Cheyenne and the Crow, the Blackfeet and Arapaho and Piegan, and commenced to warring on them pretty particular and hard. They was great warriors and a lot of them too. Lakota, Brulé, Dakota, Miniconjou, Arrows All Gone, and Wahpekute; Yankton, Uncpapa, and Oglala, and half a dozen other names—but they all spoke pretty much the same language and they all got together once a year for what they called the “sun dance,” and to hunt and share family histories and such.
“ ‘Sioux’ mean enemy,” Big Tree said. “It is Crow word.”
“Theo told me it was Cheyenne.”
I didn’t know whether he could know all he seemed to know about the Sioux, but it was easy to see that he admired them and in his own way I guess he feared them a bit too. He said he never wanted to be in a fight with the Sioux if he could help it. He said Theo felt the same way. “That is why Theo get angry that you shoot that Wahpekute when you are first in this land. Theo believe sure he will end up fighting not just Sioux but Red Top.”
Anyway, me and Big Tree spent several seasons running on the same ground as the Sioux. Years went by without my noticing nary a one. I was just having the time of my life, I guess. I didn’t think about much except where we might go next and what kind of game we’d hunt or trap.
I grew enough hair on my face that I could tuck it into my shirt and keep warm in the winter. And the winters in all of our wanderings was as tough as any I ever seen anywhere. Our first few winters was about fifty miles east of Bozeman, on the Musselshell River. That’s where Big Tree said there was still plenty of beaver and otter and we’d get plenty of pelts in the cold months.
Some nights the weather would come up on us by surprise and we didn’t have time to erect Big Tree
’s lodge. As quick as a squirrel he’d build a windbreak with pine branches and stones, and we’d crouch down under them small shelters while what seemed like a ocean of icy air passed high above us, dripping on us now and then and roaring constantly, and so cold it seemed to freeze the smoke of our fire and drive what heat it might give off back into the burning wood. For most of them winters I wore fur from four different animals and wrapped my feet with buffalo hide, sometimes still warm from the kill. Big Tree wore furs, too, but he never seemed to be cold. He’d build a fire in the center of his lodge and then we’d huddle there out of the dark, ice-filled wind, and cook our buffalo or venison or elk. The wind would slap the walls of that lodge and howl over the hole in the top where the smoke flew, but we’d be warm from the fire. The smell of them animal walls, and the woodsmoke with the cooking meat, always made me sleepy. Most times Big Tree had a large can of whiskey that he refilled his canteen from, and night after night in the cold months he’d sip that whiskey while I curled around the fire and drifted into warm sleep. I don’t know if he ever slept, to tell the God’s truth. I never seen him do it. He was awake when I got up in the morning and when I gone to sleep at night.
We wasn’t failures nor nothing, but the pelts we was collecting wouldn’t make us rich, neither. We had maybe forty or fifty after the first winter. I heard that trappers used to get pelts in the hundreds in one season, so we known it was the end of a kind of life—but I wanted to lead it anyway, as long as I could. The only thing I was sure I didn’t want to do was work. At the end of our third winter we rode into Fort Benton, north of Bozeman, and sold what we had at a trading post there. Big Tree seemed happy. But I wanted to go on down to Bozeman and see what Theo was up to. It was getting down near the end of April that year—1873—and I wanted to read a newspaper and see what was new in the world.
I didn’t find Theo, but I got myself a hotel room with some of my pelt money, and took a hot bath. I didn’t cut my beard off, but I trimmed it a bit. It was full and covered my neck for sure. I thought I looked older and more rough-and-ready with it, but women shied away from me like I was a dog with foam at the mouth.
I spent a few weeks in Bozeman. Nobody could tell me what happened to Theo. One fellow told me he believed that Theo stayed for two winters, then packed up and set off leading a train for California. “If that’s who I think it was, he got tired of the cold winters.” But he didn’t know for sure. It might of been somebody else. He didn’t remember no children nor a wife, neither.
I went on back to Fort Benton. Big Tree was glad to see me, I think. He bought some more traps and other gear—including a buffalo rifle. He’d also traded one of the packhorses for a Colt pistol and two mules. I went ahead and bought another horse from the army. The fellows there tried to get me to scout for them, but I told them I wasn’t interested. They was gonna be chasing a lot of Indians and I didn’t want no part of that.
Folks told as how some Indians signed a treaty way back in 1865 that promised for all time that they would stay the cold winters at various forts that the whites called “agencies.” The cavalry promised food and shelter if the Indians stayed put, and a few of them went ahead and took advantage of it for a while. They was always going to be free to hunt in the spring and summer in their usual hunting grounds, but in the cold long winters they could take shelter at a fort and protect their children and old people from hardship. The whites believed that the one Indian that signed that treaty spoke for all of them. No Indian ever spoke for nobody but hisself and his family and maybe his followers if’n he had good medicine and folks followed him. Then somebody found gold in the Rocky Mountains, and more and more wagon trains come through with white folks and settlers wanting to get rich quick. The agencies carried only so much food, so they’d feed the wagon trains as best they could and the Indians gone hungry. In the wintertime, lots of the tribes would leave the protection of the army and go back out into the rough country to hunt. The agency just could not feed everyone in the winter months and no man should be expected to watch his children starve just for a treaty signed by some elder in some other tribe years ago who he ain’t never met and who certainly did not represent him nor his interests. So the Cheyenne and Sioux, the Arapahos and Blackfeet, the Shoshone and Pawnee, would raid and hunt all over the Powder and Tongue River country, the Black Hills and Bighorn Mountains, and the army would send troops out to round them up and try to get them to come back to a agency where, from the army’s point of view, they had agreed to stay. The argument was that the Indians was in clear violation of that treaty. To the Indians, there was no treaty none of them was bound to respect, since almost all of them was not there when it was signed, did not know who signed it or why, and did not believe one man could make no decisions, ever, for all of them. There never was no leader in that sense among the Indians.
I said it before and I’ll say it again: there wasn’t never a man more free on earth than a Indian. They was even free from each other. They never had to learn to follow nobody’s orders but their own. There never was a Indian general or a Indian army. They had fellows who was called “chief,” but that was something the settlers agreed on. A man like Red Top or Sitting Bull might lead a band on the days his medicine was good, but his followers was welcome to leave any time. Sitting Bull wasn’t no general—he was a medicine man, a shaman. People followed him for good medicine, not because he known how to fight a war or command a army. It ain’t a wonder the Indians made such good soldiers: when they followed a man, they did so because he was a leader. Not because somebody tagged him with a piece of silver or sewn stripes on his sleeve. A Indian warrior led by the strength of his medicine and his character. Nothing else. A warrior in a Indian band might decide one day to just go to some other part of the country to hunt. The Cheyenne had bands of warriors in each camp, but they was more like clubs, and members could change from one to the other, and no Indian warrior was bound to no band if he didn’t want to be. Each one was just his own self, even though he lived all his life with his mother and father and a half a dozen of other folks that adopted him.
And living among the Indians, a fellow can get to feel like he is free too. Truly free.
Big Tree didn’t like the Sioux or the Cheyenne. His people was supposed to be the white man’s ally, but he didn’t like white men, neither. I think he finally got to like me. Or at least he come to trust me a little bit. He give me the pelts to sell at the post every year; he let me do all the negotiating when we was ready to set out again and needed supplies. At times like that, I felt like his assistant, but that didn’t matter none to me. I didn’t think I had to worry about much of anything as long as I was traveling with a giant like Big Tree.
Sometimes he’d act like that first Big Tree I come to know: he would remain silent for a whole day and barely notice that I was riding next to him. But then at night, by the fire, he’d tell me of a dream he had, or of some other adventure in his childhood. Or he’d give me more history of his people and the other Indians in his country. He was a gentle fellow, prone to misty remembering, especially of his family. He believed all of his dreams to be real experiences, and could not fathom the notion that something could only take place in his head while he was sleeping. He did not like waste or extravagance; he would of made a damn good banker. When we killed a animal that was too big to eat in one sitting, he’d clean the thing completely, keep a fur or two for us in the coldest months, and wrap and preserve the meat in tight sacks made from the rest of it. The skin under the fur would dry up eventually, but the meat would still be moist and ready to cook. He could keep meat fresh in the winter pretty much indefinitely. A pile of furs and skins packed solid with meat would hang heavy off of both mules sometimes. But Big Tree was also generous to a fault. He was always prepared to share our provender with folks that needed it.
In January or February of ’75, we come upon a band of Sioux women and children and a few old men. These people had no food to speak of, and looked to be in a bad way. Their young m
en was out making trouble for somebody, but these folks was not in a fighting mood. If the warriors didn’t return soon, some of the old men would die and the children was right puny too. We was just south of the Black Hills, in a part of the country that is full of gullies and draws, thick stands of pine and ash trees and plenty of game. We never did find out how long the men was gone, or where they went. The women seemed to be in charge, and they was not too friendly at first: they worried about the children and looked upon us with suspicion. The Sioux don’t trust nobody, but they especially don’t trust a Crow brave who’s all of six feet seven or so and looks like he might be a perfect specimen of man ready for whatever he wants to take. The old men was not much good at hunting no more, and the kids didn’t look old enough. All I wanted to do was get away from them before the men come back, but Big Tree got a pack of meat off one of the mules and stood there pointing at the ground. “We camp here,” he said. So we set up camp right next to where them starving Indians had theirs, and then Big Tree took half our meat and just give it to one of the women—a fat, hard-nosed looking sheriff with a red scarf on her head and skin like leather. Her rocky face actually broke into something like a smile, then she carried the meat off and cooked it. Then the other women come one at a time and stood in front of Big Tree, just staring up at him, until he wrapped his arms around them and squeezed a bit. Then they’d run back to their camp, giggling like they’d been tickled or something. After a while, they come back around and seemed as if they wanted to touch the mane of hair around my face. It turned out to be a long night—me afraid to sleep for what deviltry they might get up to, and Big Tree standing watch with his buffalo gun, ignoring all of us. The next day, when we broke camp, they did the same.
“Now what do we do?” I said.
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