Two in the Field

by Darryl Brock

  “Well, the hell with all this,” I said impatiently. “What is it time for?”

  Linc said something, then listened with amusement. “He wanted to know why we’re going to the Hills, so I told him. He says he must guide us.”

  “ ‘Must?’ ”

  “Says he’s been to the Hills many times and has business there now.”

  “What kind of business?”

  The Lakota spoke and signed at length.

  “I couldn’t follow all of it,” Linc said. “Mainly he says that the Paha Sapa, the “hills-that-are-black,” is the heart of everything that is. It’s the spot where the Sioux originated and spread over the plains after the buffalo were given to them. He says his spirit told him he can no longer be a hang-around-the-fort Indian. He’s got to go pray in the Paha Sapa, get himself a vision. Because you took the baby, his spirits say that he owes you more service. If we’ll get him a horse and rifle, he’ll take us anywhere we want.”

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  Linc looked thoughtful. “Interesting that he didn’t ask for liquor.”

  “No liquor,” I said flatly. “Can we trust him not to steal us blind and run off?”

  “I got a hunch we can,” Link said slowly. “If he knows the Hills and can read sign—what Indian can’t?—then I expect he’ll do for us. Who knows? He might even get us to Tim.”

  “Tell him it’s a deal.”

  “Before he can agree, he says he needs to know if the baby is healthy.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Now he cares?”

  After Linc made assurances that Lily was fine, I asked what we should call our new Lakota guide.

  “He says the first name given him was Hake, which means fifth-born.”

  It sounded like a prelude to spitting. “I can’t even say it,” I complained.

  Linc laughed. “He says there was a big storm the night he was born. Their lodge had a tear near the top and water poured in, so another of his names is Leaky Teepee.”

  “ ‘Leaky Teepee’?” I tried to keep a straight face. “Didn’t he ever get something more warrior-like?”

  “Sort of,” Linc said. “His lodge name is Man Who Walks Like Goose.”

  We looked at each other.

  “Walking Goose?” Linc suggested.

  “How about just plain Goose?”

  “He says Goose will do, so long as we remember it’s not the full handle—and that it’s Goose and not Gander.”

  I thought that over. “So he was named for walking like a girl goose?”

  “He also wants us to remember that his beadwork and feather stitching was the best in his tribe.”

  “Are you telling me he’s gay? Homosexual?”

  Linc listened intently as Goose continued to talk. “Says he’s on the road to being a winkte, but not all the way there.”

  “What’s a winkte?”

  “A man who dreams of being like a woman and one day comes out in a dress and does woman’s work and lives like a woman.” Linc paused. “I expect ol’ Goose here got off the warrior trail some time ago.”

  Just what we needed; a cross-dressing Indian scout.

  Goose made a series of signs and tossed his head pridefully.

  “What was that about?”

  “He’s boasting that his quill- and beadwork are better than any woman’s.”

  “Look, all I care is whether he can take us where we want to go,” I said. “How do you feel?”

  “Long as he stays out of my blanket, I got no kick. There was nancy boys in the army. They never hurt nobody.”

  “Then he’s got the job.”

  Custer had journeyed to the Black Hills during the hottest part of the previous year, in early July, when temperatures were over 100. Now, with August waning, we had only to deal with high 80s. Still, it was hot enough, and we had to make frequent stops for water. Cait soon realized why Custer and his men sported bushy mustaches. Her hat brim didn’t quite shield her upper lip, which soon burned and split. The first days were grueling for her, but, seasoned by her time on the plains, she impressed us all with her uncomplaining acceptance of each long day’s hardships. If anything, she was a little too self-contained for my taste. At the outset I rode close beside her and issued warnings against varied threats, seen and unseen. It wasn’t long before she waved me away, saying, “Samuel, don’t hover so!”

  Which stung, naturally. Maybe I was being over-protective, but only out of concern for her. It seemed that whenever her defenses finally yielded a bit, and we became closer, she found some new way of maintaining distance. Evidently she now wanted to be treated like one of the guys.

  Fat chance of that. Cait wore a shirt and dungarees, but only from a distance would she be taken for a man. At first I was concerned about how our goldbugs, a scraggly bunch of twenty-year-olds, would react to her, but they proved docile—especially since we’d banned liquor from the provisions. A couple of them were Irish, and Cait carried on with them like kinsfolk. They required educating the first night out, however, when they expected her to cook and clean up.

  “I’ll take my turn,” she said sweetly, “same as you.”

  Noting this, Goose privately asked Linc why we’d brought a squaw who shunned her rightful tasks and also dressed like a man. That last part was pretty funny, I thought, coming from him.

  Goose scoffed at our bonfire approach to meals. For himself he made small cooking fires, then scraped them away afterward and slept on the warm ground underneath. He generally cooked his food in a skin bag fashioned from a buffalo paunch into which he dumped water and hot rocks. He had a knack for plucking fish from streams near our camps, and to bake them he lined a shallow pit with leaves, placed the cleaned fish atop them, added a row of sticks, more leaves, and finally a layer of dirt. He lit a fire atop it all and let it burn down to the coals. Uncovered, the fish were thoroughly done, skin and scales peeling away easily. When he had time to gather them, he added garnishes of little beans stored by field mice, cactus flowers and wild plums.

  I nearly caused a brawl in my first turn at cooking when I started to use one of the mining pans. These were made of steel designed to take on a coat of rust and thereby trap gold particles. If their sloping sides were slick from grease or soap, the fine grains would slide out. One of the goldbugs swore and grabbed at me as I was about to dump lard in the pan. I shoved him away and things looked hot until Linc intervened.

  The rations we’d gotten from Custer were jerked beef and hardtack, the latter being tasteless stale biscuits that, once a few were removed from the box, disintegrated into crumbs during travel. At night we ate whatever game Linc or Goose had bagged along the way, usually garnished with wild onions.

  We saw no Indians. Goose said that the Lakota were not likely to attack during the powwow over Paha Sapa. But we were definitely being observed.

  “How?” I said. “From where?”

  On the next rise Goose pointed to cairns placed in a rough row. “They pile ’em up at night,” Linc explained, “and put their heads in between before sunup. That way they can keep watch without being noticed.”

  “You’re saying Indians can pick up every new bump on the horizon?”

  “Sure,” Linc said. “They can spot tiny movements miles off, too—things you and I wouldn’t see.”

  Goose’s value system was wildly different from mine, of course, but it was interesting to think that he sensed things differently and more acutely.

  Crossing Cedar Creek, south of Pretty Rock Butte, we saw burial scaffolds set high against the western sky. Goose became agitated as we drew near, and soon I saw why. Several had been ransacked.

  “Goose says whites did it,” Linc reported.

  “How can he tell?”

  Linc asked and then pointed to a faint indentation in the ground. “Indians walk toes in,” he reported. “Ball of foot touching first. This is a white man’s footprint ’cause our heels hit first and we walk with toes slightly out.”

  “ ‘We’?”r />
  “To Goose I’m white like you—we’re both wasichu.” He added wryly, “It ain’t no compliment.”

  Lakota corpses were wound mummy-like in clothes or blankets, he explained, with firearms, tobacco, jerked beef, moccasins, rawhide bags, horn spoons and various other articles placed inside to accompany the spirit to the Eternal Hunting Ground.

  “You’ll find all that stuff for sale around posts,” Linc said. “Once I even saw humans’ skin sold for fish bait.”

  I stared somberly at a body that had spilled from one the scaffolds, its face daubed with red dye. We waited while Goose made an offering of food and water. I’d noticed that each time Goose drank water he poured a bit on the ground to thank the provident Great Spirit. He did so now, and prayed for the departed ones. I told Linc about the scaffold Goose had made for Lily’s mother.

  “That’s a high honor,” Linc said, “for a woman.”

  “Yeah, given that he saw fit to dump her baby.”

  He frowned and said sharply, “I wouldn’t use ‘dump’ to say what’s happened to Lily.”

  He was sticking up for Kaija, I realized. And maybe for himself.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

  As we picked our way through a maze of gullies formed by tributaries of the Grand River, we came upon another troubling sight: the remains of a white man. Linc estimated that he’d been there ten days to two weeks. I tightened my bandanna over my nose and moved away. The awful smell didn’t seem to bother Goose, who stooped over what was left of skin and bones, then read signs all around.

  “Goose reckons whoever was torturing him got surprised,” Linc said, “and left before finishing the job.”

  “Torturing?”

  “The man was tied down and hot coals were put on his vitals.”

  I looked at our surroundings: buttes stratified by belts of white, black, blue, brown and red clay. So majestic, so beautiful. What caused people to do this to each other?

  “You okay?” I said, drawing Cait aside at our next halt. Since leaving the grisly remains she’d moved up to ride between Linc and me, her eyes dull, her mouth compressed into a tight line. She tried to nod but her face contorted and a sob broke from her throat.

  I put my arms around her while she cried.

  “After I saw that poor man,” she said brokenly, “I couldn’t stop thinking …” Her words trailed off.

  About Tim, I knew she meant.

  “We’ll be okay,” I told her. “We’re making pretty good speed.”

  “I must think only about finding him alive,” she said, “and not dwell on the … other.”

  “Sometimes it’s hard to stay positive.”

  She nodded, wiping at her eyes.

  The rest of that day we rode practically stirrup to stirrup. While regretting its cause, I savored our renewed proximity. It felt comfortable, like a soothing balm.

  That night I dreamed that a grizzly bear stalked us, a monster who blotted out the moon and stars, rearing up over us with slavering jaw and terrifying roars. Just as we were about to be devoured, a blue-uniformed figure swept Cait safely away. Then the bear was gone too, and I was alone under the moon and stars. Unable to get back to sleep, I tried to decide which had been worse: the bear or the loneliness that followed.

  At dawn Cait brought me a cup of coffee, her attention energizing me as much as the hot liquid did. She apologized for her shakiness the previous afternoon and thanked me for taking care of her. Again that day we rode close together.

  The next morning we set out across the Big Badlands carrying all the water we could. This was the stretch where Custer had lost men. Rising even earlier than usual, we were well underway before sunrise. By noon we were in hell. Alkali dust swirled up around us with every step, the heat was blistering, and our water was vanishing far too fast. When Cait passed out during a mid-day halt, I poured my water ration over her face and hair, fearing I’d made a fatal mistake in letting her come with us.

  As if the heat and dust weren’t enough, we had to pick our way cautiously through carpets of cactus to spare the horses’ fetlocks. Rattlesnakes were everywhere. One buzzed in front of a mare, which reared and threw her rider down hard and smashed his canteen. He wasn’t injured but we lost an hour chasing down the mare, and our water was further diminished. We crawled on. No choice but to keep moving ahead. No trace of water. It seemed to me we were in the worst possible trouble.

  Crossing a dry creekbed the second evening, Goose signaled a halt beneath scrub cottonwoods. With a sharpened stick he made exploratory pokes in the dirt. Settling on a place he liked, he dug a hole the length of his arm and motioned for us to come and look. Water was seeping into the bottom of the hole. Not much. But a life saver that would permit us to go on.

  I’d long since ceased regarding the Lakota as a stunted burnout. In my eyes he was one hell of a hero.

  Dehydrated and weakening, Cait could scarcely eat. She’d also developed a painful heat rash. I borrowed some salve from Goose and gingerly daubed it on. It was well after dark by then, but the air was still warm and thick. By the time the temperature cooled enough to offer true relief, the sun would rise again. There seemed little new to talk about, although I made several attempts. We sat side by side, seemingly in separate universes.

  “Sorry,” she murmured finally, “I can’t put off dismal thoughts of Tim.”

  “They’ll keep him alive,” I said, with more conviction than I felt. “Tim’s no use to McDermott otherwise.”

  After a moment’s reflection she reached for my hand, her fingers feeling very thin in mine. In that one small way, at least, the night desert bloomed.

  Late the next afternoon, after another day in the inferno, we finally reached a freshwater creek that marked the edge of the badlands. We slumped along its banks, exhausted. Linc and I looked after our mounts, and afterward didn’t want to move. But Goose insisted that we celebrate our successful crossing by gambling with him. He produced a small willow basket and three pairs of dice made of plum pits. One pair held the tiny image of a buffalo on two sides; the second, a bird on two sides; the third was black on two sides. “Chips” or counters were little sticks polished smooth from handling. There was a complicated point system. If the buffalo turned up twice, for example, and the other four dice showed unpainted sides, the thrower got ten points. If all dice showed blanks, the thrower got 32 points and won all stakes.

  Goose seldom lost, and we never figured out exactly why.

  “He asked who’s taking care of Lily,” Linc said when we finished. “I told him about Kaija.”

  “Tell him I’d like to know about Lily’s parents,”

  Just when I’d decided that Goose wouldn’t answer, he began to talk. He wouldn’t name the father except to say that he’d been a leading Oglala warrior and like a brother to Goose. As for the mother, she’d proved herself a witkowin, a crazy woman.

  “Then why’d he honor her with a scaffold?”

  “Not ‘crazy’ like we think of it,” Linc explained. “More like high-spirited, untamable. She would run off with other braves and her husband would fetch her back. She’d do it again, despite the shame she brought to him. When she came back heavy with another man’s child, he still took her in, so great was his caring for her.”

  Goose spoke some more.

  “When the child was near, the mother became very ill—witkowins often die young—but the father had a vision that his own death would come first, so he told Goose what to do if the baby survived them.”

  “I gather the father did die first?”

  Linc listened further to Goose, then nodded and gave me a significant look. “Shot by goldbugs.”

  Wonderful.

  “Goose had been told to journey with the girl’s mother until she died.”

  “And then …?”

  “Stay at that spot until Great Spirit caused the next thing to happen.”

  “Which was me.”

  “Yup,” Linc said. “It was
Goose who came up with whites being able to offer more—not Lily’s parents—but your destiny got hooked up with theirs.”

  Just what I needed, I reflected. More spirits messing with my life.

  Cait’s condition was our main concern, but to everybody’s surprise it was Linc who came closest to going down. On our eighth day out he had a recurrence of the malarial fever he’d picked up during the war. It left him depleted and occasionally delirious. Goose nursed him with woka and offered to construct a pony-drag decorated with his famous beadwork, so that Linc could travel like an Indian child. Linc mumbled that he wasn’t that far gone, and tied himself upright in his saddle.

  “Every canyon’s riddled with prospect holes and claim notices,” one of the goldbugs confided to me. “Men are layin’ up in there just waitin’ to haul out gold!”

  “How good are those claims?” I said. “I mean, officially everything still belongs to the Indians. Don’t claims have to be printed up in a newspaper?”

  “Ain’t none in the Hills,” came the answer. “We heard a legal recorder was in there for a spell.” He shrugged. “Don’t know if it’s so.”

  So much of their information struck me as hype and rumor, shaped to a huge degree by gold fever.

  “Okay, if somebody went in there, staked a claim, and the army took him out, what keeps it in his name?” I persisted. “And what if he doesn’t come back?”

  “He loses it. You gotta ‘represent’ your claim. That is, work it enough to show active interest.”

  “How much is that?”

  “Oh, a little shovel work every month or so.” He grinned. “ ’Course, with the army driving the shovelers out, that rule’ll be relaxed even more.”

  I began to see what McDermott was up to. With titles so precarious, he and LeCaron could strongarm whoever was there and stockpile claims to sell at sky-high prices in the spring. All they had to do was steer clear of the army. And us.

  We’d been aware of thickening mists on the western horizon. On our ninth day those mists hardened into an ominous mass thrusting up from the plains—the Black Hills. Their darkness came from evergreen forests shagging the slopes, but from our distance it looked as if the land itself was black. A cloud mass hovered over the hills, and we watched it as we made our way across the prairie. By nightfall we’d forded the Belle Fourche and set up camp in a glen below Bear Butte, a thumblike granite upshoot that rose some twelve hundred feet above us.