by Max Brand
The keepers of the entrance stood back, opening the way to the young man, their eyes on the ground. He stepped out into the blinding brightness of the morning, and, shrilling in his ears, darkening his brain as the sun was darkening his eyes, he heard the outcry of the children and the women as they realized that the tribe had lost a warrior and gained a lasting shame. He went on rapidly, his head fallen.
Once again he heard lifted a single voice of woe. He knew that that was the cry of Bitter Root, his foster mother.
The eyes of the world were killing him, it seemed, and he began to run. A dog seemed to think it a game, and bounded at his heels, frolicking about him. He came to his father’s lodge, flung open the entrance, and hurled himself on the ground. He bit at the dirt with his teeth; he beat upon it with his hands. Great sobs began to work in his body, swelling his breast, thrusting into his throat, but not a sound could reach his lips.
Chapter Six
His body. A hand lay on his shoulder, and the voice of Standing Bull said: “It is I, brother.”
That last word pierced Red Hawk’s heart. He groaned: “I am no longer your brother. I pour shame on all who are near me . . . I pour it out as the night pours darkness.”
“Oh, my friend,” said the warrior, “the hand that strikes you, strikes me. The blow that hangs over you, hangs over me. The flesh is farther from the bone than you are from my heart.”
Such grief came over Red Hawk, such agony worked in his body that he wondered why the sobbing could not reach his mouth or why the tears did not rush into his eyes. He lay still, with his fingers buried in his hair.
A woman’s voice of lament came out of the distance, approached them, swelled suddenly through the lodge as Bitter Root entered and flung herself down by the fire. She had already torn off her clothes until she was naked to the waist. Now, with a long skinning knife, she chopped her gray hair short; she began to gash her legs, her arms, her breasts, snatching up ashes from the edge of the fire and pouring them over her head. They fell down on her body, clotting the blood; they sifted into the fat folds of her stomach. And all the time she rocked herself back and forth with a double cry of monotonous lament.
Red Hawk got to his hands and knees and crawled to her. He held out his arms in supplication. He found his voice to speak, but her eyes were filled with madness and unknowing.
Spotted Antelope entered, sat on the ground, and covered his head with his robe.
Then Standing Bull touched the shoulder of his friend once more. “Come,” he said.
Red Hawk stood up and followed the brave out of the lodge. In the distance he could hear the yelling of the women and children as some one of the martyred sufferers from the medicine lodge was dragged behind the heels of a running horse around and around the enclosure.
“I must die,” said Red Hawk. “There is no more life for me. I cannot crouch among the women. I cannot carry burdens and chop wood and build fires and cook like a squaw. I must die.” “This is only one day, and even this day has not ended,” said Standing Bull. “Here is the lodge of Lazy Wolf. Ask him what you should do. The girl is weeping. Do you hear?”
“She knows that I am a coward. Last night when she saw me I was almost a man. Now I am nothing. How can I go inside?”
At that moment the entrance flap was pushed back by Lazy Wolf. He was wearing his spectacles, so that his round, hairy face looked more than ever owlish, and he had between his teeth one of the short-stemmed pipes that white men use.
He stood aside and waved them in. Red Hawk entered the lodge, white and brilliant with the strong morning light of the sun. Blue Bird, throwing a light deerskin over her head, rose from a willow bed and slipped out through the entrance, shrouded and bowed like an old woman. But the face of Lazy Wolf was calm as he sat down with his guests.
Standing Bull took out a pipe, filled and lighted it with ceremony, blew smoke to the ground, to the Listeners Above, to the four quarters of the world. “Let all the world of men and spirits know that this man is still my brother,” he said, and passed the pipe to Lazy Wolf.
The older of the two white men smiled as he puffed in a similar ceremonious manner. “My lad,” he said, “let the spirits and all the men of the world know that I, also, am still your friend. And why not? No white man with his wits about him would go through the butchery of the medicine lodge. I haven’t the stomach to look at the thing, to say nothing of enduring it. Your heart is not as red as you think, my son. However, it’s true that life from now on will be hell for you in this camp . . . for a time, at least. The thing for you to do is to take a horse and ride across the hills and across the plains until you come to some town of the whites. They’ll never think a whit less of you because you’ve not collected a set of scars.”
“Leave my people!” cried Red Hawk. “If I leave them, it will mean a death in every day of my life. When the sun rises, it will find me among the whites, who are weak and foolish . . . who lie and cheat . . . who cannot endure the wind and the sun and the cold . . . who murder the Cheyennes with tricks and cunning and black evil . . . and who do not know anything great or good.” “They make the rifles that the Cheyennes shoot with,” said Lazy Wolf calmly, “and the knives that the Indians use, the blankets they want, the bright cloth, the beads, the axes and hatchets. They bring the tea and the sugar. Except for his horses and robes, what is the wealth of a Cheyenne except the things that the traders bring to him from the whites?”
“The work of squaws,” said Red Hawk. He raised his head and one hand, in a fine gesture of disdain. “They are a people without strength. Their eyes are pale. Their ugly faces and bodies are the color of the bellies of fish. Ah, Lazy Wolf, why do you tell me to go among them? Why should I not die quickly among my people rather than go among the strangers like them?”
Lazy Wolf turned to the warrior. “Talk to him,” he said briefly.
Standing Bull nodded. He stood up by the center pole, gathered his robe about him, blew from his pipe a puff of smoke toward the sky. “I have no years,” he said. “I have not sat among the old men and heard their wisdom. I can only say to my brother that nothing but the strong sun keeps his skin dark, and that, since his blood is white, perhaps he will be happy among the white men. I shall follow you as far as you go, and never leave you till you have reached a white camp. And once I have learned the trail to your new people, nothing but death can keep me from coming in a summer, or over the snow, to look into the face of my brother.”
Red Hawk bowed his head.
“That,” said Lazy Wolf, “is a very true, sensible, and knowing sort of speech. Standing Bull, you are a fellow of promise. You have a brain . . . with a tongue hitched to it . . . and I want to see you in my teepee more often. Now then, Red Hawk, make up your mind. Are you going to stay on like a dog in the Cheyenne camp? Are you going to cut your throat like a fool and turn yourself into carrion for the buzzards to eat? Or are you going back to your own people?”
Red Hawk caught the hand of Lazy Wolf with a sudden gesture. “Tell me,” he said. “And you, Standing Bull, tell me. Could I ever return?”
“You could,” said Lazy Wolf instantly.
“There are some among us who will always be waiting,” said Standing Bull.
Red Hawk felt that something in him was dying; he knew a sorrow so great that his heart grew small under the weight of it. So he sat in silence, feeling now and again the glance of Lazy Wolf, which found him through the pipe smoke.
At last the host said: “Now is the time to go, while all the rest are yet at the blood sacrifice. Get your best horse.”
Red Hawk rose like a man in a dream, saddled a tough little gray stallion, which was his best horse, and returned to the teepee of Lazy Wolf. Standing Bull, with a saddled pony, was already waiting for him.
Then from the medicine lodge he saw the great war chief of the tribe come suddenly toward them, striding rapidly. There was hardly an Indian of the plains more famous than Dull Hatchet, and now that he was dressed in full regali
a for the ceremony of the medicine lodge, he seemed to Red Hawk the most magnificent of figures.
His shirt, of the skin of two mountain sheep, worked with stained porcupine quills and painted with memories of his battles, flowed down to a deep fringe as low as his knees. His leggings were banded with more quill work, and were fringed so that the border flowed down to the long tufts of buffalo beard attached to the heels of his beaded moccasins. The war chief’s imposing headdress of stained eagle feathers swept from his head and trailed on the ground behind him, and at least a score of those feathers were tied at the tips with the hairs that were the sign of so many grand coups.
That headdress alone overwhelmed the eye and the mind of Red Hawk, but everything about the person of Dull Hatchet was extraordinary, from the necklace of a hundred grizzly bear claws to the tassels of ermine tails that hung from a hundred places. The shield on his arm was a wonder of cunningly painted bull’s hide, with a boss of skunk fur for an edge, fringed with eagle quills and the bright little hoofs of antelope. It was human blood that had been allowed to dry in layer on layer at the base of the steel on his lance, which was sharpened only at the point.
There were other details that enchanted the eye of Red Hawk to such a degree that in the glory of his war chief he almost forgot his disgrace. He brooded on the stern face of the hero, which was gashed across one cheek by a deep scar. There were plenty of other battle marks on the body of the old warrior, but, strange to say, this mark that helped to make him so terrible of aspect was the result of a bullet fired at him by a woman. How weak his medicine must have been on that day, thought Red Hawk.
Then he heard Dull Hatchet saying, grimly: “One good deed is not enough to fill a life. Brave men have been forgotten, Standing Bull. And a brave is known not by the wife we find in his teepee, but by the friends who pass through the entrance flap. Standing Bull, you are looked for in the medicine lodge. The young men turn toward your place and their eyes are empty. The old men look vainly around them. Return!”
He half turned as he said this, pointing his lance toward the distant lodge. But to the amazement of Red Hawk, his friend made not the least move to obey his war leader. Such a thing was unheard of. A war chief of the Cheyennes, it is true, seldom gives commands when he is in camp, but, once his voice is lifted, it is hardly second in authority to that of the supreme chief, or the head medicine man and wizard of the tribe.
Still, young Standing Bull had not moved, although Red Hawk was gasping: “Go! Go quickly. I am nothing, brother. Go quickly before he is angry.”
It was plain that Standing Bull was in the greatest of anguish, for nothing could be a larger handicap to the career of a rising young brave than hostility on the part of his war chief. Honorable missions would be withheld from him, and his name would be omitted from important war parties. With a gesture, the chief was able to sweep almost any brave into the deepest obscurity.
The command had been given and it would not be repeated; the face of the great leader was already darkened before Standing Bull managed to say: “You have been a father to me on the war trail . . . you have been a shield to turn bullets from me . . . and you have been a knife in my hand. But I have heard old men say that a friend is more than a breath in the nostrils.”
The delay might have prepared the chief in part; nevertheless, Dull Hatchet was shocked by these last words. The long lance shuddered in his grasp as he turned gradually, and then the blood rushed into his face and seemed to stain his eyes as they kept their savage hold on Standing Bull to the last instant.
When the back of the war leader had been turned, Red Hawk caught the arm of his friend and shook it. “Go after him,” he whispered. “Walk at his side. Quickly. Tell him that a darkness fell over your mind, and that now you see clearly again. Go back with him or your life will be sad . . . and whenever you think of me you will groan and cover your head.”
He finished the last words in a weak voice, for already Standing Bull was drawing himself up, composing his face, gathering his strength in quietness as an Indian will do when his mind is irrevocably fixed on some dangerous goal.
Lazy Wolf, who stood behind them, said calmly: “Standing Bull, if you’re riding with him, do you know the shortest way to one of the camps of the white men?”
“No,” said the brave.
Lazy Wolf sat on his heels, and in Indian fashion he drew a trail map on the ground, describing the marks as he made them. Here he indicated a lone tree, there a flat-headed mesa, now an empty draw, then a river that could be forded at a certain place. And as he made the design, Standing Bull, watching intently, copied it with his own finger in the dust. He would not forget. Cheyennes have traveled safely over a thousand miles of unknown country with no better guidance.
“And here,” concluded Lazy Wolf, “you come to the Witherell Creek. Follow down it until you reach the hills, and inside the hills you’ll come to the town of Witherell itself.” He stood up and took the hand of Red Hawk. “When at last you come to your own white people,” he said, “remember that, although they’re new to you, you can learn to taste life as they taste it. Be quiet. Use your eyes. Then a great many things will come to you easily that you could never win by fighting.”
He held Red Hawk’s hand as they walked to the edge of the village, and even went with them for a few paces beyond the outmost circle of lodges. Then he stopped.
That stopping wrenched at the heart of Red Hawk. “I must go back,” he said, breathing deeply and seeming to get no life or strength out of the air. “I must go back to say farewell, briefly, to my father and mother.”
“Your mother is still howling and your father has blinded himself,” answered Lazy Wolf. “I’ll tell them that you’ve gone, and say why you didn’t wait to speak to them. I’ll give them farewell gifts, also. Go quickly . . . good bye, Red Hawk.” Lazy Wolf turned away, with this final remark, and marched straight back among the lodges. Once he hesitated, but then continued on his way.
Red Hawk groaned, “It is true. They no longer have a son. In their lodge I am dead. Tomorrow I shall have been a ghost for a hundred years.”
Chapter Seven
Three things of importance, never to be forgotten, were seen by Red Hawk on the way to the town of Witherell from the Black Hills. First, as he rode with Standing Bull down the narrow ravine of the first stream that watered the camp, he looked up by chance and saw what seemed to him, at first, a white rock on the verge of the bluff, high above him. But rocks cannot move, and after a moment he realized that it was Blue Bird in the shining newness of her doeskin dress.
He stared at her until he saw her make a gesture with both hands, and then he dropped his head and galloped the gray stallion swiftly down the ravine, far out of sight of the girl. Yet afterward she remained in his mind so clearly that often he wished he had last seen her in shadow rather than in sunshine, so that she would not gleam so in his memory, coming to him out of a distance.
On the third day as they voyaged over the northern plains a herd of wild horses, smaller than grains of dust on the palm of that gigantic hand, moved out of the eastern horizon and poured at a gallop closer and closer until Red Hawk saw a thing that glistened like the sharpened point of a lance. He halted his gray stallion. He threw up his arms and shouted: “Look, Standing Bull! It is White Horse! It is White Horse!”
Standing Bull drew close to him. They leaned from their saddles a little toward one another. The greatness of their excitement surrounded them like fear.
The herd swept nearer, still resembling a dark lance head with a shining point, until at last they had a nearer view of White Horse than ever a Cheyenne had had. They were close enough to see the mark of darkness between the eyes, and how all four legs were stockinged at least fetlock high with black silk. All the rest of him was purest white.
To the startled eye of Red Hawk he seemed burnished silver. Imagination stopped with the beauty of his body and his stride. The herd that followed seemed mere dust that blew at his heels.
Afterward the two men looked for a long time on one another with eyes made dull by the pain of a hopeless desire. White Horse was new to fame. He had led herds across the plains and up into the mountain valleys for only two seasons. But already Comanches in the south, Pawnees and Blackfeet to the west, the Dakotas to the north, and the riders of the Cheyennes had all melted away the best of their horseflesh in the vain effort to catch the stallion. That was why the two young Cheyennes sat their saddles quietly and made no effort now to pursue.
Then Standing Bull lifted a hand toward the sky, and Red Hawk knew that he could name with ease the subject of the warrior’s silent prayer.
They were less than a day from the end of their journey when they came to the third great milestone of the expedition. Riding down the bank of Witherell Creek, they came to the ruins of a sod house that many winters had beaten and melted into a sodden heap out of which only a few rotten poles were thrusting. More poles, sticking up through the grass, vaguely indicated what had once been a fenced enclosure. It was by no means an unusual sight, for the prairie was daubed here and there by the dim ruins of the houses of white settlers. This site, however, was more particularly marked by a large white stone, evidently quarried at a distance and brought here at the cost of a great effort, for it was far too ponderous for Red Hawk to budge, no matter how he strained at it.
He had dismounted because out of this obscure place something spoke to him. Standing Bull stood by with folded arms and watched. It was he, however, who called the attention of Red Hawk to what he called the medicine pictures on the face of that stone. Then Red Hawk, who had been taught elementary reading by Lazy Wolf, made out the chiseled letters, pointing them out with his fingers and gradually grouping them into the sound of syllables, until the words were complete.