The White Indian

by Max Brand

  Colonel Dodge’s narrative contains an interesting description of Red Hawk’s appearance at this time. He was, says the colonel, something over the average height, and so worn by continual privation that he looked some five or ten years older than his twenty-one years. His eyes were large, and so blue that the color, even from a slight distance, was as apparent as a stain in the brown of the face. His clothes were deerskin rags, with the skin of a mountain sheep, half cured by smoking over a fire, gathered about his shoulders. His body, seen through the rags, looked like that of a starved corpse; it would have made a fine, fleshless specimen for the dissecting table of medical students, observed the colonel with a touch of grim humor.

  He stated that the camp gladly furnished this bringer of help with a complete outfit of warm clothes, but that Red Hawk would not wait even to partake of the flesh of the animals that he had furnished to the camp. Saying that White Horse was not two miles in advance, he slung his rifle under his arm, and immediately left the camp.

  The colonel himself followed, urging the young man to remain at least a day in the camp to rest, and assuring him that to march on through the white heart of such a storm as was then blowing would be to imperil his life.

  To this the strange man replied: “White Horse has no warm campfires to lie by. What he can endure, I can endure.”

  Shortly after this, in a blind howling and fury of snow, the colonel lost track of his companion, and barely was able to find his way back to the camp.

  Finally, at midnight, thirty-six hours later, the wanderer returned with a report that he had found a dozen mountain buffalo in a box cañon not very far away, and that he had slaughtered them all. He urged the colonel to send out every available man to bring in the frozen meat before the wolves should get at it. When he had delivered this message, Red Hawk guided the men of the camp to the box cañon, and there he left them.

  The colonel asked him how he could be rewarded, but he merely begged that one white man’s prayer might be made to the Great Spirit to make clear the trail of White Horse.

  In conclusion, the colonel summed up the difference between the mountain buffalo and those of the plains. He found the former a shorter, stockier, more heavily furred species.

  To Red Hawk, the adventure of the stalled caravan was hardly more than an extra torment given to him by the inexplicable will of the Great Spirit, Sweet Medicine, placing him on foot and costing him a wastage of three days. It seemed to him a special miracle when, ten days later, blindly marching south over the same route that he had followed the year before, he came again within view of the great horse, once more unattended by a herd. The whole body of tough mustangs that White Horse had stolen from Murray Quale had drifted to one side or the other, worn out by the steadiness of the pursuit. There remained only the great leader himself, and once more White Horse led him south to the Colorado.

  How Red Hawk caught a wild horse in a cottonwood tangle and tamed and rode the brute is a story too long to tell. But that tough roan carried his master over fifteen hundred miles, through the warmer south and back again into the freezing north, before, on a March day, it dropped its head and could go no more.

  Red Hawk resumed the way on foot. It would be unfair to say that he thought of surrendering. Fever maddened him with thirst and turned his brain astray until on a day he threw the ponderous weight of the rifle away from him. That brought him a little closer to starvation, but already he had starved until his cheeks clove like rough leather to his teeth.

  In spite of fever and starvation, however, he kept to the trail of White Horse, for the great stallion was no longer what he had been. If he needed less sleep than the man, he required several hours for grazing—particularly when he had to paw away the snow to get at his food. But those hours were never his, now that he had not the strength to burst away at a reaching gallop and put a few miles of security between him and this patient, dogging enemy. Fear had grown such a part of the great horse that he dared not snatch three mouthfuls without jerking up his head and studying the wind and staring suspiciously all around him. If the man was but a shambling skeleton, White Horse was hardly more.

  As they entered the Blue Water Mountains, the veriest runt of a cow pony would have had speed enough to bring Red Hawk up with the stallion, so that he could at last use his rawhide lariat.

  That lariat and his knife were the last of his possessions when he came to the last day. He had dug into the heaped snow on the windward side of a thicket and slept there for a few hours of wretched dreams. Then he dragged himself along the trail of the horse, over a ridge and down into a windless valley. The sun came up, strong and clear, and almost in a moment he could hear the lodged snow on the branches begin to fall, sometimes in morsels, sometimes dropping in heavy masses that struck the snow beneath with an unmistakable puffing sound. A few great storms might still be left in the skies, but the back of winter was breaking and the long thaw had begun.

  It was a beautiful valley, and those who know the Blue Water Mountains can imagine how the slopes rose, so gigantic that the pine trees that struggled through the snow looked like a dark stubble. They will remember how the round lake, now glassed over with ice, lies in the bottom of the hollow.

  Red Hawk, as he went down the hollow with knees unstrung by famine and long labor, stared at the scene with bloodshot eyes. He knew, as though the voice of Sweet Medicine had sounded in his heart, that he had come to the end of his trail. There was no power in him to climb another ridge. He had felt a thousand times before that he was making his last march, but now there was a lump of ice in his vitals, and he was certain that his end was near.

  That was why he felt no particular leap of joy through his body when he stole through the frozen bracken and came out on the shore of the lake, with White Horse hardly ten strides away from him, breaking through the snow crust with strokes of his forehoofs, and then tearing up with his teeth the long, brown, lank grasses that all summer long grew beside the water.

  Little by little, Red Hawk worked his lariat into the coil, freed the noose, enlarged it, and began to prepare himself for the cast. His prayer was silence, and every breath he drew, to be sure, was a prayer. He felt that his arm was too weak for the throw, that he would be unable to succeed unless the Underground Listeners were good to him.

  Then, taking a half step forward, he hurled the noose. It was that half step that warned White Horse. That noise was a mere whisper, but it started the stallion away so that the noose, falling, merely whipped him across the withers and sent him into a frantic gallop right out across the face of the lake.

  There was still strength enough in the horse to keep him from slipping and falling. Though he skidded half a dozen times, he regained his control. He was almost across the lake when, with dying eyes, Red Hawk saw the monster disappear from view.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Red Hawk saw two things that for an instant were dissociated in his mind: the disappearance of the horse and the leap of the crystal water. Only a moment later, he realized that the stallion must have broken through a flaw of the ice. Half running, half skating, with the length of the lariat snaking out behind him, the trailer saw the head of White Horse, blackened with wetness, appear above the edge of the water, bobbing as though it were tossed by waves. When he came closer, he could see the reason for that swaying up and down, for the right foreleg of the stallion hung limp, and only with the left was he striking out. He swung a little to the side, as though through fear and to avoid the horrible nearness of the man, but immediately he straightened out for the edge of the ice, although that was where Red Hawk awaited him.

  All glory had gone out of the world; an endless age had passed since Red Hawk had first seen White Horse racing on the plain. The White Indian was now a tottering old man who pulled on the rope to haul ashore an ancient horse whose backbone was lifting clear of the water, whose ribs stood out one by one, and whose hip bones were like great, blunt elbows trying to thrust through the skin.

  He pulle
d until White Horse, coming to the edge of the ice, heaved up with a great effort and brought the forehoof heavily down on the rim. That effort to raise himself merely smashed the ice to pieces, so that Red Hawk shot feet first into the throttling coldness.

  He came right up beside the struggling head of the stallion, and together they fought on toward the firm ground, out upon which Red Hawk climbed, White Horse floundering after him on three legs.

  But there was no joy in Red Hawk, no racing of the pulse as he saw his rope safely around the neck of the monster. His brain was like his body, numb and trembling; he had not even wit enough to turn a half hitch around the trunk of a tree in order to hold his prize. Therefore, at the first lurch the rawhide burned through his grasp, and White Horse drove away on three legs only, the right foreleg dangling, flopping, until in the midst of tall saplings nearby he slipped in the snow and went down.

  Red Hawk, staggering in pursuit, now leaned a hand against a bending tree trunk and watched as the horse three times strove to rise. He could not bring himself clear, for the right foreleg was pinned beneath him. An inexpressible agony burned in the stallion’s eyes, widened the red of his nostrils, set his whole body shuddering.

  There could be no doubt that foreleg was smashed to pieces. It seemed to the man that it was a story he had heard before, of how Red Hawk had pursued White Horse, not contented with that glimpse of free beauty that roved the plains and climbed the mountains, until at last he put his rope on a broken and ruined white ghost. The illusion was so clear that he could almost breathe the acrid smoke of the fire in Spotted Antelope’s lodge and hear the solemn voice of the old brave as he brought the tale to a moral end.

  Red Hawk’s own legs gave way under him until he found himself sitting on a projecting root of the tree. A wind off the lake handled his wet body with fingers of ice. But his flesh could not be as cold as the heart in him. There was in him no further will to live. Drowsiness began to work in his brain. He knew the meaning of that deadly sleepiness, but life had no savor or worth, and sleep was better. . . .

  A blast in his very ears, like the thundering of many horns, roused him. It was the neighing of White Horse, struggling with high head to reach his feet again.

  A smile twisted at Red Hawk’s freezing face, for it seemed to him that the helpless stallion was not sounding that call to the whole world but only to rouse the one man who had managed to lay hand on him. Rouse him to what? Well, so that they might face death on their feet, perhaps. He pushed himself up to his feet, tied the lariat about the tree. Going to the fallen horse, he put his hands under the animal’s right shoulder, and heaved with all his might. Even that feeble assistance was enough to enable White Horse to lunge to his feet, but, in a stride, he had come to the end of the rope and was jerked about, facing it. After that he struggled no more.

  Perhaps it was the agony of his injured leg that subdued him; perhaps the iron grip of the rawhide had convinced him. At any rate, he stood perfectly still while Red Hawk wormed his fingers up that dangling leg, reading every bone and joint and sinew to the knee, without finding a break.

  Then an uncertain flame of hope wavered in the brain of Red Hawk, a hope that scarcely warmed his blood before it began to vanish. Gently he moved the stallion’s leg forward and back. He pressed his ear against the wet shoulder of the horse to hear the grating of any broken bone, but he could make out nothing. The leg was sound. Clear to the top of the shoulder it was sound.

  The only injury, therefore, must be to the shoulder nerve, for Red Hawk could remember that matchless healer, Lazy Wolf, speaking of such a thing. Sometimes it meant a ruined horse. Sometimes the hurt might heal—if only the weight of the body could be taken from the leg so that it hung free, in a sling.

  But a horse cannot stand indefinitely on three legs, particularly an animal like this white stallion, in whose body the shudder of weakness was already beginning.

  Red Hawk stood before the head of White Horse and looked into the unfathomable brightness and challenge of the beast’s eyes. Something might still be done—if only wisdom would be given, to keep the clear flame of that spirit shining.

  Red Hawk looked up to the sky and saw the slender tops of the saplings waving against it. That was what gave him his idea. To the end, he would never believe that the inspiration had come out of his own brain, but insisted that some invisible power had descended upon him.

  He set to work with a frantic haste. By the edge of the lake there were quantities of vines that climbed up among the lower branches of the trees, strong as supple ropes. He cut down a quantity of them, climbed some of the nearest saplings on either side of the horse, and fastened the vine ropes near their tops. Afterward, descending to the ground, he pulled down those trees until their heads were as close to the earth as his strength would bring them.

  Some of the tips of the young pines brushed against the side of White Horse, but still he remained motionless, his ears pricked, his head as steady as the pointing hand of a compass. It was as though he submitted in a spirit of jest, ready at any instant to leap away and snap the slender strength of the rope. But all the while hope grew stronger and stronger in Red Hawk, until he forgot the dizziness of mind, the weakness of body. Hope was the red meat that he tasted and ate of when he was almost dead of starvation.

  More than a score of those stubborn trees he bent before the tied strong withes, doubled and redoubled, from those on the right to those on the left and passed the improvised ropes under the body of White Horse until they made an almost solid network. After that, first on this side and then on that, he cut the first withes that had drawn down the tops of the saplings toward the ground, and, one after another, they gave the full strength of their recoil to lift the body of the stallion from the ground. Two still remained to be cut on either side when Red Hawk saw the hoofs of White Horse lifted clear of the ground. Another and another—and on an even balance, the great horse swung cradled a foot above the snow.

  Now there was hope indeed. Red Hawk found a quantity of dead brush and a number of dead stumps, not far away. A sound section from one of those stumps served him as a shovel to clear the snow away from beneath the horse. Then he found a piece of flint-hard rock, and, off to one side, with the butt of his knife he struck a shower of sparks into a little heap of powder-dry shavings and wood pulp until the tinder smoked and flamed. There was fire then, and plenty to feed it. There was food for the horse; he had only to kick away the surface snow, here and there, and harvest armfuls of the long grass from the verge of the lake.

  There was even time, in the late afternoon, to think of Red Hawk’s own trembling body. To that end, he whittled and notched a number of straight twigs, and made a series of strong little traps that he set along the runways that the rabbits had made through the snow among the trees. He baited these traps with a plentiful supply of seeds taken from the heads of the grasses that he had found beside the lake.

  Now he could afford time to make the sling that must support the leg of White Horse, and in the dusk of the twilight he finished it so that it supported the loose leg at the elbow and at the knee, firmly.

  There was barely light, now, for him to visit his traps, and in them find two winter-lean rabbits, already captured. A ravenous hunger filled him, but still he dared not waste time on himself. He had to cut up those rabbits, and with their shredded sinews he sewed up the rags of his deerskin shirt into the form of a large bowl that he stiffened around the edges with sections of supple branches fitted together.

  With fine grass he then stuffed the chinks of the bowl and made the crude thing fairly watertight with a plastering of mud. It was by no means perfect. Water streamed through it in small spouts as he carried it from the lake to White Horse. And for reward he was forced to stand until his arms were numb with fatigue before the wary stallion would deign to touch the surface of the water with his extended upper lip.

  Afterward, however, the horse drank deeply, while his half-naked manservant staggered back and forth between
him and the margin of the lake. But Red Hawk was unconscious of the whipping cold. Sometimes, in his joy, he even laughed, on a note so strange that it startled his own ears.

  About midnight he was able to think of himself. He roasted the flesh of the rabbits and devoured it—all save a few fragments that must be kept for a very definite purpose the next day. Afterward, on a bed of soft branches that he had hewed down with the sword-like weight of his knife, he slept close to the fire—loose-bodied, sick with exhaustion, shuddering.

  Once a soft sound aroused him. It was the whinny of the stallion, and, as Red Hawk sprang up, he saw vague shapes disappear from the verge of the firelight and sink away among the trees. If the wolves began to haunt him, from this time on there would be small chance of trapping rabbits or any other prey. Then he remembered that the spirits had been kind to him, and, with hope in his heart, he went back to sleep once more. Not until the cold of the morning wakened him to show him the last dying coals of his fire did he know anything further.

  Chapter Eighteen

  It is not well for a horse to hang in a sling for twenty-four hours a day. Therefore, with painful care, Red Hawk built a solid platform of heavy branches, too thick for him to cut through with the knife, and therefore burned until they were of the right dimensions. When that platform was completed, it was of exactly the right height to permit the stallion to bear his own weight when he chose. Otherwise he could put his entire weight on the sling by the mere bending of his knees.