by Peter Bowen
“Must have made yer arses slippery,” I says, “no wonder the Shoshones is thought such lousy riders. The ’feet likely call you Greasy Butts or something like.”
Which in fact is what the ’feet called the Shoshones, and Washakie didn’t like to be reminded of it. He spent a fair time grumbling about how Bridger had seen some promise in me but he, Washakie, even though he had give up his favorite daughter and had unwisely brung me along on this scalp-taking expedition, was beginning to think Bridger was full of shit and his daughter could use a good spanking.
For, Washakie went on, he was a good friend to Big Throat and he had out of friendship taken on this task but a man can’t make bear stew out of bear shit. Washakie was old and tired and trying to do his best but hadn’t much to work with. There was some good in all this but he was having trouble seeing it.
I let the old fool maunder on as it was plain that he’d gone and accepted me—out there back then partners never had a good word to say about each other at all.
We fringed around the edges of the Crow country for a couple of days and found sign that a village had moved through and so it wouldn’t be far off. We went careful after that, never showing ourselves on a skyline or watering from pools where our tracks might show. We finally seen the village, on a long sloping hill that went down into the Bighorn River.
We went in the middle of the night to the cover of a grove of aspens maybe two hundred yards from the camp. Washakie went silently into the darkness, flitting from shadow to shadow. I stretched a light, thin rope in front of me and the horses, looping it around the trunks.
The war ponies had been trained to silence and they were no trouble. Of course, my first time out on one of these little romps I was sure every bird call and sound was a whole war party just about to jump me and leave just a little greasy spot where I went down. Washakie was gone maybe an hour, and he come slithering up to me with two fresh, bloody scalps and thirty-four more he’d pulled off the chief’s warpole. He had taken a shit in front of the chief’s door, so when he went out to piss he’d step in it.
“Where’d you get the scalps?” I said.
“Their watchers not much good,” said Washakie. Of course, not so much as a dog had barked over there. Chills ran over my hide every which way.
While he was telling me this in a whisper the chief of the Crows must have stepped in it good because all of a sudden the camp come alive with people hollering and shots being fired and fires blazing up sudden.
“Hah,” says Washakie, “very quick are the Crows.” We made tracks for the high country where we had left the packhorses.
I had expected that we’d hightail it but Washakie shook his head and told me that he always left a calling card, a black feather from a raven, stuck to the bloody skull where he’d scalped his victim. It was his calling card and tended to make the Crows and Blackfeet not overzealous in their pursuit. I could hardly blame them. Crow mothers scared their kids into good behavior with Washakie’s name, and down in Wyoming there is a place called Crowheart Butte, where Washakie killed the best warrior that the Crows had in single combat and then tore his heart out and ate it.
Washakie told me the story, laughing. “But I can’t remember his name, it’s terrible, eat a man’s heart and then not remember his name. I am ashamed of myself.” And he laughed and laughed and didn’t sound all that ashamed to me.
Washakie sort of liked the Crows and only kilt and scalped a few now and then for appearance’s sake, but he had a mortal hatred for the Blackfeet and with our first raid on them I wished to God I was home having my brains screwed out by my lovely little wife.
Washakie changed from a sort of dutiful, funny scalper of Crows, only doing it because he didn’t want to hurt the tribe’s feelings, to a methodical cold-blooded killer, and I found the change as frightening as the war work following. Say what you will, it’s the laughing ones with the easy smile that are the worst of killers, I’ve seen it so many times.
We moved only by night in the Blackfeet country, and off the trails, hidden in the lodgepole pine. The horses made terrible crashing noises breaking sticks and small tree trunks, but so did the bull elk, and no ’feet was interested in bull elk meat, or the noise they made either.
When Washakie found fresh Blackfeet sign we bound the horses’ feet in leather boots and went to sneaking full time. The pack animals got left a good ten miles back, each footed to a whippy sapling, with rope enough to graze and water. There ain’t a lot to moving silently other than being careful and in no hurry.
We smelled woodsmoke and tied the war ponies in a thicket, and smeared our faces and hands with charcoal. We slithered off through the brush and watched the camp pretty close, marking the lodges only had one or two Blackfeet in them. I’d been lugging Washakie’s medicine bundle for him, it weighed about thirty pounds and I’d have had a smart question for him except that I was so scared my mouth was dry and stuck together.
He unrolled it and there was this double-barreled sawed-off shotgun in there looked to be about a two-gauge, and a dozen shells two inches in diameter and six inches long. He whispered that if he came back running I was to fire low. The idea was to blow as many legs off as possible and to hell with the scalps. “Further,” he hissed, “no matter how tempting, wait till I am out of the field of fire. You’d never make it out of here alive.”
“Shit!” I managed to whisper.
Then I reflected that it would leave me bringing up the rear. He was almost seventy, I’d pass him in ten seconds. My nostrils was all flared out and I was breathing deep and my senses seemed to have got better. I heard everything, saw everything, and smelled the woodsmoke from the cooking fires.
Washakie moved into the shadows when the moon was up good and I watched the Blackfeet warrior riding guard around the camp move into the shadow of a big black spruce and the horse came out with no rider on it.
A squaw come out of a lodge and moved off into the tall grass and she squatted and tipped over backward. A big shadow went into the camp.
Something had gone wrong with our counting, for the lodge the woman had come out of suddenly gave off terrible high screams just cut off like that, and then Washakie came boiling out the door and straight toward me.
I heard horses behind me and whirled around—there was four ’feet there, a hunting party come in late maybe, and they had come up behind me and if one of their ponies hadn’t nickered they’d have been on me before I would have knowed it. I let my breath out and pulled the trigger and a pound or so of lead, rusty nails, bits of strap iron, rocks, and glass shot out in a black cloud and lifted all four right off their horses. The horses fell over next, screaming, too.
When I whirled back round I saw Washakie maybe fifty feet from me, running low to the ground and covering a lot of it, and two ’feet warriors behind him. All of a sudden Washakie stopped and whirled round and shot the lead warrior and the one behind him stumbled over the corpse and went down and Washakie’s war club broke his head open like a smashed melon.
We mounted and rode hell for leather. It would take them a little time to sort things out but the ’feet was a brave sort and they have the worst tempers in the whole of the Injun nations. We bent over our horses’ necks and I wished we’d never come.
Washakie suddenly pulled off the trail into a stream and doubled back, which was the last damned place I thought we ought to go. He reined up behind a curtain of willows and grabbed the shotgun and jammed two more shells in the monster—they was the goddamn size of bitters bottles—and with that in one hand and his war club in the other he waited.
Only he didn’t wait until they was past. He spurred his war horse out when they was maybe fifty feet away, eight of them running close together, and Washakie charged right at them, firing the shotgun once—which cleared off the front four or five, and the others went down in the horse wreck that followed.
All but one who managed to rein off to the right. I yelled, all rage and fear, and went straight at him, firing my
pistol when I got close and I don’t know if I hit him with that but by God my big horse just went right up on his and I smashed his face in with my revolver barrel.
I was hollering whatever came to mind, being short on the personal sort of war cries (I settled on “Fuck the Irish,” later, and it stood me in good stead) and mine were heavy on the aarghs and yyyyaaaaaahggggs, and for some reason the Twenty-third Psalm’s “shadow of death” popped out pretty regular. I saw one ’feet struggling up from the mess—Washakie was already down in it scalping away—and I rode at him and pulled the horse up and shot him in the face with the muzzle of my gun no more than a foot from him. The powder flames scorched his hair and the stink come up quick.
Washakie had the ’feet all pelted out and he got on his pony with a big boo-kay of them scalps in one hand and he leaned over and said we’d best fly, we’d have hundreds of them after us at daybreak.
We rode for two days, getting off every few hours to rest the horses, feeding them grain we’d packed on the stocky burden horses, and going on. We went over passes that were there then and I have looked for them other times and not found them. We even doubled north at one point and then east. I never saw a ’feet and I never saw fresh sign. Washakie was always ahead of them, and me, too, and I wanted to know how he done it.
I was full of the admiration for the old buzzard, and we was headed for home.
9
WARRIORS, I LEARNED, THROW up and keep going. Blood makes the grass green and long and rich. Killing is neither a horror nor a pleasure. It’s a chore, our work, what we do.
The ’feet was tenacious and they’d started catching up, and it was all like that first time. I learned from that fierce old man to strike when we warn’t expected, hit hard, and run. The old bastard liked being outnumbered, the crowd spoiled each other’s footwork. If he was like this at seventy, I wondered what he was like when he was twenty-five. He also never got cut, or shot, or kicked by a horse.
He come back without a mark on him. All the marks was on me. I come back belly down over a horse, on account of a barbed arrow in my arse. Washakie’d dug it out right away—the ’feet poison their arrows with a green gum they get boiling the bulbs of pasqueflowers, but it’s a slow moving poison. I had cuts and bruises, a hell of a slash across my cheek, and some broken toes I got kicking a ’feet’s throat in, the treacherous bastard was wearing a brass medal heavy as a fry pan across his windpipe.
A couple of the young warriors who had been saying Washakie was a fish-hearted old woman carried me to my lodge, taking good care not to jar me.
I was set face down and Eats-Men-Whole fluttered about and fetched me hot tea and ashbread—toss a lump of dough on the coals and then when it’s cooked eat the center part—and she had a hundred questions all of which I answered with grunts. I was sore-assed, exhausted, and if I’d close my eyes I’d get the wim-wams right off, seeing one or another batch of mean Blackfeet bearing down on us.
My education was just ripping right along.
Washakie was too much the showman to haul all of the scalps out at once. He put up ten, fresh-salted ones with blood in the hair, and then every morning and evening he’d add more. Since we was so busy staying alive we often hadn’t the time to lift topknots, so the scalps he lifted from the Crow chief’s warpole come in handy. Washakie was an honest man, he only cheated by three or four scalps as to the numbers we killed. He was an awesome and terrifying fighter, in battle he’d glow with an insane light. And like I said, he come back without a mark on him.
Here I am, I said to myself, as I laid belly down and my wounds itched, white child of good family, married and murdering. We was back and safe and I had the horrors every night, feeling like I was stuck in glue while I tried to run from howling mobs of Blackfeet. Eats-Men-Whole tended me gently and sweetly and I healed up pretty fast, though the worst scars was on my heart and soul. I was changed forever and I knew it. I was a stranger to myself.
Washakie had sewed up my arse and cheek with thick thread, and when the lips of the wounds had joined good he jerked out the thread. Some of the stitches had got infected, Eats-Men-Whole put hot compresses on them and they drained good.
My scars was still flaming red, but not painful, when one day a letter come from Bridger, sent by military courier. The Oregon Trail wasn’t even a day’s ride south of us—one of the spike trails come almost to the camp itself.
The letter was dictated by Bridger who was sick and thought he’d go home to his Missouri farm to recuperate. He had a cough wouldn’t stop and he was too sick and weak to scout. Would I come to Fort Phil Kearney—that was what the army was calling Carrington’s useless stockade—by early December. I wanted to hide the letter and claim that I never got it, but I owed Bridger and so I sent back a note saying yes. They didn’t need me till then as all the Indians was off hunting buffalo.
Red Cloud had seemed to me to be the sort of feller who would attack right when all the whites thought he was off hunting buffalo, which was foolish on my part and a continuing misreading of Indian politics by all us whites that didn’t result in more than a couple hundred thousand deaths of Injuns over the latter half of the nineteenth century. In statecraft, that’s small change, but we was a young country and not as good at it as England.
Bridger was absolutely right, and the reason for it was that the Indians was all hunting buffalo, and though Red Cloud could start a war anytime he chose, if he wanted company he had to wait till his warriors were through hunting buffalo. When we started signing treaties for whatever land we was going to steal anyway, we’d sign one with Red Cloud and three or four others and them five would abide by it but the rest felt that it meant nothing at all, which it didn’t really. The Canadians never did fight an Injun War, they let smallpox, measles, and trade whiskey fight for them, and it did every bit as well.
This was a modest beginning for me in scouting for the United States Army and I was, due to bad luck and my weak character, to go on scouting far too long.
Wul, as Bridger would say, I spent what was left of the fall spawning myself almost to death. Eats-Men-Whole did show a little more respect for me since I went on the scalp-taking vacation with her father. One day she announced we were going to have a baby, and she cuts off the screwing just like that. Washakie called it the time of coyote love, when all you do is sit by the hole and howl.
I headed toward Fort Phil Kearney the first of December; the fall had been so mild the leaves was mostly still on the trees, the cottonwoods and birches in the river bottoms and the aspens on the hillsides. I wasn’t in any great hurry to get to Fort Phil Kearney, because I was sure the tribes was off east hunting buffalo.
Fort Laramie wasn’t much out of the way, and I figured to stop at it and I did, coming in on a bright crisp day to find a band assembled out front of the stockade, tootling and thumping away. I was most gratified that my fame had come before me. I pulled in casual-like, halted my horse, folded my hands on the saddle horn, and nodded along with the music.
The music trailed off and a strutty littler feller with major’s rank on his shoulders come hotfooting over to me.
“Goddamn it,” he hollered. “Git yer trampy ass out of the way! We got important visitors!”
I allowed as how it being the Christmas season and all and an old family custom decreed that I wear a large sprig of mistletoe on my shirttail in this blessed holiday season and he could pucker up and lunge anytime he’d a mind to.
“Who in the goddamn hell are you?” he screamed.
“I’m the scout filling in for Bridger,” I said. “If I offend you so goddamn much I could just go back home and you could hire somebody else, or do the work yourself.”
Bridger’s name calmed the little major right down. “Would you please get out of the way,” he pleaded. “General Custer is coming in.”
I had been hearing rumors of Custer for some time, and I gathered he was famous among the tribes for killing women, children, the lame, halt, blind, and old. Washakie spat befo
re using the name Custer, and after, too. Washakie wasn’t averse to the taking of human life, for sure, but Custer’s slaughters really stuck in his craw.
So I set my horse off for the parade ground where the troopers was all lined up, and got behind a gaggle of civilians and sat on my horse quietlike.
“Here he comes!” someone hollered, and the troopers snapped to attention and the civilians muttered with the excitement of it all.
Custer come in the gates wearing buckskins and his blond hair down to his shoulders. His wife was riding sidesaddle, a little behind the man of the hour.
He had a gaggle of hangers-on and lackeys following him, and one feller in particular stood out—a tall, brown-haired galoot in a blue leather coat with the suede side out all worked with tiny beads and enough silver on his saddle and bridle and spurs and hat to make up table service for forty.
Just my luck, to see Custer and Buffalo Bill Cody on the same glorious day. Behind the three main attractions there was a ragged assortment of newspaper correspondents, without which he never went anywhere. Why, Custer even had a couple at the Little Bighorn ten years later. They made their deadlines, so to speak.
The strutty little major sought me out after the carnival was over and invited me to dinner in the officers’ mess that night. He also apologized for his “fit of rudeness.” I said I’d had them myself.
I thanked the major and accepted the invite and I give my horse to a hostler and went on in behind the newspapermen. I had a little time, and Custer and Cody was such ridiculous and inflated specimens I really wanted to see more.
Now, who should be the Officer of the Day but big old Gus Doane, escaped from Texas. We shook hands and he looked at the scar on my cheek and shook his head. He was on duty for another hour, we’d meet later.
The newspapermen was hollering questions at Cody and Custer, and it wasn’t much amusement, so I strolled out the main gate to buy a few things from the sutler’s wagons. Things generally cost less in the raw-board, false-front business district, but the sutlers was more interesting.