Tie My Bones to Her Back

by Robert F. Jones

  Lame Deer looked up at Strongheart and said something in Sa-sis-e-tas that Jenny could not understand. Lame Deer’s eyes were sad, tired. Yet they were also strong, Jenny realized, as if she was steeling herself for some new ordeal. Jenny could not see Strongheart’s eyes.

  The old woman reached down and cupped her hands around the baby’s head, pulled, then reached in for the baby’s shoulders and snaked them out. Lame Deer heaved once more. Strongheart lifted the baby clear. She bit through the umbilical cord and wiped the blood away with a wisp of dry buffalo grass that lay by Lame Deer’s side. The baby was a girl. Strongheart lifted the infant and showed it to the mother. Lame Deer nodded and looked away.

  Not once has she screamed, Jenny thought. My God, the women of Heldendorf . . .

  Strongheart tucked the newborn into a fold of her hide shirt. Lame Deer reached for the buffalo grass she had picked earlier. She wiped herself clean, then lay back and closed her eyes. Tears glistened in their corners.

  Jenny followed Strongheart up into the hills, even farther away from the camp. There, in a grassy hollow, they stopped. A dry wind howled overhead. The old woman placed the baby on a patch of moss, in the shadow of a smooth, weathered boulder.

  What now? Jenny wondered. Some strange new Cheyenne ritual?

  The baby’s face was red and wrinkled, and it cried feebly, grimacing and wriggling its short arms and legs. Blood dried on its eyelids. Jenny’s heart went out to it. Then Strongheart placed her hand over the baby’s nose and mouth. It struggled for a minute, while Jenny looked on in horror—more than a minute; but finally the baby lay still. Strongheart was staring at her. “Yes,” she whispered harshly, “but it must be done.”

  “Why?”

  “Lame Deer has three sons and a daughter already, all of them still children. You’ve seen them playing around camp. Since her husband was killed by the Crows, her brother has been giving her meat. That means taking meat from his own family. But now another man is interested in her, Old Gland with the withered arm. He is a poor hunter, Old Gland, and he let it be known that with another child to feed he could never marry her.” She sighed and smiled ruefully. “Too few buffalo. Too many people. In German we call this Okonomie, Lame Deer had no choice. She is my friend. I helped her.”

  With her root digger, Strongheart had already prepared a hole in the ground. She placed the tiny body in the hole and scraped dirt on top of it. Jenny found a heavy, flat stone to place over the grave. Before they left, Strongheart cut a branch from a nearby osier and brushed out all signs of their footprints.

  “Won’t the others know that Lame Deer had the baby?” Jenny asked, irritated suddenly at all this secrecy. “Certainly they knew she was with child, so why won’t they suspect that she’d had it murdered when her belly’s flat?”

  “They’ll know all right,” Strongheart said. She laughed, the dry cough of a crow. “Even the Old Man Chiefs will know. But no one will say anything if we don’t. It is one of the Mysteries of the People.”

  When they passed the spot where Lame Deer had given birth, the young woman was gone. Jenny looked around, searching the hillsides, and finally spotted her down by the river, grubbing for cattail roots. She and Strongheart walked on back toward the tepees.

  “Would you have spared the baby if it had been a boy?” Jenny asked.

  “No,” Strongheart said. “A child is a child, hunger is hunger.”

  17

  OTTO HADN’T ALLOWED Jenny to bathe or shave him since he’d left the infirmary at Fort Dodge, cursing and weeping whenever she suggested it. “Kill me!” he begged her again and again. “I’m no man at all if I can’t keep myself clean!”

  “You’re a mess all right,” she told him, angry in her own turn, fed up with his self-pity. Then: “Oh God, I’m sorry, brother—but you’ve got to stop feeling so hopeless. You can do things if you’ll only try!”

  “Like . . . what?”

  “Well, you could start by trying to walk.”

  “And where would I walk to, if I could manage it?”

  “You might try the river, it’s not twenty steps from this tent. And once you’re there, you might take a bath.”

  Otto looked away, his face sullen beneath his unkempt beard.

  “What are you afraid of?” she asked.

  “They’d laugh at me,” he muttered. “I know the Indian and his wicked sense of humor. And truly I can’t blame him. Many’s the time I almost laughed at the sight of an old soldier crippled by the war. But only because I couldn’t weep anymore.”

  “What can I do to help you?” she pleaded, nearly frantic with frustration.

  “Nothing,” he said. “I’m beyond help.”

  The Elk Sisters took care of that. Tom Shields sent the noot-uhk-e-a, the four girl soldiers of the Elk Society, to care for Black Hat. Their names were Crane, The Enemy, Yellow Eyes, and Slick Blue Serpent. All were plump and virtuous. At first the Elk Sisters were repelled by Black Hat’s sorry condition. Cheyenne doctors never amputated, not even the most badly mangled limbs, trusting in secret herbal medicines and sacred spells to cure them. If a cure failed, then the All-God Maheo clearly intended that person to die. Black Hat’s lack of fingers, toes, and half of one arm was shocking, but the Elk Sisters were positively disgusted by his filth.

  They picked him up from his blankets and trundled him down to the river, where they stripped off his clothes and flung him into the water. While Crane and Yellow Eyes scrubbed him with sand and gravel, Serpent and The Enemy boiled his clothes in a bucket over the fire, then hung them over the nearby bushes to dry. With a sharp knife the girls shaved off Otto’s beard, so that he would look more human. Otto didn’t know which hurt worse, the scrubbing or the shave. But he felt a lot better once he was clean.

  The Elk Sisters then sang some songs for him and danced awhile. He said nothing. They decided that the spider was the most stupid animal they had ever seen, since even dogs and horses could understand language. “Let’s see if we can teach it to talk,” said Yellow Eyes. She picked up a rock. “Ho’honáa,” she said, pointing to the rock. She cracked it sharply against Otto’s head.

  “Ouch!” he said.

  “Na-oomo,” Yellow Eyes said. I am hitting! She tapped him again. “Na-oomo.”

  “Na-oomo,” Otto said in self-defense. He rubbed his head with his fingerless hand. “Hohonaa, rock.”

  The Elk Sisters yipped and clapped their hands. Not only was it clean now, but it could speak! Maybe this spider was human, after all.

  The Elk Sisters cooked for Otto, teaching him the words for various kinds of food and utensils. Whenever they picked up a tool, they told him its name. They taught him the names of animals, starting with dogs and horses. Each morning they took him to the river and washed him. When E-hyoph-sta and Two Shields went off to hunt, they slept in his lodge.

  One night Yellow Eyes woke from a strange, warm dream. The other girls were snoring. So was Black Hat. Yellow Eyes began to massage him gently. He stiffened. He stared into her eyes, there in the warm dark. He caressed her cheek with the glassy-smooth stump of his arm.

  “Haáhe,” he whispered in his deep spider voice. “E’peva’.”

  Yes, it is good . . .

  JENNY HAD EXCELLED in archery at the academy, but she was awed by the skill of the Cheyenne bowmen. Their bows were short, not more than four and a half feet long. The best of them were made of horn or rib bone from elk, bighorn sheep, or buffalo. They were powerful weapons, recurved at their tips like the illustrations she had seen of Mongol and Turkish bows. Tom’s bow, which he carried in a beautifully finished otterskin bow case decorated top and bottom with elaborately braided red-and-black quillwork, had been made from the horn of a mountain sheep, he told her. He had boiled the horn a long time to make it limber, then trimmed and shaved it down and straightened and laboriously flexed the limbs until they had assumed the shape he desired. Finally he had backed it with the glued shoulder sinew of a bull buffalo, to give it more throwing power. It was
white on the front—actually the “back” of the bow, in the peculiar parlance of bowyers—with powdered gypsum sprinkled over a thin sizing of glue rendered down from buffalo hide, and was painted an ocherous red on the “belly.” Its hand grip was a soft spiral wrap of deerhide. For all her strength, Jenny could draw the bow only a little more than half the length of its two-foot-long hunting arrow, but even that small effort drove the ironheaded shaft through a thick slab of pinewood.

  “When I was a boy, our arrowheads were made of stone or bone,” Tom told her. “The old men say they killed better than these iron ones.” He laughed and threw back his head. “Old folks always like old ways.”

  He pointed out the lengthwise grooves incised on the arrow shafts—a straight one from fletching to head on the top surface, a sinuous groove on the bottom. “Some say these are to make the blood run more freely, others that they are magic to make the arrow fly straight and hit like lightning. My father laughs at that stuff. He says the grooves are only there to keep the arrow from warping back to its original shape, when it was a green wand of birch.” Each arrow had Tom’s personal mark on it, two red, shieldlike circles forward of the fletching on either side of the shaft. “That’s to see who actually killed the buffalo when they’re all down and the hunt is over,” he said. “Sometimes there are fights over questions of meat.”

  Tom had her roll a willow-withe hoop, no more than three feet in diameter and covered with parfleche, across the prairie some sixty paces from where he stood. He zipped five arrows through it before it toppled to the ground, shooting faster and far more accurately than even Duck Bill Hickok could have with a six-shooter at that range. She had seen small boys, little more than toddlers, with tiny bows and arrows shooting at similar hoops around the camp, whooping and screeching whenever they scored a hit. All day long they practiced. Sometimes the more mischievous ones shot their blunt-headed arrows at her tepee when she was inside, then ran off laughing. They’re flirting with me, Jenny thought, not unflattered. No better than white boys with their infernal baseballs, knocking a girl’s bonnet off just to hear her squeal. But with a more useful purpose to their silly skills. These Cheyenne boys would kill enemies or bring home meat for their families when they grew up. You couldn’t bring home meat with a baseball, not yet at least, though before leaving Wisconsin she had read of professional baseball clubs being formed in New York.

  AT NIGHT THE white wolves howled, putting Otto in mind of his happy days on the Smoky Hill. Yellow Eyes lived with him now, having surrendered her post as an Elk Sister. The other girls had gone. The sisters of the Cheyenne soldier societies must remain chaste, and Yellow Eyes had relinquished that state. She alone cooked for Otto, helped him to bathe and shave, sewed new clothes of skin for him; she alone slept with him, in a small tepee of their own set apart from the camp circle. Yet still he refused to try walking, unwilling to submit himself to the possible taunts of the young warriors. He would allow her to help him from the tepee only at night when the village slept. Then they would sit together at the entrance to the tent while she washed him and trimmed his beard and he breathed the sweet night air.

  She cut him an elegant walking stick of fragrant cedar, peeled the bark, rubbed the wood with buffalo grease and ocher, and decorated its knurled top with a carefully carved wolf’s head. At first he had trouble holding the stick firmly in the clenched cup of hand that remained to him, but Dr. Wallace had left him a small stub of thumb which eventually gave him a suitable grip. With Yellow Eyes at his side, holding his stump to give him support, Otto started walking again, only short distances at first, limping painfully down to the river to bathe, then out into the near hills. Slowly he regained his balance. He began to eye the horse herd and wondered if he could ride again. The Cheyennes rode quite well without using their hands, guiding their mounts with only their heels and knees, but they were centaurs from birth.

  One night as the wolves sang and Yellow Eyes snored gently in the resonant dark, Otto rolled out from under his sleeping robe. With the aid of his wolf stick he hoisted himself to his feet and limped to the entrance of the lodge. He was still out of kilter—his toeless feet betraying him into a stumble whenever he forgot himself and tried to walk too fast. The weight of his body on his maimed feet remained painful, though it was beginning to ease.

  He hobbled slowly away from the camp and up to the top of a ridge overlooking the river. There he propped himself against a boulder. The moon was nearing its full and he could see white wolves coursing a young elk through the valley below and up toward the opposite height of land. His heart thumped wildly, but more with excitement than exertion. Two of the younger wolves headed the elk and turned it back toward the slower members of the pack. One big lobo snatched at the elk’s near hind leg as it galloped past, caught it, and upended the animal. The wolf pack fell on it like a thrashing white blanket. He could hear the crunch of their great jaws half a mile away. He felt a surge of elation. He raised his wolf stick and shook it at the moon.

  Then he raised his head as well and howled along with the pack.

  ONE DARK AND rainy morning Jenny laid an ambush for her pesky bowmen. Three of them were loitering nearby, waiting for her to go into the lodge. She pretended she didn’t notice them and dodged under the flap. Then she crawled quietly out the rear of the tepee, having removed a peg for that express purpose only an hour earlier. She dodged around the Buffalo Hat tepee and walked quietly up to the archers just as they were about to shoot.

  “Hi-yah!” She charged them. Two of the boys ducked away, but the third she grabbed by his braids. “I count coup on you,” she said in Sa-sis-e-tas. She drew her sheath knife. “And now I shall take your scalp!”

  The boy—he couldn’t be more than ten years old, she thought—turned to her with big black eyes, half smiling, half fearful.

  She frowned. “Are you a Cheyenne or a mouse?” she asked. “You should be singing your death song!”

  He composed his face stoically, tears gleaming, and began to chant in a broken voice:

  Rain is falling,

  The day is young,

  I am taken in battle—

  It does not hurt to die!

  “All right,” Jenny said. “Now you’re brave. Give me your bow and arrows and I’ll give you back your life.”

  The boy grinned and handed her the weapons. The bow was made of a tough wood, probably ash, she thought, and backed, like Tom’s, with the carefully cured shoulder sinew of a buffalo. Someone had lavished a lot of care on its making. The length of its back was beautifully painted in lozenges of red and blue, and from the lower limb, tied by strands of dried sinew to a carved plug, trailed a tuft of red-blond hair. At first she thought it might be a scalp, then realized from the coarseness that it was only horsehair. The bow’s handle was wrapped with a piece of dark blue wool, probably cut from a captured U.S. Army blanket and sewed neatly up the belly. She nocked an arrow and drew it full-length. The bow pulled about thirty or forty pounds—a heavy draw for such a small boy to master. She aimed at a weather-bleached buffalo skull about twenty paces off and let fly. Because of the sinew backing, the bow released much harder and faster than the yew longbows she’d shot in her archery classes at the academy. The blunt-headed arrow bounced off the skull and sailed out over the tops of the tepees.

  She kept the bow, but that night brought to the boy’s tepee the hooves and tanned hide of a deer she had killed, along with a hefty load of its salted, sun-dried meat. For the next three days she hunted the brushy draws near camp with her new bow. She killed jackrabbits, a sage grouse, and a yearling antelope buck she lured into range as Tom had taught her, by waving the tuft of horsehair, tied to the bow’s top, over the lip of a ridge behind which she crouched. The antelope seemed mesmerized by the motion, stepping closer and closer on its shiny black toes, until she stood and put an arrow feather-deep into the base of its throat.

  When she brought the prongbuck into camp draped across her shoulders, people came running from their tepees
to admire her kill. Tom smiled proudly. Strongheart winked at her, and even Pony Quirts, the boy from whom she had taken the bow as her spoils of war, whooped happily in her honor. To kill with an arrow, Jenny reckoned, was to be a Cheyenne. Or at least well on her way to becoming one.

  YELLOW EYES SEWED moccasins of heavy buffalo hide to cover Otto’s tender toe stumps, lining them with moss she gathered from the rocks of the high country. He found he could walk much faster now. She devised pads of supple, wide-cut buffalo leather that fit snugly over Otto’s knees, left hand and elbow, and the stump of his right arm, allowing him to stalk game on all fours without being seen from a distance. Every day he walked out with her, mile upon mile, uphill and down, with the hide of a white wolf draped over his back. The Indians, Otto knew, used hides like this to disguise themselves when approaching a herd of feeding buffalo, which paid little attention to wolves until they were quite close. Buffalo, the Indians said, could tell by the way wolves walked when they were about to attack. Cheyenne hunters crawled up obsequiously to within bow range, then killed the fattest cows with ease.

  But Otto couldn’t use a bow. Nor was he fast enough on his truncated feet to catch even a day-old calf—and if by chance he caught one, how would he kill it? He didn’t have the jaws of a wolf and he couldn’t wield a knife.