Tie My Bones to Her Back

by Robert F. Jones

  Some of the hunters, to show the skill and deftness of their ponies, dashed in to plant arrows by hand in the bull’s hump. Other Indians knelt on their horse’s back as they lanced the brave bull. One young warrior tried to rush in mounted backward on his pony but fell at the last moment as the pony balked. The old bull stumbled forward and flashed his short thick horns forward with the full strength of a thick heavy neck. The fallen Cheyenne flew upward trailing a string of glistening intestines from a broad gash in his belly.

  The circle of riders paused for a moment in confusion and the bull took advantage of it. He broke toward Wolf Chief’s boulder, nearly on top of him now, the arrows in his hump rattling, his breath harsh and hot, bloody spray blowing from his nostrils. Wolf Chief reared and slung his javelin. It took the bull as he passed, deep behind the shoulder, low down, through the heart. The bull turned to stare at this new adversary, and its huge black eyes locked on Wolf Chief’s. You too . . .

  Wolf Chief heard Jenny’s high whoop; then all the hunters were grinning and shaking their weapons over their heads. From the slope below he heard the tremolo of the women, gazing upward to where he stood, all singing their strongheart songs. He checked his impulse to howl. Judged solely by Cheyenne joy, he was a man again.

  When the hunting party came home that evening, laden with fresh meat and hides and the body of the horseman killed by the old bull, there was a muted sense of excitement in the camp to offset the formal lamentations over the dead man. Little Wolf and his war party had returned.

  With them they brought scalps and horses aplenty, but also grave news.

  18

  HE WAS A short, scarred, wiry man with the blackest, most ominous eyes Jenny had ever seen. He stared at her as if she were no more than a rock. Yet she could see something of Tom in his father’s face, particularly the strong chin and wide cheekbones, the breadth of skull. But there was no sense of fun in Little Wolf’s eyes. He spoke in slow cadences, uninflected, in a deep no-nonsense voice. Everyone deferred to him.

  Little Wolf’s party had ridden south, he told the Old Man Chiefs, with the rest of the band listening in the dark beyond the council fire, through the land of the Pawnee Wolf People, where they had stolen some horses and taken two scalps, but had lost a Crazy Dog soldier named Broken Face. Quiet groans arose from the audience—the mourning would begin later, when the story had ended. They had crossed the War Shield and the Salty Rivers, seeing no great herds of buffalo as in years past, only a few stragglers among the bleaching bones. They had crossed the two Iron Roads of the spiders and been chased by blue soldiers for a day, shot three soldiers and killed one of them, but left him his hair—it was far too short for a trophy.

  They had skirted Fort Dodge and crept into the great spider village that had grown up around it: lodges of wood, each one as big as a hundred tepees, with the sound of singing metal coming out the windows and gunfire in the streets, women courting men brazenly in the doorways. From a corral on the edge of town they had taken twenty-four horses and ridden south for the Flint River. Buffalo hunters everywhere, coming and going, their great wagons creaking along the new, deeply rutted trails, piled high with freshly killed hides. They had encountered three spiders cutting wood along Crooked Creek and killed them, tied them to the wheels of their wagon and shot arrows into them until they resembled heschkoveto, hedgehogs. Then they had burned the wagon with the hides and the dead spiders still on it.

  Some of the Old Man Chiefs muttered objections at this. They were Peace Chiefs.

  “The spiders are killing the buffalo of our Cheyenne brothers, south of the Dead Line set by the Medicine Lodge Treaty,” Little Wolf answered them. “The buffalo of our allies the Arapaho, the Comanche, and the Kiowa. They’ve already killed all the buffalo in our own old hunting country, from the Flint to the Buffalo Bull River. According to the treaty, they had no right to do this. But the spider soldiers won’t stop them. Why don’t you try to tell them about it and see what they say? They’ll just laugh in your face, as they did mine. ‘Our orders are to stay here,’ they say, safe in their forts. ‘We can’t go chasing every lawbreaker in the Territory.’”

  Later, Little Wolf continued when the muttering had quieted, they had met with a group of spiders—not soldiers but decent fellows who were carrying instruments of metal and glass, tall instruments that stood on three spindly legs of wood, with which they were marking out with string and stakes a series of straight lines across the land. These men had given them black soup and sweet water, even shared their meat with the Cheyennes. Yet one of these men they had killed, when they caught him alone the following day, and smashed his tools. Now he could make no more straight lines.

  More muttering from the Peace Chiefs.

  “The land was made by Maheo,” Little Wolf said calmly, “and surely the All-God did not intend it to be marked with straight lines. It is along these lines that the spiders build their Iron Roads and their villages full of crazy water and unchaste women and singing metal.”

  They had then reached the camp of Iron Shirt, the great Southern Cheyenne war leader of the Bow String Society. Iron Shirt was living near the Darlington Agency on Red River, which the spiders called the North Canadian. Iron Shirt’s people had had no food from the agency in two months, despite the promises of the Spider Father in Washington of beef and corn and blankets in plenty. Yet the Sa-sis-e-tas were forbidden to go away from the agency to hunt buffalo farther west, or else they would be labeled Hostiles and killed by the blue soldiers wherever they were found. Iron Shirt’s brother, Medicine Water, was there as well, and he, too, had a bad face for the spiders.

  Medicine Water spoke of a new holy man among the Quahadi Comanches, a fat young fellow named I-sa-tai, who urged war on the spiders before all the buffalo were gone and the Indians starved to death or were killed by the spider disease, the coughing of blood. This I-sa-tai, whose Quahadi name translated into Cheyenne as Wolf Shit, claimed the ability to vomit up whole wagonloads of cartridges, and yet to turn the spiders’ own bullets to water in the barrels of their throat guns.

  “I met with this man,” Little Wolf said, with a perfectly straight face, “and his name suits him well.”

  Jenny laughed. Little Wolf frowned at her.

  “I don’t believe it’s possible for even so plump a Quahadi to hold a wagonload of anything in his belly, or to turn bullets to water in rifle barrels. Yet there’s something to be said for a war right now. The spiders are still few in number, especially south of the Dead Line and north of the land of the Tehannas and Meskins. The Treaty of Medicine Lodge forbids these hide killers to hunt on our lands. If we kill enough of them, maybe they’ll finally learn how to behave themselves and spare us the rest of our buffalo.”

  “They aren’t killing our buffalo,” said a Peace Chief called No Neck, “not up here in the north, anyway.”

  “Not yet,” Little Wolf said. “But once they’ve finished the southern herd, they’re bound to come here. They love to kill buffalo, just as we love to steal horses.”

  “If we make war on the spiders,” No Neck said, “they’ll only send their blue spiders into this country and burn our lodges, kill our women and children and horses, as the spiders under Long Hair Kuh’sta did to Black Kettle’s people on the Lodge Pole not long ago, and Chivington before him at Sand Creek.”

  “Black Kettle believed in peace at any cost,” said a young woman named Lance, who had come from the south and was now living with relatives in this band. “Black Kettle didn’t make war on the spiders; in fact, at Sand Creek he had a big spider flag flying over the village to show his allegiance to Washington. I was with him there, along with many of you. We were camped near the spider village called Fort Lyon, but Chivington’s bad faces came and killed us anyway. And they took not only scalps—they cut the breasts from the women and rode away with them, to make purses.” Her children, three boys and a girl, and her husband had died in that fight. “The spiders will kill us whatever we do,” she concluded. “War or
peace.”

  “It’s better we leave them alone,” old Screech said. “Maybe Maheo will send a great plague to kill all the spiders. They’re a sickly lot, anyway.”

  “There’s no doubt that the buffalo are getting fewer every year,” said another Peace Chief, an old man named Chewing Elk. “This never happened before. What we need is a fresh supply of buffalo. I can’t believe Maheo has turned his face from us. Perhaps the mouth of the cave on No-wah-wus where the buffalo emerge has been blocked by some obstruction—a huge boulder, maybe. We could send some soldiers to pull the boulder free . . .”

  “We passed No-wah-wus on our return,” Little Wolf said. “I stopped to pray there. The cave isn’t blocked. The reason the buffalo are fewer every year is because the spiders are killing them faster than Maheo can breed new ones. Soon they’ll all be rubbed out—buffalo, antelope, elk, and deer, even rabbits and skunks—and our life as a People will end along with them. Soon we’ll all be dead, except for a few of us maybe, hanging on as farmers, scratching the dirt like the spiders themselves.” He paused to let that thought sink in.

  “When the Southerners were here a few years ago to renew the Arrows,” No Neck said, “Chief Stone Calf spoke of another cave like the one on No-wah-wus. It’s in a butte on the Staked Plain, and it, too, sends forth buffalo. An Old Woman sits in the cave, tending them, and orders them out into the world each spring. Maybe the Old Woman died, or forgot to release them lately, and the buffalo don’t know they’re supposed to come out. Let’s send some soldiers down there to see what’s happened. It would be better than war with the spiders, which we cannot win.”

  “We could send Yellow-Haired Woman,” old Screech said. “She claims to have power over the Buffalo People.”

  “No, I don’t,” jenny said. “It’s just you people who say that. No matter what you think, I’m just a woman—with no power at all but what’s in my own two arms.”

  “You might be touched by the maiyun and not even know it,” Chewing Elk said. “It’s happened before. And our Elk Soldiers saw you being born from the belly of a buffalo cow. Can you deny that, too?”

  “My brother, Wolf Chief, only put me in there to save me from the storm,” Jenny said. “He had killed the cow with his throat gun for that purpose. The carcass froze in the cold of the storm and they rode up just as I was breaking out.”

  “Wolf Chief is a maiyun,” Screech said. “His own woman says so. Besides, wolves speak to us all the time, in many ways, warning us of dangers or telling us where to find success.”

  The people around her nodded and said, “Haáhe! It’s true.”

  “Let’s send her,” someone shouted. Others—women and old men mainly—chimed in from the darkness. “Yes, yes—it’s better than war!”

  “You don’t even know where that cave is,” Jenny said, angry now. “It’s all just hearsay anyway, and based on superstition at that.”

  “I know where the cave is,” Little Wolf said. “We scouted it on our way back north. It is inside a butte shaped like the head of a buffalo, on the Staked Plain near the canyon the Meskins call Palo Duro. But it would be dangerous for a woman of the spiders to go there, especially traveling with Cheyenne soldiers. There are spider hide hunters all through that country now. They’d think the woman was a captive and kill our soldiers. Maybe the woman, too, if she showed sympathy to the Cheyenne. The spiders have a permanent camp near the Palo Duro now, on Red River across from a creek called White Deer. Two stores and a place to sell spider water, what they call a saloon, also a small tepee where a man puts iron shoes on their horses and repairs their wagons. It’s not far from the old trading post called Adobe Walls, the one built by William Bent, where our people fought the blue soldiers in the old days. At the new camp are many spiders we used to steal horses from in the Smoky Hill country—Rath and Leonard and Myers, the one called Hanrahan, young Ogg, and the yellow-haired friend of this man Black Hat, whom you now call Wolf Chief.”

  “McKay?” Jenny said. “Rides a pretty little chestnut mare?”

  “That’s the very one,” Little Wolf said. “I scouted his camp myself. He has some English with him, rich Long Knife spiders who live in big, striped tepees. They wear strange clothes of velvet, drink spider water all night, and only wake up at noon. Then they go out on their tall horses with their tall, weak, fast dogs and shoot everything they can find, but take only the heads.”

  “I’ll go to your Buffalo Butte,” Jenny said. “Not that it will do any good, mind you, but that’s my horse McKay’s riding. He stole her from me and I’ll have her back.”

  “That’s a laudable attitude,” Little Wolf said. “But it won’t be as easy to take ponies from the spiders as it was in the old days. Too much hair has been lifted lately, and these English keep close watch. Their guards shoot at anything that moves, and the head chief of the Long Knives has a heavy brass gun that one man can shoot all day, merely by turning a crank that’s mounted on its side. A gun so heavy that one man alone cannot lift it. We tried to steal it and take some of their horses as well, but their dogs were everywhere at night. Strongheart tells me you’re a brave woman, a good shot with throat gun and bow, not a bad rider. Perhaps you’re a good thief as well, better than a Cheyenne. Take my son with you, and such of his friends who care to go along.” He waved his hand in dismissal.

  “Haáhe!” yelled the friends of Little Wolf. The Peace Chiefs looked glum but did not object.

  THEY MADE READY to leave the following morning—Jenny, Tom, Crazy, Walks like Badger, Cut Ear, and the young Indian boy Pony Quirts. It was Pony’s father who had been killed in the closing minutes of the buffalo hunt, eviscerated on the horns of the big bull. The boy was almost twelve years old, nearly of age for the war trail anyway. He was a good rider and hunter—Jenny had seen him in action. His mother was long dead, she learned—tuberculosis. Pony had been living with a stingy old aunt who was happy to see him leave.

  “What will you use for a bow, now that I have yours?”

  “I have my father’s,” Pony said. “Along with his ponies. His moccasins, too, though I’ll have to grow into them.”

  “If you live so long,” Jenny said. “You must care for yourself on this trail, for I’ll not be a mother to you.”

  “I can fend for myself,” Pony said. She believed it.

  As they cinched down the last loads on their packhorses—extra powder and lead, parfleches of pemmican, sleeping robes, cookware—Little Wolf rode over to see them off.

  “You’ve met Quanah?” he asked Tom.

  “Yes, two years ago in a spider camp on the Buffalo Bull. He came in to trade hides.”

  “Quanah’s a good man, but he backs this Wolf Shit fellow. They may go to war soon. If so, try to stay out of it. I don’t think they can win, much as I hope they will. But I don’t want you getting killed down there. We may have plenty of fighting of our own up here before long, and I’ll need all the soldiers I can get.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “‘Yes, Father.’” Little Wolf laughed. “I’d have said the same thing to mine when I was your age—then gone out and counted as many coups as possible. The young don’t believe they can die. Well then, I won’t order you to stay out of it. But don’t get yourself killed needlessly. None of these mad, lone charges against massed rifles. Remember—the buffalo hunters can shoot straight, their bullets respect no Indian’s medicine, and they kill at a great distance. But you know that, you’ve been with them.”

  “Haáhe.”

  “The main thing I wanted to tell you, though, was this: While you were away from the People, I made a trip to Washington, along with Morning Star and the Arapaho Little Bear. Yes, ‘Wild Indians’ in the heartland of the spiders, strange, indeed—but the Army had arranged it. We took the Iron Road, and I’ll tell you, it frightened me. Their Traveling Houses move fast as the wind. And the villages—more than you could count in a year of counting, all crooked and crowded together and smelling vilely of spiders, horse dung so deep on the
streets you could disappear beneath it and never be missed. Washington is hot, full of horseflies and mosquitoes, big stone carvings of war chiefs and leaders, pillars of marble that reach the sky, gigantic lodges made of white stone, spiders everywhere. Most of them thieves. I developed a great respect for their pickpockets.”

  Little Wolf paused, shook his head, then spat on the ground as if to erase the memory.

  “There we met with the Washington Chief, a great leader of blue soldiers named Grant. Now he is chief of all the spiders. Ugly little bug, hair all over his face. But tough. You remember the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, after we killed Fetterman?”

  “Haáhe.”

  “Well, the Washington Chief says we agreed by that treaty to give up all our country north of the Greasy River—what they call the Platte—and move down with the Southern Cheyenne. But we did not agree to that, or at least the interpreter didn’t mention it, and we told him so. Grant and a subchief of his, a fat man named Columbus Delano, the Secretary of the Interior, they call him, in charge of all the dirt the spiders walk on, tried to make us agree to go south. Grant even said we’d be happier there. That country isn’t as cold, he said, and the game is more plentiful. Ha! I’ve just been there, I know differently.”

  “Haáhe.”

  “What he did not say is that the country, while it is certainly ‘not as cold,’ is at the same time too hot to live in, at least for our people. What he did not say is that the game is disappearing fast, thanks to his hide hunters. We refused to go south. We sat there for a long time, in silence, staring at each other. They finally agreed to let us remain here in the north for a while, until they figured out ‘a better solution.’ Whatever that means—more tricks, more promises, more lies, no doubt. But you can be sure they will not budge on this business of sending us south. They want our country. They want to make it like their own. All farms and Iron Roads and great ugly villages full of weak ugly spiders. Everyone crazy with working fever. So there will be war, count on it. And I want you alive to help me fight it.”