“The medicine of the white man is strong,” said Old Bear. “It is their strong medicine which has defeated my people, not their bullets or their soldiers.”
Chance stood by the old man’s pony, not knowing what to answer, not completely understanding what he had meant.
“How long have you been here?” asked Old Bear.
“Since last night,” said Chance.
“Have you food?” asked Old Bear.
“No,” said Chance.
“Did you take food from the graves?” asked Old Bear.
“No,” said Chance.
Old Bear reached to a sack that was tied in the mane of his pony. Out of this he drew a handful of corn which he placed in Chance’s hands, which Chance gobbled down, and then two grease cakes, of which Chance made similarly short work.
“I will give no offering today,” said Old Bear.
“Thank you,” said Chance.
Old Bear turned on the pony’s back, squinting toward the hill in the distance, probably seeing little, but knowing, or sensing, where the young men would be.
“Once,” said Old Bear, “the Hunkpapa would not kill a white man because it would shame them.”
“Yesterday,” said Chance, “I killed two of them, maybe three.”
“Your medicine is strong,” said Old Bear.
“I was lucky,” said Chance.
“Strong medicine makes good luck,” said Old Bear.
Old Bear turned again to face Chance. “It is said you are the brother of Joseph Running Horse.”
“I am,” said Chance.
“Then you are Hunkpapa,” said Old Bear. “You are a white man but Hunkpapa. That is why you are strong. You have the medicine of two peoples.”
He looked back to the jutting break in the prairie on which Drum and his braves waited.
“Yet,” said Old Bear, “they would let me ride to your gun.”
“It’s my fight,” said Chance. “Not yours.”
“I was not always Old Bear,” said the old man, not looking at Chance.
Chance said nothing.
The Indian turned to face Chance. “I was once War Bear,” he said.
Chance was silent.
Old Bear sat astride his pony for a long time, not moving. Watching Chance.
His hands, with their thin, worn fingers, stiff and swollen at the knuckles, held the nose rope of his pony, and, lying across the pony’s mane, his ash bow and three buffalo arrows. His body, Chance noted, had been smeared with grease. The white hair of his braids had been tied with leather strings, deerskin Chance guessed. In the mane of the pony, opposite where the sack of corn and grease cakes had hung, there was tied a medicine bag, formed from the skin of a beaver, still retaining the head of the animal.
“You did not kill me,” said Old Bear, speaking as if noting something about the weather, or what day of the week it was.
“No,” said Chance.
“When you leave,” said Old Bear, “I will go with you.”
Chance said nothing.
He watched the old Indian dismount. It was hard for the old man but Chance knew that he must do nothing to help, that he must not even appear to notice.
When the old man was afoot he turned to face Chance.
“Before I hunt the white buffalo,” said Old Bear, “I sometimes come here to pray with the spirits of my people.”
Again Chance said nothing.
Hearing of a white buffalo puzzled Chance. He had never seen one, certainly, but for that matter had seen only a handful of buffalo of any sort, thin, scraggy creatures, unsteady and afflicted by parasites, remnants of the great herds that had once covered territories, now curiosities in traveling circuses. A white buffalo, Chance supposed, would be an albino. But why should an old man hunt an albino buffalo?
But now the old man had forgotten about Chance and was lost among the cottonwoods of the place of scaffolds. Chance could hear him singing his prayers to the Mystery. Once Chance saw him with his hands against the trunk of a tree in whose branches there was fixed one of the oblong, dark, burdened platforms, leaning against the tree, his head down.
At last the old man returned to his pony.
“We will now leave,” said Old Bear.
Chance did not help the old man mount.
He untied his own horse, slipped the carbine into the saddle boot, loosened the Colt in its holster.
At the edge of the grove, both mounted, Old Bear turned to Chance.
“Once,” he said, “I was War Bear.” His dim eyes seemed to blaze fiercely for a moment. “Do you believe that?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Chance, speaking in Sioux, “your tongue is straight.”
Suddenly the old man smiled, and then laughed, throwing back his head.
He leaned over his pony’s neck, speaking in Sioux. “Once no young man of the Hunkpapa would do what Drum has done. They would not let me ride under the guns of an enemy. Do you understand what I am saying?”
“Yes,” said Chance, also speaking in Sioux. “I hear the words of a father of the Hunkpapa.”
Old Bear laughed again and he lifted his bow happily. “Come!” he shouted in Sioux, “Let us ride together!”
And so together Chance, a physician from New York, and Old Bear, once of Sitting Bull’s White Horse Riders, left the place of scaffolds, on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in South Dakota, in the late afternoon of a Sunday in 1890, and rode together into the open prairie, toward Drum, the son of Kills-His-Horse, and two braves, who rode slowly to meet them.
Chapter Ten
Winona, the daughter of Old Bear, was making her way back to the Grand River encampment.
Head down, leading her pony by the nose rope, she was in no hurry to return home. The two travois poles dragging behind the pony left a double track in the prairie dust, but not a deep one, for the travois was empty.
No rations had been distributed at the ration point.
Yet it had been, yesterday, the second Saturday, and every second Saturday was ration day.
Like several of the other women, Winona had even stayed the night at the ration point, but it had been to no avail. This morning they had been told to go away.
There had been rations, but the soldiers and the Indian police had not permitted them to be distributed.
Winona recalled the abundance of sides of beef, lying in the dirt, spotted, stinking, but meat; and the piles of bulging flour sacks, and the bolts of cloth; some blankets; but nothing had been given to them, though they were the children of the Great White Father, and he had promised them these things made holy by being written on paper and signed by men in white collars and black coats, who were subchiefs of the Great White Father himself.
Winona wished she could speak to the Great White Father. She would tell him what his people had done, and he would be angry.
But he was far away, like Wakan-Tonka, the Great Mystery, and Winona wondered if there was a Great White Father, or if the white men were only lying again.
Perhaps there was a Great White Father and he was like the other white men, and would laugh at her and not give her the rations.
No rations unless your men come! That had been what the half-breed interpreters in their plaid shirts and white-man hats had said, with their hair cut short.
This was to stop the Ghost Dancing.
Near the ration point the soldiers from Fort Yates had been practicing with their big guns, running about them, and shouting, but not shooting them. If the men had come the soldiers would have shot the big guns, off into the prairie, so the men would remember that they had the big guns. But the men had not forgotten, and did not need to be reminded. But only the women, with their ponies and travois, came to the ration point, so the soldiers only ran about the guns, and shouted and pretended to shoot them.
The soldiers were to protect the Indians, she had been told. Suppose bad Indians came to kill them and steal their rations and take their scalps. Then the soldiers would drive the bad Indians away.