Which was a big mistake: I should either never have hit him in the first place or after doing so should have strutted around boasting about it and maybe given him some more punishment to consolidate the advantage: that’s the Indian way. You should never feel sorry about beating anybody, unless having conquered his body you want his spirit as well. I didn’t yet understand that, so throughout the rest of the day I kept trying to shine up to Younger Bear, and the result was I made the first real enemy of my life and he caused me untold trouble for years, for an Indian will make a profession of revenge.
The next thing I remember us boys doing was to go and play camp with a number of little girls. This game is a mimicry of what the grownups do. The girls set up miniature tepees and the boys act like their husbands, going out on war parties and having mock buffalo hunts in which one boy, playing the animal, carries a prickly pear at the end of a stick. The hunters shoot their arrows at this fruit, and are considered to have brung the buffalo down if they strike the target. Whoever misses, the buffalo lad gets to swat on the hind end with the prickly pear. You can see that whatever the Cheyenne do has a threat of pain in it, if not the realization thereof.
In the earlier doings I had fell in on equal terms, but it wasn’t so when it came to play camp, and that I believe was due to Younger Bear, who was by common consent war chief of that establishment on account of he could shoot an arrow exceptionally well and he was very convincing when braining a make-believe foe with a nasty-looking war club he had fashioned himself. That’s the way a man gets to be a war chief among the Cheyenne: he can fight better than anyone else. He is a chief only in battle. For peace they have another kind of leader. You take Old Lodge Skins, he was a peace chief. The principal war chief of our bunch was Hump. These fellows got along fine, except you’ll recall at the whiskey fight as soon as they had a few in their belly, they went for each other. However, when Skins’s gun blew up, they forgot about it and went their separate ways.
Anyhow, Younger Bear was at about eleven years of age already very well advanced towards his true profession, and he was a big tall fellow who walked with his chest arched out. I’ll say this about the fight I had with him: he could have killed me except that he knew nothing about boxing. But his ignorance wasn’t my responsibility; I ain’t never been big, but I’m shrewd.
In those first days I was dependent on what the other boys would lend me: bow, arrows, and the certain type of stick they ran with between their legs as if it was a pony. But when it came to war games under Younger Bear’s direction, off they’d ride, even Little Horse, leaving me behind with the girls and the littler kids who were supposed to be the babies of the play camp. Now after them boys did that until it got to be a habit, they started to call me “Antelope Girl,” because there I was, helping to dismantle the toy tepees, which is women’s work.
The sun dance was another adult pursuit the children mimicked in play camp. The boys would drive thorns in their flesh, tie strings to them, and drag around prairie-dog or coyote skulls. I might have got desperate enough to try it myself, had I not already at that early age worked out the following proposition: a white man is better than a redskin, who is a savage. Why is he better? Because he uses his wits. Centuries earlier the Indians had learned you could move heavy objects by rolling logs under them, yet still by the time I lived among them they had never cut a cross section through one of them logs to make a wheel. You can see that as either invincible ignorance or stubbornness; whichever, it’s just barbarous.
I did go behind one of the play-tepees and experiment with a thorn, but no sooner than the point touched my flesh I turned yellow. I never could get interested in hurting myself. So I got an arrow, stole a real one with an iron trade point, and wore it in two with a jagged rock. Now the Cheyenne make a chewing gum from the evaporated juice of the milkweed. Buffalo Wallow Woman give me some, but I put it into my belly button rather than my mouth, and stuck in it the end of the arrow shaft that ends with the feathers. The other part, that with the iron head, I fixed so it appeared to issue from the cleft of my arse, the breechclout being drawn aside in accommodation. It looked as if I was fairly skewered through the middle, at an angle of forty-five degrees. When I was all prepared, I come out from back of the lodge, walking funny with my rump cheeks tight, and secretly supporting the feathered end with a hand to my gut as if to catch the pain-that was an infraction of the rules, for the idea is to show a manly indifference to the hurt, but I figured the act would be spectacular enough to cover up an incidental.
I was right. The girls saw me first and slapped their mouths so hard it’s a marvel their front teeth stayed tight. And then the boys, with their miserable little thorns and them tiny animal skulls. In chagrin Coyote ripped his out of his back and throwed it away, and the blood streamed in scarlet ribbons down to his rump. Little Horse began to dance about and boast how he was my friend. Poor old Younger Bear, he just turned and trudged away, the little skulls trailing along the ground behind him, hopping when they struck a rough, and when one of them caught under a sagebush the rawhide line broke rather than his skin.
From here on I was on equal terms in the war games, and before long Burns Red in the Sun made me a little bow. Burns was Old Lodge Skins’s son by one of his earlier wives now dead. My own position turned out to be orphan attached to the chief’s lodge, which gave me the right to benevolent consideration from the whole family just as if I was related to them by blood. Almost every tepee had a similar lad, though the rest was pure Indians. The women were obliged to give me clothes and food, and the men to see I grew up into a man. I don’t recall my race being held against me while I was small. Caroline, for example, was never referred to-for one reason, because it was a great shame to Old Lodge Skins that he had smoked a pipe with what turned out a female. In the very old times the Cheyenne would not smoke when a woman was even in the tepee; they tied up the door to keep them out.
Another reason why it was easy for me to melt into that tribe was that none of the Indians wanted to think about the incident of the wagons. As we have seen, my brother Bill never reported the massacre to Fort Laramie, and the soldiers didn’t come, so the Cheyenne had no worry about that. What bothered them was that while drunk they had nearly killed some of themselves; that’s the worst thing a Cheyenne could do: kill another Cheyenne. Being drunk is no excuse. It is always regarded as murder, and the murderer rots inside his guts, giving off a stink to other members of the tribe, soiling the Sacred Arrows, and driving the buffalo away. Such a fellow cannot smoke the pipe, nor will anyone eat from a dish he has touched; he is generally run out of camp.
Now I know at this point you figure you have one on me. The way I described the whiskey fight, it looked as if some of the Indians were killed: for example, I surely said Pile of Bones blew off the back of White Contrary’s head and the latter’s brains run out. I swear that insofar as anybody could have told on the spot, that is what happened. But imagine my surprise when on that first morning in the Cheyenne camp, directly after the bath we boys took in the creek, who should show up waiting for us to take him to his horse but White Contrary, big as life and twice as ugly, and showing in no particular that he had ever been hurt. I trailed along behind him, taking a special interest in the back of his head, but if there was a hole in it, you couldn’t prove it by me. I saw a louse or two crawling along the part of his braids, but not even a crust of dried blood. And it was White Contrary, all right, for he had an unmistakable wart on the left flange of his nose.
Maybe you are beginning to understand, when I pulled the arrow-out-of-arse trick, why it didn’t occur to none of the children that I was hoaxing them. That is because Indians did not go around expecting to be swindled, whereas they was always ready for a miracle.