I was still sore at that silly thing he did; although it was a typical Indian joke, it showed bad taste and worse will at this point. I wasn’t taken in for a minute by his apparent friendliness.
“You know,” said I, “that one Human Being don’t pay another for saving his life.”
“Yes,” answered Younger Bear in a deadly voice, “but you are a white man.”
There ain’t no curse words in Cheyenne and most of the insults take the form of calling the other guy a woman or cowardly, etc., and even in my anger I never thought of applying those to Younger Bear. Besides, he had a great argument. I had just been in the act of thinking the same thing. Yet you know how it is: there are women who will take pay for letting you on them, but don’t call them “whore.”
Now on the needle of this Indian, the worse fate I could imagine was not to be a Cheyenne. He had really hurt my feelings. What I should have done was to accept it the Indian way, go sulk and fast until he apologized, which he’d of had to if only on account of my high prestige in the tribe right then. Actually, Bear didn’t but half believe in his own accusation. He was jealous and so had thrown me the dirtiest insult he could think up. If I’d played it right it would have got him in the backflash: he would have had to prove he was the Cheyenne, for I had done so.
Instead, I said hotly: “That’s right, you fool. Since I gave yours back to you, you owe me one life. And you can’t pay me off with that scalp nor a blanket nor all your ponies. Only a life will do, and I’ll let you know when I want one.”
He stuck the Crow scalp under his belt and got up.
“I heard you,” he said and went back into camp.
I had said that because I was mad and wanted to play it big. I didn’t know rightly what I meant. It was probably a kid’s bluff. Myself, I forgot it directly, though remembering Younger Bear’s dislike of me well enough for a while: then I forgot that too, for I didn’t see no more instances of it. He stopped shooting play arrows at me, put no more burrs under my saddle, in fact seemed to do his best to pretend I was as solid a Human Being as he had proved me not to be.
But the point is that he never forgot what I said on that rise up by the Powder River, and about twenty years later, and some fifty mile away from where we had been sitting that night, he paid me in full.
I have said I was getting interested in girls. Just about the time this began to happen, the situation changed so that I couldn’t get near any of the Cheyenne girls of my own age. They had started to get their monthlies and from that time on was kept away from the boys, being always in the company of their mothers or aunts and wearing a rope belt between their legs until they got married. (They wore it after marriage, too, whenever their husband was away.) About all you could do was to show off when the girl you liked was watching. That probably comes as a surprise: you may think an Indian goes at it like a jackrabbit, but not the Cheyenne with their own women unless they are married to them, and since the married men always swear off it before going to war, and we were most of the time fighting, the Cheyenne were pretty hard up for tail at any given time. That’s why they was such fierce warriors, or so they believed anyway. I never knew a man who didn’t have a special interest in his own member, but to a Cheyenne it was a magic wand.
After Younger Bear went away and I cooled down, I started thinking about a girl named Howaheh-which means, I ask you to believe, “Nothing.” When we were littler and played camp, I had frequently been forced to choose Nothing as my make-believe wife, on account of them other boys knew how better to go about getting the good-looking ones for themselves and I was left with this girl, who was fairly ugly. But here lately she had, as young girls will, of a sudden turned pretty as a buckskin colt, with big, shy eyes like an antelope and the graceful limbs of a doe. She always used to like me when I didn’t pay no attention to her, but as you might expect nowadays ignored me utterly.
Well, nothing I could do about Nothing right then, so I finally got up and went down into camp. There was a dog awake there, about to howl in answer to the coyote though he knew it was wrong because it might alert prowling Crow to our location, so I said to him: “That’s not the Cheyenne way,” and he closed his chops and slunk off.
Everybody else was sleeping, the fires all cold. I found my robe, not far from the doorhole, and started to get into it when I realized it must be Little Horse’s, for he was wrapped in it, so I moved on to the empty one alongside, though I usually slept to his left.
But he was awake, and whispered: “This is yours.”
“It don’t matter none,” I says. “Stay there.”
“You want me to?” he asks, sounding disappointed.
And then I went to sleep, not thinking any more about it. If a Cheyenne don’t believe he can stand a man’s life, he ain’t forced to. He can become a heemaneh, which is to say half-man, half-woman. There are uses for these fellows and everybody likes them. They are sometimes chemists, specializing in the making of love-potions, and generally good entertainers. They wear women’s clothes and can get married to another man, if such be his taste.
Little Horse began to train to be a heemaneh not long after this incident. Maybe he got the beds mixed up by mistake that night and didn’t have anything in mind. Whatever, I personally didn’t find him my type.
CHAPTER 7 We Take on the Cavalry
THE CROW COME AFTER us on the following day and we had a good war, which was a stand-off as to who won. So we fought some more. And we fought the Ute and we fought the Shoshone, and after trading some horses with the Blackfeet, we fought them too. This fighting was pleasurable to the Cheyenne when they killed the enemy and very sad when vice versa. In the latter event you heard the wailing of mourners from morning till night. For while Indians love war, I don’t want you to get the idea they like to lose their relatives to it. They really like one another in the same tribe. And as to the enemy, they hate him for what he is but don’t want to change him into anything else.
When the Cheyenne gave the beating there was celebration. If it happened near our camp, the women and children went out and clubbed and stabbed the enemy wounded who was lying about and mutilated the dead, taking as souvenirs such items as noses, ears, and private parts. This was a real treat for them. If you seen as much as I did, you would have like me developed a strong stomach. Buffalo Wallow Woman was sort of my Ma, just a fine soul. I can’t count the times when I was small she hugged me against her fat belly, smiling down that moon-face with a sheen of grease on it; or give me a specially juicy piece of dog meat, tucked me in the robe at night, slipped me some Indian chewing gum, did beading on my clothes, and on and on. She was 100 per cent woman, like Old Lodge Skins was all man, and I don’t know that you could get near her quality had you boiled down a score of white females for their essence. But now what’d you think when you saw that sweet person ripping open some helpless Crow with her knife and unwinding his guts?
I’ll tell you what: after a while, I didn’t. The Crow and Ute and Shoshone never protested, on account of they did the same, so what the hell business was it of mine? You recall Old Lodge Skins’s attitude towards the whites: their ways were nonsensical to him but he figured they had reasons. I wasn’t going to let no Indian outdo me in tolerance. If Buffalo Wallow Woman or some tiny brown-faced kid came in from the field holding a piece of human offal, proud as can be, why I’d say the equivalent of “Swell!”
I had a bigger problem than that. I was still young but had killed my man, so if there was a war of any size I didn’t find it easy to beg off. I didn’t have no inclination to become a heemaneh like Little Horse, though that’s no criticism of him. There wasn’t any other alternative. What I did try, not being actually a Cheyenne, was to kill as few of whoever we was fighting as practicable; that is, I would go all out if it was a defensive action, but slack off if we was carrying the day.