I tried, that is, to retain some smattering of civilization while doing nothing to jeopardize my barbarian friends. A very thin line to walk. Neither was it always possible to avoid certain savage practices, if you know what I mean. Hell, I guess you don’t. All right, then: I didn’t go out of my way to do it, but I had to take hair now and again. So long as I’ve confessed that, you also ought to be told that in such cases the victim ain’t always dead or even unconscious, and your knife ain’t always sharp and sometimes there is an ugly sound as the scalp parts company with the skull. I kept it to a minimum, but sometimes Younger Bear was close by me on the field of battle, offering no choice. By the age of fifteen he carried so many scalps about his person and gear that at a certain distance he seemed covered all over with hair, like a grizzly.
I don’t want to overemphasize this practice. There was another, fortunately for me, that took precedence over it: I mean the making of coups, riding into the midst of the enemy and striking one with the handle of a weapon or with a little stick carried just for that purpose. It is a greater accomplishment than killing him because more dangerous for the practitioner, and if you had to reduce the quality of Cheyenne life to a handy phrase you might describe it as the constant taking of risks.
I could always try to count coups when I wanted to avoid bloodletting, and I often did, though not being among the foremost in that pursuit. To be outstanding at it, you had to be crazy. I held my own and never tried to compete with Coyote, who among the bunch of my age was champion and became a bigger hero for it than Younger Bear with all his hair. The Bear made valiant efforts but at the last minute he couldn’t help setting aside his coup stick for his hatchet and instead of touching he would hack. But Coyote rode unarmed into the press of the enemy and, slashing lightly with his little quirt, took coups more quickly than they could be enumerated, and though his adversaries made every effort to take his life, he would generally come back without a scratch, having great medicine.
Now I might go on for hours relating the incidents of war, but whereas they are every one different in the actual occurrence and never dull when your own life is at stake, they have a sameness in the telling. So I won’t wear them to the point where you think fighting is as routine as riding on a streetcar. Nor will I go into my numerous wounds, most of which I still bear slight traces of, like faded tattooing.
That same summer that we was up on the Powder, a colonel named Harney attacked the Brule Sioux in their camp on the Blue River, above the North Platte, and killed eighty. It almost goes without saying that these Indians was friendlies, otherwise the Army wouldn’t have found them; and put up no resistance, else they wouldn’t have been punished to that degree. Some of that figure was made up of women and children, on account of the warriors retreated from the cavalry charge. That sounds yellow but actually was ignorance. I’m talking about both Indians and whites. A coward kills women, but a soldier of that time at full gallop often couldn’t tell them from the braves, and the kids got it from the indiscriminate hail of lead.
As to the fleeing warriors, you got to know Indian ways to appreciate that. When they fight each other, one side charges and the other retreats; then they turn and reverse the situation. This makes for a nice contest in which everybody gets his chance. The Army didn’t fight by the rules and no doubt would not have if they knew them, for a white man gets no pleasure out of war itself; he won’t fight at all if without it he can get his way. He is after your spirit, not the body. That goes for both the military and the pacifists, neither breed of which is found among the Cheyenne, who fought because of the good it did them. They had no interest in power as we know it.
Well, up on the Powder River we heard about this incident even as it was happening, in the Indian way which I have already told you I can’t explain, so just accept it as I did. Red Dog mentioned it to me, and for all I know he got it from an eagle, for he was an eagle-catcher, which is a special profession among the Cheyenne. Within a minute or two it was all over camp. The chiefs didn’t hold any council this time, because for one thing no Sioux appeared with any project, and for another, it had just gone to prove Old Lodge Skins’s wisdom in staying away from white men and thus giving them no opportunity to break any rules.
We stayed the rest of the year up in that territory, which was prettier country than along the Platte, nearer to lodgepoles, firewood, elk, and bear, for the Big Horn Mountains rose fifty-sixty mile to the west with their purple base climbing to a silver crown, and they was rich in timber and game and kept the watercourses fresh through the summer from their melting snows. When winter come, we left off fighting on the larger scale, though now and again you might encounter little enemy parties trapping buffalo in the drifts while you was out doing the like, and the whiteness might end up splashed here and there with red.
But sometimes it was just too cold, with the snow up to a bull’s shoulders, and I recall once when four of us coming back from an unsuccessful hunt ran across six Crow in a blizzard, we reached wearily for our slung bows, but they signaled: “We’ll fight when the weather gets better,” and went on. That was a relief: you could hardly see them.
When it got real fierce, when your very speech would freeze as it emanated from your lips and blow back in stinging rime against the cheeks, we hung close to the tepees and ate the dried meat taken the summer before and stored in rawhide parfleches, and pemmican, the greasier the better on account of a bellyful of melting fat will warm you sooner and stick longer than most anything I know. The value of stout women also went up in the snowtime, and I believe it was that winter that that enormous fat girl from the antelope surround ran the price for her hand up to six horses and other gifts too numerous to count (all of which went to her family) and was led to the bridegroom’s lodge.
One time when Nothing was outside her tepee gathering snow in a kettle to melt down for water, I slogged over to her vicinity and warbled like a bird, but she didn’t take any more notice than if I hadn’t been present, and soon her Ma come out and throwed a little bone at me and said go away, bad boy. That was the extent of my love life that winter.
By the thaw we was all, men and animals, pretty well trimmed down to basic muscle and sinew, with our tongues sharp for fresh provender. Spring was really something to look for in those days when you were lean and hungry and young. Old Lodge Skins wasn’t the latter by upwards of fifty years, but the sap rose in him before it did in the trees and he got his younger wife, White Cow Woman, with child again. I have previously mentioned only Burns Red and Little Horse as his offspring, because I was closest to them, but there was others around in various sizes, of which I didn’t take much notice of the little girls and was banned by custom from doing so with the females of my own age, they being so to speak my sisters; and more was dead.
Shooting Star, Burns Red’s wife, was also pregnant, and a lot of the other women after that season of lay-off from war. These new children would make up for our losses in battle, those that were males, that is, and if they grew up. At present there was five or six women to every adult brave. I’ve slipped by the subject of death as if we won all the time. We lost almost as often; mostly it was an even score in the long run. What made the Cheyenne special was that they were fewer than most of their enemies; always outnumbered but never outfought, as the saying goes.