It was pretty early on that I come to realize that most serious situations in life, or my life anyway, were like that time I rubbed out the Crow: he spared me because I was white, and I killed him because I was Cheyenne. There wasn’t nothing else either of us could have done, and it would have been ridiculous except it was mortal.
Anyhow, the Cheyenne now had got to believing they might soon have to destroy all the white men on the plains, an idea that didn’t seem altogether preposterous when you saw the size of that camp. Even I got to entertaining the possibility: we could ourselves mount maybe fifteen hundred warriors, and we was now friends with the Kiowa and Comanche who lived just south, and our old pals the Arapaho would help and the Sioux from the north. I was making out all right as an Indian and didn’t figure on losing any sleep over what happened to my native race when I thought of how little they had ever done for me. Besides, there wasn’t any talk of invading St. Louis or Chicago-or Evansville-which is where white people belonged.
That was before I heard the oratory of the medicine men: two of them, named Ice and Dark. They had great powers. All they had to do was make certain motions towards the soldiers, and when the latter fired their guns the bullets would roll slowly down the barrels and fall harmless to the earth.
I used to stand along the path that Nothing took when she went to the river for water, and as she passed I’d grab the fringe on her skirt and give a little tug, then let go. About the only compensation I got for it was that she didn’t show no more attention to Coyote, who was also now stuck on her, than to me. He and I would take turns in paying her notice: such as that if I was waiting for her on the river path, he would let that go and try to approach her when she was gathering buffalo chips. Since neither of us was yet getting anywhere, we wasn’t jealous of each other and maintained the neutral relations me and Coyote had always had. You know how it is: you have your friends and enemies, and then there is that host of others you can take or leave: same way among Indians.
I also had developed an Indian sense of time. I must have been about fifteen when we was on the Solomon’s Fork, and I had this crush on Nothing but I wasn’t any more impatient in regard to it than she was: the Cheyenne take five years or so to court their women and even so I was young to be starting now. I’ll bet you never knowed redskins was so slow in this area. But being warriors, the Cheyenne like to keep themselves bottled up. You try fighting sometime after going at it hard and you’ll see the point: you’ll just want to sleep.
Well sir, it was interesting to be in that big camp with all the activities and pretty soon they held a sun dance which went on for eight days of highly elaborate doings that wouldn’t mean anything to an individual not of that persuasion, but it reaffirmed the Human Beings in their sense of superiority, if it was possible to do that when they already never believed they had even close competition. In the self-tortures Younger Bear distinguished himself of course. He ripped the pegs out of his chest within fifteen minutes after their being attached, and had them hooked into new places and hung against the rawhide lines all night long. Next day his whole upper body was like an open sore, and he didn’t treat it with salve or mud or anything but strutted around with the blood drying.
Now you might call it typical of the Cheyenne that after all the talk of how they was going to wipe out the whites, and all the ceremony that fitted them to do so, they began to break up the camp and move off with a purpose to keep out of trouble. After all that, it would have seemed like an anticlimax to go and really fight, and Indians, who war among themselves all the time, didn’t get no pleasure out of tangling with white men, which was a nasty business even if you won.
The bands traveled individually but for some distance formed two general movements: northward or south, for the tribe as a whole was divided most of the year into a larger segment that roamed as separate parts about the Platte, and another that hung around the fort of William Bent the trader, on the Purgatory and Arkansas rivers down in southern Colorado.
We who followed Old Lodge Skins was of course Northern Cheyenne and now moved with the Burnt Artery band in that direction. I should say before we get too far along that we had done a good bit of business at that gathering and married off most of our available females, whose husbands was now with us. That and his acceptance back into his proper band had put Old Lodge Skins in such a good mood that I figure he would have got into trouble again under the wrong buffalo robe had not camp been struck when it was. I had seen him flickering his ruttish old eyes at several fat figures. I myself as yet didn’t have a horny thought towards Nothing, just would have liked to hear her shy, soft voice or draw a peek from them glowing black eyes.
We hadn’t got far when our scouts come back with the report of a column of troops about half a day’s ride ahead, moving our way. Now at the big camp they had had a few flintlocks, so about three of our warriors was now armed in this fashion, and Hump, who had been waiting for years for this eventuality, wanted to ride on and fight the soldiers. But Old Lodge Skins and the head chiefs of the Burnt Arteries was concerned for the women and children, so we turned and went back south in search of our other folks. Traveling east, we caught up with some of the southern people and reassembled with them again near the Solomon’s Fork. It wasn’t the whole crowd from before, but we had maybe three hundred fighting men and say ten or fifteen flintlocks which seemed to the Cheyenne pretty formidable armament.
The excitement was so great I didn’t have no time to work out my new point of view: I had already decided theoretically, as I said, that the utter annihilation of the paleface on the western prairie wasn’t no skin off my arse: I didn’t know a white man west of St. Joe except for the remnants of my own family who by now must long have reached Salt Lake. But when I studied that out, I never actually saw myself participating in such a massacre. Now here was a battle coming up with the U.S. Cavalry and I was passing for a Cheyenne warrior of some repute. I had the choice of being a coward or either kind of traitor. I remember wishing we was still fighting the Crow.
It sure was a serious problem, but all the time I considered it I was stripping down, daubing myself with red and yellow war paint, and honing the heads of my arrows on a little whetstone. There are some who in moments of indecision cease all bodily movement so as to give free play to the mind, but I’m the other type: I give employment to my hands, figuring my brain will follow suit. When this don’t work, there ain’t no reason to believe I’d have got any farther by sitting with my chin on my knuckles.
We sent the women and children off south below the Arkansas, although owing to the confidence the Cheyenne had at this moment they set up the lodges again and left them standing. Then Ice themedicine man led us to a little lake nearby, in which we made ourselves invulnerable by dipping our hands in the water. When the soldiers fired we’d just put up our palms and the balls would barely clear the muzzles and dribble to the ground.
That was when the whole business cleared up for me: I was going to die.
You can go so far with Indians and then that sort of thing comes up. I know the medicine of Left-Handed Wolf had cured me of my head wound, but I believe that happened because I was unconscious during most of the healing, and when you are out of your right mind there don’t seem to be any rules as to what is possible. Dead drunk, a man can take a fall that when sober would mash him like a tomato. I don’t want to be no bigot: I’m not saying that under no conditions can a rifle ball be stopped by magic. What I’m saying is that it ain’t going to be stopped by someone who don’t believe it can be done as applied to himself. Which was me. So far as Hump went, or Burns Red in the Sun, or Younger Bear, that was their lookout.