Ghost Dance (8 page)

Then Chance heard the noise again, the noise of a human being, in pain, suffering.

Without holstering the Colt, Chance laid it next to his face and put out his pipe, shoving it in the pocket of his corduroy shirt. Then staying as low as he could, he pulled on his boots. He then picked up the Colt and, moving on his elbows, crawled toward the sound. The grass tickled his neck and the Colt, after a minute or so, seemed heavy in his hand. His palm was sweating and his grip on the weapon was less sure. He put the weapon down, dried his hand on the grass, picked it up again and inched forward.

Taking advantage of bushes to his left he continued for several minutes to move slowly forward. He felt the bushes scratching at the back of his shirt. At last he worked his way over a tufted hump of ground, and could look down into a small grassy clearing beyond. It was well hidden, and lay not more than sixty yards from where he had thrown his blanket and saddle.

There was no movement in the clearing, and for an instant Chance had simply assumed it was empty, and that the sound came from elsewhere.

Then he saw it.

Not more than twenty yards away.

In the center of the clearing there was planted a cottonwood pole, green and springy, about eighteen feet high.

Around this pole, in a circle, the grass had been beaten away, torn from the ground by the footsteps of a human being.

In the late afternoon light Chance squinted, trying to make out more clearly what he saw.

In a fork in the pole was a bundle of branches wrapped in bark. Hanging from the pole were several objects: a tiny bundle of sticks, from which dangled little bags, perhaps of tobacco; a piece of meat, judging from the insects that swarmed on it, tied in the shape of an animal; what appeared to be a rawhide doll; and what was unmistakably a human being.

Chance sucked in his breath.

A young Indian was fastened to the pole by two long, taut strips of braided rawhide. These rawhide strips were fastened to pegs of wood which had been forced under the lateral muscles of the Indian's chest. His chest had been cut open. Then the pegs had been thrust in, behind the muscles, and fastened at both ends to the two rawhide strips that ran like twin carnival streamers to the tip of the greenwood pole.

The young man was hanging back, his weight dragging against the pegs under his flesh.

His naked chest and belly were covered with blood, some of it fresh and red, much of it dry and caked. Hanging backward, the Indian had his hands extended like stone toward the lowering sun. His eyes, half closed, seemed to stare blindly at the sun, not blinking.

He wore a breechclout, which, like the rest of his body from the chest down, was stained with blood. From his back, adding to the weight against the pegs under his chest muscles, hung a buffalo-hide shield. On his sweating head, the man wore a porcupine quill headdress and each of his wrists was circled with a bracelet of twisted sagebrush.

Chance shoved the Colt back in his holster. He must cut the man down. He knew that, even if he were interrupting some form of primitive execution.

Drawing out the knife he wore at his belt, Chance rose cautiously to his feet, but did not go immediately into the clearing. Rather, quietly, he circled the clearing, establishing to his satisfaction that only he and the young Indian were in the vicinity. Only then Chance approached the young Indian, who seemed more dead than alive.

Then Chance was at the Indian's side. He was a young man indeed, probably less than twenty. Slowly the head of the young man turned toward him. If he saw Chance he gave little sign of it. But when Chance lifted the knife to cut the rawhide strips the Indian's hands gently pushed him away.

"Good God," thought Chance, "he doesn't want to be cut down."

Chance tried once more and once again the Indian's hands pushed away Chance's hand.

Chance inspected the man's chest, and even his table-hardened stomach, familiar with ugly, hazardous facts of surgery, retracted for an instant, making him briefly nauseous.

The pectoral muscles were nearly torn through.

Chance cleared his head and took a deep breath, and was once again the physician.

But was he?

For he had resheathed his knife.

Chance had sworn an oath, but looking on this man, he understood, swiftly and incomprehensibly, that this man had a right to the cruelty and the pole, and that Chance must not deprive him of this right.

Chance did not understand what was taking place, but he sensed that he must not interfere.

It seemed the young Indian's eyes shone on him for an instant, bright.

Then the young man gave a great cry, which startled Chance, and he backed dancing away from Chance, the two strips holding him in his bloody circle. The pole bent after him, cruelly tensing the twin strips of rawhide. Drops of blood fell into the beaten circle beneath the Indian's moccasins, mixing with the dust. Now the young man was shouting in some guttural tongue that Chance could not begin to understand. It sounded like no language that he had ever heard.

Lord, thought Chance, backing out of the circle, he's trying to tear himself loose.

He didn't really want to watch, but he felt he had to. It wasn't just curiosity, nor was it the nobler motives which might have been associated with Chance's humane calling. It was something else, and Chance didn't really understand it. He knew only that he must watch.

He went back to his saddle, got his matches and tobacco and returned. Then he lit his pipe again, hunkered down about five yards from the bloody circle and watched the young man dance.

He'll be dead in an hour at this rate, thought Chance. It will be hard to bury the body. I have no tools.

The young Indian continued to dance around the pole, now singing as he danced, a guttural chant, repetitious, punctuated by sudden shouts.

As Chance, smoking, grew more accustomed to the torture that was taking place before him, he took his eyes from the young Indian.

The streamers, fastened at the top of the pole, had been notched in, to permit turning.

Around the foot of the pole, here and there, thrust into the dirt, were some slender, wooden wands, like that he had found on the prairie. Each carried its tiny cloth bag, presumably filled with tobacco.

About three paces to the west of the pole there was a buffalo skull, lying on a cushion of sagebrush. It faced east. Behind the skull, on two forked sticks, lay a long Indian pipe. The stem of this pipe, like the buffalo skull, faced east.

Chance returned his attention to the young Indian.

Obviously it had a meaning, to someone if not to Chance. As he continued to watch, somewhat to his uneasiness, his feelings of fascination, of horror, became gradually replaced with a certain, if not awe, respect.

It was a ceremony.

This place was holy.

The pole and the cruelty and the blood were holy.

What do I believe in, Chance asked himself, for which I could dance like this, and he answered his question simply, nothing.

No bear would do this, said Chance to himself, no wolf, no bird, no animal.

Only man.

And Chance, seeing this man suffer, doing nothing to relieve his pain, smoking quietly in a cottonwood grove in South Dakota in the year 1890, thought he understood more than he had found in the books of anatomy, more than he had found in the dissected cadavers in Cambridge, more than his professors had known, or than he had ever thought that he himself would know. Something here had given him, he felt, perhaps mistakenly, perhaps not, a short, terrible glimpse of something deep and possible in the race of which he was a member, something perhaps long buried and generally forgotten, something that might be akin to the meaning and the essence of man, in all its ugly, splendid keenness.

"Hea!" cried the young Indian, a shout in no language, more an animal cry than anything, something between victory and laughter.

As the hair climbed on the back of Chance's neck, he heard the beginning of a faint, ugly tearing sound. The sound became louder. "Hea!" cried the boy again, laughing and hurling himself backward.

There was a sudden, sickening rip and the young man had fallen backward to the grass. He was sprawled unconscious on the grass, free at last, lying outside the dusty, bloody circle.

He's loose, said Chance to himself, getting up. Chance's legs were stiff. He had watched a long time.

The two pegs on their rawhide strips dangled against the pole, making a little knocking noise in the wind.

Chance went to the boy, whose chest was open and thick with new blood. It was coming through the flesh, rising like red spring water through sand. Chance took off his brown corduroy shirt and shoved it against the wounds, anything to stanch the flow, which must be done immediately.

A quarter of an hour later, Chance gave the boy a sip of water from his canteen.

Joseph Running Horse looked up at Chance. "I have watched the sun," he said. "For three days I have watched the sun." Chance nodded, understanding nothing. Joseph Running Horse lapsed back into unconsciousness.

 

* * *

 

Chance didn't ride on that night, but stayed in the grove of cottonwoods, near the tiny creek.

He wrapped Running Horse in his blankets to prevent shock, and built a fire which he tended during the night.

The chest wounds, unsanitarily clotted against the material of Chance's shirt, would close in their own fashion. The Indian would not allow Chance to use the curved needle and the catgut thread to close the wounds.

"There must be scars," Running Horse had said.

He would not even allow the physician to dress the wounds with clean bandages.

The next day, to Chance's surprise, Running Horse was eating, and could walk about the grove. He seemed weak, but that was all.

The young Indian gathered together the paraphernalia of the dance.

The soldiers must not find it.

He built a fire, throwing into it the branches wrapped in bark which he had fitted into the fork of the cottonwood pole. They were the branches which he had cut from the cottonwood to make the pole. It was only right that the whole of the little cottonwood should have participated in the holiness of the dance. Chance noticed that the meat, before Running Horse threw it into the flames, was tied into the humped shape of a small buffalo. Next to be given to the flames was the small rawhide doll, which was the figure of a warrior, and which, Running Horse told him, would give him victory over his enemies. Then Running Horse burned the tobacco and twigs, and the tobacco bags and wands which he had planted around the pole and elsewhere as offerings to Wakan-Tonka, the Mystery. Lastly he burned the pole itself, with its pegs and rawhide strips. The buffalo skull he placed in the bushes. This left only the long Indian pipe, which lay on its forked sticks with its stem pointing east.

But Running Horse did not touch the pipe.

He left it resting on the forked sticks in the small clearing, inside the dusty stained ring that marked the path of his dance. He looked at the pipe, and then at Chance, but did not touch the pipe, nor did he speak to Chance.

That night, Chance made coffee over their small fire and, on a sharpened stick, cooked pieces of a prairie chicken which Running Horse had struck down with a rock.

"You have seen me look at the sun," said Running Horse. "Let that be good medicine for both of us."

"All right," said Chance, not understanding.

After the two men had finished the prairie chicken, Chance swigged some of the coffee which he had boiled in the pork-and-bean can, and then handed the can to Running Horse.

Running Horse took a swallow of the coffee, a large swallow which must have burned his mouth, but he said nothing. He swirled the black, hot fluid about in his mouth, holding it for a time, and then gulped it down.

Chance winced.

Running Horse grinned. "Perjuta sapa," he said.

"Purjuta sapa," repeated Chance, hesitantly. "That is coffee?"

"Yes," said Running Horse. "Sioux for coffee." Then the young Indian grinned again. "It really means black medicine."

Chance laughed.

He had also learned his first word of Sioux.

The two men had eaten together, and shared the coffee. Chance felt that this meant something important to Running Horse, but he didn't know what.

Chance asked for some other Sioux words, for the common articles about them.

Surprised, Running Horse had told him.

Chance was the first white man he had known who was interested in learning to speak his language. Not even the schoolteacher at Standing Rock, the pale white woman with blond hair, had done this.

Chance took out his briar, and after he had lit it, Running Horse took it from him and lifted it to the stars, and to the winds, and then to the earth.

Running Horse took a long puff, and then another, and handed the little briar back to Chance, who took it and smoked it.

"I have smoked your tobacco," said Running Horse.

"Yes, you have," said Chance, wondering what was going on.

"I have smoked your tobacco," repeated Running Horse, looking at Chance.

Without really knowing why, Chance, followed by Running Horse, stood up and went over the small hill to the clearing where the long Indian pipe still lay on its forks, inside what had been the circle of the dance.

Chance looked at Running Horse, and the young Indian nodded.

Chance took the pipe carefully from the forked sticks. It was beaded, white with blue beads, and it seemed very old, very fragile.

He handed the pipe to Running Horse, who walked before him and carried the pipe back to their campfire. There Running Horse filled the pipe with some of his own tobacco.

The Indian lit the old pipe and drew on it until a steady swirl of smoke curled from the high, narrow bowl. Then he handed the pipe to Chance.

Trying to remember things as well as he could, Chance lifted the pipe to the sky, and then to the four directions, and lastly lowered it near the ground and lifted it up again.

He then smoked.

The smoke was hot and strong, and it stung his tongue. It was a combination of white man's tobacco and some other taste, which Chance didn't recognize.