Little Big Man (42 page)

The Bear wiped the sweat from his brow and left a great smear of blood in its place. He sighed and shrugged, but he was pleased. He handed me his knife and said, as you might to a guest sitting before a roast turkey: “Go on and take something for yourself. There is a pretty ring on his left hand.”

“Well,” says I, “I could use the shirt and pants.”

Younger Bear makes a gesture as if to say it’s on the house, and I got the uniform off that soldier and his boots, and later I found his hat nearby. I bundled that stuff under my arm, and the Bear went back to work. The soldier now lay in his wool underwear. He had unbeknownst to himself done me a favor, and I thought I would try to return it though he might never know that either.

I said to the Bear: “You had better get your arm tied up before you bleed to death.”

He looked like he noticed it for the first time, poked the muscle and winced.

“Come,” I said, “where’s your pony?” Then I saw his horse over a ways, and who should be patiently holding its bridle but Olga. And there also with her was little Gus, watching the other Indians milling about with their gory trophies, and he had a tiny wooden knife and was wielding it in imaginary scalping procedure. I reckon he would have liked to do a little real cutting with it, but Olga was restraining him with her other arm, I’ll say that much for her.

The Bear took a minute more to do something which I surely didn’t watch and then got up.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll go and you can have the rest of him. Thank you for your help.” He puts out his hand to me, and I took it—and kept it, for it wasn’t his, but rather the right hand of that soldier, which he had severed and stuck into his sleeve, drawing his own arm up.

“Hahaha!” he laughed. “Good joke!” He was still laughing as he went over to Olga, carrying the scalp and trailing that suit of long underwear like a whole human skin.

Now I had to put on that uniform, a ticklish proposition, for soon
as it was on my back I’d be alien to the Indians, but I could not get back to the village dressed otherwise. My purpose of course was to go find Sunshine and the baby. They would be prisoners by now. Wearing the blue clothes, I could get access to them, and in the disorganization of battle we could make off to the hills. Nobody would question a soldier herding along an Indian woman with a baby on her back.

Having finished their butchery in the tall grass, the Cheyenne started to move downstream again. I saw blind Old Lodge Skins among them, being led by a woman—no, it was Little Horse, who was after all his own son. That was as it should be. I done my job and had my own to look after.

The firing had died away except for scattered flurries throughout the valley, and the smoke rising above the camp was now black from burning lodges. Our people was heading for the other villages along the lower Washita. I doubted that the soldiers intended to press on in that direction, for it was afternoon now, and on the bluffs across the river I could see a body of mounted Indians which I reckon had come up from the downstream camps to oppose their progress. There was fifteen hundred lodges in that valley, of which only a little more than fifty stood in Black Kettle and Old Lodge Skins’s village. But these other camps was strung out over ten mile and discontinuous one from the next. I believe it was at the Washita that the Indians learned a lesson in villaging, for eight years later on the Little Bighorn they didn’t leave no space between their tepee circles to let Custer through.

George Armstrong Custer. I had never heard of him by this time in my life though I understand he had got a name for himself in the Rebellion. Here’s something maybe you didn’t realize: Indians almost never knowed who it was attacked them until the battle was done, and sometimes not even then. Look at what had happened to me so far upon this day: I had seen only two soldiers close up: one had been that trooper what fired into Old Lodge Skins’s tepee; and the other, Younger Bear’s victim. We had been charged at dawn by whites, dressed in blue. Nobody knew who led them, nor cared. Later, if another treaty council was held, the soldier-chief would likely be there, and say as an opening statement to the Cheyenne: “You remember how I beat you on the Washita.” Which would be the first time the Indians had this information.

Afterwards they’d call that man not by his white name but by a
peculiarity of his appearance on this occasion, like in later years General Crook was Three Stars; General Miles, Bear Coat; and General Terry was called by some The Other One, I guess because they run out of names.

When they got to know Custer, the Cheyenne and their allies named him Long Hair, but I believe 99 per cent of the individuals within the tribe would not have recognized him in parade gear at the head of his troops; and not even the chiefs he counciled with would have knowed him with his hair cut. This time will come.

Right now, there I was trailing along behind my Indian comrades as they proceeded downriver at the Washita. Custer I never heard of, but the brass badge on that dead trooper’s campaign hat told me his outfit was Company G, Seventh Cavalry. Suppose I run into other fellows from the same company? I undid it from the felt and throwed it aside. Then with my knife I tore a hole where the badge had been, as if a bullet had blown it out.

But I had yet to get into the uniform, though the other Indians what stripped the soldiers had put on articles of their loot, here a brave in a sergeant’s jacket, there a little kid wearing the gray-flannel Army shirt like a dress, and maybe a woman in a piece of wool underwear over her deerskins.

At last we come to where the ground swelled and I set down as if to tighten my moccasin lacings until the last of the Cheyenne had disappeared over the rise. Then crawled two hundred yards through the grass-matted snow, stood up, took my bearings, saw a clear route to the riverbank and took it, plunging once more into the icy Washita, which rose to my chin at this point. It was all I could do to keep that uniform above the stream, but it was still dry when I reached the other side, and for warmth alone I was glad to exchange it for them buckskins which would freeze stiff between each step.

I also remembered to scrub the black from my face; what I missed would look natural enough as the soot of battle. As you might suppose, the clothing was all too big. Now, trousers and shirts was worn voluminous in the Army, but the cavalry jacket was cut snug. I’d just have to leave this one unbuttoned to cover up the situation, despite the cold. My feet had room to tour independently within the boots, and the hat was pretty loose even with a stuffed headband.

But I was ready, and stuck my head out of the brush patch which I had used as dressing room. I found myself looking directly at a
Cheyenne brave some twenty yards on, who sent an arrow towards me before I could blink. It seemed to travel quite slow through the atmosphere, the only difficulty being that my dodge was of similar character, as if immersed in a barrel of molasses. The triangular iron head, with its razor edges, had an affection for my nose and followed wherever I pointed that feature. I mean, it seemed so. It seemed as if I was somersaulting over and over, and the educated arrow followed every convolution, a spare half inch from my beak. Actually, whatever happened was over in an instant, the arrow had disappeared, the Cheyenne was face down and dead, and a cavalry corporal rode up with a smoking weapon.

“My God,” he said, “what a place to take a dump.” Which is what he figured I had been doing in them bushes and what could I do but grin at him. “Git on,” he said, pointing to his horse’s hindquarters. “Don’t it hurt?”

Then I saw from the corner of my eye that the arrow was lodged in my hatbrim, as close across my right temple as it could have been without tearing skin. From the trooper’s angle, feathers fore and head aft, it must have looked as though my skull was spitted. I throwed it away and mounted behind him and we went back to the village.

Now we got in among the tepees at the lower end of camp, and this soldier, he trotted up to a little group of blue-dressed figures, we dismounted, and he saluted a man.

“Sir,” he says, “I scouted the—”

“Just a moment,” interrupts the officer what he has addressed and turns to me. I am standing there apart, getting my bearings, for troops is going hither and yon, looting tepees, herding Cheyenne women and children together into one party, driving captive ponies. I hardly knowed the place where I had lived some weeks.

“Soldier,” orders this officer, “come here.” I seen he meant me, so went to him. He was a right good-looking fellow, tall and well-proportioned, and I recall the collars of his blue-flannel shirt was embroidered with two gold stars on each point. He had a yellow mustache and his fair hair was so long in back, its curls barely cleared his shoulders.

His eyes was icy-blue, and under brows so pale you could see them only by their bushiness. He says in a voice like a rasp across the grain of a board, “Button that jacket!”

I proceeds to do it.

He says: “Consider yourself under arrest. Give your name to the sergeant of the guard.”

Now that trooper who picked me up does me another favor. “If the general pleases,” that soldier says, “I found this man in the brush and had to kill an Injun to get him clear. He was hit in the head by an arrer, poor devil, and is out of his mind, I believe.”

I didn’t need no further cue. I laid my head on the side and sort of goggled my eyes, letting my tongue flap loose.

A spasm of impatience run over the general’s face. “Well, get him out of here,” he said. “This is a field headquarters, not the laboratory of an alienist.”

“Now,” said my benefactor, “if the general will hear the report of my scout—”

“No, I do not intend to,” responded the officer. “It cannot have much value if instead of observing the enemy’s dispositions, you were rescuing lunatics.” He jerks his back to us, and says to them others: “I have decided to shoot the captured ponies.”

One of them officers was a heavy-set, fatherly-looking man with a full head of white hair showing below his hat. I seen him gazing at me with a trace of amusement, as if he knowed the deal. But now he gets disturbed at what the general said and starts to protest.

“There are eight hundred ponies in that herd,” he says. “Had we not better save our ammunition for—”

“I have decided to shoot them,” says the general, “and do not require your suggestions upon the matter, Benteen.”

Benteen gives him a long look of undisguised scorn. Then he says in his benevolent way to the corporal, who was still standing with me alongside him: “You had better collect a detail of fifteen men and go and execute all of our four-legged prisoners. If you run out of ammunition, you might go over on the bluffs and borrow some from the Cheyenne.”

The corporal salutes him, and so do I, and I swear he winks at me. The general never saw it, though, for he was striding vigorously up and down in his smart boots, ordering things of various officers and men, and one of them is the director of the band, I guess, for shortly that group begins to play.

When we had gone on a ways by foot, the corporal says: “I’d think you would of knowed better than to let Hard Ass Custer
catch you with your jacket open. He is a real son of a bitch, ain’t he? Goddam, I’d pay the Cheyenne what put a bullet in his brass heart.”

I said, “But that Benteen ain’t bad.”

“Ain’t bad?” exclaimed the corporal, right angry at my understatement. “I know fellows in his company would whip you for saying less than that he is the best officer who ever rode in the U.S. Goddam Cavalry.”

“That’s what I meant,” says I. Actually, at this point I was trying to find a chance to slip away from him and get to where the prisoners had been collected.

“You see how he looked at Custer? He don’t give a damn for him, I’ll tell you that. You can’t fight rank, but you don’t have to put your nose up in it, either, and the Colonel won’t. He’s right worried now over Major Elliot. Hard Ass won’t send out a patrol to look for him. That was what I was really doing out there when I run into you. You see anything of him?”

“Not me,” I says. That was when I realized it was probably Elliot and his command that the Cheyenne had wiped out and butchered in the grass across the river. I had been wise to throw away the badge from my hat.

“Benteen and Elliot served together in the War,” he says. “Well, we have to get shooting them horses. And you best find you a carbine if you can and praise your luck that Custer didn’t notice you’d lost yours. He’d of spread-eagled you in the snow.”

“I left it with my bunky,” says I, for I had learned the lingo when I was with the soldiers after the Solomon battle. “I’ll go fetch it.”

“All right, and then you get back on the double, for I got my eye on you,” he says, assuming the style of a noncom now he had work to do. That’s how it goes with rank, among the whites; I had forgot how quick relations can change.

Soon as I got some men and horses between him and me, I headed for the prisoner’s corral, which I found to be several tepees they had let to stand near the center of the camp, into which the women and children had been collected. I could hear them singing that doleful death dirge of the Cheyenne as I approached. These lodges was of course ringed by a guard of soldiers, and I looked for some difficulty in gaining access there, for I wouldn’t want to tell my purpose in so doing.

In addition I never wanted to get caught again by anybody and
put on special duty. My late uneasiness as a white man among Indians was nothing beside the feeling I had now, slogging along in the enormous boots, with only my ears holding up that hat, and the jacket stood away from my body as if it was an empty hogshead.

But then I remembered Old Lodge Skins’s stunt in walking through that crossfire, which by the way was the only time I could recall his medicine working against the whites. He had kept up his assurance, that’s why; and I reckon being blind had helped; he wasn’t distracted by anything he saw. Well, I didn’t close my eyes but I did put myself in a state of concentration: I swelled up to fill that uniform, somehow, and I walked hard and smart up to a sergeant standing at the door of one of them tepees.