The Power of the Dog

by Thomas Savage

  Now Edward would have been chief, had they not come to the reservation, and even so, he sometimes thought of himself as chief, when he got to dreaming, and dreaming he told his son of the land he knew as a child, the land the boy had never seen, for Jennie, the mother, had been pregnant in the buggy as they straggled south.

  She was a sensible woman, a tanner of the deer hides the white hunters left at the store, a maker of gloves and moccasins. When Edward told stories to the little boy, she would sometimes rise and leave them and go to the shed where the horse and the cow lived. ‘Why tell those tales?’ she’d ask angrily. ‘Why make him sad?’

  But Edward knew the boy’s need for stories, food to grow on, thread for dreams, and sometimes Jennie herself listened, and didn’t go to the shed with the cow.

  He told the little boy the truth, as his father had told him, that thunder was the pounding of buffalo hoofs in the sky and the lightning was the flash of their eyes.

  ‘Buffalo?’

  ‘You don’t remember, but your grandfather remembered. He knew, and I remember.’

  ‘I remember,’ the little boy said, eyes wide. Sometimes you don’t have to know, to remember.

  ‘Wild crazy stories,’ Jennie said.

  ‘But see how he sleeps, afterwards,’ Edward Nappo pointed out.

  ‘Sleep,’ Jennie whispered. ‘And dreams.’

  When the boy was twelve the winter was long and terrible; blizzards bearing sharp dry snow swept down from the north and sometimes it was forty below. Some old Indians died who had been strong enough in the fall, and the nights were lurid with funeral fires, loud with the muffled dirges of chanting women; snow drifted against the tarpaper shack.

  Then, alas, the cow got sick. Jennie made her a coat from an old blanket, and during the cow’s illness Edward and the boy tended a fire in the corner of the shed, their eyes weeping from the smoke that escaped little by little through a hole. As they waited and hoped and prayed, Edward told more stories of the land to the north, the land of summertime, the fields thick with purple lupine that waved and billowed in the breeze like water; he told of the watery cry of killdeers at twilight, of the dark gray thunderheads that reared high over the mountains and lumbered like grizzlies across the sky, heavy with water.

  ‘It was the Indians’ land then, and your grandfather was the chief.’

  The boy rubbed the magic ring his father had given him, made of a horseshoe nail. ‘We could run away.’

  Edward Nappo smiled, thinking of what Jennie would say to running away, that practical woman. You can’t run very fast or very far with a sick cow, she’d say. ‘That land, not the Indians’, now.’

  ‘We could look at it. They’d be good to the son of the chief.’

  Edward put another stick of cottonwood on the fire. Turning, he said, ‘You’d think they’d be, wouldn’t you.’ He came back from the fire and squatted again, his shadow was large against the wall. ‘I’ll tell you,’ he said. ‘If the cow lives …’

  And the cow lived.

  ‘Crazy,’ Jennie said. ‘That land is gone.’

  ‘But the boy could see it. See where his grandfather was chief, see his grave.’

  Jennie kept working the deerskins, kneaded them in her strong hands, made them pliable for gloves and moccasins. Her eyes were failing from the fussy work of sewing beads on buckskin; they smarted from the smoke, and the metal-rimmed glasses she’d got at the store didn’t help much. Oh, maybe some. ‘You’re crazy, and the boy is crazy.’

  But when summer came, he pointed out again the bargain he had made with himself and the boy if the cow lived, and she put up food for them, canned beans and canned corned beef from Argentina and big hard soda crackers to soak up the juice. As the son of the chief, Edward Nappo did not feel bound to report his plans to the Indian agent; anyway, the man might have made trouble; therefore, they left one morning before daybreak. They heard a nighthawk zoom in the darkness; a thin dog barked heartlessly.

  Because the horse was old, they walked unless dust in the distance said an automobile approached; then Edward thought it fitting to ride in the cart, no matter how crazy the wheels on the worn axles. The boy tossed the shoes he wore at school into the box of the cart; his bib overalls were bleached from many hard washings and hung loose from his thin frame and his big cap, though cleverly padded inside with newspaper, slid down over his eyes.

  Edward was grand in his checked shirt; he wore his black cowboy hat, uncreased so the crown rode high.

  The country, as they approached the north, looked strange, but Edward thought maybe he’d never looked closely at it before. On the way down, he hadn’t cared to look at it. When the boy had been silent for a long time, he said, ‘Don’t worry about your mother. She’ll be busy, and she’s got the cow to care for.’

  The boy trudged along, his eyes straight ahead. ‘I wasn’t thinking about her,’ the boy said. ‘I was thinking about the mountains.’

  Edward was thinking about them, too, those he had described for so long, the black timber crawling up the sides, then timberline and snow that remained all summer; he had told of cloud shadows that drifted over, drowning the rocks and ravines in shade, and of the springs that leaped out of rocks. The boy loved to hear that the water was sweet, all fit to drink. Edward told of the silence in the pine trees, and the saucy cries of the camp-robbers, known only in those blessed mountains.

  And he was thinking. Suppose the Indian agent got somebody after them? But he hoped to get far enough so they’d see the mountains. Each night they made camp off the road — in draws, in hollows, in parks in the willows near a stream. They chose grassy places where the horse could eat. If just once they saw those mountains! Saw them together!

  Once they used the rifle. Edward was proud when the boy brought down a woodchuck, and they feasted on stew flavored with onions. ‘We can’t waste shells,’ Edward warned. They had only a box, and the canned meat was getting low. How that boy ate! They had a little cash in a Bull Durham sack, and at the last minute Jennie had brought out a shoebox with five pairs of gloves she had made. Edward had smiled at her. He saw through her. She intended to justify the trip as a business venture.

  ‘Three bucks for the gloves,’ she said sternly. ‘Five bucks for the ones with beads and gauntlets.’ He had never before known what she got for the gloves. It sounded like a good deal of money to him, and it crossed his mind that she must be putting money aside for the boy. She was a strangely ambitious woman.

  He doubted that he’d have the courage to offer the gloves for sale. He had never sold anything, the thought of selling brought blood like a hot hand to his face. It was women, who have little pride and no need of it, who sell and profit.

  But give her credit. The gloves in the box were a kind of security, and made it possible for a man to sit straight when automobiles swept by.

  In the Indian School they had taught the boy to address his father as Papa. ‘Papa,’ the boy said. ‘The sagebrush smells different.’

  ‘Of course. There’s water under the ground, and it can drink.’ The gray alkali flats of the reservation had given way to green fields where white men’s white-faced cattle grazed, tame as the cow at home, but a good deal fatter. ‘But wait,’ he said, smiling as he looked into the distance, ‘wait till you smell the sagebrush near the mountains.’ And he spoke the Shoshone word for beautiful.

  ‘Papa, what’s ahead there?’

  ‘Ahead?’ They were walking to spare the horse, and when you walk your eyes are so often on the ground. ‘Why, those are clouds.’

  ‘They haven’t moved, Papa.’

  ‘No wind, because there’s no wind.’ A shape lay on the horizon, shimmering through the waves of heat that rose like flame from the dusty road; it might have been a thunderhead of the very kind he had described to the boy, those that towered up and toppled of their weight.

  It was his eyes, of course. His eyes, like Jennie’s, had been damaged by the smoke that filled their shack in winter. And after his firs
t twinge of disappointment that the boy had seen the mountains first, he was glad. How fitting that a boy should have seen that fresh beauty first, he’d always known it was the young who saw things, and the old who did all the talking. Edward smiled. No, the Indian agent had not caught up with them, and since he hadn’t it was not likely he would. Doubtless Jennie had some plausible story to explain their absence. She was good at that. It was astounding the stories she could weave, scarcely looking up from her work, and people believed them. Her old woman had been good at the same thing. In her way, that old woman was a good old woman.

  Feeling safe, he made plans.

  And once they got into the mountains, the Indian agent couldn’t find them, anyway.

  He would use the money in the Bull Durham sack for fishing tackle and barbs to make spears; it was now the salmon ran in the river. They would fish, and cure the fish with the smoke from sweet green willows. He might take back a gift of smoked fish to the agent; smoked fish was one of the few things the Indians liked that the whites liked, too.

  ‘Maybe three days to the mountains, now,’ he said, and spoke to the horse.

  Three days exactly! And the boy complimented him!

  But they came to a gate that he couldn’t remember.

  Phil had no romantic ideas about Indians. He left that stuff to professors and dudes from back East with their fancy cameras. Children of nature, my foot. That crap. Actually, the Indians were lazy and thieving. They had tried hiring Indians to work in the fields during haying, but as far as machinery went, they didn’t have sense enough to pound sand in a rathole. And poor hands with horses. When they’d tried to bunk the Indians in with the other men, in the canvas tents pitched down in the fields, the men complained about the smell, and it was either them or the Indians. The Indians stole — everything from livestock to a pie right off the kitchen table. The Indians that used to camp outside of Herndon broke into the saloons at night and smashed things. No wonder the government finally got onto itself and sent the whole shebang off to the flats.

  Phil had to laugh. When the dudes used to come out with those cameras and tried to get the Indians to pose, the Indians got coy, pretending they believed that each picture weakened them, or that the photograph was their own ghost. But believe you me, show them a little old cash money, and they posed.

  Look at their handicraft, the dudes said. Handicraft! Handicraft, hell. Phil knew more about their handicraft than the professors did. His collection of arrow-and spearheads was as good as you could put your hand to, and for years they’d been trying to get ahold of it for the museum in the capitol, and one day he’d probably let them have it. When he was finished with a thing, he was finished with it. But that same collection contained ’heads he’d made himself, using the very tools the Indians used, with agate and flint he’d found himself, and they were superior in craft to what the Indians did. You can look at their handicraft all you want! Children of nature!

  They always had their hand out, and when the Old Lady was on the ranch she used to collect old clothes and bedding and hand it out, but then all their relatives and friends started coming around with their hot hands out, and the Old Lady had to put her foot down. No telling what would have happened if the government hadn’t packed them off. They weren’t ranchers. Not farmers, and didn’t know corn from oats. The worst of it, they couldn’t face the fact that their day was over, over and done.

  Phil had ridden up into the foothills to the cow camp, a neat cabin near a spring, pretty little place, fine little corral. They were trying out a new cowboy there, fellow to ride the range, and Phil had timed his arrival about mid-morning to see if the young fellow was out of his bedroll and off on the job, keeping the cattle from wandering over the state line. You take a lot of these young fellows, they get off where you can’t watch ’em and they get to reading magazines and lazing around and maybe having their buddies up with a bottle of booze, and first thing you know, you’ve got cows all over hell.

  Phil rode up stealthily, out of sight of the cabin window, tied his horse in the timber, and then walked softly. No snapping twigs! He entered the cabin suddenly.

  Calendar on the wall with a prettied-up girl on it, showing September of last fall. The rains had dripped down and stained the thing.

  Hmmm.

  Phil walked over and felt the cookstove. Wasn’t even warm. Cold. The dishes were all done up and put away, graniteware coffeepot washed and turned upside down on the back of the stove.

  Hmmm.

  Table cleared except for a pad of cheap paper, the cover turned back under it and a letter begun in dark pencil on the top sheet in the crabbed, uncertain writing of a child or moron, hard to say which.

  Dere Ma,

  I got me a lantarn here to rite this. I tell you, Ma, it shur is grate been a cowboy.

  About the only word he could spell was what he was, a cowboy. You see, there it was. They didn’t look on ‘been a cowboy’ as a job anymore, a man’s job, like in the days of Bronco Henry. It was all playacting, like they saw in the moving pictures, and that accounted for the silver-mounted spurs and headstalls that kept them broke, for the records of cowboy songs they bought from Monkey Ward and played on their phonographs. They didn’t know what the hell they were anymore, didn’t know what was dream and what was life, and no wonder a man had to ride out and check up on them because once in the middle of the morning he’d come on one of these so-called cowboys up there in the cabin mooning and listening to phonograph records, and cattle all over hell. Maybe it was his sudden shadow across the sun behind him that had made the kid look up from his mooning about being a cowboy; for a few seconds the nasal voice out of the horn of the phonograph went moaning on about being a rolling stone or some such crap, and then the kid reached out a hand and shut the thing off.

  He was sort of loose-lipped. ‘I was riding all night.’ They always had some excuse. If there’s one thing you can bank on, everybody’s got some sort of excuse.

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you,’ Phil said softly. ‘You get your duds, and you pack them in your little old grip, and you get started down the road.’

  September of last year.

  Now here was another year.

  I tell you, Ma, it shur is grate been a cowboy …

  Phil would see about that. But the kid was off and about, the stove cold, and maybe this kid just needed a little time, because for Christ sake, everybody today couldn’t be trashy! Phil stretched and stood framed in the low doorway and gazed off across the valley, and listened to the spring play a merry tune on the rocks. Then he moved up into the timber to catch up his saddle horse, swung up and rode down to the new line-fence that separated state land from the forest. Farrest, as Phil called it. ‘The Farrest …’

  He swung down to open the gate, a government gate, the end post set on a block of concrete, the whole shebang so heavy it’d take a four-horse team to budge it, more damn gate than you ever saw in your life, but that was the government for you, and it was you, chum, who was paying for it. A gate like that set in the opening of a simple barbed wire fence! He wondered how much paperwork some punk bureaucrat had gone through before they finally got out a requisition for the design of that gate, how much some two-bit engineer had wasted in time, money and materials before emerging with that monstrosity, that stockade! The gate was fastened by a more than adequate length of log chain, another government extravagance — small in itself, but multiplied a thousand times it played right into the sweaty hands of the Bolshies and wobblies and those nuts. And by God, do you know, Phil pinched his finger in that chain, but not enough to draw blood. Just a blood blister.

  He turned alerted at a sound. Some strangeness. Saw far down the draw some sort of single-horse outfit, some sort of cart. He could make out a black hat, and so far as he knew, nobody wore black hats but Indians.

  ‘Sit nice and straight,’ Edward told the boy, but no need to say. He sat straight as you might expect of the grandson of a chief about to hold speech with a white man. The lit
tle boy’s spine was rigid. He pushed his cap up off his forehead. Edward knocked the dust off his black hat and stroked it with his palm, sort of polished it.

  They’d been walking. When they saw the man standing by the big gate, they got up into the cart. They were under the stranger’s eyes for a good twenty minutes.

  ‘Why does he rest there?’ the little boy asked.

  ‘Well, maybe he wants to see who we are.’

  ‘You tell him about your father?’

  ‘Yes, I can tell him that.’

  ‘So he’d have to let us go on by.’

  Edward no longer cared, for himself. When they take you off to a reservation and sell you moldy bread and you can’t keep a gun there’s not much more you can do. Now he hoped only to keep the boy believing that in this country their name was honored, a magic name to open gates. Or was Jennie right in cautioning him about telling stories?

  In all truth there were some in that old land, some whites who championed the Indians, took Indians’ troubles as their own to the capital of the United States of America, far to the East, where no Indians that Edward had even known had been. There had been whites at his father’s funeral, whites in honored places watching the burning of his father’s blankets, moccasins, headdress, hackamore, wickiup.

  Was this man one of those?

  Edward drew up the old horse, smartly, as you might halt a Hambletonian. ‘How,’ he said, and grinned. He handed the boy the reins, and clambered stiffly down.

  Phil said nothing.

  Edward looked around at the country. ‘No rain yet,’ he said, and walked to the big gate.

  Phil cleared his throat.

  Edward got his hands on the log chain.

  Phil spoke softly, ‘Where in hell you think you’re going?’

  Phil now stepped between Edward and the gate.

  Edward turned toward the little boy who sat stiff and straight, chin up, as much to keep his cap from sliding down as from pride. ‘My boy and I would camp out a little while. That’s my boy, there.’