by Max Brand
There was a brief, deep outcry from the Indians who watched.
“Brother,” said one of them, “will you let your poor spirit wander on foot through the sky forever?”
And Rusty answered: “I gave him love as much as he gave me. I give him freedom now as much as he can take and keep. My friends, I am sorrowful only a little bit. If my life could be held in my hands, I would spill it on the ground willingly to bring back the life of Standing Bull. But I know that this cannot be. He needs prayer, but, also, he needs rest, a cool lodge, and food. These things you will not give him. It is not the will of the Sky People that drives me away from my tribe. It is the howling of an old, skinny dog, Running Elk. He has told lies, and my people, like children, believe those lies. I am not angry. I am not afraid. But I look at your faces and sigh. You seem to be men, yet you have only the brains of babies.”
He turned his back on them and walked through the entrance without once turning to look back; he merely could hear their murmur of astonishment and anger behind him.
He was walking into a new world and he was equipped for it with only a single weapon—the long, blue-bladed knife of perfect steel that he himself had hammered into shape and tempered so that it would take and hold a razor edge.
The bones of the dead horses he picked his way over and came to the full view of the Valley of Death. It was as naked as its name, a sun-scalded place of rocks. Here and there a talus of broken debris had slipped down from the faces of the perpendicular cliffs, but except for these aprons of rubble the high rocks were unapproachable. And here and there, on the dark rocks of the cañon floor, he saw white chalk marks—and he knew that those were human skeletons bleached by the suns of a hundred summers. He walked on.
A shadow seemed to strike over him from the cliffs. It was the sleepiness of the most intense exhaustion. There was a patch of sand between two rocks. He sank into it. It seemed to him that a dark influence arose to him out of the ground. If this were death, it was delightful. His eyes closed. He slept at once.
The day closed over him. The chilly morning came. He wakened when the sky was flaring with rose and with bright gold. He stood up and thought for a moment that he was standing in the blue fields of the Happy Hunting Grounds. Then he realized that he was only in the Valley of Death. Out of the distance, voices were chanting a morning prayer to the Sky People, faintly, and he knew that these were the Cheyennes who had brought him to the place and who were now guarding the entrance. For seven days they would guard the place. Then they would go away, knowing that their man was dead.
Seven days? Already thirst pinched his throat and burned in his forehead. The sun rolled up a swift, bright wheel over the eastern cliff and instantly the valley was filled with fire. He gave one searching glance to the terrible cliffs. They were impregnable. So he prepared to die quickly. He took out the great knife and looked down the sheen of its blade. It seemed to Rusty Sabin that he could understand now why he had made that knife with such loving care. It had been to make easy the taking of his own life, in the end.
The heart or the throat? If he put the keen point under his heart and tapped strongly on the butt with his free hand, death would come as quickly as the wink of an eye.
He lifted the knife to the heavens and chanted the briefest of death songs: “Here am I, Red Hawk. My skin is white but my soul is the red of a good Cheyenne. In my life I have kept my word. I die because my people will it. Sky People, is this thing what you wish? Answer me!”
It seemed to Rusty that he could hear a faint answer, although that was doubtless the echo from the face of the cliffs.
And again he sang: “There are only four faces I leave behind me. I say farewell to Maisry and Blue Bird, to Standing Bull and Lazy Wolf . . . and I say farewell to all my people, when the white smoke goes up from the lodges on a winter morning . . . when the spring mist covers the teepees with thin blue . . . when all the children laugh and sing in the river . . . when the prairie is red with the blood of buffalo. Sky People, is this the thing that you wish? Answer!”
Again, more clearly, he heard a voice. It was no echo, and, turning about in great excitement and fear—for even at the moment of death it was terrible to hear a voice from the spirits—he saw in the distance the figure of an old man who sat cross-legged on the ground and smoked a pipe.
That picture of peace amazed the mind of Rusty utterly. This might be any one of the powerful ghosts from the underworld or the region above the sky. This might be Sweet Medicine in a new guise. Rusty went with reverent steps toward the figure. When he was close, he saw that it was a man of immense age, bent and shriveled by time to the size of a child. Rusty raised his hand and gave the greeting. But the stranger smoked on, watching him with bright little curious eyes.
He took the pipe from his mouth to say: “What is your name on earth, or are you not a ghost?”
It was good Cheyenne that Rusty heard, but not the speech of his own tribe among that nation.
“I am no ghost, father,” he said. “My name is Red Hawk.”
“Are you the rider of the white horse?” asked the other.
“I am he,” said Rusty. “I shall ride White Horse no longer.”
“Why are you sick of living?” asked the Indian. “You still have strong legs under you and a good pair of hands. You can strike in battle, take scalps, count coups, dance, boast, sing, look at pretty young women, and fill your belly with plenty of stewed buffalo tongue in summer, and plenty of good pemmican in winter. Why should you leave the world?”
“The lies of Running Elk sent me here,” said Rusty. “He persuaded the people that I was their bad fortune. They brought me to the Valley of Death.”
“A medicine man,” said the Indian, “is always jealous. Running Elk was jealous of you because you were a fool.”
“Why was I a fool?” asked Rusty.
“You were a fool,” said the Indian, “because you tried to be not one thing but many. You have a white skin, but you call yourself a Cheyenne. You are a warrior, but you became one without the pain of the initiation. You are a wise chief, and yet you had to be a medicine man, also. A man should be one thing, not many.”
“I suppose so,” said Rusty. “And who are you?”
“I have had several names in my time,” said the other. “I have been called Long Lance and Red Answers The Blow, and several other honorable names after battle. But The People remember me better by my name as a boy. Young Spotted Calf is what they used to call me.”
“Spotted Calf, I have heard of you.”
“Of course you have,” said the old man, “and that is why I am ready to die and hungry to die. All the Cheyennes have heard of me. I am therefore living more on their tongues than in my flesh. There is more weight in the words of the young men when they sit at the fire and tell of my deeds than there is weight in this dry old body of mine. And then the other day a horse kicked me and smashed some of my ribs. Why should I pay many horses from the herd to the medicine man to have my bones cured? I would not pay them. I took the oldest horse from my horse herd and traveled toward the Valley of Death. The horse fell down and died yesterday morning. I came on and reached the Valley of Death about noon. And so you understand why I am here?”
“Spotted Calf, it is a pity when such a famous man as you leaves his tribe and his family. My heart aches for the Cheyennes. They need your wisdom.”
“I was never very wise,” said Spotted Calf. “When I was a young man, I used to puff out my chest and tuck in my chin and make speeches, using all the good-sounding words. But my speeches never made very much sense. When I grew older, I used to sit with the elders very silently. If there was a question to be discussed, I never said a word until all the others had decided. Then I would say one thing. Sometimes a single word. And even the old men thought I was wise. If a man is willing to listen, other people always think that he is wise. Then I grew older still. I grew so old that children began to look at me with eyes of fear. When I saw this, I knew that I was too
long among my people.”
“Spotted Calf, you are an honest man,” said Rusty. “If I could find a way, I would save your life and my own.”
“My own life is lost, now,” said Spotted Calf. “The fever and the pain of the broken ribs is in my blood. It will not come out again. You see?”
He pulled his robe aside, and then pushed down a loose bandage that girt his body. The flesh along one withered side had been torn loose from the ribs. The whole wound was horribly infected.
Rusty sickened as he stared.
Spotted Calf knocked the ashes from his pipe and looked down at the wound. “I am decaying, you see,” he said calmly.
“What can I do to make you comfortable, father?” asked Rusty.
“Nothing, my son,” said the old man. “Nothing except to go away for a little while. The pain is growing great, and now, as you see, I am as weak of soul as an old woman. I wish to have a few moments for groaning and sighing. Afterward, like a woman delivered of a child, I shall be quite content again . . . or dead. But it is a pity that death has to gnaw so slowly at an old, dry, useless bone like me. Even death, that wants all things, does not want me now. Farewell for a little while, my son.”
And Rusty walked slowly away. He felt that life had been defined for him in a new way. And with this new definition it was not worth having.
Chapter Eight
There was one thing he should have asked the ancient chief. He should have inquired what it was that made the old man call out to him. For it seemed to Rusty, more and more, that the voice had been in direct answer to his call. He had put his question to the Sky People, and a voice from the ground had spoken to him in reply. Should that be interpreted as direct intervention from the sky?
Rusty went to a distance so that Spotted Calf could, if he wished, groan like a very woman. From the stone on which Rusty sat, he could see half a dozen skeletons on the rock. Some of them were totally disjointed, so that they looked like white writing on the stones, a language that only the Sky People could understand.
Thirst was growing a more and more fierce torment in the throat of Rusty. And the fatigue of his long watch at the side of Standing Bull left him still weak, still with a glaze before his eyes.
A thin shadow flicked over him. One of the buzzards had stooped not a hundred feet above his head. It sailed with a whisper of wings straight across the valley and alighted on a tall rock. There it sat perched, half spreading its wings as though to rise again, and thrusting out its horrible long, red, scalded neck as it stared downward.
Rusty started to his feet. Behind that rock old Spotted Calf had been seated. Then a sudden thought sent Rusty running toward the place.
The buzzard hesitated, thrust out its head to stare at him, then rose with clumsily flapping wings, struck them aslant with a sudden ease through the upper air, trailing its foul shadow again over Rusty.
When he reached the place, old Spotted Calf was dead. He had torn the bandage entirely from the wound. There had been one red gush of blood, and the feeble old life went out on that small flood. Spotted Calf lay with his head against the rock.
Rusty wrapped the old body from head to foot in the robe. The pipe and the tobacco pouch troubled Rusty with desire, for he wanted a smoke badly. But after all one cannot rob the dead. Let poor Spotted Calf take with him to the Happy Hunting Grounds all the little possessions that he had brought to the Valley of Death.
Rusty re-crossed the valley. The three buzzards descended. Others dropped into view as though born out of nothingness. Rusty turned his back on them. Our graves must be of varying kinds, it seems.
That question that he had wanted to ask of Spotted Calf never would be answered now. Twice, in the raging, furnace-like heat of that day, Rusty drew out his knife and stared hungrily at the blade that could give him an answer of its own to all questions whatever. But still he had not struck the blow when the shadow swung out from the western cliff and slowly filled the valley with dimness, except for a ridge of fire at the top of the eastern wall.
His lips were so dry that they were cracking. His throat was as though he had swallowed dust.
He was feverish. Perhaps it was the fever, therefore, that made him seem to see something that stirred in the deep shadow of the western cliff just above the slanting talus of broken rock that sloped down toward the place where the body of Spotted Calf was now lying.
He looked again, curiously, with a start of fear. For what could it be that could issue out of solid rock? And then, on wide-spreading wings, a huge night owl came out of that shadow, a great, effortless, sailing disk of a bird that slid down across the valley straight toward Rusty Sabin.
And Rusty, with a wild cry, fell headlong down on the ground and heard the faint rush of the wings go over him.
When he could rise, he stared helplessly about him, but the great bird was gone.
There could be no doubt. It was the large bird from the Sacred Valley just beyond. It was that incarnation of Sweet Medicine that had learned to come to the hand of Rusty and take living food like a hawk stooping to a lure.
The soul of Rusty was too full for thought or speech. His knees shook under him. This was a sign indeed! This was a signal and a symbol from the Sky People and from their ruler, Sweet Medicine himself.
Rusty ran straight ahead. On his right he reached the base of the slanting heap of great boulders. Up the rocks he clambered, and, when he reached the top of the talus, he stared hungrily over the sheer face of the wall that rose above. There was nothing to be seen. There was only blankness, and one big, projecting ridge down the face of the rock.
Then why had Sweet Medicine flown from this place? Why, if not to give him a sign for liberation, had the god chosen to appear out of the solid wall of rock?
He clambered slowly across the top of the heaped boulders to the farther side of the projecting ridge.
There it stood before him, as tall, almost as wide as the entrance flap of a large teepee—a great, dark gash in the face of the cliff but so obscured by the ridge that it was invisible except from a single angle.
Rusty, without fear, with a wildly joyous laughter bubbling out of his throat, entered that darkness. With his hands he felt his way. Sometimes the passage narrowed so that he hardly could squeeze through. Sometimes it became low and he had to stoop, almost to crawl. Now it grew into a spacious room. Now it closed to a scant hallway. And at last he saw before him a red eye that widened, that grew, and finally he came out to the mouth of the cave that he had known before—the cave that overlooked the Sacred Valley and let him stare westward into the red of the sunset.
A trumpet beyond the power of human lips to sound blew through the Sacred Valley the next morning at sunrise and brought Rusty bounding to his feet from his bed of evergreen boughs. And his long, shrill, answering whistle raised a keen echo along the cliffs.
Afterward, he heard the faint beating of hoofs in a rapid rhythm, and finally up the valley, bursting like a silver bolt out of the clouds of trees, came White Horse, racing. He rushed around Rusty, flinging his heels, snorting, trampling down imaginary enemies, frantic with happiness, and Rusty laughed and laughed, with tears in his eyes.
After all, it was not strange. If the Indians blocked the way to the entrance to the Valley of Death, did not White Horse have brains at least as clever as those of a wild wolf?
Would he not think of returning to other places nearby where he had been with his master?
And yet Rusty did not take the thing as casually as this. All was mysterious from the moment when he carried the gold to the town of Witherell. With it, he had sought to give Richard Lester and his daughter all comfort. Instead, it had given Lester death. With it he had wished to fill the hands of the Cheyennes with gifts and bring honor on his friend, Standing Bull. But Standing Bull had almost died, might die now, in the meaningless hands of old Running Elk. And Rusty himself was driven out by white men and red alike.
Of all things under heaven, or above it, only one had remained
true to him, and that was Sweet Medicine. Sweet Medicine, for purposes of his own, had sent him the signal and opened the door from the Valley of Death. Sweet Medicine had sent back, to be his comfort, the great shining white stallion.
And why had these things been done?
So that the life of Rusty Sabin could be devoted to the service of the god of the Indians. That much was, to Rusty, perfectly clear and simple. And, equally clear, in the gold of the Sacred Valley resided a curse. It was too terrible for men to handle.
That very first day he began his labor to cover the signs of his work when he had been delving for the treasure that white men so worship.
First, he constructed little traps along the runs that rabbits had made through the grass. All the other life in the Sacred Valley he would not touch, but rabbits, surely, had hardly a spirit to be protected. Sweet Medicine himself had proved that, evening after evening, when he flew down from his cave into the Sacred Valley and gripped a living prize out of the hand of Rusty.
When those traps were constructed and baited with the seed of grasses, Rusty fell to his important work even before he built for himself a shelter. He began to block the throat of the creek with big stones and fill the interstices with smaller stones and pebbles.
It was a great task, for the creek had cut for itself, at this narrow point, a little gorge fifteen feet deep. And since the work was to be lasting, Rusty used for it only the heaviest boulders that he could move with the strength of his hands and a strong pole for a lever to budge them. He worked for a week at this task, and many a device he used.
Even by the end of the first day he was weary enough. From the traps, before the twilight began, he took four fat rabbits and killed one for his own dinner, penned two in a little enclosure he had made when he was last in the Sacred Valley, and waited with the fourth rabbit in his arms, patiently, his face turned always toward the mouth of the cave, high up the cliff.
Now and then he chanted a brief phrase of prayer. And sometimes it seemed to him that the singing, deep voice of the waterfall gave him an answer, but the winged shadow did not appear.
