Little Big Man

by Thomas Berger

  He held up his knife, with his left fingers gripping the right-hand wrist, so as to give added support for the impact. Which is to say, I was about to be impaled just below the arch of my rib-cage. My accidental shot had gone into the air.

  Well, I was only falling six feet, but the time consumed by any type of action is relative, and I recall hanging motionless there in space like the subject in a photograph or artist’s rendering. Shadow wore two eagle feathers, aslant one from the other. There was beads of sweat upon his brown shoulders. He wore a choker of horizontal porcupine quills divided by vertical lines of blue beads; and between his left bicep and elbow cavity, a copper armlet; between his legs a dirty breechclout of red flannel. The black points of his narrow-lidded eyes was fixed on the target of my upper belly, and his legs was braced for the collision. Vermilion was the predominant color of his face paint, with an overlay of yellow bolts of lightning.

  Almost at my leisure I floated down upon the point of the knife, and when I struck it and thought sort of lackadaisically that I was sure disemboweled, time speeded up again, and I was tumbling over him at great speed and still unwounded, for without willing it I had somehow altered my style of fall and took the blade in my shirt between arm and ribs. It seemed warm there from the close call, from the threat unsatisfied; had I been cut, I would have felt nothing; that is the peculiarity of knifeplay. Well, roll we did through the sand and scrub brush, and he was a powerful Indian though fifty year old. I had lost my pistol, but he kept his knife. Still I sought to talk, but his thumb was into my throat box so far as almost to break through the floor of my mouth. Being small and limber I kneed him frequent in the lower belly, but his iron ballocks sustained these blows without effect, and I missed my chops at the paralyzing neckcord below the left ear.

  Soon I was pinned between his thighs, like steel pincers from forty years of pony riding, and now I yearned for the knife to plunge and free me from that compression which had caught me on an exhale and my vision was turning black.

  He lifted high the blade, a Green River butcher weapon without a guard, and I won’t forget its slightest property. And then a little hole sprung beneath his chin, and blood begun to burble out of it. He swallowed twice, like to get rid of a little bone that got stuck in his throat. Only then did I hear the shot. His shoulder jerked as though pushed from behind: another shot. He dropped the knife and leaned towards me, the fluid running from his neck, yet his eyes was still open. Then I pushed him in the chest and back he went all the way, bending like rubber at the waist, for his legs was yet locked about my ribs and killing me, and locking my hands together into a kind of sledge, I smote him at the navel: spang! his thigh-grip loosened like a toy when you hit its spring.

  Then down leaped that Pawnee Mad Bear from the bank above and putting the muzzle of his Spencer an inch from Shadow’s forehead, he gave him a third shot and a middle eye, and shortly ripped away his hair, which parted with a whap. He smirked at me, tore away Shadow’s breechclout and wiped the scalp upon the dead man’s private parts, saying something victorious in Pawnee.

  He had saved my life, sure enough, but I reckon I knew how Younger Bear had felt when I did the same for him them many years before: I wasn’t grateful. Shadow That Comes in Sight had took me on my first raid, having ever been like an older brother or uncle. I was right fond of him. What caught me in the heart now was not that he had been killed, for we all will be sometime. Nor that it had been violent, for as a Human Being he would not have died another way. Nor even that in an involved fashion I had been the instrument of his loss. No, the sadness of it was that Shadow had never known who I was. He had fought me as an enemy. Well, that’s why I was there, wasn’t I, to fight the Cheyenne?

  Goddam but he had powerful legs. I still could barely breathe. I got up and watched Mad Bear climb the bank and shortly reappear at its brink on his pony, smugly shake his rifle, and trot away. He hadn’t even commented on the loss of my horse, which had been borrowed from him.

  I had not had time to wonder how Shadow happened to be down in this draw in the first place, but now, moving slow for I was mighty sore, as I scratched out a shallow grave for him with his own knife and covered him over, I considered there might be other Human Beings somewhere below among the brush and if they wanted to shoot me in the back, they was welcome to do so. I’d rather that than meet them face to face and see my old friends and brothers.

  But I had just got the tip of his long nose covered over with sand when I heard a rustling in the bushes down a ways, and it is queer how my instincts for self-preservation arose without my conscious will, and I seized my fallen revolver and blowed and worked the action clean and replaced all the caps. This in an instant, and then snaked along the bottom of the draw. The brush was trembling, but whatever it could be was staying within. I lurked a moment, then parted the twigs and crept through pistol first, with my face just behind the hammer. I was looking into a clearing just big enough for one person, and that person lay upon her back. She was an Indian woman with her skirt pulled up and her bare legs stretched apart and between them she was giving birth.

  The tiny brown head was already emerged, eyes closed and looking a mite peevish at its entry into reality, and now the little shoulders squeezed through. There was never a sound except where that one straining knee was scraping the brush, which I had heard. She watched what went on and bit from time to time into a wad of her buckskin collar; maybe her eyes winced out a drop of moisture, but there was no more commotion than that. She had been there all the while, and that was the occasion for Shadow’s presence and why he fought so hard.

  Cheyenne women at such a time always go off by themselves into the brush, and when it is done, come out with the infant and return to work as usual. The only difference here was that she went into labor in the middle of a battle. But the little fellow had to come when he was ready.

  I was embarrassed for a variety of reasons, giving birth being an occasion of unusual modesty for a Cheyenne, so much so that I reckon this woman would take Shadow’s death less heavily than my observation of her. Yet I was fascinated, for within half a mile from the soles of my upturned feet the firing had not abated, nor the yells concerning the great day for the Pawnee.… Out of her come the little cleft behind of the infant, tightly pinched together. She strained some more, and then the rest of him emerged smooth as a fish onto the blue blanket spread beneath, and she set up, bit off the cord, tied the baby’s end against his tiny belly, and slapped him into wakefulness, to which he come like a real Cheyenne: with a little start but almost no noise. I expected he already knowed a cry would bring the enemy down on his tribe, so he forbore from loose utterance, and always would. That was also the first and last slap he would ever get from his own kind, while moving into a life that otherwise would know every type of mayhem.

  I backed on out of there and went down to the sand heap under which lay Shadow. In a minute she come out of the brush, walking strong and vigorous and matter-of-fact, the child’s head a-peeping from the blanket at her bosom. Eying me, she then went for her belted knife and I reckon might have been a tough customer with it in spite of her newborn. Only I put my revolver forward, which would seem brutal did you not understand by now that a Cheyenne, man or woman, has got a terrible thick skull when it comes to hearing white men.

  “Now,” I says, “I am going to shoot you and your child if you don’t listen. Shadow That Comes in Sight was killed by the Pawnee. That was the shot you heard, and then you heard him ride away. If you are related to Shadow then maybe you have heard of Little Big Man, which is what I was called when I lived with Old Lodge Skins’s band. I was a friend of the Cheyenne until they stole my wife and son. That is why I am here now. I am going to take you along with me and trade you for them.”

  She studies me through them dark eyes and says: “All right.”

  “I don’t like to do this,” I says, “with your newborn and all, but I have no choice.”

  “All right,” she answers and sets
down, opens her dress under the arm, and puts the infant to feed.

  “Look,” says I, “we had better get to open ground. A Pawnee might come upon us here unawares and kill you before I could explain.”

  “He must eat first,” she tells me quietly and sets solid.

  So I kept my watch upon the rim of the draw during the ensuing conversation. I didn’t know this woman—girl, rather, too young at the time I lived among them to take my notice, if she had been there. I figured her for Shadow’s wife, which accounted for his guarding, but it turned out she was rather one of them young daughters I have mentioned him training, way back, to control her giggle at his funny stories.

  “Your husband been rubbed out?”

  “By white men,” she says without apparent passion. She was a winsome Indian, when I noticed, having a plump face like a berry and large eyes in a slightly Chinee slant and with a sheen across the underlying tear-sacs; fine though short brow beneath the vermilion parting of her hair. Her shining braids was intertwined with otter-skin, and she wore bright beads, with brass circles in her earlobes.

  I started to ask Where, instead of Who, for she probably wouldn’t have told his name, when I heard the pounding of at least three riders on the plain above: unshoed horses, signifying Indians but whether Pawnee or Cheyenne I couldn’t say, and so far as that went, I disliked the approach of either in equal measure. Not speaking Pawnee, I might not get time to use the signs afore they had shot down this woman. If it was Cheyenne, well, that is obvious.

  I mention this because you might question what I did next: grabbed that girl and hastened her back into the brush, the infant still at her pap, and crouched there with her, holding her still though she made no resistance.

  The Pawnee arrived, for so they were as I could tell from their talk, and apparently inspected the ravine bottom from above but did not come down. Shortly they rode off, after I believe, from the sound, one had voided his water right from the saddle down the bank.

  Yet me and the girl stayed where we was for some time, and it came to me that sitting on her heels she leaned her firm body back against me, taking support from it, and unwittingly in clutching her I had got through the side-lacings of the nursing dress and that unoccupied left breast of hers, weighty with milk, lay against my hand. Now I gently cupped it, I don’t know why, for I surely wasn’t lustful in that circumstance. But me and her and the little fellow, who had now went to sleep with his tiny mouth still quavering upon the protruded nipple, we was a kind of family. I had protected them like a father should, and like I had failed to with Olga and little Gus.

  She leaned her head back and placed her warm cheek against my forehead. She smelled of suck, that sweet-sourish fragrance, and then of all them Cheyenne things I knowed of old: fire, earth, grease, blood, sweat, and utter savagery.

  She says: “Now I believe you. You are Little Big Man, and I will be your wife now to replace the one you lost, and this is your son.” She puts him into my arms, and he wakes briefly up and I’ll swear, small as he was, grins at me with them beady black eyes. I felt right queer.

  She says: “I think we had better be going. They will probably collect at Spring Creek.”

  “Who?”

  “Our people,” she answers as if that went without saying. “The Pawnee had great medicine today, but next time we will beat them and cut off their peckers, and their women will sleep alone and weep all night.”

  I was still holding the baby.

  “You have a beautiful son,” she says, looking at both of us in admiration, then takes him back. “Do you have any baggage for me to carry?”

  I was still sort of stunned and didn’t reply, so she fixes the baby inside her bosom, cinches her belt so as to secure his legs, then crawls up the bank to where my dead horse was laying, takes off the blanket from it and the pad saddle and my coat which I had took off and tied behind, and slides back down. She looked disappointed that that was all she had to tote.

  “The wolves will eat my father tonight,” she says. “We should put him on a burial scaffold, but there is no timber here and it is too far to carry him to where there are trees.”

  Then she steps back so I can take the lead as a man should. I guess it wasn’t until that moment that I gathered her intent.

  “We can’t go back to the tribe,” I says.

  “Do you think the white men will let you have a Human Being wife?” she asks. She had a point there, though exaggerated. It wouldn’t be a crime, but it would sure seem odd to Frank North were I to come back from that fight with a family I had suddenly acquired from the enemy. I could of course present this woman and child as legitimate captives, only then they’d be let in for considerable abuse from the Pawnee and later be turned over to the Army at some fort, to be held for exchange with whites taken by the Cheyenne. This was what I had had in mind earlier on, with an idea to control the trade and reclaim Olga and Gus. But right now, at a fairly outlandish moment, I got realistic. I had never received one word that my white family was still alive, and I had checked the forts along the Arkansas. And those along the Platte while working on the railroad.

  Truth was, I had just about decided they was dead without admitting it.

  I says: “In the mood they’re in at the moment, the Cheyenne will shoot me on sight.”

  My woman answered: “I will be with you.”

  So that is how I rejoined the Human Beings. I didn’t have no regrets, leaving behind only my horse with the blacksmith in Julesburg and my share in our little hauling business. As to my sister Caroline, I ought to say that just before I had went down to Julesburg, she told me Frank Delight, the whoremaster and saloonkeeper, had asked her hand in matrimony, and she was inclined to entertain the proposition favorably.

  I won’t detail our route down the ravine to an intersecting one and then on, coming out behind a hill that obscured us from the Pawnee, no more of which we encountered. And continued mile upon mile of rise and fall, during which night overtook us, and that woman arranged some brush and roofed it with blankets and we slept therein, cheek-by-jowl against the chill you usually get at night upon the prairie, where the wind blows all the time.

  The next day we reached Spring Creek and along it found a gathering of the tribe, with remnants like us still coming in. As I expected, I had a close call or two with some of the young Dog Soldiers, but my woman drove them off me like she said she would, for she had a fierce tongue and concentrated purpose.

  Old Lodge Skins had got a new tepee since last I seen him, but I recognized his shield hanging before the entranceway.

  “Wait here, woman,” I says, and she did as told, and I went within.

  “Grandfather,” I says.

  “My son,” he greets me, as if I had seen him last two minutes ago. “You want to eat?” He had the most equable temperament I ever knowed in a man.

  He looked the same to me when I could make him out, except his eyes stayed closed. I figured he was dreaming, and sure enough he proceeded to paint a verbal picture of the incidents in that ravine.

  “I saw you were returning to us,” says he. “There was nothing you could have done for Shadow That Comes in Sight. He knew he would die today and told me so. Our medicine was no good against the many-firing rifles. Perhaps we should not have gone again to the iron road, but the young men wished to destroy another fire-wagon if they could catch one. It is very amusing to see the great thing come snorting and puffing with a spray of sparks as though it would eat up the world, I am told, then it hits the road which we have bent into the air and topples off onto its back, still steaming and blowing, and dies with a big sizzle.”

  Next to him I took a seat and we smoked then, of course. And observing that through all this procedure he had not opened his eyes, I decided at length he could not and had the bad manners, maybe, to inquire.

  “It is true that I am blind,” he admits, “though the rifle ball did not strike my eyes but rather passed through the back of my neck, cutting the tunnel through which
the vision travels to the heart. Look,” he said, opening his lids, “my eyes still see, but they keep it all within themselves, and it is useless because my heart does not receive it.”

  His eyes did look bright enough. I reckon it was the nerve which had been cut or stunned in some manner.

  “Where did that happen, Grandfather?” I handed him back the long pipe.

  He looked some embarrassed, and the smoke stayed inside him a great time before it come gushing from his mouth and nose.

  “Sand Creek,” he finally says.

  And I groaned: “Ah, no!”

  “I remember your advice,” he says, “but we did not go up to the Powder River, after all. Instead we went to the treaty council. I shall tell you how it was. Hump had never attended a conference, and it was one of his needs to own a silver medal like my own. And then our young men said: ‘Why shouldn’t we get presents from the white men for talking to them? We are always in the north, and these Southern Cheyenne get everything.’ I must admit,” Old Lodge Skins goes on, “that I did not myself mind having a new red blanket.

  “So that is why we turned around and came back, and we touched the pen with the white men sent by their Father, and Hump received his medal and the young men their new pipe-hatchets, knives, and looking-glasses, and then we were going to the Powder River, but the soldier chief said: ‘You must stay in this place. That is what you agreed to do when you touched the pen.’ But I tell you I did not understand that. However, I know very little about treaties, so I believed the soldier chief was right, and we stayed, though that country was very ugly, with no water and no game. And then the soldiers attacked the village where we were camping with Black Kettle, and they rubbed out a great many of us, and that is where I was hit in the neck and became blind.”

  Then I feared the worst and asked after Buffalo Wallow Woman.

  “She was rubbed out at Sand Creek,” says Old Lodge Skins. “And White Cow Woman too. And Burns Red in the Sun and his wife Shooting Star. And Hump and High Wolf and Cut Nose and Bird Bear.”