Little Big Man

by Thomas Berger

  So what them Indians got to doing now was trying to lick the problem from the other end and dream up some medicine to make themselves impervious to bullets. One fellow seemed to have made it, for he had been shot at Beecher’s Island through the chest and did some hocus-pocus over the wound and it closed up without unfortunate effect, and he took the name Bullet Proof. So he fixed up several other braves with his medicine and a couple of weeks after the Island fight, they went against the cavalry. Out of seven Human Beings using that medicine, two was immediately rubbed out and Bullet Proof brought them back to camp and tried to raise them from the dead. One twitched his leg a little, stopped, and neither got up. Bullet Proof then admitted his failure.

  I reckon it was because of such events that Old Lodge Skins and even his fierce young men had to limit their ambition to mere survival, and after a time we found ourselves with the village of Black Kettle, who the white men in afterdays sometimes called the great Indian statesman, I guess because he was always signing treaties to keep the peace and give away more of the Cheyenne hunting grounds to the railroads and ranchers.

  Anyway, that’s how I happened to be at the Battle of the Washita. And as usual, on the side that lost.

  CHAPTER 17 In the Valley of the Washita

  WE JOINED BLACK KETTLE at the end of the big summer buffalo hunt in which all the tribe in the area come together, and then moved on down into the Nations, across the Canadian River, past the Antelope Hills, and onto the Washita, in that reservation what had been assigned to the Cheyenne by the treaty of Medicine Lodge. There was several camps there, strung along the river for about ten mile, more Cheyenne below us and Arapaho, Kiowa, Comanche, and some Apache too. The Indians figured to winter in that valley, which was well timbered with cottonwood.

  It was nice, right nice, and Old Lodge Skins had been exaggerating in his bleak description. He still claimed the water was bitter, but I couldn’t taste it. However I didn’t chide him none, for he was outranked in this gathering, what with Black Kettle and Chief Little Raven of the Arapaho and Satanta, the famous cutthroat Kiowa who painted himself red to the waist and went about tooting a brass bugle. And they none of them paid much heed to Old Lodge Skins, being he had boycotted the Medicine Lodge council and was poor and had such a small band. There is a snobbery among all people who run things, white or Indian.

  So my old chief set by himself most of the time and continued to dream and once in a while he would orate, but didn’t draw much of an audience these days, for his young men got to blaming him for not going to that council on account of the other Indians was boasting of the presents they had received for so doing and of the big show of riding the various tribes had put on for the Government commissioners, and a redskin hates to pass up a display or demonstration. Back in the old days when I was a kid we had camped near some Sioux on the Surprise River and one summer day they begun to yell and fire their pieces, and believing they was attacked we fell out to help them, but discovered they was only celebrating. Hump asked why and they said they didn’t know, but the soldiers over at Fort Laramie was doing it and the Sioux wouldn’t be found wanting in the celebration department. So Hump said he guessed the Human Beings better then, too, and all day we hollered and hooted and wasted ammunition. I figured out later it had been the Fourth of July.

  You might have wondered what become of the two Indians who figured in my youth among the Cheyenne but seemed to have disappeared by this second residence: my enemy Younger Bear the Contrary and Little Horse, who was a heemaneh.

  They had not been killed neither one, for I had asked after them and learned they was running with other bands, I expect so as to get companionship from others of their own kinds, Old Lodge Skins’s camp being too small to accommodate more than one apiece of them exotic professions. A Contrary must get mighty lonely, having to talk in reverse to all the standard people, and though a heemaneh hangs out a lot with the women, gossiping and sewing and all, he probably yearns for the company of others who understand his point of view.

  I missed both of them fellows, for a like reason. I didn’t have no friends at all, other than Old Lodge Skins, and no private, personal enemies. There was plenty of surliness towards me, as I have said, and no more than I had learned to more or less walk unobtrusive past the young men of Old Lodge Skins’s band, we joined the enormous gathering around Black Kettle and the run-ins started all over again, for though the Cheyenne was officially supposed to be at peace now, they didn’t figure it to apply to white men and was still raiding the ranches and farms as long as the weather continued good, so they’d ride back in and see me and go for their weapons even in the middle of our village. It wasn’t me them young braves disliked, but the skin I wore. That’s my point about Younger Bear, who knowed me very well as personal enemies always do; and I realized, now that he wasn’t around no more, that I had taken a good deal of satisfaction from his enmity, which was particular and special, since we had growed up together.

  As to Little Horse, the pressure was off him because of his way of life and he was ever pleasurable company, good for a song or dance or light conversation, not having to worry constantly about his manhood and medicine as a Cheyenne warrior always did. So far as heemanehs go, I’ll take an Indian one every time, for he knows his place in life, unlike the white variety.

  Little Horse and Younger Bear: I met both of them fellows in that great camp down on the Washita River, and I’m going to tell you about it.

  Late November was the time of year, the river skinned with ice and a foot of snow in the valley that would warm some in the day and then freeze into a crust at night, so if you got outside of the beaten-down floor of the campground you’d crash and crunch like a herd of buffalo and maybe cut your ankles into the bargain. Indians was still coming in from all points to this their winter quarters: war parties as well as whole villages with women, children, horse herds, and dogs. After they was settled, I’d always nose around for white faces, and having had so many unpleasant encounters with testy braves, I had got to painting myself as I done at the battle of Solomon’s Fork years ago and traded a couple of Sunshine’s dressed deerskins to a medicine man for one of them buffalo-head hats complete with horns, to hide my ginger hair. Only I didn’t use colored paint, but rather dead black made from charcoal and grease. Otherwise, my settlement clothes having worn out anyway, I wore leggings and a blue blanket. People still knew I was white, but I think thought better of me for having gone Indian as much as humanly possible.

  Well sir, on this day of which I speak, a village had come in and settled on the river about a mile below us near the big horseshoe bend of the Washita, where the water was maybe eight foot deep right off the bank, which the ones who knew the place was telling the new people in case they’d want to take that cold bath the Cheyenne go in for of a morning. By God, some of them did, plunged right in while the women was setting up the lodges and swum in that chill with the fragments of ice keeping them company. That’s when I happened along and made out Younger Bear in the middle of the stream. He had a funny mode of swimming: on alternate strokes his head would rise from the water to the flanges of his nose, his eyes staying shut as the wash streamed down over them, and since he wasn’t breathing through his mouth, the effect was as though a corpse was floating up off the bottom.

  While watching him, I heard myself being greeted in a voice that was too melodious for either a Cheyenne brave or a grown woman but like a young girl’s, and I turned and there was Little Horse. He wore the most beautiful dress of white antelope skin, with an eight-inch fringe, that I ever seen. The bosom was magnificently stitched with glass beads of every hue and even in that cold winter sun give the impression of how the Northern Lights might look if illuminating the Grand Canyon. And he wore a half-dozen bracelets and a string of beads so long they should have tripped him, and his earlobes was stretched like melting taffy by the weight of the great copper disks he carried there.

  The manner in which he approached me, I figured he was tryin
g to pick me up, so I says quick who I was.

  And he says: “Oh yes, I know you,” and giggles, which I guess by now had become his habit, so while it got upon my nerves, I tried not show it for old times’ sake.

  We held a little reunion there on the riverbank among the trampled snow, and of course he never asked me what I was doing here, for that would have been impolite between two fellows raised together, but I did have to submit to an embrace that was more sisterly than brotherly.

  “You left your father’s band?” I asks after I got out of his clutches.

  “That’s right,” says he, toying with his beads. “That was after Sand Creek. My father told me to. He said his medicine was bad and had brought misfortune to the rest of his family and that he didn’t want anything to happen to me because I was too pretty. Still, I would not have gone even so, were it not that Younger Bear”—he pointed towards the water—“left us after Sand Creek. He had an accident there. You know that a Contrary may not sit or lie upon a bed but sleeps always upon the bare earth. Well, the night before we were attacked, Younger Bear, without waking, in a dream, arose from the ground, arranged a robe into a bed, and lay down upon it and spent the rest of the night in that fashion. To his horror he found himself there in the morning. The softness of the buffalo robe had taken all his Contrary power from him, so when the fight came he was weak as a baby, and I had to help him run away from the soldiers up the dry bed of the stream and hide.”

  “I am sorry for that,” I says, and sincerely enough, for the enmity between me and Younger Bear had always gone in only the one direction, though he sometimes annoyed me.

  But Little Horse, typical of a heemaneh I suppose, passed it off fairly negligent. “Oh,” says he, “he got over it. We joined the band of Red-Winged Woodpecker, and Younger Bear sold his Thunder Bow and Contrary power to someone else, which freed him to get married.”

  At that moment the subject of these remarks come in out of the Washita, shivering off the water before it could freeze on him, and since Little Horse broke off our talk to dry Younger Bear with a red blanket and help him into his clothes, I got the idea who had participated in that wedding.

  So when the Bear was all dressed and looked at me, I couldn’t forbear from needling him a little, for though nobody among the Cheyenne ever condemns a heemaneh, it is O.K. to rib the fellow he lives with.

  So I says: “I have just been talking to your lovely wife.”

  “All right,” he says, smiling without malignance, I thought, and squeezing a quart of water out of each of his braids. “Now come and meet the other one.”

  He exchanged the wet blanket for a dry one from Little Horse, swathed himself in it, and led the way among the lodges, through the crowds of dogs, and pointing to one sharp-faced animal that had a good deal of coyote in him, I expect, he told Little Horse to cook it for the guest, so the Horse popped it in the head with a club from his beaded belt and carried its limp yellow body by the hind legs along with that wet blanket, and we come to a shabby tepee and went through its entranceway.

  A goodly fire was blazing in the center and over it hung the usual black pot being stirred by the usual stout woman, except her face was white beneath the dirt and her hair blonde for all the sooted grease. It was Olga.

  Younger Bear turns to me and shows what I took to be an evil sneer at the time, but now I realize it was mainly pure pride, for he had no idea that his female wife and me was related other than by race alone.

  “We will smoke,” he says, “and then we will eat.”

  Olga looks awful as to her person, wearing a dirty buckskin dress and leggings and old moccasins gone almost to rags. The Bear might have took his regular bath irrespective of the temperature, but I believe Olga abstained according to the same schedule. I said before I seen her blonde hair, but actually it was greenish, and the tail of an uncurried horse was less tangled.

  Now, I had left all my weapons back at my own lodge, so as to display my peaceful intentions to any hostile braves I might encounter, and Younger Bear was a great husky fellow more than six foot tall and we was right in the middle of an encampment no doubt full of his friends. I didn’t think of these matters. All I seen was my dear, sweet wife degraded into a slave for this damnable savage, and my fingers curled into murderous claws and I would have been upon the Bear and tore out his throat in the next second … had not Olga looked up right then and sounded off in a voice that for sheer raucousness took the cake from Caroline, or Nothing that time I heard her bawling out her man, or any other female white or red who ever tormented my eardrums.

  “Maybe you can tell me what we’re going to eat, you good-for-nothing loafer, you!” she howls. “I can’t remember the last time you brought in any game. Why, Little Horse here is more of a man than you.” The latter had stayed outside to prepare that dog, and now he come in with the bleeding hunks of its flesh, his dress arms pulled back so as not to soil them, and he tries to calm her down, but Olga continues to Younger Bear: “I think you should change clothes with Little Horse, except that you are too stupid and awkward to be a heemaneh! And who is this foolish beggar you have brought here to steal what little food we have, none of which you provided? Tell him to do his buffalo dance elsewhere.”

  Younger Bear scowls and says: “Unless you want a beating, woman, you will shut your mouth.”

  “You know who’ll get the beating,” snarls Olga. “I’ll break a club against your lazy spine.” She brushes back her hair, leaving a long smear across her forehead, and spits contemptuously in the fire. Then she takes them hunks of dog from Little Horse and hurls them into the pot with a splash of blood and boiling water, some of which hits the Horse and he shrieks in horror that his dress is stained, and Olga says: “I’m sorry, dear,” and takes him outside to look at the spots in the daylight.

  You might have thought Younger Bear was shamed in front of me, but he didn’t show it. He shrugs and lights his pipe. “Usually,” he says, “this woman is gentle as a dove. I think she acts this way just to show off for the guest, for I am a good provider. Did I not bring in that dog just now? I am also a wonderful lover, for I stored up my force for several years as a Contrary, when it was not permitted to have a woman, and now …”

  Well, he went on boasting for a time, and lying, and I’ll tell you his degeneration was awe-inspiring. How many times have I said that the Cheyenne spurned both these indulgences, and here this Indian had taken them up like a saloon bum.

  Not that I thought of that at the time—no, I was still paralytic from seeing Olga. She wasn’t a victim, that much was clear, but her whole personality had changed. You remember how amiable she was when married to me, even to the point of meekness. She never in those years learned much of the English language, yet here she was already fluent in abusive Cheyenne. Maybe her Swedish throat took more naturally to another harsh tongue, but what about that fear of Indians she had had since the massacre of her family by the Santee Sioux?

  My God, but it was strange, and in the pondering of it I forgot for a time about Little Gus, when suddenly in he runs, dressed like a savage and with his fair hair in braids. He must have been about the age of five now and he was a robust lad, his sturdy little body half-naked despite the cold. He had a bow and took it to Younger Bear.

  “Father,” says he, “the string is broken. Please make me a new one, because I need it for our war.”

  The Bear smiled real fond at Gus, though he chided him: “It is not the way of the Human Beings to interrupt the smoking of a guest.” But he pulled the lacing from his own quiver hanging from a lodgepole and stretched a new bowstring of it.

  At last I found my tongue and asked Gus, the child of my own loins, “Who are you fighting? The Pawnee?”

  My voice must have sounded strained, but he didn’t take enough notice of me that it mattered. He was still breathing hard from his running, and as a kid will be, was absolutely occupied with that momentary need of his. So he grabs the bow from Younger Bear, which had now been repaired, an
d answers while en route to the outside.

  “No, not Pawnee,” he says in his high, fierce voice in that guttural language. “White men!”

  “I wish you would come back here and show the proper respect for the guest,” said Younger Bear, but rather weakly, I thought, and before he had got it all out, my Gus had rejoined his playmates. You could hear them whooping. He figured himself for a pure-bred Indian.

  I didn’t know what Olga thought, and having seen her in action I didn’t want to find out. It was the goddamnedest thing I ever seen or heard of. The Kiowa, down in their camp, had a white woman who was used as the lowliest slave. I didn’t have much protection in that village, so hadn’t stayed longer than to determine that she wasn’t my wife, but had seen the poor thing and her baby of eighteen months and she was a miserable sight.

  But the only distress hereabout was in Younger Bear’s countenance when Olga lighted into him. Now that we was alone he starts to boast of how he paid ten ponies for her to the Southern Cheyenne brave what captured her upon the Arkansas. The usual price for an Indian girl, paid to her father, was only three or four animals.

  You might think I was sitting there gritting my teeth. I wasn’t. I felt as if in a dream, and says right calm: “That boy has pale skin.”

  “And hair like the morning sun,” says Younger Bear. “His name is Medicine Standing Up, only we usually call him Potbelly. I think he will become the most powerful war chief of the Human Beings. You know the great Crazy Horse of the Oglala has light skin and fair hair, and he cannot be hit with a bullet.”

  “You made this child?” I took a drag on the stone pipe and handed it back to him. I expected him to say he had, in the mood he was in then, but he looked into the fire for a time through half-closed lids and then replied: “No, his father was the same medicine bird that came to me at Sand Creek and said: ‘Stop being a Contrary! Run away! Do not care what people think. You have a greater destiny than fighting these bluecoats today. You must marry a woman with pale hair and rear my son!’ So that is what I did.”