Little Big Man

by Thomas Berger

  When I come to her she whispered: “Shall I put more wood upon the fire?”

  “It’s all right,” says I, quaking away, for I had got up a sweat beneath Wunhai’s robes and it now felt as if it was turning to ice.

  “Well,” she said, “you better get in here before you freeze.”

  This girl’s name was Digging Bear, and she was a few years older than Sunshine, maybe about twenty-three or four, very wide across the horizontal centerline of her face, an effect that was made more so by her sometimes wearing the braids behind her ears. She had positive features but handsome and was firm as a mare. She wore her dress in bed but had it lifted by the time I joined her. She was the only sister shorter than me; still she was right powerful of muscle. Having admitted me to the field of battle, as it were, she made me struggle over the outcome, and for a long time thereafter, the calves of my legs bore bruises where she had dug in with her heels as if riding a pony upside down.

  Afterward she wanted to talk: “I heard that white woman with Younger Bear is ugly and has a funny smell. I knew that she could not be your wife. Nobody but a coward like him would keep a woman of that type.” Etc., etc.; she was the malicious sister, but I’ll tell you that a nasty streak ain’t the worst quality for a woman in bed. Adds a touch of seasoning. The best kind of war pony always has some meanness in him and so escapes being hitched to a travois.

  I was a bit hung over by the time I pulled away from Digging Bear, and having been recharged by her own comments, she was clutching at me for another go.

  “Stay here,” she whispered. “Corn Woman is too tired.”

  This referred to the remaining sister, the widow. I swear I had not thought of her until then. She was the biggest, the plumpest, the oldest, being maybe twenty-eight, with them two kids on adjoining robes.

  “So am I tired,” I tells Digging Bear. “And you should be too. Go to sleep.” But I could feel her watching me as I went back to my bed alongside Sunshine, and I had to lay there awhile in pretense before her head disappeared beneath the covers and I could steal out again and over to Corn Woman.

  Yes, tired I was and sore, but whatever had sent me on those rounds was not extinguished while one sister remained. Whatever, Corn Woman was sleeping when I got there, and I didn’t go through no ceremony, just flung back her robe and got inside. She clasped me without rightly awakening: she had had a husband and two kids, and this wasn’t no novelty as with Wunhai nor a fierce exercise like with Digging Bear, but as natural as eating a meal. She was warm and soft, and I found her mighty soothing for a skinny, nervous fellow like myself.

  Who was best? None of your business. I maybe said too much already, for I cannot impress upon you too earnestly that my activities that night were by Cheyenne standards the opposite of loose morals. These was all my wives, and I was doing my duty towards them.

  I could hardly walk when that was done, but a great calm had descended upon me. I still wasn’t sleepy, but no bitterness nor unresolved problems kept me awake. I put on my breechclout and leggings again—I had worn my shirt through all of it—wrapped a blanket around me, and went outdoors.

  It hurt some to breathe deep, so cold and merciless clean was the air. A dog yapped a mile away, in Younger Bear’s village: you could hear it perfect. The moon had set by now and all was dead black, for the dawn would soon rise. I had consumed the night in delivering my masculine services. There could be no doubt that I had once and for all turned 100 per cent Cheyenne insofar as that was possible by the actions of body. I might have planted a new human being or two by that night’s work, and I never thought about how they would be little breeds, growing up into a world fast turning uncongenial even to fullbloods. No, all seemed right to me at that moment. It was one of the few times I felt: this is the way things are and should be. I had medicine then, that’s the only word for it. I knew where the center of the world was. A remarkable feeling, in which time turns in a circle, and he who stands at the core has power over everything that takes the form of line and angle and square. Like Old Lodge Skins drawing in them antelope within the little circle of his band, but concentric around them was all other Cheyenne, present and past, living and ghost, for the Mystery is continuous.

  It was a grand moment, and into it, out of the night, stepped Sunshine. I smelled rather than seen her, for the blackness was absolute.

  “You cannot sleep?” I asked, believing she had come from the tepee.

  “I was in the woods,” she said, and took my arms and put between them a tiny parcel in a blanket. It felt like a warm coal, but was a newborn child. She had gone out and had it while I was bedding with her sisters. “Another son for you,” she said. “He will be a great speaker. Did you not hear his powerful cry?”

  But of course, with them sisters, I had not been listening. I had not knowed she had even left the lodge.

  “I hope our enemies are far away,” she said, “for when he came to life he had great lungs.”

  Well, this was no break in my medicine feeling but rather a richening of it. I held the little fellow to me and Sunshine leaned her head upon my shoulder, and then this thing happened. A burning golden ball appeared on the dark horizon, and as it slowly clumb into the sky, it changed through marvelous colors, vermilion to yellow to emerald green, turquoise to intense blue, then into purple and indigo and bright again, like a moving peephole through the roof of the world onto the great rainbow outside down which the chiefs ride in ceremonial array in the Other Life. Finally, when it got well up, there was a moment of mother-of-pearl and then the colors burned off into full radiant white.

  “That is his name,” said Sunshine. “Morning Star.”

  I handed my son back to her and she went into the lodge to feed him.

  As it happened, another person was also provided with a name by that heavenly display, which he was watching at this same moment from behind the hills overlooking the valley of the Washita. I reckon he took it as a favorable portent of the fate what had made him a general at the age of twenty-three. And maybe he was right, for in a few moments now he would ride to the greatest victory he ever knowed.

  In later years his Crow Indian scouts would call him Son of the Morning Star. His real name was George Armstrong Custer.

  CHAPTER 18 The Big Medicine of Long Hair

  FIRST LIGHT COME OUT of the east not long afterward. I was still out of doors and full of wonder, so much so that I was actually considering to go break the ice on the river and take me a Cheyenne plunge. But my pony, tethered near, was stirring for a morning drink. Actually—you won’t believe this—he looked at me out of his big clear eyes and said: “Father, take me down to the water.” I don’t mean he spoke in words, but he said it. Then he said: “We are in for a big fight.” To hell with what you believe. He said it. I was there.

  I said: “Oh, you hear the crashing of the snow crust up the valley. That is just the horse herd of your brothers and cousins.”

  “No,” said my pony, stubbornly shaking his head as I undid the halter from the picket pin. His breath and mine was steaming great clouds in the cold.

  “Come,” said I, “I’ll show you.” I mounted him and started out of the cottonwood grove which the camp was in among. My own tepee stood near the edge with no timber close enough to fall on it in case of storm, so we rode only forty yards to the open bottomland of the valley and looked up the meadow where the herd was. At that moment I heard a distant shot behind me, from the hills on the far side of the village. Reason I didn’t turn, though, was that straight ahead, galloping in a line that stretched across the snow-whitened bottom, come a great body of animals. But you can be fooled by the morning air and all the more when crystalline, which magnifies, so that at distance a man will seem a horse, a horse a buffalo. Allowing for this effect, I seen that charge as our pony herd in stampede, set off by Pawnee raiders. With a purpose to go get my gun, I wheeled; and as I did, a whole brass band commenced to play, trumpets, flutes, and drums. I thought I had lost my mind. It was an Irish tu
ne called “Garry Owen,” what I had heard the post band at Leavenworth play in Sunday concert. At the first strains, my pony reared and throwed me. “I told you,” he screamed and bolted crazy towards the oncoming charge, going maybe fifty feet before his front legs broke at the knees and he plunged into the snow, skidding in a long trace of red.

  He had been hit in the neck while I was still mounted, for that whole line had begun to fire upon the first notes. I was drenched with his blood. From about three foot above ground the air seemed solid with whining lead. Yet I got up and run untouched towards my tepee. I might have been yelling but couldn’t tell owing to the music. I couldn’t even hear the hoofbeats or the carbine fire, just that band blare.

  Digging Bear was coming out of the lodge door, carrying my piece and a leathern pouch of ammunition. Ten yards still away, she throwed me the rifle and swung her arm back to hurl the pouch, but a little black hole sprung in her broad temple, like a fly had lit there, and she set down dead in the snow. A dozen more slugs snapped through the lodge cover behind her, and when I run inside, I seen young Wunhai had gathered half of them into that warm brown breast I had fondled several hours before, her deerskin bosom all bitten up.

  Sunshine sat in the rear, Morning Star at her nipple.

  “Down, down!” I shouts. “Lie flat.” She curled around the baby, and I covered her over with buffalo robes. I went to do the same for Frog Lying on a Hillside and Corn Woman and her children, but they were gone from the tepee.

  By time I got to the door again, the bluecoats was so close they fired beyond our lodge into those in the timber behind. To leave by that egress would have put me under their hoofs, so with my knife I slashed a rent in the back and slipped through it. Indians was coming out everywhere, some not getting far before they went under, others diving behind cottonwoods and subsequently delivering a return fire, mainly arrows, but the targets was bad and their own folk running between.

  The cavalry pounded in among the lodges now, the band still playing out in the open valley where they rested. That music was driving me batty. I belly-flopped behind a tree. I had not yet fired my piece, but not because of delicacy. No, I would have dropped them troopers without mercy had I the wherewithal to do it: they was ravaging my home, had killed two of my women, and because of them my dearest wife and newborn boy lay in uttermost jeopardy. At such a time you see no like betwixt yourself and enemy, be he your brother by blood or usage.

  But my gun was empty. Around the lodge I kept it unloaded in case them children got to tinkering. The ammunition rested in that pouch under Digging Bear’s body, some fifty yards of galloping cavalry from where I lay.

  Some Cheyenne had went to the river, leaped in, and was using the high bank as fortification behind which they covered the retreat down the center of the icy stream by a large body of women and children. I thought I saw Corn Woman and her young among them, but the gun smoke was thick now and closed across about that time, and when it cleared a trooper’s horse was shot under him and fell into my line of vision. I was distracted by the sight of them saddlebags, where the cavalrymen generally packed their extra ammunition. I run towards it, but before I got there the animal clumb to its feet and galloped away riderless. Just stunned, I reckon. But the trooper was hurt worse. He lay with his left boot at a strange angle from his upper leg. He was a young fellow, hardly beyond a boy, with a newly started mustache. Him and me, our eyes met, and a blaze come into his as they was windows in back of which somebody just fired a torch, but it was dying caused it and not recognition, for the next instant his head pitched forward showing the back of the skull busted open like an orange. And the Cheyenne who did it, using a wooden war club embedded with a triangular blade of rusty iron, took the lad’s carbine and cartridge belt and dashed for the river, whooping, but got his own as he leaped the bank, belched blood as he hit the water, and sank in frothing commotion.

  Already the troops had passed into the lower reaches of the village, the noise suddenly half-distant as if from a fight in the room next door. I had a mind to go back to my lodge and fetch the cartridges from underneath Digging Bear, but knew the soldiers would soon reverse for the clean-up and my activity might bring them down on where Sunshine was hid, so I run among the other tepees, and that was when I saw the stout body of Black Kettle, sprawled near his lodge door. He had signed his last treaty. Sand Creek and now this. His wife lay nearby, still dying.

  Old Lodge Skins, I thought: I must get to him. He’d be helpless now, with no sons and blind. So I doubled back, for his tepee was near my own, and on the way I passed numerous dead Indians and almost got shot by a wounded brave I didn’t know, but he went under before he could stretch the bowstring. The incident brought my appearance to mind. I hadn’t cleaned the black paint from my face of the day before—it keeps your nose and cheeks warm in winter—but some of it must have been scraped away in this or that activity since. Aside from that, my hair was wholly exposed. Well, I didn’t know what to do about it at the moment.

  I plunged in through the entranceway of Old Lodge Skins’s tepee. Sure enough, he was still there. But he was not abandoned. Them two young wives of his was trying to get him to flee. The one had a baby strapped to her back. The other was especially wrought up, and automatically went for me with her butcher knife, though she used to see me often.

  I held her off on the muzzle of my empty gun, and says: “You women run for it. I’ll help Grandfather.”

  “Kill me then, too,” cries Tassel Woman, who had that knife.

  “Get on out, you fool!” I yells, and stepping to the side, fetches her a swat in the ample hindquarters with the stock of the Ballard. “Go down to the river.”

  That shook some sense into her, and the other with the baby said: “I believe you”; and they left.

  “My son,” Old Lodge Skins remarked, quite casually. “Sit down beside me and we will smoke.”

  Would you believe it? That old man set there upon his buffalo robe and commenced to fill his pipe.

  “Grandfather, have you lost your wits? The bluecoats are wiping us out. We have only the time of a bird flight to get under the riverbank before they turn back.”

  “Black Kettle is dead,” said he. “I know it. I am blind and cannot fight. Yet neither will I run. If it is my day to die, I want to do it here, within a circle.”

  Well, I could see from the set of his leathery old jaw that talk from me would never stir him.

  I says: “All right, I will light the pipe.” He stuck his head forward, I grabbed away the pipe stem with my left hand, and with my right fist I hit him full force upon the chin. My hand was perfectly stunned, I couldn’t unclench it. Old Lodge Skins, however, setting there like a rock, appeared undamaged.

  “You are worried too much, my son,” he said. “Your hand slips upon the pipe. Give me the brand. I will light it myself. Then we shall smoke, and your worry will lift and fly away like the little buffalo bird.”

  I didn’t think I’d ever regain the use of my right hand, so I brought him a glowing coal in my left. By now the shooting outside was coming back in our direction. What I had intended to do with that blow, you see, was to knock him unconscious and carry him to the river. I now considered cold-cocking him with my rifle butt, but it was likely his head was even harder than his jaw, besides being padded with that coarse, thick hair.

  He puffed on the pipe and offered the usual smoke clouds to East and West, etc. By God, I thought, he is sticking to it, he is an Indian to the core. You know how you think about foreigners, savages, and so on, that in an emergency they’ll be just like yourself, even to talking English. But it was me who had to become Cheyenne here.

  I got the eloquence of desperation. “The river is part of the great circle of the waters of the earth,” I says in the highest, squeakiest voice I could imagine, in mimicry of the falsetto of classic Cheyenne oratory. It seemed to work: Old Lodge Skins come alert and put down his pipe.

  “The sacred waters flow through the body of the earth as th
e blood runs within a man and the sap within a tree. All things are joined in this great current. O White Buffalo Spirit, hear me! Lead your children to safety by the river!”

  I don’t want you to think I was mocking anything at this point. Get into a battle and see how derisive you feel. No, I felt the call then. It might have been an instinct for preaching inherited from my Pa, but I was right exalted.

  Not so much so, however, that I failed to see Old Lodge Skins picking up a huge old muzzle-loader from where it had laid beside him. My God, I thought, he’s going to shoot me for trying to save him, the crazy old galoot.

  Then I heard a noise at the door and turned, and a soldier crouched there, thrusting in a pistol and trying to see through the dim light.

  “Barroooom!” I never heard a louder report than that made by Old Lodge Skins’s piece. It must have been double-charged to make such a noise, spitting fire and smoke halfway across the tepee circle, and when the ball hit that soldier boy he was flung out the door like an empty suit of clothes.

  The chief set up from where he had laid back with the five-foot barrel between his moccasin toes. He had sighted on sound.

  “Go get his hair, my son,” said he. “Then we will talk some more about the river. Maybe I will go there.”

  “It’s probably too late already,” I says. “Now they will come like coyotes to a rotting carcass. I won’t argue with you any more.”

  I took an arm and pulled him to his feet. He never resisted in the slightest. I reckon he had decided to go: otherwise I’d never of moved him, I’m sure of that. I slit the tepee cover with my knife and prepared to lead him out.