Follow the Free Wind

by Leigh Brackett

  “Against the Dakota and the Cheyennes you could not stand, although you fought strongly. They were too many, you said. They were like the leaves of the trees, you said. You could not kill enough of them. How will you stand against the whites, who are more numerous than the flakes of snow that come in winter? Only the first handful of those snowflakes have you seen. But they will bury your lodges.”

  He paused, so that they should have time to think and understand.

  “Not because I love the white men do I say this.” Although, he thought, I can’t deny my blood, even if they deny it. I can’t be like young Charlie Bent, who perhaps I should not have saved at Sand Creek. “Not because I love the white men, but because I love the Crow, I tell you to remain at peace.”

  He made the sign that he was finished.

  The chiefs talked. Jim sat looking at Young Bear and remembering.

  White Bull said at last, “As the Antelope says, we will do. We will remain at peace.”

  “It is well,” Jim said. Still he looked at Young Bear. “You do not think it is well?”

  Young Bear did not answer, but Jim knew what was in his mind.

  “That time is gone,” he said. “Not only for the Crow. For everyone. You and I were fortunate. We were young in a good day.”

  White Bull said, “If the Antelope were to remain now with his people, it would be well.”

  Jim nodded. “I will remain.”

  He arranged for Mays to be brought to the village on the following day. Then he went with Young Bear to his lodge. There was warmth and food and much talk, a constant coming and going of old friends, a streaming of people he did not know, Black Panther’s children, clan connections, the children of friends. Faces blurred and ran together in the firelight. Voices were strident, painful to the ear, and then they receded, and there was a feeling of joy and peace, and a pleasant darkness.

  “He is sleeping,” Black Panther said.

  Young Bear shook his head. “Perhaps. Stay by him.”

  In the middle of the night Black Panther woke his uncle. “He is awake. He is talking, but he speaks to ghosts. He asks my mother to make him moccasins for the war trail. To Muskrat he speaks of warriors to lead against the Dakota when green grass comes.” Muskrat had been dead for twenty years.

  The two men listened, heavyhearted and afraid, until finally the Antelope slept again.

  Lieutenant Mays came into the village late the next day. He stayed, not because he wanted to but because he felt that he must. He waited four days, and on the last one Jim knew him and told him that the word he would take back to Carrington was peace. After that Mays was awakened by the sound of wailing.

  The Crow began their mourning. It was a great mourning, and Mays was frightened by the violence of it. He saw Jim’s body laid out, dressed in the buckskins of a chief, wrapped in fine blankets of scarlet and blue, with the bow and the battle-ax he had once used placed ready to his hand. Then they brought buffalo robes for the final wrapping, and they brought the shield that Arepoesh had given him and laid it on his breast with the blazon covered. All the time the crying and the wailing kept up, and the people fasted and gashed themselves, and the Antelope’s son and brother built the four-pole platform on a high hill, barren of trees, where a man might look every way and see the wide land of Absaroka. Mays looked at the blood and the mourning paint, the shorn hair and torn clothing, and thought that it was all hideously savage, and at the same time he was sure that no nation of people in the world would ever mourn him at all.

  He stayed to the end. The Crow hardly noticed that he was there. They laid the Antelope on a travois and took the long slow way to the hilltop. It was almost sunset when they reached it and lifted him onto the platform, with the wind sweeping shrilly across the land and the tops of the mountains turning red. Black Panther set the long pole, bracing it with rocks on that hard hill, so that the scalps at the end of it stood high, hanging like a banner above the covered shield on the Antelope’s breast.

  That was the last that the white man’s world ever saw of Jim, when Lieutenant Mays looked back from the foot of the hill at the banner of scalps blowing in the gathering dark.