The Key to the Indian

by Lynne Reid Banks

  She wasn’t so much staring as peering at him through the smoke, with narrowed eyes. A long time seemed to pass. Then she rose slowly and hobbled round the fire to where he was standing.

  She crouched down again. Her knees in their ancient buckskin skirt rose on either side of him like hills. He gazed up into a face that reminded him of the cliffs on the shore of the English Channel, near his home – reddish sandstone eroded by rain into long downward creases. This face was like a wind-carving in that cliff, wrinkled beyond anything he had ever seen. She looked about a hundred and twenty years old. Her eyes were swollen and inflamed; Omri saw that she couldn’t make him out properly because she kept turning her head this way and that. But she was smiling an ancient smile.

  She put the bowl down and a palsied hand groped for him. Before he could think what to do, she had picked him up.

  She lifted him level with her face and examined him. She turned him this way and that and felt him with her bony fingers. She was smiling and shaking her head wonderingly. She spoke to him. Of course he didn’t answer. Her face registered impatience.

  Suddenly her trembling hand slipped and the next moment, he was dangling upside down by one leg! He let out a yell. Hastily, she righted him, and again she asked him a question. He shrugged, the big, neck-shrinking shrug his dad did sometimes, using his hands. The old woman grinned crazily. She had one huge tooth, the size of a tombstone.

  Her face was so full of child-like pleasure, he felt emboldened somehow. He pointed to his mouth. She nodded, still grinning, and put him in her lap, which was like a vast hammock. She reached up and scooped something out of the pot with the ladle, and brought it down to him.

  The ladle was like a small murky lake full of islands. The liquid was gravy, the islands were lumps of meat and vegetables. It was steaming hot. The old woman let out a cackle, and with heat-proof finger and thumb she broke off a pinch of meat and blew on it. Then she dumped it into Omri’s arms. He yelled again! It was like having half a barbecued pig to hold.

  It was burning his arms, and smearing them all over with grease and gravy, but this was bearable next to his hunger. The smell pulled his teeth to the meat like a magnet and he took a bite. It was marvellous! He gnawed on the long fibres of the meat and the juices spilled into his eager mouth. He tore at it until he could eat no more, while the old woman made little gurgling noises of amusement.

  She took the last of it away from him and ate it herself. She wiped her fingers on the ground. Then the ‘hills’ and the earth floor sank away as she levered herself upright, still holding Omri tightly. She turned – she was going to take him off to her own place, Omri knew it and felt almost as fearful as when he had been in the power of the dog.

  But suddenly, right in front of him, he saw a familiar necklace.

  He strained to look upward. Yes! It was Little Bull, standing close in front of the old woman.

  He spoke to her, respectfully, bowing his head. He put out his hand – it was within reach of Omri. There was a pause. He felt the old woman’s claw-like fingers clenching on him possessively. He gasped – he felt the breath being squeezed out of him. Little Bull laid his hand on the old woman’s and he spoke again, very gently. He was asking her to give Omri up… The squeezing clutch relaxed, and, with a reluctance Omri could sense, she handed him over.

  The relief was overwhelming! He instantly felt safe again. He almost kissed Little Bull’s hand as once again it encircled his waist. Little Bull went striding down the aisle and in a few moments, Omri felt the rustling curtain brush against his face and they were back in the compartment.

  Little Bull then held him up in front of him and proceeded to give him the telling off of all time.

  “You! You stay with father! Stay where you are safe! You are boy and Little Bull is man, but when in your world, he stays, does not run alone to look for danger! If you die, Little Bull will cry. Twin Stars cry. Father cry. And how your father will help our tribe if he cries over your body? Stupid. Stupid!”

  “I was hungry,” said Omri sulkily.

  Little Bull looked taken aback. “No one give you food?”

  “No.”

  Little Bull grunted thoughtfully and set him down next to his father, who looked white-faced and torn between anger and relief.

  “Where the hell did you go?” he muttered. “What happened to you, you’re covered with bruises?”

  “A dog picked me up.”

  Omri’s father turned a shade paler, if possible, and simply stared at him in horror. He looked almost ill. He put his arms around Omri and held him for a moment. “Don’t. Don’t,” he muttered into his ear.

  Omri understood what he couldn’t say. “I won’t, Dad. I’m sorry.”

  They sat down among the hide-hills together in silence.

  After a few minutes, Twin Stars came through the curtain with a bowl in her hand and laid it before them. It was full of the same stew.

  Omri’s father perked up a bit. “Hey, smell that,” he said rather weakly.

  Omri was feeling terrible about having frightened him, and tried to get over it with a joke. “I’m an Indian stew!” he sang. “Try it, Dad. It’s good.”

  But his dad was more cautious. “What is this meat?” he asked Twin Stars.

  She smiled and touched some decoration on her dress.

  “Does she mean it’s deer?”

  “No,” said his dad. “I’m afraid not. Those are quills. This must be porcupine meat.”

  Omri swallowed. “Well, it’s really good, anyway.”

  “How do you know?”

  “A crazy old woman gave me some.”

  Whoosh!

  He left his stomach, full of the oily meat, far behind him as Little Bull snatched him up again. It was like going up in a lift at the rate of twenty floors a second.

  “Bad words!” roared Little Bull, shaking him fiercely. “You do not call woman crazy! She is Eldest Clan Mother! Full of wisdom, full of years! You show her respect or I bring dog, and drop no tears when he eats you!”

  Omri tried to hold the contents of his stomach down but it was no use. The shaking was the last straw, and he threw up violently. This brought Little Bull out of his anger, if only because he had to thrust Omri hastily away.

  There was a pause and then he burst out laughing. “Now you need more food, to fill empty stomach! Soon no more food for tribe!” he said.

  Omri uttered a groan and wiped his mouth, thinking irresistibly of his tiny pellet of sick, probably still on its long journey to the ground. Little Bull set him down more gently.

  “You and father eat,” he said. “Then father tell what talking paper says will come.”

  “Are you all right, bub?” asked his father anxiously as Omri was restored to him.

  “More or less,” said Omri. “I didn’t know she was a clan mother. It’s clan mothers who choose the chiefs – perhaps she chose Little Bull. No wonder he was so polite to her.”

  He glanced at the huge lake of stew at whose shores his father had begun to feast, and then hurriedly away again. Noticing his green face, Omri’s dad stopped eating. Omri half expected to see him wipe his fingers on the ground, Indian-fashion, but he rubbed the grease carefully into his hands instead. It didn’t seem right to wipe them on any of the skins or on his new clothes.

  “What are you going to tell Little Bull?” Omri said after a pause.

  His father sighed heavily. “God knows. What a terrible dilemma. I wish I’d stayed well out of it now.”

  “Why? What did the book say?”

  “From what I can make out, there were three ways the Iroquois tribes went at this time. Some of them stayed put and tried to recover their lands or at least to hold out against the settlers, who were steadily moving west and driving them back. I hope Little Bull’s people won’t do that, because those Indians lost everything. A lot of them were killed, and their way of life was badly damaged. A lot of the tribes who stayed on the fringes of settler-territory just succumbed to despair and
alcohol and – No. I can’t bear to think of that.

  “The second thing was, they moved west, trying to get out of the way of the expansion, and joined with other tribes. But that wasn’t much good either, because the whites just kept coming up behind them, pushing them farther and farther from their own territories, forcing them to make alliances with tribes whose customs they didn’t understand. They tried to fight back, but in the end they were all overtaken by the Europeans anyway. Most of their homelands, except for a few patches, were taken from them by conquest or by broken treaties. It was just a long drawn-out agony. Defeat and treachery and poverty – and the worst was that many just didn’t know who they were any more. They went through hell. An awful lot of them died of diseases brought by the Europeans. There were some terrible cases of them being infected on purpose, to kill them off…”

  Omri shuddered. “And the third way?”

  His father brooded for such a long time that Omri began to fear that there was no third way, or that it was just as bad as the other two.

  “Dad?”

  “Well. The Canada option.”

  “Moving north?”

  “Yes. Especially the Mohawks. There were several villages of Mohawks in Canada already, and some of the ones from here in New York State went up there and joined them.”

  “What happened to that lot?”

  “They’re still around.”

  Omri sat up straight, queasiness forgotten. “Now? I mean, in our time?”

  “Yes. Tens of thousands of Mohawks, and other Iroquois tribes, have survived. A lot of them are still living in a few small reservations around the US-Canada border. They still have their pride and their identity. They even remember their language.”

  “Dad!” Omri cried excitedly. “Then that’s it! That’s what you have to advise Little Bull to do!”

  He looked into his father’s face for some reflection of his own feeling of intense relief. But there was none.

  “I don’t think,” he said very soberly, “that it’s up to me to advise them at all. And if I did, I’m not sure I’d want to let them in for – the Canada option.”

  18

  Dreams

  “But what did the clan mother think when she saw me?”

  Omri and his father were sitting once again on Little Bull’s thighs, this time in the ‘room’. Twin Stars was weaving a basket out of thin, pliant strips of white wood; Tall Bear was having his afternoon nap among the furs.

  “Eldest Clan Mother thinks you are little man.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “One of small people, living in earth, under bushes, in holes. They have life like us.”

  Omri and his father exchanged puzzled looks. You could believe strange things more easily here; but what were these ‘little men’? The Indians’ leprechauns?

  “Do you believe in them?”

  “Why this question? They are.”

  “Have you seen them?”

  “Before two moons I see one teasing dog with stick.”

  “How do they look?”

  “Like us. But small.”

  “How do they dress?”

  “As me. As you.”

  “Lucky I wasn’t wearing my sweater!” said Omri. He could see his dad was thinking what he was. Could Little Bull really have seen one?

  “Clan Mother spoke of you,” Little Bull said presently.

  “She said something about me?”

  “Yes. She said she saw you in night.”

  “No one saw us,” said Omri’s dad. “Except you.”

  “She saw you in dream.”

  “Oh, a dream…” said Omri. He thought dreams were a drag.

  But his dad leant forward eagerly. “What was her dream, Little Bull?”

  “Clan Mother ask me to guess her dream. I try to guess, so then she tell me. Little man came out of ground. Arm straight.” He pointed. “Shout without sound. Moving other arm. Like this.” Little Bull beckoned strongly. “In her dream, Clan Mother call to others. People come out of longhouse. Little man turn and run away. Still move arm and show way.”

  “As if calling the people to come after him?”

  Little Bull nodded slowly, frowning.

  “Which way did he run, the little man?”

  “To forest.”

  “Which direction is that? Towards the sunset?”

  “No. Towards home of most cold wind.”

  “North,” said Omri’s dad quietly to Omri.

  Late in the afternoon, Little Bull took them for a walk.

  He didn’t cover them with his cloak this time, and the Indians they passed who saw them seemed curious but not surprised. Perhaps the clan mother had passed the word that ‘little men’ were visiting their chief.

  They could now see that there was a palisade of sharpened stakes, perhaps six metres high, set in the ground tightly together all around the longhouse. There was no gate. The palisade’s two ends folded one behind the other, so people could get in or out in single file. Omri couldn’t see a back entrance, but he hoped there was one.

  Beyond was a large cleared area, with the forest only coming close in one place, on a hill too steep for fields. You could see the stumps of many trees, and among them was a blackened field where, Little Bull explained, some settlers had sneaked up at night a month before, and burnt their crop. A few sweetcorn plants had survived – now rustling-dry and stripped of cobs. Up the still upright stalks of the corn plants Omri could see that beans had been growing, and round their bases, there had been – and still was, though the big leaves had been frost-shrivelled – another kind of vegetable: marrows like enormous green sausages, and big sun-coloured pumpkins that lay among their dry tendrils, big enough to make Cinderella’s coach. There were women out picking the smaller squashes and putting them into big baskets.

  “How come they didn’t burn everything?”

  “We see fire in night. Run out, making big noise. Shoot with bow and gun. Kill three, drive others off. I jump on horse and follow.” Little Bull pointed to his pony, brought back from Omri’s time, grazing at a distance. “I kill two more with tomahawk.” He put Omri and his dad on the ground, sat cross-legged before them, and with an air of grim satisfaction, pulled two hanks of hair out of his belt.

  Omri turned his head away instinctively, but then he made himself look. The hair looked fresh; he could see the dried blood on the scraps of skin at the bottom. He set his teeth against a grimace, and stared steadily at the scalps, crushing his squeamishness. It helped that he didn’t care that those men had been scalped. He felt totally on the Indians’ side.

  “Now all our bullets are gone,” said Little Bull quietly. “Soon rebels will come again. We fight guns with bows, arrows, trade axes. And we are not enough. Many young warriors of tribe are gone from us. To scout, to keep watch for raids. And to raid in vengeance.”

  “Raids against the settlers?”

  Little Bull looked away. “Not only.”

  “Who else?”

  “Oneida. Cayuga.”

  “Little Bull, not your own Confederacy tribes!”

  “My word was no!” he shouted suddenly. “There was great quarrel with young warriors! But Little Bull is only pine-tree chief, and our Mohawks are very angry. Oneida, Cayuga help French in war, and now they join with the rebel English. These promise protection, tell them land is there for them. For us, land is mother, not for belonging. So some Iroquois tribes fight against us on side of rebels. Now Mohawk warriors punish them – burn their villages.”

  There was a long, long silence. Omri was shocked and scared. He glanced at his dad. He was looking very serious, and heaved a deep sigh.

  “Of course that won’t help,” he said.

  “I know this. But young men cannot stay in longhouse and work land like women. Their blood is hot.”

  “And you?”

  “My blood is hot. But head is cold. Hot head is no good. Chiefs must think for all people in longhouse.” There was another silence, and at la
st Little Bull sighed heavily in his turn. “We must leave longhouse. I know this for many moons.”

  “So why didn’t you leave before now?”

  “After we leave,” Little Bull answered slowly, “the longhouse will fall down. Fall down for ever.”

  “You mean, yours will.”

  “No, not only. Iroquois will be no more Haudenosauree, People of the Longhouse.”

  “Little Bull,” said Omri’s dad carefully. “I’m curious. My books say most Iroquois live in cabins now.”

  “True. Our village is not like others.”

  “Why?”

  “A dream was my teacher,” said Little Bull in a solemn undertone. “After my journey to you, a dream came of the Peacemaker who planted the Tree of Peace, before many, many harvests. He sits before me and makes ring with his arms. Inside this ring are all my people. His hair blows over them. Then his arms become walls made of skin of tree, and his hair is roof. He changes. He becomes the longhouse. I hear his voice say, ‘When Mohawk no longer live together as one people, they are no longer People of the Longhouse. Onondaga, Keepers of the Fire, already break fire in two. People scatter one from one, like dry leaf in wind. They no longer talk together, in counsel. No more one people. Hear my words. Longhouse must stay for ever.’

  “When we travel here from village Algonquin burn, my people say they want to live in cabins, one man, one woman, alone with their children. My word was no. Many times I speak it, and tell them, guess my dream. They will not guess. So I cannot tell them. They show me their backs and begin to make cabins. So Little Bull build longhouse alone, as he build once with you. Clan mothers keep closed mouths. No one helped me. Many days Little Bull worked alone, and village watched. First they laughed. Then they stopped, and watched without noise. And then Old Clan Mother speak. ‘Little Bull is right. Help him’.”

  “And did they help then?” Omri asked.

  “Yes. Then many worked with me, men and women, build longhouse big enough for all. Wood of cabins we burned in longhouse fires. Put up wall of trees, as in time before. For this, they make me Pine-Tree Chief.”