by Jon E. Lewis
“Run in and get me a couple cigars.”
Bruce hesitated, his eyes on Enich. “Run!” his father said harshly.
Reluctantly he released the colt’s halter rope and started for the house. At the door he looked back, and his father and Enich were talking together, so low that their words didn’t carry to where he stood. He saw his father shake his head, and Enich bend to pluck a grass stem. They were both against him; they both were sure Socks would never get well. Well, he would! There was some way.
He found the cigars, came out, watched them both light up. Disappointment was a sickness in him, and mixed with the disappointment was a question. When he could stand their silence no more, he burst out with it. “But what are we going to do? He’s got to have some place to stay.”
“Look, kiddo.” His father sat down on a sawhorse and took him by the arm. His face was serious and his voice gentle. “ We can’t take him out there. He isn’t well enough to walk, and we can’t haul him. So Jim here has offered to buy him. He’ll give you three dollars for him, and when you come back, if you want, you might be able to buy him back. That is, if he’s well. It’ll be better to leave him with Jim.”
“Well . . .” Bruce studied the mole on Enich’s cheek. “Can you get him better by fall, Mr. Enich?”
“I wouldn’t expect it,” Enich said. “He ain’t got much of a show.”
“If anybody can get him better, Jim can,” his father said. “How’s that deal sound to you?”
“Maybe when I come back he’ll be all off his braces and running around like a house afire,” Bruce said. “Maybe next time I see him I can ride him.” The mole disappeared as Enich tongued his cigar.
“Well, all right then,” Bruce said, bothered by their stony-eyed silence. “ But I sure hate to leave you behind, Socks, old boy.”
“It’s the best way all around,” his father said. He talked fast, as if he were in a hurry. “Can you take him along now?”
“Oh, gee!” Bruce said. “Today?”
“Come on,” his father said. “ Let’s get it over with.”
Bruce stood by while they trussed the colt and hoisted him into the wagon box, and when Jim climbed in he cried out, “ Hey, we forgot to put his hobbles back on.” Jim and his father looked at each other. His father shrugged. “ All right,” he said, and started putting the braces back on the trussed front legs. “ He might hurt himself if they weren’t on,” Bruce said. He leaned over the endgate, stroking the white blazed face, and as the wagon pulled away he stood with tears in his eyes and the three dollars in his hand, watching the terrified straining of the colt’s neck, the bony head raised above the endgate and one white eye rolling.
Five days later, in the sun-slanting dew-wet spring morning, they stood for the last time that summer on the front porch, the loaded wagon against the front fence. The father tossed the key in his hand and kicked the doorjamb. “Well, good-bye, Old Paint,” he said. “See you in the fall.”
As they went to the wagon Bruce sang loudly,
Good-bye, Old Paint, I’m leavin’ Cheyenne,
I’m leavin’ Cheyenne, I’m goin’ to Montana,
Good-bye, Old Paint, I’m leavin’ Cheyenne.
“Turn it off,” his father said. “You want to wake up the whole town?” He boosted Bruce into the back end, where he squirmed and wiggled his way neck-deep into the luggage. His mother, turning to see how he was settled, laughed at him. “You look like a baby owl in a nest,” she said.
His father turned and winked at him. “Open your mouth and I’ll drop in a mouse.”
It was good to be leaving; the thought of the homestead was exciting. If he could have taken Socks along it would have been perfect, but he had to admit, looking around at the jammed wagon box, that there sure wasn’t any room for him. He continued to sing softly as they rocked out into the road and turned east toward MacKenna’s house, where they were leaving the keys.
At the low, slough-like spot that had become the town’s dump ground the road split, leaving the dump like an island in the middle. The boy sniffed at the old familiar smells of rust and tar paper and ashes and refuse. He had collected a lot of old iron and tea lead and bottles and broken machinery and clocks, and once a perfectly good amber-headed cane, in that old dump ground. His father turned up the right fork, and as they passed the central part of the dump the wind, coming in from the north-east, brought a rotten, unbearable stench across them.
“Pee-you!” his mother said, and held her nose. Bruce echoed her.
“Pee-you! Pee-you-willy!” He clamped his nose shut and pretended to fall dead.
“Guess I better get to windward of that coming back,” said his father.
They woke MacKenna up and left the key and started back. The things they passed were very sharp and clear to the boy. He was seeing them for the last time all summer. He noticed things he had never noticed so clearly before: how the hills came down into the river from the north like three folds in a blanket, how the stovepipe on the Chinaman’s shack east of town had a little conical hat on it. He chanted at the things he saw. “Good-bye, old Chinaman. Good-bye, old Frenchman River. Good-bye, old Dumpground, good-bye.”
“Hold your noses,” his father said. He eased the wagon into the other fork around the dump. “ Somebody sure dumped something rotten.”
He stared ahead, bending a little, and Bruce heard him swear. He slapped the reins on the team till they trotted. “What?” the mother said. Bruce, half rising to see what caused the speed, saw her lips go flat over her teeth, and a look on her face like the woman he had seen in the traveling dentist’s chair, when the dentist dug a living nerve out of her tooth and then got down on his knees to hunt for it, and she sat there half raised in her seat, her face lifted.
“For gosh sakes,” he said. And then he saw.
He screamed at them. “Ma, it’s Socks! Stop, Pa! It’s Socks!”
His father drove grimly ahead, not turning, not speaking, and his mother shook her head without looking around. He screamed again, but neither of them turned. And when he dug down into the load, burrowing in and shaking with long smothered sobs, they still said nothing.
So they left town, and as they wound up the dugway to the south bench there was not a word among them except his father’s low, “For Christ sakes, I thought he was going to take it out of town.” None of them looked back at the view they had always admired, the flat river bottom green with spring, its village snuggled in the loops of river. Bruce’s eyes, pressed against the coats and blankets under him until his sight was a red haze, could still see through it the bloated, skinned body of the colt, the chestnut hair left a little way above the hooves, the iron braces still on the broken front legs.
DOROTHY M. JOHNSON
A Man Called Horse
DOROTHY MARIE JOHNSON (1905–1984) was born in Iowa, and was educated, like many Western writers after her, at the University of Montana, Missoula. After several years as a journalist and editor, she returned to the University of Montana as Assistant Professor of Journalism. Although Johnson wrote two well-received Western novels, Buffalo Woman (1977) and All the Buffalo Returning (1979), her reputation as a Western writer rests chiefly on two collections of short stories, Indian Country (1953) and The Hanging Tree (1957). Johnson dispensed with many of the clichés of popular Western fiction, and she was notably sympathetic to the American Indian viewpoint. Among the numerous awards Johnson received for her Western fiction were a Western Writers of America Silver Spur in 1957 and a Western Literature Association Distinguished Achievement Award in 1981. She was made an honorary member of the Blackfeet tribe in Montana.
The captivity story “A Man Called Horse” is from Indian Country, and was made into a classic Western film of the same title, directed by Elliot Silverstein in 1970.
HE WAS A young man of good family, as the phrase went in the New England of a hundred-odd years ago, and the reasons for his bitter discontent were unclear, even to himself. He grew up in the gracious old Bost
on home under his grandmother’s care, for his mother had died in giving him birth; and all his life he had known every comfort and privilege his father’s wealth could provide.
But still there was the discontent, which puzzled him because he could not even define it. He wanted to live among his equals – people who were no better than he and no worse either. That was as close as he could come to describing the source of his unhappiness in Boston and his restless desire to go somewhere else.
In the year 1845, he left home and went out West, far beyond the country’s creeping frontier, where he hoped to find his equals. He had the idea that in Indian country, where there was danger, all white men were kings, and he wanted to be one of them. But he found, in the West as in Boston, that the men he respected were still his superiors, even if they could not read, and those he did not respect weren’t worth talking to.
He did have money, however, and he could hire the men he respected. He hired four of them, to cook and hunt and guide and be his companions, but he found them not friendly.
They were apart from him and he was still alone. He still brooded about his status in the world, longing for his equals.
On a day in June, he learned what it was to have no status at all. He became a captive of a small raiding party of Crow Indians.
He heard gunfire and the brief shouts of his companions around the bend of the creek just before they died, but he never saw their bodies. He had no chance to fight, because he was naked and unarmed, bathing in the creek, when a Crow warrior seized and held him.
His captor let him go at last, let him run. Then the lot of them rode him down for sport, striking him with their coup sticks. They carried the dripping scalps of his companions, and one had skinned off Baptiste’s black beard as well, for a trophy.
They took him along in a matter-of-fact way, as they took the captured horses. He was unshod and naked as the horses were, and like them he had a rawhide thong around his neck. So long as he didn’t fall down, the Crows ignored him.
On the second day they gave him his breeches. His feet were too swollen for his boots, but one of the Indians threw him a pair of moccasins that had belonged to the halfbreed, Henri, who was dead back at the creek. The captive wore the moccasins gratefully. The third day they let him ride one of the spare horses so the party could move faster, and on that day they came in sight of their camp.
He thought of trying to escape, hoping he might be killed in flight rather than by slow torture in the camp, but he never had a chance to try. They were more familiar with escape than he was and, knowing what to expect, they forestalled it. The only other time he had tried to escape from anyone, he had succeeded. When he had left his home in Boston, his father had raged and his grandmother had cried, but they could not talk him out of his intention.
The men of the Crow raiding party didn’t bother with talk.
Before riding into camp they stopped and dressed in their regalia, and in parts of their victims’ clothing; they painted their faces black. Then, leading the white man by the rawhide around his neck as though he were a horse, they rode down toward the tepee circle, shouting and singing, brandishing their weapons. He was unconscious when they got there; he fell and was dragged.
He lay dazed and battered near a tepee while the noisy, busy life of the camp swarmed around him and Indians came to stare. Thirst consumed him, and when it rained he lapped rain water from the ground like a dog. A scrawny, shrieking, eternally busy old woman with ragged graying hair threw a chunk of meat on the grass, and he fought the dogs for it.
When his head cleared, he was angry, although anger was an emotion he knew he could not afford.
It was better when I was a horse, he thought – when they led me by the rawhide around my neck. I won’t be a dog, no matter what!
The hag gave him stinking, rancid grease and let him figure out what it was for. He applied it gingerly to his bruised and sun-seared body.
Now, he thought, I smell like the rest of them.
While he was healing, he considered coldly the advantages of being a horse. A man would be humiliated, and sooner or later he would strike back and that would be the end of him. But a horse had only to be docile. Very well, he would learn to do without pride.
He understood that he was the property of the screaming old woman, a fine gift from her son, one that she liked to show off. She did more yelling at him than at anyone else, probably to impress the neighbors so they would not forget what a great and generous man her son was. She was bossy and proud, a dreadful bag of skin and bones, and she was a devilish hard worker.
The white man, who now thought of himself as a horse, forgot sometimes to worry about his danger. He kept making mental notes of things to tell his own people in Boston about this hideous adventure. He would go back a hero, and he would say, “Grandmother, let me fetch your shawl. I’ve been accustomed to doing little errands for another lady about your age.”
Two girls lived in the tepee with the old hag and her warrior son. One of them, the white man concluded, was his captor’s wife and the other was his little sister. The daughter-in-law was smug and spoiled. Being beloved, she did not have to be useful. The younger girl had bright, wandering eyes. Often enough they wandered to the white man who was pretending to be a horse.
The two girls worked when the old woman put them at it, but they were always running off to do something they enjoyed more. There were games and noisy contests, and there was much laughter. But not for the white man. He was finding out what loneliness could be.
That was a rich summer on the plains, with plenty of buffalo for meat and clothing and the making of tepees. The Crows were wealthy in horses, prosperous and contented. If their men had not been so avid for glory, the white man thought, there would have been a lot more of them. But they went out of their way to court death, and when one of them met it, the whole camp mourned extravagantly and cried to their God for vengeance.
The captive was a horse all summer, a docile bearer of burdens, careful and patient. He kept reminding himself that he had to be better-natured than other horses, because he could not lash out with hoofs or teeth. Helping the old woman load up the horses for travel, he yanked at a pack and said, “Whoa, brother. It goes easier when you don’t fight.”
The horse gave him a big-eyed stare as if it understood his language – a comforting thought, because nobody else did. But even among the horses he felt unequal. They were able to look out for themselves if they escaped. He would simply starve. He was envious still, even among the horses.
Humbly he fetched and carried. Sometimes he even offered to help, but he had not the skill for the endless work of the women, and he was not trusted to hunt with the men, the providers.
When the camp moved, he carried a pack trudging with the women. Even the dogs worked then, pulling small burdens on travois of sticks.
The Indian who had captured him lived like a lord, as he had a right to do. He hunted with his peers, attended long ceremonial meetings with much chanting and dancing, and lounged in the shade with his smug bride. He had only two responsibilities: to kill buffalo and to gain glory. The white man was so far beneath him in status that the Indian did not even think of envy.
One day several things happened that made the captive think he might sometime become a man again. That was the day when he began to understand their language. For four months he had heard it, day and night, the joy and the mourning, the ritual chanting and sung prayers, the squabbles and the deliberations. None of it meant anything to him at all.
But on that important day in early fall the two young women set out for the river, and one of them called over her shoulder to the old woman. The white man was startled. She had said she was going to bathe. His understanding was so sudden that he felt as if his ears had come unstopped. Listening to the racket of the camp, he heard fragments of meaning instead of gabble.
On that same important day the old woman brought a pair of new moccasins out of the tepee and tossed them on the gr
ound before him. He could not believe she would do anything for him because of kindness, but giving him moccasins was one way of looking after her property.
In thanking her, he dared greatly. He picked a little handful of fading fall flowers and took them to her as she squatted in front of her tepee, scraping a buffalo hide with a tool made from a piece of iron tied to a bone. Her hands were hideous – most of the fingers had the first joint missing. He bowed solemnly and offered the flowers.
She glared at him from beneath the short, ragged tangle of her hair. She stared at the flowers, knocked them out of his hand and went running to the next tepee, squalling the story. He heard her and the other women screaming with laughter.
The white man squared his shoulders and walked boldly over to watch three small boys shooting arrows at a target. He said in English, “Show me how to do that, will you?”
They frowned, but he held out his hand as if there could be no doubt. One of them gave him a bow and one arrow, and they snickered when he missed.
The people were easily amused, except when they were angry. They were amused, at him, playing with the little boys. A few days later he asked the hag, with gestures, for a bow that her son had just discarded, a man-size bow of horn. He scavenged for old arrows. The old woman cackled at his marksmanship and called her neighbors to enjoy the fun.
When he could understand words, he could identify his people by their names. The old woman was Greasy Hand, and her daughter was Pretty Calf. The other young woman’s name was not clear to him, for the words were not in his vocabulary. The man who had captured him was Yellow Robe.
Once he could understand, he could begin to talk a little, and then he was less lonely. Nobody had been able to see any reason for talking to him, since he would not understand anyway. He asked the old woman, “What is my name?” Until he knew it, he was incomplete. She shrugged to let him know he had none.
He told her in the Crow language, “My name is Horse.” He repeated it, and she nodded. After that they called him Horse when they called him anything. Nobody cared except the white man himself.
