The Sundown Man

by Jory Sherman

  “I do not care if One Dog likes the story. But I am going to make the scratches that tell him this true story, Yellow Water. You go now. Leave the skins and the paints and the brushes.”

  He got up and looked at me. I had never seen pity in an Arapaho’s eyes, but the look in Yellow Water’s appeared to be something mighty close to pity, the kind of pity one might extend to an imbecilic child.

  “It does not matter,” he said.

  “What does not matter?”

  “That your father did not kill the two boys of our people.”

  “Why not?”

  “What one does, all do. Your father was of the tribe of white eyes.”

  I did not know if the Arapaho had a word for justice. If they did, I had never heard it. But I wanted to cry out to Yellow Water that my father and mother deserved justice. Instead, I looked at Yellow Water and told him this:

  “My mother never killed anything. She never killed the rabbit, nor the mouse, nor the fly.”

  “What one does, all do.”

  There was no pity in Yellow Water’s eyes. Contempt perhaps, or an age-old hatred of white men that I had stirred up. He walked away, his back as straight as a fence post. I took another skin and began to write the story of that day when Hogg and Rudy Truitt had killed those two Arapaho boys and scalped them. I wrote short easy sentences that followed the tableau that Yellow Water had drawn on the other skin.

  I wrote that my father’s heart was filled with sorrow when he saw what Hogg and Truitt had done and that he had been banished from the tribe, left to wander like the Arapaho people, exiled like Odysseus, forced to find his way to a home far to the west where the sun set, where it dropped burning into the sea. With a flourish, I wrote the last line.

  “That place where the sun dies in the water, and the water turns red and dark as wine.”

  Homer, I thought, would have been proud of what I wrote that day.

  I returned the brushes and the pots of dye to Yellow Water’s lodge, a lean-to covered with spruce branches, and then went to see One Dog. He was sitting under a tree near his lean-to, chipping flakes from a piece of flint.

  I gave One Dog the painting and showed him the other skin with the white man’s scratches on it.

  “What is this you give me, White Man?”

  “It is a story. The story of who killed those two boys. I have written it down in white man’s words. If you wish, I will read it to you, tell you its meaning.”

  He put down the flint and the rock he was using to knap the stone into a sharp arrowhead.

  He studied Yellow Water’s drawings, grunting as the story unfolded.

  “I see you and your sister,” he said.

  “Yes. We did not want the bad white man to kill those two boys. We turned our backs on him.”

  “But you were of the same tribe?”

  “No. We gave the man the shining yellow metal to take us across the land of your people. He stole from us. He put the scalps in our wagon. He wanted you to kill us.”

  “Why did he do this?”

  “Because he is a bad white man. I think he is the same man who gave rifles to the Ota. I think he bought the girls from the Ota.”

  “Ha. You do not know this.”

  “No, but one of the rifles belonged to this bad white man. It is the rifle with the wound on it, a wound my father made when he dropped it from his hands.”

  “Read me the story. I will see if I can make sense of it,” One Dog said.

  I read him the story. It was very short. I read it very slowly, hoping he would understand most of the white man’s words.

  When I finished, he asked me to tell him the story in his own language.

  I did that, wondering if I was using the correct words.

  When I finished, One Dog was silent for a long time. He got up, went to his lean-to, and came back with a pipe filled with tobacco. He used the burning glass to light his pipe. He held the glass up to the sun so that one ray struck the tobacco and turned it hot, set it on fire. He smoked, looking at me with no expression on his face.

  “What you say to me may be true,” he said. “But the world is the way the world is. I cannot change it. You cannot change it. Your father is gone. Your mother is gone. You are here. You are alive. Your sister is somewhere else. Maybe she is alive too. You have all that you need. I cannot bring your father and your mother back. They are gone to the setting sun, the sun you say that falls into the sea and drowns. Do not speak of this to me ever again.”

  “Yes, One Dog. I have spoken. So it will be. What one does, all do.”

  “What? You give blame to your father and mother?”

  “What one does, all do.”

  He gave me a stern look. I got up and walked away, leaving him there. I knew he was mad, but I didn’t care.

  I wanted One Dog to think over my words. If I had written them well and spoken them well, they would be like little burrowing worms, gnawing away at his primitive Arapaho mind. They would consume him from within, perhaps make him question his own beliefs.

  Then, perhaps, the Arapaho might come up with a word that meant justice.

  I thought that, but I knew it would never be so.

  One Dog was One Dog, and he could not be anything else. He acted according to his nature, as all people do.

  But I wanted him to know that I blamed him and his whole tribe for the murder of my parents, the loss of my sister.

  What one does, all do.

  Thirteen

  We changed camps many times that summer. The women were kept busy tanning deer and elk hides, sewing teepees, cutting up meat, curing it, and cooking it over small fires that concealed our smoke. I was beginning to realize that the Arapaho were a constantly hunted people. Their numbers, I learned, had diminished considerably since the advent of the white man, which included Spaniards, Frenchmen, and Americans.

  But, as some told me, mainly Blue Owl, who shared my buffalo robe at night, the Arapaho were always a scattered people, homeless by our standards, but actually sharing lands with other tribes as long as the other tribes didn’t know they were around. They had come from the north, Blue Owl told me, but their legends went all the way back to the beginning of creation. These tales, she said, were too sacred for her to share with me, but she hoped that someday, the tribe would accept me and I would hear these ancient stories of how the people came to be.

  We hunted buffalo on the plain one last time that summer, and when we left the mountains for the plain, we had travois and teepees and buffalo robes for the winter. We traveled south and east to a large river that I later learned was called the South Platte. The Arapaho didn’t call it that, however. They called it the Musselshell and sometimes at night, when the light from the moon was on the water, I thought I could see little shells in the lapping waves. Long ago, Blue Owl told me, the people used to gather mussels there, or they saw mussel shells washed up by some long-ago or faraway sea.

  I was still planning my escape now that I had my own pony, but the Arapaho were subtly clever. I was never left alone, yet, for all outward appearances, none of the braves behaved like guards or watchers. They were very clever, I decided. And sometimes, I thought, they could read my thoughts. But then, I have to admit, I gave them good reason to suspect that I might run away from them.

  One day I asked Yellow Water if he knew what lay to the south of the Musselshell.

  “Why do you ask this?”

  “I am as curious as an antelope,” I said.

  “When the antelope is curious, he falls to the arrow.”

  “Tell me, if you know. But I think you do not know the land to the south.”

  “I know it.”

  “You have been there? No, you could not have gone to the south. The people would not let one so young go to unknown land.”

  “I have been there. I have seen the white man forts and the white man towns.”

  “Can you draw them for me? In the dirt?”

  “I can draw them.”

 
“I do not think that you can. I think you are making it up that you have been to the south.”

  Yellow Water got angry with me, but he plunked down on his loinclothed butt and picked up a stick. He began to draw furiously in the soft earth, rivers, trails, forts, and towns.

  “Do you know the names of these places?” I asked him.

  He shook his head. But I kept the map in my mind, and later came to know the names of Fort Collins, Pueblo, Taos, and Santa Fe. And the rivers were the South Platte, the Cache la Poudre, and El Rio Grande del Norte. But I was not to know these names or hear them mentioned for some time yet, and I didn’t realize how long I would remain with the Arapaho.

  We did cross wagon tracks on our way to the Musselshell, but the Arapaho stayed well away from traveled roads and trails. They were furtive without appearing to be so. I knew better than to ask any of the tribe about these roads. I just kept their images and locations in my mind.

  Dogs came to the new camp. These were thin, rangy dogs, ribs showing like slats through their mangy hides. The Arapaho appeared to have known them, or the dogs knew the Arapaho, because the animals came in, one by one, wagging their tails, and the people fed them and petted them. These dogs were ridden with fleas and soon I saw the children scratching. So I stayed well away from the dogs. But the children hooked them up to little play travois and had a fine time playing with them.

  From where we camped, I saw the first snows of the mountains. It started snowing up in the Rockies during the night and by morning, all of the dark faces of the mountains were white and beautiful. The air was chill and we had snows too, bad ones, drifting ones, but the fires in the teepees kept us warm and there was plenty of food.

  Blue Owl pestered me that first winter with the Arapaho.

  “Why you no give me baby?” she said, using the English I had taught her. It was then I realized why she kept asking me the words she wanted to learn, especially the word “baby.”

  “We are not married,” I said.

  “What is ‘married’?”

  I realized that I had stepped into a linguistic tangle. There was no such word that I knew of in the Arapaho tongue, and our customs were just too complicated for Blue Owl to understand. But I tried to explain it to her.

  “The white man has a dance he does with a woman,” I lamely explained. “There is a medicine man, a shaman, who speaks words over them. The man and woman give each other rings. They put these rings on their fingers and then the shaman ‘marries’ them. It is a treaty the shaman makes with the Great Spirit. He asks the Great Spirit to make this man and woman into one spirit, a human spirit, so that they may live together always.”

  “You give me ring,” she said.

  “I do not have a ring to give you.”

  “You give me ring,” she insisted.

  When Blue Owl and I made love, I always pulled out before spilling my seed in her. I knew that much about the birds and bees, but not much else. She always urged me to stay inside her, but I didn’t want her to have my child. So there were constant arguments and she accused me of being less than a man.

  But I set out to make her a ring. And, of course, I had to make one for myself.

  We did not have any gold or silver, or at least I didn’t, so I thought I would make the rings from an elk antler I had. The antler had broken off, but was long enough to be used as a back-scratcher and that was its use to me. I knew that I could cut up the antler, with a lot of sawing with my knife, and this is what I did. I cut two round pieces from the antler, one large enough for my ring finger, and a smaller one for Blue Owl.

  It was difficult work, but I cut these two circular chunks from the antler and then began hollowing them out with the tip of my knife blade. I expected the task would take me some time, perhaps all winter, and I was in no hurry. As long as Blue Owl saw me working on the rings, she seemed content not to pester me.

  It snowed fairly often that winter down on the Musselshell, which made the tracking of game easier and more fun. I got to be a pretty good shot with a bow, but I had my eye on a muzzle-loading rifle that one of the braves owned, a man named Speckled Hawk. I knew I would never get my hands on one of the Winchesters, and even if I did, I’d be hard-pressed to steal ammunition for it. But I remembered that first lake where the Arapaho had taken me and Kate and all the powder, ball, and other things I had hidden there. And I had a pretty good idea where it was, since through all of our journeys, I had been keeping a map in my head. I studied that map on many a night when I was gazing up at the stars. In fact, I transferred that map to the heavens and found the constellations that fit it. So, whenever I got the chance to ride away from my captors, I could just look up at the night sky and follow my map.

  The rifle was Pennsylvania-made, from a place called Lancaster. Speckled Hawk let me look at it one day when I asked him. I didn’t just ask him outright, because that was not the Arapaho way. Instead, I told him I admired it and thought it was a fine rifle. I told him I wondered if it shot true and if he had ever missed with it. He told me that he had not, that it was a very good rifle and shot truer than any he had ever owned. He said his father had gotten it from an old white man who trapped in the mountains. He said that his father had coveted the rifle and one day, when he had the chance, he had killed the white man and taken his rifle. When Speckled Hawk’s father died, he inherited the rifle and all the possibles that went with it, a ball pouch, a mold to make the lead balls, a powder flask, and good flints. He cut little pieces of leather to hold the flints in the vise.

  I told Speckled Hawk that my father had owned such a flintlock rifle, but that it was not nearly so good and had been converted to percussion. He wanted to know what percussion was, and I told him about the little copper caps that exploded when the hammer struck them. This fascinated Speckled Hawk, and he said that he would like to own such a rifle so that he would not have to make flints anymore.

  So, I examined the rifle. I held it to my shoulder and liked the fit of the stock to my shoulder. The stock was made of curly maple and was quite beautiful. It had a patch box of copper inlaid into the stock near the butt, and a fine hickory ramrod with brass fittings. The rifle was in .64 caliber and with one hundred grains of powder could knock a buffalo bull down with one shot.

  This was a beautiful long rifle, much nicer than the one my father had owned, and I had no doubt that it shot true. I vowed to myself that when I made my escape, I would steal the rifle from Speckled Hawk, just as his father had stolen it from an old mountain man long ago.

  But after that day when I looked at the rifle, Speckled Hawk and others kept their eyes on me more intently than ever.

  I felt as if the Arapaho could truly read my thoughts.

  Much as I yearned to make my escape that winter, the red men of One Dog’s tribe never gave me the chance.

  I was still a prisoner.

  And I pined for my sister Kate on those long winter nights when snow flocked the land and locked it into a deafening silence, broken only by the howl of a wolf sounding as lonely as I was, and just as lost.

  Fourteen

  One cold winter day, it must have been February or March, two white hunters on horseback stopped by the Arapaho camp on the Musselshell. I had been sprouting hair on my face, much to my embarrassment, and had taken to scraping the silky strands off with the blade of my knife. I was well embedded in the tribe and did not want to appear different. My skin was tanned from wind and sun, and my single braid had grown long until it was halfway down my back.

  The two men of my race looked hard-bitten, but it was obvious that they were acquainted with One Dog and several of the braves. They were greeted warmly and offered the hospitality of the band. They were leading two pack mules. They spoke a little Arapaho, but mostly spoke in hand sign, or in French, of which I knew very little. But I stayed close to One Dog, who invited them grandly into his teepee.

  “You make the hunt,” One Dog said, using sign language.

  “Oui,” one of the men said. “We h
unt the elk for the fort.”

  One Dog called this man “Pierre,” although his pronunciation was not the best. I learned his name from the other man, whom One Dog called “Jock.” I knew his name was Jacques, because the two men used each other’s names and pronounced them correctly.

  “There are few of your people left on the plains,” Pierre said as he smoked the long pipe that One Dog passed around after he lit it. “It is the same everywhere we go. The white eyes do not want the Indian people riding around loose, hunting the buffalo, killing the game.”

  “This land is of the people,” One Dog said.

  “Soldiers might shoot you,” Jacques said. “The white eyes want to put you in a camp of their own making so that they can watch you.”

  “They hunt the people, these soldiers?” One Dog said.

  “Yes,” Pierre told him, then he looked at me.

  “Your son, One Dog?” he said.

  “No. He is a slave.”

  “What tribe is he?” Jacques asked.

  One Dog laughed.

  “I’m an American,” I said, just blurting it out.

  Both Frenchmen drew back in surprise, their faces alight with astonishment.

  “Oh, an american,” Pierre said. “C’est bon.”

  “Do you know a man named Hogg?” I asked.

  The two men looked at each other, their eyebrows rising like caterpillars.

  “He is your father?” Jacques said.

  “No. I am wondering if you have seen this man with a young white girl named Kate.”

  “We know this man,” Pierre said. “He is a very bad man. He sells guns to the Indians, and whiskey.”

  “What about the white girl?” I persisted.

  “He come into the fort with some girls,” Jacques said. “Two Indian girls and a white girl. I think her name was Kate.”

  “What did he do with her?”

  “He sold the white girl,” Jacques said. “He said that she was a bond servant.”

  “Who bought her?”

  “What was the name of that farmer, Pierre? Pettibone, no?”

  “Pettigrew, I think. Yes, Pettigrew. I do not know his given name.”