She said nothing.
Hugh clapped out his pipe in a gnarled palm, dropped the crisp ball of burnt tobacco into the fire. The ball of tobacco wasn’t altogether burnt up, and when it landed in the hottest part of the tuffing fire, it shot out one last quick spit of blue flame.
“Well then, shut up, if it pleases ee,” Hugh said.
Bending Reed immediately broke into a hurrying rattling chattering talk. It went on and on. Her pout lips and thick tongue couldn’t fashion the words fast enough. She spoke in Sioux.
Hugh sat back astounded, huge brows lifted, gray eyes for once wide open and showing rings of fine-veined white.
The swift words didn’t make sense to him at first. It had been some time since he’d heard her particular dialect of Sioux. And it had also been some time since he’d heard her peculiar kind of sentence-making. Had the young squaw bitten the bitter loco weed? Had herself one bite of the herb too many?
But then, listening intently, he got it. She was telling him everything that had happened to her since she’d last seen him.
Shortly after he had made good his escape from the Pawnees on the Platte River, a band of Arikaree braves came down from the north to visit their tribal cousins the Pawnees. The Rees needed horses, they said, and gunpowder, and they were willing to trade some of their new wonder seedcorn to get both. The Rees, already famous on the plains for having developed a new kind of green watermelon and a white squash and a yellow pumpkin, the Rees had worked up a great medicine for the growing of this corn. The medicine made the corn ripen early with the ears fully as fat and fully as mature as later corn.
While the friendly bartering was going on, one of the Ree braves spotted Bending Reed at work dressing some moccasins, a work for which she’d become well known among the Pawnees. The Ree brave took a shine to her; wanted her after he tried on one of her moccasins. The Pawnees were willing to sell her in exchange for some of the new corn with the great medicine in it. They were short of horses and were loath to get rid of the few they had. Also Bending Reed had caused them much trouble because lately she’d developed a balky streak. Her heart was sad that her brave, White Grizzly, had deserted her.
Bending Reed took one quick robin-shy look at the Ree brave, and instantly disliked him. The Ree brave had the soft hands of a dressmaker. And he gestured like a girlman. A soft-handed brave for her after having lived with her great bull of a White Grizzly? She wanted children. If White Grizzly couldn’t father them on her, how could this girlman Ree? So she said, “I’ll marry you when the pine leaves turn yellow.”
But the Ree brave especially wanted her, and she had to go. And shortly, along with a few mustangs, she went north with her new husband Can’t Father.
Hugh broke into Bending Reed’s telling. “What? Can’t who?”
Bending Reed shut up on the instant.
“Who did you say, Reed?”
She looked down, tongue contrary again. Her darting blackcherry eyes flickered. She worked to bite back the words.
Old Hugh snorted. Then he laughed. “I forgot, Reed. Now shut up, will ee?”
Immediately she rattled on. Yes, her husband was a brave named Can’t Father.
Once more Old Hugh couldn’t help but break in. “You mean, Can’t Fornicate, don’t you?”
This time Bending Reed momentarily forgot her contrary set. “No, Can’t Father. It is not the same.”
“How’s that, Reed?”
She remembered, then, and fell silent.
Old Hugh let out a merry bellow. “Reed, if that’s the way your stick floats, all right, shut up.”
Once again she chattered away. Except she didn’t go on to explain just what the difference was between a brave who couldn’t fornicate and a brave who couldn’t father.
She said Can’t Father was kind to her. He treated her well. Gave her the best of everything: mirrors, awls, ribbons, red silk from the Great White Father in Britain, porcupine quills, necklaces, woolen blankets from the English mills, all such fine things. Nor could she complain that he wasn’t a brave man in battle. He counted many a coup, brought home many an enemy scalp.
“Not a coward then.”
She shut up.
Hugh laughed. “Shut up, Reed.”
“He was a brave man full of wise council. His tongue was short, his arm was long. But he was not a father.”
Then Bending Reed told Hugh something that made his jaw drop.
One day Can’t Father came home from a hunt and fell upon her and almost beat her to death. When she’d recovered enough to crawl around again, Can’t Father made her cut off some of her beautiful blueblack hair, shorten it until his own hair was at least two hands longer. A couple days later Bending Reed found out what it was all about. On the hunting party Can’t Father and his friends had run into a small party of hostile Sioux braves. The Sioux braves were from her band and they, knowing her to have long braids, and seeing his were short, taunted him with not having as much medicine in his hair as Bending Reed had in hers. And if there was one thing Can’t Father was touchy about, aside from his fatherlessness, it was his pride and glory, his glossy black braids of hair. When he wasn’t hunting he was always busy preening his raven horsetail hair with a rough-cut ivory comb he’d gotten in trade with the English in Canada.
Of course a squaw prided herself on her hair too. And Bending Reed promptly fell into a pet. For dim in her memory and out of her tribal pantheon came a god called Heyoka and he took possession of her. The god Heyoka was a little old man with a short body and very long legs who went naked in the winter suffering intensely from the heat and who went about warmly clad in the summer suffering intensely from the cold. Suddenly after Heyoka the contrary god had taken possession of her, Bending Reed felt full of power and purpose. She could do anything. Defy Can’t Father even if he beat her. Defy even the chief of the Arikaree tribes, Grey Eyes. Defy all of the Rees in fact. She had great medicine. The Rees were astounded by her conversion to a life of going about butt-first. But because they respected superstitions they respected her curious new religion. All day long the old squaws thought of things for her to do just to see her do the opposite. Many times too they had her do something they wanted her to do by telling her its contrary.
Strangely enough, shortly after the god Heyoka had taken possession of her, Can’t Father changed subtly, both in person and manner. He could once more satisfactorily perform the role of the male. He was no longer Can’t Father but Man-Who-Wants-Many-Sons.
Listening, Hugh hunkered down over the fire. First his eyes opened a little; then they closed. He nodded sagely. He understood it. He had heard of such things happening. He knew of a case where two men went into the mountains together to trap beaver, one of them having a bad case of the rheumatiz and the other not—and lo and behold, the one who’d always complained of the rheumatiz came back out of the mountains completely cured while the healthy one came back a cripple. The rheumatiz spirit or devil, or whatever rheumatiz was, had jumped across to the other.
It was as a result of the Rees respecting her contrary religion that Bending Reed got away. One day her husband, being of an amorous frame of mind, and she not, told her to come in under the bull buffalo robe with him. She refused; did the opposite. She ran out of the breast-shaped dirt-covered lodge. Then Man-Who-Wants-Many-Sons in his male frustration and rage leaped up and ran after her, yelling, “You she-dog, you she-wolf, you she-coyote, you mouse of a squaw, come back to my lodge and woman with me or I’ll lodge-pole you!” His yelling, his scolding, only made her run the faster. By the time she reached the edge of the village, all the Ree braves and squaws and children were out of their dirt-mound lodges listening and laughing, the squaws especially delighting in the show. When Bending Reed vanished beyond the picket barricade, out past the guards, out over the last hill and finally out of sight, they suddenly understood, too late, that she’d played a ruse on them. And had escaped.
Old Hugh had to laugh. “That was some, Reed, that was. As good a pe
edoodle as any I ever heard of. But how come ye’re still playin’ this contrary fiddle, Reed? Now that Heyoka has helped ee get away, can’t ee lay him to one side, Reed?”
Reed shut up.
Old Hugh laughed aloud. “Ho-ah! I see. It’s a habit that’s took hold, has it? Well, well. That’s some, that is.”
Abruptly Bending Reed seemed to remember something. She bustled around in the tepee like one possessed. She grabbed up a fire-blacked pot and filled it with water from a leather bag and set it on the cookstone at the edge of the twig fire. She pushed the twig ends up into the pyramid fire all around and added a few small logs. She grabbed up a stone club, and a piece of savory meat, and rushed out through the doorflap. She whistled up the fort dogs. A moment later there was a short yelp and the punking sound of stone hitting skull. Then she came back in dragging a dead yellow-haired puppy. She gutted it and prepared it and dropped it into the pot. Next she got out the skin of pemmican and with an old worndown butcher knife cut off a few slices and laid them on some fresh green cottonwood leaves at Hugh’s feet. She made some gruel out of hump fat and ground corn and berry pits. She dug out some buffalo marrow for butter.
Slowly the water warmed; became uneasy with heat; began to boil.
While the meat cooked, she slipped down the legging on Hugh’s bad leg. She shook her head when she saw how red and angry the bullet wound was. It had begun to look like a big red boil. She put a hand over open mouth a moment and her paired blackcherry eyes rolled big and shiny. Then she pitched in. She made a fine paste out of powdered cedar-tree needles and rattlesnake oil. She rubbed the fragrant ointment gently but firmly into his leg around and over the touchy wound. And last she got out a bag of grizzly-bear grease and gave his entire body a rubdown with it. The grizzly grease gave her brave husband great power.
Old Hugh sighed. He lay back on the musky robe and enjoyed it all. It had been many a moon since he’d had a warm even urgent rubdown. He groaned both in pleasure and pain.
Presently the puppy meat was ready and she motioned for him to dip in.
And Hugh did. The meat was very tender. It fell off the bones at the least touch of his butcher knife. The pemmican, made of pounded buffalo-cow meat and tallow, was as sweet as fresh cheese. And the corn gruel went down like heated honey. It was a feast fit for the Great White Father himself.
Finished, Hugh jabbed his knife in the ground a few times and then wiped it clean on his leather sleeve. He lay back on the buffalo robe. He groaned with both pleasure and pain again. It was a great life.
He lit his pipe.
He watched Bending Reed take her turn at the pot and the pemmican. She ate demurely, even delicately, like a bunny nibbling grasstips. Hugh had always liked the way she ate. She was a bunny one, she was. Ae. She didn’t chew with her mouth open like some squaws did.
After a while, thoroughly relaxed, and moved by a need to talk to someone, he began to gossip a little about the old days.
He told her a little of his adventures since he’d escaped from the Pawnees. She listened while she began to work on a new leather hunting shirt for him. Every now and then her wondering blackcherry eyes studied his old gray eyes and grizzled leathery face.
On his second pipe, Hugh went back a little further, before the time of his capture by the Pawnees, before he had met her while with them. He told of how as a young man he’d run away from home in Pennsylvania, from the very Lancaster County where his gun, Old Bullthrower, had been made; told how he had gone to sea on a ship out of Philadelphia, how he had sailed before the mast over most of the globe, to the East Indies, to China, to the great Northwest south of Alaska, to the Scandinavian countries, even to Scotland the land of his fathers, and to such ports as Antwerp, London, Amsterdam, Marseilles, New Orleans, Boston.
One day out on the seas of the Gulf of Mexico his ship was attacked and captured by the famous pirate Lafitte. He and his mates fought like men, but the pirates proved too much for them. Finally when only a half-dozen men were left, with the captain and first mate dead, Hugh and his comrades surrendered.
Lafitte was quick in his justice. Either join up as pirates or walk the plank. Hugh and a man named Clint decided to join up. The rest walked the plank into a watery blue death. Hugh and Clint had to swear a horrible oath of allegiance to pirate Lafitte. From then on Hugh’s life was uncertain and bloody at most. Lafitte worked out of the Baratarian Coast south of New Orleans, and as a buccaneer Hugh had to help prey on Spanish shipping, had to help sell stolen goods through merchant contacts in New Orleans.
Hugh shivered as he remembered some of it: poor food, long hours, devilishly brutal and lawless companions, scurvy, cholera, cruel bloodlettings. For two years Hugh suffered it.
One day he had enough of it and refused to shoot down a captive. His companyero Clint refused too. Both were thrown in irons; were told that the next day it would be their turn to walk the plank.
During the night, however, the two of them managed to slip out of their chains, escape the ship, and swim to shore.
The land they found themselves in was the far free wild. They wandered through it, heading north, later northeast, hoping to come onto St. Louis. They lived off tree buds, green grass, mice, berries. Sometimes they even ate partly smoked snakemeat. And once they ate of flesh unmentionable.
They managed to get safely through the land of the fierce Comanches. Then their luck ran out. A raiding party of Pawnees caught them around a fire in a gully. The Pawnees took them back to the tribal headquarters on the Platte River. The chief of the Pawnees questioned them at length; condemned them to be burnt at the stake.
Tied to a tree, Hugh and Clint watched the preparations. A stake was driven into the earth; fagots were arranged around it; ceremonies were enacted; dances were danced.
Clint was the first. He was led to the stake and tied securely. The chief pierced Clint with the first pitchpine splinter, then backed off to let his sadistic braves finish the job. Accompanied by Clint’s cries of pain and their own howls of triumph, the braves stuck Clint’s skin so full of splinters he looked like a shaggy badger. The fagots at Clint’s feet were lit and the final agony began. It didn’t last long. Flames swept up over Clint’s besplintered body, and with an awful scream in the midnight blackness, companyero Clint passed away into tomorrow.
Hugh’s turn came then. Two scalplocked braves untied him from the tree; led him to the chief.
Just as the chief got ready to stick Hugh with the first splinter of pitchpine, Hugh, desperate, bethought himself of something. Hugh reached inside his buckskin shirt; pulled out a thin package. He handed it over to the proud and haughty chief with an air of affection and respect. There was not a trace of fear in Hugh’s demeanor. Then he bowed a final farewell to life.
The chief opened the package, found it to be vermilion, an article the Pawnees, as well as all plains’ savages, valued above all price. The chief started. He looked Hugh over carefully. Then, majestically, he stepped up to Hugh and embraced him. And with paternal regard and affection, and smiling, the chief declared Hugh free, out of respect for his great bravery and his gift, and led him to his lodge as his guest.
Old Hugh served the Pawnees well. They considered him a very brave warrior. They respected his strategies of battle. His feats of strength and his terrible rage in battle earned him the name of White Grizzly.
He lived like a king. And like a king, he was under constant watch, so that he often lamented that while he had women and food and gunpowder and horse galore, he actually was worse off than a slave.
Some months after his capture he met Bending Reed, just captured by a raiding party into Siouxland. Old Hugh and Bending Reed took to each other on the instant. Both were strangers amongst the Pawnees and both privately hated them and both longed for the day of their escape. They were married with the chief’s blessing.
All the while that Hugh ruminated about the old days with the Pawnees, Bending Reed kept on working on his new elkskin hunting shirt. As he talked alo
ng, Hugh noted out of the corner of his eye that Reed was using an odd new stitch. It bent back on itself. Heyoka had apparently reversed her stitching style too.
Bending Reed asked suddenly, “My husband says he ran away from his father’s tepee when he was a boy. Why did my husband run away?” Her paired blackcherry eyes were bright on him for a moment; then shied off.
Hugh started. His gray eyes clouded over.
Ae, why indeed?
Hugh shook his head. That was something he couldn’t talk about. That belonged to a long and terrible time ago. And it was better left untold.
Hugh finally managed a laugh. “Wimmen! they always know how to ask you that one perticular question that brings blood on the run. Reed, red or no, ye’re no better than the rest.”
Bending Reed laid aside her needlework and nestled against him and cast him sly slant eyes.
There was the smell of a clean washed mink about her. Hugh knew of her habit of taking a daily bath in the Missouri, summer or winter, a habit that not even the most elegant white woman practiced back in the settlements during the summer. The white women sometimes stank awful, Hugh remembered, especially the free and easy ones, while the most one could say against an Indian woman was that she sometimes was a little strong with prairie-root ointments and a little slippery from excessive use of wildrose-scented beargrease.
Hugh took a deep breath. He thought her animal smell peculiarly rich and stirring. He thought it a good thing that from birth on Indian women were taught to serve their lord and master. They knew exactly how to arouse the man in him. They knew how to keep a brave man brave.
Bending Reed said, “My husband is not afraid to tell of that time, is he?”
Hugh chuckled in his grizzled beard. He tugged at his beard a little. “Reed, an’ now I suppose ye’ll be holdin’ me off until I tell ee?”
But Reed surprised him. Heyoka was still in her and she pressed him back on the musty brown buffalo-bull robe and became his wife again.
Afterward she lay smiling and contented beside him. Playfully she matched the redstone skin of her plump arm against the white of his lean biceps.
Lord Grizzly, Second Edition Page 6
