by Win Blevins
Worm glanced at her in the shadows of the lodge, her hands working slowly at making moccasins. For a moment he thought she was looking straight at him and smiling impudently. True, old Plum was far past the age when she needed to deflect her glance downward, away from men, and mostly she was expressionless. But she had been improving recently. Maybe he hadn’t imagined that smile. He knew her well—she’d lived with him for twenty years. He wondered whether she could speak if she wanted to. He suspected she could. What would she say? Since people talked as though she wasn’t there, she knew everything.
He had a funny thought. How nice to have a woman in the lodge who never said a word. His wives, who were sisters, were magpies.
The canupa had made its circle and came back to him. He took a moment to puff and watch the breath of Maka, Earth, rise ethereally. Then he said, “Little Big Man and two other Bad Faces came visiting today.”
Crazy Horse nodded.
Worm wondered if his son knew the trouble simmering. “Many of the Bad Face young men are among us,” he said.
Since the sun dance a dozen young warriors of other bands had made their wickiups with the Long Face band of Hunkpatila. Or, as most of the young men called it, the Crazy Horse band. They were waiting to see where Crazy Horse wanted to fight and when. Evidently they’d rather follow him than their own war leader, Red Cloud.
“It will cause hard feelings,” said Worm.
“Red Cloud is still the first war leader of the Oglala,” said Crazy Horse. “Or Buffalo Hump.” He glanced deferentially at his hunka.
Crazy Horse never liked to talk about what people would think or how they would feel. Politics, he called it. He just wanted to do what seemed right, without considering what other people would think of his actions. Worm thought this was the young man’s nature and to be respected. It was also naive. Naivete had cost his son the woman he wanted.
Little Hawk spoke sarcastically. “Red Cloud isn’t thinking about how to run the soldiers out of the country.”
Worm interrupted his younger son with a look. The youngster was about to blurt out what many of the people were thinking but shouldn’t be said. Maybe Red Cloud wasn’t looking to kick the whites out but to get a good deal for giving in. Little Hawk’s way, in war and in council, was to rush in first and think later. Even now he went on a little. “The warriors know that my brother will fight forever,” he said less noisily.
“Red Cloud will remember this,” said Worm. “Like the elk teeth.”
Crazy Horse looked away fast at that one, and Worm saw Hump suppress a smile. So his eldest son had thought Worm didn’t know about the elk teeth. Worm knew Hump disapproved—Hump had always thought his hunka’s attachment to the woman was excessive.
Yes, it was foolish, making presents to another man’s wife, even stupid. Which Worm had said as clearly as was polite.
He sighed. This business of the warriors coming to follow Crazy Horse was troublesome, and Worm foresaw more of it. It was his son’s vision to be a warrior and his medicine to be a powerful one. Yet Worm’s son’s destiny seemed to be always to look to his own medicine and his solitary glory. Which wasn’t the way of a leader.
Worm addressed Buffalo Hump. “What do you think should be done against the forts?”
Hump shrugged lightly. “We’ll make them think their hair is on fire,” he said. Despite his easy tone, Hump meant it and would do it. But he evidently didn’t want to say what he thought the strategy should be. He would save his thoughts for the council, with the other war leaders.
“What do you think?” Worm asked his elder son.
Crazy Horse scraped the ashes out of the canupa, thinking. Finally he said, “I don’t know. I don’t decide such things.” He did not add, “And I seldom go to council and never speak.” “For myself,” he said, “I will go against the Psatoka tomorrow.”
Little Hawk smiled broadly. “Me too.”
Hump said nothing. His job was to stay and help with the planning.
Worm looked at his elder son. Crazy Horse had as much as said, “I’m going to fight the Psatoka. When the chiefs make up their minds where and when to fight the soldiers, they can let me know.” Which would have been rude.
He saw a difficult course for his elder son. Then he looked into Little Hawk’s face. Yes, it was easier just to act and not think.
Soon the Lakota went against the woodcutting detail at Fort Phil Kearny again. It didn’t go the way Crazy Horse wanted.
Everyone wanted to free-lance. Hump did lead some decoys, but the young warriors from the north, the Mniconjou and the Hunkpapa, rushed down and ran off the horses near the wagon boxes. Some of the soldiers fled into the timber, but most of them forted up behind the fourteen wagon boxes set on the ground. The warriors circled the boxes and fired arrows from under their ponies’ necks, but the soldiers were well shielded by the boxes and answered with the many-shooting rifles. Hump and Crazy Horse didn’t want to get good men killed attacking such a position. There had to be a way to make the whites use up all their ammunition.
The Lakota tried a charge up a ravine on foot, but the white fire made them pull back again. Two more foot charges, another mounted charge, and still the lead came flying. When more soldiers came out from the fort with wagon guns, the Lakota gathered up their wounded and one of their dead and galloped off fast, like buffalo with their tails up.
Crazy Horse’s mind was on five bodies, bodies left on the battlefield, five of the six Lakota killed today. They lay so close to the whites that not even he could get to them and drag them away. One of them was Jipala, who had walked slowly straight toward the wagon boxes singing his war song and shot arrows into the wagon-box circle faster than a many-times-shooting rifle would fire. It hurt Crazy Horse deeply to have to leave a brave Lakota on the field where he died.
When Crazy Horse and his brother started eating the stew Plum had made, Little Hawk said that Yellow Shield had counted his first coup today, on one of the soldiers guarding the horses.
Crazy Horse thought bitterly, Coups! Sounds and pictures jumbled through his mind. Yes, strike an enemy with your hand. Strike him with your coup stick or your lance. Take his scalp. Kill him. Strike his woman before his eyes. The list went on and on. Coups! Do it for honor, for glory, to look big in the people’s eyes, to get big between some woman’s legs, but it is all…
Finally, he said softly to his brother, “Everything’s so different now.”
Little Hawk didn’t see—none of the young men did. The whites didn’t beat you by whipping you on the battlefield. They simply changed everything. Trade goods. Firearms, which your enemies had. Emigrants across the country, every summer more than all the Lakota added together. The game killed or driven off. Now war was ruined—it was ignominious. A challenge of spirit turned into a slaughterhouse. A man felt ashamed to fight.
“What should we do?” asked Little Hawk.
“Get guns,” said Crazy Horse. “Lots of guns and lots of ammunition. Nothing else will work.”
When Little Hawk went out to stand in the blanket with some girl, Crazy Horse sat with Plum. He helped her pit the berries for the pemmican. He thought maybe it made her feel good to get more done, however it got done. He felt sure she liked the company, even if she couldn’t say so.
Sitting there, he discovered he didn’t want to talk tonight. They were communicating without talking, the two of them, feeling the slickness of the fruit and hardness of the pits. It was real, unlike words, and he liked it.
He looked straight into her eyes, which he hadn’t done in years. When he looked right at her, the eyes were glazed, indifferent. But when she thought he wasn’t looking, they had intelligence in them, sometimes. Will you ever speak again? he wondered silently.
He had something to say, so he said it. Not just to Grandmother Plum, but to the lodge walls and the spaces in the village beyond them and the four-legged and rooted and winged people in the night and the vast prairie and the sky still more vast. “Arrows and lances
and clubs won’t do it,” he said distinctly. “Big hearts won’t do it. Clever strategies won’t do it.” He imagined his words rising into the sky like steam from the rocks of the sweat lodge. “If we don’t get enough guns, the hoop of the people will be broken for seven generations. Or twice times seven.”
He thought something he didn’t say aloud: It is broken anyway.
INTRANSIGENCE
The rest of the summer and autumn the Oglala had no big fight against the soldiers. No whites traveled the Bozeman Trail except soldiers, and they moved only in large numbers. When another invitation came to visit Fort Laramie and talk peace, the Oglala made their excuses and stayed home.
To Crazy Horse it was another sign of how peculiar the whites were. They knew the Oglala didn’t want peace. They wanted the whites out of Shifting Sands River country for good. So the whites did something funny in their minds and pretended they didn’t know what they knew and smiled in an odd way and said, “Want to come in and talk about peace?”
Some Lakota would always talk, of course, for presents. Especially the ones who didn’t live in Shifting Sands River country to begin with and didn’t need it. Which was funny.
Crazy Horse wanted presents, too, if they were guns and powder and lead, or cartridges for the new kinds of rifles.
Visitors came from the Spotted Tail people and the southern bands and told about the iron road. They brought white-man newspapers to show pictures of it and told how hundreds of men prepared the way, smoothing the road and laying the twin tracks. Drum-on-His-Back puzzled out the marks that were words and told everyone how excited the whites were about their railroad.
It was astonishing, the visitors said, the way all the white men worked together and set up the road so quickly, each man like a limb of a hundred-legged bug, each doing just what was needed at the right moment. A small thing for each man, but when it was done right, the bug scooted fast.
Crazy Horse wondered if this was why the whites always drove the Indians off their land. For a Lakota living was individual and private. You strove to keep your mind walking in a beautiful way.
The white men, though, seemed to focus more on group goals, and they were good at achieving them. Their soldiers could make hundreds of men bring off a tricky maneuver together. Their iron-road laborers could work together so that the twin tracks got laid down from salt-water-everywhere in the east to salt-water-everywhere in the west, and very fast.
The way they walked was ugly. He had never met one except maybe Caspar Collins that was likable, or honest, or full of love for other whites, or who lived in awareness of Spirit. Yet they could build a fireboat and travel four sleeps in a day.
Strange, strange, strange people.
The southern visitors also said the whites were killing hundreds and hundreds of buffalo to feed the iron-road workers, so meat was almost impossible to find in that country. The Spotted Tail people were worried about starvation this winter.
Hump and others talked hard at the visitors about this point. If they kept making peace papers and giving the whites permission to have more and more roads, trading for presents so they could survive this one winter, the buffalo would be fewer and fewer. Next year and the year after that what would the people eat? In a generation? In seven generations?
The visitors didn’t answer.
Someone else had been north to visit the Hunkpapa and said the Sitting Bull people, who stayed far away from the whites and took nothing at all from them, were rich in robes and meat.
“But we can’t see the future,” said the southerners. “We’re just trying to stay alive to see the grass green once more.”
Ah, Uncle, said Crazy Horse to Spotted Tail in his mind, what are you doing? You go to the Indian agent and he issues you rations to live, or half-starve. Or he gives you what he doesn’t steal, or gives you back what he stole to begin with. Your people become beggars.
Life for the body, death for the spirit. And next year or the next, death for the body, too. To Crazy Horse this was no choice at all. You lived for the spirit, the Hawk inside you, or your life would turn to ashes.
Crazy Horse promised himself he would never let his people have to beg for food. He and Hawk would fight until not even the whites could tell where the wagon ruts of the Bozeman Trail used to be. From the Elk River to the Shell River, from the Shining Mountains to Paha Sapa, the Shifting Sands River country would belong to the Oglala.
Otherwise, he and Hawk did not care to live.
FLIRTATION
It was a sunny day, warm for the Moon When the Wind Shakes Off Leaves. The women were outside cooking or tanning buffalo hides from the hunt, or pounding meat for pemmican, or sewing and trading gossip. Children were playing everywhere, and the dogs were underfoot.
Crazy Horse, Little Hawk, and Little Big Man walked across the camp circle, laughing. Little Big Man could make Crazy Horse laugh out loud, a rare thing. It was his weird face and his weird body. When he told jokes, which were no better or worse than anyone else’s, he made his eyebrows wiggle like worms, or jabbered his lips insanely, or did a dance with his hips. Little Big Man had a short, squat body and a face that looked stiff as a wood carving until he started acting like that, so it was doubly funny.
Crazy Horse liked this young Bad Face. He was a true warrior who understood that every day was a good day to die, and that made him a good companion. He visited in the Hunkpatila camp often now, and the two sons of Worm returned the visits. If that meant having to see No Water and the twins and Pretty Fellow and Red Cloud, it also meant getting to see Little Big Man, and Black Buffalo Woman.
Black Buffalo Woman stirred her stew, seeming not to watch out of the corner of her eye the Strange Man walking with Little Hawk and Little Big Man.
Suddenly Yellow Shield walked between lodges leading two young horses.
The camp circle hushed. Even the children seemed to stop yelling, and the dogs didn’t yip. Though no one looked directly at Yellow Shield, everyone was watching.
Eagle Foot was sitting in front of his lodge, smoking and enjoying the sun. Five or six sleeps ago Yellow Shield had disappeared with Eagle Foot’s woman. They hadn’t been seen since. No one knew whether they would come back to camp or go visiting with another band for the winter. However amiable he looked sitting there absorbing the sunlight, Eagle Foot was a violent man. He got into fights with other men, quarreled loudly with the woman who used to be his wife, and probably even hit her. Once Black Buffalo Woman saw him trip over a dog and angrily beat it to death with a limb and not even take the meat. Maybe he would beat his rival now.
Yellow Shield walked straight up to the lodge without a word to Eagle Foot. The former husband appeared to take no notice.
Black Buffalo Woman held her breath. Evidently Yellow Shield was making a gift of the horses to show good-heartedness toward Eagle Foot.
She stirred the stew and tasted it. Rabbit, the way the Strange Man liked it, with plenty of wild onions. She’d made rabbit because it was meat she snared herself, something of her own. She realized she was still holding her breath and let it out.
Yes, everyone said it was a woman’s right to choose her man, especially when she was no longer a maiden but a mature woman. If she put his belongings outside the tipi, that was an end of it, so they said. If she went off with another man, her first husband would be too proud to complain.
That was theory. Husbands weren’t always so benevolent.
Yellow Shield staked the horses behind the lodge. He walked away. Eagle Foot gave no sign at all, unless drawing deep on the canupa was a sign, and letting the smoke out like a big sigh.
She glanced up at Crazy Horse. He had been watching Eagle Foot and Yellow Shield, too. With the same thoughts she had, she was sure.
She stirred hard. It would not be the same with me, she thought wretchedly. Not the same for a woman who has been made into a symbol. With her three children she was a sign of the resurgence of the Bad Face band. She was married to an important Bad Face lead
er. She was the niece of Red Cloud, the war leader of all the Oglala. She wasn’t just any woman.
She felt a squeezing in her chest and wondered if she was glad or sorry.
“Cousin, what are you cooking?” cried Little Big Man.
“Rabbit stew!” she called. “Come and taste it, all of you!” It was generous of Little Big Man to understand and find an excuse to bring Crazy Horse to her.
She watched the Strange Man’s face as he sipped the stew out of the spoon. He murmured his appreciation, which sounded bigger than the words.
“I bet a younger woman would cook better for you than Plum,” Black Buffalo Woman said, pretending to tease. But she didn’t know who she was teasing, him or herself.
Crazy Horse looked wounded.
Yes, she thought, it isn’t funny—it hurts.
And knowing he still loved her—that hurt, too.
Sometimes she really did wish he would marry. Sometimes.
Other times she wished she dared slip away with him into the willows again.
No Water watched from the trees. She handed the Strange Man the spoon with a special grace in her arm and waited his response expectantly.
No Water had his rifle in his hands. Somehow he felt self-conscious about coming back without meat this time. His hands squeezed the stock, but he knew better than to raise it.
The Hunkpatila has been lifting my lodge flap when I was gone hunting.
Lifting it this hunting trip, probably earlier trips. How long? he screamed inside himself. He didn’t even let himself think the bigger question: Are my children his children?
He watched the four of them talking, smiling like innocents, cousins and friends enjoying each other and the day. She looked at the other two directly but cast her eyes down from the Strange Man’s glance, as a woman does from a lover’s gaze.
