Conquering Horse

by Frederick Manfred

  No Name spotted his cousin Circling Hawk coming down the path. Despite the chill in the air, Circling Hawk scorned the use of a robe and had on but a narrow breechclout and a red-tipped feather in his hair.

  Circling Hawk hailed him. “Is the morning good, friend?”

  “It is quickening, friend.”

  Circling Hawk was very tall, had great muscular bulk, and big hands. His face was as Leaf said—rough, like the back of a toad. It was also huge, more round than oval, with rolling flashing eyes. There was an air about him suggesting that on the least provocation he was ready to go down the violent path with one. Circling Hawk danced energetically in the dust of the path. “Well, well.” Circling Hawk had a way of talking all over, with his face and hands, with even the muscles of his body. “Ha, how is it that one who is last to dream is always first to bathe?”

  No Name tried to hold up to Circling Hawk’s eyes; found he was not quite up to it. “My father laughs when I tell him what you say.”

  Circling Hawk’s feet stilled. His eyes began to glow in his great head. “Your father laughs at what Circling Hawk says?”

  “Ae. He says the Thunders are preparing a special vision for his son.”

  Circling Hawk’s hair rose like bristles on a wild boar. “Must No Name always wait for his father’s words? Has he no words of his own to speak?”

  No Name could see that Circling Hawk longed to call him a coward to his face but didn’t quite dare. Circling Hawk knew that No Name could be brave when necessary. No Name had once swum the Great Smoky Water when it was raging full of ice. Somehow Redbird’s favorite buffalo pony had got across before spring breakup and when No Name saw tears in his father’s eyes at its possible loss he plunged in without a word. He swam across, caught the horse, swam back again, steering the horse ahead of him by its tail, calmly braving the driving cakes of ice and all the lashing whirlpools.

  Circling Hawk glanced scornfully at No Name’s body; then touched a pair of white sun dance scars on his own chest. “I see you still have the body of a ẇoman. When will you torment yourself?”

  Disdain rose in No Name. Circling Hawk was a crude man. For a brave who dreamed of replacing Redbird as chief of the band, Circling Hawk had little of the reserve and dignity that went with such an office.

  “The day waits for me,” No Name said then, and brusquely left Circling Hawk standing alone.

  Coming through the horns of the camp, the opening to the east, No Name found the women up and about. All were lighting cooking fires outside their lodges. The various plumes of smoke around the camp circle rose straight up into the windless air, then, at about tree height, flattened off into a vague cloud. The sun was at last fully up, above the mist on the land, illuminating the smoke plumes with a hue as softly purple as the inside of a clam shell. The old women opened up the food parfleches and immediately all the dogs and children crowded in. The slimlegged fierce dogs became so daring the women had to club them away. One yellowish-gray dog, with the flashing green eyes of a wolf, was hit both front and back, and ran hobbling off on only a front paw and a hind leg, yelping pitifully. The old women called up the little girls to get more water for the cooking. Presently the young women returned from their bathing. Some took to combing their hair in the sun, decking their cheeks and the parts in their hair with vermilion. Others got out the master’s spear and shield and medicine pouch and hung them in the sun high out of reach on the tripod. Soon too the old men got up and poked their heads out of the door flaps and looked at the morning sun. A yell from some of the boys told of how they’d been caught stealing meat from a drying rack. At this the old men smiled. Stealth learned early made for bold raiders. It would come in handy when they went on horse raids later on.

  Looking around, No Name finally spotted Leaf sitting on a high red rock at the edge of the camp circle, combing her hair. Her face was hidden behind a long lash of hair. Her hair glowed with a touch of rust, like a raven’s wings in springtime. He whistled and she looked up. She gave him a wide fulsome smile, then went back to her grooming.

  Redbird’s lodge stood opposite the horns of the camp circle, west of the council lodge. In the bright sun the painted emblems on the lodge stood out very clearly. The upper half of it, including the smoke flaps, had been painted a deep black. This signified that Redbird had once been given a vision by the Thunders. The panel to the right of the door featured a running horse. It was done in red ocher, and was so spirited in detail that No Name sometimes had to look twice to make sure it wasn’t their spotted horse Swift As Wind. It signified that Redbird had once dreamed of a horse of a certain swiftness. The imprint of a bloody hand decorated the panel to the left. It signified that Redbird had once killed a man barehanded.

  The most decorated tepee in camp belonged to his bachelor uncle Moon Dreamer. It stood next to Redbird’s lodge. Moon Dreamer the holy man had once heard in a revealed vision the White Woman In The Moon singing a majestic song. To commemorate the great event he had painted a rising white ball at the top of his tepee. Thirteen rays shot out from the ball. One of the rays became a long curving line and pointed at a picture of the Sioux bird, the singing meadowlark. Moon Dreamer had also spoken in dream with the Ancient Of Clouds as well as the Ancient of Darkness and so had worked out the design of a dark cloud moving across an empty land, with below a band of deepest black from which reared the dark head of a buffalo.

  No Name stooped through the door of his father’s lodge. “I am here.”

  “When you come I am glad,” his mother said. “The meat is ready.”

  No Name sat down before the steaming earthenware pot with his father. Cross-legged, knives in hand, they each speared up a piece of dripping buffalo meat, the fat on it globular and grayish. They chewed solemnly together, with smacks of satisfaction. No Name consciously tried to imitate his father’s delicate way of turning his knife around as he ate. Star brought them both a chip of baked prairie beans. She served the bread on a wide piece of cottonwood bark. Then she sat back, folding her arms inside her loose wing sleeves.

  “My mother, the bread is very good,” No Name said.

  “I am glad.” Star sat in the woman’s way, knees and feet to one side. Her hair and braids shone from combing. The part down the middle, from the forehead back to the nape of the neck, had been neatly painted with vermilion. Copper earrings dangled from her ear lobes.

  “The bread is very light, mother. It is like the lungs of a dog.”

  “Eat, my son. You are very thin.”

  Finished, both men stabbed their knives into the sandy earth to clean off the fat. They washed their hands in a jar of water.

  Next they prepared the toilet for the day. No Name loosened his two fat braids, as well as the finely plaited scalp lock in back, and combed them out with the rough side of a dried buffalo tongue. Tangles he cut through with his knife. He found a few lice, as well as nits, and killed them by placing them on a flat smooth stone and whacking them with the handle of his knife. The larger lice made a light pop of a sound when hit just right. Redbird reclined on his willow back-rest and held up his long hair to the light of the smokehole, looking for gray hairs. When he found one he jerked it out with a quick, deft snap of fingers.

  Again Thunder Close By, the crier, made the rounds of the camp, roaring out more orders for the day. “Clean up! Our helper the sun is here again. Clean up!” Almost immediately Star along with all the other women in camp bustled about, dragging out the sleeping robes to give them an airing and sweeping the grass floors with rush brooms. They rooted out the mice and their nests, with eager yipping dogs killing as many as the women. The women next rolled up the leather bottoms of the tepees a foot to let the air pass through and freshen the interior. Mothers also checked over the little children, examining them for lice, redoing their braids, looking for dirt in the ears. All the while Thunder Close By kept up his roaring, making the rounds four times to make sure all the laggards had been routed out. “Clean up! Our helper the sun has come again.
Clean up!”

  At last Redbird looked at No Name. “My son, the horses wait and the night herder wishes to be relieved. Take Swift As Wind and bring her to the best grass with the other horses. Let her have water where it runs cool and clear.”

  “I will go, my father.”

  While Star packed his lunch in a heartskin, No Name drew on his clothes: clout and leggings and buckskin shirt and fresh moccasins. He tested the string on his bow, culled out the better arrows, slung bow and quiver over his back.

  Just then there was a cry outside. The cry was of such a nature that No Name, Redbird, Star, all three, started. Their eyes became suddenly the glittering eyes of alert wolves.

  Redbird rose up from his back-rest with a rush, poked his head out through the doorflap.

  “What is it, my father? What do you see?”

  After a moment Redbird heaved a huge sigh and withdrew his head. He gave his son a sad twisted look.

  No Name looked for himself.

  There, from behind the council lodge in the center of the camp, came Circling Hawk’s fat mother, Soft Berry, leading a string of ten handsome ponies, some black, some red, a few spotted. Nose high, puffed up with haughty pride, casting a scornful look in No Name’s direction, she paraded by. A troop of handsome young men followed her, trailing elegant elkhorn quirts, fluttering, chuckling, favoring the ladies with sheep’s eyes. All came from Circling Hawk’s warrior society. She waddled up to Leaf’s tepee and with a stone hammer pounded a stake into the ground near the door. She picketed all ten of the horses to it and then spoke into the door. “We put our kindness before you so that you will remember it. We have a son who wishes to marry your daughter. We are poor, humble, therefore we have but ten horses. We know the value of your daughter and would, had we the wealth of a great chief, give a hundred horses for her. Remember us. I have said.” Then, with a final look of haughty triumph in No Name’s direction, she walked back to her tepee.

  No Name was sick. Ten ponies! Leaf’s father and mother would surely accept the offer of marriage.

  No Name turned. Quickly grabbing up his lunch, he ran around behind the tepee, loosened the picket rope, and leaped bareback on Swift As Wind. The red-spotted pony needed but a touch of the heel and they were off with a gathering clatter of hooves.

  4

  He sat alone on a high hill. It was noon, and as warm as summer again. Below him, in the bend of the river, the ponies grazed, some two hundred of them, sleek blacks, sun-burnished bays, lively sorrels, here and there a gray, with only a dozen or so of the most prized of all, spotted horses. Further along the bluff, northwest, sat another Yankton lad, No Name’s friend White Fingernail. He too sat watching a herd of horses. All the horses had just had their fill of water and were back to cropping grass in the meadow.

  Far off to the north, where the River of the Double Bend made its last big turn before finally heading south to the Great Smoky Water, stood their camp. No Name could just barely make out the smoke-blackened tops of the tepees, all tilted slightly to the west the better to slip the prevailing winds. There was a shimmer in the hazy air, and sometimes the whole camp seemed to shift back and forth, as if the earth beneath were quaking. Sometimes too he could make out the children playing in the streaming red cataracts.

  Like a wild animal ever alert for signs of danger, he watched on all sides. The Pawnees were known to make raids even in broad daylight. They were experts in picking exactly the right moment in which to sweep off a band of horses. He savored each bird call in his ear to make sure it was a true bird call. He studied every puff of wind in the tall grass. He examined with close attention the whistling of the gopher and the soft rustling passage of the rattlesnake.

  After a while he felt sleepy. His lunch lay heavy on his stomach. He waved to his friend White Fingernail to watch both herds while he took a nap.

  No Name placed his bow and quiver near to hand and lay on his belly on the hard ground. Eyes focusing up close, he spotted a red ant trying to drag the husk of a beetle four times its size through a clump of short grass. No Name watched the red ant for a while, finally decided it was stupid. A little to the right or the left and it could have had a clear path.

  The shimmer of a fragile web next caught his eye. It hung just above where the red ant struggled in the clump of grass. He decided a spider was probably lurking nearby, set to pounce. He ran his eye up and down each blade of grass, finally spotted it. The spider had drawn itself up into a tiny ball in imitation of a head of seed.

  He waited. He watched through half-closed eyelids. The spider stirred once, its movement resembling the twitching of an opening seed bud. He waited. And waiting, fell asleep.

  A sound coming by way of the ground gradually woke him. Something was wrong. His eyes opened on the shimmering spider web, now but the length of a finger from his nose. Slowly he rolled over, pretending to be lazy, like a puppy casually lolling in the sun. He picked up his bow, strung it, took an arrow from his quiver, got set to leap to his feet. His eyes flicked from side to side, then all around.

  He saw nothing. His friend White Fingernail still sat in stony repose on the far hill, intent upon the horses in the valley below. The pony Swift As Wind was also at ease, cropping quietly in a coulee immediately below.

  He sat up, quickly threw a look at the swale south of the hill, then around at all the horizons. The only thing different was the sky. The haze was gone. The wind had gone around to the north and all objects were now clear and sharp to the eye. His mother had been right to say that ducks southing meant cold was coming. He got to his feet, catching his quiver over his shoulder.

  He waved to White Fingernail, received a wave in reply. He wasn’t satisfied. Something was still wrong. He walked a few steps back and forth, eyes glittering, examining everything closely, even the still things. The twoleggeds and the fourleggeds and the wingeds were easy to account for. It was the still things that were sometimes treacherous.

  A meadowlark cheered from the twig of a small ash in the swale behind him. “Wake up! there is much to see.” He was about to imitate it for use as a secret call when out spying, when it struck him that the whistling was not quite the true meadowlark call. Ae! that was it. He stepped toward the swale some twenty paces, then called out, “Come up, my father. You are there under the little tree.”

  No answer.

  He studied the swale closely, blade for blade, watching the north wind stream through the grass. He also studied the stones to see if there might not be one that resembled a humped back. This was to be another of his father’s lessons and he was eager to show him how good he was at reading signs.

  He considered. It was a good hour’s walk from camp. His father would hardly walk that far, not as long as he had a good riding horse in the corral behind the willows. That was it. Find the mare, Red Moon, and he would find where Redbird lay hidden.

  His eye followed the swale down to where it fell away into a ravine. The ravine in turn slowly curved east into the river. He decided his father had come in from the east, slipping into the ravine without being seen by White Fingernail and picketing his horse out of sight in the deepest part. Redbird was probably right now peering at him through the tall grass where water from the swale first trickled down into the ravine.

  No Name smiled. He fitted an arrow to his bow and drew it back almost to its full length even as he aimed it.

  Precisely at that moment Redbird rose in full view, a smile on his face. Redbird waved a hand to indicate the game was off. He stepped back into the ravine, vanishing completely for a moment, then reappeared astride the mare Red Moon, copper-tipped lance held high. A rawhide lariat rolled on his arm. Redbird rode up swiftly. He had not rebraided his hair that day and it streamed behind him as he came on. His black hair and bronzed chest and the black mane and the burnished bay of the horse glowed brightly in the lemon light of the afternoon. The black and bronze of the man and the black and burnished bay of the horse moved as one harmonious aspect of a single creature.


  Redbird charged until he was almost on No Name; then, with a quick hauling up of the reins, drew Red Moon in, so sharply that the mare reared, kicking gravel and dust over No Name’s leggings.

  No Name jumped back.

  Redbird laughed down at his son. “Oho! So a certain son was asleep on his watch, ae?”

  No Name laughed back at him. “Ho! So a certain father thought to surprise his son, ae? Yet his son heard him. It was the earth who told of his father’s coming.”

  “Ha! I see a certain son has become such a nightwalker that he needs sleep in the day.”

  “The meadowlark I heard sang very well.”

  “Perhaps this son was seeking a vision while he napped.”

  At that No Name’s face clouded over. A vision, ae. And a nightwalker, ae. By now Leaf’s mother and father had probably already accepted Soft Berry’s offer of ten ponies. Perhaps also by now, at the very moment even, Leaf lay in Circling Hawk’s sleeping robes, cowed and a wife.

  No Name did not dare search his father’s face for some hint of what might have happened back at camp. Instead he looked across to where White Fingernail sat watching the horses.

  Redbird glanced up at the clear blue sky. “It was here that they came.”

  “Who, my father?”

  “The Thunders. One day a black cloud came. I went out to meet it, holding up my pipe to it. When I came to this high place, lightning jumped down. I fell on my face, hearing the Thunders roll a great stone across the sky. Then the Thunders spoke to me, telling me to get the green ball from the Porcupine Mountains and make a copper tip of it for my lance. It happened in the spring after my sixteenth winter and ever since I have been eager to smoke the pipe with them again.”