Conquering Horse

by Frederick Manfred

  With an effort Moon Dreamer recovered his poise. “Nephew, you must go through with it. Terrible punishment awaits those who do not fulfill the vision. The Thunders seek them out and mark them for death. You must go through with it.”

  No Name sat up. “But I love my father dearly. I love him even more than I love my mother.”

  “Nephew, follow your helper. Do as she tells you. First go out and conquer the wild horse. Then, when you return in glory, your name will be given to you and it shall be told you what you must do about the second part.”

  “But shall I tell my father all this?”

  Moon Dreamer considered. At last he said, “Let us wait until you return before we tell your father. It will then be given you what you must do.”

  “And what shall we tell the people? They also sit waiting to hear.”

  “My son, if your father who is our chief must wait, the people must wait.”

  No Name looked around at the people sitting in the shadows under the willow shade. Again his eyes sought out his father and his copper-tipped lance. He forced back tears. After a short struggle his face became impassive. “I must do as the white mare commands. It is fated. There is nothing I can do. I must try to be a brave man and take things as they come. I cannot weep.”

  The virgin Pretty Walker approached shyly, hesitantly. “Did your helper give you a new song? We wish to sing it.”

  No Name remembered her request. He smiled at her, slow, grave. With Moon Dreamer and Circling Hawk helping him, he got to his feet. As Strikes Twice struck up the drum, gently, he sang in a low hoarse voice:

  “Friend,

  I come from conquering a horse.

  My horse flies like a bird when it runs.

  It is wild and very fierce.

  It likes to bite.

  Friend, I come. Be careful.”

  When he sang it a second time, Circling Hawk and his four singers joined in. Over them all, like a skylark drifting gently down, quavered Pretty Walker’s virginal voice.

  Then Moon Dreamer faced the people. He lifted his hand and proclaimed to all. “Hahol let the people know this. No Name, our son, was valiant and dared to face the sun all day. He conquered the sky-horse before it could sink behind the earth in the west. He was valiant and he conquered. Also, the second part of the vision was given him. It will be told to all the people when he returns from conquering the great white stallion. I have said. Yelo.”

  The people shouted tumultuously. The men sang wildly. The women’s speech became as the happy warblings of birds.

  PART THREE

  THE CHASE

  1

  It was the fourth morning after the sun dance. No Name was ready to leave. He had bathed in the streaming cascades. He had eaten a hearty breakfast of meat boiled with dried plums. He had bound up his braids under a tight wolf cap.

  He stood alone with his mother inside their tepee. He watched her look him over to make sure he had everything: leather shirt and leggings, moccasins, bow and arrow and knife, several pairs of extra moccasins tucked under the belt, long rawhide lariat also caught under the belt, light pack over the shoulder stuffed with dried meat, pemmican, pipe and tobacco, awl and sinew thread.

  She gave his sleeve a tug. “Son, the sun shines. It looks well for you.”

  “I have seen, my mother.”

  She gave his sleeve another tug. “Son, the thing you seek lives in a far place. It is good. Go to it. Do not turn around after you have gone part way, but go as far as you were going and then come back.” Her old waxy eyes looked at him in love. “If you are to be killed, be killed in open air so that the wingeds can eat your flesh and the wind can breathe on you and blow over your bones. Also, be killed on a high hill. Your father believes it is not manly to be killed in a hollow.”

  No Name waited. The long black lashes over his eyes held still.

  “Son, keep this thought in your heart. The man who loafs in his lodge will never be great. No. It is the man who is tired from taking the trail who becomes great, the one who sweats, who works.”

  “I listen, my mother.”

  “Do not be afraid of the Pawnee. Some day you will be the head chief of the Shining People.”

  “I will remember.”

  Again she tugged at his sleeve. “My son, have you told your father the second part of the vision?”

  No Name stirred. “I cannot. Also, our uncle Moon Dreamer says to wait until I return.”

  “It is good. We do not wish to know it. Yet speak to your father of something before you go.”

  “He waits at the red ford to walk with me for a short way.”

  “It is good.” She reached up and with both hands stroked him, from his shoulder down to his wrist. “Go, my son. Be valiant. Earn your name.”

  “I hear you, my mother.”

  He ducked out through the door.

  From behind the drying racks stepped Loves Roots. She was crying. Her oily hair hung unbraided and tangled. She clutched at his arm. “Do not go, Little Bird. I am afraid. The Pawnees will kill you. They will torment you at the stake with burning arrows.”

  He suffered her touch. He looked more beyond her than away from her.

  She hung onto his arm.

  “Remember the fate of Holy Horse. He followed a white ghost horse into a deep cave. There the middle-of-the-earth demons overcame him and he was never seen again.”

  “I did not dream of a cave.”

  “Remember also the fate of Wants To Be A Woman. He also was never seen again.”

  No Name remembered. Wants To Be A Woman had dreamed that a white ghost had come to sit at his side while he lay asleep in bed. Wants To Be A Woman got up and tried to run outdoors, away from it, but the ghost followed him and jumped on his back. Wants To Be A Woman did not feel weight but he knew the white ghost was there anyway. He ran for the river and jumped in, yet the ghost stayed with him. Then he ran to his friend and begged him to destroy the white ghost. His friend saw nothing. He began to laugh at him. “The heat makes your head spin, friend. There is no white ghost.” Wants To Be A Woman ran out into the night again, wild with fear. At last he climbed a cliff and got set to jump. At that moment the white ghost spoke to him. It said, “Do not jump, friend. I am not a harmful ghost.” But Wants To Be A Woman was very afraid and he jumped off the cliff anyway.

  No Name said in young sullen dignity, “What has this to do with me?”

  “Did you not dream of a white thing?”

  She tried to stroke his arm from the shoulder to the elbow as his mother Star had done, but he pushed her brusquely aside.

  “You will not listen?”

  “I must go. A certain horse calls from a far place.”

  She handed him a pair of moccasins. They were packed tight with food.

  “What is this?”

  “Dried skunk meat. Eat it when you have hunger. It will make you strong because the skunk eats many good roots.”

  “It is good.” He looked down at her bowed head. He looked at the stripe of bright red paint in the parting of her hair. He recalled the night he was tempted to use her. Then he said, “Be kind to my father.”

  He walked out through the horns of the camp. It was a fresh spring day, the Moon of First Eggs. The sun glowed big and yellow across the river. Mist rose golden off Falling Water.

  Next to bid him good-bye were the young braves lounging naked on the red rocks after their morning bath. Among them was a wild youth whom the maidens had nicknamed Bull All The Time. Bull and his rowdy friends had been successful in a horse-stealing raid and since then he had gone around preening himself like a fox with a dead gopher in its jaws. Bull laughed at No Name. “Ho! I see that an old mare in a dream has you chasing a white ghost horse.”

  Before No Name could retort, a heavy raw voice let go from a large red rock on the other side of the path. “Look who mocks. Is it not the one who only yesterday was begging his mother for more ma-ma?”

  It was Circling Hawk speaking and he was referring t
o something the entire village used to wonder about. Even at eight, Bull had sometimes run after his mother and beseeched her to give him suck.

  Bull swelled with sudden hate. His black eyes slowly reddened over.

  No Name laughed with the others. Then, with a smile at Circling Hawk, he moved on toward the red ford. “Some day,” No Name said to himself, “after I have become a father to my people, I shall make Circling Hawk a chief second only to me.”

  Another to bid him good-bye was Pretty Walker. The slender virgin stood under a stunted ash. Her easy gestures and the manner in which she held her head to one side reminded him of a shy puppy. She called out, “Have a new song when you return. I will sing it.”

  He smiled at her. “And I will dance it.”

  “I did not speak in jest.”

  “And I did not answer in jest.”

  “I will wait.”

  “And I will come.”

  He took the red stepping stones across the river with easy grace, leaping lightly, sure-footed. Water whorled green at his feet.

  He found his father sitting on his heels on the sunny side of a huge boulder some distance out on the prairie. The color of his father’s skin was almost exactly the color of the boulder. No Name blinked his eyes at the wonder of it. He saw now how true it was that the Shining People had been formed out of the red bones of the earth.

  His father saw him and his face lighted up. He smiled in gentle dignity. “It is a good day to leave on a horse-raiding party, my son. The gods favor you at last.”

  “It is my helper who does this.”

  “Have you given your mother a last word?”

  No Name smiled. “She spoke of a hill on which I might place my bones so the birds would find them and pick them clean.”

  Redbird’s smile deepened. “Ae. Do not die in a hollow where no one will find you. Also bones will rot in the wet.”

  No Name looked at his father and again was full of admiration at the manner in which he carried his sixty-one winters. Soon even Loves Roots would appear to have caught up with him in age. No Name said, “I am ready, my father.”

  For a brief moment a shadow lurked in Redbird’s eyes. Then it was gone.

  No Name remembered his mother’s instruction to speak to his father about something before he left. “My father, what is the way? Can you tell me?”

  Redbird took up a stick and leveled a patch of red earth between his knees. He drew some lines on the level patch, a big flowing S for the River of the Double Bend, with a tail which went down until it joined another line, heavier and deeper. The heavy line was the Great Smoky Water. It came out of the northwest, and after joining the River of the Double Bend, went straight south to another line wriggling in from the west.

  Redbird pointed at the last line. “Here is the River That Sinks. The Pawnees live four sleeps west of where it joins the Great Smoky Water. In this place.”

  “Have you seen this river?”

  “A long time ago, my son, when a few of us went on a horse-raiding party. The river is very thin and very wide. It flows in some places as after a rain on flat ground. In other places it flows not at all. It is all sand.”

  “Did you catch many horses?”

  “The Pawnees had none to steal that spring. But we saw the tracks of many wild ones.”

  “It is good.” No Name stared intently at the map in the dust. “I see it all. I will remember.”

  Redbird pointed at a spot on the west side of the Great Smoky Water, below the mouth of the River of the Double Bend. “Here live the Omaha, they who went against the current. The Omaha have come to hate us. They have stories which tell them they were once the keepers of the Place of the Pipestone. Their stories tell them that we defeated them in a great battle and chased them away.”

  No Name started. He had never heard of this. “Is it true, my father?”

  Redbird smiled. “Our old ones did not speak of it. I do not know.” He shifted his weight, still squatting on his heels. “Another of their stories tells them it was one of their maidens who found the quarry. Their stories say that she was living with us as the wife of one of our braves. It is said she was digging for prairie turnips when she struck upon the pipe stone.”

  “Is this true?”

  “I do not know. Our old ones did not speak of her either.” Redbird mused in reverie. “We have always known it as a place of brothers, where the warclub was put aside and the red pipe smoked in peace. We have never seen it as a place where a battle was fought or where women were captured.”

  No Name stood back on one leg, considering. He suddenly saw his father very clearly as one of those who could tell much about old things. His father’s memory was like a bullhide covered with the pictographs of a long winter count.

  “You have your charm, my son?”

  “Moon Dreamer gave me a thing to wear. It will be my mystery power until I catch the wild horse. Alter that there will be another.” No Name wondered why his father had not noticed the fetish on him. Late the night before, over a pipe, as the white mare had told them to do, Moon Dreamer had given No Name a piece of horse chestnut to wear in the fat braid behind his left ear. He was to wear this until he returned with the scarlet plume. The grayish black piece of gristle had a powerful odor. No Name decided that his father’s sense of smell was failing a little. No Name added, “Also I feel the power of the sun dance in me.” No Name touched his shirt where the wounds still stung him when he moved too quickly.

  Redbird sighed. His son still had not told him the second part of the vision. Then he stood up and he raised his hands and stroked his son from the shoulder to the wrist four times. “Go, my son. Do not return until you have caught the wild seed stallion.”

  “I am going.” No Name broke away from his father and began to walk south.

  The morning continued fair and the vast and blooming prairie was as a land of dreams. The grass looked so sweet to him in the broad forenoon sunshine, so fresh, so crisply green, he envied the horses their grazing. He stalked through deep grass. A dew had fallen in the night and soon his moccasins were sopping wet. The sound of wet leather brushing through wet grass was like the vigorous flourishing of horsetails.

  The land sloped gently down, leveled off to a bottom through which flowed a slow grass-tressed creek, then sloped gently up toward a wide level rise. From the bottom the country resembled the inside of a cupped hand; from the rise it resembled a rising shoulder. The growth differed too. Ripgut grass grew in the lowlands. If a walker was not careful his moccasins and leggings were soon cut to shreds. Soft green buffalo grasses grew on the upland. The soft carpet made for easy going.

  He found a patch of wild honeysuckles growing on a south slope. They belled softly in a gentle breeze, orange petals glowing in sharp contrast to the pale grass. He settled on his heels and picked one and did as he had once done as a boy. He sucked a single drop of clear honey from its throat.

  He threaded his way across a meadow of creamy beardtongue growing as high as his hips. Without having to bend he could peer into individual flowers to see if the wild bees had beaten him to the nectar. The air was so sweet with the smell of the flowers that his eyes watered and his nose became stuffy. He put it down in his memory as a place where he would some day take the new spotted colts.

  Birds lifted ahead of him as he went along; settled again behind him. Bluebirds momentarily deepened the glowing blue of the sky. Tufted redbirds shooting from one wolfberry bush to another reminded him of bloodied arrows. Redwings chirred at him from the wet lowlands: “Friend! we alone know joy.”

  He knew when it was almost noon by the way the yellow primroses began to close up. His mother Star had once told him the reason. Their silky blossoms were open all night because they wanted to please the spirits of the dead who lived on the stars. “They of the other world are pleased to see flowers too,” she said. “Therefore the primroses bloom best when it is darkest at night.” When he protested that he had often seen them open in the morning, she s
aid, “They also bloom in the forenoon for a little while to let us see what we will have to look at when it is our turn to pass on.”

  When the sun was directly overhead he paused beside a small stream. It was but a step wide and it was clear and trickled musically over round red pebbles. He kneeled beside it and with his palm lapped up a long cool drink. He watched minnows no longer than his little finger come gupping up to lip his hands in play. Their gray bead eyes glowed up at him. As a boy he had once eaten a minnow and found it mushy sweet.

  He took off his light pack and made a pillow of it in the deep grass. He lay down, belly up like a lazy puppy resting on the sunny side of a tepee. He watched the birds fly by. He lay so quietly he soon heard mice creeping stealthily through the little shadows in the grass. As long as the birds flew by and the mice moved near him he was safe from ambush.

  He got out the dried skunk meat Loves Roots had prepared for him. He was so hungry he emptied both moccasins, even turning them inside out to lick them clean. The skunk meat was excellent. It lay filling and warm in his stomach. It made him think of himself as a sacred snake that had just swallowed a fat gopher. He knew Loves Roots had given him the meat and the moccasins because she hoped he would wive her some day. He remembered the night she crept in with him under his sleeping robe, how she touched him until, become so trembling rigid he thought he would break, he had at last pushed her away.

  Thought of Loves Roots reminded him of the Yankton maiden who had performed a feat so great in the old time that men still talked of it, partly in awe and partly in laughter. The maiden’s father and mother had been killed in a raid by the Chippewa when she was but a child and so she had been adopted by a chief who had no children. Even as a young girl she had been a daring one, playing boy games with the boldest and roughest of the lads. One fall, after she had grown into a beautiful young woman, to make sure she would get the most manly of all the braves for a husband, she invited forty of the most valiant to a feast. She gave them as much buffalo meat boiled with wild plums as they could hold, then, afterwards, gave each a private treat behind a leather curtain. The young men were all eager to comply. Later, astounded by her generous gift of hospitality, since virginity was highly prized among the Yanktons, all of them courted her eagerly. They thought she was surely of the gods to have given herself to so many men at one time. Otherwise it could not be explained. She finally chose one of the tallest braves and married him. It was told of her subsequently that she had great power over her husband and helped him in the wise rule of the tribe. It also was told of her that she remained his faithful and loving wife until death.