Conquering Horse

by Frederick Manfred

  Thinking of his own carelessness in being caught by the Omahas, he remembered the story of another foolish youth, named Spider. Spider was out exploring one day and ran across some ripe chokecherries. Spider began stuffing himself with them, until his lips and tongue turned black and his throat almost puckered shut. At last the chokecherry tree decided Spider was making a pig of himself, so she whispered, “Little nephew, do not eat too much of me or your bowels will bind.” This made Spider laugh. “Oh, that’s all right, little mother tree. I’ve just had a lot of artichokes and they’ll keep me loose.” But his bowels did bind, and a few days later he was seen sitting on a hill facing the wind, trying, trying. Suddenly a rabbit ran between his legs. Astounded, he thought he had given birth to a son. Grabbing his clout, he jumped up and ran after it, calling, calling. “My son, my son, wait for me. I’m your father.” But the rabbit got away. Muttering, cursing the bad manners of the new generation, Spider went back to his hill and sat down again. Except that this time he wrapped a robe around his legs and seat to make sure nothing could get away. At last it came. He folded his robe carefully over it, then quickly got a stick and began to pound it, crying, “Try to get away from me now, will you? My son you are and my son you will remain.”

  Thinking about the story again, No Name laughed merrily to himself.

  The sun began to shine directly down upon him. It became sticky hot. A few mosquitoes got wind of him and despite the bright sun wisped out of the shadowy undergrowth and sat on him.

  “Ae, they have come to tell me something. Perhaps the Omaha have gone.”

  He reset his wolf cap, then got up on hands and knees and like a skulking fourlegged peered through the cattails to all sides. The Omaha had left. Also, the swamp was suddenly full of singing redwings.

  He resumed his running, walking, running routine. His pace was constant more than swift. The little hills and narrow valleys along the east side of the Great Smoky Water unrolled beneath him. He watched the crows and wolves for sign.

  At last, sure he was well beyond the country of the Omaha, he turned west and went down to the banks of the great river. He found a dry cottonwood log with two armlike limbs. It was as white as an old licked-over buffalo bone and because it was very dry would float high in the water. He rolled up his clothes and bow inside his light pack, as well as his fetish, and fastened them on top of his head. Then he pushed the cottonwood log down the bank into the coursing waters. Some dozen yards in, the current seized the tree and began carrying him downstream. The two armlike limbs kept the log from turning over in the water. He paddled along easily, aiming his crude craft for a distant high bluff on the west side. The bluff would make a good lookout from which to examine the farther country.

  He remembered his grandfather Wondering Man’s last request for a drink from the Great Smoky Water. He sipped a few palms of it as he floated along. The tan water was medicine and restored him.

  The river came down between two long lines of wind-blown bluffs, swinging back and forth in slow heavy curves. It shoved more than it ran. It threw up innumerable sandbars from its bottoms, then promptly undermined them and dumped them lower down. It undercut its own banks, dropped and overran them, then built them up again. It ripped trees loose from one bank and planted them deep in the opposite bank, sometimes right side up, sometimes upside down. It robbed itself of islands, then promptly created new ones. The great river boiled on, a restless fluid force, driving as well as driven.

  Abruptly the current in the main channel caught his log. It was tumultuous, with waves as high as a small tree. It lifted him, dropped him, then spun him around in violent sickening swings. It raced with a low gushing roar. He hugged the old tree with both arms; swallowed water; got dunked; was lifted clear. Then, as suddenly as it had caught him, it let him go.

  He steered his log past mushy sandbars and mucky islands and around floating live trees.

  He was almost across the old river when it went for him once more. A whirlpool near a sinking collapsing island grabbed his log and ripped it from his grip, taking it from him like a bully taking a stick from a boy. He had just time to take a deep breath, and under he went. The whirlpool sucked him down, down. His head sparked with flying stars. His lungs swelled until he thought he would burst.

  Then the airtight pack on his head, tied under his chin with thongs, began to swell up and pull him the other way. The deeper he sank the harder the pack pulled. The tan waters rushed and whelmed and gurgled over him.

  “Ae,” he thought in the darkness of his skull, “it is my helper. He is hidden in the pack and the great river does not know this. My helper does not wish us to drown.”

  He began to rise very rapidly, suddenly popped out on the surface. A log lay almost against his face, spinning crazily. He grabbed for it even as he sucked for air. With his hands he stayed the log’s wild revolutions, got a leg and an arm over, then his chin. He lay on it, puffing.

  At last the rushing stream was through with him and let him drift toward the bank. His feet touched bottom. Spent, he slithered up the muddy bank and collapsed.

  When he got his breath, he put on his leathers again, hid his charm in the left braid, ate what was left of the dried meat, and set out. He followed a stream which eventually led up through a brushy ravine. This in turn lifted onto the treeless bluffs. Eyes and ears alert, he kept looking for sign. He saw no tracks, neither of man nor horse. He had struck exactly between the Omaha to the north and the Pawnee to the south.

  Ahead to the west lay open prairie. The country rolled some at first, gradually leveled off, became a vast lake of knee-high grass. There were no trees, no bushes, no buffalo, no deer, nothing on which the eye might rest in relief or the spirit fasten in hope. It was all new to him. Yet his helper, hidden in his braid, opened his eyes in such a way that it seemed vaguely familiar. This comforted him.

  He followed the sun down the sky. Heat waves danced and glittered on the horizon. Sometimes the burning appearance of the prairie gave him the feeling it was all on fire. He ran. He walked.

  Toward dusk he spotted something. It was hard to see against the sun and he could not quite make out what it was or how far away it was. Palm over black glittering eyes, he peered intently. After a while he decided it was some kind of fourlegged. It too seemed to have stopped still, waiting for him to move first. Against the sun there was a curious glowing over its dark back. Ahh. Grizzly. He had once seen a silvertip in the brush along the River of the Double Bend.

  He strung his bow and drew an arrow from his quiver. Again he had a vision of himself as dead with his bones whitening in a waste of waving green-gray grass. “Ai, soon someone will weep. I hope it will not be my mother.”

  He sank slowly out of sight in the grass. He waited. There was no wind. The grass stood still. It also waited.

  He raised and looked out again, and was just in time to see the grizzly look back over its shoulder at him and then, shrugging, separate into two parts. Astounded, he watched the two parts become two old crows and fly off. They disappeared into the blue dusk to the south.

  When he arrived at where the crows had been sitting, he found a single seedling ash, about hip high, with birdsquit staining the grass at its foot.

  Bone-tired, upset by the grizzly apparition, he decided to make a night of it beside the seedling. He poked around through the grass on hands and knees and uncovered a few prairie turnips. Seasoning the spring roots with some brown June bugs, he ate them raw.

  The sun sank in a series of color explosions, the one shading off into the other, first bloodstone, then moonstone, last brownstone.

  Looking around to all sides, he missed something. He could not think what it was until he took off his wolf cap. “Ahh,” he cried out softly, “it is the wolf I miss. Not even the coyote dares to live in this place. It is too wild for even the fourleggeds.”

  Parfleche for a pillow, he stretched out on the grass. Stars came out as thick as mosquitoes. He watched the leaves of the seedling ash stir ag
ainst the White Path Across The Sky. He counted the leaves and found there were exactly as many as he had lived winters. The tree was his twin brother. He sighed. He missed Circling Hawk. He wished his brother Pretty Rock might have lived so that he could have known him. He lay quietly on the heaving breast of the earth. It turned under him. “My heart is on the ground,” he whispered. “I am lonesome.”

  He slept. He dreamed. A black horse stood on a rise of land. After a while he saw it was Lizard, his black gelding. Two eagles, attracted by the horse’s strange raw nose, were attacking it, one from above with enormous sailing wings, the other from the ground. Before he could come up and help, the two eagles had torn open the horse’s head so that its eyes hung loosely down its face. He picked up a heavy stick and clubbed the eagles over the head until their brains ran out like curdled milk. Then the two eagles flew off. He bounded on Lizard’s back and they were off. After a wild ride they arrived safely in camp. Redbird his father praised him for his bravery. At that, Lizard his horse lifted his long black tail a little and watered on the grass. Then his mother came out of the tepee and took Lizard by the bridle and led him away.

  Some of Lizard’s water sprinkled on him, and he awoke. Huge drops were hitting the ground all around him. It was raining. The sound of it reminded him of June bugs hitting the taut sides of his mother’s leather tepee.

  Suddenly, a hundred yards away, a thin streak of fire leaped out of the ground. It speared straight up into the heavens, revealing boiling clouds. Immediately, along the same track, a fat prong of zigzag lightening dazzled down. Thunder smashed into the ground. The earth shook with long heavy undulations. Then a wind sprang up and the sprinkling thickened into a rain, gradually became a heavy downpour.

  He slipped out of his buckskins and folded them under his back to keep them dry. The rain pelted his naked body like flicking finger tips. The wind became strong, began to roar. It bent the little tree until finally its wild leaves snapped in his face. The wind became so fierce it drove water under him.

  He couldn’t keep his buckskins dry, so he decided to use his shirt to catch some of the water. He anchored it down at the corners with his hands and knees. In a few seconds he had more than enough to drink. The water was sweet, as fresh as milk from a mare.

  It poured.

  After a time, the wind gradually died down, the rain thinned, the shower moved on. He got up and wrung out his leathers. When he put them on they clung clammy to his skin.

  A new wind rose, from the south. It was warm and dry. The little tree beside him wrung out its leaves too. Soon both he and the little tree were dry.

  Lying down again, he touched the little seedling, gently, just above the roots. And touching it, he fell sound asleep.

  The next forenoon found him lost on the gray, green sea.

  Shortly after sunup, the sky became overcast. Search the horizons as diligently as he might, he could find no hint of where the sun might be. The sky was all one vast continuous gray cover, with no blue openings or dark thickenings, with no edges or shadows. The prairie also remained flat. It too was one vast continuous piece, with no trees or brush, no rises or valleys. There were just two great sweeps: one overhead, gray; one underfoot, gray-green. Nor could he find in himself any feeling or instinct as to where the four great directions might be. Whether he stood still, or spun around on a toe, it was all the same.

  Once he thought he saw a second seedling ash. But when he came up to it, he found flattened grass beside it and knew it to be the same little tree he had slept under. He had wandered in a circle.

  He took out his charm and propped it up on a little mound of plucked grass at the foot of the seedling and prayed to it. “Help me, my protector. I am lost. It is the same country where my father was lost. His charm helped him. Help me.” He cocked his head this way, that way, waiting to hear.

  The piece of horse chestnut gave no sign it had heard.

  “Will I perish on the plains, unheard of and unpitied? My mother will soon be crying alone by the River of the Double Bend.”

  Silence.

  At last, angry, he began to scold it. “Have I not been good to you? Have I not carried you far, even tenderly, as though you were my own grandfather? Is this a good way?”

  Silence.

  He gave the fetish a little flick with his fingers, hard enough to knock it off the mound of grass.

  “Ahh, you will not help, I see.” And with that he picked it up and put it back in his braid. “Today it wishes to be balky.”

  He found a few more turnips and ate them raw. He clawed up some of the sod and found a half dozen white orange-nosed grubs. He ate them also, found them sweetish.

  He heard a gopher whistling off to one side. Hunger still gnawed in him and he looked around cautiously. Finally he spotted the gopher some dozen yards away, yellow-brown, fat, rearing up like a man’s stalk out of the grass. He quickly fashioned a snare from his bowstring, then on hands and knees went after it, head and shoulders humped over, black eyes blazing in anticipation. The gopher, still sitting erect on its haunches, cocked first one bright little bulbous eye at him, then the other. It whistled, short. It ducked down into its hole; popped out again. No Name moved stealthily toward it, first on right hand and left knee, then on left hand and right knee, predator eyes half closed. He imagined himself a bobcat. If he went slowly enough, and if the gopher continued daring enough, he might catch it barehanded and not need the string snare. His buttocks lowered as he got set to pounce. At that moment, little slope-jaw chewing rapidly, the gopher gave him a hard look and then, whip! was gone. No Name padded softly to the hole. He studied it a moment, then deftly laid out the loop of his snare. Trip string in hand, he retreated a few feet and lay low in the grass. Holding himself in check, crouching, eyes almost closed, he waited. At last the gopher couldn’t resist a quick peek. Then another. Then yet another. On its third peek, No Name jerked and zip! had it. He pounced on the struggling gopher and hit it precisely behind the head with his bow. It shivered, its rear legs pumped a few times, and then it stretched out. Before its eyes could glaze over in death, No Name skinned and ate it.

  The sky continued overcast. It remained very still.

  He sat on the ground, bowed, head between his knees. His thoughts were dark. “Alas, why is it that I die? I thought my path would be clear before me and the skies cloudless above me. My thoughts dwelt only on the good. There was no blood in my thoughts. Yet my father the sun has deserted me and my helper will not speak.”

  He sat still as a stone for a long time.

  He had almost fallen into stupefied sleep, when he heard a single low squeak. Looking up, he saw a swallow flying glossy-blue against the gray sky. It was a dirt dauber. He watched it a moment, then realized from the way it flew, low, mouth open, its flight as straight as an arrow’s, that it was heading for water. He bounded to his feet and ran after it, hoping to keep it in sight long enough to find where it was heading.

  But the swallow flew too swiftly for him and before long it vanished from view. Puffing, eyes stinging with sweat, dejected, he sat down again.

  It occurred to him after a while that the ground he sat on felt harder than usual. Getting to his knees, looking, he found two stones half-hidden in the grassy turf. Both were perfectly round, about the size of buffalo testicles. Also, someone had painted them red.

  He stared at them. “Ai,” he whispered, “sacred stones.” He backed away.

  Then, even as he stared at them, he saw the stones stir in the tough webbing of grass and shimmer toward him. He wiped stinging sweat from his eyes; stared again.

  The stones spoke to him. “My son, hear this. We are round. We have no beginning and no end. We are related to the sun and the moon because they also are round. Therefore we know where the sun and the moon are and where your father lives. We are two. That is why the grizzly became two crows. That is why the black horse was attacked by two eagles.” Having spoken, the two stones lay still again in their place in the grass.

/>   “Aii!” He knew then that this was the place where his father had been lost. Full of reverence, of dark awe, he quickly got out his tobacco and placed a pinch of it in sacrifice before the two stones.

  He prayed to the stones. “Grandfathers, I thank you. I have been lost, yet you have found me. I thank you. A man as he goes forth makes stops, in one place to eat, in another place to sleep. So also Wakantanka. The sun, which is so high and bright, is one place where Wakantanka has stopped. The moon, which is so soft and beautiful, is another place where he has stopped. The little ash tree, the whistling gopher, the flying swallow, all are places where he has stopped. I think of these places where my god has stopped and I send my prayer to them to help win a blessing.”

  Again the stones stirred in an oscillating manner, this time as if pointing in a certain direction.

  “Ae, they point to where the swallow flew. That way lies water. Thank you, thank you. Now I have found the true path.”

  3

  He awoke in the dark. He lay awake on the grass.

  Presently he felt something tugging him. A thing warm and strong had a grip on his heart, and it pulled as if to help him to his feet.

  Finally the pulling became so insistent he had to get up. He threw quiver and pack over his shouder.

  “I am coming,” he said, eyes glowing. He walked quietly. After a while he saw something just ahead in the pre-dawn dark. It curved in a long uneven line before him. “Trees,” he said softly, “ae, and a stream.” He walked straight for it, unworried that someone might be skulking after him.

  The land dipped and the grass deepened. The grass was very wet and soon his leggings and moccasins were soaked. The blades were as sharp as bird teeth. He moved through them slowly to avoid getting cut.

  Soon trees lifted over him. From the rustling sound he recognized them as cottonwoods. They grew thickly together and were short. He touched them as he moved through them. Some twenty steps further he saw stars twinkling at his feet. He knelt. With his finger tip he touched water. It was a softly flowing stream and it was cool. He had a long drink. The water was gritty with silt and afterward his teeth hurt. He removed his leathers and bathed in the stream. He scrubbed himself harshly with the sandy water. He took down his braids and rinsed them. He combed out his long black hair. He fluffed his hair in the air until it was nearly dry, then he did it up in braids again and bound them tight around his head and put on his wolf cap.