Conquering Horse

by Frederick Manfred

  “Cup your hands.”

  “I hold them open before you.”

  She poured out half of the multi-colored corn. “See if the mare likes it. It may give her strength to live.” She hung the rawhide strap over his shoulder. “Try to catch her while she eats.”

  He suppressed a smile. He turned and again pushed through the plum bushes.

  The gray mare stood in the same place, switching her wet tail. He held out the corn to her. She got the smell of it, nickered weakly, but made no move to come for it. He stepped closer, reaching as far as he could, at last got the corn under her nose. She lipped up a few kernels, rolled them around loosely in her mouth, then let them dribble to the ground.

  Moving still closer, he stepped on something soft and giving. He looked down. There, barely hidden under old leaves, lay a second colt. “Ahh-h-h,” he said. Looking around, he spotted another bag of waters, this one broken, and next to it the afterbirth. “Twins,” he whispered softly. He poured the corn to one side on the ground and knelt softly. Gently he scratched away the leaves.

  The second colt was alive. Barely. The mare had cleaned it thoroughly. She had bitten the cord off neatly, close to the navel. Examining the earth behind them, he saw she had picked it up by the neck and carried it to dry ground and then had covered it with leaves to keep it warm. He lifted its rear leg. “Ai-ye!” he cried aloud. “It is a stud colt.”

  Leaf heard his cry and came hurrying through the plum thicket. “What is it, my husband? What have you seen?”

  He jumped up for joy. “It is yet another colt, my wife. The white stallion’s favorite has had twins. A wonderful thing. Truly a sign from the gods.”

  “Ahh-h-h,” Leaf said, low.

  He knelt beside the colt again. “See, it is a white colt with a reddish mane and tail. A true son of his father.”

  “Ahh-h-h,” Leaf said again, low.

  He looked across to where the sun was setting. A flare of red gleamed on the winking river. “My father, you have given me what my vision desired. Thank you, thank you.”

  He lifted the colt’s pulpy head. Its half-closed bluish eyes were glazed over. A film of dust covered its under eye. Its mouth, already pursed for suckling, weakly drew air instead. The colt smiled a strange ludicrous smile, lower lip hanging, fuzzy nose lifted.

  “It is dying,” Leaf said.

  No Name knew it. But it enraged him to hear her say it. He lashed out, snarling, “Woman, why do you hate the white ones? Are they not holy and wakan? Woman, perhaps this is the horse the white mare told about in my vision. Would you destroy my vision?”

  Meekly she bowed her head, “I hear you, my husband.”

  He picked up the colt tenderly in his arms. “You are my god,” he cried, looking down at it. “Live! I will take care of you as if you were my own son. You shall see.”

  Holding its slender slippery body close, he felt its heart beating against his bare chest. “Aii,” he cried, “it will live. Already I feel my power entering its heart.” Gently he laid it down again. He cupped his hands around its soft protruding lips and breathed into its mouth, deep, long; breathed until the colt’s chest began to lift and fall on its own a little. His breath and the breath of the colt became one. The breath of the colt had a flesh-sweet taste.

  Leaf said behind him, “It was born too weak to stand. It could not get the milk.”

  He let go of the colt’s mouth. “Ha,” he snapped around at her, “at last you speak with the wisdom of a Yankton breeder. Woman, it is well known a colt must drink milk immediately after it is born or it will die.” He picked up the slack body in his arms again, with its head in the palm of his hand, and moved toward Twinkling Feet.

  But Twinkling Feet, though weak, and interested in what was happening to her colt, was suspicious and moved away.

  “Wait a moment, my husband.” Leaf scooped up the corn No Name had thrown to one side. Carefully she held it to the mare’s lips. Twinkling Feet, with some reluctance, at last took a mouthful and began chewing.

  Leaf waited until the mare had chewed the corn some, then took the rawhide strap from No Name’s shoulder and secured the mare. Twinkling Feet, never touched before, was at last too beaten down to care.

  Again No Name approached Twinkling Feet, holding the mouth of the colt to her bag. The mare stood. Her black dugs were dripping full. With a prying finger, No Name opened the colt’s mouth and pushed its lips around the near dug. The colt lay inert.

  Leaf said quietly, “Milk a little in the colt’s mouth, my husband. So it gets the taste.”

  No Name gave her a scorching look. “Count my hands, woman, and then tell me which one is not busy.”

  “I hear you, my husband.” Holding the strap with one hand, she reached her other hand under the mare and milked the dug into the colt’s mouth a few times.

  The colt’s lips moved loosely, milk ran out of the corners of its mouth, its glazed eyes rolled once.

  “When my father still had horses,” Leaf said, “he often said twin colts were not a good thing. Neither the one nor the other was ever born strong enough to stand. The mother could not sustain both of them in her belly at the same time and yet give them full hindquarters with which to stand.”

  “Ho, no doubt that is another bit of wisdom you father unearthed alone, which my father Redbird as a horse breeder never knew.”

  “Nevertheless, my husband, what my father said remains a true thing.”

  “Milk the mare again, woman.”

  Leaf stripped the dug a half-dozen times. Again milk ran out of the corners of the colt’s mouth and down its slippery white hide. The mare shuddered, and almost collapsed.

  Leaf withdrew her hand as if to suggest it was no longer any use.

  “Again!” No Name ordered harshly. “It is the wakan white horse of my vision that I hold in my hands. Would you destroy my vision?”

  Once more Leaf milked into the little one’s mouth, a series of good steady streams.

  All of a sudden the colt gathered itself up and coughed, exploding milk over No Name’s face and Leaf’s arm and the underside of Twinkling Feet. All three jumped a little.

  “Look,” Leaf said, matter-of-fact, “it coughs.”

  “See,” No Name cried, joyfully, “it lives!”

  The colt licked its lips and swallowed. It rolled its eyes. Some of the glaze and dust on its pupils washed off under its long pink lashes.

  “Drink, my son,” No Name urged coaxingly, cuddling the colt against his chest. “Drink, all the Yanktons wish it.” He held the colt’s mouth to the mare’s dripping dug again.

  This time the touch of the fat dug awakened the colt and it suckled a few moments. Its throat pulsed twice.

  “Ahh,” Leaf whispered.

  “Hi-ye,” No Name cried.

  Twinkling Feet looked around and nickered at her colt. She smelled its thin rump where it lay over No Name’s arm. She seemed to understand that the thing being done was good.

  “It is well, mother,” No Name murmured. “He has my breath and I have his. Also my wife has the smell of your milk on her. We belong to you.”

  The colt sagged again, and quit breathing.

  No Name whispered fiercely, “Woman, quickly, milk the mare a little.”

  Milk ran out of the corner of the colt’s mouth again before it exploded a cough. Then, abruptly, it began to breathe in an even steady rhythm. Gradually too what was left of the glaze vanished from its eyes. It seemed to awaken to the world. At last it began to push its nose around against the mare’s bag. It found the dug by itself.

  The colt suckled for some time. No Name counted some thirty swallows before the colt quit, exhausted.

  Happy, No Name carried the colt back to the nest of dry leaves. He laid it down gently. It lay breathing to itself, slowly.

  “Woman, fetch us a robe. The colt must be kept warm while the milk works.”

  She brought the robe quickly. No Name lay down beside the colt and took it in his arms while she covered t
hem both. He stroked the colt under the robe, down its back, down its leg, over its head. He loved it. Gradually, after what seemed a very long time, warmth seemed to return to the colt’s slender white body.

  He saw Twinkling Feet pulling against the strap, desiring to be near her colt.

  “Let her come,” he said. “Tie her to this bush close by.”

  Leaf led the mare over and tied her securely.

  He looked up at Leaf again from under the robe. “I have almost forgotten our son. Where is he? He is well?”

  “He hangs sleeping in his cradle from a tree.”

  “Care for him while I care for this one.”

  Lying patiently in the nest of dry leaves, under the warm buffalo robe, he held the white colt in his arms. He lay holding it in love the whole night through.

  Early in the morning he fed the colt again, holding it up to the mare’s other dug. It fed well. When he put it back on the dry leaves under the robe, he saw that its eyes finally shone bright with life. Its white ears and short reddish plume of a tail flopped occasionally at the buzzing flies. Sometimes its legs trembled as if in a phantom gallop.

  He waited until the sun had risen some, then uncovered the colt and began to work it. He rubbed its legs, stretching all the ligaments and muscles, and shaped its slender ears with his fingers, and combed out its lovely baby tail with a brush of sticks. He lighted a fire of dry sage and hardened the colt’s slippery cartilaginous hooves in the smoke and heat. He collected certain aromatic leaves, chewed them thoroughly, then perfumed the colt by blowing and spitting the particles into the reddish mane and tail.

  At noon, at the same time that Leaf gave breast to their son, he again held the colt up to Twinkling Feet’s bag. This time the colt drank eagerly.

  Later that evening, when he held it up to drink once more, it struggled to break free of his arms. When he let it rest lightly on its feet, it took hold and stood alone. And alone it punched its nose into the bag and found the dugs. It drank until the mare was dry.

  The next day, try as they might, they could not get Twinkling Feet to eat. They brought her more corn. They coaxed her with fresh grass gathered from the unburnt meadow across the river. They brought her fresh prairie clover from the unburnt meadow across the river and from farther down the valley. They rubbed her down. They lavished love upon her. Yet she would not let her teeth be parted. She had resigned herself to dying.

  “She wishes to follow her husband Dancing Sun,” No Name said. “She has been wild too long.”

  “Perhaps we should let mother and son go free,” Leaf suggested.

  “The white colt? Woman, why do you hate the white ones?”

  “If the mare dies the colt dies.”

  “I will get the mare some water,” he said. “If she drinks she will eat.”

  But Twinkling Feet refused the water too. She did not even bother to lip it.

  And that evening, Twinkling Feet went down. She died as the sun set, her eyes glazing over even as the colt emptied her bag for the last time.

  The following evening they were back in their cave, sitting by the fire. The baby hung in its cradle from a peg in the wall, the colt slept curled up at No Name’s feet. Earlier in the day, to make sure the colt would stay close, No Name had cut a belt from the hide over Twinkling Feet’s back and belly, including the dugs, and he wore it around his middle.

  No Name felt bad. At supper the colt had refused to drink a gruel made of cornmeal and water. No Name had begun to wonder how he was to keep the colt alive.

  No Name and Leaf sat watching the fire die away. They sat a long time, wordless.

  Finally Leaf, knowing his thoughts, had a suggestion to make. “My husband, I have a thing to give to the colt. Yet I am afraid to speak of it.”

  He said nothing.

  “It is because I am afraid you will scorn me.”

  He sighed, then said, “Speak, woman, my ears hear you.”

  “My husband, well, our son does not need all there is to drink. I have too much milk. Therefore let me give the colt suck. I have seen that his mouth is very tender.”

  No Name stared at her.

  “Once my mother told me she did not have enough milk for me when I was born. Therefore she gave me some milk to drink from a mare. It is time that I repay horsekind. Why cannot this colt be raised on a mother’s milk? Yankton mothers are often known to give little puppies to suck.”

  He continued to stare at her with large black fixed eyes.

  “I wish that my husband may be happy. He has had a great vision for his scarlet people. He has overcome many difficulties. He has an enemy scalp to show. Soon he will be wearing an honor feather. Thus perhaps it is right and good for him to cling to the little white stud. The stud colt will no doubt help the Yanktons become a rich and proud people. I have said.”

  He still could not speak. He looked down at the sunken fire. Presently he picked up a twig and without thinking scratched pictures in the dust of the cave floor.

  “Has my husband lost his tongue?”

  He coughed; then looked into the darkness outside the cave. “Do as your heart tells you. But do not let me see it.”

  “My mother also told of another thing she gave me. She cooked some cornmeal in marrow soup and then strained it and gave it to me to drink through a leather teat.”

  “Ahh.”

  “Also, the colt will soon be able to drink water and eat of the tender grasses by itself. It will not take long.”

  He nodded. “When we arrive at my father’s lodge he will find us a milch mare and let the colt feed from her.”

  She reached a hand around the side of the fire. “Give it to me.”

  “Give you what?” he cried wonderingly.

  “The gray belt. That the colt may smell its old mother when it abides with its new mother.”

  Slowly, gravely, he unstrapped the gray hide belt from around his middle and handed it across to her.

  In the next days, during the Moon of Black Cherries, while the white colt filled out and became strong, they prepared for the long trip home.

  He hunted buffalo; she dried meat and cured hides. He cut thirteen short tepee poles; she patched together a skin cover. He made a high saddle for her; she got ready a travois on which to carry their possessions. He shot a porcupine; she made combs from its tail and dyed the quills. He made himself a new quiver; she decorated it tastefully with quillwork. He made himself a new sinew-backed bow from second-growth ash; she embossed it beautifully with more quillwork.

  He made himself a good warclub out of maple knurl and a thick shield out of tough bullhide, and painted the main elements of his vision on both to make them sacred. She made leather cases for them so they might always be covered except in time of battle. She also made him a heavy buckskin shirt, with fringes of varying lengths on his right arm, the varying lengths indicating the kinds of trails he had taken. With quills he embossed the small leather charm case she had made for him and placed in it, reverently, the circlet of scarlet mane he had cut from Dancing Sun. Out of deer shinbones she made charms and hung them on the cradle to protect the baby from evil spirits.

  To vary the diet, he went to the river and caught fish. He found the channel catfish fat and lazy. Sometimes they were so sluggish he could charm them to the surfacf by gently tickling them under the belly with a willow twig and then throw them out onto the shore. He gathered twists of kinnikinick and wild tobacco and cured them in the sun and then put the twists in parfleches.

  She gathered cherries, sometimes serving them raw and sometimes stewing them with meat. Some of them she pounded to a fine pulp—skin, flesh, pit—to make soap.

  He took the colt to the river and gentled it into the deeper waters, teaching it to swim and to accept his handling. He delighted in swimming with the colt under his arm.

  She hung the child from the peg in the wall near the fire. She rocked it to sleep, singing a lullaby in a low, whispering drawling manner:

  “A-wu-wu-wu

&
nbsp; Be still my baby

  Sleep sleep

  A-hu-hu-hu.

  “A-wu-wu-wu

  My baby be still

  Sleep sleep

  A-hu-hu-hu.”

  When the baby would not sleep, she sang songs to strengthen its man soul:

  “My son, it is a sad thing.

  A day will soon come

  When you must leave your mother.

  Your father will call,

  The drums will call,

  The warriors will call.

  Crying loud:

  ‘They are coming, the chargers!

  It is good to die young!’

  “My son, be strong, do not fear.

  Remember the old ones.

  Remember the hungry children.”

  Over the days the white colt became vexingly domestic. They could not make a move but what it was in the way, bumping into them around the fire, gamboling against them when they went for water, even insisting on lying next to them when they went to bed.

  Yet, for all the colt’s affectionate playing, No Name still brooded on occasion. Haunting images tormented him. Sometimes, memory of his mother telling of his older brother Pretty Rock became confused with a picture of Circling Hawk kneeling over him on the grit sand beside the Great Smoky Water. Sometimes memory of his father sitting in noble repose beside his fire got mixed up with Dancing Sun in rampant battle with Black One on the burning prairie. Sometimes memory of the love between the slow brown stud and its mother became mixed up with scenes from his childhood. And sometimes, when he contemplated the healing wound on his thigh where Dancing Sun had bitten him, he thought of himself as Leaf’s brother Burnt Thigh.

  Once Leaf broke across his brooding with a question. She was sitting across the fire from him, giving suck to the baby. “My husband, I see that you look often into the darkness.”

  He jerked erect. Ahh, her spirit soul had been visiting with his spirit soul and he had not known it. He permitted a silence to widen between them, then said, “It is nothing.”

  “What is it that you see in the darkness?”

  “It is nothing.”