by Max Brand
“You were in his lodge?” cried the old man. “You went into his lodge?”
“Yes,” said Red Hawk. “I went inside his lodge to kill him or . . .”
“Hai!’ cried Spotted Antelope. “You want to kill Wind Walker? Listen to me. If you were to kill him, your bones would rot with unhappiness . . . your hair would fall from your head. You would lose the use of tongue and death would be close to you.”
Red Hawk listened with perfect bewilderment. “But why should that be?” he demanded. “What spirit has told you these things?”
But his foster father began to stare straight before him at nothingness, and now seemed incapable of either speech or hearing.
Chapter Twenty-Three
It was clear that whatever Spotted Antelope saw, no questions would draw out his vision into words. Therefore his foster son was still.
A moment later, the voices of Lazy Wolf and Standing Bull called outside the lodge. With a gesture, Red Hawk brought White Horse into the great teepee, and with another signal made him lie down like a dog on the ground. But his head remained nervously high, his eyes shining with more than the light of the fire that was reflected in them.
The two visitors, as they entered, paused for a long moment to stare at the horse before they sat down. Then all four sat in a circle, smoking a ceremonial pipe. Red Hawk, sitting close to the stallion, kept his left hand on the sheen of the hard muscles of the animal’s neck, where it arched close to the head, and from time to time he tangled affectionate fingers in White Horse’s forelock. It seemed to him that there was now enough in this teepee to fill the heart of any man—two friends, his foster father, and the great horse. Yet his pleasure was as melancholy as some remembered happiness. They might have been ghosts who sat about and smiled at him, asking questions. He narrowed his eyes, in order to pierce into their minds and realize to the full this sun of friendship that was playing upon him. But nothing could lift the shadow from him or make them seem real.
What amazed and hurt him most of all was that he perceived everything with new eyes. Lazy Wolf began to look like a fat and lazy vagabond, with yellow tobacco stains in the gray of his curling beard. Spotted Antelope was a death’s-head, over whose skull the skin was drawing tighter and tighter. The film of age covered his eyes, except when a frenzy lighted them from within, as when he had seen some warning vision of Wind Walker, just now. And even Standing Bull had been new made by the touches of the last three years, for the frown was permanently gathering between his eyes, and deep lines drew down past the corners of his mouth. His nostrils flared a trifle, and his eyes flashed from moment to moment, as though he hunted on the warpath.
That sick man in the town of Witherell, with his lofty brow and gentle expression, had a certain value that was not expressed by any of these men. He was hardly stronger than a woman, but with the hand of the mind, perhaps, he could accomplish more than all of the men of the Cheyenne tribe.
However, the moment that thought formed in Red Hawk’s mind he forced himself away from it. He summoned his spirits; he tried to forget the ache in his heart and to make these faces a little more real than the images that drifted up in his mind with the rising smoke of the fire.
He began to talk of the thing that they wished to hear, of that famous hunt for White Horse. Yet he had hardly started the narrative when the voice of a crier went ringing through the camp. It paused not far away to shout the tidings.
Running Elk, the medicine man, and Dull Hatchet, the war chief, were together giving a feast in the lodge of the war chief. To that feast were invited all the important men of the tribe. The name of Standing Bull came early in the list, and that of Lazy Wolf also appeared, no matter how unpopular he might be with both of the Cheyenne leaders. Last of all, the crier chanted out the name of Spotted Antelope.
The four men in the lodge looked at one another, listening, incredulous, unable to believe that the name of the returned wanderer had not been called.
“Well,” said Standing Bull, as the fullness of the insult became more apparent to him, “I shall stay here. I could not now eat the food that is cooked in the teepee of Dull Hatchet.”
Lazy Wolf raised a hand of warning. “You’ve quarreled with Dull Hatchet once before,” he said, “and for a whole year you were not asked to join a single important war party. I know what it means to you to lose chances to lift hair or horses and risk your own scalp into the bargain. As for me, I am going to this feast . . . and you are coming with me. Spotted Antelope, come along with us. When the chief of the tribe calls us, it is a command. We’ll be back to see you before long, Red Hawk.”
Red Hawk, however, was suddenly seeing the truth as if from a great height. The days that were to come scattered before him like so many faces, although far away. Again he had that strange sense of a remembered thing, as though all the years of his life he had known that his doom was in the scarred and ugly face of Dull Hatchet. There could be no clearer way for the war chief and the medicine man to tell him that no matter how the younger men and women of the Cheyennes looked up to the captor of White Horse, the great and important heads of the tribe had not forgotten that Red Hawk had failed in the blood sacrifice of the initiation.
And Red Hawk, as he watched his friends move out from the tent, felt that he was looking at them for the last time. Standing Bull stood for an instant with a great hand resting on the shoulder of his friend, but Red Hawk, looking him calmly in the eye, told him to join the rest.
So, in a moment, he was left alone. With his brow in his hand, he sat cross-legged beside White Horse. There was no need for pondering. With the white race he had no place, and from the Indians he was cast out. Perhaps it remained for him to live like a lone wolf of the prairies, drifting here and there, alone. Even with White Horse for a companion that desolate thought was more bitter than death to him. Death itself seemed the simplest way by which he could leave his troubles.
If that desire had been clear in him when he ventured into the house of Wind Walker, it was doubly strong at this moment. He could avoid the sin of self-destruction by going, now, into the house of a power far more terrible than Wind Walker himself. The thing loomed with a sudden certainty before him; he could see the picture of the great pillar that leaned at the gate of the Sacred Valley, and of himself moving small through the entrance and onto that ground where no Indian ever had stepped before him. It seemed to him that he could understand now that word that had been whispered in the air above him from the wings of the great night owl, those years ago. All of his wandering had been futile. Now he must go straight into the presence of the Great Spirit, Sweet Medicine.
He stripped himself, found some sweet grass, purified himself with the smoke, and dressed himself in some new leggings of deerskin. There was a new deerskin shirt, but when a man was to stand in the awful presence of Sweet Medicine it was fitting that the body should be naked above the waist.
He would have to be painted, or else the Great Spirit would not even know that he was a Cheyenne, perhaps. Therefore he mixed some red paint, and painted on his breast what seemed to him a speaking likeness of an owl, flying with outstretched wings. On his feet he drew on a pair of beaded moccasins; he dressed his dark red hair with eagle feathers from a priceless little packet that he found in a willow basket, and over his shoulders he drew a buffalo robe. With a gesture he raised White Horse to his feet.
So he stepped into the night with the shimmering figure of the great horse behind him, and went straight out from the camp.
Most of the Cheyennes had gone to sleep by this time, in spite of the great excitement caused by the arrival of White Horse. But though the majority of the camp slept, there was still a sea of noise. Some of the young men were out serenading—rhythms that had once seemed blood stirring to Red Hawk, but which he now found strange and discordant. Two or three sick babies were crying. Above all, the dogs maintained a steady uproar; there would not be a moment during the night when there was not at least one fight in progress, or one
false alarm of coyotes to bring the pack hurrying out from the lodges into the open night.
One of those canine outpourings occurred at the very moment when Red Hawk left the camp. A great roaring wash of dogs swept out around him, yelled at the moonlit hills, and then receded again among the lodges.
Red Hawk, turning to watch them go back, saw a woman moving slowly after him. She came up without haste, until he could see the moon polishing the braids of her hair and the turn of her throat and above all the light of it was in her eyes. It was Blue Bird.
When she was near, she waited for him to speak. A wind out of the valley whispered and tugged and fluttered about her, and he thought of the white girl in Witherell. She might be more delicately made, but she had not carried burdens, and therefore she did not stand as straight as Blue Bird. And what could the white girl do except sing and turn the pages of a book? But the hands of the Cheyenne woman were strong enough to grasp the heart of a man. Yes, and to fight for it, once held.
He said to her: “Blue Bird, it is a lucky thing that you have met me here.”
“It is not luck. I have followed you,” said the girl.
“Have you?” he said. “Well, I could give my message to no one else, but I can trust you. Stand here, where I can see you with the moon on your face. Ah-hai. Ah-hai,” he added softly. “You have grown beautiful. I wish that I had sun . . . or even firelight . . . to see you by, so that I could find all the color. You had a golden face, and I can remember the color and the blue-black in your hair and eyes. Stand a little closer. Now turn your head to the right . . . so! You have grown beautiful because you are a little sad. Why are you sad, Blue Bird? Are there no young men among the Cheyennes?”
She looked straight back at him for a moment, until it was difficult for him to stare into her eyes. He watched her breathing, which made a ripple of light run down the two long braids of her hair falling forward over her shoulders.
“You have found a white girl,” said Blue Bird. “That is why you talk to me like an old man to a child.”
“I have found a white girl,” he admitted. “But she goes to the lodge of another man.”
He saw her hands gripping hard together, so that, when he looked up into her face, he expected to see some strong emotion. But she was as calm as an image that falls by moonlight into still water.
“You are leaving us again?” said the girl.
“I am walking out in the night for a time,” he said.
“You are leaving us,” she said. “You have made up your mind to do some great thing.”
“Why do you say that?” he asked her.
“The war chief and the medicine man turn their backs on you. That you have brought in White Horse is not enough to please them. Therefore you are going out to throw yourself away.” “How?”
“You will find a Pawnee camp and ride through it without a weapon, to count one grand victorious coup before you die.”
He smiled. Compared with the dreadful thing that lay before him, what was a Pawnee camp filled with wolfish fighters?
“There is another way to die,” he said. “Tell your father and Standing Bull and my father. I am going to the Sacred Valley. The white people laugh at me, and the chiefs of the Cheyennes turn their backs on me,” he went on. “I am going into the house of Sweet Medicine to die,” he said. “Tell Standing Bull that I wanted to leave White Horse behind me for him, but this is a medicine horse, and it is my medicine. It would not be good for any other man.”
“Wait for me to speak,” she said, whispering. “I am going to say something.”
He waited. The wind that pressed against her seemed to sway her a little from side to side, as a warrior is sometimes swayed when a spirit is working strongly in his throat, about to break forth into a great utterance.
But, at last, all she said was: “Farewell . . . Red Hawk.”
“To my father say this . . . ,” he began.
Then he saw that she was turning away from him, with her hands crossed on her breast. She went slowly back toward the moon-whitened lodges of the Cheyennes.
Something made him stare after her until she was lost among the shining teepees.
Chapter Twenty-Four
When Red Hawk rode the stallion up the ravine toward the Sacred Valley, it seemed to him that the walls of the gorge were ten times as deep as when he had come here with his foster father. He told himself that it was not death itself that he feared; what he dreaded was the moment when destruction approached, for there is agony of mind greater than any of the body. His thoughts were those of delirium.
He had expected that it would be full daylight when he reached the mouth of the valley, but in this calculation he had overlooked the speed of White Horse, which rapidly unrolled the remembered silhouettes of the hills and brought him in the first of the dawn to the entrance of the valley.
He had made up his mind before. Perhaps it was more fitting that he should walk meekly, with bowed head, through the enormous gate, but, since destruction was so near at hand, he had determined to ride in to meet it on the back of White Horse.
Mounted, therefore, he made a short prayer holding out his hands: “Sweet Medicine, since you made the feathered wing of an owl speak to me in your name, I have been your man. But I am tired of traveling in sorrow, and so I have come back to look into your face. I am going to ride into your own valley. If I have done wrong, you will kill me quickly, but, if you have pity on me, then you will let me go back to the world, and you will show me happiness among men.”
When he had finished, he took the robe from around his shoulders, folded it, and laid it across the loins of the stallion, so that on his own bare breast Sweet Medicine might see the painted symbol of the owl. After that, Red Hawk rode straight forward to meet his destiny.
He was glad that there was a morning mist in the air, for its obscure rollings would hide whatever death ran upon him until just before its hand was at his throat. He threw open his arms and put back his head to receive the fatal stroke, as White Horse carried him straight into the valley.
It seemed that something like a shadow crossed his mind. But now he saw before him only the green billowing of trees on either side of the water that shunted down the slant, held quiet by its speed and the smoothness of its bed. It was a forest that thronged all the throat of the valley, so that in a moment he was passing through a second night, dim and gray. The branches were polished with wet and blackness. They interlaced their fingers to continue overhead a billowing gloom, except where he found a monstrous trunk fallen, making a gap in the solid canopy.
Little saplings had taken root in the ground that the giant had broken in its fall. It was as though Sweet Medicine had little care for even his finest trees, but allowed the storms to enter the sacred precincts and strike down the mightiest in his forest.
The silence of the flowing river, which made only hushed sounds, was proof that Sweet Medicine wished the magic voice of his distant waterfall to be heard from afar. That noise was a chanting and a shouting and a trampling, still far away when Red Hawk left the trees and came suddenly out into such a prospect as he had never seen before.
The morning had increased from gray to rose, burning higher and higher behind the black shoulders of the mountains, and the mist had almost dispersed. Only walking wraiths moved from hillock to hillock, and flowings of translucent silver poured over the low places. The wet grass took the rosy sheen of the dawn like a dim lake, and here and there, and again in the distance, rose open groves of enormous trees that seemed to be standing in water. It appeared to Red Hawk that their lofty heads mounted as high as the great walls of the valley.
Something moved out of the mist that still clung about the trunks of a grove of trees. Then one after another he saw buffalo stepping behind a lordly bull. By twenties and twenties they moved. They drew near; they paused, and all at once turned their shaggy eyes to behold him, without fear.
At that, Red Hawk’s strength slid like water out of his heart, and he dro
pped from White Horse to the ground. In the wet grass he lay face down and groaned with terror. Why should the buffalo fear him, when they were accustomed to the comings and goings of Sweet Medicine? He had entered a world of magic. The very taste of the air was different, and even the grass was not cold, but wet and warm against his flesh.
When he ventured to lift his head again, he saw that the monsters had vanished. White Horse stood close by with lifted head, listening, listening.
He stood up, and the stallion crowded close to him. He made himself bold, and plucked up a handful of grass and offered it to the lips of White Horse. But the stallion shook his head in a human gesture of refusal, and there was wonder in his eyes. At least, the wounding of the turf brought no instant punishment on Red Hawk’s impious head and hand.
He walked on, the stallion ever pressing close behind him. They passed over a small rise, and, in the hollow beyond, a whole herd of antelope stood frozen in attention. He waited for them to scatter before him like leaves on a wind of fear, but with bewildered eyes he saw them begin to graze again.
He walked straight down among them. None of them seemed to avoid him, though in their grazing they happened, as it were, to drift away from the line that he followed, so that a clear path was left before him. To right and left, he could have touched them. He saw their little black hoofs shining in the wet of the grass. A buck showed the sharp tips of his horns, and stamped with threatening anger. A fawn stretched out its head toward his hand, and then shrank back from the great step of the stallion.
“Why should they be afraid?” said Red Hawk to his soul. “Arrows and bullets would turn aside from them. Sweet Medicine has breathed upon them, and steel edges cannot slay them.”
He was walking through wildflowers. Wherever his eyes fell, beauty looked back at him, for this was the abode of a god, and where the feet of a god have rested—where even his eye has fallen—there is, of course, an enduring loveliness.
