by Dan Simmons
Hoka Ushte was their only child. Both parents, I am told, thought that a child given to them so late in life would be very important, but neither parent lived to see their child old enough to talk. Three Clouds Woman left her tipi in a blizzard to get water in that same winter of the year When They Brought in the Captives and was found frozen to death. Sleeps by the Creek, despite his advanced age, left the camp the next summer after boasting that he was going to count coup on a Pawnee and was never seen again.
Hoka Ushte was raised by grandparents and all of the women in the village and became the spoiled takoja I described to you earlier.
But in a sense, all of the Ikče Wičaśa were takoja in those days. By that I mean that the days were rich and easy, the past existed only in stories and the future only in dreams, and despite pain, fear, hardship, and death, life was full and simple. There were no boundaries to the wanderings of the Ikče Wičaśa and we truly dwelt in the maka sitomni—the world over, the universe.
But this is just background to the story. The story itself begins when Hoka Ushte is in his seventeenth summer and begins his hanblečeya, the vision quest that would change him and his people forever.
Now stop your tape and write this down. The word you hear is “hanblechia” but I want you to see it: HAN BLE ČE YA. It is important to know the word.
“A name is an instrument of teaching and of distinguishing natures.” Do you know what wise wičaśa wakan said that?
No, not Black Elk. His name was Socrates. Now write the word down. Hanblečeya. Good. Now listen again.
By the time Hoka Ushte was seventeen summers old, some of the older men of the tribe wanted to rename him Lodge Pole because his child-maker seemed to be always standing stiff and tall, like the lodgepole pines we harvest for our tipi sticks. Hoka Ushte was embarrassed by this, but he was a passionate boy. Unlike the other young men who preferred to ride and wrestle and plan the stealing of Pawnee or Crow ponies, Hoka Ushte chose to hang around the camp and watch the young girls. He was lucky that the others did not rename him Counting Coup on Girls.
Now I have to tell you that in a small camp such as the one Hoka Ushte grew up in, there were never many winčinčalas—attractive girls for a boy to lose his heart to. There was, however, one such winčinčalas, and her name was Calf Running. Fifteen years old with a sweet face and long black hair which she kept shiny with grease, Calf Running would have been a prize for any proud brave to claim, much less a callow youth like Lame Badger. But Hoka Ushte’s eye was on Calf Running much of the time.
Now I have to tell you two other things about dating and sex among my people in the times before the reservations. First, we are very shy about such things. We even have a word for that shyness—wistelkiya—which means both bashfulness about the act and fear of incest. It is the last part that makes us nervous. Our tribes were never large, you see, and our camps were even smaller, and our ancestors had seen the effects of too much inbreeding. Thus all the taboos on marrying too close to the family. Thus our wistelkiya about the whole subject.
Secondly, it is hard to describe to you now how little privacy there was then. Families slept together in communal tipis, so the children grew up with the sight and sounds of father and mother going at it like dogs in the corner or copulating under their robes, but it was considered bad manners to peek and worse manners to be so obvious in front of the older children. Hoka Ushte, raised as he was by his old grandparents, had probably never seen the making of the beast with two backs. Nor had he ever been alone with a girl in his life. The way of the young Ikče Wičaśa was largely a life of boys among boys and girls among girls; except for the common effort of moving camp or searching for firewood or buffalo patties, the sexes were separate.
So Hoka Ushte did what he could to get close to Calf Running, most of which consisted of hanging around the creek like a hunter stalking a wily prey. Sooner or later, he realized, every woman of the village came down to the stream to fill her water skin. So Hoka Ushte would hide behind the bushes near the stream and wait from sunrise to sunset for Calf Running to come alone to fill her bag. Sometimes Calf Running would come with her fierce mother, Loud Woman, and Lame Badger would just wait there behind his yucca plant or cottonwood tree or juniper bush, scratching his leg and looking stupid. And even when Calf Running went alone to the stream, the only thing he could do was pop up and grin at her. Sometimes Calf Running would smile back at him, but at other times she would ignore him and proceed to fill her water skin. Then Hoka Ushte was left with scratching his leg and looking stupid again.
Eventually Hoka Ushte grew bored with hanging around the stream and looking stupid, so he decided to go tipi-crawling.
Now crawling into your girlfriend’s house might sound like a straightforward enough solution to a Wasicun, but it took most of Hoka Ushte’s courage. Calf Running’s father was named Standing Hollow Horn and he was fabled for his bad temper. Most people assumed the bad temper was a result of his living with Loud Woman, but his temper was legendary nonetheless. Hoka Ushte’s worst fear, however, was that his tipi-crawling would wake Loud Woman herself, who would tell the other women in the village.
Sioux mothers did not treat the molestation of their daughters lightly. If Hoka Ushte had been a brave living by himself, such a discovery might have meant that the women would burn his tipi down while he slept in it. Or perhaps hamstring his horse. Since Hoka Ushte still lived with his grandparents and had no horse, he quaked at the thought of what Loud Woman and her friends might do.
But his passion for the winčinčalas was stronger than his fear.
On a moonless night in the Moon When the Ducks Come Back—that is to say April—Hoka Ushte crept out of his grandfather’s tipi and circled the camp, making sure to keep away from where the horses were kept, until he came to where Standing Hollow Horn’s tipi stood. Luckily, his beloved’s tipi was at the edge of the camp so Lame Badger did not have to find a way to avoid all the dogs that would have barked at him if he had crawled through the center of the camp…for even though he knew all the dogs by name and they knew him, dogs are nervous at night and quick to bark at someone crawling like a weasel between the lodges.
Hoka Ushte had listened to his grandfather and the other warriors speak of how they had crept into Pawnee and Shoshone camps to count coup on their enemies, and he used those skills now to creep up on Calf Running’s tipi, to pull the stake flap away from the stake at the rear of the tipi, and to slide his head under the buffalo hide wall of the lodge.
The air had been crisp and wintery outside; inside was the usual thickness of campfire smoke, exhalations of the sleeping, and the homey smell of sleeping robes that had not been aired for a long time. Loud Woman was not the neatest or most hardworking of women. As he had been taught by the warriors’ stories, Hoka Ushte slipped his head under the tipi wall and did not breath or stir until he located all of the sleeping figures within. Standing Hollow Horn was located immediately by the sound of his loud snoring; Loud Woman talked and snapped even in her sleep, and every time her shrill voice filled the darkness, Hoka Ushte shuddered at the thought of waking her. Calf Running slept quietly, and as Lame Badger’s eyes adjusted to the dark, he could see her pale shoulders and dark hair gleaming softly in the bit of starlight coming down through the open smoke hole.
Hoka Ushte exhaled and took a breath just before he would have passed out. The snoring and sleep-talking continued. Lame Woman snorted something derisive at her dream people and then rolled over with a great tugging of robes, putting her face to the tipi wall opposite Hoka Ushte. He took this as a welcome and wiggled into the tipi, sliding his skinny behind under the heavy buffalo canvas as silently as he could. Holding his breath again, Hoka Ushte crept the four or five feet to Calf Running’s side. He saw that she wore nothing but a loose shift under her sleeping robes, and both her thin shoulders were bare. His heart was beating so loudly that he was sure it would wake everyone in the camp. He was reaching out to touch her when Standing Hollow Horn’s snoring
seemed to stumble, the man snorted, and he sat up in his robes.
Hoka Ushte froze into perfect stillness and tried to become a heap of buffalo robe. His heart hurt his chest it was beating so hard.
Standing Hollow Horn stood up in the dark, kicked aside his robes, opened the tipi flap, and stepped outside. Hoka Ushte could hear the big man making water out there. It sounded like a buffalo pissing to the boy. An instant later Calf Running’s father stepped back into the lodge and tugged at his robes. Hoka Ushte was no more than six feet away, but his head was down, his legs were curled up, his hands were tucked away so as not to catch the starlight, and he was praying hard to Wakan Tanka that the older brave would not sense the extra body in the tent and gut him like a deer before bothering to find out who the invader was.
Standing Hollow Horn began snoring again.
Hoka Ushte let several minutes pass before he dared to move again. As if sensing his eagerness, Calf Running turned toward him and kicked off the last of her sleeping robe. Her breath was sweet and quick against Hoka Ushte’s cheek as he leaned closer and he thought, She is awake! She welcomes me.
He licked suddenly dry lips and raised his left hand to her leg; his other hand was lifted to clamp across her mouth at the first indication of a scream. Hoka Ushte touched his beloved’s thigh. The skin there was softer than he could have imagined, the muscle more supple than he had ever dreamed. Calf Running let out a sleepy sigh but did not scream. Hoka Ushte half-swooned with the surge of passion and imminent danger he felt. He moved his hand higher, feeling the inward curve of that strong thigh muscle, her light shift sliding up as his wrist and hand progressed. He paused only when his fingers were inches away from the warmth of Calf Running’s groin. Hoka Ushte’s entire body quaked with excitement; only his hand was steady and still, his fingers as rigid as his raised child-maker.
Finally Hoka Ushte could wait no longer. He slipped his fingers closer to the source of all that warmth, certain that Calf Running must awaken if she were asleep, cry out if she were already awake. But she did not awaken or cry out, only murmured softly in a sleep voice that sounded too vague to be feigned.
Hoka Ushte forgot to breathe. He was touching a woman’s winyañ shan for the first time in his life. Excitement almost made him cry out, but he clamped his teeth onto his lower lip until blood flowed. All of his attention was on his fingertips now as they explored this new phenomenon.
Hoka Ushte was surprised to find that Calf Running’s maiden hair there was not soft and curly as he had imagined, but long, almost plaited like her braids. He slid his hand along the curve of her groin and the surprisingly tough hair there and he realized that it extended out over her lower thigh and that it was braided. This surprised him and excited him almost beyond endurance until suddenly a cold thought struck him and stopped the excitement just before it made him explode.
With a stab of suspicion that made his already trembling fingers tremble harder, Hoka Ushte lifted his hand from the winčinčalas’s groin to her waist under the loose shift.
The maidenhair was there also, wrapped around the girl’s waist like a harness.
Hoka Ushte knew at once that he had been fooled. His hand went lower, found the braid that extended between the girl’s now-closed legs, and felt along the long hair as the braid ran out under the shift, under the edge of the sleeping robe, and across the tipi floor. Hoka Ushte was lying on it. He rolled half over and felt the line of hair as it crossed the sleeping space. Straight to Loud Woman.
Calf Running’s mother had outsmarted him. She had used an old Ikče Wičaśa mother’s trick and had tied a rope made of horse’s hair around her daughter’s waist and run it between her daughter’s legs. The end would be tied to Loud Woman’s ankle. Hoka Ushte drew back his trembling hand, knowing that any pressure on the horsehair braid could awaken the old woman who lay there now suspiciously silent. Perhaps she was already awake and clutching her skinning knife.
Hoka Ushte felt the last of Calf Running’s warmth against his fingers as he drew back. He took the weight off the braided rope with infinite care, sliding back away from the sleeping girl the way he had once slid away from a coiled rattlesnake on a large rock where he had been napping.
It took Hoka Ushte an eternity to cross the little space to the gap where he had entered, and it took him two eternities to work up the courage to lift the flap and slide under it again. The noise and rustling of the tipi wall seemed like thunder on top of a buffalo stampede when he did so. Crouching outside, he was trying to bring his breathing back to order when a dog outside a neighboring tipi began barking and Hoka Ushte forgot all craft as he ran for the edge of the village, slid down the bank to the stream, and hid by one of the cottonwood trees there until it was almost dawn and he could creep back to his grandfather’s tipi and re-enter as if he had just stepped outside a moment to make water.
Meanwhile, Hoka Ushte’s body and mind were raging with frustrated passion. It was a very long night.
Early the next morning, Hoka Ushte’s grandfather, Tunkashila Good Voice Hawk, came into the tipi, nudged the boy awake with his moccasin, and said, “Co-o-co-o! Wake up. Get ready. We are going to see Standing Hollow Horn.”
Well, you can imagine how frightened Hoka Ushte was. He was sure that Calf Running’s father had found his track in the morning and knew about his tipi-crawling. As afraid as he was of Standing Hollow Horn, Hoka Ushte discovered that he was more afraid of Loud Woman. The entire camp joked about how miserable a life Standing Hollow Horn lived as a result of his wife’s barbed voice, and now Hoka Ushte imagined that she-turtle’s beak attached to his own behind for the rest of his life. Dragging his feet through the dust to Calf Running’s tent behind his tunkashila, Hoka Ushte could think of no way out of his disgrace except for suicide or exile.
Standing Hollow Horn’s tipi had been cleared out except for ceremonial robes upon which the two men and the shame-faced boy sat. There was no sign of Loud Woman except for bowls of hot pejuta sapa which she had obviously boiled up and which Standing Hollow Horn now offered to Good Voice Hawk and Lame Badger. Pejuta sapa was “black medicine,” the thick, sour drink which the Ikče Wičaśa traded for occasionally from the Wasicun. Even given how strong and bad-tasting the coffee was, it was considered wakan by some of the Sioux—second only to mni waken, holy water, whiskey—and in those days before Wasicun crawled all over the plains like lice on a buffalo hide, pejuta sapa was rare indeed. Hoka Ushte was surprised by such generosity, but then realized that such formality must precede a terrible dressing down.
The formality was increased after the pejuta sapa was swallowed when Standing Hollow Horn filled his pipe with kinnikkinnik and lit it. Again Hoka Ushte was surprised when he was included in this adult ritual, and again he decided that it was merely a prelude to the terrible punishment he was about to receive. The black medicine and the strong tobacco had made his tired head dizzy. He decided that he was too timid and too tired to go into exile for the rest of his life. He would kill himself.
“Hoka Ushte!” began Standing Hollow Horn in a voice so fierce and so resonant that the boy almost levitated off his blanket. “I think you know my daughter, Calf Running?”
Lame Badger was just able to say “Ohan.” Yes. Other words fled his mind. He had no excuses.
“Washtay,” said Standing Hollow Horn and dragged deeply on his pipe, handing it to Good Voice Hawk again. “It is good. You then know why your tunkashila and I have called you here?”
Hoka Ushte could only blink. I will use a skinning knife, he was thinking. It is sharper and opens the large vein more quickly and with less pain.
“Calf Running is growing too old to be without a husband,” grunted Standing Hollow Horn. “It is time she wed and gave her mother and me grandchildren. This I have said to Good Voice Hawk many times. We have agreed that you would be a good husband for my daughter.”
This time Hoka Ushte was not even capable of blinking.
Standing Hollow Horn continued glaring at the boy.
“And last night I dreamt of you, Hoka Ushte.”
The boy’s eyes stayed open. He felt as if he would never blink again.
“I dreamt that I came into my lodge on a winter’s evening and you were there with my daughter and two grandchildren. This morning I went to see Good Thunder and our wičaśa wakan says that the dream may have been a vision. He says that I am no waayatan, but that the dream may have been wakinyanpi. He says that this thing is good.”
Hoka Ushte managed to move his head so that he was looking at his grandfather. Good Voice Hawk was taking smoke from the pipe. His eyes were narrowed to slits. Hoka Ushte looked back at Standing Hollow Horn. My father-in-law? Suddenly he imagined Loud Woman as his mother-in-law, living in the same tipi. Luckily it is considered taboo among the Ikče Wičaśa to speak to one’s mother-in-law or to directly acknowledge her existence in any way. Another result of wistelkiya, fear of incest, perhaps. But a welcome taboo to Hoka Ushte at that moment.
“Pilmaya,” said Hoka Ushte, his voice as thin and shaky as a willow reed in a summer storm. “Thank you very much.” He realized even as he spoke how stupid it sounded.
Standing Hollow Horn made an impatient gesture. “You do not understand. Good Voice Hawk?”
Hoka Ushte’s grandfather blew a cloud of smoke and looked at his takoja. “Standing Hollow Horn and Loud Woman are ready for a grandson,” he said slowly. “A baby to pamper and spoil and make takoja like yourself. Calf Running is ready for a husband…” He paused as if Hoka Ushte could see the obvious.
Hoka Ushte nodded, seeing nothing.
Good Voice Hawk sighed. “But you are not ready to be a husband,” he said softly to Lame Badger.
The boy tried to understand this.
Good Voice Hawk scratched his cheek impatiently. “You have become neither a warrior nor a good hunter nor a young man interested in the affairs of the tribe. You have neither ponies nor pelts nor eagle feathers. You have never counted coup or laughed in the face of opponents who would have your scalp.”
