lay down among its friends. Nobody knows what happened to the head, which was dropped by the man carrying the spear when it began to shout.
“Moon recovered afterwards but was humpbacked like a buffalo for the rest of his life. He bore no shame for his running because Little Man had a medicine that day that no Snake could have been expected to stand against. Moon told me this story himself in a later time when we made peace between our tribes, and the Snakes also found Little Man’s brother and gave him that horse they had promised, so that they could go again to the place where Little Man died, without being attacked by his body.”
I had not seen a white person since Caroline snuck out of camp that night. One time since, when we was camped on the Surprise River and us boys was out hunting prairie chickens, we saw some moving objects a couple miles off that I took for buffalo, but Little Horse, with his Indian eyes, said no, they was white men, that one had yellow hair, was armed with a shotgun, and rode a bay that was slightly lame in the left forefoot; and the other wore a beard and was mounted on a roan with a saddle sore. Also, they was lost, but he could see that the bay had got the scent of water and shortly they would strike the river and know where they was. So we went in the other direction.
There was a reason why we didn’t hanker none to meet these whites: it had begun to mean bad luck for the Cheyenne. You remember what happened at the wagon train of my white family: some Cheyenne had almost killed one another. Then some bad things was occurring from time to time down at Fort Laramie, where a number of Indians camped roundabout to trade. A young man might get drunk and take a shot at a soldier or run off with some horses. And once a Sioux come across an old sick cow strayed from some emigrant train, and killed it for its hide. Burned up at this, the Army attacked the Indian camp and several individuals on both sides was rubbed out.
We was sixty-seventy miles away from Laramie on War Bonnet Creek at the time of this incident but knew about it quick enough. Some Minneconjou, which was a type of Sioux or Lakota, come riding in and held counsel with Old Lodge Skins, Hump, and our other principal men. Anybody can attend such a meeting, and can say anything that isn’t ridiculous, but generally the chiefs do the talking because they are wiser, which is why they are chiefs.
Luckily there was a man with the Minneconjou who knew Cheyenne, for though the Human Beings and the Sioux been allies for generations, they speak altogether different languages and usually have to converse in the signs as if they had no closer connection than a Portuguee and a Russian. So this man interpreted.
Great Elk, a Minneconjou, stood up and told what happened down at Laramie, concluding: “I have met many Wasichu”-which is how the Sioux call whites-“and drunk their coffee and eaten their molasses, which is good.” Here many of the Cheyenne sitting round the tepee said: “How, how.”
“But I have never known why they came to our country,” Great Elk went on. “First there were just a few of those poor homeless ones, and the Lakota took pity on them and gave them food. Then many came with the ugly cattle that one cannot eat because they have lost their testicles and have tough flesh, being good only to pull the Wasichu wagons which are filled with useless things except for the coffee and sugar and the iron hoops of barrels, from which you can make arrowheads. The Wasichu women are sick-looking and make me sneeze. Then the soldiers came with their big, weak horses; and they have no wife each man for himself but share among them a few women whom one must give a present every time he lies with her.
“If a Wasichu does something that the other Wasichu do not like, they tie a rope around his neck and drop him from a high place, so as to pull his spirit from his body. They talk of the great villages they have in the place where the sun rises, but if that is so, why do they come to our country and scare away the buffalo?
“I shall tell you why: the Wasichu are sick, and if they ever had the great villages they brag about, everybody there has died from lying with those sick women or eating that bacon which stinks, and now the rest come here and if we don’t kill them all, they will infect the Lakota and our friends the Shyela.”
The latter was the Sioux name for “Cheyenne.”
Great Elk sat down then and scratched his lice, and another Sioux spoke to the same effect, and then our Hump stood up to talk. He wasn’t much of an orator, but he sure had a grasp of the practicalities.
“If we are going to fight the white man, we had better get some guns and powder. The only place we can get enough guns and powder and shot to fight the white man is from the white man. I do not think that he will want to give them to us for this purpose; we have very little to buy them with even if he would sell them for this purpose; and we certainly can’t take them away from him, for if we could do that, we wouldn’t need guns and powder and shot for this purpose.”
Hump thought for a moment, opening and closing his mouth for air since his nose was permanently obstructed by that damage he sustained at the wagons. “I don’t know, either, what the white men are doing here. I think they may be crazy. I think it’s better to keep away from them, since we don’t have guns and powder and shot.”
Great Elk got up again and said: “At the fort was a young soldier chief who said with ten men he could rub out the entire nation of Shyelas, and with thirty men, all the people of the plains. But we Minneconjou, along with some Oglala, rubbed him out instead. This is his ring that I am wearing on a string around my neck. I used to have his finger, too, but I lost it.”
Old Lodge Skins finally took his turn, and put on that falsetto that proper oratory called for. The following remarks was developed deep in the chest, but come out high and quavering after having fought a passage through his tightened throat. The first time you heard it, you might have thought the poor devil was dying of strangulation; but it could get the wind up in you once you caught the style.
For a while he flattered the Minneconjou and the rest of the Lakota. Then he reminded them of the Cheyenne theory that they was established in the Black Hills and rich in horses at the time when the Sioux showed up there poor as could be and with only dogs for transport, and the Human Beings took pity on them and give them a horse now and again, which enabled the Sioux to prosper into the great tribe they was at present.
“As to the white men,” he said after an hour or so, “among my people it was my grandfather’s grandfather who saw them for the first time. His name was Walking on the Ground. In those days our people lived near the Lake You Cannot See Across, in houses of earth, and they raised corn. One morning Walking on the Ground and several other Human Beings were tracking a bear along a creek when they came across the trail of another kind of animal they had never seen before. These new tracks were almost the size of a bear’s, but they showed no toe marks and were round and smooth. Our people believed these tracks to have been made by a water-animal, whose toes were joined one to another so he could swim well.
“They followed the trail until they came to a clearing in the forest, and there they saw six of these new animals, and the grizzly bear too, who had also been tracking them. The new animals looked strange to our people. They seemed to be naked, but each one had a different type of fur or skin and another shape of head. Our men then thought they were cousins or even children of the grizzly bear because like him they stood on their hind feet and had bulky bodies and used their front paws like hands.
“But the next moment, the grizzly bear charged the new animals, and several of the latter took from between their legs their penises, which were longer than their arms, put them against the shoulder, and making a great noise, shot flame and smoke at the grizzly and he fell dead.
“Our people were terribly frightened at this and ran back through the forest to their village to tell the others, and the others were excited and had to see these new animals for themselves. So all the warriors in the village went back to the clearing where the animals were and hid in the bushes and watched them. One of the animals stripped the skin off its body and head and our men clapped their mouths in astonishment. But when the animal’s fur was off, it looked just like a human being except that its flesh was white and it had hair all over its face. It washed itself in the creek and put its skin back on, and our men then realized that what they thought was its hide was actually clothing.
“Several of the animals had hairy faces, and our people supposed these to be the males, whereas the smooth-faced ones were the females. And they saw that the lightning-shooting sticks were not the penises of those animals, but they sometimes stood holding them between their legs, so it had looked that way.
“Our men drew back into the forest and held a counsel. Hungry Bear said: ‘I don’t think we should bother these animals or make them angry, because they are very strange and you can’t tell what they will do.’
“Black Wolf, who had not been with the first party that saw the shooting, said: ‘We could easily kill them, but that white flesh doesn’t look as if it would be good to eat, though the skin might make a pretty shirt.’
“But Walking on the Ground, who was very wise, said: ‘These animals are not Human Beings, but they are
