LITTLE BIG MAN

goddamnedest sound, reverberating to your testicles.

Now my hair was longer than when I had been with my white kin, but not nearly so long as an Indian wears his. The reason for this is that it grew naturally like snagged wire: let it go a month and I’d look neither Indian, white, male nor female, but rather like the belly of a goat that had been tracking through fresh dung, for along with the tangle the ginger color would darken, the more the hair, and go to brown, and any kind of animal fat laid on it would streak in green.

That was why I’d hack it off now and again when it got more than halfway down my neck. So this Crow, he was already in the act of scalping me when he hesitated for the briefest space on account of the funny feel of that short hair, which sure belonged to no Cheyenne by birth.

This break in rhythm brought me out of the spell I was under, quietly suffering the top of my head to be sliced off, the warm blood running into my right ear. I couldn’t wrestle him, I didn’t have no weapon, Younger Bear so far as I knowed was stone dead, and the other Cheyenne was in the village by now, too far away to help, and if I made a noise the rest of the Crow would be roused and murder my friends. This was the kind of thing for which Old Lodge Skins had told us boys that story about Little Man fighting the Snakes. Sooner or later he knowed it’d come in handy. I couldn’t let a Crow do this to a Human Being!

I jerked back and bared my teeth.

“Nazestae!” I hissed. “I am Cheyenne!” It would have sounded more impressive could I have afforded to shout it as battle cry; I have explained why I couldn’t.

But do you know, with that the Crow pulled away his knife, fell back on his haunches, and covered up his mouth with his left hand. His thumb had slipped on my movement and run across my forehead, opening up a white streak through that paint made of soot and buffalo grease. He didn’t understand what I said, for Crow and Cheyenne have different tongues, but he spoke as if in answer to it and in English:

“Little white man! Fool poor Crow! Ha, ha, big fooling. You want to eat?”

He was scared I’d take offense, see, because the Crow always sucked up to Americans, and in his dumb way wanted to bring me over to his lodge. It wasn’t his fault, of course, none of it, and that fellow has always been on my conscience. It appeared he was out in the night by himself for some reason when he run across me and the Bear, and worked quiet for he didn’t know how many others of us was in the vicinity. But I couldn’t have known that at the moment; I couldn’t in the time at my disposal explain the situation for him; and least of all could I go as his guest to camp, or even let him talk about it any longer in that loud voice.

So I had to kill him. Murder him, a friendly fellow like that. Shoot him in the back, what’s more. In retrieving my wolfskin that had fell off in the struggle, I had found my bow and quiver on the ground. The Crow at that moment was crawling up the wall of the draw to get the pony he had left on the plain.

Three Cheyenne arrows, thunk, thunk, thunk, in a straight line along his backbone. His hands lost their purchase and his big body slid down again till his moccasins hit bottom, and it stopped rigid on the incline.

That was the first I ever took a human life, and however it sounds to you, it was one of the best times. I was saving my friends, and you shouldn’t never have to apologize for that. And after all, he had scalped me almost halfway, which though he later veered friendly left its mark I can tell you. The right side of my face and neck was sticky as molasses with lifeblood-mine, very dear to me-and I was afeared to feel up there in case my whole skull-cover flapped loose. I dropped out of the picture then.

Next time I opened my eyes, I was laying inside a little tepee of brush and alongside me squatted some fellow wearing the top of a buffalo’s head, horns and matted hair, and he was singing and shaking a buffalo tail in my face. I had a terrible headache; my skull felt as though it had shriveled like a dried pea. I seemed to be wearing a cap of mud. I tried it gingerly with my fingers, but the medicine man gave a loud buffalo-snort at that moment and spat a mouthful of chawed-up flower petals into my face.

I had been long enough then among the Cheyenne to hold my peace. Besides, the headache gave one great surge and then began to ebb away. I sat up, and Left-Handed Wolf, for that was the medicine man’s name, started to dance around the robe where I lay, singing that monotone curing song interspersed with snorts and bellows. And he kept chewing more dried flowers from a little pouch on his belt and blowing them at me from the quarter points of the compass.

Then he leaned over and tapped a little stick on my cranium, and off fell the clay cap in two halves in which a few wiry hairs was embedded. Now my head felt especial cool as if indeed the whole scalp was missing, but he spat some flowers on it and it didn’t hurt no more at all.

Now he danced slowly before me and dangled that buffalo tail just beyond my reach. I tried weakly to seize it, but he’d back off a little each time. I felt the strength coming up from the soles of my feet, and when it reached my knees I got up and followed him, still trying to grab the tail that he shook before me while bellowing and tossing his horns. His face was painted black, with the eyes and nostrils rimmed in vermilion.

Wolf backed through the tepee door and I come along, reaching for that tail more and more vigorously, and when I got outside, I saw the whole camp, warriors, women, kids, babies, and dogs, lined up in parallel rows from the lodge entrance to the river. They was all by their presence working for my cure. No Cheyenne suffers alone. I was mighty touched by this display and got the power of it, straightening up my back and walking with almost normal force.

When we reached the riverbank, Wolf said: “Stretch yourself.”

I did so, and some black blood started from the place above my temple where the Crow had first inserted his knife, and falling into the water was carried away and lost in the Powder’s swift current. Then came the good red blood, which Wolf stanched with dried flowers.

“I am well now,” said I. That’s the God’s truth, and was the end of the incident. Afterwards I looked in a trade mirror and found a thin blue tracing at the roots of my hair, but even that was gone in a day or so.

The moral effects was farther-reaching. For one thing, a crier right away went about camp singing about what a hero I was and inviting people to a feast Old Lodge Skins was holding in my honor. The chief for celebration give most of his horses away to certain poor Cheyenne who didn’t have any, and after the eats he made presents to everybody who come: blankets, jewelry, and so on-he ended up almost naked. He also made a speech which from modesty I’ll pass up except for the important points.

After recounting my exploit at great length in a poetic fashion that would just sound silly in English, he said: “This boy has proved himself a Human Being. Tonight there is weeping in the Crow lodges. The earth shakes when he walks. The Crow cry like women when he comes! He is a Human Being! Like the great Little Man, who came to him in a dream and gave him strength to kill the Crow, he walks!”

This was exaggerating some, but as I told you I did think of Little Man and jerked away from the knife, which caused the Crow’s hand to slip proving I was white. I had told Old Lodge Skins only about the inspiration of Little Man, figuring it would please him. He took it from there.

After some minutes of the foregoing stuff, which didn’t embarrass me none, for everybody was beaming at me, including some of the young girls who was allowed to peek under the tepeeskin-I was getting some interest in girls at this point of my life-after that, the chief said:

“This boy’s medicine comes from the vision of Little Man. He is himself little in body and he is now a man. But his heart is big. Therefore his name from now on shall be: Little Big Man.”

That was it, and that’s how I was called ever after by the Cheyenne. True to Indian ways, no one used my real name; no one even knew it. It was Jack Crabb.

The horse-stealing expedition was also in its other respects a job well done. Them four warriors had slipped into the Crow village without rousing a soul and took thirty horses, more or less, driving them back to our camp through what remained of the night into early morning. When they reached where me and Younger Bear was, Bear had come to with a knot on his head but otherwise O.K. Lucky for us that Crow had been wandering without his bow, else we’d both been plugged from the top of the draw and never knowed the difference. So they tied me to my pony and brung me in.

I got four horses from the common loot, thereby becoming a man of certain substance, but had a greater thrill when a little lad, eight or nine, named Dirt on the Nose, asked me: “Now you’re a warrior, can I tend your ponies?” Meaning I could stay in bed of a morning now when the kids got up for chores. Maybe I could, but it was not the Cheyenne way to press your advantages. Shadow That Comes in Sight, for example, the veteran warrior who had