healing, and when you are out of your right mind there don’t seem to be any rules as to what is possible. Dead drunk, a man can take a fall that when sober would mash him like a tomato. I don’t want to be no bigot: I’m not saying that under no conditions can a rifle ball be stopped by magic. What I’m saying is that it ain’t going to be stopped by someone who don’t believe it can be done as applied to himself. Which was me. So far as Hump went, or Burns Red in the Sun, or Younger Bear, that was their lookout.
If you been listening close you might have caught me up back a ways in the part about fighting the Crow. That first one I killed had found I was white even in the dark: what about those we rode against in the daytime? I painted my face and body, but how about my red hair? I’ll tell you. After all the enthusiasm over my first exploit, I certainly didn’t want to mention the peculiar conditions of it to any of the Human Beings, for that Crow’s discovery of my race, his friendly ways, etc., would only have confused them to hear about. But when we rode out in war, I had represented my problem to Old Lodge Skins in this style:
“Grandfather,” I said, which is how you address a man of his age, “I want to do something and don’t know the proper way. I don’t want the Crow to see the color of my head, and yet I don’t want them to think I have been such a coward as to cut off my hair so I can’t be scalped. I am still too young and have taken too few coups to wear a full war bonnet.”
The chief thought this over, and then he took his plug hat and put it on my head. It was a bit big and came down to my ears, but all the better for coverage.
“Whenever you fight, you may wear this,” he said, “but give it back between times because it goes with that medal the Father sent to me from the main village of the whites.”
And that’s what I did, stuffing a little padding inside the band so it’d be snugger and tying it to my chin with a rawhide cord. As to the hair on my nape, I’d run the paint up to cover that. I still didn’t have no braids, of course, and the Crow probably didn’t take me for a 100 per cent Cheyenne, for Indians have sharp eyes even in the press of war, but I could have been a breed.
Now we were about to go against the troops, so I went to where Old Lodge Skins with the other leaders was planning our order of battle, they doing this in a formal way like with a trained army, and I caught his attention and asked for the hat, which he was then wearing.
He drew me aside; in fact, we both mounted and rode up on the bluffs above the river, him on one of his marvelous pintos that did his bidding without a word or touch of the bridle. At the highest point we stopped, and he looked into the distances and remarked there was 250 horse soldiers about five miles off, followed two or three miles behind by a body of infantry. I couldn’t see a goddam thing but the swelling prairie.
Then he put his bright old eyes on me and said:
“My son, those are white people that we are going to destroy. This will be the first time I have ever faced the whites as an enemy. I have always believed they had a reason for what they did, and I still do. They are strange and do not seem to know where the center of the world is. And because of that, I have never liked them but never hated them either. However, recently they have been behaving badly towards the Human Beings. Therefore we must rub them out.”
He looked sort of embarrassed and scratched his nose.
“I don’t know whether you can remember back that far, before you became a Human Being and as dear a son to me as those I made with Buffalo Wallow Woman and the others, filling my heart with pride and bringing honor to my tepee.… I shall not speak of that earlier time, which has probably been washed from your memory. I just wish to say that if you do recall it and believe riding against these white-skinned ones would be bad medicine, you can stay out of the fight and no one will think the worse. You have proved many times you are a man, and a man must do what is in his heart and no one can question it.”
He wouldn’t say I was white, see, but was giving me an out if I wanted one. With his usual arrogance he assumed anybody who had the chance would rather be Cheyenne; but with his consideration, which was no less habitual, he was acknowledging the fact of my birth.
“Grandfather,” I said, “I think it is a good day to die.”
You tell that to an Indian, and he don’t immediately begin soothing you or telling you you’re wrong, that everything’s going to be swell, etc., for it ain’t the hollow speech it would be among whites. Nor is it suicidal, like somebody who takes the attitude that life has gone stale for him, so he’s going to throw it over. What it means is you will fight until you’re all used up. Far from being sour, life is so sweet you will live it to the hilt and be consumed by it. One time before I joined the tribe a band of Cheyenne caught the cholera from some emigrants and those that wasn’t yet dying got into battle dress, mounted their war ponies, and challenged the invisible disease to come out and fight like a man.
I don’t honestly know whether I was saying it in the Indian sense, but Old Lodge Skins took it so and give me the plug hat. A jackrabbit appeared at that moment and sat there within easy range, wrinkling its nose at him. He got a bothered look, wheeled, and galloped down to the bottomland. It was several years before I talked to him again.
The troops reached the river about two miles to the west and then began to move downstream towards us. They knowed we was in the vicinity but it held a certain surprise for them to come round a bend of the Solomon and find three hundred Cheyenne horsemen waiting in line of battle, our left flank against the river and our right under the bluffs.
The Human Beings was in full regalia, warriors and ponies painted, feathers galore, a good many in the full bonnet, the sun picking up the gaudy colors and glinting off lance heads and musket barrels. Some of the braves was talking to their horses, those animals prancing and breathing through expanded nostrils as if they was already charging. They smelled the big cavalry mounts and began fiercely to whinny, having the same attitude to them that the human Cheyenne had to the whites.
I was riding a buckskin, one of those taken in that Crow raid, and he was a mighty good animal though having to make his way through life without much commentary aside from the normal greetings. Right now was the closest I ever come to discussing philosophical matters with him. I was real nervous owing to my suspicion that not all my comrades took Old Lodge Skins’s position on my presence in the middle of the first rank. Especially Younger Bear, who had been down on the right wing but seeing me rode up and wedged a place for his pony alongside. He was painted dead black from waist up, with vermilion in the part of his hair, his eyes outlined in white and horizontal white bars across his cheeks.
I couldn’t tell whether he was grinning at me or just baring his teeth; it was the first notice he had paid me in a long time. I didn’t return it; I wasn’t feeling at all well, and was sure grateful for the war paint I had on myself. That’s the wonderful thing about paint: no matter how you feel inside, you will still look horrible.
Hump and the other fighting leaders was riding up and down the line and the medicine man Ice was also there, uttering his mumbo-jumbo and shaking rattles, buffalo tails, and other junk towards the cavalry, which had stopped a half mile away on the bottom and seemed to be just studying us. I was hoping they would maybe start laughing themselves to death: the soldiers, I mean. Because that’s what I was inclined to do. You get this funny excitement before a charge; and the longer it takes to get under way, the more intense it becomes, so that when you finally go, you are doing what you need more than anything in the world at that point.
But add to the situation that I was naked and wearing the plug hat, that we was facing some three or four hundred white men carrying firearms, and that I was in my fifth year of pretending to be an Indian-I found myself laughing my guts out no doubt preparatory to their being filled with hot lead.
However, I did my best to muffle this, so that it sounded like a mumble or a deep guttural chant as a matter of fact, like a natural Cheyenne thing. It seemed to impress Younger Bear, for he took it up, and then the next braves on either side, and pretty soon it was sounding from every chest and had turned into the Cheyenne war song, and we began to move forward on its music at the walk, some of the ponies dancing out but the front rank generally dressed. We was still holding back our power, bottling it up while working the charm, paralyzing them whites by our magic as we walked in the sacred way.
I forgot about myself, being just a part of the mystical circle in which the Cheyenne believed they were continuously joined, which is the round of the earth and the sun, and life and death too, for the disjunction between them is a matter of appearance and not the true substance, so that every Cheyenne who has ever lived and those now living make one people: the invulnerable, invincible Human Beings, of all nature the supreme product.
We had proceeded maybe two-three hundred yards in this fashion, the troops still watching us, obviously
