had been killed, for we all will be sometime. Nor that it had been violent, for as a Human Being he would not have died another way. Nor even that in an involved fashion I had been the instrument of his loss. No, the sadness of it was that Shadow had never known who I was. He had fought me as an enemy. Well, that’s why I was there, wasn’t I, to fight the Cheyenne?
Goddam but he had powerful legs. I still could barely breathe. I got up and watched Mad Bear climb the bank and shortly reappear at its brink on his pony, smugly shake his rifle, and trot away. He hadn’t even commented on the loss of my horse, which had been borrowed from him.
I had not had time to wonder how Shadow happened to be down in this draw in the first place, but now, moving slow for I was mighty sore, as I scratched out a shallow grave for him with his own knife and covered him over, I considered there might be other Human Beings somewhere below among the brush and if they wanted to shoot me in the back, they was welcome to do so. I’d rather that than meet them face to face and see my old friends and brothers.
But I had just got the tip of his long nose covered over with sand when I heard a rustling in the bushes down a ways, and it is queer how my instincts for self-preservation arose without my conscious will, and I seized my fallen revolver and blowed and worked the action clean and replaced all the caps. This in an instant, and then snaked along the bottom of the draw. The brush was trembling, but whatever it could be was staying within. I lurked a moment, then parted the twigs and crept through pistol first, with my face just behind the hammer. I was looking into a clearing just big enough for one person, and that person lay upon her back. She was an Indian woman with her skirt pulled up and her bare legs stretched apart and between them she was giving birth.
The tiny brown head was already emerged, eyes closed and looking a mite peevish at its entry into reality, and now the little shoulders squeezed through. There was never a sound except where that one straining knee was scraping the brush, which I had heard. She watched what went on and bit from time to time into a wad of her buckskin collar; maybe her eyes winced out a drop of moisture, but there was no more commotion than that. She had been there all the while, and that was the occasion for Shadow’s presence and why he fought so hard.
Cheyenne women at such a time always go off by themselves into the brush, and when it is done, come out with the infant and return to work as usual. The only difference here was that she went into labor in the middle of a battle. But the little fellow had to come when he was ready.
I was embarrassed for a variety of reasons, giving birth being an occasion of unusual modesty for a Cheyenne, so much so that I reckon this woman would take Shadow’s death less heavily than my observation of her. Yet I was fascinated, for within half a mile from the soles of my upturned feet the firing had not abated, nor the yells concerning the great day for the Pawnee.… Out of her come the little cleft behind of the infant, tightly pinched together. She strained some more, and then the rest of him emerged smooth as a fish onto the blue blanket spread beneath, and she set up, bit off the cord, tied the baby’s end against his tiny belly, and slapped him into wakefulness, to which he come like a real Cheyenne: with a little start but almost no noise. I expected he already knowed a cry would bring the enemy down on his tribe, so he forbore from loose utterance, and always would. That was also the first and last slap he would ever get from his own kind, while moving into a life that otherwise would know every type of mayhem.
I backed on out of there and went down to the sand heap under which lay Shadow. In a minute she come out of the brush, walking strong and vigorous and matter-of-fact, the child’s head a-peeping from the blanket at her bosom. Eying me, she then went for her belted knife and I reckon might have been a tough customer with it in spite of her newborn. Only I put my revolver forward, which would seem brutal did you not understand by now that a Cheyenne, man or woman, has got a terrible thick skull when it comes to hearing white men.
“Now,” I says, “I am going to shoot you and your child if you don’t listen. Shadow That Comes in Sight was killed by the Pawnee. That was the shot you heard, and then you heard him ride away. If you are related to Shadow then maybe you have heard of Little Big Man, which is what I was called when I lived with Old Lodge Skins’s band. I was a friend of the Cheyenne until they stole my wife and son. That is why I am here now. I am going to take you along with me and trade you for them.”
She studies me through them dark eyes and says: “All right.”
“I don’t like to do this,” I says, “with your newborn and all, but I have no choice.”
“All right,” she answers and sets down, opens her dress under the arm, and puts the infant to feed.
“Look,” says I, “we had better get to open ground. A Pawnee might come upon us here unawares and kill you before I could explain.”
“He must eat first,” she tells me quietly and sets solid.
So I kept my watch upon the rim of the draw during the ensuing conversation. I didn’t know this woman-girl, rather, too young at the time I lived among them to take my notice, if she had been there. I figured her for Shadow’s wife, which accounted for his guarding, but it turned out she was rather one of them young daughters I have mentioned him training, way back, to control her giggle at his funny stories.
“Your husband been rubbed out?”
“By white men,” she says without apparent passion. She was a winsome Indian, when I noticed, having a plump face like a berry and large eyes in a slightly Chinee slant and with a sheen across the underlying tear-sacs; fine though short brow beneath the vermilion parting of her hair. Her shining braids was intertwined with otter- skin, and she wore bright beads, with brass circles in her earlobes.
I started to ask Where, instead of Who, for she probably wouldn’t have told his name, when I heard the pounding of at least three riders on the plain above: unshoed horses, signifying Indians but whether Pawnee or Cheyenne I couldn’t say, and so far as that went, I disliked the approach of either in equal measure. Not speaking Pawnee, I might not get time to use the signs afore they had shot down this woman. If it was Cheyenne, well, that is obvious.
I mention this because you might question what I did next: grabbed that girl and hastened her back into the brush, the infant still at her pap, and crouched there with her, holding her still though she made no resistance.
The Pawnee arrived, for so they were as I could tell from their talk, and apparently inspected the ravine bottom from above but did not come down. Shortly they rode off, after I believe, from the sound, one had voided his water right from the saddle down the bank.
Yet me and the girl stayed where we was for some time, and it came to me that sitting on her heels she leaned her firm body back against me, taking support from it, and unwittingly in clutching her I had got through the side-lacings of the nursing dress and that unoccupied left breast of hers, weighty with milk, lay against my hand. Now I gently cupped it, I don’t know why, for I surely wasn’t lustful in that circumstance. But me and her and the little fellow, who had now went to sleep with his tiny mouth still quavering upon the protruded nipple, we was a kind of family. I had protected them like a father should, and like I had failed to with Olga and little Gus.
She leaned her head back and placed her warm cheek against my forehead. She smelled of suck, that sweet-sourish fragrance, and then of all them Cheyenne things I knowed of old: fire, earth, grease, blood, sweat, and utter savagery.
She says: “Now I believe you. You are Little Big Man, and I will be your wife now to replace the one you lost, and this is your son.” She puts him into my arms, and he wakes briefly up and I’ll swear, small as he was, grins at me with them beady black eyes. I felt right queer.
She says: “I think we had better be going. They will probably collect at Spring Creek.”
“Who?”
“Our people,” she answers as if that went without saying. “The Pawnee had great medicine today, but next time we will beat them and cut off their peckers, and their women will sleep alone and weep all night.”
I was still holding the baby.
“You have a beautiful son,” she says, looking at both of us in admiration, then takes him back. “Do you have any baggage for me to carry?”
I was still sort of stunned and didn’t reply, so she fixes the baby inside her bosom, cinches her belt so as to secure his legs, then crawls up the bank to where my dead horse was laying, takes off the blanket from it and the pad saddle and my coat which I had took off and tied behind, and slides back down. She looked disappointed that that was all she had to tote.
“The wolves will eat my father tonight,” she says. “We should put him on a burial scaffold, but there is no timber here and it is too far to carry him to where there are trees.”
Then she steps back so I can take the lead as a man should. I guess it wasn’t until that moment that I
