Little Big Man (69 page)

But there was a lot of agony before that conclusion and I don’t know if the Bear survived it. So I am happy he had at least one big win, and of course I wouldn’t be here if he hadn’t.

Some of the other Indians also went for the Bighorns, but we traveled separate from them and numbered only twenty-odd lodges. Apart from the chief, I didn’t know none of these people. My old friends had all died and gone off. Though I was only thirty-four year of age, I felt in some ways older than I do now. Now it is only one man’s life that is about to end; then it was a whole style of living. Old Lodge Skins had seen it all, up there on Custer Ridge, when he said there would never be another great battle. I didn’t get his point immediately, and maybe you won’t either, for there was many a fight afterward, and mighty fierce ones, before the hostile Plains tribes finally give up and come in permanent to the agencies.

One night in early July, it must have been, and we was camped in the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains and had got some buffalo and ate its juicy hump that evening, spicing it with the bitter gall of the beast, into which we’d first dip our knives. It had been a hot day, but cooled off rapidly at that height, and the fire was right cheery to feel against your greasy face, being made of pinewood, crackling and fragrant, for we was close to real timber. After a time it got so
warm inside the tepee that them little kids throwed off their blankets and scampered around with their tiny brown arses bare.

The chief’s fat wives was chewing on a big hide to soften it, one on each end, and chattering gossip between each bite, about the love life of Crazy Horse who had married a Cheyenne girl. I seen that great warrior once before we split off by ourselves: he had a face full of sharpened edges, wore no ornamentation whatever, no paint, no feathers; he was like a living weapon. He surrendered a year later to the military and was stabbed to death in a scuffle at the agency while his arms was being held by another Indian called Little Big Man. —Not me. He was a Sioux and therefore it was a different name though Englishing the same.

Old Lodge Skins wiped his knife blade on his legging and belched like a trumpet call.

I asked him then what he had meant by his remarks up on the ridge. For I saw it as queer that he had turned more pessimistic after the Indians had won than upon the many occasions when they lost.

“Yes, my son,” he says, “it is finished now, because what more can you do to an enemy than beat him? Were we fighting red men against red men—the way we used to, because that is a man’s profession, and besides it is enjoyable—it would now be the turn of the other side to try to whip
us
. We would fight as hard as ever, and perhaps win again, but they would definitely start with an advantage, because that is the
right
way. There is no permanent winning or losing when things move, as they should, in a circle. For is not life continuous? And though I shall die, shall I not also continue to live in everything that
is?

“The buffalo eats grass, I eat him, and when I die, the earth eats me and sprouts more grass. Therefore nothing is ever lost, and each thing is everything forever, though all things move.”

The old man put his knife into its beaded scabbard. He went on: “But white men, who live in straight lines and squares, do not believe as I do. With them it is rather everything or nothing: Washita or Greasy Grass. And because of their strange beliefs, they are very persistent. They will even fight at night or in bad weather. But they hate the fighting itself. Winning is all they care about, and if they can do that by scratching a pen across paper or saying something into the wind, they are much happier.

“They will not be content now to come and take revenge upon us for the death of the formerly Long Hair, which they could easily
do. Indeed, if we all return to the agencies, they probably would not kill anyone. For killing is part of living, but they hate life. They hate war. In the old days they tried to make peace between us and the Crow and Pawnee, and we all shook hands and did not fight for a while, but it made everybody sick and our women began to be insolent and we could not wear our fine clothes if we were at peace. So finally we rode to a Crow camp and I made a speech there. ‘We used to like you when we hated you,’ I told those Crow. ‘Now that we are friends of yours, we dislike you a great deal.’

“ ‘That does not make sense,’ they said.

“ ‘Well, it wasn’t our idea.’

“They said: ‘Nor ours. We used to think you Cheyenne were pretty when we fought you. Now you look like ugly dogs.’

“So it was an emergency, and we had a big battle.”

Old Lodge Skins shook his head. “Those Crow,” he said. “They were good fighters in the olden time, but nowadays they are full of shame, riding with white soldiers. I heard they ran off at the Greasy Grass, and it did not surprise me.”

Well, speak of shame, there was me. I still had not commenced to explain my presence with Custer. If indeed it could be explained. I had to try.

I says: “Grandfather, few people have your great wisdom. The rest of us are often caught in situations where all we can do is survive, let alone understand them. So with me, Little Big Man—” I realized my error soon as I said it.

“Ah,” says Old Lodge Skins, “a person should never speak his own name. A devil might steal it, leaving the poor person nameless.”

I apologized and started in again, but the chief yawns and says he was going to sleep, so he did.

Next morning when we had woke and took a wash in the cold, crystal stream that come down from the mountains, Old Lodge Skins stripping to the buff, immersing his ancient body, and splashing like a sparrow, and I was a-fixing to lay into a big breakfast, the chief dried himself on a blanket, wrapped another around him, and said: “My son, I have to go up to a high place and do something important today. Will you lead me there?”

He told me I could eat first if I needed to, but he could not. From which I knowed that the thing he had in mind was sacred; and though I might not be involved in it, I didn’t want to mock his gods with a full belly. So I took no food either, and we started off.

Well, I regretted that decision after walking uphill for hours, for the place he had chose to go was a considerable peak. By noontime we had gained only about half of it, and had not brung along even a drink of water, and the higher we went, the less chance of finding one. I was still not thoroughly recovered from my wounds, and the air was thinner as we proceeded.

Old Lodge Skins climbed with a firm, powerful, even eager stride. He wore a single eagle feather and that red blanket, with nothing but a breechclout underneath. Far enough away so you couldn’t see the seams of his face, I reckon you would have thought him a young brave.

Well, on we went, hour after hour, and I was so dizzy by time we reached the timber line that I thought I’d see double the rest of my life. Occasionally we’d stop so I could rest, but the chief never sat down then, just stood there impatiently, and soon he would say: “Come, my son, there are times to be lazy and times to be quick.” So I’d drag myself off again.

It was late afternoon when we reached the summit. It was fair rocky up there, and only one peak among many in the range. I saw a bighorn sheep over yonder, leaping from crag to crag. To the west, the whole world was mountains, all the way to where the sun hung low over the final eminences. I don’t think I ever seen a sky as big as that one, or as clear. Real pale blue it was, like a dome made of sapphire, except to say that makes you think it was enclosed, but it wasn’t: it was open and unlimited. If you was a bird you could keep going straight up forever, fast as you could fly, yet you would always be in the same place.

Looking at the great universal circle, my dizziness grew still. I wasn’t wobbling no more. I was there, in movement, yet at the center of the world, where all is self-explanatory merely because it
is
. Being at the Greasy Grass or not, and on whichever side, and having survived or perished, never made no difference.

We had all been men. Up there, on the mountain, there was no separations.

I turned to Old Lodge Skins to tell him I had got his point, but he had drawn off from me, dropped his blanket, and standing with his scarred old body naked to the falling sun, he yelled in a mighty voice that sounded like thunder echoing from peak to peak.

“HEY-HEY-HEY-HEY-HEY-HEY-HEY!”

It was the great battle cry of the Cheyenne, and he was shouting
it at all eternity and for the last time. His blind eyes was crying with the ferocious fun of it, his old body shaking.

“Come out and fight!” he was shouting. “It is a good day to die!”

Then he started to laugh, for Death was scared of him at that moment and cowered in its tepee.

Then he commenced to pray to the Everywhere Spirit in the same stentorian voice, never sniveling but bold and free.

“Thank you for making me a Human Being! Thank you for helping me become a warrior! Thank you for all my victories and for all my defeats. Thank you for my vision, and for the blindness in which I saw further.

“I have killed many men and loved many women and eaten much meat. I have also been hungry, and I thank you for that and for the added sweetness that food has when you receive it after such a time.

“You make all things and direct them in their ways, O Grandfather, and now you have decided that the Human Beings will soon have to walk a new road. Thank you for letting us win once before that happened. Even if my people must eventually pass from the face of the earth, they will live on in whatever men are fierce and strong. So that when women see a man who is proud and brave and vengeful, even if he has a white face, they will cry: ‘That is a Human Being!’

“I am going to die now, unless Death wants to fight first, and I ask you for the last time to grant me my old power to make things happen!”

That sheep I had seen earlier, or another, come into view on a neighboring crag with his magnificent scrolled horns and seemed to look questioningly over towards us. But this was not what Old Lodge Skins meant, and he couldn’t see it anyway, so he give his war cry once more, and as it went reverberating across that range, an answering roll of thunder come out of the west, and that sky which had been crystal pure suddenly developed a dark mass of cloud above the sun and it begun to roll towards us across the vast distance.

I stood there in awe and Old Lodge Skins started to sing, and when the cloud arrived overhead, the rain started to patter across his uplifted face, mixing with the tears of joy there.

It might have been ten minutes or an hour, and when it stopped and the sun’s setting rays cut through, he give his final thanks and last request.

“Take care of my son here,” he says, “and see that he does not go crazy.”

He laid down then on the damp rocks and died right away. I descended to the treeline, fetched back some poles, and built him a scaffold. Wrapped him in the red blanket and laid him thereon. Then after a while I started down the mountain in the fading light.

Editor’s Epilogue

IT WAS SHORTLY
after reaching this point in his narrative that Jack Crabb himself passed on, as I have described in the Preface. A pity that we will never get the account of his later years, which he led me to believe were no less remarkable than his first thirty-four. From various of his references, always spirited, I gather that he toured for a time with the Wild West spectacle directed by the late William F. Cody, “Buffalo Bill.” He may have traveled to Europe with that company. His allusions were ambiguous, but it is possible that he went as far as Venice and was there photographed in a gondola with several Sioux Indians.

He seems in later years to have visited the Sandwich Islands—Hawaii, in our modern terminology—and there to have developed a taste for the female inhabitants, whose custom it was yet to swim in the nude. He led me to assume that he was no stranger to Latin America in the last years of the nineteenth, and the early twentieth, century. There were elusive references to Guatemala, Cuba, Mexico, generally in time of revolution—though as he has made so clear, Mr. Crabb was devoid of political convictions.

Which is perhaps as deplorable as his apparent approval of violence, from which I must dissociate myself. I am after all a white man, and believe that reason must eventually prevail, the lion
will
lie down with the lamb, if, though agnostic, I may use the idiom of the superstitious to express a serious moral proposition. I made such expression once to Mr. Crabb, and his answer made me shudder: “That’s O.K., son, so long as you add fresh lambs now and again.”

Jack Crabb was a cynical man, uncouth, unscrupulous, and when necessary, even ruthless. In sponsoring this his partial biography, I can in no way commend it to the overimpressionable. He must be seen as a product of his place, time, and circumstances. It was such
men who carried our frontier ever westward to meet the shining ocean.

However, in concluding, I must make a frank admission. I have never been able to decide on how much of Mr. Crabb’s story to believe. More than one night, I have awakened in the wee hours with a terrible suspicion that I have been hoaxed, have rushed to my desk, taken out the manuscript, and pored over it till morning.

It is of course unlikely that one man would have experienced even a third of Mr. Crabb’s claim. Half? Incredible! All? A mythomaniac! But you will find, as I did, that if any one part is accepted as truth, then what precedes and follows has as great a lien on our credulity. If he knew Wild Bill Hickok, then why not General Custer as well? The case is similar when we suspect his veracity at a certain point: then why should he be reliable anywhere?

I can certify that whenever Mr. Crabb has given precise dates, places, and names, I have gone to the available references and found him frighteningly accurate—when he can be checked at all. There are exceptions: according to the best authorities, the only Negro at the Little Bighorn was a man named Isaiah Dorman, but he
had
earlier lived with the Sioux and he
was
killed in the valley while riding with Major Reno’s command. There is no Sergeant “Botts” on the rolls of the Seventh Cavalry, though a Sgt. Edward Botzer appears upon the fatality list. As to Crazy Horse’s not wearing feathers, we know that statement to be erroneous—his war bonnet, as mentioned in the Preface, presently reposes in my own collection; the dealer who sold it to me is a man of the highest integrity.