Stone Song (55 page)

A few mornings later Crazy Horse’s warriors went to the trading houses to get rifles and ammunition for the hunt and were refused. No hunt, the traders said. They showed their orders from the agent. No guns or ammunition to be traded to the people of Red Cloud Agency.

So Crazy Horse sent friends to find out the explanation of this broken promise, friends with good contacts among the whites. Among them he sent Little Big Man.

His old friend talked to Billy Garnett and Grouard—Grabber—and others and pieced together the story he brought to Crazy Horse. Because ears seemed to be everywhere these days, and lying tongues, they talked inside the lodge.

Much of this information came from Billy Garnett, said Little Big Man. Though he was young, they had known Billy a long time and he had lived with them, and you could see he worked hard to tell everyone the truth.

“The night Young Man-Whose-Enemies-Are-Afraid-of-His-Horses asked that you and I give the feast,” said Little Big Man, “two of Red Cloud’s people went to the agent, Irwin, secretly, their faces covered with blankets. Some say No Water was one of them. Others say Grabber was there, and Red Cloud’s confidant Red Dog, and Standing Bear.”

Crazy Horse sniffed. Standing Bear, the brother of Woman Dress. After all these years the sly hand of Woman Dress worked against him. The most foolish thing Crazy Horse had ever done was break Pretty Fellow’s nose by accident.

“No one knew for sure who went,” Little Big Man went on, “but they came from Red Cloud’s side. They told the agent, who was brand-new to the reservation, that he didn’t understand who Crazy Horse was. A troublemaker. Even the chiefs had thought so for a long time—they took the shirt away from you seven winters ago. The chiefs still don’t trust you, these men said. You were hostile to the white people. No one ever knows
what you’re thinking. You’re a bad influence among the young warriors. It wouldn’t do to let such a man give a feast.”

Crazy Horse just waited.

“Irwin told them he was surprised. ‘The officers like and respect Crazy Horse,’ he said. ‘Even Crook does.’

“The Indians gave a sterner warning. If the agent lets the Crazy Horse people trade for rifles, they will go back to their country and go on the warpath. They won’t kill buffalo—they will kill white people.”

The two old friends looked at each other. Something was slipping away here.

“The next morning telegrams flew from the agent to Crook and back. Also to Spotted Tail Agency and back. Crook decided the hunt was too risky. Some said that even Crazy Horse’s uncle Spotted Tail doubted the wisdom of the hunt—he too said that if his nephew left the agency, he might never come back.”

“
E-i-i-i
,” Crazy Horse said regretfully to Little Big Man. He was hurt. Spotted Tail knew that a Lakota chief keeps his promises.

The two men sat and stared into the fire. Their friendship had been forged in the hardships and dangers and loyalties of the war trail. Yes, Little Big Man had held Crazy Horse’s arm from behind against danger, but even that was a closeness. Crazy Horse rubbed the scar below his nose with a forefinger.

Little Big Man had come to Crazy Horse as a passionate young man, eager to show his power in war. Then he had become a respected war leader, now an officer of the Indian police. Always he’d been a determined defender of the people—no one had been more obstinate about keeping the Black Hills. No one had been more zealous to stay in the hunting country and fight the whites. He was a good man. Yet now even he was changed.

Crazy Horse took a little sweetgrass and put it on the fire. The smell always brought him a kind of tranquillity. He had liked to use it when he wanted to sit quietly and be with Hawk. He missed Hawk. Right now he burned the sweetgrass to invite the spirits to attend this talk. He watched the pungent smoke waft up toward the smoke hole.

“My friend,” he said, “look what we’ve just done. I asked you to creep around and ask questions of this person and that one and put the answers together so we know what’s going on. Now, in the same darkness, we think of doing something back and hope we get what we want, maybe, sometimes, depending on who outschemes who.” He paused. “And who are we scheming against?” Crazy Horse shook his head. “Other Lakota. Even other Oglala.

“I can’t live like this.”

They let the words sit. Little Big Man didn’t deny them.

“I think Little Hawk will be a better agency leader than I am. He is a good speaker, and lets the whites know how a real Lakota feels.” Crazy Horse smiled a little. “As for me, I think I want to live quietly, and maybe somewhere else.” He waited. “Out in the hills somewhere.” He listened for the beat of the earth, but for the moment he heard nothing. He rubbed the scar on his upper lip. “Would you like to smoke?” he asked. Then he lit the short
canupa
once more. Both of them were thinking how short it was.

Crazy Horse made time often now to listen to the Inyan. He went down to a quiet place he knew by White Clay Creek, where no one could see him or was likely to come on him by chance, and prayed to Inyan, Stone, the first power, which came before anything else. He never heard words from Inyan, but he knew now he was hearing something. Not words, as he had expected, but the beat of the drum, which was the beat of his pulse, which was the beat of life upon the earth. Yes, he had heard it all these years and never known it as the song of Inyan, the song of the oldest creatures on the earth.

Sometimes he got a whisper of what more there was to hear, an understanding. It didn’t come as words, but as something wispy, like the sound of wind when it isn’t quite loud enough to hear. An awareness, a sense.

He didn’t know what this whisper meant. It was tempting, seductive. It was also tranquil, sweet, at rest with the world. Nothing else in his life seemed sweet or tranquil now. He would sit for days and days beside Inyan, his mind within them, savoring this feeling.

He thought that if he felt Hawk again, it would be here. If he felt Hawk again. He was still desolate.

But the soldiers did not like for Crazy Horse to be off by himself somewhere, no one knew where. The rival chiefs liked it even less. “He comes back with a faraway look in his eyes,” they said. “He doesn’t seem so ready to sit around the fire and tell stories anymore. He’s morose, and we can’t tell what’s on his mind.”

So they sent word for the village of the recent hostiles to move in close to Red Cloud’s village for a big council.

When the headmen discussed it, Crazy Horse said he didn’t want to go. He was starting to talk often in council, and he thought that was another sign that he was leading a life that wasn’t for him. “I see no point in going,” he said. “They have broken their promise about the hunt. I am not willing to talk to them about anything. Let them send word that we
can have our agency back in our country. Then we’ll talk about trading so we can leave.”

Crazy Horse went on, “Every man can do as he wishes. Whoever wants to move next to Red Cloud for this council can say so by moving his lodges across the creek.”

For once He Dog opposed him. “This is not the time to make a stand,” he said. “I will move across the creek. Everyone who doesn’t want your wives and children shot by soldiers, come with me.”

No one knew why He Dog was so sure of a crisis coming. He would say nothing but, “Trouble is close.”

Soon two soldier chiefs came to visit Crazy Horse, one of them Col. Luther Bradley, the new commanding officer at Fort Robinson. To show hospitality Crazy Horse offered them coffee, but he drank none himself. Though he was fond of the sweet taste, he had decided it was another
wasicu
weakness and had made up his mind never to touch it again.

The soldier chiefs gave him a new knife in a leather scabbard and asked if he was willing to go to Washington City.

If they wanted him to go before giving him an agency in his own country, Crazy Horse replied, he would have to think about that. Maybe his uncle Little Hawk should go.

Crazy Horse hinted again that Little Hawk was a better man than he to lead the village now and the soldiers should look to him. But he could see they only thought he was being uncooperative.

He said he had no more coffee, and they understood that he was breaking off the talk and left. He appreciated that. He wanted to go down by White Clay Creek and pray over Inyan and listen to the beat of the earth, hoping to see toward a future.

Leaving, the soldier chiefs marked him down as sullen and evasive.

He Dog thought he was changed, too. His friend had always been quiet and sometimes remote. Now he seemed even more withdrawn. “You seem different,” he said to Crazy Horse. “I wonder—if I move across the creek, will we still be friends?”

Crazy Horse laughed easily. He Dog was glad to hear his laugh again. “Only white men draw a line and say, ‘If you camp here, we are friends. If you camp there, we are enemies.’ There’s plenty of room, my friend. Camp where you want.”

But the big council never happened. Clark gave He Dog the food to host a feast so the soldier chief could talk to Crazy Horse. But the Strange Man didn’t come—he sent a message that he saw no point in talking to the soldiers anymore.

He Dog considered before he spoke to the soldier chiefs. “His Crazy Horse has strong medicine,” he said. “I think it is warning him. Warning him of what? I don’t know.”

“Is he going to break out?” Colonel Bradley asked in a demanding way.

“No,” said He Dog. “He has said over and over that he came here for peace. He will stick to his word.”

Bradley and Clark seemed to accept that.

Crazy Horse spent more and more time with Inyan, listening, sometimes praying, often simply sitting with them. For entire days he waited over Inyan in the warrior way that Hump had taught him, paying attention only to his own breath, becoming in that way stiller than anything living could normally be, still as the living Inyan itself. Stronger and stronger came the sound that was not a sound, the pulse of the earth.

He waited as a warrior waits, fully aware, fully ready, surrendering expectation, giving his being to awareness, to welcoming anything in the forest or on the plains or on Maka, Earth, that might come to his consciousness. Now, more than in his youth, that might include visitors from the realm of spirits, or dreams, or ideas, or visions.

He had gone to Horn Chips to talk about his time with Inyan. Though he didn’t hear words from them, he said, he was hearing something, not with his ears, not even with his mind, with … He heard the pulse of the earth and of all living creatures. “In this pulse is a sense of vastness,” he said, “or something like vastness. Like the feelings you get when you sit all night in the warrior’s way, breathing as a warrior, and the prairies begin to get light, and that light
is
the prairie, and is you, and you are it, touching everything in the prairie, Inyan and Maka and all the creatures that grow, and the air, and the light is the air, and you are the air, and you are within everything, and everything is within you. And then Father Sun rises….”

After a moment he went on. “When I have that feeling, I can’t be angry or rash or foolish. It makes me want to spend day after day with Inyan.”

Horn Chips said, “Inyan is speaking.”

Crazy Horse said, “I don’t know what the stones are saying.”

Horn Chips’ only other comment was, “Keep listening. Expect nothing. Listen.”

As Crazy Horse left, Chips remarked to his wife that he saw that his friend’s spirit was better, and he was glad.

Though Crazy Horse concentrated on waiting without expectation, one of his thoughts was that Hawk might return to him if he spent his time this way, his heart open, his being receptive. Sometimes he had a sense that Hawk was near, just out of reach, close but not yet back in his heart. He knew better than to lurch toward this presence he felt hovering. Hawk would come when she was ready.

His sense of the nearness of Hawk was not vague or ephemeral. It was definite, as Hawk’s perch in his heart had been unmistakable, and it clearly did not yet include Hawk. She was not within.

His heart began to recover now. He recognized again the feelings of his youth and young manhood, tentative yet returning—aspiration and hope, a sense of possibility, the prospect of welcome challenges.

Sometimes he thought the coming challenge was living wild again. Other times he thought it was his own death. Either way, desolation seemed to be loosening its grip on him.

As he sat breathing, he thought often of the
cante ista
. He knew that when he was listening to Inyan and the beat of the earth, he saw with the single eye that is the heart. He had no words for what he saw and heard. It was just a sense of the rightness of things. It was healing.

He would be willing to die if he could have Hawk back, and be healed.

Crazy Horse called his friends to him in twos and threes, men he had ridden the war trail and the hunting trail with, men who could keep a secret and who were of like minds, as unsuited for agency life as he was. Red Feather, the younger brother of Black Shawl. Black Elk. Ashes and Bull Head, his father’s brothers, his
ate
. His father and Touch-the-Sky, his uncle on his birth mother’s side, slipped down from Spotted Tail Agency one night, and he talked all the next day with them. Club Man, his sister’s husband. Little Killer, Little Shield, and Short Bull. Good Weasel, his lieutenant through the last years of war. He wanted six or eight companions, with their families.

He made them all the same proposition. He was weary of chieftainship, he said, and was setting it down as fast as the
wasicu
would let him. Little Hawk would be much better than Crazy Horse at facing the new challenges of agency life. For himself, he said, agency life was no life. His spirit was dead here, his medicine sapped. “Maybe agency life isn’t for you either,” said Crazy Horse to each one.

“I have given my word,” he declared, “and I will not lead the people off the agency and back to the free life. I have given my word. But a few of us can slip away, and live as we like. Maybe you would like to do that on your own. Or maybe you have relatives with Sitting Bull in the Land Their Grandmother Claims. Or maybe you would like to do it with me.