The Key to the Indian (12 page)

“Now we talk,” said Little Bull.

He stood up – far, far up, till his head was as high above them as a clifftop – and, leaving Twin Stars smiling and Tall Bear playing on the earth floor, he swooped on them and picked them up.

Omri was made sick and dizzy by the speed with which he was lifted high above the safe earth, and he heard his father gulp and gasp. Little Bull held them, one in each hand, in front of his handsome face.

“You want food?”

“Not just now” Omri’s father managed to say.

“Good. Talk first.”

Little Bull stuck them without ceremony into his belt, wrapped his cloak around them, and they heard the dry rustle of the corn-husks as he brushed past the curtain, moved swiftly beyond the room and, quite shortly, out into the open air.

W
hen Little Bull strode with them up a steep hill and into a thick belt of trees, Omri felt almost hit in the face by the impact of the long-ago forest.

It was very different from the ones around the Hidden Valley where he lived. There was a feeling you never got in England, of wildness, of
wilderness
. Some of the trees were the oaks and beeches and willows and ash trees he knew. But there were others, so brilliantly coloured that, with the sun shafting through their leaves, Omri could scarcely look at them. It was like being roofed by jewel-coloured glass. The air was glassy too, it was so clear, and after the smoky, smell-laden
air in the longhouse, it prickled in his lungs like frost-crystals.

There was also a subtle feeling that the forest was somehow
alive
, and that was scary. Of course, being small didn’t help.

But being close to Little Bull’s strong, warm body, did.

Little Bull sat down on a gigantic fallen tree, took them out of his belt and set them one on each thigh. Omri found it was like straddling a whale. He glanced at the ground. It was a long way away. His fingers searched for something to cling to, finding only the smoothness of stretched buckskin. But Little Bull kept a guardian finger and thumb looped loosely around him.

The Indian began to speak. In fact, he seemed to be making a speech. His voice boomed out far above them. When they gazed upward, they could see the jerks of his adam’s apple like the prow of a ship moving sharply with the waves. But his voice flowed over their heads and was drowned by the cries of birds, the whirring of a million insects, and the loud rustle of twigs, leaves and branches in the forest canopy, which was sky-high above them.

Omri’s dad leant towards Omri across the gap.

“Can you hear what he’s saying?”

“Not properly.”

“Tell him.”

“You.”

Omri’s dad put his head back and shouted. Little Bull took no notice. Omri had an idea, and thumped with both fists against the huge thumb that encircled his waist.

Little Bull, startled, looked down, then bent toward them. The sudden appearance of his enormous face close above them made them cower.

“What?” he said. It came out as a roar that lifted the hair on their heads.

“We can’t hear you, Little Bull! Come down to us!”

The next moment they were lifted to dizzy heights; then the ground – covered with a glorious pattern of bright five-pointed leaves as big as hearth-rugs – rushed towards them as Little Bull stretched himself at full length on the forest floor. He put them down and they sat on the coloured leaves. It was like sitting on an endless leathery carpet of reds, oranges, yellows, browns and greens. The crisp air chilled their bare chests and they hugged themselves.

“Little Bull has waited,” said Little Bull clearly. “Wait long before making plan. Wait for
you
. Longhouse council says, we can wait no more. We cannot stay here. There is much danger.”

“What is the danger?” asked Omri’s dad.

“English soldiers go home and leave us. People of the Longhouse are alone.”

There was a pause. He scowled, as if suddenly remembering that
they
were English. But if so, it didn’t hold him back.

“They promised very much, for our help. Weapons. Blankets. Trade goods. Pay from English king. They used fine words: ‘No Indian child will be cold again. No Indian woman hungry.’
Ha
! So we fight. First the French. Then other
Indians. We beat them. English thanked us! Very good! But as we fight, all is changing. White men come, more than hunters and traders, men with hunger for our land – many, many – from across the big water. Bad men. They call us savages, then teach us what that word means. Cheat, lie, do very evil things.

“Then English king’s men come again to us. Again they need us, to fight these bad people. They call them ‘rebels’, men who hate English king and want to stay here and drive Indians out with tricks and lies, with white man’s sickness, with whisky, with guns, with fire.”

“The settlers” said Omri’s father under his breath to Omri. “The European settlers who were starting to be American.”

Little Bull didn’t hear him.

“This time we tread the warpath with hot blood, more than before. We hate these people. They are like fire in forest, river that forgets its path, that grows and grows and swallows everything. They move always toward the sunset.”

“Westward.”

“They cut down our trees, drive away our hunt-animals, burn our corn. Kill, and do worse than kill.”

He turned his face away and his voice dropped. “Om-Ri. You asked one time about wife. Wife who is gone from me.”

“Yes. You told me she’d died.”

“This I told. But not how. Now you will listen. White savages come and burn our crops. They take my wife.
Take
her. You understand me? When found, she was not dead. She asked me to end her shame. I could not. But she—” He
stopped and did not go on for a long time. They saw his throat move as the muscles tightened. “She choose her own ending. This eat me like the lump-sickness. White men do this who call Indians dogs. This the Indian does not do to woman – never.

“So we fight these rebels. Burn and kill like them. And they fall to our warriors like deer. We drive them back and back. Their blood washes our land clean and it becomes again our land. This is our fight, but England’s also. We look that the king’s men keep their word! And then –
whaaah!
– the English say ‘finish’. They give up and go.”

“They knew they’d lost their colony,” muttered Omri’s dad. He was looking very uncomfortable. As if he was ashamed. But why? thought Omri. What the English did hundreds of years ago wasn’t our fault.

“Couldn’t you go on fighting the settlers without them?” he asked.

“The English had clever talk to make us tread warpath, now they make new talk. They say, ‘We go home. No more war’. They say we must plant again the great Tree of Peace. Bury weapons as Iroquois did long ago, when the great Peacemaker ordered that we stop fight Mohawk against Onondaga, Oneida against Cayuga and Seneca. English say, we must make new Confederacy, this time with rebels. This is their counsel! But these are not Indian brothers to bring to the white roots of our Peace Tree! They are our enemies, for ever. Anger burns our hearts. We want to fight. But we cannot follow warpath now without English weapons and other
things we need. We cannot fight bows and arrows against guns. And our guns are empty.

“And rebels’ fire burns against us again. More hot than before, because now they want vengeance. We have no supplies. Many fields black with fire. Fruit trees cut. Our stomachs grow small. We must stand on our land against their guns, as in the beginning of the white man’s coming. Or we must find new hunting-grounds where white men cannot follow.”

“And you need to decide where to go,” said Omri’s father.

“Yes. That. And to turn angry young warriors from warpath when they want to fight without hope to win. Who will father new children if all our young men are dead?”

There was a pause in the conversation. Omri looked into Little Bull’s smooth golden face in the flickering, shifting light. It was not just the cold that made him shiver, because for seconds at a time it seemed as if Little Bull vanished. The light would flash on him again, showing his dark, anxious, expectant eyes. Then, again, he would fade into a shadow.

A thought he couldn’t explain or repress seemed to write itself across Omri’s mind:
Desperate. He feels desperate. We owe him. We must help
. But wasn’t this as ludicrous as Little Bull saying to him, the first time he ever saw him, “You touch – I kill”? What could they possibly do to help?

At last Omri’s father said, “Which of the Six Nations of the Iroquois do you belong to, Little Bull?”

“Three eagle feathers stand in my
gustoweh
. I am Mohawk, elder brother among our nations.”

“I need to look up some things in my books.”

“You bring paper that tells what will come?”

“Yes. I want to see what the Mohawks actually did. Of course that doesn’t mean your longhouse couldn’t do something different.”

Back in the longhouse, in the compartment belonging to Little Bull’s family, Omri and his father were left alone with their things. They were shielded by a stack of baskets, in a corner by the bark wall.

Omri’s father immediately sat down cross-legged on the earth floor. Omri thought he looked strange in his Indian clothes, like an actor who’s forgotten to fix his hair and take off his watch. Indians’ skin, he’d noticed, was not red at all, but it wasn’t white either and his father really looked like a ‘paleface’.

He took
Stolen Continents
out of the box they’d brought. It had bits of paper sticking out, marking places, and he opened it to one of these, putting his face right down to the page. Omri realised he had lost his glasses when he lost his own clothes.

“What are you reading, Dad?”

“I want to find out what happened with the Mohawks. I seem to remember some of them had settled in Canada long before the Revolutionary War. And the British promised them more land around Lake Ontario, to keep for ever, as a reward for their help. I just have to see what happened to them and whether our lot could join them. It’d get Little Bull
out of the way of the horrors that are coming to the Indians who stay here, anyway.” He looked at Omri and said soberly, “This is such a terrible moment for them. You can’t imagine how powerful the Iroquois were once! How well-organised and what ferocious fighters. They claimed to have conquered half this country, before it was a country. And now they’re facing annihilation. Let me read, Omri.”

He became immersed in his book.

Omri knew he should stay close to him, but he was restless. And hungry! He sniffed. Through the strong smells of bark, smoke, sage and smoked skins came a rich, meaty smell. The clean, cold air of the woods had sharpened his appetite. This morning they’d foraged in the box, and found nothing. The tins of meat and beans and soup mocked their lack of a tin-opener, and Omri thought enviously of Patrick, tucking into the stuff in the cold-box.

He drifted towards the smell of stew. Just to get a better whiff of it. He knew he mustn’t break cover, but if he just put his head under the corn-husk curtain…

The next second something huge pounced on him, and gigantic teeth closed around his body.

A
wave of absolute terror went over Omri.

He was snatched from the ground and borne along. He guessed at once that it was a dog that had pounced on him – he had seen, or at least heard, dogs around the longhouse – and he managed to stay perfectly still. He felt instinctively that if he struggled, its great teeth would close and he would be bitten in half, and the thought was enough to paralyse him.

As it was, he was held tightly – he could feel the teeth digging into him without piercing his skin – and carried at speed along the aisle, to him as wide as a six-lane highway,
between the family compartments towards one of the central fires.

Halfway there, his fear-frozen brain came to his aid.

He was small, rat-size to the dog, but he was not a rat – he was a human being and he must smell like one. Perhaps that was why the dog had not simply eaten him on the spot. The scent of human would confuse it.

In a flash he remembered the old man who’d lived next door to them in their last London house. He’d had a dog. It was very obedient and well trained. He used to throw things for it to chase, in his garden next to theirs. When it brought the ball or stick or whatever it was, it would stand in front of the man, who would say in stern tones:

“Drop it! Drop it, I say!”

Omri had once peered over the fence and asked him if the dog understood his words. “More the tone of voice, actually,” the man had replied.

“So if you said it in French, he’d still do it?”

“Can’t speak a word of French,” the man had said shortly, “so we’ll never find out.”

And Omri couldn’t speak a word of Iroquoian.

The dog holding Omri slowed down as it came near the fire. Omri felt the heat scorching his skin and instinctively twisted his head to look. To him it looked like a blazing forest. The smell of stew was very strong now – there was a cauldron-like pot hanging from a hook over the smoldering side logs.

What if he said, “Drop it!” to the dog, and it dropped him – into the red-hot embers?

The dog stood still. It turned its head, with Omri still firmly held between its teeth. It seemed to be looking for something – waiting for an order. Omri made up his mind. When the dog’s head was turned away from the fire, Omri shouted:

“Drop it! Drop it now!”

For a split second the teeth tightened and Omri thought his last moment had come. But then, quite gently, the dog bent its head and laid Omri on the ground.

He lay there, his heart nearly bursting out of his ribs. There was slobber all over his torso, and bruises wherever the teeth had been. He felt himself gingerly, while the dog sniffed at him, but somehow respectfully now.

It’s a dog, thought Omri. That’s all it is. Just a stupid old dog.

He got up slowly, his eyes on the dog. He noticed it was white all over, and of a breed he had never seen before. It backed away, whining softly.

“Get lost!” Omri shouted commandingly. “Push off! Scram!”

The dog’s hair suddenly bristled and Omri thought he had made the worst mistake of his life. But then it turned, tail between legs, and slithered under the nearest corn-husk curtain, yelping with fear.

Omri stood near the fire, dry-mouthed, shaking, and tried to recover himself. He knew he should get back straight away to Little Bull’s compartment, but he didn’t know which one it was and for him it was quite a long walk, a walk frought
with danger all the way. Besides, the smell of stew, and the warmth of the fire, held him as long as he felt weak from his scare.

Just then he became aware of a movement. He turned his head sharply, and saw that someone was watching him.

She was sitting on the other side of the fire. An old, old woman. The reason he hadn’t seen her before was because part of the fire with its drifting smoke was between them, and she was quite still, a dark, hunched figure with a ladle in one hand and a wooden bowl in the other, just watching him through the smoke.

She wasn’t so much staring as peering at him through the smoke, with narrowed eyes. A long time seemed to pass. Then she rose slowly and hobbled round the fire to where he was standing.

She crouched down again. Her knees in their ancient buckskin skirt rose on either side of him like hills. He gazed up into a face that reminded him of the cliffs on the shore of the English Channel, near his home – reddish sandstone eroded by rain into long downward creases. This face was like a wind-carving in that cliff, wrinkled beyond anything he had ever seen. She looked about a hundred and twenty years old. Her eyes were swollen and inflamed; Omri saw that she couldn’t make him out properly because she kept turning her head this way and that. But she was smiling an ancient smile.

She put the bowl down and a palsied hand groped for him. Before he could think what to do, she had picked him up.

She lifted him level with her face and examined him. She turned him this way and that and felt him with her bony fingers. She was smiling and shaking her head wonderingly. She spoke to him. Of course he didn’t answer. Her face registered impatience.

Suddenly her trembling hand slipped and the next moment, he was dangling upside down by one leg! He let out a yell. Hastily, she righted him, and again she asked him a question. He shrugged, the big, neck-shrinking shrug his dad did sometimes, using his hands. The old woman grinned crazily. She had one huge tooth, the size of a tombstone.

Her face was so full of child-like pleasure, he felt emboldened somehow. He pointed to his mouth. She nodded, still grinning, and put him in her lap, which was like a vast hammock. She reached up and scooped something out of the pot with the ladle, and brought it down to him.

The ladle was like a small murky lake full of islands. The liquid was gravy, the islands were lumps of meat and vegetables. It was steaming hot. The old woman let out a cackle, and with heat-proof finger and thumb she broke off a pinch of meat and blew on it. Then she dumped it into Omri’s arms. He yelled again! It was like having half a barbecued pig to hold.

It was burning his arms, and smearing them all over with grease and gravy, but this was bearable next to his hunger. The smell pulled his teeth to the meat like a magnet and he took a bite. It was marvellous! He gnawed on the long fibres of the meat and the juices spilled into his eager mouth. He tore at it
until he could eat no more, while the old woman made little gurgling noises of amusement.

She took the last of it away from him and ate it herself. She wiped her fingers on the ground. Then the ‘hills’ and the earth floor sank away as she levered herself upright, still holding Omri tightly. She turned – she was going to take him off to her own place, Omri knew it and felt almost as fearful as when he had been in the power of the dog.

But suddenly, right in front of him, he saw a familiar necklace.

He strained to look upward. Yes! It was Little Bull, standing close in front of the old woman.

He spoke to her, respectfully, bowing his head. He put out his hand – it was within reach of Omri. There was a pause. He felt the old woman’s claw-like fingers clenching on him possessively. He gasped – he felt the breath being squeezed out of him. Little Bull laid his hand on the old woman’s and he spoke again, very gently. He was asking her to give Omri up… The squeezing clutch relaxed, and, with a reluctance Omri could sense, she handed him over.

The relief was overwhelming! He instantly felt safe again. He almost kissed Little Bull’s hand as once again it encircled his waist. Little Bull went striding down the aisle and in a few moments, Omri felt the rustling curtain brush against his face and they were back in the compartment.

Little Bull then held him up in front of him and proceeded to give him the telling off of all time.

“You! You stay with father! Stay where you are safe! You
are boy and Little Bull is man, but when in your world, he stays, does not run alone to look for danger! If you die, Little Bull will cry. Twin Stars cry. Father cry. And how your father will help our tribe if he cries over your body? Stupid. Stupid!”

“I was hungry,” said Omri sulkily.

Little Bull looked taken aback. “No one give you food?”

“No.”

Little Bull grunted thoughtfully and set him down next to his father, who looked white-faced and torn between anger and relief.

“Where the hell did you go?” he muttered. “What happened to you, you’re covered with bruises?”

“A dog picked me up.”

Omri’s father turned a shade paler, if possible, and simply stared at him in horror. He looked almost ill. He put his arms around Omri and held him for a moment. “Don’t. Don’t,” he muttered into his ear.

Omri understood what he couldn’t say. “I won’t, Dad. I’m sorry.”

They sat down among the hide-hills together in silence.

After a few minutes, Twin Stars came through the curtain with a bowl in her hand and laid it before them. It was full of the same stew.

Omri’s father perked up a bit. “Hey, smell that,” he said rather weakly.

Omri was feeling terrible about having frightened him, and tried to get over it with a joke. “I’m an Indian stew!” he sang. “Try it, Dad. It’s good.”

But his dad was more cautious. “What is this meat?” he asked Twin Stars.

She smiled and touched some decoration on her dress.

“Does she mean it’s deer?”

“No,” said his dad. “I’m afraid not. Those are quills. This must be porcupine meat.”

Omri swallowed. “Well, it’s really good, anyway.”

“How do you know?”

“A crazy old woman gave me some.”

Whoosh!

He left his stomach, full of the oily meat, far behind him as Little Bull snatched him up again. It was like going up in a lift at the rate of twenty floors a second.

“Bad words!” roared Little Bull, shaking him fiercely. “You do not call woman crazy! She is Eldest Clan Mother! Full of wisdom, full of years! You show her respect or I bring dog, and drop no tears when he eats you!”

Omri tried to hold the contents of his stomach down but it was no use. The shaking was the last straw, and he threw up violently. This brought Little Bull out of his anger, if only because he had to thrust Omri hastily away.

There was a pause and then he burst out laughing. “Now you need more food, to fill empty stomach! Soon no more food for tribe!” he said.

Omri uttered a groan and wiped his mouth, thinking irresistibly of his tiny pellet of sick, probably still on its long journey to the ground. Little Bull set him down more gently.

“You and father eat,” he said. “Then father tell what talking paper says will come.”

“Are you all right, bub?” asked his father anxiously as Omri was restored to him.

“More or less,” said Omri. “I didn’t know she was a clan mother. It’s clan mothers who choose the chiefs – perhaps she chose Little Bull. No wonder he was so polite to her.”

He glanced at the huge lake of stew at whose shores his father had begun to feast, and then hurriedly away again. Noticing his green face, Omri’s dad stopped eating. Omri half expected to see him wipe his fingers on the ground, Indian-fashion, but he rubbed the grease carefully into his hands instead. It didn’t seem right to wipe them on any of the skins or on his new clothes.

“What are you going to tell Little Bull?” Omri said after a pause.

His father sighed heavily. “God knows. What a terrible dilemma. I wish I’d stayed well out of it now.”

“Why? What did the book say?”

“From what I can make out, there were three ways the Iroquois tribes went at this time. Some of them stayed put and tried to recover their lands or at least to hold out against the settlers, who were steadily moving west and driving them back. I hope Little Bull’s people won’t do that, because those Indians lost everything. A lot of them were killed, and their way of life was badly damaged. A lot of the tribes who stayed on the fringes of settler-territory just succumbed to despair and alcohol and – No. I can’t bear to think of that.

“The second thing was, they moved west, trying to get out of the way of the expansion, and joined with other tribes. But that wasn’t much good either, because the whites just kept coming up behind them, pushing them farther and farther from their own territories, forcing them to make alliances with tribes whose customs they didn’t understand. They tried to fight back, but in the end they were all overtaken by the Europeans anyway. Most of their homelands, except for a few patches, were taken from them by conquest or by broken treaties. It was just a long drawn-out agony. Defeat and treachery and poverty – and the worst was that many just didn’t know who they were any more. They went through hell. An awful lot of them died of diseases brought by the Europeans. There were some terrible cases of them being infected on purpose, to kill them off…”

Omri shuddered. “And the third way?”

His father brooded for such a long time that Omri began to fear that there was no third way, or that it was just as bad as the other two.

“Dad?”

“Well. The Canada option.”

“Moving north?”

“Yes. Especially the Mohawks. There were several villages of Mohawks in Canada already, and some of the ones from here in New York State went up there and joined them.”