The Powder River (5 page)

Through this gesture we hope to gain something intangible but immense: until now the people have treated us—Adam too—as someone special, someone apart. The reason for this deference was only in part respect for our positions as doctor and teacher. It was more an acknowledgment that we could ride away freely from the people’s dilemma, and no one else could. Anywhere we wanted to ride, we would be left alone by the whites. If we went to the Powder River country, we could stay. We could ride into one of the forts sending soldiers against the Cheyennes and be welcomed. We could even go home to Brahmin Boston, a mere fairy tale to the Cheyennes, and live and thrive. No disease threatens our bowels. Starvation does not stare us in the face. Soldier bayonets do not fence our freedom. Surely our people think that before the time might come to die, the doctor and teacher would choose to disappear.

What a color-prejudiced nation ours is!

Elaine Cummings Maclean, though, is determined not to be separate, apart, superior, white. I have married a Cheyenne, and it means something to me I do not know how to tell even you. I want to take it into myself fully and truly, whatever it means. Perhaps it means a last taste of the old, free life. Perhaps it means an opportunity to inspire an elevation of the people into a new way of living. Or perhaps it means fleeing soldiers, fighting, hunger, destruction, and death. I want my fate, and the fate of my husband and of my marriage, to be part of the fate of the Cheyenne people.

That is my decision. Yes, it frightens me.

She closed the ledger book. She couldn’t send this letter—it sounded mad. She did not permit herself the thought that her life was now mad.

Chapter 5

“Little Wolf says we don’t shoot first,” Smith told Elaine. Calling Eagle nodded to herself. Little Wolf was a wise man, Calling Eagle thought. In the end it likely wouldn’t help, but he was a wise man.

“Maybe the soldiers
won’t
shoot,” Elaine put in. The scouts were reporting a plain full of U.S. cavalry, but Smith, Elaine, and Calling Eagle were well back, at the top of the gully where most of the women were.

“Morning Star thinks they won’t,” said Smith without hope. “Since they didn’t catch us sooner, he thinks they’re not too interested in us. Little Wolf thinks they will.”

“What do you think?” asked Elaine. He shrugged his shoulders. He was painting his forehead bright crimson.

My grandson Vekifs is wise, too, Calling Eagle reflected.
Vekifs
was her pet name for him, an affectionate form of
veho
, meaning roughly “Dear Little White Man Who Has Become a Cheyenne.” As applied to Smith,
little
was ironic. He is wise, she thought, to decline to try to predict the choice of another man, especially a
veho
. He simply readies himself with his paint. His wife, though, the sign of his foolishness, clings to beliefs about things. She believes the white man is what she calls civilized, so she believes his soldiers will behave in a civilized way. Maybe the blood will make her stop believing. Maybe not.

Smith finished reddening his forehead and started applying three horizontal stripes of verdigris to his nose. Calling Eagle observed wryly the odd expression on his wife’s face. Even your husband the doctor is not so civilized, Calling Eagle thought. She wondered what Elaine would say if she knew that the paint medicine was taught to Smith by Owen Mackenzie, the murderer of Smith’s father and brother.

The woman had it wrong anyway. She looked at paint and feathers, the great protectors, and saw barbarism. Then she looked at powder and ball, the great destroyers, and saw civilization. Just backward.

Smith finished his face and turned and gave Elaine a mock growl and a big grin. So he could see he was making his young and innocent wife nervous.

Smith’s comrades-at-arms were getting ready, too. How strange their medicine objects must seem to the white woman—a little pebble, a dried-up lizard, the skin of a bird, the paw of a badger, the dried heart of an eagle, a piece of fox dung, the feather of a raven. How strange the states of trance, the medicine words crooned over and over. The woman knew the Cheyenne words, but not the Cheyenne soul.

Calling Eagle wished the warriors did not need the white man’s weapons. This morning two young men came in with three guns, a few cartridges, and a little powder and some percussion caps. The old-man chiefs had sent them to a renegade trader hidden in the oaks. But for what little they got, they had to give an ancient medicine headdress, two fine-quilled otter skins, their wives’ saddle trappings, and lots of beadwork. So much to give for so little, the power of the Tsistsistas-Suhtaio way for the power of the white-man way.

Calling Eagle thought such trades spelled the end of the spirit life of the Tsistsistas and Suhtaio, the life Sweet Medicine taught them. Yet she, too, could see no way to survive without the white-man guns. She and the other medicine people of the tribe could offer no power to compete with the guns. That, she thought, was what was wrong. That was the great regret of her life.

Smith stood up to go to the rocks and do battle. “Go to Lisette,” he said gently to his wife. “She’s just beyond the spring.”

Elaine looked at Calling Eagle expectantly. The old woman shook her head. “I’m going with Vekifs,” she said, nodding at Smith. “I go with the men.”

Calling Eagle smiled at the puzzlement on Elaine’s face. She did not realize that Calling Eagle was different. No white people realized. When they were told, they were outraged.

Well, that would come later. Calling Eagle followed Smith toward the rocks.

Little Wolf walked in a measured way toward the soldiers, with Morning Star and other chiefs at his side. Every man’s hands were empty, except that Morning Star carried the pipe, showing peaceful intentions. An Arapaho scout came out to meet the Cheyennes. The chiefs did not like having a man of their friends the Blue Cloud people come out to them to talk for the enemy, but they said nothing.

The Arapaho was sent out with the words Little Wolf expected. Come back voluntarily and the whites will treat you well. Try to go on and they will drive you back.

Patiently, the Cheyennes said the old words again. We don’t want to fight. We won’t shoot unless the whites attack us. But we won’t go back—we’re going home to the Powder River country.

So the Arapaho went back to Captain Rendlebrock, and the chiefs went back to the Cheyenne soldiers on the hills. Little Wolf stayed out in front by himself, feeling ambiguous, easing toward the soldiers, hoping to talk a little more, or to show something, or do something—just foolishly hoping.

Watching the soldiers and waiting, he remembered what he’d said to his warriors a few minutes ago. Don’t shoot first. If the soldiers have to kill someone, let me be the first one.

And he might be the first one. He wished he was at a point in his years when he might surrender life gracefully, but standing out here, waiting uneasily, he knew very well that he wasn’t. He loved being in the swim of things too much, loved being the Sweet Medicine chief, he whom the people called their brave man, their dedicated man. He loved taking hold and making even the most terrible decisions of these terrible days. He also loved to fight—how gloriously alive he’d felt that day two years ago on the Powder when he’d been shot seven times. He also loved watching his children becoming full people. Approaching sixty winters, he also felt so much love for one of his wives, Feather on Head.

He had sung many times with the other warriors the great battle words, “It is a good day to die.” But he liked his life very much right now, and wanted to keep it. Perhaps that was unworthy of him. Perhaps that was what life had yet to teach him, to ease the fierceness of his grip on it. Teach it to me slowly, he thought—I am in no hurry.

He could imagine feeling less attached to life under only one circumstance: if the Human Beings could not go home to Powder River, if they all must die here in this wretched country, if there was no hope for the Tsistsistas and Suhtaio. In that case he would like to throw his life on the ground in front of the whites in contempt.

With every moment that passed, and the soldiers did not send anyone out to talk to him, Little Wolf became more resigned to his certainty that the whites would shed blood here. That was their nature. He had given up trying to understand it.

He tried to laugh about the whites’ dumb ways. It had gotten around camp that the teacher, the wife of Smith, had asked why the soldiers brought Blue Cloud scouts. She did not see that the soldiers like to get Indians so corrupted that they would trade the lives of their friends for a few dollars. But Calling Eagle had answered, so the tale went, that without Indian scouts the cavalry couldn’t find dung in a buffalo herd.

Little Wolf liked that. It was good to laugh at white stupidities. But he couldn’t find much laughter in his heart.

He was not surprised when the music came across the still, sunny afternoon. The trumpet rang out, “Fire!”

Smoke rose from the barrels into the sky, and then the battle call of the trumpet came across the bright plain. Smith nodded to himself—they’re attacking. But it was all distant and abstracted, like a painting of a war instead of a battle itself.

Little Wolf started walking back calmly, without hurrying. Smith watched with breath held, amazed at the chief’s courage. Or maybe he had accepted his own death, and that gave him dignity. Or maybe he had made medicine to become invulnerable and was sure he could not be struck.

Smith was well protected in some rocks, walled off from enemy fire. Calling Eagle crouched beside him, her eyes intent on Little Wolf. Smith forced his mind through the odd unreality of it all, forced himself to feel the vulnerability of Little Wolf’s flesh moving slowly through the invisible fire, as yet untouched.

Little Wolf walked, measured step after measured step, through the barrage. Cheyenne bullets flew over his head, and soldier bullets plunked all around him. The soldiers were off their horses, every fourth man holding the mounts of his companions, in their way.

Smith heard the Cheyenne women make their high trilling for the chief’s bravery from the first little hill to the west. So they had come out from the gullies to watch the fighting, and to hell with the danger. Smith was damn glad—those were
Cheyenne
women. Loudest of the trillers were Pretty Walker, Little Wolf’s daughter, and one of his wives, Feather on the Head, and Singing Cloud, the woman Finger Nail hoped for. Smith hoped they’d sneaked off and left Elaine in the gully—surely they did.

Smith rose up on his knees and yelled exultantly
ah-ho!
His voice sounded shrill to himself, so he bellowed again, lower, like the thunder. He grinned sheepishly at Calling Eagle. Getting onto his knees reminded him that he wore pants instead of a breechcloth. Pants below and bare torso and painted face above—half-white and half-Indian. He chuckled at himself.

Little Wolf simply continued to walk. Some bullets kicked up the dust around him, though Smith thought most of them flew into the Cheyenne positions on the hill. This walk was a gesture of greatness—it would be memorialized in the songs and stories of people and wreathed in double glory if Little Wolf came out unharmed. To Smith he seemed to walk even now in an aura of light.

The chief reached the base of the hill and stepped in among its creases. The trillers raised their sound to the skies.

Calling Eagle shook Smith’s shoulder, grinning broadly. He knew what she was saying—See, medicine can whip weapons—the spiritual defeats the merely physical.

Smith didn’t know. His education was in the physical, but he had grown up witnessing the power of medicine.

Now the soldiers came forward, within easier range for their Springfields. They knew the Indians didn’t have many guns, or they wouldn’t have dared. So this was the time for Smith to add his lever-action Winchester to the melee. He held steady on a horse, pulled the trigger, and saw the creature leap about crazily.

After several shots the fighting felt good. He had spent his youth with a rifle in his hands, and the old sense of competence came back. He was still a dead shot, and the lever-action made him fast. The soldiers were too far away for him to hold on men, but Smith made several horses come.

Curiously, it felt fine. It was not hard to shoot at white men. It was as satisfying as shooting at any enemies.

Then Smith saw the thin line of horses bolt out onto the plain and ride hard at the whites—a war charge!

“Hoka hey!”
yelled Smith. The warriors were using mostly spears, axes, and bow and arrows to save ammunition. When they neared the soldiers, Smith held his fire. The cavalry line fell back, confused and disorderly. The young men yelled and shot and dashed forward and back and forward and back again.

The soldiers ran, and the ones at the rear were digging rifle pits. Behind Smith, Calling Eagle made a little trill.

Smith stood up and faced the retreating soldiers. He still felt a little self-conscious about his damned pants. He shook his rifle in the air and at the top of his lungs roared, “
Hoka hey!
You bastards!” He threw an arm around his grandmother and hugged her. He thought, Look at those bastards run.

Chapter 6

Elaine hurried down the hill through the broken rocks and little gravel slides, slipping and half falling. If only her knees would keep steady. She was rushing to join Adam, who was said to be at the foot of the hill checking a man named She Bear. She Bear, they said, was the only man killed in the battle—the other wounds weren’t even serious.

Oh, yes, damned lucky, she thought sarcastically. Only one man dead.

She longed to touch Adam, simply to feel his solid arm in her hand, his big back inside her arm.

It had been awful, just awful. From her place in the gully she could hear the guns going off but couldn’t see anything. But her imagination had done its nasty work. The whole time it had spewed up images of mayhem and death, and cast them about prodigally. She had simply sat there rigid and refused to pay attention to them, had sat there almost in a trance, knowing nothing, intelligence and understanding and life itself suspended until it was over.

She had not let herself scream.

She was not too dissatisfied with herself, really. She had maintained her demeanor. When she got to Adam, when she touched him, she would be all right.

Smith put his arm briefly around Elaine’s waist and turned back to his patient. “He’s going to be OK,” Smith said happily. He felt the route of the big wound around She Bear’s head. “It’s amazing. It went in here,” he said lightly, “and out there.”

He felt Elaine touch his shoulder with her cheek and pull away to make room. Calling Eagle and Medicine Wolf had arrived—Smith had sent the old woman for one of the tribe’s healers, a practitioner with herbs and incantations. Smith waved the medicine man forward to show him the wounds.

Smith began to feel terrific. She Bear was still groggy as hell, but he would be fine. Elaine looked OK, maybe a little shaky, but Calling Eagle was steadying her. And now he got to do what he had come back west to do—give his people something important by doing what he did best. Smith was grateful to Calling Eagle, who had summoned him to the supposed dead man first instead of getting Medicine Wolf. He laughed to himself. Did his grandmother call Smith first because she thought the man was dead?

“See, the bullet just tiptoed around his skull and didn’t penetrate. It made this big gully”—he fingered the bigger wound, which circled toward the ear—“and this little one.” He touched the other gully, which angled upward. “The bullet actually split. She Bear has a skull like a grizzly’s.”

She Bear managed a dizzied grin at this compliment.

Smith picked up She Bear’s hat, made out of the skin of a grizzly head, cocked it in the air, and grinned at Elaine. The gesture was silly, but what the hell? Then he got an idea. He felt around inside the hat, and, sure enough—

“I found it!” But he couldn’t get it out. He took his knife, picked at the skin of the hat, and brought forth his little prize. “Here’s the piece of bullet that went upward. The other one went on through.” He stuck his little finger out the hole where the bigger fragment went and wiggled it at everybody.

Smith put the piece of bullet in She Bear’s hand. He knew the warrior would want to keep it, perhaps put it in his medicine bundle. “What medicine you made today!” Smith complimented him.

The warrior nodded. He looked more alert now. He’d taken a hell of a lick, though, and Smith meant to keep him lying down as long as possible.

It felt so good to be healing the people. Back at the agency most of them avoided him. More white-man stuff, they said, and they were rejecting all of that. Now, broken and bleeding, his people really needed him.

“Medicine Wolf,” Smith said, “don’t you think we ought to poultice these? Can you make some poultice?” Smith had confidence enough in folk-medicine poultices—they seemed to work as well as the concoctions he used. The doctor began to rummage in the geometrically painted rawhide box he’d brought, called a parfleche, his improvised version of a Gladstone bag.

“I think I’d better sew this big one up,” Smith said. “Would you hold the skin for me?” Medicine Wolf eased in close and pressed the torn edges toward each other. Elaine was good at doing this, but it was important to teach Medicine Wolf, and Elaine would understand that.

When he’d threaded the needle, Smith carefully made his row of neat stitches with silk thread. Medicine Wolf watched keenly. See what happens when you treat him as a colleague? Smith said to himself. “You can sew up the next one,” he told Medicine Wolf. “It’s easy.” See what happens when you treat your people as adult human beings?

He turned back and smiled at Elaine. She didn’t look so pale anymore. I’m getting it done, he wanted to cry to her. I’m getting it done.

“Hou! Hou!”
shouted Twist throatily. Morning Star, the great Morning Star, had also spoken up for the war charge. A real, old-time Cheyenne war charge. Overrun the soldiers—they deserve it. Didn’t they attack us, even our women and children? Aren’t they dog-manure-eaters?

“Hou-hou!”
Twist shouted again, his inflection rising with the other men’s. All the young men wanted a war charge, and the great Morning Star was on their side. Was he not one of the two old-man chiefs? The young men looked at each other with blood lust in their eyes.

Twist wanted to count coup on the soldiers. He wasn’t a member of the society of Dog Soldiers, because he was without honors. In the last two years, the younger Tsistsistas had had no chance to show their daring at war. No chance for coups, no chance for glory, no chance to gain the standing in the tribe that would enable a man to take a wife. To Twist, that was the worst part of the imprisonment on the cursed agency. For Twist it was even worse, for he was small and ill-favored.

Now Twist exulted. Even Morning Star was for the charge. Twist scowled at the tall white-man doctor known as Smith—damn the white men!

But Little Wolf, the warrior turned old woman, spoke up now. He argued that the people should simply accept the good luck they’d had today. They’d held off the soldiers without wasting too much of their precious ammunition. No Human Beings had been killed, and only a few soldiers. Maybe the officers, even though they were white, would not feel so humiliated that they would telegraph for the railroad to bring five times as many fighters and kill a lot of Indians to get their self-respect back. A very lucky day. So if the Human Beings just waited, the soldiers would run out of water down there in their rifle pits and have to go home.

It would be very satisfying, yes, to ride out there and get personal glory in the only way a warrior could get it. But the responsibility of the old-man chiefs, both himself and Morning Star, was the welfare of all the people, not just the young men. The whites back east had too many soldiers and too many guns.

Twist felt bile in his throat. This chief would turn all the Cheyenne warriors into women. Then who would protect the people?

Little Wolf asked several men to tell the warriors about the whites’ overwhelming numbers—the four men who had been sent to prison far off in Florida, and the white-man doctor, who had been all the way to a place called Boston. Twist didn’t care what they had to say. The four had been broken in spirit by their time in the white man’s jail. The doctor, worse yet, had the whites whitewash his Indian spirit and paint over it with what they called education.

When Smith began to speak, Twist fixed him with a malevolent glare. Naturally, the doctor spoke as the coward Little Wolf told him to, and as the others did. Yes, yes, more soldiers and guns and ammunition than we could ever imagine—the doctor parroted his lines perfectly, like the others halter-broken by the whites.

Now Little Wolf, satisfied with himself, tried to put even more hobbles on the warriors. When the young men were out trying to trade for horses and guns, he argued, they should steal nothing and kill no one. The white people got more excited by Indians’ raiding farmers and ranchers than their fighting with soldiers. Peace, Little Wolf counseled all of them. Don’t shoot, don’t steal, only trade.

Twist looked across at Black Coyote, and his friend sent back a hooded glance. Some of the warriors would ignore this stupid advice.

Inflicting a bad defeat on the whites, Little Wolf summed up, would endanger everyone. If the warriors made the whites mad enough, there might even come a day when not a single Tsistsistas-Suhtaio of the northern band would stand between the earth and sky. The only way to get back to Powder River country was to walk as quietly as possible.

Twist felt disgust as real in his throat as vomit. When Little Wolf asked for the sign of assent, and even Morning Star gave it, Twist found it almost unbearable. But he noticed that maybe a dozen young men, like himself, gave no sign at all.

Now the dog soldiers, under their leader Tangle Hair, were assigned to watch the soldiers during the night and keep them from going for water, but to avoid killing them. Since Tangle Hair would charge him with the duty of staying peaceful, Twist strode away from the council.

The doctor made him mad. That Smith had no business speaking up in a war council—he wasn’t a Cheyenne. His father was a white man, and his mother the offspring of the old Frenchman Charbonneau and an Assiniboin woman. Besides, his mind had been spoiled by education.

The doctor and his schoolteacher wife were pretending to be on the side of the Tsistsistas-Suhtaio. But at the same time they tried to convert the people to white ways. It was worse than forcing the people to live like whites—these two wanted to take over their minds and make them
want
to live like whites.

Twist’s blood was up. He felt like clubbing the doctor’s head in. He knew that killing another Cheyenne was the unpardonable sin, always punished by banishment from the tribe. And the old-man chiefs said the doctor was a Cheyenne. But the people—would the people say so?

Twist thought they would see that the doctor was a white man’s disease. They would praise the warrior who purged the people of disease.