Tie My Bones to Her Back (24 page)

Jenny did so. All she could hear was the screaming of the magpies. They bounced on the branches of the spindly cottonwoods lining the draw. She shook her head in puzzlement.

Strongheart repeated the sign, this time more urgently:
Listen more keenly!

Jenny concentrated, and finally she heard a false note. Someone was trying to sound like a magpie. She started to pull her sheath knife, but Strongheart grabbed her wrist. Come with me, Strongheart signed.

They walked into the coulee. In the tall grass of a south-facing slope, above a pool of stagnant water left from the winter, they found a young woman in labor. Jenny recognized her as Lame Deer, a short, thin girl whose husband had been killed during a horse-stealing raid on the Crows that past winter. Her skirt was hiked to her hips, her legs spread, and as they watched, her belly heaved with a powerful convulsion. This was the moment, Jenny thought. A baby’s head emerged through bulges of blood. It stuck there for a moment. Strongheart signed Jenny for her knife. Jenny handed it over. Strongheart spat on the point of the blade, worked it against a whetstone, wiped it clean against her shirt, and cut the woman just below the birth canal. Lame Deer’s belly convulsed once more. The head emerged fully this time.

Lame Deer looked up at Strongheart and said something in Sa-sis-e-tas that Jenny could not understand. Lame Deer’s eyes were sad, tired. Yet they were also strong, Jenny realized, as if she was steeling herself for some new ordeal. Jenny could not see Strongheart’s eyes.

The old woman reached down and cupped her hands around the baby’s head, pulled, then reached in for the baby’s shoulders and snaked them out. Lame Deer heaved once more. Strongheart lifted the baby clear. She bit through the umbilical cord and wiped the blood away with a wisp of dry buffalo grass that lay by Lame Deer’s side. The baby was a girl. Strongheart lifted the infant and showed it to the mother. Lame Deer nodded and looked away.

Not once has she screamed, Jenny thought. My God, the women of Heldendorf . . .

Strongheart tucked the newborn into a fold of her hide shirt. Lame Deer reached for the buffalo grass she had picked earlier. She wiped herself clean, then lay back and closed her eyes. Tears glistened in their corners.

Jenny followed Strongheart up into the hills, even farther away from the camp. There, in a grassy hollow, they stopped. A dry wind howled overhead. The old woman placed the baby on a patch of moss, in the shadow of a smooth, weathered boulder.

What now? Jenny wondered. Some strange new Cheyenne ritual?

The baby’s face was red and wrinkled, and it cried feebly, grimacing and wriggling its short arms and legs. Blood dried on its eyelids. Jenny’s heart went out to it. Then Strongheart placed her hand over the baby’s nose and mouth. It struggled for a minute, while Jenny looked on in horror—more than a minute; but finally the baby lay still. Strongheart was staring at her. “Yes,” she whispered harshly, “but it must be done.”

“Why?”

“Lame Deer has three sons and a daughter already, all of them still children. You’ve seen them playing around camp. Since her husband was killed by the Crows, her brother has been giving her meat. That means taking meat from his own family. But now another man is interested in her, Old Gland with the withered arm. He is a poor hunter, Old Gland, and he let it be known that with another child to feed he could never marry her.” She sighed and smiled ruefully. “Too few buffalo. Too many people. In German we call this
Okonomie
, Lame Deer had no choice. She is my friend. I helped her.”

With her root digger, Strongheart had already prepared a hole in the ground. She placed the tiny body in the hole and scraped dirt on top of it. Jenny found a heavy, flat stone to place over the grave. Before they left, Strongheart cut a branch from a nearby osier and brushed out all signs of their footprints.

“Won’t the others know that Lame Deer had the baby?” Jenny asked, irritated suddenly at all this secrecy. “Certainly they knew she was with child, so why won’t they suspect that she’d had it murdered when her belly’s flat?”

“They’ll know all right,” Strongheart said. She laughed, the dry cough of a crow. “Even the Old Man Chiefs will know. But no one will say anything if we don’t. It is one of the Mysteries of the People.”

When they passed the spot where Lame Deer had given birth, the young woman was gone. Jenny looked around, searching the hillsides, and finally spotted her down by the river, grubbing for cattail roots. She and Strongheart walked on back toward the tepees.

“Would you have spared the baby if it had been a boy?” Jenny asked.

“No,” Strongheart said. “A child is a child, hunger is hunger.”

17

O
TTO HADN’T ALLOWED
Jenny to bathe or shave him since he’d left the infirmary at Fort Dodge, cursing and weeping whenever she suggested it. “Kill me!” he begged her again and again. “I’m no man at all if I can’t keep myself clean!”

“You’re a mess all right,” she told him, angry in her own turn, fed up with his self-pity. Then: “Oh God, I’m sorry, brother—but you’ve got to stop feeling so hopeless. You can do things if you’ll only try!”

“Like . . . what?”

“Well, you could start by trying to walk.”

“And where would I walk to, if I could manage it?”

“You might try the river, it’s not twenty steps from this tent. And once you’re there, you might take a bath.”

Otto looked away, his face sullen beneath his unkempt beard.

“What are you afraid of?” she asked.

“They’d laugh at me,” he muttered. “I know the Indian and his wicked sense of humor. And truly I can’t blame him. Many’s the time I almost laughed at the sight of an old soldier crippled by the war. But only because I couldn’t weep anymore.”

“What can I do to help you?” she pleaded, nearly frantic with frustration.

“Nothing,” he said. “I’m beyond help.”

The Elk Sisters took care of that. Tom Shields sent the
noot-uhk-e-a,
the four girl soldiers of the Elk Society, to care for Black Hat. Their names were Crane, The Enemy, Yellow Eyes, and Slick Blue Serpent. All were plump and virtuous. At first the Elk Sisters were repelled by Black Hat’s sorry condition. Cheyenne doctors never amputated, not even the most badly mangled limbs, trusting in secret herbal medicines and sacred spells to cure them. If a cure failed, then the All-God Maheo clearly intended that person to die. Black Hat’s lack of fingers, toes, and half of one arm was shocking, but the Elk Sisters were positively disgusted by his filth.

They picked him up from his blankets and trundled him down to the river, where they stripped off his clothes and flung him into the water. While Crane and Yellow Eyes scrubbed him with sand and gravel, Serpent and The Enemy boiled his clothes in a bucket over the fire, then hung them over the nearby bushes to dry. With a sharp knife the girls shaved off Otto’s beard, so that he would look more human. Otto didn’t know which hurt worse, the scrubbing or the shave. But he felt a lot better once he was clean.

The Elk Sisters then sang some songs for him and danced awhile. He said nothing. They decided that the spider was the most stupid animal they had ever seen, since even dogs and horses could understand language. “Let’s see if we can teach it to talk,” said Yellow Eyes. She picked up a rock. “Ho’honáa,” she said, pointing to the rock. She cracked it sharply against Otto’s head.

“Ouch!” he said.

“Na-oomo,” Yellow Eyes said.
I am hitting!
She tapped him again. “Na-oomo.”

“Na-oomo,” Otto said in self-defense. He rubbed his head with his fingerless hand. “
Hohonaa
, rock.”

The Elk Sisters yipped and clapped their hands. Not only was it clean now, but it
could
speak! Maybe this spider was human, after all.

The Elk Sisters cooked for Otto, teaching him the words for various kinds of food and utensils. Whenever they picked up a tool, they told him its name. They taught him the names of animals, starting with dogs and horses. Each morning they took him to the river and washed him. When E-hyoph-sta and Two Shields went off to hunt, they slept in his lodge.

One night Yellow Eyes woke from a strange, warm dream. The other girls were snoring. So was Black Hat. Yellow Eyes began to massage him gently. He stiffened. He stared into her eyes, there in the warm dark. He caressed her cheek with the glassy-smooth stump of his arm.

“
Haáhe,
” he whispered in his deep spider voice.
“E’peva’.”

Yes, it is good . . .

J
ENNY HAD EXCELLED
in archery at the academy, but she was awed by the skill of the Cheyenne bowmen. Their bows were short, not more than four and a half feet long. The best of them were made of horn or rib bone from elk, bighorn sheep, or buffalo. They were powerful weapons, recurved at their tips like the illustrations she had seen of Mongol and Turkish bows. Tom’s bow, which he carried in a beautifully finished otterskin bow case decorated top and bottom with elaborately braided red-and-black quillwork, had been made from the horn of a mountain sheep, he told her. He had boiled the horn a long time to make it limber, then trimmed and shaved it down and straightened and laboriously flexed the limbs until they had assumed the shape he desired. Finally he had backed it with the glued shoulder sinew of a bull buffalo, to give it more throwing power. It was white on the front—actually the “back” of the bow, in the peculiar parlance of bowyers—with powdered gypsum sprinkled over a thin sizing of glue rendered down from buffalo hide, and was painted an ocherous red on the “belly.” Its hand grip was a soft spiral wrap of deerhide. For all her strength, Jenny could draw the bow only a little more than half the length of its two-foot-long hunting arrow, but even that small effort drove the ironheaded shaft through a thick slab of pinewood.

“When I was a boy, our arrowheads were made of stone or bone,” Tom told her. “The old men say they killed better than these iron ones.” He laughed and threw back his head. “Old folks always like old ways.”

He pointed out the lengthwise grooves incised on the arrow shafts—a straight one from fletching to head on the top surface, a sinuous groove on the bottom. “Some say these are to make the blood run more freely, others that they are magic to make the arrow fly straight and hit like lightning. My father laughs at that stuff. He says the grooves are only there to keep the arrow from warping back to its original shape, when it was a green wand of birch.” Each arrow had Tom’s personal mark on it, two red, shieldlike circles forward of the fletching on either side of the shaft. “That’s to see who actually killed the buffalo when they’re all down and the hunt is over,” he said. “Sometimes there are fights over questions of meat.”

Tom had her roll a willow-withe hoop, no more than three feet in diameter and covered with parfleche, across the prairie some sixty paces from where he stood. He zipped five arrows through it before it toppled to the ground, shooting faster and far more accurately than even Duck Bill Hickok could have with a six-shooter at that range. She had seen small boys, little more than toddlers, with tiny bows and arrows shooting at similar hoops around the camp, whooping and screeching whenever they scored a hit. All day long they practiced. Sometimes the more mischievous ones shot their blunt-headed arrows at her tepee when she was inside, then ran off laughing. They’re flirting with me, Jenny thought, not unflattered. No better than white boys with their infernal baseballs, knocking a girl’s bonnet off just to hear her squeal. But with a more useful purpose to their silly skills. These Cheyenne boys would kill enemies or bring home meat for their families when they grew up. You couldn’t bring home meat with a baseball, not yet at least, though before leaving Wisconsin she had read of professional baseball clubs being formed in New York.

A
T NIGHT THE
white wolves howled, putting Otto in mind of his happy days on the Smoky Hill. Yellow Eyes lived with him now, having surrendered her post as an Elk Sister. The other girls had gone. The sisters of the Cheyenne soldier societies must remain chaste, and Yellow Eyes had relinquished that state. She alone cooked for Otto, helped him to bathe and shave, sewed new clothes of skin for him; she alone slept with him, in a small tepee of their own set apart from the camp circle. Yet still he refused to try walking, unwilling to submit himself to the possible taunts of the young warriors. He would allow her to help him from the tepee only at night when the village slept. Then they would sit together at the entrance to the tent while she washed him and trimmed his beard and he breathed the sweet night air.

She cut him an elegant walking stick of fragrant cedar, peeled the bark, rubbed the wood with buffalo grease and ocher, and decorated its knurled top with a carefully carved wolf’s head. At first he had trouble holding the stick firmly in the clenched cup of hand that remained to him, but Dr. Wallace had left him a small stub of thumb which eventually gave him a suitable grip. With Yellow Eyes at his side, holding his stump to give him support, Otto started walking again, only short distances at first, limping painfully down to the river to bathe, then out into the near hills. Slowly he regained his balance. He began to eye the horse herd and wondered if he could ride again. The Cheyennes rode quite well without using their hands, guiding their mounts with only their heels and knees, but they were centaurs from birth.