Boone's Lick

But the fear inside me had me paralyzed. I couldn't step around the dead miner to go get the deer. What was in my mind was that if I went a foot 106

closer to the trees I would end up with my head smashed in and my privates cut off; there would only be a patch of blood where my hair was.

I don't know what I would have done--it was my good luck that Uncle Seth heard the shot and came loping over on Sally to help me.

"Venison, that's fine," he said, when I pointed to the dead deer.

Then he looked down and saw the corpse. "Uh-oh," he said. "This is getting repetitious. Let me see the arrow.

"It's a Sioux arrow, same as the one Marcy found," he said. "If Charlie or Villy were here they could probably tell us what band it came from.

I've not had a proper opportunity to study Sioux arrows, myself."

Ma and Neva didn't come look, this time. The ground was frozen so hard we couldn't get a real grave dug. We put the miner in a shallow trench and piled rocks on until we had it pretty solidly covered.

"An antelope beats a deer, anytime," G.T. said.

"Yes, and there's something that beats an antelope," Uncle Seth said, pointing to a half dozen brown dots, far up the valley.

"Buffalo!" Neva said. "It's about time we seen some."

At first I could hardly believe the brown dots were buffalo. Pa and Uncle Seth had talked to me all through my childhood about buffalo, and yet these were the first we'd seen. Even now, the fact that they were so few was disappointing.

"It's only six," I said.

"Maybe if I'm lucky I can bring one down," Uncle Seth said.

He wasn't lucky, though. Long before he came upon the buffalo they took fright and rumbled over a ridge, into another valley, where Uncle Seth didn't seem to think it wise to follow them.

Ma noticed his caution and taxed him about it when he came back.

"Why'd you pull up?" she asked.

"The bufs had too big a lead," he said.

Ma didn't press him, but that night she raised a question that had been in my mind all day, ever since I stumbled on the second miner.

"Do you think they're watching us?" she asked.

Uncle Seth shook his head. "If you mean Indians, no," he said.

"Why wouldn't they be?" Ma asked. "This is their country. They were watching those two miners who got chopped up."

"Maybe not," Uncle Seth said. "It might not be a tribe or a band that's doing this. It might just be a lone warrior who don't like miners."

107

"If they're watching us, would you know it?" Ma asked.

"The Indians out here ain't shy," he told her. "If they wanted to come out and inspect us, they would. Remember the Pawnees, and the Bad Faces?

If the Sioux or the Cheye

That seemed reasonable to me--I don't know what Ma thought, but she and Uncle Seth sat up talking, now and then throwing wood on the fire, until real late. I couldn't hear what they were talking about, but just the fact that they were talking pleasantly made it easier to go to sleep.

6 THE next day we reached Fort Reno and managed to purchase a large brown mule, to take the place of Montgomery. Ma objected to the trade--we still had four mules and a horse, which she thought was ample, but Uncle Seth bought the brown mule over her objections. "They've got more transport animals than they can feed, at this fort--this mule was a bargain," he said. "I say we name him Reno, after the fort he's leaving."

In fact, Fort Reno seemed to be a foul place, full of soldiers who were drunk and scared. Some of the soldiers stared at Ma and Neva as if they had never seen a woman or a girl before--their stares were impolite, the more so because all the soldiers were filthy.

"We don't bathe much, when it's chillv" thp

quartermaster explained. He was a ski

"If you've found two, that makes sixteen," he said. "Sixteen dead is a lot of dead--the army ought never to have put up these forts if they can't protect the roads any better than that."

"Why, it would take a thousand soldiers to protect this route," Uncle Seth said. "I doubt the army can afford to allow a thousand soldiers to loiter around in a place like this."

Ma asked about Pa and was told he was at Fort Phil Kearny, hauling wood--

the news made her impatient to leave, but the new mule, not knowing any of our mules, was jumpy and took a while to harness.

In the center of the fort, not far from where the mules were stabled, there was a wagon with a wooden cage in it. It looked empty, except for a pile of rags in the corner, but as we were getting ready to leave, the rags began to stir around and an old Indian man crawled out from under them. He was a terrible sight: naked, except for the rags he held around him, filthy, toothless, his hair full of straw and lint, his wrists bloody from a pair of handcuffs, blind or nearly blind. There seemed to be a film of some kind over one eye. While Uncle Seth was trying to get the new mule to accept the harness the old Indian man began to chant, in a high singsong voice. Pretty soon he was singing loud enough that everyone in the little fort could hear him.

Uncle Seth stopped what he was doing and stared at the old man for a while.

"Who is that?" he asked. "I swear he looks familiar."

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The wheezy little quartermaster, whose name was Botchford, must have heard the old Indian's singing once too often, because he turned red in the face and began to threaten him with an iron from the smithy's forge.

"Shut up, you goddamn squeaker!" Botchford yelled--but the old man just went on chanting, as if Botchford wasn't there.

Botchford put the iron back in the forge--the color gradually left his face.

"I wish they'd hang him!" he said. "He's always making that racket."

Neva couldn't take her eyes off the old Indian in the cage.

"I wish I knew what he was singing," she said. "Oh no you don't, young lady," Botchford said. "What's he's singing ain't for a young lady's ears." Ma jumped in at that point, on Neva's side. "I'm curious myself,"

she said. "What is the poor man saying?"

"Ma'am, it's just wild Indian preaching," Botch-ford said. "He's been preaching this wild Indian preaching all over the plains. It's got the tribes stirred up, which is why we caged him. They're sending him down to Fort Leavenworth until the tribes settle down."

"He's just one old man," Ma said. "What could he say that would be so bad?"

At that point Botchford got exasperated, partly with Ma and partly with the wild old prisoner. He began to stomp around and get red in the face again, as if the old man offended every belief he held.

"Oh, you want to know, do you?" he said. "All right then, you'll know.

What he's saying is that a sheet of shit ten feet deep will cover the whole earth pretty soon, and all us whites will drown in it! Green shit!

But the Indian folks can just dance on top of this shit! Then new grass is supposed to come out all over the world and all the dead buffalo will rise up and the Indians will rise up too, the dead ones and the living ones, Miniconjous and Cheye