LITTLE BIG MAN

After I had lived some time with the Cheye

Apparently it didn’t work this time because I saw the same fellow next day in camp, where he was peering into a little trade mirror and plucking out facial hair with a bone tweezer. His vanity had got the upper hand, so he must have recovered by then.

The riding got somewhat easier because the chief proceeded in a slow walk and every half mile or so stopped altogether, turned to us, and made certain hand signals accompanied by noises in his heathen tongue-communications which Caroline interpreted as statements of admiration for herself and suchlike rot. Then he would stare sadly at us for a minute and head on.

Now I better explain part of the secret at this point, as long as you understand what neither Old Lodge Skins nor me got the hang of it until quite a spell afterward. As to Caroline, well, it’s useless to speculate about what she thought she knew or what she imagined, because they was always all mixed together.

The main thing was that the chief had not made a deal to buy me and Caroline back at the wagons. What he done instead was make a long statement on the massacre, excusing the Cheye

So there we were, what with Caroline’s taste for romance and the gift for jumping to conclusions she inherited from our Pa, trailing Old Lodge Skins across the prairie under a terrible misapprehension. The chief thought we was following him to get more reparation and the speeches he made at them stops was to protest against the injustice of our hounding him like coyotes, who will sometimes follow you for miles.

Caroline stared at him in love, and that poor Indian interpreted it as the look of ruthless extortion. In later years I grew greatly fond of Old Lodge Skins. He had more bad luck than any human being I have ever known, red or white, and you can’t beat that for making a man likable.

As I say, none of us understood the situation, but me and Caroline was considerably better off than the chief, because we only looked to him for our upkeep in the foreseeable future, whereas he at last decided we was demons and only waiting for dark to steal the wits from his head; and while riding along he muttered prayers and incantations to bring us bad medicine, but so ran his luck that he never saw any of the animal brothers that assisted his magic-such as Rattlesnake or Prairie Dog-but rather only Jackrabbit, who had a grudge against him of long standing because he once had kept a prairie fire off his camp by exhorting it to burn the hares’ homes instead. Which it did, turning away from his lodges after coming so close the tepee-skins was scorched. Ever since that incident the rabbits all knew him, and when encountering him alone would stand up on them enormous hind legs and say: “We think bad thoughts for you.” They would also call him by his real name, which is as malicious as you can get, and go bounding off, showing white or black tail as the case may be, for both families had it in for that particular Indian.

And I’ll say this: I never in my life saw more examples of that animal than when in the company of Old Lodge Skins. Let the toe of his moccasin protrude from the tepee, and up they’d leap for miles about, numerous as sparks when you throw a horseshoe in the forge.

But the one defense a redskin has against the kind of harassment me and Caroline was, unbeknownst to us, dealing to our host is loss of interest. If an Indian can’t accomplish his purpose with reasonable haste, it bores hell out of him and he will forget it immediately. He is interested only in a going proposition. So with Old Lodge Skins, who after a bit tightened the scarlet blanket around him, which under a hot sun kept him cooler than had he exposed his naked back, and rode on as if he was the only living individual north of the River Platte.

The third brave (counting as second the fellow sitting back a ways under the illusion he was dying) specialized in being always a half a mile off, to the left, right, or ahead. I guess he was looking both for enemies and something to eat. At any given time the Cheye

In such fashion we proceeded towards the Cheye

The sun still held itself a hand’s width above the horizon, but the prairie underhoof was slowly turning purplish. A person who knows that land can fix his look on a square foot of turf, never turning to the sky, and tell you the hour of day at any moment from the general cast of light upon it. I mean a white man. An Indian don’t keep that sort of time because he ain’t, in the white sense, ever going anywhere. You can imagine Columbus saying, “I better get started: it’s 1492 and I got to get across the ocean blue before midnight on December 31st or else America won’t be discovered till ’93,” but a redskin computes in another fashion. The sign-language term for “day” is the same as for “sleep.” Now, looking at a patch of earth, an Indian would see which animals had stepped there during the past two weeks, what birds had flown overhead, and how far it was to the nearest water-this in addition to a lot of supernatural stuff, because he does not separate the various types of vitality one from the next.

So if I say Old Lodge Skins went along in a coma, I mean as far as we were concerned. He knew where he was, all right, and at one point caught the attention of the scouting brave-whose name I might as well give: Burns Red in the Sun-pointed ahead to rising ground, and showed a hooked finger. Burns Red traveled in from the left flank and slipped off his pony, undoing the single rein of the rawhide war bridle from his belt and tying it to a lance which he drove into the earth. He dropped his blanket and stripped off his leggings. In his breechclout and carrying bow and arrows, he snuck up the long swell of which we others waited at the foot, flopping to his belly just before the point of divide. The grass hereabout had been trampled flat by a great herd of buffalo and not long before, it not having sprung back yet, and you could see him snaking all the way until his moccasin soles tipped up and disappeared.

Shortly there came on the wind, blowing from him to us, the thu