LITTLE BIG MAN

I suppose we must have walked three miles out in the prairie-everybody except one decrepit old woman and a warrior who stayed behind because he had the sulks. At a certain point on a space of flatland we stopped, and Old Lodge Skins set down on the prairie. He had left behind his plug hat, and wore two eagle feathers braided into his hair. Now the unmarried women come up before him, and he chose the stoutest two by waving the antelope arrows at them, sort of charming them into sitting alongside him. One girl was average fat, but the second was so chubby it took a keen watch to find the features of her face; her eyes was like little seeds.

Set a fat girl to catch fat antelope, was the idea.

Them braves that still kept their horses now mounted, and the rest of us fell in on either side of the chief and the fatties so as to make a half-circle with them in the middle. Two other girls, ski

Well, this one stared so hard you would have thought his ears might shoot off his head. Meanwhile the riders was reaching his lateral. He looked left and he looked right, but them equal forces emanating from the flanks sort of compressed his attention back to the middle, and even at the distance you. could see him quiver from the haunches though his yellow cheeks and black muzzle was froze in wonder.

Old Lodge Skins set within the red blanket, the white plumes on the ends of his two feathers blowing in the soft wind. The two fat girls was still as mounds of earth, nor among the pack of dogs did one cur so much as show a tongue; they was also Cheye

That scout moved forward, placing each dainty hoof as if it was a separate decision, his white neck-bands puffed out like a collar of shirring. Along the crest behind him appeared a margin of little horns, followed at length by little tan heads, staring our way. The forward horsemen gained the rise and went over, the fu

Down the slope trotted that sentry; behind him the horizon was full of animals, with more crowding over. He came a hundred yards on, and still there was no end to the massing herd, forming the shape of a huge arrowhead back of his lead, aimed at Old Lodge Skins. Cheye

The lead riders, with the staffs and wheels, having reached the end of the herd out there and crossed behind it, changing sides one to the other, galloped back to Old Lodge Skins and gave him the medicine devices. There was now a magic line tied round the antelope, and with a wand in each hand, the chief began to draw it in.

He flang up his arms, and the whole vasty herd began to run, its head some seventy yards out, its tail just coming over the rise. A good three hundred yards of prairie was jammed with animals, haunch to haunch; with the width of the mass at the rear covering about the same measure east to west: an enormous heaving wedge of pure antelope. We people now stirred, extending the crescent horns, rounding out the base of the V into a U, and the beasts came towards a living corral of which the walls was Cheye

Half along the left arm of it, I tried to cock an eye on that first sentry, but he was gone in the rush as faster animals overtook him, and soon all particularity was lost in the churning of numberless legs and clouding dust. The chief waved his wheels as the leaders reached the entrapment, and they diverted left, but there met the Cheye

This pile-up happened right before me, and from there on it was sheer panic as beast clumb upon beast and butted each other’s brains out, goring one another’s bellies, and some just plain trampled into the earth. We closed in then, and the horsemen completed the great circle, everybody with a club or hatchet or maybe merely a big stone, but no kind of projectile for this tight work. I’d say it took a good hour to beat every last antelope to death though we was swinging incessantly, and a number of animals died of their own efforts.

At no time did Old Lodge Skins put down his wands, but rather kept on gesticulating till no beast lived to see them; that was his duty and obligation, and he took no part in the killing. So far as I went, I had not the strength at that age to do much damage even to such a fragile animal, but joined my efforts to the general mob, pounding a rock at tan hide wherever an opening showed. I might have struck Younger Bear once or twice in the confusion, for he was very near me. That boy tried to break an antelope’s neck with his bare hands, like some of the stronger men could, by twisting its horns. He couldn’t manage it, and finally had to sink his hatchet between the ears, and its starting eyes welled with blood from the inside and its tongue retched forth and it died.

CHAPTER 5 My Education as a Human Being

YOU MIGHT HAVE NOTICED that Old Lodge Skins started out as a buffoon in this narrative. Let me say that was true only around white men. Among the Cheye

I’m going to tell you two of his tales. One of them saved my life when I went on my first horse-stealing raid. The other, which he spoke at a council-meeting with some Sioux, will give you a better idea of the difference between red men and whites than anything else short of having lived as both, like me.

Several snows had fell and melted since I joined the Cheye