LITTLE BIG MAN

About a mile away, a coyote barked for a while, then yelped, then howled, then whined in several different notes. It sounded like a whole pack, but was just one animal, for they are natural ventriloquists. He was answered from the north by the long, sorry wail of a timber wolf-or Crow raiders imitating the same, for that is one of their specialties; but it continued off and on for an hour in the same location, so must have been the real beast.

After I had sat there long enough to warm the earth with my rump, a rattlesnake come crawling towards me, as they are ever cold and will move right into your bed if you suffer them to do it, for a bit of warmth. But I heard under the wind noise the slither of his dragging length, so counterfeited the flap of an eagle’s wing and he reversed himself.

So I, Jack Crabb, was a Cheye

That’s how my thoughts was ru

Right then I heard a sound that made me think the rattler had took a second thought and decided in his slow, stubborn way: what’s an eagle doing here in the night? and come back to try his luck again at getting near that warmth.

But it was Younger Bear, sitting down alongside. That shows how dangerous it can be to think white in the middle of the prairie. I hadn’t heard him coming. I could have lost the scalp that just was healed back on had it been an enemy.

He sat there some ten foot away, staring into the night and, I expect, thinking red. I didn’t say nothing. At last he looked in my direction and said: “Hey, come here!”

“I was here first,” says I.

“I got something for you,” he says. “Come on over here and get it.”

I wasn’t taking any of his crap now that I had saved his life, so I just turned away and directly he come crawling to me.

“Here,” he said. “Here’s a present for Little Big Man.”

I couldn’t see what he was holding behind his back, and leaned to look, and he pushed the big bushy scalp of that Crow into my face, laughing like hell.

“That’s a stupid thing to do,” I told him. “You are the biggest fool I have ever known.”

He dropped the hair and fell back on his arms.

“I thought it was a pretty good joke,” he says. “That is a beautiful scalp and perfumed with musk. Smell it if you don’t believe me. It’s yours. I took it, but it should belong to you. You killed him and saved my life. If you want me to do anything for you, I will. You can have my pony and best blanket, and I’ll tend your horses.”

I was still sore at that silly thing he did; although it was a typical Indian joke, it showed bad taste and worse will at this point. I wasn’t taken in for a minute by his apparent friendliness.

“You know,” said I, “that one Human Being don’t pay another for saving his life.”

“Yes,” answered Younger Bear in a deadly voice, “but you are a white man.”

There ain’t no curse words in Cheye

Now on the needle of this Indian, the worse fate I could imagine was not to be a Cheye

Instead, I said hotly: “That’s right, you fool. Since I gave yours back to you, you owe me one life. And you can’t pay me off with that scalp nor a blanket nor all your ponies. Only a life will do, and I’ll let you know when I want one.”

He stuck the Crow scalp under his belt and got up.

“I heard you,” he said and went back into camp.

I had said that because I was mad and wanted to play it big. I didn’t know rightly what I meant. It was probably a kid’s bluff. Myself, I forgot it directly, though remembering Younger Bear’s dislike of me well enough for a while: then I forgot that too, for I didn’t see no more instances of it. He stopped shooting play arrows at me, put no more burrs under my saddle, in fact seemed to do his best to pretend I was as solid a Human Being as he had proved me not to be.

But the point is that he never forgot what I said on that rise up by the Powder River, and about twenty years later, and some fifty mile away from where we had been sitting that night, he paid me in full.

I have said I was getting interested in girls. Just about the time this began to happen, the situation changed so that I couldn’t get near any of the Cheye

After Younger Bear went away and I cooled down, I started thinking about a girl named Howaheh-which means, I ask you to believe, “Nothing.” When we were littler and played camp, I had frequently been forced to choose Nothing as my make-believe wife, on account of them other boys knew how better to go about getting the good-looking ones for themselves and I was left with this girl, who was fairly ugly. But here lately she had, as young girls will, of a sudden turned pretty as a buckskin colt, with big, shy eyes like an antelope and the graceful limbs of a doe. She always used to like me when I didn’t pay no attention to her, but as you might expect nowadays ignored me utterly.

Well, nothing I could do about Nothing right then, so I finally got up and went down into camp. There was a dog awake there, about to howl in answer to the coyote though he knew it was wrong because it might alert prowling Crow to our location, so I said to him: “That’s not the Cheye

Everybody else was sleeping, the fires all cold. I found my robe, not far from the doorhole, and started to get into it when I realized it must be Little Horse’s, for he was wrapped in it, so I moved on to the empty one alongside, though I usually slept to his left.