LITTLE BIG MAN

Take Frog now, tied up into his cradleboard, with his little head like a brown bean; when he wasn’t sleeping or eating, them sharp black eyes was studying everything within short range and never took displeasure. He reminded me frequently of little Gus, for my boy had had the even temperament of his own Ma, but there was a difference no less marked. Gus was ever delighted in my pocket watch, which I’d hang before him to produce its tick, like everybody does with babies and they is fascinated. Not Frog. It didn’t make him sorry, for nothing did that, but he just cared nought for it: looked through and listened past it, you might say.

Or maybe what did not interest him was the person holding it. Talk as Sunshine did and Old Lodge Skins too of him being my son, Frog himself was not fooled. He didn’t hate me; I was simply to him a kind of device that picked him up on occasion and embraced him, or swung him high into the air and let him down again, and he liked the motion and the contact but acknowledged in it nothing personal.

Then again, maybe the deficiency was mine, for though I liked him, I had had no hand in making him and could see no future for us as boy and Pa, no matter whether I ever found Gus and Olga again or not. The Cheye

However, I couldn’t have asked for a more ardent wife than Sunshine. That woman was utterly devoted to me, so much so-and I hate to say this, but it was true-that she commenced to bore me. I reckon the circumstances of our meeting had to do with the respective attitudes of us both. She saw it as a perculiarly touching thing that I had showed up in her hour of grievous need-though she exaggerated that: she was tough enough to have had that baby and escaped by herself-whereas to me she had started out as a burden, which while I freely assumed it there in that ravine as an emergency measure, seemed to gain weight as we lived in the camp.

I have to explain, for as you know the Cheye

Well sir, I suppose a bachelor is at a peculiar disadvantage up against a respectable married woman everywhere in the world, and Sunshine would cast reflection on the young fellow’s potency and speculate unfavorably on the quality of his endowments, etc., with the other women laughing nearby, maybe including some young girl he had a crush on, and away he’d slink, poor devil, having arrived a hero and departed a buffoon.

Now, as if it wasn’t bad enough to be defended by a woman in that style, next Sunshine would get to boasting about me. First it was how I saved her from the Pawnee, and that story growed from what had really happened, us cowering in that bush, to my standing off five or six of them and dropping three. She wasn’t a liar: I reckon that somehow that is what she saw through the distorting spectacles of her recollection. Then of course if she could be vocal about another man’s sexual abilities of which she knowed nothing, think of what she might do with the man on whom she stood as the local authority: I become a champion stud.

And I tell you it embarrassed me to be so characterized, but you know how it is, a person is sometimes the victim of his own vanity, so I fair killed myself trying to live up to my reputation, during the nights under our buffalo robe. Jesus, there was mornings when I couldn’t stand up straight, feeling like I had been kicked by a horse into the small of my back. I guess it ain’t right to tell this, for Sunshine was my wife and though a man can talk endlessly of his adulteries and fornications, the subject is in bad taste when it concerns respectable mating, I don’t know why.

The only way I finally got off the hook was that Sunshine one day turned up pregnant. That must have been about late March of ’68, figuring on the basis of what happened nine months after; otherwise I’d never have had any idea of the time, for by then I had been with the Cheye

During all this time we ranged mainly between the Arkansas and the Platte, which is now southern Nebraska and northern Kansas, and there was another railroad building in the latter state: the Kansas Pacific, along the Smoky Hill River, which had been good buffalo country, and so the game grew scarcer and we ate more roots than meat. And the troops was after us, and the Pawnee, but by the superior generalship of Old Lodge Skins, blind though he was, as a village we eluded them all, though our small raiding parties had many a small-scale brush.

Our band continued to live apart from the other Cheye

Nor was Old Lodge Skins a deal of help in this matter. His blindness cut down his horny behavior-he couldn’t eye no more fat wenches-but it had strengthened his intention to go his own way. What happened in the fall of ’67 was that the Government signed another treaty with the Southern Cheye

“I will not live in that bad place,” he told me, referring to the western Nations. “The grass is poor there, and the water is bitter. And it is properly the country of the Snake People, who I know are our friends now, but they copulate with horses and that makes them strange to me. Also the People of the Rasp Fiddle”-Apache-“come there, and they are brave but extremely ugly, being short and bowlegged and not at all handsome like the Human Beings. A long time ago when we used to fight them, I captured an Apache woman but it was like lying with a cactus, so I sent her back to her people with some presents, which was a great insult.…”