CHAPTER 6 A New Name

I STRIPPED OFF my leggings and shirt and smeared myself full of black paint so that white hide of mine wouldn’t put me at a disadvantage in the moonlight, and Little Horse showed up again, carrying the whole skin of a black wolf that was so big I could get inside with almost nothing hanging out. Which was the idea: the head went right over my own skull, and I looked out the eyeholes.

We started off soon as it was definitely night, seven of us, and rode twenty mile at the trot over a plain of grass; then walked, leading the animals, for say another three. Much of the latter was rough terrain, in and out of ravines filled with scrubwood, and the only light a half-moon that seemed to carry the same cloud across the heavens with it as a shade. I could just have made out my hand at arm’s length had it not been blackened. But Shadow moved along right smartly as if it was high noon; and three men behind, I let my horse follow his lead.

We fetched up in a deep draw that went down to the Crazy Woman’s Creek, and there across the water were the lodges of the Crow camp, each glowing like a lantern from the fire within, for the older a tepee skin the more it takes on the character of oiled paper and sometimes you can stand outside at night and identify the inhabitants through it. We was still too far away for that, but what I saw was mighty pretty in a toy way, and the wind was moving from them to us, bringing the smell of roast meat. We hadn’t ate all day, for you don’t stuff yourself when you go to steal horses. Yellow Eagle sniffed alongside me and said: “Maybe we ought to visit first.” We could have walked peaceful into camp and them Crow would of had to feed us, for that’s the Indian way.

“We’ll leave the ponies here,” whispered Shadow That Comes in Sight, “and you and you will hold them,” touching me and Younger Bear; it was O.K. by me. But Younger Bear began to protest so strongly you might have thought he was sobbing.

Which infuriated Yellow Eagle. I didn’t know that man well, who had joined our camp only a few months back, but he possessed a deal of scalps and he owned a percussion-cap carbine, which was a rare implement among the Cheyenne in them days. For a long time that was the only gun in our bunch, and it wasn’t no good owing to a lack of the caps, for we avoided the whites, even traders, like Old Lodge Skins said. Elsewhere, though, the Sioux and other bands of Cheyenne were having little run-ins with the Americans along the Oregon Trail, taking their coffee now from the emigrants without waiting for it to be offered and sometimes all else as well. I noticed among Yellow Eagle’s collection of hair some which looked too light for Pawnee or Snake ever to have sprouted. The carbine probably came from the same quarter.

The Eagle was burned up at the improper manner in which Younger Bear was carrying on.

“You have lived for enough snows,” he scolded him, “to understand that among the Human Beings a veteran warrior knows more than a boy about stealing horses. It has nothing to do with who is brave and who isn’t: no Human Being has ever been a coward. You are asked to stay here because someone has to hold the ponies, which is as important a job as going into the Crow camp; and you know that we shall share equally what we capture. I don’t hear Little Antelope complain. He is a better Human Being than you, and he is white.”

Nobody else said a word and Yellow Eagle had been whispering. Nevertheless an awful silence descended, as if after a riot of noise. Younger Bear had been wrong, but the Eagle turned out more so. Not a word had been said about my race since I joined the tribe, not even by the Bear himself, who hated me. That wasn’t done, it could do no good, as the Indians say, and Yellow Eagle no sooner got it out than he knew his error.

“That should not have been said,” he told me. “A devil had control of my tongue.”

I was getting into the wolfskin at the moment, which I slung behind me while I rode; just aligning the eyeholes so I could see through them. The light was poor and everything looked hairy.

“I don’t think bad of you,” was my answer, “for you haven’t been long with our camp.”

“I don’t think it is a good night to steal ponies,” said Shadow, and started to remount while the others murmured agreement and followed suit.

“No,” said Yellow Eagle. “I will take away the bad luck I have brought.” He leaped on his horse and rode off in the direction whence we had come.

“I’ll stay and mind the ponies,” Younger Bear stated contritely, his head down. “With the other one,” meaning me.

So he accepted the halters of three, and I took as many, and so nobody could see us against the moon we kept hard against the left side of the draw that was hereabout maybe seven-eight foot deep, adequate to conceal men and animals from anybody on the plain above. The four big Cheyenne walked towards the Crow camp glowing across the water. In a minute you couldn’t see them any more nor hear them in two. After a while the moon finally got rid of that cloud and brightened some though not enough to throw a shadow.

I sat down in that wolf suit, which I was glad to have for its warmth alone, and sure didn’t grieve none that I was not en route into the camp. On the other hand, if I’d had to go, I couldn’t have picked better comrades than them four. I had started to get a glimmering of what the Cheyenne meant when they always talked about dying: I began to understand the loyalty to friends, but what I didn’t have was the feeling that I myself was disposable.

Now that the rest had gone, Younger Bear took up his grumbling again.

“They should not have done this to me,” he muttered. “I should have gone along. You could hold six ponies alone.”

“For that matter,” says I, “you could hold them all, and I might go.”

“You would be scared,” he comes back at me. “Your medicine may be big in play camp, but it wouldn’t fool a Crow. This is the time to be a man.” He was standing there with his chest puffed out as usual, though he wasn’t so husky as formerly, having gone into the skinny lankiness of the teen years.

I don’t know what I’d have been forced to do at this point so as not to let that Indian outface me—probably would have dropped them halters had he refused to take them, therewith losing the horses, and run towards the enemy camp to join the raiding party, thereby losing my life and throwing those of the others in grave jeopardy.

I was saved in a curious fashion. Suddenly an enormous Crow sprang over the bank onto the floor of the draw and knocked Younger Bear senseless with a war club. This in utter silence excepting the impact of his moccasins on the sand, which was scarcely noisy, and the sound of the club against Bear’s head, just a sort of neat chock! like when you throw a stone against a keg.

In a flash his knife was out and his left hand drawing Bear’s braids tight so the scalp would begin to pull off as it was being cut.

Then I was at the Crow, who hadn’t taken notice of me because he maybe thought I was a real wolf that Bear was talking to—an Indian wouldn’t have seen that as funny—I was at him and on him as if I was climbing a tree, for he was monstrous large with all his sinews in tension, skin rough as bark. But now I was there, I didn’t know what to do with the son of a bitch. I was now too close to shoot a bow, which anyway I had dropped, and I was clawing for my knife but that wolfskin was all bunched up and I couldn’t find it.

Of course the Crow was not exactly waiting in amused toleration. The big devil flexed his hide and flung me against the other side of the draw, and I was knocked cold by the meeting of my chin with my own right knee.

I come to within the next second, when the point of his knife had already broken skin above my right ear and begun sawing round towards the back of the head. I started some and the knife scraped bone. That makes the goddamnedest sound, reverberating to your testicles.

Now my hair was longer than when I had been with my white kin, but not nearly so long as an Indian wears his. The reason for this is that it grew naturally like snagged wire: let it go a month and I’d look neither Indian, white, male nor female, but rather like the belly of a goat that had been tracking through fresh dung, for along with the tangle the ginger color would darken, the more the hair, and go to brown, and any kind of animal fat laid on it would streak in green.

That was why I’d hack it off now and again when it got more than halfway down my neck. So this Crow, he was already in the act of scalping me when he hesitated for the briefest space on account of the funny feel of that short hair, which sure belonged to no Cheyenne by birth.

This break in rhythm brought me out of the spell I was under, quietly suffering the top of my head to be sliced off, the warm blood running into my right ear. I couldn’t wrestle him, I didn’t have no weapon, Younger Bear so far as I knowed was stone dead, and the other Cheyenne was in the village by now, too far away to help, and if I made a noise the rest of the Crow would be roused and murder my friends. This was the kind of thing for which Old Lodge Skins had told us boys that story about Little Man fighting the Snakes. Sooner or later he knowed it’d come in handy. I couldn’t let a Crow do this to a Human Being!

I jerked back and bared my teeth.

“Nazestae!” I hissed. “I am Cheyenne!” It would have sounded more impressive could I have afforded to shout it as battle cry; I have explained why I couldn’t.

But do you know, with that the Crow pulled away his knife, fell back on his haunches, and covered up his mouth with his left hand. His thumb had slipped on my movement and run across my forehead, opening up a white streak through that paint made of soot and buffalo grease. He didn’t understand what I said, for Crow and Cheyenne have different tongues, but he spoke as if in answer to it and in English:

“Little white man! Fool poor Crow! Ha, ha, big fooling. You want to eat?”

He was scared I’d take offense, see, because the Crow always sucked up to Americans, and in his dumb way wanted to bring me over to his lodge. It wasn’t his fault, of course, none of it, and that fellow has always been on my conscience. It appeared he was out in the night by himself for some reason when he run across me and the Bear, and worked quiet for he didn’t know how many others of us was in the vicinity. But I couldn’t have known that at the moment; I couldn’t in the time at my disposal explain the situation for him; and least of all could I go as his guest to camp, or even let him talk about it any longer in that loud voice.

So I had to kill him. Murder him, a friendly fellow like that. Shoot him in the back, what’s more. In retrieving my wolfskin that had fell off in the struggle, I had found my bow and quiver on the ground. The Crow at that moment was crawling up the wall of the draw to get the pony he had left on the plain.

Three Cheyenne arrows, thunk, thunk, thunk, in a straight line along his backbone. His hands lost their purchase and his big body slid down again till his moccasins hit bottom, and it stopped rigid on the incline.

That was the first I ever took a human life, and however it sounds to you, it was one of the best times. I was saving my friends, and you shouldn’t never have to apologize for that. And after all, he had scalped me almost halfway, which though he later veered friendly left its mark I can tell you. The right side of my face and neck was sticky as molasses with lifeblood—mine, very dear to me—and I was afeared to feel up there in case my whole skull-cover flapped loose. I dropped out of the picture then.

Next time I opened my eyes, I was laying inside a little tepee of brush and alongside me squatted some fellow wearing the top of a buffalo’s head, horns and matted hair, and he was singing and shaking a buffalo tail in my face. I had a terrible headache; my skull felt as though it had shriveled like a dried pea. I seemed to be wearing a cap of mud. I tried it gingerly with my fingers, but the medicine man gave a loud buffalo-snort at that moment and spat a mouthful of chawed-up flower petals into my face.

I had been long enough then among the Cheyenne to hold my peace. Besides, the headache gave one great surge and then began to ebb away. I sat up, and Left-Handed Wolf, for that was the medicine man’s name, started to dance around the robe where I lay, singing that monotone curing song interspersed with snorts and bellows. And he kept chewing more dried flowers from a little pouch on his belt and blowing them at me from the quarter points of the compass.

Then he leaned over and tapped a little stick on my cranium, and off fell the clay cap in two halves in which a few wiry hairs was embedded. Now my head felt especial cool as if indeed the whole scalp was missing, but he spat some flowers on it and it didn’t hurt no more at all.

Now he danced slowly before me and dangled that buffalo tail just beyond my reach. I tried weakly to seize it, but he’d back off a little each time. I felt the strength coming up from the soles of my feet, and when it reached my knees I got up and followed him, still trying to grab the tail that he shook before me while bellowing and tossing his horns. His face was painted black, with the eyes and nostrils rimmed in vermilion.

Wolf backed through the tepee door and I come along, reaching for that tail more and more vigorously, and when I got outside, I saw the whole camp, warriors, women, kids, babies, and dogs, lined up in parallel rows from the lodge entrance to the river. They was all by their presence working for my cure. No Cheyenne suffers alone. I was mighty touched by this display and got the power of it, straightening up my back and walking with almost normal force.

When we reached the riverbank, Wolf said: “Stretch yourself.”

I did so, and some black blood started from the place above my temple where the Crow had first inserted his knife, and falling into the water was carried away and lost in the Powder’s swift current. Then came the good red blood, which Wolf stanched with dried flowers.

“I am well now,” said I. That’s the God’s truth, and was the end of the incident. Afterwards I looked in a trade mirror and found a thin blue tracing at the roots of my hair, but even that was gone in a day or so.

The moral effects was farther-reaching. For one thing, a crier right away went about camp singing about what a hero I was and inviting people to a feast Old Lodge Skins was holding in my honor. The chief for celebration give most of his horses away to certain poor Cheyenne who didn’t have any, and after the eats he made presents to everybody who come: blankets, jewelry, and so on—he ended up almost naked. He also made a speech which from modesty I’ll pass up except for the important points.

After recounting my exploit at great length in a poetic fashion that would just sound silly in English, he said: “This boy has proved himself a Human Being. Tonight there is weeping in the Crow lodges. The earth shakes when he walks. The Crow cry like women when he comes! He is a Human Being! Like the great Little Man, who came to him in a dream and gave him strength to kill the Crow, he walks!”

This was exaggerating some, but as I told you I did think of Little Man and jerked away from the knife, which caused the Crow’s hand to slip proving I was white. I had told Old Lodge Skins only about the inspiration of Little Man, figuring it would please him. He took it from there.

After some minutes of the foregoing stuff, which didn’t embarrass me none, for everybody was beaming at me, including some of the young girls who was allowed to peek under the tepeeskin—I was getting some interest in girls at this point of my life—after that, the chief said:

“This boy’s medicine comes from the vision of Little Man. He is himself little in body and he is now a man. But his heart is big. Therefore his name from now on shall be: Little Big Man.”

That was it, and that’s how I was called ever after by the Cheyenne. True to Indian ways, no one used my real name; no one even knew it. It was Jack Crabb.

The horse-stealing expedition was also in its other respects a job well done. Them four warriors had slipped into the Crow village without rousing a soul and took thirty horses, more or less, driving them back to our camp through what remained of the night into early morning. When they reached where me and Younger Bear was, Bear had come to with a knot on his head but otherwise O.K. Lucky for us that Crow had been wandering without his bow, else we’d both been plugged from the top of the draw and never knowed the difference. So they tied me to my pony and brung me in.

I got four horses from the common loot, thereby becoming a man of certain substance, but had a greater thrill when a little lad, eight or nine, named Dirt on the Nose, asked me: “Now you’re a warrior, can I tend your ponies?” Meaning I could stay in bed of a morning now when the kids got up for chores. Maybe I could, but it was not the Cheyenne way to press your advantages. Shadow That Comes in Sight, for example, the veteran warrior who had led the raid, took a share of three horses, kept the least for himself, giving the best to Old Lodge Skins and the next to Hump—not because they was chiefs, for that cut no ice as such; no Cheyenne kissed the arse of authority—but because they had advised him well. Then Bird Bear and Cold Face each give one of their ponies to Yellow Eagle, who though he made a mistake had done the right thing to correct it. Then I gave him one of mine, for the same reason, and since I had been involved. Then I offered another to Left-Handed Wolf, who refused because you aren’t supposed to be paid for treatment. But it was O.K. to present it to his brother, which I did.

Therefore I answered Dirt on the Nose in this wise: “Killing one Crow does not yet make me the equal of the great warriors among the Human Beings. I shall still tend my own horses, but you are a good boy and I am going to give you that black I have been riding.”

Everybody said: “How, how.”

So none of us who took our life in our hands ended up a hell of a lot richer except in pride and honor, but a Cheyenne would die for them things any old day.

Younger Bear never showed up at the feast, I think the reason is obvious. It went on far into the night, and I ate a good deal too much of boiled dog, which was the fare: I had got a taste for that victual by now but had never developed an Indian’s capacity for gorging on the one hand, and then fasting on the other. After the shebang was finally done, I went out into the prairie and relieved myself and then set for a spell on a nearby rise. The moon was a hair skinnier than last night, but riding clear. Nevertheless, it would rain towards morning: you could feel that in your nose and through the soles of your moccasins against the old autumn grass and even through your haunches on the ground. Nobody ever told me that sort of thing. You learned it naturally living in our manner, like a man in town knows from the look of a storefront that they sell tobacco inside.

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 Cheyenne warrior. Had made my kill with bow and arrow. Been scalped and healed with hocus-pocus. Had an ancient savage who couldn’t talk English for my Pa, and a fat brown woman for my Ma, and for a brother a fellow whose face I hardly ever saw for clay or paint. Lived in a skin tent and ate puppy dog. God, it was strange.

That’s how my thoughts was running at that moment, and they was white to the core. Them kids I used to play with in Evansville would never believe it, neither would those with our wagons. They knowed I was always mean, but not that rotten. On the night of my great triumph, there I sat, thoroughly humiliated. Other than for my real Pa, the one killed at the wagons, who was crazy, you could seldom find a man back in town who didn’t think an Indian even lower than a black slave.

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 Cheyenne and most of the insults take the form of calling the other guy a woman or cowardly, etc., and even in my anger I never thought of applying those to Younger Bear. Besides, he had a great argument. I had just been in the act of thinking the same thing. Yet you know how it is: there are women who will take pay for letting you on them, but don’t call them “whore.”

Now on the needle of this Indian, the worse fate I could imagine was not to be a Cheyenne. He had really hurt my feelings. What I should have done was to accept it the Indian way, go sulk and fast until he apologized, which he’d of had to if only on account of my high prestige in the tribe right then. Actually, Bear didn’t but half believe in his own accusation. He was jealous and so had thrown me the dirtiest insult he could think up. If I’d played it right it would have got him in the backflash: he would have had to prove he was the Cheyenne, for I had done so.

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 Cheyenne girls of my own age. They had started to get their monthlies and from that time on was kept away from the boys, being always in the company of their mothers or aunts and wearing a rope belt between their legs until they got married. (They wore it after marriage, too, whenever their husband was away.) About all you could do was to show off when the girl you liked was watching. That probably comes as a surprise: you may think an Indian goes at it like a jackrabbit, but not the Cheyenne with their own women unless they are married to them, and since the married men always swear off it before going to war, and we were most of the time fighting, the Cheyenne were pretty hard up for tail at any given time. That’s why they was such fierce warriors, or so they believed anyway. I never knew a man who didn’t have a special interest in his own member, but to a Cheyenne it was a magic wand.

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 Cheyenne way,” and he closed his chops and slunk off.

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.

But he was awake, and whispered: “This is yours.”

“It don’t matter none,” I says. “Stay there.”

“You want me to?” he asks, sounding disappointed.

And then I went to sleep, not thinking any more about it. If a Cheyenne don’t believe he can stand a man’s life, he ain’t forced to. He can become a heemaneh, which is to say half-man, half-woman. There are uses for these fellows and everybody likes them. They are sometimes chemists, specializing in the making of love-potions, and generally good entertainers. They wear women’s clothes and can get married to another man, if such be his taste.

Little Horse began to train to be a heemaneh not long after this incident. Maybe he got the beds mixed up by mistake that night and didn’t have anything in mind. Whatever, I personally didn’t find him my type.