THEY ARE THE ONES WHO DID WRONG THINGS

They are following us as perpetually as FROG stays glued to the MOON’s eye,

even now into late summer, when the male tree swallows have begun turning greener:

our women gathering serviceberries and chokecherries as they ride, no longer hoping to stop long enough to dry them into cakes,

whipping the mules our best men stole from Cut Arm

(these animals are strong, but cannot travel quickly, so let us beat and scare them until they die! That will punish Cut Arm the Moldy—

and if only he had not picketed his horses that night!

Peopeo Tholekt, whom the Bluecoats nearly killed, actually untied Tsépmin’s grey racing-horse and stampeded him away, but in the morning he was not among the captured animals; who can say how that happened? Red Spy, scouting back upon the Bluecoats, is grieved to see our former brother once again riding that fine stallion:

Why can we never kill Tsépmin?),

our weary wounded children weeping

(Mourning Dove has now begun to die; black blood blossoms on her deerskin dress);

and Over The Point is making us all homesick by singing,

although Looking-Glass grows easier in his heart, since we praise the way he led our night raid on Cut Arm

—whom we would tear apart with our hands!—

I am telling you three times, although he must not be head-chief anymore, Looking-Glass remains a good war-chief!

and now his Crow friends will take us into their country;

while White Thunder’s heart continues proud that he injured those killers

and his great war-friend Wottolen, bruised below the ribs by an almost spent Bluecoat bullet, is laughing yet over how we scared them into the cottonwoods

(they cannot make themselves brave);

he jokes with Toohhoolhoolsote, who can steal a tethered horse from the hand of his sleeping enemy;

as for Ollokot, who led the young men of Wallowa so well on that night, he has begun to heal from the death of Fair Land, his matchless one,

whose son he now carries all day on his roan horse

and Cloudburst rides behind, driving the pack animals and worrying about how to do alone for her man and boy what Fair Land used to help her do,

White Bird turning aside to shoot mallards for his People

even as White Thunder kills a black bear cub so that his Uncle Yellow Wolf, his Aunt Springtime and the other wounded People can salve themselves with fat,

all our People riding here and there as they please, delighted to have escaped from being penned up forever on painted land,

longing to ride and hunt forever

as we drive our ponies into the Buffalo Country:

a rich home where drying meat will dangle everywhere,

camas prairies and wild horses again at our hands, going this way farther than we know, and that way into the dead places which the Bostons have already made.

Even now,

although Burning Coals has lost Long Ears and six more good stallions,

we remain horse-rich:

black and ocher they accompany us, red and white, lovely palominos and strong Appaloosas, our jewels—

a thousand and more!

and just as a silty stream flows into a clear green river, muddying it, our wealth pours onto the trail, sometimes half a dozen abreast, raising the Big Dust for Cut Arm, saying: Hinimí!,

our herders riding in and out of the horde, quirting the slowest: kíw, kíw!

Now we arrive at the place where White Thunder’s grandfather Homas died while hunting buffalo. We ride up the river and cross it where the two big rocks stand, there on the south side of Tongue Water,*

TRAVELLER’s light greening the golden sagebrush, buttes standing out, the sky finally bluer than blue-white,

riding on as if we were thirsty and the river were receding,

but where we go is as obscure as the part of the forest where GRIZZLY BEAR WOMAN dwells all alone.

Meanwhile Looking-Glass, he whom the Crows call Arrowhead,

who in his youth used to climb trees to kill eagles for their feathers,

now decorates himself,

his wives winding brass wire around the ends of his braids as he fastens on his brass earrings, his daughters cleaning that tin looking-glass he loves:

soon he will be smoking again with Blackfoot the lucky man, whom he aided against the Cutthroats

and Húsishúsis Kute pulls on his eagle-plumed headband of fine hard rawhide;

Toohhoolhoolsote will likewise ride with them, for he is longing to eat buffalo liver in order to improve his old eyes;

Strong Eagle,

remembering a certain Crow woman who paints her face with white clay,

and his new war-friend Over The Point will also go

(although Wottolen, Red Owl and Two Moons speak against it);

likewise Ollokot, because when his marriage dance with Fair Land was held, Looking-Glass came to him, and gave many horses

and because he has said to Heinmot Tooyalakekt: Elder brother, stay here and I shall go for you, in case they kill us;

therefore, thanking and praising him, his brother chief,

who has travelled to the Buffalo Country only once

(to Looking-Glass he is as ignorant as one who cannot recognize the coughing of a grackle),

remains to help the weak,

whom Lean Elk leads deeper into the forest, shouting: Hurry, hurry!

(Looking-Glass’s heart is so happy to ride away from this man that he begins singing).

Riding their best fast horses northwest into the hot country of mourning doves,

and wondering how it will be,

they go easily, unworried about that pale old creeper Cut Arm:

Ollokot first, on the same cream-colored buffalo horse he rode at Sparse-Snowed Place,

then Húsishúsis Kute,

and because Heinmot Tooyalakekt saved Looking-Glass’s horses at Ground Squirrel Place, and those good sister-wives Blackberry Person and Asking Maiden have saved most of his ornaments, Looking-Glass, wishing to rest his favorite stallion Home From Capture, rides a fresh bay whose collar is of trade cloth dark blue, light blue and yellow, embroidered with white pony beads in diamonds and triangles outlined in black,

while Toohhoolhoolsote’s horse is ugly and old like him

and Strong Eagle’s horse is as graceful as a woman,

and Over The Point rides a fine black stallion whose saddle is lightly decorated;

so they ride on, their horses bending down to drink as they wade each cañon stream,

until these emissaries presently see smoke and send word;

and just as a rider throws up his arms when he is shot in the breast, then whirls off his horse, so the red SUN speeds out of the ground

as they enter the Crow Country,

watching for Lice-Eaters and Bostons to kill.

Looking-Glass the renowned one now paints his face red

and Over The Point and Húsishúsis Kute paint their faces in reds and ochers,

while Strong Eagle,

he whom we can always recognize from far away, from the lovely shoulder-beadings on his elkhide shirt,

decorates himself in stripes of white and yellow,

but Toohhoolhoolsote makes himself more varicolored than anyone,

for he, farfaring Dreamer, has ridden west through the Umatilla country to Painted Hills, treasury of pigments, where some mounds are scarlet, and others violet-grey or else golden-green with rays of black descending them; here are hills of ocher-brown which blends into pure red, and yellow hills, and hills of broken white stone bearing leaf-images and shell-images;

this of all places is the place for a man who paints himself;

so now they have become ready;

and coming into Blackfoot’s camp, leading three gift-horses, Looking-Glass smiles to see a young girl riding alone on a pony behind her mother, both of them with saddleblankets and blouses decked out in elkteeth

and the bleached buckskin fringe on her sleeves hanging and swaying way down the horse’s side

so that loveliness is shimmering in all our hearts:

and one Crow has painted an X on his face, signifying that he has killed an enemy;

now here come the old men and the young boys and all our old friends:

the Lost Lodges, Bad Honors, Bear’s Paws, Ravens and Prairie Dogs

(even Horse Rider is here);

young women begin to smile at them,

pretty ones who have painted their hair partings red and perfumed themselves with yarrow,

so that Looking-Glass, swallowing hard with lust, remembers the way that Crow women incite us to war by waving scalps;

Toohhoolhoolsote’s leg-rattles are hissing; his fishbone necklace is chattering

and a little Crow girl comes carrying her doll-baby on her back

while in the dying grass graze so many painted ponies (some with Mexican brands) that we can almost believe we have come back into the days when the Crows were rich in horses;

as from that sunbleached tipi painted with a golden-ocher SUN-device, circletted with outward-pointing white teeth, Blackfoot emerges.

Looking-Glass and his People give the Crows brass bracelets, and the Crows give them pretty parfleche bags of buffalo pemmican. Their hosts invite them to a buffalo feast, serving the meat in buffalos’ shoulderbones,

so we keep our hearts quiet as men should,

determined not to speak of the Bostons—or, as they are called here, the Yellow Eyes—

until it comes time to pass the pipe.

The Crow chief, whose hair is tied in a greying, feathered knot over his forehead, stares upon Looking-Glass almost in dread, the pair of great white shells upon his breastplate of necklaces trembling like a butterfly’s wings, his cheeks drawn in, perhaps with illness, his lips silently parted to emit sad breath, his eyes wide yet dull

and the vertical wrinkles between his eyebrows deepen

as beside him Curley Crow, who rode to Little Big Horn with Yellow Hair* last spring, and never disdains to take the Bluecoats’ part, now squints into the sun, showing off his smooth bare chest and neck with the many white necklace-loops on them, his wavy brown hair braided almost like a white woman’s; he is gazing at the ground

(although even now Looking-Glass’s eyes cannot help but seek a certain Crow woman whose forehead bears a circle tattoo);

and Yellow Hair’s old scout, White Man Runs Him,

naked to the waist, crowned with eagle feathers,

frowns and flares his nostrils at Looking-Glass, who begins to speak in words as sweet as the tight-clinging leaves of a sweetgrass bundle: My dear brothers, we are now here in this place so that we may know each other’s hearts.

Taking the pipe, Blackfoot replies: Brothers, my heart is glad to see you. I wish that we could stop this bad feeling between your nation and the Bostons, but it is too late, because your young men have done evil things, and the Bluecoats will hunt you down forever. Looking-Glass, ever since I have first seen you, my heart has loved you, and I still have the same heart. Now I wish I could guide you straight, or persuade Cut Arm to listen, but since I cannot, there is nothing for you here. Now I am finished speaking; now I have opened my heart,

and the lucky man, with his many feathers radiating from his scalp, draws in his blanket with his arm inside it, half-closing his eyes, lowering his head, as if he could truly be sad

to which Looking-Glass replies: My brother, have my ears become addled, or have you really spoken such words? Have you then forgotten your promises?

—speaking loud and long about this matter,

his words winding around: pokát, pokát—

until Blackfoot says: Why should you ride here to carry war to our fireside? Why bring the Bluecoats upon us? You know that I do not lie; if we go against them they will take away our country, I am telling you three times! But hear me, Looking-Glass: Should Cut Arm require us to ride against you, we shall shoot in the air . . .

Blackfoot, I had not looked to find you such a cowardly old woman. You have grown too fond of the Bostons’ sugar. Blackfoot, you cower before them like a dog!

That may be so, Looking-Glass; but I remember how you refused to rise up against them when we urged you; moreover, from what I have heard, you would not help your own People when they struck the Bostons on the Chinook Salmon Water,

and Horse Rider, the “white Crow” who could never help us much, is not much help to-day, either,

so Toohhoolhoolsote snarls: You too have sold your country,

and Ollokot widens his eyes, smiling at the Crows with extreme hatred,

and White Man Runs Him finally takes the pipe only to say: My heart falls to the ground,

so that once again Toohhoolhoolsote’s heart finds occasion to say: It is warped;

and Strong Eagle, who should have left the talking to the chiefs, but like our other young men has lately learned to speak yes and no, smokes the pipe, then slowly tells the Crows: If you fight us, I shall make your women gash their foreheads with arrowheads,*

after which the People take their gift-horses back again;

their dreams have withered, just as the MUSSELSHELL SISTERS dry up in the sun.

So we must ride to Sitting Bull. If we are straight in our hearts, perhaps he will not kill us.

There remains nothing but to cross the Medicine Line to the far place, the cold place, the Place Where Dead Trees Whistle,

but for all the ride back Looking-Glass is speechless, and even Toohhoolhoolsote,

bowing his head, with his hands clasped across his chest and his white braids hanging still across his arms,

now says: I know not where to go.

Ollokot, my dear younger brother, please tell me exactly what has been done,

but before Ollokot can open his mouth, Toohhoolhoolsote explains: Once again Looking-Glass has misled you. He promised that the Crows would save you. As for me, I am a man, and so I expect nothing,

and in much the same way that a woman knows that something bad has happened when her needle breaks while she is sewing, Cloudburst (although she has not been sewing to-day) understood already before she even saw Ollokot’s face;

now she is boiling soup for him, and for him she is cutting off a piece of Welweyas’s gift to her,

that dried huckleberry cake from the Salish country;

while Looking Glass keeps silent; a headache is haunting him. Blackberry Person crushes up some sage leaves for him to sniff, and then he sits grimacing on his horse.

Red Spy, who even until now believed in Looking-Glass, has been thirsting in his heart to ride alongside the Crows, raiding and killing Shinbones, Big Bellies and Walking Cutthroats,

and tasting enemy women in much the same way as we crack bones and suck out their marrow,

for before this war, when the People used to come together at Weippe and Split Rock, Looking-Glass many times told us how the great Crow chief Tattooed Forehead disguised himself as a Big Belly, spied two Big Belly maidens bathing naked in a river, and when they laughingly hid themselves in the brush, caught one by the hair and quicker than you can imagine cut off her head!—Red Spy, feeling hilarious over that joke, immediately thirsted to kill more enemies; and now that he has begun shooting Bostons, his heart has learned to laugh at the blood of others; he has made himself brave; why should he not kill Big Bellies?

Now we must ride north alone, hoping that these enemies will become our friends,

and so Red Spy grows enraged at Looking-Glass.

Now again we all ride together,

our young warriors still perfect with their tight braids and their roached hair shining with grease;

and Toohhoolhoolsote is listening to the creakings of trees as he goes

(even after this he will Dream himself where he likes, no matter whether the Crows think to deny to us the Buffalo Country:

like a green-grassed creek-groove down deep in the dry dirt always runs his Dream, cutting through the skulls of any who would tell him where he must go;

because Toohhoolhoolsote, who knows the pale gold of the Buffalo Country in late afternoon

and black buffalo in the golden grass,

has what belongs to a man),

while Cut Arm must sit on the ground far behind, because we have got his mules!

Exactly here where pallid grey fans and pillars of rain connect the clouds across the pale whitish-grey air to the almost silhouetted pines along the soft green ridge, we find buffalo in a row, and kill three of them;

the women butcher the meat and pack it on ponies; to-night in camp we shall roast it. Asking Maiden and Blackberry Person are glad,

but as for their husband, once again he has grown silent:

treachery upon treachery undoes him!

Even now he can scarcely believe in Cut Arm’s crookedness; the murders of our women and children at Ground Squirrel Place have grown almost unreal to his heart; and what the Crows have now done,

those very ones who have sung praising-songs for my war-deeds,

his heart cannot comprehend; closing his eyes, he feels himself galloping down, galloping down

through rimrocks and currant bushes, these junipers so still against the dark blue sky,

because we must all now pass through the sayings of Lean Elk’s heart like mice running through dark narrow slits in sandstone,

Looking-Glass meanwhile waiting for some Power to fly down and restore his luck.

Lean Elk shouts: Hurry, hurry!

—to which Toohhoolhoolsote replies: I, a chief, will not be spoken to so.

Our tired old ones become strong from eating so much meat, so Lean Elk makes us travel as quickly as the mules can go. Now we enter a valley where another herd of fat shaggy buffalo grazes like black stars on the sky of grass, munching and slowly ambling, rolling on the ground as if they itch; white dust rises from them even in mist and drizzle.

Smiling, Toohhoolhoolsote stalks a buffalo cow who is ducking her head down against the heavy rain which has greyed every ridge down to outlines,

riverbends of living white fog in the rain

(even between the nearest trees there seems to be fog);

now he and the animal have both vanished as we ride on past bubbles, geysers and overlapping raindrop-rings in the puddles between sagebrush

(Lean Elk is not certain which way to lead us):

here runs the wide, steel-grey river, rain-pimpled, wriggling over blue-grey rocks,

and Looking-Glass is silent; then

pim!

at which Toohhoolhoolsote’s hungry old wives come grinning and galloping, ready with their knives.

We have begun to lose our way; even Lean Elk cannot explain why even the best men have come to this. He sends scouts in three directions to find a safely secret way to the Swift Water,

which we must cross to get into the dry prairie

(soon that place will be getting cold),

through the coulees and into the marshes where the yellow columbine grows low and high,

then around the snowy mountains to Place of the Cave of Red Paint

and thus to Wolf’s Paw*

past Big Bellies and Walking Cutthroats

to the Medicine Line

—so far away!

Our wounded and our old ones will keep dying.

So our scouts ride out, northwest, north and northeast:

The other People follow, riding too far on weary horses, resting too little, Dreaming horribly, awaking in fear to flee again

(as she begins to help Cloudburst pack Uncle Ollokot’s horses, a stallion tries to kick Sound Of Running Feet, so she pricks him hard with her knife; he rolls his eyes and jerks; she clouts him on the muzzle as he skips and cringes; then the packbags go on him)

and Lean Elk yells: Hurry, hurry!

Strong Eagle spies a mule deer’s outstretched ears in the golden grass:

Pim!

the doe falls dead; her chest explodes; to-night our widows will be praising him.

Over The Point and Swan Necklace ride back up to the pass:

Cut Arm is not yet in sight, nor any Lice-Eaters.

White Thunder’s party,

watching down the winding pine-walls to the white river-pavement where the mourning doves are creeping,

finds an old Boston, evidently a miner. Gathering round their captive,

his face white as a new-peeled lodgepole,

they tell the half-breed Bunched Lightning what to say, and in the Boston language he shouts: You Boston, answer quick! Can you find Elk Water?*

Since he can, they do not kill him. They take him to the People. We make him draw a map, to show us the marks of this country. Then we keep him, and make him drive our horses as if he were a woman

while the creek, reddish-brown and silver, alters rapidly but mutedly beneath the clouds, a great buckskin-colored bluff watching over, and beyond it taller cliffs with snow on them;

a few of us still have tipis; that night our women raise them on the sandbar

where Ollokot entices Cloudburst to open her butterfly

so that their hearts forget to grieve, just for awhile

and Toohhoolhoolsote Dreams of visiting Smohalla in a place which smells like home

(the Chinook Salmon Water)

but Smohalla will not ring the small bell:

covering his face with both hands, he keeps silent, as if I, his brother, were some crooked-hearted Boston.

On the next day, White Thunder and his war-friends,

still longing to harm and punish the Horse People

and to injure Cut Arm above all,

hear a noise like a musselshell cracking open in the fire:

someone is shooting far away;

and so they find a camp of Bostons.

One man (he must be chief) offers his hand to White Thunder, who therefore no longer wishes to kill these people. First we take their flour, sugar and bacon. We search for marrow-like to bring our children, but they have none. Now we are admiring their horses:

The chief Boston’s stallion, tall and white, with a reddish undercoat and strong legs, looks too heavy for war, but strong and calm—good enough for Rainbow’s widow

(let her work him to death).

The Bostons stand there with their hands up. Bunched Lightning shouts in the Boston language: We take you to the chiefs. You come now d——n quick!

There are seven of them. Terrified of our warriors’ smooth red-brown young faces and shining eyes, they rush to get ready. Then two women emerge from the tent,

Emma and Ida,

pretty ones,

their hair dark brown like a buffalo’s new coat.

For what are they coming here? To spy for Bluecoats who kill us?

Once we begin to taste them with our eyes,

grinning crookedly or staring with our mouths a trifle open,

we young men to whom no Boston woman has ever said: Taste me, even though so many Bostons have raped our women

(they have no hearts),

a certain Boston

(he must be their husband or father)

grows angry and begins to shout. We shall certainly make him understand.

We take our captives to the People, and when other young warriors see them, they begin to tease these Bostons, just for fun, lassooing their horses, shouting: Quick, fast, heap fast! galloping round and round (Ida and Emma weeping almost silently), chasing them all when they dismount,

saying: What do you mean, killing our People?

—so that they must run like children to Lean Elk and Looking-Glass, who cannot tell us yes or no about this,

not even about these Boston bitches

(no matter what Heinmot Tooyalakekt may say);

for just as male and female towhees wear the same blood-splash on their flanks, so these Boston men and women are all bloody killers:

They are our enemies forever, and we shall treat them so,

although Lean Elk,

who dislikes to see the young men go wild,

quietly leads two Bostons into the trees, murmuring: You fellows run away quick!

(in time they will find Cut Arm),

and the other People, all Boston-haters, go riding by,

discussing how Emma and Ida’s female parts might be fashioned,

joking about the noise of opening and closing which a MUSSELSHELL WOMAN makes

(One such lured COYOTE into Her clashing vagina, and squeezed until She had killed Him):

—can Emma do this? Ida appears not strong enough:

Áhahahaha!—

the brownish-black oval of a distant bear crawling through the sagebrush

as our young men in their feathered top hats and their striped gorgets keep playing with their prey,

sharing out weapons:

a Henry rifle with two hundred rounds, a shotgun, two Ballard rifles, three revolvers and two needle guns

and then:

Get’m off, mister. Me want ring.

No get’m off. My wife gave me this.

My friend, me see’m ring. Get’m off, or I cut’m off! Áhaha! Good. You’re a d——n good little white man. Now me have ring, GODd——n you,

the Boston women staring at them so that they are reminded of how a deer raises its ears before it leaps away:

then the hearts of the Bostons become smaller and smaller, and their women are weeping.

White Thunder says: My WYAKIN told me never to be cruel.

Yes, replies Red Spy, but they are the ones who did wrong things,

the eye of his gun as black and round as a horse’s opening anus,

and now Swan Necklace,

he who first started this war

(the other two with him lie dead and dug up at Ground Squirrel Place)

and whose sister lies buried or maybe dug up far back on the trail, in a gravel place which the greyish-pink mourning doves will soon be leaving,

rides up,

with his long braids spilling neatly down to his blanket-robed lap, where his pretty hands rest opened like knives, the long fingers clenched together, his dark eyes shining with some unknown purpose,

quickly shooting the nearest Boston in his thigh,

only once and then just twice

(he is merely playing around)

so that this white man

(the one who shouted at us when we touched his women),

a tourist who came to see Wonderland, hunt swans and shoot bald eagles

(now he has become red-eyed like a towhee),

tumbles off his horse, his legbone shattered, and tries to crawl for the ravine,

his woman, awkward in her Boston bell-skirt, lowering herself from the saddle as quickly as she may, wrenching herself away from us, running toward him, shrieking: O, George! O, George!

Áhahahaha!

Let me pound now him to death,

and Swan Necklace (whose voice is beautiful) begins happily singing his WYAKIN song

while Red Spy shoots another Boston in the side of the head: pim!

(and just as from the dark square cave of smoky heat in the square white blacksmith’s shop there comes an orange light more vicious than the desert sun, so within his skull there suddenly enters pain’s illumination, brilliant beyond all his suppositions,

although his story is strange:

this one will hide, and live, and in great pain make his own secret way to Cut Arm)

and his horse lowers his handsome white head, half-closing his white eyelashes, and sneezes at the blood in the grass

while the enemy women keep screaming like female wood ducks

and the thigh-shot Boston’s woman rushes to him, cradling his face in her arms, crying: Kill me, kill me first!

(now she is convulsing bitterly)

until Strong Eagle pulls her away and shoots him in the forehead:

Áhaha!

and Shooting Thunder rides happily up the creek to whistle for elk.

We take the Boston women and the last Boston man to Heinmot Tooyalakekt,

he who saves the weak,

and when Swan Necklace ecstatically enlightens this chief’s heart about the Bostons we have shot, he turns his back, wrapping himself in his King George blanket

(he is but a camp-chief; now it is for the young men to say yes or no);

and now Ollokot has killed another deer, which Welweyas has eagerly helped Cloudburst skin with her Wilson knife

as Peopeo Tholekt comes in from singing to his yellow horse;

we are eating roast meat,

although Looking-Glass’s wives and daughters will not come here; their hearts are ashamed that their man whom we once admired has now overflowed with errors,

and the leftover venison Cloudburst, Good Woman, Kate and Springtime now begin to pound with berries, hoping for time to make pemmican, since we must keep riding forever, it seems:

we become horse-happy,

for Burning Coals now owns the short Boston woman’s mare:

a fine white-footed roan, who bent her long neck so gracefully to graze while we began to torment those two sluts;

while White Thunder has got the other woman’s horse:

a mare truly lovely to our hearts, for her coat is of a rare reddish orange like some pigments that our best men gather at Cave of the Red Paint;

I am telling you three times, we are all full of good meat, and would be laughing at Cut Arm if we still laughed

but there was a way Fair Land used to pound meat that was better than this way; Cloudburst should have learned it, so now Good Woman is scolding her; in that moment those two are hating each other, and as her baby yawns in the cradleboard, Springtime sits on a rock, pounding meat alone

as Heinmot Tooyalakekt watches the enemy people from across the fire; when the man begins to plead with him, he turns away.

Red Spy,

who would sit beside these fine Boston girls and maybe pull back their heads by the hair

—were Heinmot Tooyalakekt only absent, I should take one of them with me and use her on the trail

(as easy as slitting a dying deer’s throat)—

keeps wondering how they might taste

(for Yellow Bull has shared his heart with me; it was his best men who killed those Bostons in their homes by Chinook Salmon Water and then raped their women; why shall I not do the same?)

Then the boy About Asleep cocks a pistol at the Bostons, shouting: GODd——n, GODd——n no good! White man no good,

and the People laugh

(but not Heinmot Tooyalakekt).

Realizing at last that nothing is taller than a Nez Perce horseman at twilight, with grey tipis rising like volcanoes behind him, the last Boston stares into these warriors’ eyes, desperate to learn whether they mean to kill him; he cannot even tell if they can see him; for a moment they appear to be dead; or it might merely be that they are staring through him in that Dreamer way—and nothing has changed in them; it is only he whose perceptions cannot stay still; then all at once, with that same almost unwinking gaze, they seem to look upon him as if he himself were dead.

He seeks to calm himself by remembering how Henry’s Lake shone brighter than Looking-Glass’s mirror (he could see the trout right through the water)

and everyone danced the pigeon wing, drank root beer, then went swan-hunting.

Sitting on a fallen tree, a young brave with flowing black hair watches him cruelly, with a rifle across his lap, imperial in his fringed and beaded robes, with bearteeth at his throat and two U.S. Army cartridge belts strapped on him. Half-smiling, half-grimacing, he seems to see into the white man’s skeleton

(LORD JESUS, grant me a brave death! And if the last thing I’ll see on earth is this grey spill of hair on the shoulders of an Indian’s striped blanket, and that rifle swinging toward me, I must look the villain in the face—but I suppose what I’ll actually see last is the heels of his moccasins when I’m lying in the grass and he walks off . . . although he might bend down and scalp me; don’t they all do that?);

and Sound Of Running Feet is longing for her father to kill these Bostons! Wearily he sits down between her and Good Woman,

the young men watching among the trees, murmuring: Let us be evil to them;

even Ollokot (although he stands aside), craves vengeance for Fair Land, who once beaded his rifle-scabbard red and black

and Arrowhead would wish to cut those long Boston dresses with her skinning-knife to make new bandages for our wounded;

Looking-Glass lacks pity for them;

even Welweyas the half-woman, whose heart adores women everywhere, would laugh to see the deaths of these two Boston bitches:

all the time their race keeps seeking to squeeze us into a small place!

—and White Bird stares into the fire,

sitting with his wrinkled hands folded in his blanketed lap, with lovely dark and white double bars of bone about his neck, his hair roach akimbo and soot around his squinting eyes,

remembering how the creek back home in Sparse-Snowed Place appears in this season:

wide and brown, with its white stones rising from the shallow water, the humid sky white and purple-grey, and my father’s grave in the mound of dying grass where Tsépmin promises to dig for gold after he has killed us,

as smoke obscures the rising moon, and the young men,

some of them joylessly playing at the Stick Game,

wait for what will happen,

and as Sound Of Running Feet crouches down, staring (her eyes strangely half-closed) across the fire at the enemy women, Naked-Footed Bull says to Grizzly Bear Youth,

who Dreamed so wisely that we should steal Cut Arm’s animals:

Boston women are happy when the Bostons kill us! To-morrow let us kill them on the trail . . .

—but who can account for what now occurs? She with the scarred arm and sickly infant to whom the murders committed by the Bluecoats and Bostons must surely stink worse than any deed of ours, she whose child, as she begins to know, will never see the home in which it was conceived, whose husband, who was meant to be her protector, cannot save her from Cut Arm’s pursuing terror, and whose elder sister-wife no longer understands her heart, why should she for whom these near-worthless wailing days and nights are now an expected portion show in her heart any residuum of pity?

Yet Springtime now takes up her baby girl and seats herself by the Bostons.

Doing whatever he can to be liked,

terrified even of these squaws, whose gazes seem to him as faint as starlight on Springfield rifles

(the warriors overgazing him almost gently, their eyes filled with some meaning which it might save his life to understand),

the man lifts up the child and gives it to one of his women to hold. She makes a disgusted face. He says: Pick up the baby, Emma. Don’t you want to live?

She does; so will he. In his memoirs he writes: I know I could have sat down on that young one and smothered it, with a good deal of relish.

She takes the child, who looks up at her wide-eyed, not crying; the Boston woman wipes its snotty nose and all at once our women smile.

Almost weeping, the Boston man stretches out his hand to Heinmot Tooyalakekt, imploring: Friend?

Heinmot Tooyalakekt takes his hand, replying: Citizens’ friend.

We keep these Bostons for some days. Some of Toohhoolhoolsote’s young men still wish to rape the women, then kill them like deer, but Heinmot Tooyalakekt says: You have done many things against my advice. There will now be an end to this talk.

The next day, Lean Elk leads away the captives, gives them played out horses and sets them on the Bozeman Trail toward Fort Ellis.

As we ride, Heinmot Tooyalakekt comes to our chiefs and best men one by one, asking them to spare the Bostons—for who can say that this war will not keep going against us?—but some will not answer; and Toohhoolhoolsote replies: I am a chief. No one commands me.

Riding east through the stormcloud meadows, we shoot other Bostons and steal their horses, paying back Cut Arm wherever we can. (When they bleed, they go as pale as buffalo tallow.)

Heinmot Tooyalakekt keeps quiet. Since he cannot straighten the young men, they must straighten themselves as they see fit.

Over and over he hounds us: Leave a clean trail, but even his own dear nephew White Thunder is one of those who now often says: Let us go and devour them,

and farther up the trail Toohhoolhoolsote’s best men, as cruel and furious as grizzly bears, corner a Boston who has come prospecting—

—let us help him so that he need not go on weeping!—

loot his corpse

(his open eyes already less blue than huckleberries),

then break, burn or bury his tools:

We do not sell or wound OUR MOTHER!

Here is the dead man’s palomino grazing in pale yellow grass; let this animal begin to gladden our hearts!

—and that night Toohhoolhoolsote dreams of a grizzly bear, part tawny, who stretches out in the golden grass.

Far away, past a yellow stripe of sunlit meadow, we spy a herd of buffalo, and one bull alone; our best men ride there, we hear rifle-shots

(Welweyas and Springtime clap their hands)

and soon the women are butchering the meat

although Looking-Glass declines to hunt; keeping aloof like an old stallion banished from his harem by some snorting young challenger,

because now that the Crows have closed their hearts to us, he has begun to Dream of enemies ahead:

like some whirling snow-wind is the trailer bonnet of a Painted Arrow* warrior, streaming straight out behind him as he gallops toward us on a fine brown horse, upraising a long lance decorated with streamers of red trade cloth; he wears a great white rectangle of bone beads across his chest and he is coming to kill us—

all the same, Lean Elk has uplifted our hearts; he has led us to a place where we have found our way:

we shall now ride upriver to the trail called Narrow Solid Rock Pass on the south shore of the Tongue Water; then we shall cross the Swift Water and pass quickly through the Country of the Crows, whose hearts no longer open to ours. But the Buffalo Country has no end; even before the Cave of Red Paint we shall be resting and wandering as we used to do,

just for awhile, before we ride to Sitting Bull.

And now all the berries are ripe, but we have lost our cedarbark baskets on the way,

and although the Medicine women are singing over her, blowing her sickness far from us, Mourning Dove cannot live anymore, so we bury her in her ragged blanket, and Tuk-le-kas rings the small bell.