––––––––
THE point at which we had been sitting separated the bottom in which our lodge was pitched from that in which the war party was traveling, so they could not have seen us even had they been out of the timber. On our way up across the bottom we rounded up the horse herd and drove it before us, and as we approached the lodge my father called out: "Hurry! Help catch the saddle and pack-animals! A war party is near."
But sensing danger from our rushing in with the herd, my mother and sister were already coming to meet us with the ropes, and we soon caught out and conveniently tied for saddling the number wanted. While we were doing that my father explained the approach of the war party in the bottom below.
"Don't get excited," he said; "unless there are scouts ahead of the party, we have time to pack up everything and make our escape. I leave you to do the packing, while I go down to the lower end of the bottom and stand watch." And with that he re-slung his bow case and quiver, took his gun, and rode off.
Never did a lodge come down quicker than ours. My mother pulled the front fastenings while I raised the pegs around it, and while I pulled off the lodge skin and folded it, she bunched the poles and attached them to the two horses that dragged the sixteen slender sticks. Sister, meantime, was busy with the parfleches, refilling them with the food and other things — not many — that had been taken out for use. And in a very short time we had the last pack fastened and got into our saddles.
Evidently there were no scouts ahead of the party, or, if there were, they had passed on the opposite side of the river and had not noticed us. My father, down at the end of the bottom, had been keeping an eye on us as well as watching for the approach of the enemy, and when we mounted our animals he came to us on a swift lope.
"All is well. We are mounted and the enemy, afoot, cannot harm us," he said. "Woman mine, and you, Nitaki, strike out across the bottom and up the valley slope, and from the rim go straight out on the plain. Keep your animals at a good trot. We shall follow with the herd. As soon as it is dark we will turn and go east, and then into the river and make camp."
The sun had already set. As we climbed the slope the night came fast. We kept looking back into the bottom for sight of the enemy, but they did not appear, and as we neared the top of the slope, the rim of the valley, this worried my father.
"It may be," he said, "that instead of following the river they cut up on to the point and are even now waiting for us there on top. You drive the herd, my son, and I will go on ahead until we are well out on the plain."
The slope was quite steep on its upper reach and the horses had slowed down to a walk. My mother, in the lead, was quite near the rim when my father started ahead, making his big and powerful horse take the hill on the jump despite its steepness. He was almost abreast the lead when there suddenly sprang up in sight on the rim the whole line of the enemy, and with dreadful yells they fired down at us with their bows and four guns.
At that one of the horses in the lead gave a strange, almost human cry of pain, and dropped, and even in the excitement of the time I noticed that it was the one that carried my father's sacred pipe, his war finery, and medicine sacks. I should have told you before that he was a medicine man and owner of the Thunder Pipe and all the mysteries that go with it.
When the stricken pack-horse was hit, so, an instant later, was my sister, an arrow whizzing into the fleshy part of her left arm above the elbow. She also gave a terrible shriek, and my mother cried out: "Oh, my daughter! She is shot! She dies! Take me, too, oh, enemies!"
"Hush! She lives. Turn, both of you, back down the hill," my father shouted, and fired his gun at the enemy, now rushing down at us.
Most of the herd was already stampeding. As we turned the also frightened and willing pack-animals after them and lashed our horses to a lope, more arrows showered among us and some of the enemy closed in, and, swinging lariats, attempted to catch here and there a horse. Strangely enough, not a single noose fell over the head of an animal, and before the throwers could recover their ropes for another cast we were well away from them and fast leaving them behind.
Back down into the valley we rushed the herd and then, at my father's shouted commands, up the length of it, then across the river and out on the plains of the north side.
There, at my mother's call, we halted; while she quickly did what she could for my sister, snapping the arrow shaft in two and withdrawing it from the wound, which she bound with a soft piece of buckskin. And through it all, painful as it was, Nitaki never once cried out or flinched.
My mother, however, was in tears as she worked, and kept crying out to my father: "Oh, my man! See! Just see what your willfulness, your hard-mindedness has done. And this is but the beginning of bad luck. Know you that the Thunder Pipe – all your medicines—are in the hands of the enemy?"
"Yes, I know it," my father answered, and was silent.
We knew how he felt. This was a terrible loss, a loss affecting us all: without this medium of prayer, favored by the sun and all the gods, of what avail would be our sacrifices, our prayers for help, for safety from the enemy, for long life and happiness?
"I have to recover that pipe! Oh, I just have to recover it!" my father exclaimed, as we mounted and rode on.
"You can never do it," my mother told him.
"Yes, I can," he confidently answered. "That is an Assiniboine war party, on a raid against the Pikuni no doubt. If your people don't discover them, they will be back in their camp by the end of this moon. It is there that I shall go for the pipe, once you and the children are safe with the Gros Ventres."
My mother made no answer to that. My own thought was that my father was talking very big: one could go into an enemy's camp in the night and sneak out horses, but to find, among several hundred, the one lodge in which was the pipe and then take it, that was surely the impossible.
Said my mother now: "My man, here is your chance to get back the pipe and at the same time do much good: let us turn straight home and warn our people of the approach of this war party. And you will have but to make the call, and enough warriors will gather to enable you to wipe out the war party, every last man, and get the pipe."
"Call the Pikuni your people if you will. They are not my people: I don't care if they lose all their horses," he answered.
And, oh, how that answer hurt us!
For more than half the night we traveled far out on the plain eastward, then turned southeastwards and after a time struck the river. There we packed the horses in a big cottonwood grove, tied up some of them, hobbled others, and then made down our beds and slept.
With the first faint light of the new day, without eating, we packed up and went on and on down the valley, and not until the sun was straight over our heads did we stop to eat and rest for a time.
It was late in the day when we came to the junction of the Teton and Marias Rivers, crossed both streams, and went on down the big berry-brush bottom of the Missouri. Nearing the lower end of it we heard the sound of an axe in the big cottonwood grove there, and as we pulled up our horses and listened, a tall tree trembled at the top, and then went crashing to the ground.
"Ha! That was white man's work," said my father. "An Indian would never cut down a big, green, and useless tree. "
We rode on, then, turning in toward the river, and not at all afraid, for white men never fought the plains people unless first attacked. We soon came close to the big grove, and just this side of it, in a clear, grassy space near the river, saw many white men at work putting up the walls of a large log house. Right near it was a great quantity of trade goods in boxes, barrels, and sacks, and tied to the bank of the river were three large boats in which all the stuff had been brought up.
As we sat motionless on our horses looking intently at the strange scene, one of the white men made signs for us to ride in. As we neared the place he advanced and met us, shook my father's hand, and in signs invited us to dismount and camp with him. He was a rather slender, not tall, very fine-looking man, smooth-faced, long-haired, and dressed all in blue, with many large bright shining buttons on his long-bailed coat. On his feet were beautifully embroidered moccasins, and when my father noticed them, the pattern of the porcupine quill work, he smiled happily, and jumped from his horse and shook hands again, and said to us: "This can be no other than the trader with the Earth House People, of whom we have so often heard." And in signs he asked him if it were not so?
"Yes, I am that man," he signed; and added: "Come; come with me to my lodge."
We followed him into the timber and to a big, fine lodge from which stepped a smiling, beautifully dressed, handsome young woman and made signs to us to dismount; her lodge was our lodge, she said.
Need I say more, my son? Yes, these were no other than Ki-pah and Sah-kwi-ah-ki, father and mother of your own close friend, Raven Quiver. Ki-pah — he is gone. And Sah-kwi-ah-ki — there she sits beside you, my son, and gray is her head and wrinkled her face, like mine. Oh, the dead and gone years—the happy, happy years of our youth! Sah-kwi-ah-ki, true friend mine, oh, that the gods would give us back those years!
Well, my son, we went into the lodge and feasted upon buffalo meat and white men's food. Boiled beans were placed before us, the first I ever saw. I liked them. After we had feasted we went out and set up our own lodge and then went out to watch the strange work of these white men. Twice in my life I had been to the fort of the Red Coats, in the North, but never before had any of us seen the Long Knife white men. Some of our people, however, had traded with them at their fort at the mouth of the Yellowstone, the one in the village of the Earth House People, — as you say, the Mandans, — and it was at this last place that they had met Ki-pah and Sah-kwi-ah-ki. Him they liked best of all the Long Knives. They told much of his kindness to them, and of the presents he and another, a painter, had given them. The painter, they said, had made pictures of Bull's-Back-Fat, and of Eagle Ribs, Northern brothers of ours, so lifelike that the pictures could not be told from the men. These first Long Knives to come into the country were clean men, my son. They took pride in their appearance. They were always smooth-faced; they wore their hair long and well combed; they dressed in neat blanket capotex, and blanket trousers, except their chiefs, who always wore blue cloth clothing with many bright buttons. And they were ever polite to us. These who now swarm into our country,—hairy-faced, rough-headed, greasy, and bad-mannered,—the very sight of their hair-covered faces makes us sick.
It was on the day after our arrival there that the Long Knives finished one room of their fort and placed in it the trade goods they had brought up river from the big fort at the mouth of the Yellowstone. Long, long we gazed at the beautiful and useful things displayed on the shelves and walls of that room: fine blankets, bolts of red and blue cloth, beads, bracelets and ear-rings, paints, needles, awls, fire steels, and knives, guns and pistols, pots and dishes and cups of hard metal, beaver traps and saddles.
My father could not keep his eyes off those saddles. Of black, shiny leather were they made, horn and cantle and stirrups studded with large-headed brass nails. They were beautiful saddles; and so made that they would not chafe a horse's back.
"How much for one of them?" my father asked Ki-pah.
"Twenty skins," meaning beaver-skins, of course.
Said my father: "I have no skins, but I have four traps that I got from the Red Coat traders of the North. I will trap twenty skins with which to buy one."
Ki-pah gave him two traps. "I make you a present of them. With six traps you will soon get you a number of skins," he said.
There were beaver dens and slides all up and down the banks of the Big River and the Marias. My father and I went first over on the smaller stream and set the traps, and the next morning found four beavers in them. We quickly reset the traps, and skinned the animals and went home. There my mother and Nitaki fleshed the hides and stretched them on willow hoops to dry.
On the seventh morning we came home with five skins: "There, I now have twenty-three skins. As soon as they are dry I will trade them for a saddle for myself, and a white blanket for you, woman mine," said my father.
"Man mine, you shall do neither," said my mother. "With these skins, and more, if necessary, we must buy a gun for Black Otter."
My father turned to her in surprise. "Why, he is only a boy. Boys don't have guns," he told her.
"Well, this boy shall have one," she answered, "even if I have to trade some of my horses for it. He has handled a man's bow and with it saved his sister's life. If he can use a bow he can use a gun. Don't forget what you have done, my man: you have taken us away from our people, from the safety of the big camp. We need all the protection we can get."
"But he has not yet obtained his medicine. He is too young—"
"He shall get his medicine at once," my mother broke in. "If he is too young to face the enemy— well, who forces him to do it, I'd like to know?"
"Oh, well, as you say, so shall it be," my father answered.
He wasn't a stingy man; he was just thoughtless; and in most things he took my mother's advice. As soon as the last skins of the catch were dry, we gave them to Ki-pah for a gun and a white blanket for my mother. And with the gun Ki-pah gave four cups of powder, one hundred balls, and two extra flints. The gun was a flintlock, of course; smooth-bored, and brass-trimmed. And wasn't I a proud boy when it was put into my hands!
Ki-pah himself taught me how to load it, and gave me a little metal powder measure: "Never put in more powder than it will hold, or you will likely burst the barrel," he told me.
Toward evening of that day my mother went to visit with Sah-kwi-ah-ki. My father was with the white men. Nitaki and I sat in our lodge, she making a head of horse-tail hair for a new leather doll, and I happy with my gun in my lap. I couldn't set it away at the head of my couch; I just had to keep my hands on it all the time. I wanted to shoot it; to see something fall when it bellowed. "Come on, sister, we will go get some meat," I said at last; and with her arms full of dolls she followed me out into the timber.
We went clear to the lower end of the long bottom, and there hid in the thick willows bordering the shore of the Big River. Not ten steps below us was a big, well-used, dusty game trail that ran from the high plains down the valley slope and through the timber to the water's edge; I was sure that meat of some kind would soon be coming along it to drink.
In a little while Nitaki nudged me: "Did you hear that?" she whispered.
"No."
"A stick cracked back in the timber," she said.
I felt ashamed that I had not heard it. I was the hunter, I should have heard it. I listened more intently and heard nothing — neither of us heard the footsteps of the big bull elk that soon appeared walking along the trail. His new fuzz-covered horns were no longer than the length of my hand; his winter coat of hair hung to the new growth in faded, rough patches; he was thin-fleshed, of course. But so was all the game in the New-Grass Moon: we had to eat poor meat.
Oh, yes, I was excited, and so was Nitaki. We stared open-mouthed at that oncoming elk. I could feel Nitaki, pressing against my back, trembling with excitement. My heart beat so fast that it made my already raised gun wobble. I seemed to be able to sight it at anything but the big body of the animal.
I gripped it more tightly, held my breath, and aimed as well as I could, and pulled the trigger. The flint clicked against the pan; the powder in it hissed and flamed; and then the barrel spit out black smoke and boomed. The elk flinched back, sprang high from the ground, and when he came down rushed straight for the river, Nitaki and I fast after him, she dropping her dolls along the way, in my excitement forgetting the greatest rule for the hunter, which is, reload the gun, fit a fresh arrow to the bow, before breaking cover.
But this time there was no need to reload the gun. I dropped it. The elk leaped out across the sands and fell into the river with a big splash. Nitaki and I ran after him, waded and half-swam out until we could get hold of his heels, and we had a fight with the swift current in towing him back to the shore. We could not drag the big, heavy body out on the sand, but we did manage to get it out from the pull of the current, and then Nitaki threw her arms around me and kissed me. "Meat-getter!" she called me, and kissed me again, and I was very proud of what I had done.
We had no knife. Dripping wet from head to foot we started home and met my father and Ki-pah, hurrying for the lower end of the bottom whence had come the sound of my shot. We led them back to the shore and showed them the elk, and while they butchered it my father praised my good shot, and scolded me for leaving camp without him: war parties were too many, he said, for children to be wandering away from camp.
So it was that I first fired a gun, and with the first shot made a killing.
We were now trapping more beavers, in order to get enough skins for one of the black leather saddles. Ki-pah offered to give my father one if he would go tell the Pikuni to trade no more with the Red Coats of the North and bring their beaver and other furs to him. My father refused to do that, of course, explaining that he had forever parted from our people, and giving his reason for leaving them.
Ki-pah closely watched him as he told it, then shook his head and signed: "You are making a great mistake. Cast off the anger in your heart and go back to your people. Yes, they whipped you, but you deserved the whipping. You broke the hunting law."
"They should not have whipped me," my father signed, so angrily and quickly that his hands worked almost too fast for the eyes to follow; "I fed widows and their children. I went first in battle against the enemy."
"Yes, and you should have been for that very reason first to obey the laws that your ancient, wise fathers made," the trader told him.
My father made no answer to that. He drew his robe closely around him and walked away, and for several days spoke very little to any of us. After he had got over his anger my mother again proposed to him that I should get my medicine. He agreed to it, and we all went out from camp to look for a good place for me to do my fasting.
We rode all around on the valley slopes of both rivers and found no sheltered spot. Then, coming down the Marias on our way back to camp, my father decided that the only thing to do was to build a resting-place for me in a tree. My mother objected that that would be too much like burying me. Our people, you know, place their dead on scaffolds built in trees. "But so much the better," my father told her. "To get his medicine, one must have to do with the mysteries of the other world; with death itself. It is when the body is, for the time, dead, and the shadow wanders, that one gets his medicine. Yes, his fasting-place shall be in a tree."
We soon found the very tree for our purpose: a cottonwood with low, wide-spreading big limbs, and handy to camp, yet so far from it that I should not be disturbed by the noise made by the white men fort builders. My mother and sister were a whole day fixing a place in it for me. Between two big limbs they laid and firmly lashed a long, wide scaffoId of poles; laid a soft bed of buffalo robes on it; and over it stretched a part of an old lodge skin to shelter me from rain and sun heat. It was near sunset when I climbed to the scaffold, lay down with my gun at my side, and drew a robe over me.
"Pray! Pray continually to the gods for help," my father told me. "Pray to the creatures of earth, and air, and water. And I will pray to them for you. Oh, that I now had my medicine pipe!"
"Sister and I will come daily with water," my mother said.
And with that they all left me to my dreams, and went home.
Night came on. I was hungry, but not sleepy. I thought that I should not be able to sleep, all was so strange to me; so different from any other night. Never before had I slept alone outside a lodge. Never before had there been so many mysterious noises of the night.
Owls hooted all around me. "O Big Ears!" I prayed, "be my secret helper, my medicine, one of you."
All up and down the valley and along the rim of the plains wolves called one another for the evening hunt. "O wise ones, best of hunters, sure meat-getters, help me! Be good to my shadow as it goes forth on discovery this night," I prayed them.
Also I prayed to all the unseen ones who flitted around me on almost noiseless wings; who rustled and pattered about on the dead leaves of dead and vanished summers. As my father had directed, I prayed to all the living things of the air, the earth, and the deep waters. And then I tried to sleep, but sleep would not come.
Some deer or elk passed close under my tree, stopping here and there to nip off new shoots of brush. Not long after they had gone, another animal came along with almost silent tread, and much snuffling and champing of the jaws. That I knew was a bear; probably a big long-claw, a real bear. But I was not afraid. That kind, killer of people, could not harm me. Only the black bears could climb trees, and they were great cowards: even when wounded they would run from man.
As I could not sleep, I began praying again, calling upon every kind of creature for help.
And then I suddenly stopped and listened: other prowlers of the night — a great herd of them, judging by their footfalls—were coming. Right under my tree they stopped and began talking. Not Pikuni, nor Gros Ventre, nor Crow; I had heard those languages. "They are — they must be — Assiniboines," I thought.
On either side of me was a big pole lashed there for the purpose of keeping me from rolling out of my bed when asleep. I leaned out over the outer one, scared though I was, and tried to see the talkers.