NO EARS DECIDED HE HAD TRAVELED FAR ENOUGH WITH the whites. Blue’s wife, the half-Cree woman, fed him several tasty biscuits and some more buttermilk. With the North Star still bright in the heavens, he left to walk down to the Little Bighorn, but when he got there he changed his mind about looking up the Cheyenne. Some of them talked too much—and the Crow talked even more. In No Ears’s opinion both the Crow and the Cheyenne ought to move south, far from the Greasy Grass; then perhaps they wouldn’t bore their guests with endless talk of Custer.
He himself had no regard for Custer or for any white soldiers; he was happy enough that Gall and the others had killed him and all his men; but it was easily possible to make too much of such a victory. What was one battle to the grass, which had swallowed the men’s blood at once and their bones within a few months? The grass forgot the dead it took; probably the ocean, the great plain of water, forgot those it swallowed, too. It was silly of men to suppose they would be remembered long, once the earth or the sea had taken them. The Greasy Grass had swallowed Custer as easily as the gray ocean had swallowed the foolish elk that jumped off the English boat.
No Ears traveled on south, avoiding men. He was not in the mood for silliness, and where men went there was likely to be silliness. Traveling alone, he could devote himself to watching birds fly; lately he had become more interested in plants, though for most of his life he had not been a student of plants. The most interesting question about plants was why some of them chose to grow underground, although most preferred to reach upward toward the sun. What were the ones that grew downward trying to reach? Could there be an underground sun?
It was while he was thinking about plants that No Ears noticed the sage bush for the third time. Once again, without thinking, he had wandered back to Crazy Woman Creek. No Ears knew that this return was bad news; his thoughts were no longer working as they should, or he would not have done such a foolish and dangerous thing.
No cranes were in the creek, but that in itself was not enough to reassure him; their tracks were there in the mud. No Ears decided to pull up the dangerous sage bush at once. He seized it with both hands and did his best, but it would not come up. The sage bush was stronger than he was; he broke off a few branches, but he could not pull it up—it wouldn’t leave its place in the ground. No Ears grew angry at himself and at the bush. He had been foolish to return, but the sage bush didn’t need to be so stubborn either. He hacked at it a bit with his knife, but his anger had tired him; it left him exhausted and distracted. He began to wish Martha Jane was there, or Bartle, to help him remove the stubborn, offensive sage bush; even if they didn’t succeed they could help him watch for the cranes. But he grew more and more tired; his hacking at the bush had seemed to such away his breath. When he stretched out to sleep, he put on his one wax ear and tried to position himself so he could hear the great wings if they came. It occurred to him too late that he had made another mistake on Crazy Woman Creek: the cranes had only wanted Jim Ragg—it was the sage bush itself that wanted him. It had wanted him badly enough to call him back a third time. He felt very foolish; all his life he had made little effort to understand plants, and now a stubborn one had caused him to use himself up. He crawled away from the bush for many yards until he was too weak to crawl any farther; then he lay on his back looking upward until the dark sky sucked the last of his breath.