I I A one-room log cabin, with an indolently smoking chimney, squatted in sullen destitution a hundred yards away. Before the door a ramshackle wagon stood waiting for nothing with its load of snow. Down yonder in the brushy draw an all-but-roofless shed stared listlessly upon the dull February sky. With a man-denying look, the empty reservation landscape round about lay hushed and bluing in the cold.
Raising the flap of the tepee, with its rusty stovepipe thrust through its much-patched canvas, I stooped in a puff of pleasant warmth and entered, placing my last armload of cottonwood chunks behind the sheet-iron stove.
The old man threw back his blankets and sat up cross-legged upon the cowhide robes that served for bed, his gray hair straggling thinly to his shoulders about an aquiline face that had been handsome, surely, before time carved it to the bone.
“Palamo yelo, Kola,” he said cheerily, as he fumbled in his long leather tobacco sack; “Thank you, friend. Now we can be warm and smoke together. You shall be my grandson, Wasichu* though you are; for it is no man’s fault how he is born, and your heart is as much Lakota† as mine.
“It will be good to remember, as you wish. The story that I have will make me young again a little while, and you shall put it down there in your tongue as I could say it if your tongue were mine. Too many snows are heavy on my back, and when I walk, as you have seen, I am like an old three-legged horse, all bone and hide and always looking for the grass that used to be.”
Eagle Voice chuckled at his picture of himself.
“But it is only my body that stoops, remembering the mother ground,” he continued, “for I can feel my spirit standing tall above the snows and grasses that have been, and seeing much of good and evil days. There are battles to be fought, and ponies to be stolen, and coups to be counted. And there is happy hunting when the bison herds were wide as day, and meat was plenty, and the earth stayed young. That was before the rivers of Wasichus came in flood and made it old and shut us in these barren little islands where we wait and wait for yesterday. And there are visions to be seen again and voices to be heard from beyond the world. And far away on the other side of the great water towards the sunrise where I went when I was young, there are strange things to be remembered, strange ways, strange faces. And yonder there is a woman’s face, white and far away; and if it is good or bad I do not know. I remember, and am a boy in the night when the moon makes all the hills and valleys so that he wants to sing; but something afraid is hiding in the shadows.”
The old man lit the pipe and his lean cheeks hollowed with a long draw upon the stem. The brooding face went dim behind a slowly emitted cloud of smoke, to emerge presently, shining with a merry light.
“Washtay!” he exclaimed, with a look of triumph; “Lela washtay!”
“What is very good, Grandfather?” I asked.
“It is what I see clearer than all the rest,” he answered, passing the pipe to me; “and that is very strange, for many things were bigger long ago.”
He thought awhile, a slow smile spreading until, with a look grotesquely young, he fell to giggling like a mischievous boy. Then his face went sober, and fixing serious eyes upon me he said with great dignity and deliberation:
“It is just a little girl I see, my grandson. I used to be her horse.”
His only response to my laughter was a deeper crinkling about the mock-serious eyes.
“Yes, I used to be her horse, and I will tell you how it was.”
It might have seemed that he had changed the subject abruptly when he began again, talking eagerly; but I knew that I had only to wait for the connection.
“In the old days, before the hoop of our people was broken, the grandfathers and grandmothers did not just sit and think about the time when things were better, even if they were old as I am. Maybe a man was so bent and stiff that he could not hunt or fight any more and maybe he could hardly chew his meat; but he had happy work to do, because there were always little boys who had to learn how to be good hunters and brave warriors; and he would teach them and tell them stories that were teaching too. When I listened to my grandfather I used to think and think about how tall men were when he was young. I remember the first bow and arrows he made me and how he taught me to grasp the bow—like this; and put the arrow on the string—like this; and pull with the fingers—like this; and let the arrow fly—so—whang! And I remember the day when I came home with my first kill, and he laughed hard and said he could see already that I was going to be a great hunter and a great warrior. I wondered why he laughed, but I thought maybe it was because he was so glad.
“It was just a little bird, but it was a bison bull anyway, and I was more surprised than my grandfather was. For I had been shooting at rabbits in the brush along the creek for a long time, and even when I hit them, they would just wiggle their white rumps at me and hop away. When my grandmother saw the bird, she did not laugh at all. She just said, ‘hm-m-m,’ high up in her nose, like that; for she was even more surprised than my grandfather. Then she told my mother we would have to make a victory feast for this young man; and it was so, because grandmother said it. She invited some old women and old men to come over and eat; and when they came into our tepee and saw the little bird lying there, they all said, ‘hm-m-m,’ high up in their noses. And while we were eating they made me stand up and tell just how I did it; and so I did, like a great warrior making a kill-talk after a victory. Then the women all made the tremolo with their hands upon their mouths—so—and the men cried, ‘hi-yay-ay.’
“And maybe there was an old grandmother who was getting fat and heavy because she could not chop much wood any more or carry much water; but she could peg down green hides and tan them with ashes, and sit down and beat them until they were very soft. And her hands were never still, for there were always moccasins to make and warm things of deer-hide for the winter, all fine with beads and porcupine quills.
“Or maybe there was meat to be cut in long thin strips and hung on the drying racks—such thin strips that it was just like unwinding a bundle of meat, around and around. The women used to hold their strips up, to see whose was longest; and the strips my grandmother cut were always a little thinner and longer than the others.
“And maybe there was going to be a new baby in a tepee, and it would need a good start in this life; for it is not easy to live on this earth. So the parents would think of two women who were good and wise and nobody could say anything bad about them. They would be grandmothers, for who can be wise and young too? And the parents would ask these old women to come over and help the baby. So they would come when it was the right time. And when the baby was brought forth in this world, the first grandmother would cut and tie the cord. Then she would clean out the baby’s mouth with her forefinger, and when she did that her good spirit would get into the baby so that it would be like her.
“Then the second grandmother would take some of the inside bark of the chokecherry that had been soaked and pounded soft, and with this she would wash the baby; and if it was a girl she would say to it: ‘I am a good woman; I have worked hard; I have raised a family; and I always tried to get along with everybody. You must always try to do the same way.’ After that she would make it dry and rub it all over with grease and red paint, because red is a sacred color. Then she would take some soft powder that she had made by powdering dry buffalo chips and she would put this in a piece of hide that had been tanned very soft and fasten it around the baby’s rump, so that it could be kept dry and clean.
“And always there were little girls who had to learn how to be good women; and a grandmother would teach them, because she had been a woman so long that she knew how better than her daughters did; and, anyway, everything was done better when she was young.
“The first thing this grandmother gave to a little girl was a deer-hide pouch with everything in it that a woman needs to make a home—a knife, an awl, a bone needle, and some fine sinew for sewing. And she would say, ‘You must always keep this with you whatever happens and never let it go if you want to be a real woman and good for something. With this you can always make a home.’ It was the way a grandfather gave a little boy a bow and arrows, a knife, and a rawhide rope for taming horses.
“And when a little girl was still so little that she could not yet do much with a knife or needle, the grandmother would teach her the rolling game. There was a stick about as long as my finger with three short twigs on one end so that it would stand up; and the little girl had to roll a small round stone at this to knock it over. It was very hard to do, and she had to keep on trying and trying, so that she learned to be patient like a good woman.
“Then when the little girl was big enough, her grandmother taught her how to make a tepee cover out of hide, and how to set it up with the tepee poles fixed together at the top just so; and how to set the smoke-flap at the peak to suit the wind and make a fire burn without smoking the people out; and how to take the tepee down quickly and put it on a pony-drag in a hurry, if there should be an attack and the women had to run away with the children and the ponies while the men were fighting.
“The little girls used to get together and play village, with their tepees all set in a circle, just right, with the opening to the place where you are always looking [the south]; and there were buckskin dolls stuffed with grass for children; and the little boys played they were chiefs and councilors and warriors. Of course, there had to be horses.”
The old man sat chuckling for a while before he continued.
“I think I was about eight years old that time, and I was getting big fast, for my grandfather would let me have some sharp arrows if I would be careful, and I had killed a rabbit already—maybe two. Many of our people were camped not far from the soldiers’ town on Duck River [Fort Laramie]. It was summer, and there was big trouble coming. The old people were all talking about the bad Wasichus and how they were crazy again because they had found gold in our country; and they wanted to make a road through it and scare all the bison away, and then maybe we would all starve. It was the time just before Red Cloud went to war, and the people were camped there waiting to see what would happen.
“We little Oglala boys were playing killing-all-the-soldiers; but we got tired doing that, because nobody wanted to be a soldier, and we had to kill people who were not there at all. And one of the boys said, ‘Let us quit killing soldiers. They are all dead anyway, and they are no good. The Miniconjou girls and boys have got a village over there. Let us charge upon them and steal all their horses!’ So we all cried, ‘hi-yay,’ and began to get ready for the charge with our bows and blunt arrows and old sunflower stalks for spears.
“And when we had crawled up on our bellies as close to the village as we could get without being seen by the enemy, we leaped up and cried ‘hoka-hey’ all together and charged on the village.
“It was a big fight, a big noise. We could have won a victory, because we all said that one Oglala boy was better than two or three Miniconjous; but some of the bigger boys over there got after us, and we had to run.
“And while I was running, I looked back over my shoulder to see how big a boy was chasing me. And it was not a big boy or even a little boy. It was a girl—a pretty little girl—but she looked terrible with her hair all over her head in the wind she made with her running; and she was yelling and swinging a rawhide rope while she ran. I was longer legged than she was, but she caught me around the neck with her rope anyway. Maybe all at once I wanted to be caught. And she said, ‘You bad boy! You are just a shonka-’kan [horse], and you are going to pull my tepee.’
“So I let her lead me back to her village; and all the Miniconjou boys poked their fingers at me and yelled and wanted to charge me and coup me; but she picked up a stick and yelled back at them, ‘You leave my horse alone or I will hit you.’ And, of course, if I was a horse I wasn’t a warrior any more.
“So I got down on my hands and knees and she hitched the drag-poles on me and packed her tepee on them. And when I snorted and pranced, she petted me on the rump and sang to me, so that I was as tame as the other little hoys who were being horses too and helping to, move camp away from the enemy country.”
For a while, Eagle Voice seemed to have forgotten me, gazing over my head with a faraway illuminated look. Then he spoke slowly in a low voice as though talking to himself:
‘Tashina Wan-blee [Her Eagle Robe]. She was a pretty little girl. I liked to play over there; and she said I was the best horse she ever had.”
Then, becoming aware of me again, he continued, chuckling: “But one day I got tired of playing horse; so I stood up on my hind legs and I said: ‘When I get just a little bigger I am going to marry you, and you are going to be my woman.’ And she stuck her tongue out at me and said: ‘You are only a shonka-’kan. Go and eat grass!’ ”
The old man’s laughter trailed off into silence and the boy look went away.
* Here the word signifies white man; but see page 36.
† Sioux.