Little Big Man

I’d sooner have made my bed in a campfire. But Old Lodge Skins pointed out that the warriors was all miles upstream, and the women and children had got finished with most of their mutilating and stripping the bodies on the evening before, so it would be quiet there, and I could put on a buffalo hat like Younger Bear’s and leather shirt and leggings, painting my face. Not to mention I would be with him.

Well, them wives of his helped me into the new getup, cutting down an extra pair of the chief’s leggings, and a couple little kids was also there, his I reckon and only six-seven years old and him at least ninety by now, and I needed a breechclout, so one of them women handed me a company guidon of the Seventh Cavalry, which was a swallowtailed version of the Star and Stripes. I am happy to report for the sake of fellow patriots that I never employed it for this purpose. I don’t curse in front of ladies and don’t degrade the national colors, not even in an emergency: I used my old bandanna.

But those wives had got into the spirit of the thing now, giggling away as they disguised me as a proper savage, dropping necklaces and such over my head, and finally they come with a beaded belt to which they had just tied a number of fresh scalps.

I says, “No, no!” And they pushed it at me, with magpie noises, and my hand struck against one skull-cover, and it was real black and woolly of texture, and I caught it and held it up, asking: “Where did you get this?”

Traded it, they says, for a blond one which Younger Bear had give them, to a Hunkpapa Sioux who fought upstream in the valley against the first bluecoat attack.

I don’t know if you can appreciate what it feels like to hold the scalp of a friend.

“It came,” says the fattest wife, “from a Black White Man whom the Hunkpapa recognized as a person who once lived with his tribe and married a Lakota woman. ‘What are you doing here?’ asked the Hunkpapa in surprise. ‘I don’t know,’ the Black White Man said. His horse had thrown him and he was lying on the ground with a broken leg, his rifle some distance away. ‘Well, you were shooting at us, so I think I should kill you,’ said the Hunkpapa. ‘I think you should,’ said the Black White Man, so the Hunkpapa did.”

Even so, I reckon it was better than working your life long as a yardman back in Missouri.

Taking Old Lodge Skin’s arm, I left the tepee and walked through the Cheyenne camp towards the ford, which was not far, for the Minneconjou village was just next door. As the chief said, all the warriors was up at the current battle and nobody was around but women, children, and aged men sitting in the sunlight and chewing their toothless gums. Some of the women was working as usual, but others was loudly mourning their dead husbands, sons, and brothers, for the Indians had lost some men themselves, only they didn’t count them: maybe forty or fifty. They had erected a funeral tepee in the Cheyenne camp, with the bodies inside on scaffolds, and killed a number of horses, arranging the carcasses outside like spokes of a wheel.

The youngsters was playing in the sunshine. I seen a boy that had a little toy horse made from dried clay, and it wore a curious saddle blanket, a folded U.S. greenback. There was also other Seventh Cavalry souvenirs in evidence: one woman wore a blue jacket with a corporal’s chevrons, some other kids was skimming a campaign hat through the air, and lying on the ground at one point was a pair of Army underdrawers, which had the name of the late owner stenciled across the waist. Further on, a shirt stiff as parchment from dried gore, torn canvas cartridge belts, discarded boots. Near to the ford the volume of this stuff increased, and small boys was watering pony herds there, among them a few big bays and sorrels with the conspicuous brand “7USC.”

Nobody paid mind to us, not even among the Minneconjou women who was washing clothes in the Little Bighorn, and me and Old Lodge Skins entered the river, fast-flowing and waist-deep, and waded across. I have mentioned my outfit, but not his: the chief had donned his full war bonnet of eagle feathers, which was a little moth-eaten if you examined it close but for all that a magnificent piece of headgear, each plume tipped with a puff of white down and little round mirrors at the temples, and trailing a long tail of more feathers which brushed the earth back of his heels. His face was painted crimson, and yellow lightning flashed across the cheeks. In one hand he carried a large bow, a special one, unstrung and with an iron lancehead affixed to one end. In his other hand he had that old medicine bundle I remembered from the Washita and further back: its skin wrappings was rotting away to dust in one corner and a bird-foot good-luck charm was protruding. I kept an eye on it but did not poke it back, for you wasn’t supposed to touch another’s medicine nor even know what it consisted of.