Little Big Man

What could be seen from the knoll was as follows: a couple of dozen hide tepees, pitched on the right bank of the stream. In the meadow beyond, a pony herd of some thirty head. In the water itself, a number of giggling, bare-arsed brown children slapping water at one another. A bunch of able-bodied young men sitting around smoking and fanning themselves with eagle feathers, a few others strutting up and down wearing finery before a group of womenfolk pounding something on the ground. A couple of young girls towing in from the prairie a buffalo robe full of the stacked dry dung of the same animal, the so-called chips used for fuel on the plains being there was little wood available. A heavy-set female chewing soft a hunk of hide. Others going for water and hauling bundles and mending lodge skins and making moccasins, sewing leggings, fringing shirts, marrowing bones, grinding berries, stitching beads, and the rest of the duties to which an Indian woman gives herself from dawn until she lies on her robe at night and her man mounts her.

As we come down to the creek nobody in camp paid the slightest notice, but when Burns Red in the Sun, who rode last, splashed across with the antelope slung behind, it created quite a stir among the women. I found out later that band hadn’t had a bite of meat for about ten days and was feeding on prairie turnips and old rawhide and considering the chewing of grasshoppers like the Paiutes, which to an Indian is about as low as you can get. This was in late spring, when in those days the plains were ordinarily hairy with buffalo, and if you recall, the grass on the hill near the water hole had been beaten down by a great herd. Yet Old Lodge Skins’s bunch hadn’t ate flesh for more than a week. That’s what I mean about their bad luck.

Now a special mention to their dogs. Little as the band was, they had thirty or more mongrels, the prevailing color of which was pus-yellow though every other hue was also represented, including a good many of the spotted variety. This crowd kept up a constant din at all times, snarling, barking, howling, quarreling among themselves, so that they were generally worthless as watchmen, even in the nights, which they would spend answering the coyotes who wailed from the bluffs while the Pawnee snuck in and cut out a dozen ponies without drawing a growl.

These dogs met us at the creek, swarming among the horses’ legs and jumping at the antelope’s head as it swung lifeless above them. But they was also wary of the rawhide quirt strapped to Burns Red’s left wrist, which he flicked negligently at them like a horse scattering flies with his tail, so though they clamored and snapped their fangs, they didn’t actually bite nothing. The secret to enduring an Indian dog is to ignore his noise; he hasn’t got much worse. I didn’t learn that right off, and had some bad times, as right now: there was one dirty white dog, with red eyes and a slavering mouth, who decided to give me his preference over the antelope carcass. He crouched below our pony’s left haunch, and while studying my face, slowly rolled back his upper lip at the same time as his lower jaw fell away, making all in all a very savage exhibition of yellow ivory. Caroline had to elbow me in the ribs so as to draw breath, I was hugging her that tight.

“Now don’t shame me before our friends, Jack,” said she, straining to smile at the Cheyenne women crowding round, none of whom however give us yet a glance. I believe at that point Caroline had already begun to lose her nerve. I don’t know what exactly she had thought she was getting into, but at the first sight of an Indian camp the stoutest heart is likely to quail. Without experience of them, you tend to think: well, I see their dump, but where’s the town? And the smell alone is very queer: it isn’t precisely a stench as white people know one, but a number of stinks melding together into a sort of invisible fog that replaces the air, so that with every breath you draw in all the facts of life concerning mankind and the four-footed animals. Right now it had a principal odor, owing to our pony staling under us at the very moment. Except in the case of such a particular event nearby, no smells predominated. You was just completely in another type of existence from the first minute your lungs filled with that atmosphere.

But, like anything else, living in it made it your reality, and when next I entered a white settlement, I missed the odor of what seemed to me life itself and felt I would suffocate.