Little Big Man

Old Lodge Skins finally took the device away when it got to where she was expelling only a thin vapor, and Caroline gasped and chewed awhile on her neckerchief. She was panting for a goodly time after, but never passed out and didn’t puke. Caroline was a pretty tough old girl.

The chief now loosened the ashes in the pipe bowl and poured them out on the toes of Caroline’s boots, so as to give her bad luck, only we didn’t know that at the time. Then he stoked up again from his beaded pouch with what was actually in small part tobacco, the rest being made up of red-willow bark, sumac leaves, the marrow from buffalo bones, and several other ingredients. Indians of course invented the habit of smoking, and almost nothing else.

By the time he had smoked his own bowl out, Old Lodge Skins changed his whole style. He grinned, he spoke a good deal of Cheyenne in an affable tone, and he said something to the woman at the fire that was apparently orders, for she left directly and come back with a fresh hunk of antelope from the carcass earlier referred to.

This moon-faced woman hacked up the flesh and throwed it in the pot with the mess already simmering there. I figure it was on account of the smell that while the meal was cooking a bunch of Indians began to show up at the tepee. First come that boy who took the horses, and then another stoutish woman who from the back was a dead ringer for the cook, and a tiny girl wearing not a stitch and a slightly bigger lad likewise; next appeared a fine tall fellow about twenty-five years of age; and finally Burns Red in the Sun, the breadwinner himself, still in his mask of clay, and just behind him a procession beginning with a slender woman with a great fall of loosely braided black hair and eyes soft as a doe. Three or four kids followed her, the oldest about six.

These people squatted around the circle of the lodge wall and had eyes for nothing but that pot. Most of them brought their own wooden bowls and some had spoons of the same or else horn. They never uttered a sound, and not once did they so much as glance at me and Caroline.

After a bit the cook ladled out a bowl each for my sister and me, and then the others gathered around and got theirs. Old Lodge Skins didn’t eat a thing, just sat there on his buffalo hides and looked grand.

Now it happened that I remembered how the redskins that had come to our wagons always said “How, how” when they ate biscuit and drank coffee. I still felt mighty uneasy about the whole situation, and though I was terrible hungry, that meal did very little for my peace of mind: it was pretty strong, I’ll tell you. The antelope chunks weren’t too well done. Indians don’t have a prejudice against grease, on the one hand; and on the other, they weren’t given in those days to using salt. Along with the meat was some chokecherries all cooked to a mush, and a root or two that didn’t have a taste until you swallowed it and it fell all the way to your belly and gave off the aftereffect of choking on sand.

But, as I say, I recalled that courteous remark and put it. I wanted them people to like me. They weren’t paying no attention to us yet, but I had seen how Indians could change. “How, how, how,” said I, right to Old Lodge Skins. It took a bit of nerve. Caroline give me a poke, but the chief was considerably pleased.

In fact, he shot it right back at me, “How, how,” and then spoke something that turned out, after I learned to parley in Cheyenne, to be my first Indian name: Little Antelope, which was Voka in that lingo and sounded like a cough. As a name it had no undue importance since I got several more in time, but was a start. At least I hadn’t been scalped for uttering the sentiment, which I had considered not unlikely, for you probably ain’t got no conception of what it resembles to be a boy of ten newly joined a pack of barbarians.

And Caroline got a favor, because while the chief was grinning at me, I saw her fish a big hunk of meat from her bowl and slip it outside under the tepee skin, where a dog could be heard to gnaw it up straightway, because you never find a nook or cranny in an Indian camp that don’t have a dog right at hand.

I figure it was the colorful aspect of the Indians, along with their cruelty, that she had been attracted by back at the wagons; but the longer we stayed with Old Lodge Skins, the more commonplace the life of a savage seemed. For it is true that an Indian can slaughter a person one minute and the next sit down to his grub as quiet as a clerk in the settlements. He don’t make the separation between the various endeavors that a white man does. Indians are altogether different from anybody you ever knew.