Little Big Man

“Savages ain’t much of a lot, Jack,” she answers, inconsiderately loud, I thought, with her hosts trying to catch their sleep. “See how they done in that little dog? Following which they was feeling me as if maybe I was next for the pot, though I never heard Indins was cannibals. I don’t think you can count on them, Jack.” With a grunt she struggled to get her soles to the ground, which ain’t the easiest thing when you have had your rump on it for some hours with your legs crossed.

She repeated almost the same remark, with a significant difference that did not strike me at the time: “You better not count on them, Jack”; and stumbled stiff-legged towards the door flap—I figured, to go relieve herself before bedding down for the night. For myself, I determined to hold it till morning because of being scared of the roaming dogs outside.

Well, that was the last I saw of Caroline for a time. She went over to the meadow, cut a pony out of the herd, rode away, and it was years before I ran into her again, which event we will come to in order. Meanwhile, you have to understand I considered her for a spell as missing and then forgot about her altogether. Nobody could say I owed her more.

I probably could have heard the hoofbeats as she fled had I not fell asleep directly, there being little else in the way of wrapping so cozy as a buffalo robe when you get the hang of it. Though at first it tends to be stiff on the skinned side, whereas the hair on the other is rough as a brush, it soon cleaves to the body from your natural warmth and becomes as if you have growed it on yourself.

Next thing I knowed, that young boy Little Horse woke me up in the dawn. “Come on,” he indicated; and shivering off the remains of my sleep, which wasn’t hard to do because of the cold of that time of morning, I followed him out to the field where the ponies was pastured. There was markedly fewer than when I had seen the herd the day before: Caroline’s theft of one was nothing to what some Ute had come and stole a little later on, or maybe it was the Pawnee this time. Anyway, unless Old Lodge Skins’s crowd went out soon and stole some horses back, they would all be walking.

Little Horse already knowed, as an Indian would, that Caroline had run off and figured correctly that I was going to stay and be part of the tribe, having no alternative, and he had woke me to go with him because that was the duty of the boys of my age: tending the ponies first thing every morning. Which is to say, he knew more about me than I did myself at that moment, but his grin was in no wise mocking or mean as we left the tepeeful of sleeping Cheyenne grownups. Indians don’t rise especially early when nothing’s doing, except for the boys.

Outside the dawn was blue, and chill to go with it. I hadn’t had one particle of my clothes off for a couple days, and not washed for the same space of time, enjoying my deficiency. I mention that because I recall thinking about it and feeling luxurious. Even as a small boy, a white man gets that sort of idea when he goes among Indians: What the hell does anything matter? I’m with savages, don’t have to wash, can go to the toilet right where I stand, and so on. My point here is that, on the contrary, a Cheyenne takes a bath every day in the nearest water, and even if they hadn’t observed that custom, there would have been another requirement to take its place. If you’re a human being, you can’t get away from obligations.

On the route to the meadow, me and Little Horse encountered various other lads going to the same chore, aged eight to twelve; and on account of the thefts, there was so few ponies left that the herdsmen almost outnumbered the stock. Our job turned out to be leading the animals to the creek for watering. After which we took them to a new pasturage, for they had ate quite a bit of grass from the old one, and after all, the plains belonged to us far as the eye could see.

Little Horse and the other boys did a lot of gassing and laughing among themselves, and for all I know it might have been at my expense. I was alone insofar as wearing pants, shirt, boots, and hat; but after we rehobbled the lead mare to keep the herd from straying and went back to the creek and stripped down to take that bath I mentioned, I was distinguished only by my skin, and when we come back out of the water—which was fairly cold to start with but warmed once you were in, especially because of the horseplay that Indian boys give a lot of time to—why, I left off all my duds except the wool pants. Gave everything away, in fact, which made me a lot of immediate friends.