Little Big Man

Them braves that still kept their horses now mounted, and the rest of us fell in on either side of the chief and the fatties so as to make a half-circle with them in the middle. Two other girls, skinnier people, suddenly grabbed the antelope arrows from Old Lodge Skins and dashed away on diverging tracks like the legs of a V with him at the point. Off go the horsemen in pursuit, the two leaders overtaking the girls and swiping the medicine sticks, then riding on still along the V legs, holding up the little wheels with the raven feathers fluttering. Now a single antelope come into sight on a roll of ground about a quarter mile ahead of the riders, in the exact center between their two files, on a dead line with Old Lodge Skins’s position. Like men, grazing antelope put out sentries. These here signal the herd by putting up their white tails like signal flags. What would you think a pronghorn scout might do when he saw twenty Cheyenne galloping on either flank and a bunch more standing in the midst of the prairie around an old Indian and two tubby maidens?

Well, this one stared so hard you would have thought his ears might shoot off his head. Meanwhile the riders was reaching his lateral. He looked left and he looked right, but them equal forces emanating from the flanks sort of compressed his attention back to the middle, and even at the distance you. could see him quiver from the haunches though his yellow cheeks and black muzzle was froze in wonder.

Old Lodge Skins set within the red blanket, the white plumes on the ends of his two feathers blowing in the soft wind. The two fat girls was still as mounds of earth, nor among the pack of dogs did one cur so much as show a tongue; they was also Cheyenne.

That scout moved forward, placing each dainty hoof as if it was a separate decision, his white neck-bands puffed out like a collar of shirring. Along the crest behind him appeared a margin of little horns, followed at length by little tan heads, staring our way. The forward horsemen gained the rise and went over, the funnel they made ever widening, with its neck pointing to Old Lodge Skins sitting way back here in the crescent of his tribe. There was only enough riders to indicate the lines of flank, with full space between each Indian to let through a nation of antelope, but these beasts, being charmed, had no mind to escape.

Down the slope trotted that sentry; behind him the horizon was full of animals, with more crowding over. He came a hundred yards on, and still there was no end to the massing herd, forming the shape of a huge arrowhead back of his lead, aimed at Old Lodge Skins. Cheyenne and animals were harmonizing in a grand rhythm, for which the old chief beat time. I guess the gods was supposed to have writ the music. If you don’t like that aspect of the affair, then you’ll have a job explaining why maybe a thousand antelope run towards ruin; and also how Old Lodge Skins could know this herd would be in this place, for no animal had showed a hair before he sat down on the prairie.

The lead riders, with the staffs and wheels, having reached the end of the herd out there and crossed behind it, changing sides one to the other, galloped back to Old Lodge Skins and gave him the medicine devices. There was now a magic line tied round the antelope, and with a wand in each hand, the chief began to draw it in.

He flang up his arms, and the whole vasty herd began to run, its head some seventy yards out, its tail just coming over the rise. A good three hundred yards of prairie was jammed with animals, haunch to haunch; with the width of the mass at the rear covering about the same measure east to west: an enormous heaving wedge of pure antelope. We people now stirred, extending the crescent horns, rounding out the base of the V into a U, and the beasts came towards a living corral of which the walls was Cheyenne—men, women, children—made solid by their outspread blankets and the dogs between their legs.

Half along the left arm of it, I tried to cock an eye on that first sentry, but he was gone in the rush as faster animals overtook him, and soon all particularity was lost in the churning of numberless legs and clouding dust. The chief waved his wheels as the leaders reached the entrapment, and they diverted left, but there met the Cheyenne fence; then to the right with similar dismay. He crossed the wands twice, and the eyes of the foremost beast followed suit, nose snorting, and it locked hoofs and went to its knees, forming a hurdle for those hard behind, which they failed to negotiate.