Bill Dugan_War Chiefs 03 Read online

  Good Feather shrugged noncommittally. “I don’t know. Everything he does is slow. He was even slow to cry when he burned his hands. Maybe that’s what we should call him. Slow.”

  Her Holy Door wouldn’t hear of it. “Jumping Badger is a perfectly good name. I don’t see why we should change it.”

  Good Feather would not surrender easily. “Did you see how long it took him to cry when he burned his fingers? That was slow, wasn’t it?”

  “He didn’t understand what had happened,” Her Holy Door argued.

  “But he was slow, wasn’t he, Mother?”

  And so the name stuck. By the time he was three, more people knew him as Slow than as Jumping Badger. And he continued his explorations at the same solemn and studied pace. On walks with his father, he would wander off to examine a flower. If a bee paid a visit to the blossom, then darted off in search of another, Slow would follow it, his own route as jagged and indirect as that of the bee.

  On his own, he would walk up the hill behind the village to watch the prairie dogs popping in and out of their dens. Sometimes the older boys rigged snares, arranging a rawhide loop around the mouth of a den and then lying patiently, waiting for the hapless inhabitant to pop up, then jerking the rawhide noose to catch the plump rodents. As soon as he had mastered the tying of the loop, he began to catch prairie dogs himself.

  Already he was running fast enough to belie the name Good Feather had given him, and he loved to race with the older boys, always keeping up with them, but not yet long-legged enough to win.

  By the time he was four, he had discovered the wonders of the riverbank. He would sit for an hour at a time, watching fish dart toward the edge of the river, hang placidly in the current, and break the surface to make a meal of an unwary skimmer or mayfly. He especially liked the young fry, swarms of them like waterborne gnats. He would dangle his bare feet from a flat rock and feel the tickle of the tiny fish as they nibbled at his toes and ankles.

  But tadpoles were the best of all. In the sluggish pools, clogged with weeds and water lilies, he watched them wiggle their way among the roots. Once Sitting Bull had explained to him the connection between tadpoles and frogs, he grew even more fascinated, spending whole days in late spring and early summer hoping to see one change into the other.

  There were times when his patience was exhausted and he was convinced his father had been teasing him. Not once had he seen a tadpole become a frog. How could it be true? But Sitting Bull had never lied to him, and what he said was always so. This could not be an exception. He just needed more patience.

  Late in the day, lying on his stomach with his arms folded under his chin, staring through the glaze of sunlight on the surface, he would sometimes fall asleep. When Good Feather came to fetch him, he would grow irritable, throwing pebbles at her to try and chase her off. But she always prevailed.

  One thing never changed. There was always something new to learn, and he couldn’t get enough information about the ways of nature. More and more, when Sitting Bull was not out hunting or on the warpath, father and son would go off into the hills. Instead of planning lessons, Sitting Bull waited to see what the day would bring. If they stumbled across a deer, they would watch it for a while, tracking it, studying its ways, Sitting Bull pointing out how to tell when the deer knows it’s being watched, how to follow it, and how to tell the difference between the hoofprints of the deer and the elk and the pronghorn.

  If they found a bird’s nest, Sitting Bull would climb the tree, Slow on his back, and together they would examine the nest and, if there were any, the eggs.

  Once, Sitting Bull brought Slow along when he needed eagle feathers for a new warbonnet. Finding a suitable hollow in the ground, one that would hold them both, Sitting Bull wove a blanket of grass and brush large enough to cover the hole and sturdy enough to hold the weight of the eagle. Then he trapped a rabbit in a snare, tied its legs with a rawhide thong, and fed the loose end of the rawhide through the grass thatch. After directing Slow to crawl into the hollow, Sitting Bull followed him inside, then made a hole in the thatch just large enough for his hand to fit through.

  “What do we do now?” Slow wanted to know.

  “Now we wait. If you want an eagle feather, it is better not to kill the eagle. But you can’t go to him, you have to let him come to you.”

  “How?”

  “Wait and you will see. You must be quiet now, Slow.” Sitting Bull covered his lips with a finger. Slow stared up at the thatching. Now and then he caught a glimpse of the terrified rabbit. Once or twice it tried to hop away, but the rawhide held it securely.

  It seemed to take forever. It was hot under the grass roof, but Sitting Bull sat patiently. Slow was learning how to control himself and tried to sit on his haunches without speaking. Eventually, the flutter of wings could be heard and a huge shadow passed over the hole in the roof. The rabbit squealed and tried again to pull itself free, but it was too late. The shadow reappeared and the flutter of wings grew loud in the hollow. As the eagle sank its talons into the rabbit, Sitting Bull reached through the hole in the thatching and grabbed the great bird by the ankles.

  Standing up, he reached around the edge of the grass mat and plucked several feathers from the eagle’s tail, taking care not to come within reach of the razor-sharp beak. The eagle beat its wings, trying to pull free, and gave a terrible cry. Sitting Bull was almost done. After plucking one more feather, he let go of the bird, and it took off with several frantic beats of its broad wings.

  Slow watched as the bird rose into the air with an angry squawk. “Isn’t it easier to shoot the eagle?” he asked.

  Sitting Bull laughed. “Yes, it is. But if you shoot all the eagles, where will we get the eagle feathers when the birds are all gone?”

  “I never thought of that.”

  “You should think of such things,” Sitting Bull cautioned. “Take only what you need, and leave more for another time.”

  The eagle was circling overhead, watching them, one eye on the wounded rabbit.

  Sitting Bull handed the feathers to his son and bent to set the rabbit free. It dashed off, its terror more than making up for its weakened state. The eagle dropped like a stone and once more sank its talons into the rabbit. After a baleful glare at Sitting Bull, it started to tear strips of fur and flesh from its now-lifeless prey.

  “Why did you do that?” Slow asked. “Why did you let the eagle have the rabbit?”

  Sitting Bull laughed and explained, “The eagle has given us some fine feathers. We promised him a rabbit and he should have one.”

  “I still think it is easier to shoot the eagle—as long as you don’t shoot them all!”

  Sitting Bull nodded. “When you are old enough to gather eagle feathers, you get them the way you want to. This is the way I learned from my father. It was good enough for him and it is good enough for me.”

  “Sometimes things change,” Slow argued. “Sometimes there is a better way.”

  The boy was right. Sitting Bull just nodded. “As long as you know when something is better, not just new,” he said.

  Chapter 3

  Platte River Valley

  1839

  SLOW WATCHED AS THE buffalo robes were tied in bundles and bound to travois. He stood quietly, trying to stay out of the way yet close enough to hear the men talk. What he heard confused him.

  “Are you sure,” his father was asking, “that they want buffalo robes at the white man’s fort?”

  Four Horns nodded. “I have heard this many times. I know that many tribes travel to the worn-out fences and bring furs. In exchange, they get tobacco and metal knives and looking glasses, coffee and sugar—white man things.”

  “I am not so sure we need such things,” Sitting Bull said. “We have always managed without them. I don’t know why we should change now. We will just make ourselves need the white man, and will forget how to live without him.”

  Four Horns smiled. “We used to say that before the Chippewa traded beav
er skins for the white man’s guns. Then when they had guns and we did not, we had to move. I still remember the old men talking about such things. I think maybe now that the Blackfeet and the Crows and the Hohe are trading to get guns, we have to do the same.”

  Sitting Bull wasn’t so sure. “If we get the white man’s guns, then we will always need to trade with him. We will need the powder and the balls and will have to get them from the white men, or from other people who got them from the white man. We will be dependent on one enemy to be able to fight another.”

  “But you say yourself,” Four Horns reminded him, “that our enemies are getting such things. If the Crows have guns, we will need guns, too. Already, Elk-Who-is-Afraid and Standing Deer have been killed by the guns of the Crows. They are getting the guns from across the mountains, from the Flatheads, because the white men come down from the Grandmother Country and trade guns and knives and beads for beaver pelts and horses.”

  Sitting Bull nodded. “I will go, but I still don’t think it is a good idea.”

  “I don’t think it is a good idea, either,” Four Horns agreed. “But I think not doing it is a bad idea. And when you have to choose between a bad idea and another one that is not a good one, the choice is still clear. It is not even really a choice.”

  “I don’t like killing more buffalo than we need, just to get skins to trade to the white man.”

  “We have nothing else he wants, except maybe our land, and we will not trade that, not for all the guns he has. And I say again, if we want to keep our land, if we want to keep hunting the buffalo, and living the way we have always lived, soon we will need guns to do it. That is just the way it is.”

  Slow was still confused. He understood trade, knew that sometimes even the Crows and the Hohe would enter into a truce with the Hunkpapa so they could exchange goods. But they didn’t stop being enemies, they just stopped fighting long enough to trade things. Sometimes, too, they went to the Pawnees, and traded horses or buffalo skins for the maize the Pawnee grew near their villages. But trading with the white man was something different, something new.

  Slow had seen only one white man, and he had not been that white. Burned bronze by the sun, with many dark whiskers on his face, he had spoken a strange language to his companions, and a creaky kind of Lakota that was just good enough to make himself understood. The white man had had only some cloth and some glass beads to trade. The beads were pretty and lasted longer than the quills that Her Holy Door used to decorate moccasins and clothing. The man had not wanted skins, only meat, because he had been traveling for a long time and had used up the food he had brought with him. Slow had been six years old then and could not understand why the white man had not hunted for his own food. Sitting Bull had tried to make him understand that some white men didn’t hunt but ate food that others hunted for them, and that they grew food out of the ground the way the Pawnee and the Mandan and Hidatsa did.

  To Slow, that had seemed a strange way to live.

  But he knew already that the Crow did not live exactly like the Hunkpapa. And the Arikara did not live like the Crow or the Hunkpapa. If it worked for the white man, that was fine … but only for the white man. As he had grown older, spending more time with his father and with Standing Bear, the medicine man, he learned more about the wasichus, which is what they called the white man. But he still didn’t think he understood them, really, and wasn’t sure his father did either. It was one thing to learn about what someone did, and another altogether to truly know it, to understand. And Slow wanted to understand.

  As soon as the buffalo skins were packed on the travois, the lodges were disassembled, and a half hour later they were ready for the long trek to Fort Laramie. The fort was on the western edge of Lakota land, and it would take several days to get there.

  On the way, Slow listened to the men talking about the fort. Few of them had actually ever seen it, and it was difficult for him to visualize. As near as he could picture it, there was a high wooden fence surrounding buildings where the white men kept their trade goods and lived. But that wasn’t much to go on.

  He listened, too, to the talk about the buffalo skins. Sitting Bull said they were good skins, taken in the winter when the hair was thick and long. Four Horns had heard that those were the kind of skins the white men wanted. He also said they prized beaver pelts, which they got in abundance from the western tribes. Slow didn’t know why the skin of the beaver should be worth anything. Beaver were small, and it would take dozens of skins to make a decent robe for sleeping—hundreds to make a lodge. And the skin was not thick or strong like buffalo hide, so it was hard to imagine anyone wanting to give something of value for so fragile a thing as a beaver pelt.

  They traveled for six days, camping at night and setting up the lodges, but not unpacking their belongings. Only the food and the things needed to prepare it were taken from the travois. Even though the countryside was beautiful, and they were going someplace he had never been before, Slow found the trip boring. Every day was the same: wake up, wash, eat, and help pack, then start walking. At night, they did everything in reverse, slept, and started all over again the next day when the sun came up.

  But just when it seemed the trip would never end, the scouts came back with news that the fort was not far, half a day more. And when they came over the last rise, Slow was stunned by the scene. There, looking nothing like what he had pictured, was the famous fort. But the fort itself was nothing compared to what surrounded it. Hundreds of lodges, not all of them Lakota, were arranged in a dozen circles or more. After they rested on the hilltop, Sitting Bull took Slow a little way down and sat in the grass. He pointed out the Crow camp, and the Arikara, and the Cheyenne. There were Hohe lodges, Flathead lodges, and Arapaho lodges, too. More tribes of Indians than he had ever heard of could be found here.

  Slow wondered how his father could tell one from another. “Every people has its own style, its own designs. You can tell the Crow lodges by the way they paint them. You can tell the Hunkpapa from the Arapaho the same way. You can even tell the Oglala from the Miniconjou, if you know what to look for.”

  “Won’t we have trouble with the Crows?” Slow asked.

  Sitting Bull laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. “No. At the fort, there is always a truce. The white men want the skins and we want what they have to trade, so we forget about our enemies for a few days. That doesn’t mean that we should turn our backs to them, only that we don’t have to kill them when we meet them. They might even have some things to trade for what we have.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Sitting Bull didn’t laugh this time. It was a hard thing to explain. He wasn’t even sure he understood it himself, but he knew that that was the way it had been since he was a boy, and probably long before that.

  Then Sitting Bull told Slow about the dentalium shells, gathered by coastal tribes from the bottom of the Great Water and transported all the way across the western mountains. “Have you ever seen the Great Water, Father?” Slow asked.

  Sitting Bull shook his head. “No, I haven’t.”

  “How do you know it’s there?”

  “You can’t believe only in things you see with your eyes, Slow. Some things you never see, but you believe in them because you see them with your heart. Or the eye in here.” He tapped his head. “When you get older, you will make a vision quest and you will see things you have never seen before. You might see things that no man has ever seen. But that won’t mean that these things weren’t there all along, waiting for the right time to make themselves known to you. And it is the same with these shells and the Great Water.”

  Sitting Bull reached up and removed the choker of dentalium he wore around his neck and dropped it over his son’s head. It was too large for the boy and hung down over his chest a little. Slow ran his fingers over the smooth shells, cool even in the sunlight, and looked down at his chest where the dentalium glittered white as snow.

  He was about to ask another question, bu
t Black Moon shouted the command to start down to the fort, and the akicitas, the warriors who were in charge of the march, were busy getting everyone moving again. The Hunkpapa wanted to make a good showing as they arrived at the campground. It would not do to straggle in like some rag-tag bunch of fugitives. It was important to carry yourself well, especially since you were under the scrutiny of warriors who were your enemies and might try to kill you the next time they saw you. It was important to show them that you were strong and proud.

  Once on the flatland, they quickened their pace and headed for an open space near the circle of Oglala lodges. It was late afternoon by the time they had set up their own tipis, and the first order of business was a feast to show how well the Hunkpapa were doing. They invited warriors they knew from the other Lakota circles, and some Cheyennes, too, who had long been friends in the war against the Crow and the Pawnee.

  Slow watched the welter of color as Indians mingled. Some Crows and Arikara visited during the celebration, and, as usual, warriors on both sides took the opportunity to ask for missing friends. More often than not, the enemies knew one another by name and reputation, and it was not uncommon to talk over old battles, double-checking on outlandish claims of battle exploits.

  Occasionally an enemy warrior was asked to show a scar from a wound allegedly inflicted by one of the Lakotas, and sometimes a Lakota warrior was asked to do the same. In the absence of written records, the plains warriors were very concerned that their oral histories be accurate, and that no man claim credit for a thing he had not done.

  The celebrating went on long into the night, and Slow was too tired to stay awake until it ended. When he awoke early the next morning, the adults were already preparing for their trip to the fort, where the traders would be waiting for them. Slow shadowed Sitting Bull, determined not to be left behind.

  Approaching the fort’s high palisade, Slow looked at the hills beyond for a moment, trying to measure the size of the place. It was the largest structure of any kind he had ever seen. As they drew close to Fort Laramie, the place the whites called Fort William, he saw why the warriors disparaged the stockade walls. The vertical timbers had been exposed to many years of weathering and truly looked like they were close to falling down.