Tie My Bones to Her Back (23 page)

Jenny nodded.

“Ja, sicher
,” Strongheart continued, smiling. “But truly, you must remain free of womanly obligations until Little Wolf returns and decides how best you might serve the Cut-Arm People.”

“And if I don’t care to serve them?”

“Then you may leave, but you’ll take my son’s heart with you.”

T
HE
C
HEYENNE CAMP
stood on the edge of the timber, against which the buffalo-hide lodges shone white in the hard morning light, blackened only near their conical tops from the smoke of cookfires. The smoke rose slowly, thin in the cold still air. In front of the lodges a tributary of the Páae-ó’he, or Powder River, raced clear and cold over beds of rattling gravel. The pony herd, more than three hundred strong, grazed in lush meadow grass just downstream from the camp. Each morning when the first rays of the sun warmed the lodges, an old, battle-scarred crier named Tall Meat walked through the camp, relaying the orders of the day from the band’s four chieftains.

He might announce that the band would remain in this camp for another two or three days. There were buffalo nearby. No one must make unnecessary or excessive noise for fear of frightening them away. The soldiers of the Kit Fox Society would be in charge of discipline in this regard. The chiefs would decide today when to run the buffalo. Or Tall Meat might tell the camp that someone had misplaced a favorite skinning knife, it had a handle of otter skin and a nick in the blade, and anyone finding it must not claim it for his own but return it at once. The crier’s words confirmed ownership of the knife, and had the force of law. No member of the band would now think of keeping it. Nor would any Cheyenne, once warned by the crier—not even the most obstreperous boy—dare to hunt buffalo on his own, against the crier’s orders. The Fox soldiers enforced discipline with pony quirts, forcefully and expertly wielded.

Already the men and boys of the band had run down from their lodges to the creek, to splash and wrestle in the icy water. Women did not bathe as often, nor were they as vain as the men in their mode of dress and makeup. The women had followed with buckets made from buffalo paunches to replenish the water in their lodges. The Sa-sis-e-tas would not drink “dead water,” which had stood overnight in a bucket. It had no strength. Their water must be cold and alive, from the running brooks. In the lodges, cast-iron pots of stew were heating over the fires for the morning meal, sending forth a rich odor of buffalo meat and sliced wild turnips. The turnips and other tubers were gathered daily on the prairie by women and girls with their elkhorn root diggers, while the men hunted meat and scouted for enemies.

Jenny was known throughout the camp as E-hyoph-sta, or Yellow-Haired Woman. The Cheyennes didn’t know quite what to make of her. For one thing, she dressed like a white man, in woolen trousers, a man’s chambray shirt, and a drover’s jacket of tanned sheepskin, wool side in. On her head she wore a flat-brimmed, dark brown beaver-felt hat. She braided her blond hair and pinned it in a knot, under the hat. She carried a nine-shot revolver in a holster on her right hip, and she shot it well. Knee-length boots of black leather covered her man-sized feet. She often hunted alone, carrying a heavy Sharps breech-loading buffalo rifle, returning with wild turkeys, mule deer, antelope, and once a large cow elk which she had quartered expertly by herself and dragged in behind her pony on a travois.

In so many respects she was like a man, yet she was a woman. The Sa-sis-e-tas had seen her bathing. She lived in a lodge with Two Shields, who was not a Contrary—not the sort of man who did everything backward, dressing as a woman and sleeping with men. Perhaps E-hyoph-sta was a Contrary, though among the Sa-sis-e-tas there were no female Contraries. Perhaps it was different with the white spiders, surely the strangest creatures on earth.

With them in their lodge lived E-hyoph-sta’s brother, the spider named Black Hat, whom some of the men of the band had seen a few years ago, living alone in a cave near the Mán-oi-o’he, or Burnt Timber River, which the spiders called the Smoky Hill. Black Hat was crippled now. His fingers, toes, and right arm had been cut off by a white spider doctor at Fort Dodge after Black Hat froze them in a blizzard down near the Bull Buffalo River. The Sa-sis-e-tas knew just from looking at him that Black Hat wanted to die. No one would kill him, though they all felt sorry for him. They were afraid of his magic. He had killed many Crazy Knife soldiers in a fight just before he was frozen. Two Shields had told them so, and Two Shields did not lie.

P
ERHAPS BECAUSE SHE
had spoken both German and English from childhood, Jenny found the Cheyenne language easy to learn. To her ear, at least, it sounded like German, with a lot of
ch
and
sch
sounds, and the same vowel pronunciations. Like German it also contained many compound words constructed of shorter ones, chained together and subtly altered in combination to create a whole new meaning. Sugar, for instance, was called
ve’kee-mahpe,
or “sweet water,” in Cheyenne, just as—say—oxygen in German was
Sauerstoff,
or “sour stuff.” She had brought a wheel of cheese with her from Fort Dodge, and learned when she shared it with the Cheyennes that they called it
hekone-ame,
or “hard grease,” while butter—
heove-ame
—was literally “yellow grease.”

Jenny was glad she had also packed the wagon with plenty of coffee, since the Cheyennes were crazy for it. A scarred old warrior might stride up to her at any time of the day or night and declare in a booming voice, “
Na-mane-tano!”
(“I am thirsty”). Then, whipping a horn cup from behind his back and grinning from ear to ear, add,
“Hoseste ne-xohose-metsestse mo’kohtávi-hohpe
.” (“Give me some more black soup”). Tea, by contrast, was
vépotsé-hohpe
, or leaf soup.

She especially delighted in the Cheyenne names for certain birds and animals—
heóve-se’tave,
or “yellow feet,” for the cottontail rabbit;
néschkeésta
, or “perky ears,” for the chipmunk;
no’heo
, or “brown wings,” for the little brown bats that hawked bugs along the river in the dusk. The big, glittering dragonflies which roared in metallic diminuendo over the river meadows were aptly named
hevovetaso,
“the whirlwind.” Apt, too, was their word for child,
ka’ischkone
, or “little mind”—but only in the sense of unformed, untutored. The Cheyenne loved their children and took more pride in them than many whites she had known. They answered a child’s questions seriously, no matter how foolish, and were rarely too busy to tell a tale out of the past to illustrate a point of behavior or technique. They answered Jenny’s questions the same way, and at first it irked her. It smacked of condescension.

Many Cheyenne words were more direct, earthier, like
cháa’e
for weasel, which meant “the pisser,” and
heschkó’sema,
or “thorny bug,” for cricket. Coffee, which the Cheyenne loved with lots of “sweet water” in it, was called
mo’kohtávi-hohpe
, or “black soup.” For some reason, perhaps out of the distant past when the Cheyenne were dwelling elsewhere, their word for dog,
oeschkeso
, translated into English as “small seal.” A rifle,
ma’aetano
, meant “iron bowstring,” while a bullet,
vého’e-maahe,
was a “spider (or white-man) arrow.”

“Why do they call us
vé’ho’e
—’spider’?” she asked Strongheart one day. “Because we’re poisonous?”

The old woman laughed. “I hadn’t thought of that, but it makes sense. No, it’s actually a compliment. The People believe there are two main gods who control the world—
He-amma-vého’e
and A
kh-tun-o-vého’e,
the Spider Above and the Spider Below. They consider the spider a very clever creature. He spins a web to trap his food, so he must have tools that they cannot see. Other insects get caught in the web and cannot get loose, but the spider runs across it without sticking. He goes up and down through the air with no support. When French traders came down from Canada, nearly a century ago, from what I can make out, they were the first whites the People ever met. They had tools and implements the Cheyenne had never seen before—iron traps and cook pots and axes, magical sticks that roared and threw flames and smoke, and killed their enemies at great distances, leaving holes with no arrows sticking from them. So the People stood in awe of them. They believed those first white men were sent by their gods, and so they called them
veho’e.
No, no, my dear, all the poison came later, when the white men started spreading their steel webs—their railroads—across our land and began killing the buffalo.”

F
OR THE MOST
part, once she’d gotten through the language barrier, life in the camp was pleasant. Living in skin tents—even in the mud and rain of early spring—was not much different from living under canvas in the buffalo camp. Smudge fires kept off the black flies and mosquitoes that swarmed with the onset of hot weather, and Cheyenne wives were death on lice and fleas, picking them out of the seams of clothing and crushing them with tough-tipped, expert fingers. Food was fairly abundant—elk, deer, antelope meat aplenty, though buffalo were growing ominously scarce. Or so the old people claimed. Still, in any lodge, at any hour of the day or night, a kettle of meat and root vegetables was always simmering. Anyone whose appetite was stirred by the odors wafting from the cook pot, whether a member of that lodge’s family or not, was free to step into the tepee and help himself.

All day long the camp was busy—with men making or repairing weapons, if they were not out hunting or scouting or training their horses, while women scraped and tanned hides, or searched in the brushy draws or out on the plains themselves, picking plums and berries, grubbing up edible tubers with root diggers made from the shoulder blades of animals, or else loading their travois with firewood or dried buffalo chips. Cheyenne boys played at war or hunting, and little girls cuddled their dolls or imitated their mothers by trekking around camp with tiny travois loaded with sticks or straw and pulled by the old, calm, slow dogs of the camp. Sometimes the children paired off, playing mother and father, building toy tepees, cooking doll-size meals of mice and songbirds and minnows and weeds, tending mock horse herds that were really just bundles of sticks.

Meanwhile, there were always a few crotchety old women stalking the camp day and night in search of scandal. Old women angry at their lives, looking to make trouble for others wherever it could be snooped out. And the other common coin of any human community: self-important young men who spent more time on their dress and grooming than even the most vain of the Heldendorf belles Jenny had known, hoping to appear cool and brave, but simply looking silly as they strutted through camp in their finery. Harried young mothers scurrying from one task to another, scolding their husband when things went wrong whether it was his fault or not. And always a few pompous old men solemn as parsons, pipe-smoking dotards who leaked adages and homilies day and night. It was probably not unlike life in any village over the past thousand years, Jenny thought—European or American, white or red.

O
NE MORNING, WHEN
Jenny had been admiring an elegantly painted red-and-black tepee that stood alone in the center of the camp, Strongheart suddenly stopped scraping her deer hides and rushed over.

“Don’t go in there,” she said. “This is the home of Is’siwun, the Buffalo Hat. It is the great Sacred Mystery of these people, their Holy Grail. It brings success in war and the buffalo hunt.”

Strongheart explained the origins of the Hat and its counterpart, the Sacred Arrows of the Southern Cheyenne—about the two heroes, Erect Horns and Sweet Medicine, and the woman, E-hyoph-sta, who had brought buffalo and corn to the Cheyenne from the All-God Maheo’s Thunder Lodge inside No-wah-wus, the Sacred Mountain in the Black Hills which the whites now casually called Bear Butte. From time to time, over the many years since then, the strength of the Hat and the Arrows had had to be renewed, by painful sacrifice in the “Standing Against the Sun” ceremony and by other, more elaborate rituals, when some Cheyenne had committed a sin against the People or some unforeseen tragedy had befallen the Mysteries themselves.

Such a tragedy had occurred not long before Strongheart had joined the People. In an attack on a Skidi Pawnee village, the Sacred Arrows, all four of them, had been captured by the hated Wolf People. Normally the Hat and Arrows led the attack on an enemy force and, when accompanied by the proper ceremonies, blinded the enemy soldiers to their Cheyenne attackers. This time, because of the rashness of some hot-blooded, coup-crazy young warriors who attacked before the ceremonies had been completed, the Skidis were ready, their eyes wide open. They defeated the Cheyennes easily and stole the Arrows.

“Nothing’s been right for us since,” Strongheart concluded. “The buffalo grow fewer and wilder on the prairie, we find their skinned carcasses everywhere, killed by the spider hide hunters. The Traveling Houses of the spiders blow black smoke from their Iron Roads, which reach everywhere, clear across the prairie, frightening what game remains and bringing more and more spiders into our country. Diseases I knew as a child among the spiders—measles, whooping cough, pneumonia—now move among the Cut-Arm People and take off not only our children and old ones but even the strong and healthy, men and women alike. We fight the spiders and often win, and then the spider chiefs promise us peace. But a year later they invade the land they had promised was ours forever, and we must fight and die all over again. How can we live now? Everywhere we turn it’s sundown. Sundown for the buffalo, sundown for the Cheyenne. Sundown for all of us—Sioux, Pawnee, and Snake, perhaps even for the spiders themselves someday. For who can live in a world without buffalo?”

L
ATE ONE AFTERNOON
, while Jenny was skinning an antelope, Strongheart beckoned to her. Jenny could tell from the old woman’s face that it was serious business. She led the way back into the hills surrounding the camp. Magpies were screaming. Strongheart said nothing as they hiked. In tall grass, near a coulee, Strongheart halted. They were still within earshot of the camp. With her right hand alongside her ear, Strongheart made a fist, leaving the index finger and thumb pointing upward—the Plains Indian sign language for “rabbit.” But when she rotated the fist from side to side on the axis of her wrist, Jenny knew, that meant: “Listen.”