Conquering Horse (9 page)

White Fingernail next danced up to the white skull of the dog at the foot of the scalp pole. Three times he danced up to it and made as if to strike it with his lance, with the drummers and singers building up a crescendo of sound each time, and then, the fourth time, did strike it. Instantly silence fell over the camp. Only the fire talked and the river laughed.

White Fingernail’s chest swelled with a great breath. Then, touching the topmost scalp hanging from the pole with his lance, he pronounced, “I have overcome this one.”

It was a true claim and no one spoke up to deny it.

White Fingernail touched the second scalp with his lance. “I have overcome this one.”

It was also a true claim and again no one spoke up to deny it.

White Fingernail next told how he had been the first to spot the Pawnee raiders, how he had whistled the bluejay call across the meadow to warn Chief Redbird and his father Speaks Once and his friend No Name, how No Name came running, how No Name gave chase, how No Name killed two of the enemy, how he, White Fingernail, came riding after and struck the first coups.

Lifting his face to the darkness overhead, he sang his song:

“Houw! houw!”

He sang his song a second time, with the drummers and singers joining in, and the chorus of old women singing the tremolo in falling wavering accents.

Then Speaks Once stepped forward, thick lips screwed up proud, bustling, clam shell ornaments jingling, skunktails fluffing at his heels. He too struck the white skull of the dog with his lance four times. Again, except for the crackling bonfire and the laughing river, there was solemn silence.

“Friends,” Speaks Once said, “you have heard my son. You have heard his story. You have heard his song. Is there anyone to deny it? Others can speak. I will listen. I have said.”

The silence continued, full, intent. Black eyes glittered in the glowing firelight. Bronze forms stood enstatued in the red quartzite basin.

“No one steps forward to deny it. It is good.”

Speaks Once turned to Redbird sitting at the edge of the crowd and beckoned him to come forward. “Father,” Speaks Once said, “we ask this. Our son needs a new name. Will you give it?”

Redbird got to his feet and stepped up. With a grave air, he drew two feathers of the golden eagle from his belt. He held
them up in the light for all to see. The bottom portion of both feathers were white, and the top brown, with the points tipped with the red down of a woodpecker. He turned each slowly. They glistened in the dusty red light.

“My son,” Redbird said, and he touched White Fingernail on the shoulder with one of the feathers.

White Fingernail knelt in the dust at the foot of the scalp pole. His hair, purposely left unbraided, flowed in two black streams down his back.

“My son,” Redbird said, “today you have made the Yankton people a great nation.”

“Houw, houw!”

“It is because you have done this for us that we now give you these.” Redbird thrust the two feathers into the youth’s hair at the back, setting them in a horizontal position. Then slowly, solemnly, he turned to the assembled tribe. “Friends, hear me. Our son has earned a new name. Today he struck first coup twice.” Redbird turned and looked down at the kneeling youth again. “My son, take courage. Your name is now Strikes Twice. Arise. Stand on your feet. I have said. Yelo.”

The great drum boomed twice, deep.

“Houw, houw, houw!”

Singers awakened. Again the drum beat swiftly. Dancers revolved around the fire. Involuntary yells burst on the night air. Rattles buzzed. Clam shells tinkled.

The drummers beat in an ectasy of exultation. The drum was a hollowed out cottonwood butt with a piece of stretched bull-hide for membrane and every time the drummer’s stick fell on it the cottonwoods along the river seemed to thresh their leaves in an agony of joy. Through the beating drum the cottonwoods at last had heartbeat. The drumbeat became the heartbeat of all living things: the rooteds and the wingeds, the twoleggeds and the fourleggeds. The drum beat the tempo of their common origin.

All the while the marshalls kept order. The marshall’s symbol
of authority was a willow wand some four arm-lengths long, forked at the small end, peeled and dried. The tips of the forks were ornamented with quills from the golden eagle. All the marshalls wore a black stripe from the outer corner of the eye to the lower edge of the jaw. People feared them and always fell silent when they came near.

Presently a sudden whoop sounded from the council lodge. Out of the darkness bounded seven naked dancers, all of them tall, handsome, and members of the Foreskin Society. Each had a naturally long foreskin, from which dangled a red feather tied on with a buckskin thong. On each chest was painted the rampant figure of a buffalo bull. They were all known as brave fighters and were held in high esteem. The other dancers made respectful room for them in the circle. Only the little boys sitting along the edge giggled at the sight. All the women and the old chiefs, however, looked on with solemn gravity. These men were wakan. They had been born with a certain mark which set them apart.

The seven naked stalwarts had barely made two turns around the fire, dancing and singing their society songs, when another shout sounded from the dark. This time four more naked braves, members of the rival No Foreskin Society, sprang dancing into the circle of light. Each carried a crook; each had bared his part to show he had a natural right to his membership; each had painted his nose a bold red. The little boys tittered at the red noses, but again the women and the chiefs looked on with gravity. They were brave men who also had been born wakan.

Later, when No Name looked around for Leaf, he discovered that both she and her parents had vanished. One look at their tepee under the cottonwood near the horns of the camp and he knew that they had gone to bed. The door flap was lashed down for the night.

“Ae, their tepee is asleep,” he said to himself. “It is easy to see that Full Kettle did not like the celebrating.”

Their withdrawal made him melancholy. Brooding, he wandered away from the dance. He let his toes find a way. They took him west down a trail and climbed him onto a high rock over-looking the village.

He heard the guards on the hills behind him whistling bird calls to each other that all was well. Once a coyote yowled a falling cry. One of the guards immediately imitated it so clearly, so cleverly, that for a moment No Name had trouble making out it wasn’t a true call. A star fell. It streaked across the eastern skies like a giant firefly. “Ae,” he thought, “another of the Old Ones has fallen from his appointed place in the Other Life.” Cold settled down on him like a strong draft. The night was extraordinarily clear. The stars above and the fires below burned sharply. He snuggled against the fur inside his white robe. He watched the river wrinkling in the light reflected from the bonfire. The sound of Falling Water was faint. An owl hoo-hooed in the trees down river.

It was well after midnight before the dancing Yanktons finally went to bed. The bonfire slowly died away. It became still out. The low sounds of the night on the prairie, mysterious irregular footsteps, spirits laughing and whispering and chuckling overhead, moved around No Name.

Thinking that his father and mother might be wondering about him, he climbed down from the rock and slowly headed back to camp.

No Name brooded as he followed the path. Strikes Twice was now a full man. Ae. It was certain the gods did not favor the son of Redbird. Otherwise one of them would long ago have visited him in a vision and told him what he was to do in life. Standing at the door of his father’s lodge, in the dark, he could not find it in himself to go to bed. He felt lonesome. He had a need to be stroked. Not by his father and mother, but by someone else.

Abruptly he turned about. Slowly and softly he toed across the grass toward Leaf’s tepee. She would be asleep by now, bound to
stakes for the night, with coils of rawhide around her thighs so no sly nightwalker could come creeping in and seduce her. He smiled to himself.

He stopped behind her tepee. Reaching up, he picked a few pieces of meat off their drying rack. These he fed to Full Kettle’s four dogs, making friends with them. Then, hanging his robe on the racks, he got down on his bare belly at the back of the tepee and quietly lifted its cowhide side and slid in. He listened. Full Kettle and Owl Above were snoring loudly. He hunched along like a measuring worm, in a looping manner. His hand touched a parfleche. He pinched it, felt giving pemmican inside. He crept on. He touched a leather case of clothes.

Then his fingers came upon a row of stub stakes. Cords rose from each one, and following them, he felt Leaf’s arm. He listened. She was breathing slowly, evenly, asleep. Peering intently across the lodge he tried to make out where Owl Above and Full Kettle snored. But the fire was almost out. Its center threw out but a vague light, pinkish. He touched Leaf’s shoulder, her neck, her bosom. His fingers moved gently, hardly touching her. As he expected, her belly and thighs were crisscrossed with rawhide thongs.

She stirred, restless, against the thongs.

He pitied her. It was not a good thing to sleep all night long bound against the earth in one position, with only the head free. He fumbled with the knots. He found them too intricate. He could not make them out in the dark.

No Name ran a finger along the cutting edge of his stone knife. It was sharp, like catfish teeth. Very slowly, yet with some pressure, he began sawing at one of the thongs over her thighs. It parted slowly under the rasping edge of his knife, finally snapped with a loud pop. Afraid that the sudden sound might have awakened her father and mother, he pressed his belly tight against the grass floor, hiding his head behind her hips. He listened. To his relief Owl Above and Full Kettle snored on soundly.

Then he noticed the rhythm of Leaf’s breathing had changed. Ai! she was awake.

He leaned close and whispered in her ear. “Someone you know has come.”

She lay still.

“He has a great ache in his heart.”

She took a slow deep breath.

“I have seen a maiden who looks so wonderful to me I feel sick when I think about her.”

Slowly she turned her head. Hardly audible she whispered in his ear. “My mother will hear.”

“I ache and feel very sick for you.”

“Tomorrow you will sing about me that you have wived me without giving the horses. You will call out my name for the others to laugh at.”

“I am without one to comfort me in the night.”

“Shh!”

“Even the horses when they feel lonesome at night stroke each other with their noses.”

“Shh.”

He slid his hand down to the next thong over her thighs. Pressing hard, sawing, he was suddenly through it. There was a loud snap and the end of the thong slapped him in the eye. He jerked back, and hit his head against a slanting lodge pole. A piece of smoked meat hanging from the lodge pole began to swing back and forth in the dark above him. He listened, hearing the smoked meat creak on its string. Presently something dropped from the swaying meat, falling exactly in the middle of the pink embers. There was a soft sizzle. Suddenly a single flame leaped up, white-yellow, lighting up the whole interior. A piece of fat had broken off and fallen into the live embers.

Leaf gave him a wild look. He returned the look. Then he ducked down, began sliding backwards. His buckskin leggings made a soft ruckling noise on the grass floor.

Full Kettle rolled over under her sleeping robe. She lay listening
a moment. Then she gave Owl Above a bump in the ribs. “Old man, wake up. Someone is in the lodge.”

No Name flattened himself in Leaf’s shadow.

Again Full Kettle gave her husband a poke in the ribs. “Old man, wake up. Someone is in the lodge.”

“Waugh?” Owl Above whoofed, sitting up suddenly, long braids falling forward. “Who is here?”

Leaf pretended her father’s cry had awakened her. “What is it, my father?”

Owl Above stared at Leaf; rubbed his sleep-bleared eyes; stared some more. “There is someone with you, my daughter?”

“I have been sleeping, my father. Also I am bound to the earth.”

At that Full Kettle sat up, suspicious. Looking sharply, she saw the severed thongs. “Old man,” she cried, “someone has cut the ropes. See, the ends are freshly cut. Get up!”

Owl Above peered intently. “Ae, it is one of the nightwalkers again.” Groaning, stark naked, he reared his old bones out of his sleeping robes and staggered over to where Leaf lay. The flame of the spitting fat glowed a brilliant yellow. Hands hanging open at his bronze thighs, he glared down at her. “Who was it? Tell your father.”

“My father, I was asleep.”

“The thongs are cut, my daughter.”

“Perhaps it was Circling Hawk come to steal what I would not let him purchase.”

Full Kettle snorted from her bed. “Hah! I say it is that No Name. He thinks to take a thing for nothing.”

Owl Above knelt beside Leaf. He examined the parted ends of the thongs. “This has been cut, my daughter. Did you not feel his knife?”

“My father, I dreamed and did not know if it was real.”

Suddenly Owl Above spotted No Name’s eyes glittering in Leaf’s shadow. He let out a roar. “Hi-yu-po! Where is my lance? Where is my bow? Old woman, give me my warclub!”

Full Kettle leaped to her feet, eyes wild, braids tousled. “Where is he? Where is he?”

“Woman, my warclub!”

The four dogs outside came alive, roaring. In a moment all the dogs in camp were howling with them.

Like a brown cricket springing backwards, No Name flipped himself under through the leather side of the tepee and then up on his feet. But it was too late. Even as he turned to run for his father’s lodge, he found himself surrounded by what seemed a thousand dogs, all of them snarling mad. He clawed up and around, trying to find the meat racks, thinking that a few handfuls of dried beef might shut them up. Just then Owl Above came flying out the tepee door, warclub in hand. Behind him came Full Kettle. Full Kettle quickly threw a piece of buffalo fat into the live embers of the cooking fire outside the door. A flame shot up like a leaping red fox, lighting up both horns of the encampment. No Name saw instantly that the best thing for him to do was to scramble up on the meat racks. He made it in one flying leap. He grabbed up his white robe that he’d hung on the racks earlier and caught it around his shoulders. The meat racks swayed under his sudden weight. Crouched, looking up, he saw a cottonwood limb hanging just above him. Quickly standing erect, he got a good hold on the limb, chinned himself on it, swung a leg up and over, and in a flash vanished into the leaves above. The dogs below, frustrated, sat down on their haunches and yowled up after him.