Joseph M. Marshall III (5 page)

Crazy Horse had told Light Hair and his sister that they would have new mothers. It was a tentative declaration though, not in the sense that it might not happen, but stemming from a feeling of trepidation. There was the real fear that Light Hair and his sister would not accept their father’s new wives as their new mothers. But although there was uncertainty on both sides of the new family, day by day they grew to tolerate one another. Tolerance, in the end, was the mother of acceptance and in time the sisters of Spotted Tail became, in practice and in the heart, mothers to the children of their husband.

Crazy Horse was relieved, for he did have the welfare of his children in mind when he offered gifts to the family of Spotted Tail. His duties as a medicine man kept him busy and away from the home and he knew that his new wives were thought of as good young women well taught in the art of keeping a home. And like all Lakota women, they knew their eventual calling was to be mothers whether the children they cared for and raised were only born to them in the heart. As for Light Hair and his sister, the emptiness that had been in their lodge began to slowly fill in with soft voices and laughter and the sense of purpose and comforting presence only a mother could provide.

The lodge of Crazy Horse became whole again, not because the two new wives and mothers replaced her who had been the first mother, but they came with their own presence and their own ways. There was still a sense that someone should be there in the hearts of the children she had left behind. Yet there was the growing sense that beside the empty space was the reality of mother embodied in two. The specific memories of she who had given them life began to fade and take much of the pain with them. They would always have memories of her, but over time they would grow more into feelings than images.

Three

Light Hair knew his father was different from other men because he spent many days and nights away from his family. He knew he was curing fevers or treating broken legs or rattlesnake bites, and he also helped families prepare for burials when there was a death.

The boy didn’t completely understand all about his father. But he did know that Crazy Horse didn’t hunt like the other men or go to war. A father who was a medicine man and didn’t do the things all men did caused the boy to feel all the more different. He wondered most of all why he looked different than other boys. Each summer gathering when several encampments came together, he always looked for other boys with light hair like his. To his dismay, the only other children with light hair were girls. Older boys also noticed and teased him by pulling on his breechclout—their way of suggesting that he should be wearing dresses instead.

Light Hair was about to begin a journey that, in the end, would make him even more different than the boys who teased him mercilessly. But first, he would become a hunter.

Hunting was the Lakota lifeblood. Like the wolf, fox, eagle, mountain lion, and hawk, the Lakota were hunters. At age seven, Light Hair realized more and more that hunting was the way to have fresh meat, and deer and elk hides for clothing, and buffalo hides for lodge coverings. He also sensed that he would be part of the process somehow.

Like all boys, Light Hair was becoming skilled with his bow. He had progressed to a stouter bow, stronger than the first he was given—one made in proportion to his size and strength. His favorite game had changed as well. Shooting arrows through a rolling willow hoop had become too easy and boring, so his uncle Little Hawk and a few other men introduced him to a new game—shooting at grasshoppers. The rules were simple: Walk along the prairie with an arrow on the bowstring, and shoot at a grasshopper when it flew. A rolling hoop was a much easier target. A grasshopper was about the size of his little finger and flew erratically, and fast. The men would suppress smiles when, at first, the boy was unable to get off a shot. Before he could pull back the string the insect was back in the grass. But as he learned to hold his bow ready, he could send an arrow in the general direction of the flitting grasshopper. Shooting at grasshoppers was not boring. It was, he learned, a very humbling experience.

As the summer wore on, his reaction became faster and more and more his arrows only narrowly missed. Grasshoppers, an old man told him, have much to teach. Many Lakota hunters bring down rabbits or deer because grasshoppers taught them how to shoot with unerring marksmanship. If you want to sharpen your shooting eye, they said, or if you ever think you are as good as you’ll ever be, chase grasshoppers.

But fortunately for Light Hair there was more to his training than humiliation by grasshoppers. Across the prairies, through brushy creek bottoms and up mountain slopes, he followed his mentors, and each kind of terrain offered ample opportunities to learn. Whitetail deer, he noticed, left a nearly perfect, matted circle in the grass where they had been resting the day away. They lay in hiding most of the day and grazed at night. A wolf’s paw print was almost as large as a grown man’s hand. After sundown, warm air flowed up from the floor of a valley; therefore, the best place for a night camp was high on the slope.

Lying beneath the branches of a pine tree, Light Hair watched a young coyote approach. “Stare at him,” whispered the teacher. “Stare at his eyes.” Light Hair did as he was told. The coyote was about to pass when he stopped and turned to stare back directly at the boy hidden among the branches, and then fled.

“No matter how far, the eyes have the power to draw the eyes,” said the teacher. “A good thing to know when scouting in Crow lands. Do not stare at the enemy’s eyes too long. He will feel your stare. He will know you are looking. Just as the coyote did.”

Light Hair’s teachers were not loud, vociferous men. They made no speeches espousing grandiose philosophy. Their approach involved action more than words. They took him away from the comfortable confines of his boyhood environment and into the realm of their knowledge and experience. They introduced him to the various dimensions of his world. Day by day he learned its rhythms, its moods, its colors and textures, and he began to form his own experiences, build his own knowledge, and develop his own intimacy with it. What he thought was merely endless space had its own life, its own spirit. He began to appreciate that the grasshopper had something to teach him. More importantly he began to understand that, like the grasshopper, he had a place in the world around him.

As a child, Light Hair saw men ride into the encampment with deer, elk, and antelope either hanging across the back of a packhorse or on drag poles behind the horse. It was a mystery to him how exactly the hunters were able to find such game. Buffalo hunting was not so much a mystery. He’d watched a few chases from hilltops, horses and riders on the edges of an undulating black river, dust billowing, a low rumble coming across the prairie. It was the most exciting thing he had ever seen. He knew it was dangerous, but he couldn’t wait to chase buffalo. Now, under the tutelage of men like his uncle Little Hawk, he began to understand the practical aspects of hunting.

Much of it was repetition and practice, which was not exciting at all. Sitting along a game trail waiting for a mountain black tail was almost as boring as shooting arrows through a rolling willow hoop. He would have preferred to watch the clouds billowing above the horizon, or the eagles circling overhead. But if he didn’t have the patience to wait for the deer to come, or the patience to wait for it to come into range of his bow, and if he missed when he had the right shot, his family would go hungry.

“The family of a good hunter looks well fed,” he was told. “They wear fine clothes because he takes deer and elk so the women can tan the hides and sew them into shirts and dresses and make moccasins. The family of a poor hunter is thin, with worn clothes because there are no new hides to sew. What do you want everyone to say about how you provide for your family?”

So Light Hair took his lessons seriously.

Some lessons had nothing to do with improving his physical endurance or distinguishing between elk and deer hoofprints. They were nonetheless just as important.

One afternoon Light Hair spotted a hare resting beneath a clump of sagebrush well within range of his bow. The teacher took the bow away. “Run,” he said, “chase it and catch it with your hands.”

Light Hair put down his weapon and did as he was told, or tried. The hare was off and running in a heartbeat and out of sight before the boy had run ten strides. He returned complaining that he couldn’t catch the animal.

“But it’s only a hare,” replied the teacher, “and you are a human being. You are the hunter.”

Like all boys caught in such a predicament, Light Hair humbly reasoned that he couldn’t bring down the hare without his bow and arrows.

“True,” said the teacher. “Remember that we all have weaknesses and strengths. Sometimes the hare will win, sometimes you. Even the wolf fails more often than he wins, but he doesn’t stop. He has great fangs, he can smell a trail two days old, and he can hear you over the next hill. But his real strength is endurance. He never quits.”

As he was learning the skills necessary to hunt, Light Hair was also learning that the hunter had much in common with the hunted. We all live to sustain the life of others, he was told. The grass feeds off the earth; the rabbits, buffalo, elk, deer, and antelope feed off the grass, and wolves, foxes, and men feed on them. In the end, the hunters feed the earth when the life of even the mightiest hunter comes to an end. To acknowledge this practical and spiritual connection, Lakota hunters performed a simple ceremony. Light Hair was taught to offer a bundle of prairie sage to acknowledge the gift of life the animal had given, whether it was a squirrel or an elk.

As the days passed he unknowingly attracted the interest and curiosity of a man called High Back Bone. He was a Mniconju with an Oglala wife, and he liked what he saw in the shy Light Hair. Perhaps it was the boy’s quiet determination or his innate humility.

High Back Bone himself was a quiet man, not given to pursuing the path of glory, but he was deeply committed to achieving the status of
wica,
the complete man. The complete man embodied the best qualities of the hunter and the fighting man. Though all men necessarily filled roles of both provider and protector—the hunter/warrior—not everyone could achieve the highest ideals for both callings. High Back Bone was one of the few.

High Back Bone was a leader of fighting men, muscular and broad shouldered, exuding the confidence of a man who not only had physical strength but also a lifetime of experience and accomplishment. He knew that Little Hawk and the Light Hair’s other teachers had taught him a variety of physical skills, but had also laid the foundation for an important quality that would stand him in good stead throughout his life: self-confidence. Most important, he also saw in the boy the proverbial stillness of deep water. The day he visited the lodge of Crazy Horse and asked to take the light-haired boy under his wing was the beginning of a lifelong friendship. From the first time High Back Bone rode out of the camp with Light Hair at his side, the future of the Oglala Lakota rode with them.

The Oglala had been slowly pushing westward from the Black Hills before Light Hair was born. By the time he was seven, there was a consistent Lakota presence as far west as Elk Mountain at the northern tip of the Medicine Bow Mountains, and north into the Powder River country east of the Shining Mountains. Buffalo and pronghorn antelope were plentiful on the prairies, as were the elk and deer in the mountains. All were essential to survival and comfort. The Snakes, also known as the - Eastern Shoshoni, had prior claim to the lands near Elk Mountain. Likewise, the Crow, who called themselves Absaroka, long roamed the Powder River region. Those ancient Lakota enemies grudgingly gave way but only because they were outnumbered. Numerical advantage was the basis for strength. A willingness to fight added to it, and when the Lakota did fight and win, their victories stayed in the minds of those they defeated. They were not better than their enemies, simply stronger. And Light Hair would learn where that strength came from.

High Back Bone reminded the boy that he was born in the Year a Hundred Horses Were Taken. In a daring raid on a Snake encampment, a handful of Lakota warriors swooped in and drove off a hundred horses without losing a single man or horse. Perhaps it was a sign that he was born in a year designated by warrior accomplishments. Every man was a hunter and every man was a warrior. A few warriors set themselves apart with their exploits on the battlefield. Such men seemed to be born to the calling, more than others. High Back Bone sensed that in his slender, light-haired charge. The stillness of deep water.

High Back Bone’s choice did not go unnoticed. A man with his reputation might have been expected to pick the son of an influential family, the kind of association that would enhance High Back Bone’s standing in the community and in the warrior societies. More than a few men were puzzled over his selection of the light-haired son of a humble medicine man. On the other hand, Crazy Horse’s wives were the sisters of Spotted Tail, an important man among the Sicangu. Perhaps, some said, High Back Bone selected the nephew of Spotted Tail, rather than the son of Crazy Horse. But the Mniconju paid no heed to such opinions. If anyone would have asked him, he would have told them, but no one did.