Tie My Bones to Her Back (25 page)

One night as the wolves sang and Yellow Eyes snored gently in the resonant dark, Otto rolled out from under his sleeping robe. With the aid of his wolf stick he hoisted himself to his feet and limped to the entrance of the lodge. He was still out of kilter—his toeless feet betraying him into a stumble whenever he forgot himself and tried to walk too fast. The weight of his body on his maimed feet remained painful, though it was beginning to ease.

He hobbled slowly away from the camp and up to the top of a ridge overlooking the river. There he propped himself against a boulder. The moon was nearing its full and he could see white wolves coursing a young elk through the valley below and up toward the opposite height of land. His heart thumped wildly, but more with excitement than exertion. Two of the younger wolves headed the elk and turned it back toward the slower members of the pack. One big lobo snatched at the elk’s near hind leg as it galloped past, caught it, and upended the animal. The wolf pack fell on it like a thrashing white blanket. He could hear the crunch of their great jaws half a mile away. He felt a surge of elation. He raised his wolf stick and shook it at the moon.

Then he raised his head as well and howled along with the pack.

O
NE DARK AND
rainy morning Jenny laid an ambush for her pesky bowmen. Three of them were loitering nearby, waiting for her to go into the lodge. She pretended she didn’t notice them and dodged under the flap. Then she crawled quietly out the rear of the tepee, having removed a peg for that express purpose only an hour earlier. She dodged around the Buffalo Hat tepee and walked quietly up to the archers just as they were about to shoot.

“
Hi-yah!
” She charged them. Two of the boys ducked away, but the third she grabbed by his braids. “I count coup on you,” she said in Sa-sis-e-tas. She drew her sheath knife. “And now I shall take your scalp!”

The boy—he couldn’t be more than ten years old, she thought—turned to her with big black eyes, half smiling, half fearful.

She frowned. “Are you a Cheyenne or a mouse?” she asked. “You should be singing your death song!”

He composed his face stoically, tears gleaming, and began to chant in a broken voice:

Rain is falling
,

The day is young
,

I am taken in battle
—

It does not hurt to die!

“All right,” Jenny said. “Now you’re brave. Give me your bow and arrows and I’ll give you back your life.”

The boy grinned and handed her the weapons. The bow was made of a tough wood, probably ash, she thought, and backed, like Tom’s, with the carefully cured shoulder sinew of a buffalo. Someone had lavished a lot of care on its making. The length of its back was beautifully painted in lozenges of red and blue, and from the lower limb, tied by strands of dried sinew to a carved plug, trailed a tuft of red-blond hair. At first she thought it might be a scalp, then realized from the coarseness that it was only horsehair. The bow’s handle was wrapped with a piece of dark blue wool, probably cut from a captured U.S. Army blanket and sewed neatly up the belly. She nocked an arrow and drew it full-length. The bow pulled about thirty or forty pounds—a heavy draw for such a small boy to master. She aimed at a weather-bleached buffalo skull about twenty paces off and let fly. Because of the sinew backing, the bow released much harder and faster than the yew longbows she’d shot in her archery classes at the academy. The blunt-headed arrow bounced off the skull and sailed out over the tops of the tepees.

She kept the bow, but that night brought to the boy’s tepee the hooves and tanned hide of a deer she had killed, along with a hefty load of its salted, sun-dried meat. For the next three days she hunted the brushy draws near camp with her new bow. She killed jackrabbits, a sage grouse, and a yearling antelope buck she lured into range as Tom had taught her, by waving the tuft of horsehair, tied to the bow’s top, over the lip of a ridge behind which she crouched. The antelope seemed mesmerized by the motion, stepping closer and closer on its shiny black toes, until she stood and put an arrow feather-deep into the base of its throat.

When she brought the prongbuck into camp draped across her shoulders, people came running from their tepees to admire her kill. Tom smiled proudly. Strongheart winked at her, and even Pony Quirts, the boy from whom she had taken the bow as her spoils of war, whooped happily in her honor. To kill with an arrow, Jenny reckoned, was to be a Cheyenne. Or at least well on her way to becoming one.

Y
ELLOW
E
YES SEWED
moccasins of heavy buffalo hide to cover Otto’s tender toe stumps, lining them with moss she gathered from the rocks of the high country. He found he could walk much faster now. She devised pads of supple, wide-cut buffalo leather that fit snugly over Otto’s knees, left hand and elbow, and the stump of his right arm, allowing him to stalk game on all fours without being seen from a distance. Every day he walked out with her, mile upon mile, uphill and down, with the hide of a white wolf draped over his back. The Indians, Otto knew, used hides like this to disguise themselves when approaching a herd of feeding buffalo, which paid little attention to wolves until they were quite close. Buffalo, the Indians said, could tell by the way wolves walked when they were about to attack. Cheyenne hunters crawled up obsequiously to within bow range, then killed the fattest cows with ease.

But Otto couldn’t use a bow. Nor was he fast enough on his truncated feet to catch even a day-old calf—and if by chance he caught one, how would he kill it? He didn’t have the jaws of a wolf and he couldn’t wield a knife.

One night, sleepless with the desire to hunt, to provide meat for himself and his woman, it came to him.

A javelin.

He awakened Yellow Eyes and set her to work at once, fashioning a short throwing spear with a shaft of tough ash. For a spearhead of the proper weight she found a double-edged spon-toon, an eighteenth-century infantry weapon similar to a pike. The Elk Soldiers had captured it sometime in the dim past, Yellow Eyes said, in a battle with spider soldiers near the great lake where the Sa-sis-e-tas had lived before venturing onto the plains in pursuit of buffalo. Probably Frenchmen, Otto thought, and sure enough found a faint, time-worn fleur-de-lis, the armorial emblem of the Kings of France, engraved on the spearhead. She honed its edges to razor sharpness and bound it to the spear shaft with strands of sinew. A thong of rawhide tied just below the spearhead and then to Otto’s left hand allowed him to drag it with him as he stalked. He could untie the thong with his teeth when he was ready to throw. Into the pad of his throwing hand Yellow Eyes sewed a small shallow socket which would accept the butt of the spear. Balancing the shaft with his stump while throwing with his left hand, he found with much practice that he could hit a stationary target hard and accurately up to fifty feet away.

They began hunting at night, for small game at first. Yellow Eyes accompanied him, crawling beside him as he made his careful stalks on grazing deer and antelope, then running down the game he hit and finishing it off with a stone-headed war club Crazy had given her. She gutted and skinned their kills, but he insisted on carrying the meat back to camp by himself, lashed over his back. One night a pack of white wolves spotted him stalking a deer and came over to investigate this alien-smelling look-alike. Black Hat faced off against their leader, growling ominously under his visor of dried wolf face. The wolf chief circled cautiously, his heavy neck bowed, his thick gray mane and bushy tail bristling. Slowly, Black Hat got down on his knees and let the wolf approach.

Yellow Eyes noticed that he had not untied the spear, which still lay in the grass behind him.

Man and wolf stood neck to neck, shoulder to shoulder, of a height, and she saw from her own safe distance how the wolf curled his lip, bared long white fangs. Then Black Hat stood and showed his own teeth, rumbling caution deep in his chest. The pack leader, confused by this odd wolf’s dangerous posture and smell, finally turned and stalked stiffly away, pretending that Black Hat wasn’t there. The other wolves, too, stared off into the distance as if nothing had happened. Then they trotted into the dark.

He is a
maiyun
, Yellow Eyes thought suddenly, one of Maheo’s helpers here below. She shook with excitement. From that time on, once she had told the story to the camp, he was no longer Black Hat. Now he was called Ho-nehe Ve-ho—Wolf Chief.

S
COUTS HAD LOCATED
a small herd of buffalo—bulls, cows, and yearlings, all still shedding their winter coats—moving slowly up the river toward the greening meadows on the flanks of the Big Horns. They had herded them with care toward a familiar killing ground not ten miles from the camp, then settled the herd peacefully on a piece of good grazing ground.

On the morning of the hunt, shamans prayed and smoked their long pipes over painted buffalo skulls and fires of white sage. The women sang buffalo songs, the Kit Fox soldiers in charge of hunt discipline smeared their faces with black ash to indicate their authority, while the hunters themselves—only about a dozen of them, Jenny guessed, surprised at how few they were—caught up their prized and pampered buffalo ponies and readied their weapons. Unlike her fellow townsmen at pre-hunt festivities she’d witnessed in Wisconsin, the Cheyennes went about the whole affair quite solemnly. In Heldendorf the eve of a big town-wide deer drive was marked with loud roistering and joyous fiddle music; beer flowed freely along with an abundance of brag. A kind of Fourth of July in the fall. But the Indians, unlike the whites, counted on this meat for their very survival. They would take no chance of offending the All-God with their hubris.

Tom came up from the river leading Wind Blows and a second buffalo pony, a tall bay gelding. Jenny noticed a brand on its hip. A U.S. Army horse, and by the look of him a cavalry mount. “We call him
Vé’ho Mo’éhe-no’ha,”
Tom said. “Spider Horse. My father took him in a fight with the cavalry. He’s a good buffalo pony—he loves to bite their tails as they run. He rides rough, but he’s afraid of nothing.”

Both horses were wet. Tom had thoroughly doused them with cold river water to get their blood up, and now they blew and tossed their heads, dancing fretfully as he held them, eager for the hunt.

“They want to run,” Tom said. “Get your horse Trooper and let’s go.”

“I’m going with you?”

“Yes. Don’t you want to make some meat?”

“You expect me to hunt?”

“Of course,” Tom said. “It’s fun.”

“I can’t ride as well as you or these others, and I’ve never shot anything from horseback.”

“It’s easy,” Tom said. “Use your Yellow Boy. When you come up on a fat cow, aim for her kidneys—the small of her back. The horse will bring you so close that you can nearly touch her with the muzzle.”

“Trooper can’t run with the buffalo,” she said. “He’s too old. Ready for the glue factory.”

“You’ll only be riding Trooper until we get ready to run the buffalo. Then I’ll give you Wind Blows. She’s the best buffalo pony in the memory of the Cut-Arm People. She’ll put you right on top of the buffalo. She recognizes the fattest cows from the thickness of the roots of their tails and will take you through the herd, straight to them. If a bull hooks at you, she’ll dodge away. Come on now, get Trooper and your Yellow Boy and let’s make tracks. The buffalo wait to die.”

Jenny stared at him. She did not want to hunt buffalo on horseback, not out of any sentiment for the animals—the Cheyennes would make good use of them—or fear of embarrassing herself, but out of sheer funk. She did not want to die under their hooves or on their wicked horns. Tom had told her about friends of his who had met just such a fate. Yet at the same time she was pleased that Tom would allow her to ride Wind Blows. He loves that horse more than most men love a woman, she thought. But can I really ride with them? I’ve ridden mostly plowhorses so far, except for Vixen. These men—their women and children, too—ride as if they were born on horseback.

But if I beg off hunting, what will they think of me?

Strongheart had told her that when E-hyoph-sta first brought the buffalo to the Cheyenne, the Yellow-Haired Woman’s father, Coyote Man—who had generously allowed her to take them to the People from his great cave high on No-wah-wus—warned that if she ever expressed sympathy for the animals while the Indians were killing them, the buffalo would return whence they came. The Cut-Arm People would go hungry again. For eight years after she’d joined the tribe, Yellow-Haired Woman had heeded his warning. Then one day some boys dragged a buffalo calf they’d captured into the camp and started clubbing it to death outside her tepee. Without thinking she cried, “Oh, my poor buffalo!”

With that, the herds had vanished, and for many long years the Cheyenne lived on rabbits and skunks, until the heroes Sweet Medicine and Erect Horns once again brought the buffalo back to them.

They rode to the killing ground leading Wind Blows and Spider. Strongheart rode with them on one of Little Wolf’s ponies. Women and children followed the hunting party, carrying knives and hatchets to butcher the kill, trailing their packhorses to bring in the meat. Not one of them laughed or shouted, not even the babies. This was serious business.

“Don’t use the Yellow Boy,” Strongheart said in a quiet voice as they trotted toward the mountains. “I’ve brought your bow and some special arrows, ones that belong to my husband.”

“I’m not good enough with the bow,” Jenny said.

“At close range you are, and Wind will bring you close. It’s important you hunt in the traditional manner, a test of the gifts Maheo gave you. Two Shields didn’t want you to come on this hunt, he feels you have too much to lose. But the other evening some of the People began questioning whether you were truly our Yellow-Haired Woman. ‘She’s just another spider,’ they said. These critics are the enemies of my husband. They’re ambitious. Two Shields told them that as Maheo’s daughter you would kill buffalo as you were instructed to do. A wicked old crone named Loon-Eye Woman laughed—the children call her Screech—and said you could not hunt buffalo. Birds and rabbits and antelope and elk, yes, they are easy to kill, even women kill them, but not the buffalo. She said you would feel sorry for the buffalo because of what the other spiders are doing to them. Else why did you leave the hide men? She said you would not kill them, or even if you did, you would only kill them from afar, where you didn’t have to see the buffalo’s big wet eyes weeping at its death; you would kill with the spider’s throat gun. So you must use the bow, my dear, in close.”