C
ASPAR
C
OLLINS LOOKED AT HIMSELF
in the mirror and wondered what was happening to him. He no longer felt as comfortable in his uniform as he used to. The buckskin pants felt natural to him now, the shirt as if it were an extension of his body. Many of the troops, members of the 11th Ohio Volunteer Cavalry regiment, had adopted frontiersman garb, too, but for reasons he did not share.
The troops, disappointed at being sent west, to a region they regarded as the most desolate and godforsaken spot imaginable on the continent, had expected to be fighting rebels in Virginia and Tennessee. Spoiling for a fight, frustrated at not getting one, they felt as if their time was being wasted, so they emulated the white men they saw most frequently, the hunters and scouts, pretending they were ready to take on any damn bunch of Indians the plains had to offer. Their arrogance was that of the late Lieutenant Grattan. It didn’t seem to matter that that attitude had gotten Grattan killed.
But Caspar Collins was irresistibly going native for other reasons entirely. He had spent several months, off and on, with Crazy Horse. The Sioux
was given to long silent stretches, and Collins had come to accept them, but when he did talk, he proved to be articulate and intelligent, displaying an understanding, and a kind of sad resignation at the future, of his people. But he was devoted to the old ways, and Collins was starting to agree with him.
There was something criminal in forcing a way of life on a people that was as far as imaginable from the one they already had, the one that had allowed them to flourish in land that belonged to them, if it belonged to anyone, and it seemed to Collins that Sioux belief was not that acquisitive. The land, along with everything in it, was there to be used, to be lived on, to be loved and feared.
This morning, he was going hunting with Crazy Horse for the first time. He had been making progress in studying the Lakota language, enough that he no longer needed Peter Bordeaux along to interpret, although he was far from fluent. Crazy Horse proved to have a sly sense of humor, and delighted in teasing him about his mispronunciation and limited vocabulary, two aspects of his shaky command of the language that often led him to turn right when instructed to turn left, or to think a conversation was about the Great Spirit when it was about a buffalo.
There was a kind of pantheistic embrace of the universe in Sioux thought that saw holiness everywhere, meaning in the eye of a butterfly and the whole wheeling shield of midnight stars. The approach was one Collins had found congenial, even persuasive, and in the few conversations he’d had with Crazy Horse’s father, Worm, he had
learned a great deal about respect for the land and, especially, for the animals and plants on which Sioux existence depended much more directly and completely than any white man’s did.
Stepping back from the mirror, he ran a hand across his features, delicate under the light brown hair, almost the color of his Sioux friend’s hair, and recognized that his face was aging, as if the weight of the Sioux future were impressing itself on him, too. The colonel had asked him once whether he might not be getting too close to the Sioux, a people who, after all, he was here to supervise. But the colonel was almost as impressed with the Sioux as he was, and had meant the question not as a rebuke but as an expression of parental concern. It was a kind of warning that his heart might be broken in a way he could not anticipate. Caspar acknowledged the risk, but thought it one eminently worth taking. In any case, it was too late to do anything about it—he was smitten.
Turning away from the mirror, he glanced once over his shoulder, and it seemed for a moment as if the figure in the glass were someone else. Maybe, he thought, it is, but he turned away and headed for the door. Stopping for a second to grab a new pair of Springfield rifles, he stepped outside and closed the door. His horse was already saddled, standing nervously at the hitching post in front of the officers’ quarters, and he mounted up with a wave to a couple of his men.
“Where you goin’, Lieutenant?” one of them called.
“Hunting.”
“For Injuns?”
Collins shook his head. “No, Timmy.
With
Indians.”
The soldier waved derisively, but Collins, knowing the man probably would not understand and if he did, would disapprove, waved back and kicked his horse into a trot.
He felt better once he got away from the fort. It had come to symbolize something that he could not justify much longer, if he still could. He felt like he were trapped between two great stones. Both seemed solid, and each pressed flush against him. If either moved, he would be ground to fine powder, and it was beginning to seem that there was no way out, no way to slide away from the stones because any attempt to do so would cause one or the other to shift, not much, but enough to do him in entirely.
The ride to Red Cloud’s camp was second nature now. The Sioux were accustomed to his presence, and barely noticed him when he arrived. Some of the other warriors waved a greeting, and, as always, he stopped by the chief’s lodge to pay his respects, then walked his mount around the outside of the village circle to hobble it behind Crazy Horse’s tipi. He took one of the new Springfields from the back of his saddle and held it behind his back as he moved around to the front of the lodge.
The warrior was expecting him. They hadn’t seen each other for more than two weeks, and Collins was curious about where the Sioux had been. As he entered the lodge, he waited a moment for his eyes to adjust to the firelight. Crazy Horse was sitting in front of the fire, working on a new bow. He looked up and nodded at Collins.
In greeting, Collins tried the creaky mechanism
of his Lakota, and drew a smile from the warrior. “I brought something for you,” Collins said.
He brought out the rifle and offered it to Crazy Horse. The warrior looked skeptical, but Collins pressed the gift on him. “It’s brand new,” he said. “I have one just like it for myself.”
Crazy Horse took the rifle and examined it. Most of the guns the Sioux had, and they didn’t have many, were old throwaways. Many had their barrels bound in rawhide to hold them together, their stocks cracked and scarred, decorated with brass tacks driven into the wood.
“Thank you,” the warrior said.
“I thought we might use them on our hunt.”
Crazy Horse grunted, looking at the unfinished bow where he had left it beside the fire. “No,” he said. “We both know how to use guns. But you do not know how to use the bow. We will hunt with bow and arrow.”
“I’m not sure I …”
Crazy Horse shook his head vigorously. “You want to learn the way we live. That is how we live. To understand it, you should learn to do it. Just be happy that your life does not depend on the bow, as ours does.”
Crazy Horse held the gun for a long moment. “Thank you, my friend. I hope that I never have to look at you over the sights of this rifle.”
“No chance of that, Crazy Horse,” Collins said.
“We should go now.” The Sioux led the way out of the lodge, and Collins followed behind him, meek as a child, glancing longingly back once at the rifle, where Crazy Horse had placed it against the wall of the lodge.
Mounting their horses, they rode away from the village, heading up into the hills away from the river. “What are we hunting for?” Collins asked.
“Food. And wisdom.”
“I have enough food but not nearly enough wisdom.”
“No man has enough wisdom, Caspar. My father is the wisest man I know. And Sitting Bull, the Hunkpapa medicine man. But even they together don’t know half of what there is to know.”
“Will we go far?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“When one hunts, one must go where the prey is to be found. One never knows that until he gets there.”
The rolling grassland of the river bottom was falling away behind them as they moved up into the hills. As they reached the high rise ahead, Crazy Horse turned on his pony and pointed back down toward the river, which caught the sunlight and seemed to be on fire. The lodges of the Sioux village seemed like toys, and the warrior nodded, then said, “The Lakota are a very small thing. The world is very large. Sometimes I wonder why there does not seem to be enough room.”
“You mean the white men?” Collins asked.
Crazy Horse nodded. “Yes. And the Crow and the Pawnee and the Arapaho and the Shoshoni.” He paused for a long moment, then added. “And the Sioux.”
Collins didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing. After a pause in which the warrior’s face seemed to betray a thousand ghostly sorrows that
swept in wave after wave across his features, he turned and nudged his pony forward with his knees.
Collins knew this was no ordinary man he followed. But he was still surprised by some new revelation every time they were alone together. It seemed almost as if there were some secret Crazy Horse that he reserved for rare moments of confidence, times when he could tell Collins things he dared not share with his own people.
And Collins felt himself changing almost daily. Going about the performance of his everyday duties, he would catch himself, suddenly wondering what he was doing. It didn’t take much to set off the doubts. Maybe he heard one of the other officers say something about the Sioux that struck him as woefully ignorant, or maybe it would be just a little thing, like a ladybug landing on his wrist triggering a recollection of something Crazy Horse or Worm had said. No matter what it might have been, once triggered, the doubt was almost impossible to brush aside. It would haunt him all day long, leave him tossing under his blanket at night.
Once, he tried to explain to his father what was happening to him, but the colonel just smiled sadly, as if he had expected as much. There was resignation in that smile, as if one had just heard a death sentence pronounced on a loved one, a sentence with no appeal.
It was well after noon before Crazy Horse called a halt for food and to give the horses a rest. The two men ate in silence. Only after the meal was finished, did Collins break it. “Why do you fight the Crow?”
Crazy Horse looked at his friend as if he could not understand the question. When he was certain that he had not misheard, he said, “Why do the white men fight the Lakota?”
Collins shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do know.”
“Tell me, then.”
“Land. The white man wants the land the Sioux depend on for their lives and the lives of their families. Every year they take more. We fight the Crow for the same reason. What you take from us has to be replaced. We cannot go east, so we go west, where the Crow are. If we beat them, they will turn west, too, and make war on whoever lives there.”
“I …”
Crazy Horse shook his head. “I know what you are thinking. You are thinking that you wish it was not like that. But it is. It has always been that way, as long as I can remember. As long as the oldest Lakota can remember. Your people gave guns to the Chippewas and we were forced off our land to the north and east of the Black Hills. Now it is not the Chippewa who force us, but your own people. It can be no other way. If we are strong, then we will win and the Crow will lose. If not, we will be ground up between the white man and the Crow the way grain is ground between two stones.”
“I’m sorry it has to be that way.”
“Is the wolf sorry it has to hunt the deer? Does the bear feel sad that it eats a fish? It is the way things are. We are what we are. There is no time to be sorry.”
After the meal, they mounted up and headed uphill. Over the rise, Crazy Horse had said, was a
valley full of forest. It was the best place for hunting for miles in any direction. Reining in, the Sioux said, “We will ride partway down the hill, then leave the horses. It is best to hunt deer on foot.”
Collins nodded, then waited for Crazy Horse to lead the way.
Once into the trees, it seemed to Collins that the forest filled the whole world. There was no direction in which he could see anything but trees. Cottonwoods, pines, ash and maple, oak and elm. It seemed as if every tree he had ever seen was represented.
Entering a clearing, Crazy Horse dismounted and hobbled his pony. Collins emulated his friend. “Just the bow and arrow,” Crazy Horse reminded him.
“But I’ve never used a bow at all. Not even to practice.”
“We will practice if we see a deer.”
“He’ll get away for sure.”
“Today it is more important to hunt than to kill a deer. There has to be a first time for everything, Caspar Collins.”
The lieutenant shook his head meekly, glanced longingly at the stock of his rifle, then took the bow and a quiver full of arrows from his saddle. He slipped the quiver over his shoulder then draped the bow on the other shoulder, as Crazy Horse had done.
The Sioux stepped away from the ponies and into the trees, the soldier right behind him. Overhead, patches of bright blue sky brought fitful illumination to the deep shade of the forest. Already, Crazy Horse had found tracks. He pointed
to scuff marks in the leaf mulch littering the forest floor.
“How do you know that’s a deer track?” Collins asked.
Crazy Horse just smiled. He moved off after the deer, finding the trail where Collins could see nothing at all, even from hands and knees while leaning close to the earth. When they had gone several hundred yards, Crazy Horse stopped, turned, and placed a finger to his lips. Then he pointed. Peering through the trees, Collins followed the extended arm. He could see nothing but the dark trunks of trees and masses of shadowy underbrush.
But he knew better than to question his friend.
Moving lightly, Crazy Horse led the way until the underbrush thinned a little. Something glittered through an opening in the brush, and Collins soon realized it was sunlight on bright water. A spring of some kind, maybe a brook. Then, almost as if it hadn’t been there at all until a moment before, a deer materialized. It was a large one, a female, Collins thought.
Pointing to his bow, Crazy Horse nodded. The lieutenant removed the bow from his shoulder, then an arrow from the brand new quiver. He fitted the arrow’s notch to the bowstring, struggled to hold the arrow in place against the bow grip. It rattled several times until he tilted the bow and let gravity hold it in place. Crazy Horse shook his head the way one does at a child’s prank.