T
HEY CALLED HIM
C
URLY
. He wouldn’t have another name until he grew strong, and achieved something worthwhile, perhaps stole a horse belonging to the Crows, or killed a buffalo on his own. For the time being, his appearance would have to give him his name. Maybe, if he were pure enough, and special enough, he would go on a vision quest, and he would receive a sign from the Great Spirit. But that was years away, if it would ever happen at all.
Most of his first year, he spent on a cradle board. Sometimes he would be allowed to crawl around inside the tipi on the floor covered with buffalo robes, or outside with the other children, his hands and knees covered with dirt. He would be free to learn in the Sioux way, by experience. If he thought the fire looked interesting, he was free to reach into the flames and grab a burning brand; free, too, to cry when the pain stabbed up his hand and forearm, his light skin already turning red as White Deer rubbed a coating of buffalo grease on the burn or, if it was winter, wiped it with soothing snow.
The Sioux were very free with their children. The young ones, as soon as they could toddle, were
welcome in any tipi, where they would be fed, if they were hungry, or coddled by any adult who happened to be there. Even the warriors, when they had time, loved to play with the children, teasing them, tickling them and teaching them the things they would need to know if they were to survive the hard life that stretched out ahead of them until a stray arrow or, if they were lucky, old age, finally came to take them away.
Curly was no different. The members of his father’s band seemed a little bit in awe of him, partly because Crazy Horse was a holy man, in touch with things they could not see, but which they knew existed, and partly because he looked the least bit different. It wasn’t just his light skin or the light, curly hair which gave him his name, either. He seemed to understand things beyond his years.
White Deer insisted at least once a week that Curly could speak but simply chose not to, as if his understanding were a great secret he was not quite ready to share with the other members of the band. Two or three times a day she would sense something, look up from her beadwork or stop paying attention to one of the other women, and search the tipi, her eyes darting around the perimeter of the lodge until she found him. And invariably he would be looking at her, his eyes bright with the firelight and fixed on her face, as if wondering why she had stopped what she was doing. At such times, she would squint a little, even lean toward him, maybe to encourage him, she wasn’t quite sure, or perhaps to hear the first word as if she were convinced that when it came it would be a whisper, and something she dare not miss hearing.
Crazy Horse, too, knew that his son was special. He spent as much time with the boy as he could. He took Curly on long walks in the open plains, pointing things out to him, showing him where the prairie dogs swarmed in their warrens, pointing out the silent wings of a great eagle high overhead, drifting almost motionless on the air currents far above the summer grass. When he had a dream, he would explain it to his son, sitting alone with the boy, almost whispering, puzzling out the meaning, watching the boy’s face as if for some assistance.
Like most of the young ones in the camp, he spent much of the day playing, but the games were serious business. It was important to be strong and to have great endurance. The survival of the band, that of the Oglala and of the Sioux in general, depended on the strong arms and sharp eyes of their warriors. Danger was everywhere. The Pawnees were particularly fierce, and they were not afraid of the Sioux any more than the Sioux were afraid of them. To the west, where the buffalo were increasingly wont to go, there were the Crow, mortal enemies as deadly as the Pawnee and as fierce.
So the games were an extension of the children’s education. Often, they combined instinct and physical ability, honing the one and stretching the other, pushing both to their very limits. One game the young Curly came to love had no real name, but everyone called it “Hitting with Fire.”
Two mounds of brush would be assembled by some of the older boys, one at either end of the camp. Borrowing a flame from one of the cook fires, the organizers then ignited the brush. Broken
into teams, the players grabbed handfuls of burning branches and swarmed over one another, swatting and slashing with the flaming torches. If one of the boys managed to get close enough to hit his opponent, more often than not the first couple of blows were enough to extinguish the flames, and he was left with a blackened stick, its glowing end slowly turning black. More than likely, the opponent still had a torch or two, and unless you were fast enough to get away, you had to take your own swats with the burning wood until it, too, was extinguished.
The game was a great favorite of Curly’s by the time he was barely two, still young enough to attach himself to the nearest woman for milk, whether White Deer or some other recent mother. The Sioux shared everything they had, and mother’s milk was not exempt from community demands. More often than not, his meals consisted of a piece or two of buffalo meat, softened by his sister’s teeth, then dipped in broth which he could suck from the stringy meat before chewing with his first few teeth.
Curly was playing one day when he saw one of the young men who guarded the horses come running toward the camp, his hair flying behind him as if it wanted to stay behind.
“Crows!” he yelled. “The Crows are coming!”
Suddenly, the camp erupted like an anthill disturbed with a sharp stick. Men spilled out of the tipis, some still pulling on their buckskin shirts. They carried their bows and rawhide quivers. The women, too, began running around, gathering up the children and hauling them, most kicking and
screaming, toward the nearest tipi, to get them out of harm’s way. Crazy Horse rushed from his own tipi and saw Curly in the arms of Black Calf Woman. He carried his own bow, the new one he had made at nights in the last week, Curly sitting on a buffalo robe beside him, asking questions in his halting language. Now his father was going to use the bow, and Curly wondered if it would work well. He wanted to go along, and stretched his arms out to Crazy Horse, who shushed him and waved goodbye as the tipi flap closed between father and son.
Black Calf Woman pulled him down and sat him on her lap. Outside, he could hear the men shouting, their deep voices rising to piercing howls as they cut loose with war whoops, as much to bolster their own spirits as to frighten the enemy, who was still some distance away. The high-pitched voices of the women, still gathering the last few children together, rode above the war whoops like the chattering of frightened birds.
Curly had never experienced anything like this before. He kept squirming in Black Calf Woman’s arms, trying to work his way free. Several children huddled around her, and many were starting to cry. The wailing began to fill the tipi, and Curly watched his older friends curiously.
He tugged at Black Calf Woman’s hair to get her attention. When she finally noticed him, he pointed to the other children, his eyes wide and his mouth open as if he had just asked a question. “Not now, Curly,” she said, leaning forward to reach for one of the smaller children. In that instant, feeling her grip loosen the least little bit, Curly broke free
and darted through the circle of children toward the flap which kept out the sunlight and the shouting in the camp.
Black Calf Woman called to him, and he turned once, but didn’t slow down as he careened toward the entrance way, tripped, and tumbled against the flap. He rolled on through and out into the open.
Everywhere he looked, adults were running. Most of the men were already on the edge of the camp, their backs to him. Far ahead, he could recognize his father’s shirt, and he toddled after him on his short legs.
One woman noticed him and darted after him, but he zigzagged away and kept on in pursuit of the warriors. He could hear her call to him. He recognized her voice. It was Blue Owl, a friend of his mother, but he paid her no mind. It was more exciting away from the camp, and he wanted to see what all the commotion was.
He heard a loud crack far in the distance, then another. He knew enough to recognize the sound as that of a gun. He knew the young man who had sounded the alarm had shouted that the Crows were coming, but he had no idea what that really meant. He knew the Crows were the deadly enemies of the Sioux. He knew, too, that they would steal Sioux horses and Sioux women, but those were alien concepts to him. He had no idea what it meant to be stolen. He knew it was supposed to be a bad thing, but it was too hard to imagine what it would be like to be truly frightened of it.
His legs were beginning to give out, and he was slowing down. He heard the whoops of the Crow warriors far away, and on a ridge above where the
pony herd was grazing, he saw several warriors. They wore feathers and had their faces painted, but their hair was not like Sioux hair. Just as he was deciding that those must be the Crows, an arm encircled his waist. He started to squirm as the arm lifted him off his feet. He called to his father, but Crazy Horse was too far away to hear. He saw his father kneel to steady his aim as he drew back the bowstring and let an arrow fly up the hill over the backs of the frightened ponies, but he lost it in the flurry of arrows from the other warriors.
He turned then to see who had captured him, and found White Deer scowling at him. He started to cry then, as his mother closed her arms around him and squeezed him until the air could hardly get into his lungs.
She was angry at him, he could see that. And frightened, too. Maybe she thought that he had been stolen, or that he would be stolen if he had gone too far. But she would not hit him; he knew that. He had never seen a Sioux, man or woman, strike a child.
White Deer turned and hurried to the nearest tipi, still squeezing him tightly in her arms. He could feel her legs moving under the deerskin dress, and her breathing in his ear was very loud. She made little squeaking sounds, like a mouse, almost with every step. The sounds made him laugh, and he tugged on her hair once, then craned his neck to look over her shoulder up toward the hillside where his father was doing battle with the Crows.
White Deer ducked into the tipi and tugged the
flap closed with one hand while her other arm circled under his armpits and dangled him in the air. Then she sat on the ground right in front of the entrance flap, to make sure that he could not escape again.
The noise of the battle was far away now, just distant echoes of war cries punctuated by an occasional gunshot. The children were beginning to settle down, but the women eyed one another nervously. They knew that there were not many Crows and that everything would be all right in the end, but that did not mean that one of their own might not be wounded, perhaps even killed. They would not stop worrying until the attack was beaten back and all the men were home safe.
Curly walked over to his mother and stood beside her, then knelt on her lap, resting his head on her shoulder. His fingers played idly with the flap, but he made no attempt to open it. White Deer stroked his head and cooed in his ear. Some day, not that far off, he would be out there with the men, and she would have to worry whether he would come back.
Watching him, the joy bright in his eyes, his face curled into a grin, she understood that he would relish it. For a while.
C
URLY CONTINUED TO GROW
in ways that amazed the members of his father’s band. Crazy Horse himself was the most amazed of them all, but he was used to being amazed, to seeing things he could not understand. This led to a kind of serenity in the face of the astounding, one that was rooted not in submission, but in acceptance. There were more things on earth and in the heavens than any one man could possibly understand. Resistance would be of no use, so one learned, if one were wise, to nod and go on with his life. Crazy Horse had done it a thousand times and, if he lived long enough, would do it a thousand more. So, watching his extraordinary son was not something for which he was not prepared.
The boy was nearly eight now, and Crazy Horse sat on a low rise, watching the camp below, his son playing a game with several other boys. It involved one boy, with nerves of steel, holding over his head a huge lobe of cactus out of which the center had been cut. The rest of the boys were armed with bows, small but not toys, and blunted arrows. The boy who held the cactus raced around the village
while the others fired their arrows at him almost as fast as they could fit them to the string and draw it back.
The object, of course, was to put an arrow through the heart of the cactus lobe. But it was the responsibility of the cactus bearer to make that as difficult as possible. In the process, he would take a constant pelting. Arrow after arrow would slam into his cheeks and head, his shoulders and chest and back. He was besieged from all sides as the boys swirled around him, launching volley after volley. His only solace was the knowledge that, if someone did manage to hit the bull’s-eye, the cactus bearer was free to chase the marksman all over the village, slapping his buttocks with the cactus. The lucky marksman would then get to spend several hours yanking the painful spines from his tender parts.
Crazy Horse remembered Curly playing the same game four or five years before. He had just made the boy his first bow. Only four years old, Curly had been watching the older boys with their bows, and every day would ask when he would have one of his own.
“You are too young yet, Curly,” Crazy Horse would say. “Wait until you have the strength to pull back the bowstring. Then I will make you a bow.”
“When?”
“Soon.”
“How soon? Tomorrow?”
It had gone on like that every day for nearly a month. Each day Curly would have a different reason for needing the bow, and each day Crazy Horse
would put him off. It was the first thing on the boy’s mind in the morning, and the last thing out of his mouth at night. He would even ask White Deer to ask Crazy Horse when he felt his father was avoiding the issue. Finally, when she could stand it no more, White Deer took Crazy Horse aside.
“I think you should make Curly a bow,” she said.
Crazy Horse shook his head. “I keep telling him that he is not ready. I’ll make it when he’s older.”
“He thinks he’s ready now.”
“I don’t think so.”
“But until Curly understands that, none of us will have any peace. All day long he asks. He asks everyone he sees who is older than he is. And the other children he tells that he will have a bow that very afternoon. I’m afraid that he will get a bow from someone else. One of the men will make him one just to quiet him. But his first bow should come from you, Crazy Horse. It should come from his father.”
The holy man shook his head again, this time in bewildered resignation. He knew his wife was right. Looking back on it now, he couldn’t understand why he hadn’t seen it sooner, but he hadn’t.
Even then, in the back of his mind was the thought that maybe Curly knew something his father didn’t. Maybe the boy was ready. Maybe he was ready and he was the only one who realized it.
They had been camped near the Powder River. It was the middle of summer, and the days were long, the sun hanging in the sky off in the west as if reluctant to go down. After the evening meal, he swung Curly up onto his shoulder and grabbed
one of the white man’s tools, a double-bladed ax, its handle shortened to hatchet length for easy transport, and to lighten the load of carrying it from place to place. When you moved your home and all your worldly possessions on a regular basis, you learned where to cut corners, how to economize.
He ducked under the flap and out into the evening air. Curly, sensing that something important was about to happen, fidgeted on his father’s shoulders, his feet tattooing the man’s chest, his fists pounding excitedly on Crazy Horse’s head.
“Where are we going, Father?” Curly asked.
“You’ll see, Curly,” Crazy Horse told him. “Just be patient.”
Crazy Horse walked toward a small creek that canted to the southwest and flowed into the Powder River. Its banks were lined with stands of cottonwood, and beyond it, a small clump of trees sat in a shallow bowl-shaped depression. More trees were scattered beyond it, on the hillside.
Crazy Horse waded across the creek and headed for the trees. He held the ax with the blade cradled in his fingers, the handle splitting them into pairs. In time to his stride, he tapped the shortened handle against the side of his knee. The boy squirmed so that he almost slipped from his perch, and Crazy Horse was forced to grab him by the feet and hold on.
When he reached the trees, he swung the boy to the ground. Then, almost as if he were alone, he moved from tree to tree, paying particular attention to the smaller ones, the saplings. He tested several, grabbing the trunks above his head and tugging, then letting go, testing for elasticity.
“What are you doing, Father?” Curly asked.
“Looking for a tree, Curly,” his father answered.
“There are trees all over the hillside.”
“I don’t want just any tree. I am looking for a special one.”
“Why?”
“You’ll see.”
The boy darted from tree to tree, touching each with an open palm. “This one? Is this it? This one?” After each question, he would turn to wait for his father’s answer and, when it was a negative shake of the head, he would bounce to the next and the next and the one after that.
Watching Crazy Horse, Curly realized that size was a consideration, and soon he touched only saplings. But the holy man was looking not just for a sapling, but an ash sapling. He wanted one that was strong but resilient. He wanted it to be thick enough to contain the perfect bow, but not so thick that the wood would be too hard and too brittle.
Finally, testing one particular ash a third time, leaning into it with all his weight and then letting it go to spring back, he said, “This is the one.”
Making sure the boy was out of harm’s way, he knelt beside the sapling and began to hack at it. The thud of the ax as it dug into the strong, springy wood seemed to echo among the taller trees, the sound of the blows drifting up, down, and across the hillside and bouncing back from every direction. He could smell the sweet sap now, and chips of wood flew with every bite of the blade.
Soon, he had cut almost all the way through. Still on his knees, he moved around to the opposite side for the last few swings of the ax. The young
ash quivered with every blow now, and started to lean. Then, as the blade cut all the way through, the force of the blow pushing the butt of the severed sapling off its base, it thumped to the ground, teetered for a moment, then fell with a swish of its leaves.
The tree was a good one, and Crazy Horse knew he could make more than one bow from the wood, so he measured a length almost eight feet from the butt to the point where the sapling began to get too thin for his purpose, and cut it all the way through.
Lopping off a few short, slender branches little more than shoots, he hefted the eight-foot length of ash. It was heavy, which meant the wood was dense and strong, and then got to his feet. Hoisting the sapling to his shoulder, he called to Curly, who had wandered off among the trees. The boy came scurrying back, stuck his small hand in his father’s large palm and smiled when the man’s fingers curled over his own.
Crazy Horse took his time on the way back to the village, letting the boy waddle along beside him, his short legs taking three and four steps for every one of his father’s. When they reached the creek, Crazy Horse let Curly find his own way across the stones, only once hauling the small boy up when he lost his footing.
White Deer was in front of the tipi when her husband and son returned. She saw the sapling over Crazy Horse’s shoulder, but said nothing, in case he hadn’t told Curly what it was for. She smiled, and Curly noticed, quickly glancing up at his father for a second, as if to catch some secret meaning on the wing.
Setting the sapling on the ground, Crazy Horse knelt to cut it into two unequal lengths, the smaller for Curly’s bow, the larger for his own. Ducking into the lodge, he hauled both pieces of ash with him, set them by the fire, and put away the ax.
He said nothing to Curly, and did not look up, knowing that the boy’s curiosity would draw him inside sooner or later. Sitting cross-legged, he took the shorter piece of ash and began to pare away the bark. The process would take several days, perhaps even as much as two weeks, and he hoped that Curly, once he realized what was happening, would find the patience to simply watch and wait.
It was important that the wood dry evenly, and getting the bark out of the way would facilitate the process. He stripped both pieces, then turned his attention to the short one. Turning it over in his hands, he eyed its length, hefted it, balanced it on the surface of one upturned finger, feeling for the inner balance, trying to find the perfect point for the center, where the grip would be carved.
Balance was everything in handling a bow. The movement necessary meant that the bow must function as an extension of its owner’s body, move precisely where and how it was supposed to. A fraction of an inch at the point of release would translate into several feet at long range, so accuracy meant that nothing could be left to chance.
Over the next two weeks, Crazy Horse worked both pieces of ash every day, leaving them by the fire, not too close, but close enough, all day long, and taking his steel-bladed white man’s knife to the wood every night. Slowly but surely, the shape
began to emerge. Curly had not bothered him once, as if he were certain what was happening to the ash.
The holy man remembered his own father telling him that the bow was already in the wood. It was up to the warrior to find it, to cut away all that was not the bow from the bow itself. Only in that way would the weapon be as perfect as it could be and must be. He thought of his father’s words as he smoothed the wood, making sure not to pare away too much, coaxing the perfect curves out of the ash.
When Curly’s bow was almost done, Crazy Horse pulled the boy onto his lap and held it out to him. He watched as the boy grasped it almost precisely, his short fingers curling around the grip. He adjusted the fingers, then watched as Curly moved the nearly completed bow from side to side, turning his wrist this way and that, the ash almost whispering in the quiet.
Taking it back, Crazy Horse pared a little more away from the grip, then set the small bow on the ground to finish carving the larger one.
That night, when Curly was asleep, Crazy Horse stayed up late, working with a small brush of horsehair, painting the curves of both bows. The front of each was daubed a bright yellow, the inner curve a softer blue. Then, taking the smaller bow in hand, he wrapped the grip in strips of deer hide. He did the same for the larger, and now had a pair, identical in every attribute but length.
Thinking back on it now, it seemed as if it were a lifetime ago. Four winters. Not much, maybe, but when any given day can see life end, impaled on a Pawnee shaft or ground to bloody gristle under the
hooves of the buffalo, four years was eternity and then some.
Now, he smiled, watching his son send an arrow through the cactus heart then run, his hands cupped over his buttocks as the boy with the target chased after him, flailing the spiny weapon closer and closer. He looked up then to see White Deer, also watching Curly run for his life.
“Do you remember his first bow?” he asked.
The sad smile she returned told him more than he wanted to know. She remembered the first, and hoped not to live to see the last.
Sighing, Crazy Horse prayed her wish would be granted. Then he said another for himself.