Conquering Horse (24 page)

After a time she learned enough Pawnee to make out that her tall captor was known as Sounds The Ground As He Walks, that he had pledged to keep her a virgin. He was a warrior priest, and except for one man the entire village held him in awe. The one man who did not fear Sounds The Ground was a subchief named Rough Arm.

It quite surprised her to find that the Pawnees guarded her chastity with an almost fierce jealousy. During the day they treated her as a special honored one. Many prayed to her. At night she was bound in hymen cords to prevent rape and placed in a bed between Sounds The Ground and his wife Shifting Wind. She knew rape was the usual fate of captive women. Even those lucky enough to fall into the hands of a kind man had to submit themselves to his lust for the first while. Yet Sounds The Ground never touched her. She wondered if something was wrong with Sounds The Ground as a man. She noted he was very kind, sat brooding much, sang plaintive songs, and often stopped on the prairie alone to contemplate the flowers. These things she associated with those-unable-to-marry or men-touched-by-the-moon-being. Later, when she became better acquainted with his family, his two wives and seven children, and when she learned that as a child he had slept in his slain mother’s blood, she saw how wrong she had been. She also learned in time that he had been a captive of her band of Yanktons. This explained why he spoke Sioux so well.

Shortly after arriving among the Pawnees she found she was with child. She worried about what Sounds The Ground would do when he learned of it. She knew she would soon be suspect if she did not show the usual signs of menstruation, so she secretly cut her hand and pretended that the blood was her menses. Thus always each month, upon the sign of the blood, Shifting Wind, the older of Sounds The Ground’s wives, put her alone in a menstrual hut. Five times the stratagem of cutting her hand worked successfully.

It was Shifting Wind who first detected it. Shifting Wind had been given the task of giving her a daily bath in the River That Sinks, to keep her fresh and well-perfumed. Upon emerging from the menstrual hut the sixth time, Shifting Wind took her to the river to cleanse and purify her. There, helping her, rinsing her body with water, she felt the knot in her belly.

There was an immediate hullabaloo. Old Shifting Wind
shrieked at the top of her voice, tore her hair, clawed at Leaf with fierce nails. The whole Pawnee village charged the place where they were bathing, Sounds The Ground among them. After Sounds The Ground learned what the trouble was, his face became that of a man who had been grievously betrayed. From him Leaf learned why they had been saving her for all this time. It was their custom to capture a virgin from some enemy tribe, and early in the spring, at corn-planting time, to offer her in sacrifice to the male god, the Morning Star, so that he might be kind to them in the coming year. Sounds The Ground told her that now, learning she was with child, the Pawnee village would demand that she and her unborn child be thrown to the wolves. Sounds The Ground felt very sad about it, yet said he would do what he could to save her.

Leaf wept.

The Pawnee village immediately divided into two camps, Sounds The Ground at the head of one group and Rough Arm of the other. For once Sounds The Ground found himself in the minority. Yet for two months he managed to keep her secure in his dirt lodge. He carefully explained to her that the reason he was saving her life was because the Yanktons had been kind to him when he had been their captive, always treating him as if he were one of their children. Meanwhile, another virgin was found, from the Kansa to the south, and Rough Arm was momentarily held in check.

Immediately after the sacrifice of the new virgin, however, Rough Arm began drumming up a new campaign to throw Leaf to the wolves. The village finally went into such an uproar about her that Sounds The Ground decided it would be best if he took his group on a short buffalo hunt, hoping that in the meantime the old men of the village could talk some sense into Rough Arm. Sounds The Ground and his group were out on the hunt but a week, when suddenly Rough Arm came with all the braves of his warrior society and surrounded the encampment.
They seized her, dragged her to the stream, and buried her in the sand up to her neck….

No Name sat with a stone face. Yet inside he boiled with great astonishment at it all.

A meadowlark whistled from the tip of a wolfberry bush. Slowly the sun sank toward the fringe of young cottonwoods along the curve of the stream. Sweet aroma from the pink prairie clover continued to waft around them. Mingled with it was the stench of the broken bones in the middenheap.

The bad smell of the bones reminded him that danger lurked near. He looked at her. “Sister, let us remove to a place further up the stream. The Pawnees may yet return to see if the wolves have eaten you.”

She agreed immediately. “But first we must jerk some of the meat and dry it. Also, I wish to make some clothes for our return to Falling Water. I cannot be wearing a man’s shirt when my mother greets me with joy at the edge of the village.” Mention of his shirt caused her to look at his muscular chest. And looking, she suddenly clapped hand to mouth.

He caught her look. He had been wondering how long it would take her to catch sight of the sun dance scars on his bare chest. Yet he disdained to show pleasure at her surprise. He said quietly, “I have been given the vision at last. I have been sent to catch a certain wild horse. A white stallion.”

She looked at him with new respect. “You have come a long way from home. What is the news?”

He told her that her mother and father were alive and well, that his grandfather Wondering Man had at last died, that the Yanktons had lived well on buffalo flesh most of the winter. Also, almost grudgingly, he told her more of his vision, first the part given him on the Butte of Thunders and then some of the second part after the torment of the sun dance.

This time she could not keep from exclaiming aloud. “Sounds
The Ground has spoken of such a horse. A great white stallion that no one can catch.”

“What! Where?” he exclaimed, jumping up.

Leaf’s face closed over instantly. She realized she had said too much. She shook her head. “It is very far away. I do not remember.”

He was almost beside himself with joy. He recalled the words of the white mare in his vision. “First, you must take a long trail alone, on foot. Go to the River That Sinks. It is to the south where the Pawnees live. There it will be told you where the white stallion lives.” He trembled, thinking again of that magic day on the Butte of Thunders. The white mare had also said, “Meat and clothes and a place to sleep will be given you also. Have courage. Be patient unto the day.” He saw now what the white mare had meant. She had looked ahead and seen that he would find Leaf in this place, that it was fated Leaf would tell him about the white stallion. The white mare had also seen that it would be Leaf who would provide him with food and clothes and shelter, as a good woman should, while he went out to catch the sacred horse.

He cried aloud, dancing in the pink prairie clover. “Ai! now I know that my protector lives. He is helping me. The vision is coming true. I will become a great man and my people shall become as numerous as the leaves of the rustling tree.”

Leaf bowed her head over her swollen belly.

He stood over her. “Tell me the way. Where does this Sounds The Ground live? Tomorrow I shall go in search of him and make him tell me where the white stallion lives.”

She wept. “Rough Arm and his soldiers will kill you.”

“I must go,” he said. “I have been told all this in a vision and it is fated that I shall do it. It cannot be otherwise.”

She shuddered. “The Pawnees call themselves the men of men. They are fierce when they are angry. Rough Arm will kill you.” Again she shuddered. “His hands were very rough when he buried me in the sand. This I know.”

He stood above her in stiff hauteur. “Woman, it is fated that I should know. Tell me. What is the way?”

She shook her head. Bitter tears fell on her hands. Her face began to swell again.

“My helper will show me the way. I will go without your help.”

She clutched him by the leg again. “Do not go. My child was without a father until today. Do not take this from my child again.”

He stood very still beside her. Gradually the burning glitter in his eyes subsided and his face resumed the cast of graven stone.

At last, looking down, he touched the painted part in her hair. “Tell me, when will our child come? I have not counted the moons.”

She threw him a wild look of joy. “It will be here by the next moon.”

He stood considering her. A smile worked his lips. “Ahh, there will be enough time to catch the white horse first.” His smile deepened. Then he said winningly, delicately, repeating an old refrain, “I am without a wife. I am naked. Oh, let us run away to my uncle the great white stallion. Let us elope. Come.” He tugged in love at a strand of her rust-touched hair. “I have seen a young girl who looks so beautiful to me, I feel sick when I think about her.”

Leaf wept.

“Will you be my wife? After I catch the white horse we shall have many horses and I will give more than ten to your father Owl Above.”

“I cannot return to the Pawnee. Not even to Sounds The Ground. I cannot.”

“I will hide you. I will go alone in the dark and talk to this Sounds The Ground in the privacy of his lodge. With his voice he will tell me where my white horse lives or my knife will be
at his throat. So tell me the way! Come. Show me on a dust map.”

She held against him.

“Come, let there be no shadow between us. I wish to be a father who has listened to his vision. Will you be the wife of such a one?”

At last, sighing, she consented and drew him the map.

4

The next morning he inspected his bow and arrow and knife, put on a new pair of moccasins, and sang a song of self-encouragement in a low private voice. Then, turning his back on Leaf, he resolutely set off in a loping run, south, across the pathless waste of grass.

Late in the afternoon, hungry, he sat down in a swale where the grass was higher than his head. Here he ate the dried meat Leaf had prepared for him. He was thirsty. All sorts of shiny green frogs were hopping about, yet there was no water. Flying above him were some redwing blackbirds, black males with red shoulders, and rust females with whitish undersides. They kept circling low over him, fluttering, scolding, sometimes dipping down as if to peck him in the eye. It came over him that the birds were angry because he sat near their nests. Ahh, eggs. Creeping through the grass, first to one side, then the other, watching to see when the redbirds became the angriest, he finally came upon some grass bent down by stormwind. The moment
he crouched over the down grass the female redwings dove at him in desperate fury, wingtips snapping against his wolfcap. Humping over to protect his face, he parted the thick grass carefully. There, well hidden in the center of a tussock, were two nests, each with five speckled greenish-white eggs. Gravely, with the redwings continuing to strike down at him from on high, he took a pinch of tobacco and scattered it on the wind, saying, “Wingeds, you are my friends. I take these eggs because they were made for this. Tell our grandfather the sun that I do this because there is no water. I am thirsty. I am sorry. But I have been sent to catch the white horse.” Carefully he took but two eggs from each nest, leaving three, and withdrew. The eggs were fresh. They quenched his thirst.

He settled back on his heels, knees against his chest. He rocked quietly back and forth in the deep grass.

A single rose bloomed at his feet. Its five pink petals reminded him of baby tongues. A big green-black bee bumbled around and over its powdery yellow stamens, seeking nectar. Off to one side of the prairie rose lay a scab-like patch of prickly pear cactus. The patch glowed with strangely beautiful yellow blossoms.

Slowly he rocked himself to sleep.

He awoke just as the sun was setting. From Leaf’s map he knew he was not more than a short run from the Pawnee settlement. At the edge of the swale he lay down in the grass and looked against the sun to see if anyone had passed by in the last day. Shining spider threads vibrated from grass-tip to grass-tip everywhere. Look as he might he couldn’t find a single broken thread. Nor could he find any grass bent down or stepped on. Apparently the route Leaf had shown him was one rarely used by the Pawnees.

When darkness finally settled on the vast prairie, he began his approach from the northwest, the wind against him. Presently he came to the brow of a shallow drop-off. Below, not
too far away, lay the Pawnee village. He could just make out the irregular pattern of the earth lodges.

He moved reptile-like, humped, slinking through the grass. He kept a bush, then a clump of bunchgrass, then a stone, between himself and the village.

He came upon a field of young corn. He crept through it slowly, going from row to row. From the height of the corn and the crumbly state of the soil, he made out the field had been hoed but once. It meant the men were still home. The Pawnees rarely left their village to go on their summer hunt until at least after the second hoeing. The rustle of the corn leaves was just loud enough to hide the sound of his crawling on the crumbly earth.

Next came a horse corral. One by one the horses lifted their heads as they got wind of him. He recalled Leaf’s warning that the Pawnees liked to attract horse thieves by tying a very white horse outside the corral and making it look easy to steal. White could be seen even on the darkest and blackest of nights. He looked carefully to all sides but saw no white horse.

Beyond the corral he felt his fetish working.

“What is it, friend?” he whispered. “I am going so softly not even the mole can hear me.”

An owl hooted. Directly ahead. He listened. He stood stooped over with eyes dilated. A moment later another owl hooted. Off to the right. He crouched lower. He listened, mouth open. His heart pulsed in his ears. The first owl hoot sounded true, he thought, but the second not. In rocky land it was easy to tell a true birdcall from a false call by listening to see if there was an echo. If there was an echo it was human and false. On flat ground one had to listen for something else, something almost the opposite, a mumming sound as if someone had held his nose too tight.