Conquering Horse (37 page)

He said nothing.

“It is because I am afraid you will scorn me.”

He sighed, then said, “Speak, woman, my ears hear you.”

“My husband, well, our son does not need all there is to drink. I have too much milk. Therefore let me give the colt suck. I have seen that his mouth is very tender.”

No Name stared at her.

“Once my mother told me she did not have enough milk for me when I was born. Therefore she gave me some milk to drink
from a mare. It is time that I repay horsekind. Why cannot this colt be raised on a mother’s milk? Yankton mothers are often known to give little puppies to suck.”

He continued to stare at her with large black fixed eyes.

“I wish that my husband may be happy. He has had a great vision for his scarlet people. He has overcome many difficulties. He has an enemy scalp to show. Soon he will be wearing an honor feather. Thus perhaps it is right and good for him to cling to the little white stud. The stud colt will no doubt help the Yanktons become a rich and proud people. I have said.”

He still could not speak. He looked down at the sunken fire. Presently he picked up a twig and without thinking scratched pictures in the dust of the cave floor.

“Has my husband lost his tongue?”

He coughed; then looked into the darkness outside the cave. “Do as your heart tells you. But do not let me see it.”

“My mother also told of another thing she gave me. She cooked some cornmeal in marrow soup and then strained it and gave it to me to drink through a leather teat.”

“Ahh.”

“Also, the colt will soon be able to drink water and eat of the tender grasses by itself. It will not take long.”

He nodded. “When we arrive at my father’s lodge he will find us a milch mare and let the colt feed from her.”

She reached a hand around the side of the fire. “Give it to me.”

“Give you what?” he cried wonderingly.

“The gray belt. That the colt may smell its old mother when it abides with its new mother.”

Slowly, gravely, he unstrapped the gray hide belt from around his middle and handed it across to her.

In the next days, during the Moon of Black Cherries, while the white colt filled out and became strong, they prepared for the long trip home.

He hunted buffalo; she dried meat and cured hides. He cut thirteen short tepee poles; she patched together a skin cover. He made a high saddle for her; she got ready a travois on which to carry their possessions. He shot a porcupine; she made combs from its tail and dyed the quills. He made himself a new quiver; she decorated it tastefully with quillwork. He made himself a new sinew-backed bow from second-growth ash; she embossed it beautifully with more quillwork.

He made himself a good warclub out of maple knurl and a thick shield out of tough bullhide, and painted the main elements of his vision on both to make them sacred. She made leather cases for them so they might always be covered except in time of battle. She also made him a heavy buckskin shirt, with fringes of varying lengths on his right arm, the varying lengths indicating the kinds of trails he had taken. With quills he embossed the small leather charm case she had made for him and placed in it, reverently, the circlet of scarlet mane he had cut from Dancing Sun. Out of deer shinbones she made charms and hung them on the cradle to protect the baby from evil spirits.

To vary the diet, he went to the river and caught fish. He found the channel catfish fat and lazy. Sometimes they were so sluggish he could charm them to the surfacf by gently tickling them under the belly with a willow twig and then throw them out onto the shore. He gathered twists of kinnikinick and wild tobacco and cured them in the sun and then put the twists in parfleches.

She gathered cherries, sometimes serving them raw and sometimes stewing them with meat. Some of them she pounded to a fine pulp—skin, flesh, pit—to make soap.

He took the colt to the river and gentled it into the deeper waters, teaching it to swim and to accept his handling. He delighted in swimming with the colt under his arm.

She hung the child from the peg in the wall near the fire.
She rocked it to sleep, singing a lullaby in a low, whispering drawling manner:

When the baby would not sleep, she sang songs to strengthen its man soul:

Over the days the white colt became vexingly domestic. They could not make a move but what it was in the way, bumping into them around the fire, gamboling against them when they went for water, even insisting on lying next to them when they went to bed.

Yet, for all the colt’s affectionate playing, No Name still brooded on occasion. Haunting images tormented him. Sometimes, memory of his mother telling of his older brother Pretty Rock became confused with a picture of Circling Hawk kneeling over him on the grit sand beside the Great Smoky Water. Sometimes
memory of his father sitting in noble repose beside his fire got mixed up with Dancing Sun in rampant battle with Black One on the burning prairie. Sometimes memory of the love between the slow brown stud and its mother became mixed up with scenes from his childhood. And sometimes, when he contemplated the healing wound on his thigh where Dancing Sun had bitten him, he thought of himself as Leaf’s brother Burnt Thigh.

Once Leaf broke across his brooding with a question. She was sitting across the fire from him, giving suck to the baby. “My husband, I see that you look often into the darkness.”

He jerked erect. Ahh, her spirit soul had been visiting with his spirit soul and he had not known it. He permitted a silence to widen between them, then said, “It is nothing.”

“What is it that you see in the darkness?”

“It is nothing.”

“You have not told me much of your vision, my husband. Is there more?”

“What can a woman know of a man’s vision?”

“I have seen you think about your father. Do you not remember your mother?”

He watched her narrowly. He wasn’t sure if it was the shadow of a sinking flame passing over her moon-round face or a brief knowing smile. He said shortly, “A son always remembers his mother.”

She looked down in love at her suckling son. “Does he think of her when he is being very brave?”

“When he is brave he remembers how his father stood up to the enemy and overcame him.”

“Does he ever think of his mother’s brother?”

“I think mostly of my father. Moon Dreamer is sometimes my preceptor but my father is my father.”

She sat very still. A complete awareness of his troubles seemed to emanate from her stolid silence.

“Ae,” he said then, sighing, “sometimes it is difficult to know when a memory is not a vision.”

“My husband, what has your vision to do with your father?” Upon her question, the baby quit suckling. It gradually let her nipple slip from its lips. Slowly, after a moment, a white drop of milk formed over the dark nipple and then ran down the underside of her rose-brown breast.

“Woman, the question you ask is as dark as its answer.”

She threw a brief look up at the leather case containing his warclub. “I have seen your warclub. On one side I see painted a white mare and the Butte of Thunders and a Yankton capturing a white stallion. On the other side I see painted a white stud colt and a young warrior returning to his father’s lodge and the figure of an old one rising in the sky.”

He held himself severely erect. “You see well, woman.”

“Why should the father have to die?”

“Woman, the answer to your question is a thing that sometimes does not let me sleep at night.”

“Tell me the full vision, my husband. Perhaps a wife can help her husband understand it.”

Slowly, reluctantly, in the briefest of words, he told her all that had been revealed to him in the sun dance.

Her eyes showed rings of white by the time he finished. Then slowly her eyes fell and she looked down at her baby. She shivered. “Let us hope our son will never be tormented by so terrible a vision.”

“Aii,” No Name cried. “Yet I would never deny it him. It is not a good thing to deny the vision. Worse misfortune always befalls those who do.”

“What will you do?”

“My helper will tell me.”

“How can a son destroy his father?”

“My helper will tell me what to do when the time comes.”

“It is a terrible thing when a son is asked to do such a thing to his father.”

“A man must obey the voice within.”

There was a long pause, then she asked, as she gazed in sad love upon her smiling baby, “When will you make the divination for our return?”

“Tomorrow, after the sun sets. I will then offer sacrifices and seek instruction from those of the other world.”

“It will be a good thing to show our son to my mother and father. Yet I shall be sad on our return. I have come to love your father.”

The next day at dusk he made the divination. He went to a lonely place beside the river and built a small stick fire. He sprinkled a handful of tobacco in the flames as a token offering to the sun. He hung some dried meat in the brush for the fourleggeds to eat so they might tell those of the other world that his heart was good. He threw a few kernels of precious corn upon the grass so the wingeds would tell Wakantanka that his hand was always open.

Last he poured some badger blood over a buffalo chip and stirred the two together with a stick. When he had mixed them sufficiently, so that the wisdom-giving power of those who live underground had become one with the truth-telling power of those who live above the ground, he peered into the blood-and- dung pie long and anxiously. Gradually, as the evening light faded, lines and swirls began to form into a picture. Only when it was almost dark did he see it clearly: a man on a sorrel horse leading the way, with a woman following on a dun mare, a baby and some household goods riding in a basket on two travois poles, while around them a white colt galloped, making a circle like a burning corona around a sun.

“Thank you, thank you. Now I fear only what must be done to my father. I love my father dearly and do not wish to kill him.”

2

First the ears of a sorrel horse showed over the low rise, then the tufts of a wolf-cap, then the bronze face of a man. Slowly the whole of the man and the horse came to view. It was late in the afternoon and the sinking sun hit the high cheeks of the man and the bluff chest of the horse full on. The man was stripped for action: quiver bristling with arrows, bow strung, knife ready in the belt, warclub dangling from the wrist.

Behind the man came a woman on a dun mare. The woman sat with her legs straddled over the thin ends of travois poles. Behind her on the travois, on top of a basket of goods, rode a baby nodding in its cradle. Farther behind ran a white colt, sometimes skimming over the grass, sometimes stumbling in buck brush.

The man held up his hand. They stopped. Leaning forward, eyes glittering, the man searched the horizon ahead.

The woman looked back and smiled tiredly at the sleeping baby and the gamboling colt.

The man sat as high as he could on his horse and looked once more along the entire length of the horizon before them. At last the man said, “They are not in their accustomed place beside Falling Water.”

“Perhaps they have not returned from the Place of the Pipestone.”

“It is now the Moon of Ripe Corn, woman. It is already long past the time for the making of the pipe.”

The woman waited patiently.

The man said, “Perhaps they have removed to a new place along the river.”

“Perhaps the buffalo did not come to the valley this summer and they have gone for a summer hunt from which they have not yet returned.”

“Woman, you have forgotten the power of Moon Dreamer’s buffalo medicine. When he dances and sings for the buffalo to come, they come. His dancing and their coming is one and the same. His medicine has never failed the Yanktons.”

The woman waited patiently.

Again the man rose to his full height on the horse. Finally, staring intently at the wide valley ahead, he made out what looked like a circle of sharp wolf teeth.

“Do you see them, my husband?”

“It is as I have said. They have removed to a new place. I see the Yankton tepees on the east side of the river. It is where the grass is deep for the horses.”

“Ahh, the new encampment will have a sweet smell.”

As the man watched, a puff of smoke rose off the bluffs above the camp, white against a yellow sunset. “They have seen us,” he cried. “They ask what is the news.”

Quickly he put his horses through a series of zigzag maneuvers, telling the guards on the bluffs that he brought much that was good. He watched until he saw small specks run down toward camp, then said, “Let us rest the horses. I wish to prepare for the welcome home.”

He slid to the ground and settled to one side in the green grass. From a small leather case he dug out some black paint, the symbol of joy, and smeared a wide band across his face from nose to ear. He next decorated the sorrel, painting white circles on its flanks and hanging brilliant red feathers in its tail. He also caught the white colt and hung a beautiful necklace of red quills around its neck. And last he fastened the scalp of the Pawnee, as well as a portion of Dancing Sun’s scarlet mane, on the necklace, in such a way that they dangled noticeably every time the colt moved.

The woman waited until he had finished, then, asked, “Will my husband carry his warclub?”

He caught what she meant. He looked down at the figures he had painted on it. “Perhaps my father Redbird will not see them if I swing the warclub swiftly about to show my joy.”