Two in the Field (49 page)

He showed up again just after the horses had arrived too late and we’d returned them to the stable for overnight keeping, having decided to start at daybreak tomorrow.

He’d cleaned up. Buckskin breeches now instead of filthy jeans. Hair combed and gathered together into a braid with beads worked into the tip. Eyes red-rimmed but more focused. Still a sawed-off little runt, but apparently
trying
to stand straighter.

“He says his heart is bad.”

I stared at him. “He’s gonna have a coronary?”

“Not that kind of bad.” Linc pursued the matter with
whooshes and grunts. “More like his spirit.” The Indian’s manner turned reproachful. “He also says you shouldn’t say the baby was his—she wasn’t.”

“Not his baby? Dammit, I asked him and he said yes, it was his!”

Linc relayed it. The Lakota eyed me with what looked like heavy irony. “What he told you was, the beadwork on the dog-pull crib was his,” Linc said. “He thought you were admiring his work. Says the baby isn’t his.”

“Then what was he doing with her?”

“Says he had a vision,” Linc relayed, after more conversation. “Supposed to give the girl to whites, so she’d grow up protected and maybe someday help her people.”

Looking sorrowful, the Lakota spoke further.

“He says he thought when first seeing you here that your having gotten a pelt attached to your face—I reckon he means the beard—would get him off the hook for dealing with you. But his spirits say no, he can’t slide off so easy.”

“What does he want?” I said. “Lily back?”

“He ain’t getting
that,”
Linc said firmly.

“Ask who the mother was,” I said. “She’s dead, I know that much.”

“He says it’s not time to tell you.”

“Well, the hell with all this,” I said impatiently. “What
is
it time for?”

Linc said something, then listened with amusement. “He wanted to know why we’re going to the Hills, so I told him. He says he must guide us.”

“ ‘Must?’ ”

“Says he’s been to the Hills many times and has business there now.”

“What kind of business?”

The Lakota spoke and signed at length.

“I couldn’t follow all of it,” Linc said. “Mainly he says that the Paha Sapa, the “hills-that-are-black,” is the heart of everything that is. It’s the spot where the Sioux originated and spread over the plains after the buffalo were given to them. He says his spirit told him he can no longer be a hang-around-the-fort Indian. He’s got to go pray in the
Paha Sapa
, get himself a vision. Because you took the baby, his spirits say that he owes you more service. If we’ll get him a horse and rifle, he’ll take us anywhere we want.”

“What do you think?” I asked.

Linc looked thoughtful. “Interesting that he didn’t ask for liquor.”

“No liquor,” I said flatly. “Can we trust him not to steal us blind and run off?”

“I got a hunch we can,” Link said slowly. “If he knows the Hills and can read sign—what Indian can’t?—then I expect he’ll do for us. Who knows? He might even get us to Tim.”

“Tell him it’s a deal.”

“Before he can agree, he says he needs to know if the baby is healthy.”

I rolled my eyes.
“Now
he cares?”

After Linc made assurances that Lily was fine, I asked what we should call our new Lakota guide.

“He says the first name given him was Hake, which means fifth-born.”

It sounded like a prelude to spitting. “I can’t even say it,” I complained.

Linc laughed. “He says there was a big storm the night he was born. Their lodge had a tear near the top and water poured in, so another of his names is Leaky Teepee.”

“ ‘Leaky Teepee’?” I tried to keep a straight face. “Didn’t he ever get something more warrior-like?”

“Sort of,” Linc said. “His lodge name is Man Who Walks Like Goose.”

We looked at each other.

“Walking Goose?” Linc suggested.

“How about just plain Goose?”

“He says Goose will do, so long as we remember it’s not the full handle—and that it’s Goose and not Gander.”

I thought that over. “So he was named for walking like a girl goose?”

“He also wants us to remember that his beadwork and feather stitching was the best in his tribe.”

“Are you telling me he’s gay? Homosexual?”

Linc listened intently as Goose continued to talk. “Says he’s on the road to being a
winkte
, but not all the way there.”

“What’s a winkte?”

“A man who dreams of being like a woman and one day comes out in a dress and does woman’s work and lives like a woman.” Linc paused. “I expect ol’ Goose here got off the warrior trail some time ago.”

Just what we needed; a cross-dressing Indian scout.

Goose made a series of signs and tossed his head pridefully.

“What was that about?”

“He’s boasting that his quill- and beadwork are better than any woman’s.”

“Look, all I care is whether he can take us where we want to go,” I said. “How do you feel?”

“Long as he stays out of my blanket, I got no kick. There was nancy boys in the army. They never hurt nobody.”

“Then he’s got the job.”

Custer had journeyed to the Black Hills during the hottest part of the previous year, in early July, when temperatures were over
100. Now, with August waning, we had only to deal with high 80s. Still, it was hot enough, and we had to make frequent stops for water. Cait soon realized why Custer and his men sported bushy mustaches. Her hat brim didn’t quite shield her upper lip, which soon burned and split. The first days were grueling for her, but, seasoned by her time on the plains, she impressed us all with her uncomplaining acceptance of each long day’s hardships. If anything, she was a little too self-contained for my taste. At the outset I rode close beside her and issued warnings against varied threats, seen and unseen. It wasn’t long before she waved me away, saying, “Samuel, don’t
hover
so!”

Which stung, naturally. Maybe I
was
being over-protective, but only out of concern for her. It seemed that whenever her defenses finally yielded a bit, and we became closer, she found some new way of maintaining distance. Evidently she now wanted to be treated like one of the guys.

Fat chance of that. Cait wore a shirt and dungarees, but only from a distance would she be taken for a man. At first I was concerned about how our goldbugs, a scraggly bunch of twenty-year-olds, would react to her, but they proved docile—especially since we’d banned liquor from the provisions. A couple of them were Irish, and Cait carried on with them like kinsfolk. They required educating the first night out, however, when they expected her to cook and clean up.

“I’ll take my turn,” she said sweetly, “same as you.”

Noting this, Goose privately asked Linc why we’d brought a squaw who shunned her rightful tasks and also dressed like a man. That last part was pretty funny, I thought, coming from him.

Goose scoffed at our bonfire approach to meals. For himself he made small cooking fires, then scraped them away afterward and slept on the warm ground underneath. He generally cooked his food in a skin bag fashioned from a buffalo paunch into which
he dumped water and hot rocks. He had a knack for plucking fish from streams near our camps, and to bake them he lined a shallow pit with leaves, placed the cleaned fish atop them, added a row of sticks, more leaves, and finally a layer of dirt. He lit a fire atop it all and let it burn down to the coals. Uncovered, the fish were thoroughly done, skin and scales peeling away easily. When he had time to gather them, he added garnishes of little beans stored by field mice, cactus flowers and wild plums.

I nearly caused a brawl in my first turn at cooking when I started to use one of the mining pans. These were made of steel designed to take on a coat of rust and thereby trap gold particles. If their sloping sides were slick from grease or soap, the fine grains would slide out. One of the goldbugs swore and grabbed at me as I was about to dump lard in the pan. I shoved him away and things looked hot until Linc intervened.

The rations we’d gotten from Custer were jerked beef and hardtack, the latter being tasteless stale biscuits that, once a few were removed from the box, disintegrated into crumbs during travel. At night we ate whatever game Linc or Goose had bagged along the way, usually garnished with wild onions.

We saw no Indians. Goose said that the Lakota were not likely to attack during the powwow over Paha Sapa. But we were definitely being observed.

“How?” I said. “From where?”

On the next rise Goose pointed to cairns placed in a rough row. “They pile ’em up at night,” Linc explained, “and put their heads in between before sunup. That way they can keep watch without being noticed.”

“You’re saying Indians can pick up every new bump on the horizon?”

“Sure,” Linc said. “They can spot tiny movements miles off, too—things you and I wouldn’t see.”

Goose’s value system was wildly different from mine, of course, but it was interesting to think that he
sensed
things differently and more acutely.

Crossing Cedar Creek, south of Pretty Rock Butte, we saw burial scaffolds set high against the western sky. Goose became agitated as we drew near, and soon I saw why. Several had been ransacked.

“Goose says whites did it,” Linc reported.

“How can he tell?”

Linc asked and then pointed to a faint indentation in the ground. “Indians walk toes in,” he reported. “Ball of foot touching first. This is a white man’s footprint ’cause our heels hit first and we walk with toes slightly out.”

“ ‘We’?”

“To Goose I’m white like you—we’re both
wasichu.”
He added wryly, “It ain’t no compliment.”

Lakota corpses were wound mummy-like in clothes or blankets, he explained, with firearms, tobacco, jerked beef, moccasins, rawhide bags, horn spoons and various other articles placed inside to accompany the spirit to the Eternal Hunting Ground.

“You’ll find all that stuff for sale around posts,” Linc said. “Once I even saw humans’ skin sold for fish bait.”

I stared somberly at a body that had spilled from one the scaffolds, its face daubed with red dye. We waited while Goose made an offering of food and water. I’d noticed that each time Goose drank water he poured a bit on the ground to thank the provident Great Spirit. He did so now, and prayed for the departed ones. I told Linc about the scaffold Goose had made for Lily’s mother.

“That’s a high honor,” Linc said, “for a woman.”

“Yeah, given that he saw fit to dump her baby.”

He frowned and said sharply, “I wouldn’t use ‘dump’ to say what’s happened to Lily.”

He was sticking up for Kaija, I realized. And maybe for himself.

“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

As we picked our way through a maze of gullies formed by tributaries of the Grand River, we came upon another troubling sight: the remains of a white man. Linc estimated that he’d been there ten days to two weeks. I tightened my bandanna over my nose and moved away. The awful smell didn’t seem to bother Goose, who stooped over what was left of skin and bones, then read signs all around.