Scarlet Plume, Second Edition (21 page)

The beat of the drums came down wind, from the north. She could just make out a weak orange reflection on red rock across the stream. The dance was being held around a fire in a hollow to keep down the sound as well as the light.

She couldn’t resist one little peek. She had to look. She had seen a few ritual Indian dances at Skywater, but the trouble with them was that they had been held for the benefit of the whites. She wanted to know what a real Dakota dance was like out in the wilds.

Cautiously she stepped through the soft, deep grass. She walked soundlessly. She pushed through a cluster of grazing ponies. She passed unheard within a dozen steps of a camp guard. She had to part some prickling gooseberries. At last she stood on the rimrock. To the left, and below, there it was. A dance. Some twenty men and boys were slowly winding around a small stick fire, around and around on beaten grass, toe down first and then the heel, a bird step, drums striking
tuk-tak tuk-tak
, mouths lifted up and bellowing. Each brave had tied a buffalo tail to his buttocks and fetlocks to his heels. A few braves wore black horns to represent buffalo heads. And one of the braves actually had put on a huge dressed-out buffalo head with horns and hair and whiskers. Otherwise they were stark naked. Around and around they pranced.
Tuk-tak tuk-tak.
They bellowed. They crouched on all fours. They pawed the earth. They butted each other. Some mounted each other.
Tuk-tak tuk-tak.

A little closing of the eyes, Judith thought, and one could see them as actual buffalo bulls. They were truly dancing up the buffalo.

Judith spotted Two Two, Bullhead, Traveling Hail, and Whitebone. Walking Voice and another old man were at the drums, both of them crying their hearts out. At their feet lay a white buffalo skull, fired sweet grass smoldering in front of its bony nostrils. It was heathenish, pagan, savage, barbaric, all these things, and yet at the same time Judith couldn’t help but admit it was more profoundly moving, soul-rousing, than any Christian rite or ceremony she had ever witnessed in her life. Only the Roman Catholics and the Episcopalians had anything like it. In their own minds the Yankton men had been transformed into buffalo. They were the buffalo. It went beyond mere belief.

It struck her that the white man had things backward. The white man, both her brother-in-law Claude and her sister Theodosia, believed that all things spiritual were heaven-sent. They weren’t. The real truth was they were earth-born. Stone was not just stone, dust was not just dust, grass was not just grass, savages were not just savages, but all of them were manifestations of something profound, utterances dark and from far out of the deeps of time. They related back to some ultimate seat of truth. A truth was emanating out of dreaming stone rather than out of indifferent pan-Spirit. The dancing and the crying, the butting and the bellowing, the drumming and the singing, were voices out of the heart of Matter.

Then she recognized Scarlet Plume. He was the dancer wearing the huge dressed-out buffalo head.

His dancing was magnificent. A true re-creation. His movements were truly the motions of a real butting buffalo bull. His horns hooked up on the left, gutting a rival bull, then his horns hooked up on the right, gutting another rival bull. His bellowing, resounding out of the huge hollow skull he wore, was tremendous, deafening. He kept butting away the rival bulls. Slowly he made his way to his favorite buffalo cow. Already he was prepared for her. His phallus was erect, resembling the head of a bull snake straining to lift itself off the ground. He was buffalo.

Judith backed away. As she retreated, she kept looking at the dancing risen Scarlet Plume until she could see him no longer.

It was only when she lay down again by her tepee fire that she remembered who she was: a white woman captive.

At dawn the form of Traveling Hail loomed a golden copper in the leather doorway. He was naked except for clout and bow and arrows.

Whitebone was instantly awake. He reared up from his fur pallet. “What is there, my son?”

“My father, a big dust has appeared in the air across the plains. It is the buffalo.”

“What is the direction, my son?”

“They come from the northwest.”

“Where lies the wind this morning, my son?”

“It comes sweet and warm from the southeast.”

“How many buffalo are there?”

Holding up both hands, Traveling Hail bent down each finger in turn. When all ten fingers were down, he let them spring up like geese flying away. To remember each ten, he kept down a finger. He counted his ten fingers ten times and then added six. “Six and ten bending downs, my father.”

“Ah. They are the buffalo Scarlet Plume saw in his divination. It is good. Hoppo! Up! Awake the people.”

“They are already awake my father.” Traveling Hail smiled down at his uncle in a slow, sober manner. “We await you and Two Two. Also the Woman With The Sunned Hair. Hurry. The people tremble at the thought of the great day before us.” Traveling Hail was careful not to look at Judith as she lay beside the old man.

“Have they all had the morning bath?”

“All, my father. Already they wear freshly washed moccasins. My brother warns we must be very careful not to leave any scent in the grass for the wise bulls to smell.”

“You speak well, my son. Have the women tied up the dogs?”

“They have, my father.”

Whitebone turned and placed his hand on Judith’s belly. “Awake, woman. Be ready to run far. There will be no time to warm the wake-up soup. First the chase. Ho hechetu, the buffalo awaits us. He wants us to catch him so we can all eat fat pa-pa again and be merry.”

Whitebone was quickly out of bed. He grabbed up his robe and stomped off to take his morning dip. Two Two followed him, hopping along lightly.

Judith and Smoky Day and Tinkling also got up and hurried off to take their required baths.

Returning, Judith slipped on her tunic and freshly washed leggings and moccasins. The buckskins, having become rounded to her form, fit her perfectly. Never in her life had she worn such comfortable attire.

She stepped outside. Sparkling lemon light brought out the deeper greens in the grass and the subtler reds in the rocks. Her stomach gnawed in hunger; nevertheless she felt extraordinarily alive, ready to run miles.

Yanktons who were to make up the two wings of the human corral were gathered under the oaks: camp soldiers, young mothers, boys and girls. Traveling Hail was giving them some last-minute instructions. They listened, eyes flashing, flushed to their chins. Some ran about not quite knowing what they were doing. Some touched the hard elbows of oaks for strength.

Judith found herself assigned to the south wing, the one which would form along the rim of the escarpment far to the south. She and Two Two, and others, would hide behind rock outcroppings.

Scarlet Plume stalked in among them carrying his buffalo effigy.

Judith couldn’t help but shiver at the sight of him. Several times already she had caught herself daydreaming about him, and in a way to make her blush.

Scarlet Plume looked each member of the chase in the eye.

All fell silent.

Slowly Scarlet Plume’s calm face changed. A great weep took possession of him. Copious tears ran down his red-brown cheeks. He let the sparkling tears fall on his buffalo effigy.

Scarlet Plume spoke. “This we do in memory of all the pa-pa who will die for us today. We are of their blood. We weep for them now because we already know their fate. Ho-ha. Listen at all times to my brother Traveling Hail. He has been appointed the master of the surround. Remember, it is very bad to disobey him. I have said.”

Scarlet Plume’s tears abruptly ceased. He covered his little effigy with a parfleche, and turning on his heel, disappeared behind the scrub oaks.

The Yanktons hurried. Each carried a scaring blanket. Sometimes they ran skulking, sometimes openly. The land rose under them like the slanted deck of a vast ship. They toed through patches of buffalo grass, its blades curly and crinkly. They raced across islands of sage, its silver dusty and muted. Sprigs of wild onion and lonesome bull thistles speckled solid stands of golden-rod.

As much as possible they kept to the exposed red rock. The soil was so thin that in spots whole acres of absolutely naked red rock lay open to the sky. The open red rock made Judith think of the time when as a child she had badly barked herself falling out of a tree. There were skinned areas on her thighs as big as peeled beets, red flesh showing. The exposed red rock was sometimes so glassy slick she had trouble keeping to her feet. Across the face of one such exposure ran long, wavering lines, as if some cosmic groom had run a currycomb across it.

Judith ran easy in her Indian garb. She ran lightly up the hard rising plateau. She seemed to have endless breath that morning.

She came across a tumble of rocks where the quartzite still seemed to be in a state of violent boiling. Mad scarlet and bruised blue and veined purple and raw pink swirled underfoot. She couldn’t resist pausing for a look.

“Why do you stop, my mother?” Two Two called.

“It’s this rock. Like flowing blood.”

“It is Boiling Rock you are looking at.”

At last Judith found herself hidden behind an outcropping. The outcropping resembled a family of blue buffalo snoozing in the morning sun. The outcropping was reddish along the edges near the grass, but thick blue lichen bearded over the rest of it. Some of the edges, about waist high, shone as if polished with a lapping rag.

Two Two was stationed not far off, west some fifty steps. He also lay hidden behind a tumble of rocks. The Yanktons once again seemed to have vanished into the ground.

Judith allowed herself a cautious look around. To the south, the escarpment dropped away in a series of rock shelvings, until it leveled off into a prairie. The view beyond was stunning. She could see miles and miles across an expanse of valley. A spacious sky arched high over a sweeping land. The valley lay like the palm of an open hand. Down it ran a life line, the River Of The Rock.

“The prospect from Summit Hill in St. Paul can’t compare with it,” Judith thought. “Not even the hills west of Davenport.” She nodded to herself. “I see it now. This is why men have westered. Yes. Beyond the ridge of every horizon lies a new Eden prairie. Each new valley is a virgin in itself, and if a man is any kind of bull at all, he has to possess it, he has to fulfill it.”

Judith wished she were a man.

She looked down. At her feet she spotted the purple flowers of a cluster of wild onions. There seemed to be three of them in a bunch. Kneeling, she dug out the pale bunched roots. The ancient turf was tough and it took a firm forefinger to pry them loose.

She nibbled at all three until they were gone. The wild onions were strangely sweet. It made her think of what she had seen the night before, Scarlet Plume dancing naked and risen. Some dirt had gotten under the nail of her forefinger and she sucked it out.

“They come,” Two Two called over in a piercing whisper.

Judith turned to look.

“Do not show yourself,” Two Two warned. He smiled at her from behind his rock and tilted his head in such a way as to show it wasn’t his fault the laws of a buffalo surround were hard.

Judith looked cautiously around a corner of her rock.

Blinking, she saw them, lumps of dusky brown against a shimmering morning green. Except for their color they reminded her of a herd of cattle. The cows and yearlings were up front, the bulls behind.

They came grazing. A crop here at a better tuft of grass, a switch of the short tail, a half-dozen steps forward, then a crop there. They grazed through little gardens of golden aster. The soft wind blurred the brown hair over their humps. With every step they loomed a bit larger, sometimes all at once, sometimes in varied groups, sometimes singly. Dipping swallows caught insects on the fly above the herd. Bolder cowbirds sat on the backs of the bulls and dug out the larvae of botflies.

“Scarlet Plume comes,” Two Two whispered low along the ground.

Judith slid around the tumble of her rocks and looked from the other side.

At first she couldn’t find him. All she saw was yet another buffalo, a bull, grazing alone. Then she noted the single bull was smallish. Scarlet Plume. He had put on a buffalo skin and head. She guessed instantly what was up. He was the decoy, a Judas buffalo.

Scarlet Plume grazed quietly along. Every now and then he lifted his shaggy head to sniff the air. He switched his tail. He stomped a foot at a fly. He grazed.

When the herd was yet some distance away, Scarlet Plume sang a song, softly:

The herd came on, cropping at ease. All the buffalo were fat.

Scarlet Plume grazed through an island of rippling sage. His brown fur took on a blackish luster against the silver leaves.

Judith watched Scarlet Plume, fascinated. She forgot where she was.

The calves cavorted in and around the cows. The calves had fluffy yellowish hair, remindful of just-hatched chicks out for their first perky walk.

Certain of the bulls walked a step behind the cows. Every now and then an old bull would mount a young cow, and he would be so heavy for her she would almost collapse under him. When a young bull mounted a cow, usually an old one, he could scarcely make connection. Sometimes the young bull missed entirely and his charge of seed floated on the air like a liquid arrow.

The rest of the bulls formed the rearguard. Sometimes they stopped to rub themselves on the edges of the taller rocks. They gave themselves a good scratching. Their vigorous rubbing explained the polished lapped edges.

There was one very old bull. He trailed along far in the rear with the yellow calves. He had hair on his forelegs and chin so long it dragged through the grass. From a distance his hair resembled shadows trailing under his body and tapering off to wavering points.