The Powder River (7 page)

Elaine lost her balance for a moment and nearly fell. Adam grabbed her, and she clung fiercely to Big Soldier.

“What?”
Elaine snapped at Calling Eagle.

The old woman shrugged. “It is our way.”

Elaine suddenly felt sure she’d sold herself into barbarism with this marriage.

“That’s enough,” said Adam.

“Adam Smith Maclean, you haven’t—”

Adam cut her off. “They’re teasing you.” Big Soldier’s stomach rumbled again.

“It is our tradition,” said Calling Eagle, shrugging. “You are obliged to take Bain in….”

Bain smiled at Elaine, and Elaine hadn’t the damnedest idea what that meant.

“Adam Smith Maclean,” she started in….

Adam took her by both shoulders and looked her in the eye. “They’re teasing you,” he repeated. “We have no such custom. I can take her in without taking her as a wife.”

Elaine felt she might collapse if Adam weren’t holding her up.

“You are all the wife I can handle,” he said.

Lisette came and put an arm around Elaine’s waist affectionately. “We really were just teasing,” Adam’s mother said.

“They were unkind to tease you like that,” Bain said.

“You better believe I’m all you can handle,” Elaine snapped at Adam. But she wondered if he didn’t want more sex than she could offer.

“You are all the wife I want,” Adam told her straight in the eye.

Big Soldier emitted a long, raspy burp.

Chapter 9

Calling Eagle lay in her blankets before first light, unmoving, looking at the great patterns of stars. She had lain here awake for nearly an hour, accepting. She had seen it clearly in her dream this time—had seen herself dead—and had heard the song the wolf sang for her. It was not being dead that concerned or surprised her. It was that there in the tree, on her scaffold of death, she was dressed like a man. And she was laid out with the weapons of a warrior. She, Calling Eagle.

In the first dream night before last she had not seen it clearly—it had come to her as it might be seen through the white man’s glass windows, murky and distorted. It had come in jumbled bits and pieces, shards and splinters. She had not even actually seen herself on her scaffold—at least she could not bring back the picture. She woke up unsure how she got the impression that she was dressed like a man. Perhaps she had heard someone in the dream speak of her breechcloth or leggings. Or heard someone actually speak of herself as
him
.

This time she had seen it all. Not only the breechcloth but the pattern and colors of the quillwork on it. Not only her man’s face but the paint on it. Tomahawk and war club laid across her chest. And the song.

It was wonderfully strange. A he-wolf sat below the body on the scaffold, like a mourner, and he sang. He didn’t howl—he sang, with a human voice, dark-timbred, reedy, but human. Calling Eagle heard the words of an old victory song, the invitation of the wolflike Cheyenne warrior for his cousins the wolves to feed on the bodies of his enemies:

Ho! Listen! Come to us! Feast!

O wolves!

Feast and make merry,

Yo ho! Gather

At the dawn.

The victory song of a wolf warrior. Now she knew. And she would act accordingly.

With the practiced discipline of seventy years, she put away that matter, which was of the highest importance, and turned her attention to what else disturbed her during the dream.

The white woman. During the dream Calling Eagle had not seen Elaine, but she kept having an urgent feeling that the people had to get the white woman out of camp, get her gone. Sometimes a desperate feeling.

Calling Eagle felt for Elaine. She thought Elaine was giving her life as a gesture of love to Smith and to the Tsistsistas-Suhtaio. But even love could be wrongheaded.

In Elaine’s understanding the Cheyennes were childlike people in need of affection and assistance. She and the agent and the missionaries and the doctors were ministers of kindness, wise, benevolent adults tending to ignorant children.

This understanding kept Elaine from seeing the realities before her face. She thought this flight northward was a heroic show of spirit, but misguided. She thought the way to a better life was capitulation. She was waiting for the people to give in to the greater physical force.

Elaine’s understanding did not allow her to see that the struggle here was of the spirit. Not barbarism against science, or arrows against bullets, but old, mysterious powers against new, mysterious powers. Powers of honor and beauty against ugliness and falseness. So Elaine could not understand, in her kindly, white way, what the Cheyennes had to live for, or to die for.

Calling Eagle herself did not know much about the great powers. In a long lifetime of study she had learned only how to make certain gestures of obeisance to them. Certainly she could not command the powers. But, unlike the white woman, she did feel their presence.

Calling Eagle thought it was odd, surpassing odd, to walk the earth and be unaware of the powers. How could the whites have no sense of the mysterious power in water that makes it flow downhill, in grass that makes it turn green in the spring, in a bird that makes it rise on the wind?

After decades of observation, though, Calling Eagle had come to accept the fact that white people did not see and hear the powers. They saw the rock, but not the spirit of the rock that made it hard. She pitied them for their blindness.

Of course, the white woman understood nothing about Calling Eagle either. Elaine did not grasp that Calling Eagle had special powers given only to the
hemaneh
. Elaine did not even imagine such powers, or imagine Calling Eagle’s true way.

There in the dark Calling Eagle smiled a wrinkled and distant smile. Elaine would be upset when she learned Calling Eagle’s way. All the whites had been, even the Cheyennes’ friend De Smet, the blackrobe—even Mac Maclean, Calling Eagle’s son, her first Vekifs.

Well, the blind Elaine would soon see more about Calling Eagle. How would the white woman respond? Regrettably, it made no difference.

The old woman rolled over. She had brought her quills and paints. She could get a good piece of cloth from someone. She would help Lisette and Rain do the quillwork—Calling Eagle was especially skilled at quillwork. To save the people, it had to get done fast.

The scouts brought bad news that day. The white people all over the country ahead, which they called Kansas, were in an uproar about Indian troubles. Their newspapers talked about little else. Their governor helped arm the town of Dodge, a ride of a day or two from where the tribe would cross the Arkansas. Army posts were on alert. White people everywhere were demanding protection from the marauding savages.

Scouts who had spent time among the whites sneaked into Dodge City and Fort Dodge and got all this news. Everyone agreed they were lucky to know what was going on. Smith read the newspapers the scouts brought back and confirmed that things were at least as bad as the scouts said. They could expect big trouble at the crossing of the Arkansas, if not before.

What no one could understand was why the whites thought so many ranches had been raided, so many people killed. It was true that Little Wolf and Morning Star could not always control the young men, but the newspapers were reporting at least a hundred whites killed. The Tsistsistas-Suhtaio could count six.

A special train would take troops and volunteers from Dodge City to the river crossing the whites called Dull Knife, one of the names of Morning Star, turning two days on horseback into two hours by rail. That was where the Cheyennes were headed. Volunteers meant cowboys and other men who were eager to kill Indians. That was bad. The people had encountered white volunteers before—at Sand Creek, and at the fight against the buffalo hunters on the Sappa Creek, and other places. Volunteers lacked the discipline of troops and went wild. Sappa Creek had horrified these Cheyennes, and they still wouldn’t talk about it.

In camp tonight the people were worried. Maybe a big massacre here, another Sand Creek, would end it all.

So they were astounded when the crier came around the camp announcing a great feast to be offered by Lisette two nights from then. A great feast meant a day spent in camp when they needed to be hurrying north every hour. But it also meant powerful medicine, medicine that might change the destiny of the people. They couldn’t imagine what.

Smith and Elaine were as curious as anybody about why his mother would give a feast now. When she asked them to get a horse for the feast, though, they asked no questions, but simply rode out to trade for one. At Elaine’s suggestion, they decked themselves out as respectable white folks. Elaine put on her best dress. Smith wore his proper doctor’s outfit, his black Prince Albert coat, gray woolen trousers, and Jefferson boots.

Smith felt silly dressed up that way, maybe even dishonest. Could clothes make a giant, long-haired half-breed look respectable? But Elaine looked at him benevolently and said, “You
are
a doctor, you know.”

It turned out that Elaine’s idea was a good one. Despite her presence the rancher eyed Smith suspiciously. But he got a fat animal in exchange for his revolver. The rancher said he needed the weapon more than a critter the marauding redskins were going to run off anyway. This remark came with more dark looks.

Elaine and Bain spent all the next day cooking. Lisette and Calling Eagle couldn’t help because they were busy doing something in private—sewing, Smith gathered. The horse would not make a proper feast—buffalo would have been a better way to set off an auspicious occasion. Smith knew his mother also would have wanted to serve cakes of cornmeal, Jerusalem artichokes, coffee with lots of sugar, and other treats. But she didn’t have them, and Calling Eagle wouldn’t wait. Though Smith had no idea why, he felt patient. Patience was something he’d learned from his people.

Elaine reflected that evening, as she tasted horse meat for the first time in her life, that she had changed. She didn’t quail at tasting this flesh at all. She merely hoped that it would help the people recoup their strength.

The loss of a day’s travel worried her—it just gave those soldiers another day to get on the train and out to the Dull Knife crossing and intercept the Cheyennes. But she saw that the day’s rest did the people some good, especially the children. And she saw that everyone was cheered at the prospect of some beneficial medicine. Though she was glad for anything that raised their spirits, she wondered that their minds were not more on the menace of rifles and cannons. They really were children.

During the meal, Adam was a little too attentive to her—too many white smiles in his dark face, too many mischievous looks, too many affectionate touches. She wondered what surprise was coming. Probably Adam wondered, too, she reflected.

Calling Eagle waited until full dark to gather the people in a big circle. Adam and Elaine sat right in front. In silence Calling Eagle started the fires laid by Adam. She laid out on the ground a handsome breechcloth of dark blue trade cloth with a four-directions wheel quilled into its front in gold, light blue, and rose. Beside that she laid a cudgel. Elaine had seen the cudgel before. It was a bighorn ram’s horn pulled to three-foot length and ornamented with a brass head—a handsome piece, and heavy. It had belonged to her husband, Strikes Foot, and occupied an honored place in the lodge Calling Eagle and Lisette normally shared. Next to the cudgel Calling Eagle set a parfleche box, but Elaine couldn’t see what was in it.

“What’s she going to do?” whispered Elaine.

Adam said softly, “I don’t know.” He didn’t sound happy about it.

“I had a dream,” Calling Eagle began gently, crooning the words. Elaine got that phrase, and most others, but she had difficulty with some. Calling Eagle spoke in a ceremonial way, an elevated blend of speech, prayer, and song. She faced each cluster of people in turn, so that her back was sometimes to Elaine.

Elaine got the gist of it: Calling Eagle dreamed that she saw herself dead, on a scaffold, dressed as a warrior. Elaine felt a thrill—she had heard of woman warriors among the Indians. Maybe Calling Eagle would claim this rarest of stations.

The people knew that many years before, Calling Eagle chanted, the child Calling Eagle had seen herself as a
hemaneh
in a dream. That was a great calling to power. Calling Eagle repeated once more, and for the last time, she said, the song she had been given in that dream.

Elaine wished she knew what
hemaneh
meant.

So, the old woman continued in singsong speech, she had followed the way of the
hemaneh
all her life. She had lived with Strikes Foot—Elaine wasn’t getting all of this—she had gone on hunts and pony raids, she had sung certain songs, performed certain ceremonies for the benefit of the people, had lived in the way her vision showed her.

Now, in this time of trial for the people, the powers had sent her a new dream. Now she would live in a new way.

Elaine was fascinated—she felt goose-bumpy. Adam slipped a comforting arm around her. He seemed tense.

Now Medicine Wolf began to beat softly on his drum, and Calling Eagle began to sing, a song given her by a wolf in the dream, a song that spoke of the new way. And as she sang, turned sideways to Elaine, she walked close to the people on the west side of the circle and began to pull her dress up over her head.

The sight of bare flesh was rare among the Cheyennes, a modest people, and Elaine noticed that almost everyone sat with eyes averted. Elaine gritted her teeth, but she supposed all the people were as shocked as she was, and only religion could compel this behavior.

Soon Calling Eagle stood entirely naked, her ancient dugs the merest hints of breasts. As she sang, she took paints from the parfleche box and began to paint her face.

Still singing, her face painted, Calling Eagle turned her back to Elaine and approached the people on the north side. Elaine caught most of the words of the song—the phrases
youthful power
and
untapped power
kept recurring. A hush of awe came over the people.

Calling Eagle now walked toward the people on the east side of the circle, to Elaine’s right. Calling Eagle tied a wolf’s tail into her hair. Still she sang her hymn to power. Elaine strained to see something odd in the area of Calling Eagle’s hips, but the firelight was too weak.

At last Calling Eagle approached the south side, directly in front of Elaine and Adam. Elaine felt Adam’s arm tighten around her. Elaine saw unmistakably, in the pride of full revelation, that Adam’s grandmother Calling Eagle was and always had been a man.