A goodly fire was blazing in the center and over it hung the usual black pot being stirred by the usual stout woman, except her face was white beneath the dirt and her hair blonde for all the sooted grease. It was Olga.
Younger Bear turns to me and shows what I took to be an evil sneer at the time, but now I realize it was mainly pure pride, for he had no idea that his female wife and me was related other than by race alone.
“We will smoke,” he says, “and then we will eat.”
Olga looks awful as to her person, wearing a dirty buckskin dress and leggings and old moccasins gone almost to rags. The Bear might have took his regular bath irrespective of the temperature, but I believe Olga abstained according to the same schedule. I said before I seen her blonde hair, but actually it was greenish, and the tail of an uncurried horse was less tangled.
Now, I had left all my weapons back at my own lodge, so as to display my peaceful intentions to any hostile braves I might encounter, and Younger Bear was a great husky fellow more than six foot tall and we was right in the middle of an encampment no doubt full of his friends. I didn’t think of these matters. All I seen was my dear, sweet wife degraded into a slave for this damnable savage, and my fingers curled into murderous claws and I would have been upon the Bear and tore out his throat in the next second … had not Olga looked up right then and sounded off in a voice that for sheer raucousness took the cake from Caroline, or Nothing that time I heard her bawling out her man, or any other female white or red who ever tormented my eardrums.
“Maybe you can tell me what we’re going to eat, you good-for-nothing loafer, you!” she howls. “I can’t remember the last time you brought in any game. Why, Little Horse here is more of a man than you.” The latter had stayed outside to prepare that dog, and now he come in with the bleeding hunks of its flesh, his dress arms pulled back so as not to soil them, and he tries to calm her down, but Olga continues to Younger Bear: “I think you should change clothes with Little Horse, except that you are too stupid and awkward to be a heemaneh! And who is this foolish beggar you have brought here to steal what little food we have, none of which you provided? Tell him to do his buffalo dance elsewhere.”
Younger Bear scowls and says: “Unless you want a beating, woman, you will shut your mouth.”
“You know who’ll get the beating,” snarls Olga. “I’ll break a club against your lazy spine.” She brushes back her hair, leaving a long smear across her forehead, and spits contemptuously in the fire. Then she takes them hunks of dog from Little Horse and hurls them into the pot with a splash of blood and boiling water, some of which hits the Horse and he shrieks in horror that his dress is stained, and Olga says: “I’m sorry, dear,” and takes him outside to look at the spots in the daylight.
You might have thought Younger Bear was shamed in front of me, but he didn’t show it. He shrugs and lights his pipe. “Usually,” he says, “this woman is gentle as a dove. I think she acts this way just to show off for the guest, for I am a good provider. Did I not bring in that dog just now? I am also a wonderful lover, for I stored up my force for several years as a Contrary, when it was not permitted to have a woman, and now …”
Well, he went on boasting for a time, and lying, and I’ll tell you his degeneration was awe-inspiring. How many times have I said that the Cheyenne spurned both these indulgences, and here this Indian had taken them up like a saloon bum.
Not that I thought of that at the time-no, I was still paralytic from seeing Olga. She wasn’t a victim, that much was clear, but her whole personality had changed. You remember how amiable she was when married to me, even to the point of meekness. She never in those years learned much of the English language, yet here she was already fluent in abusive Cheyenne. Maybe her Swedish throat took more naturally to another harsh tongue, but what about that fear of Indians she had had since the massacre of her family by the Santee Sioux?
My God, but it was strange, and in the pondering of it I forgot for a time about Little Gus, when suddenly in he runs, dressed like a savage and with his fair hair in braids. He must have been about the age of five now and he was a robust lad, his sturdy little body half-naked despite the cold. He had a bow and took it to Younger Bear.
“Father,” says he, “the string is broken. Please make me a new one, because I need it for our war.”
The Bear smiled real fond at Gus, though he chided him: “It is not the way of the Human Beings to interrupt the smoking of a guest.” But he pulled the lacing from his own quiver hanging from a lodgepole and stretched a new bowstring of it.
At last I found my tongue and asked Gus, the child of my own loins, “Who are you fighting? The Pawnee?”
My voice must have sounded strained, but he didn’t take enough notice of me that it mattered. He was still breathing hard from his running, and as a kid will be, was absolutely occupied with that momentary need of his. So he grabs the bow from Younger Bear, which had now been repaired, and answers while en route to the outside.
“No, not Pawnee,” he says in his high, fierce voice in that guttural language. “White men!”
“I wish you would come back here and show the proper respect for the guest,” said Younger Bear, but rather weakly, I thought, and before he had got it all out, my Gus had rejoined his playmates. You could hear them whooping. He figured himself for a pure-bred Indian.
I didn’t know what Olga thought, and having seen her in action I didn’t want to find out. It was the goddamnedest thing I ever seen or heard of. The Kiowa, down in their camp, had a white woman who was used as the lowliest slave. I didn’t have much protection in that village, so hadn’t stayed longer than to determine that she wasn’t my wife, but had seen the poor thing and her baby of eighteen months and she was a miserable sight.
But the only distress hereabout was in Younger Bear’s countenance when Olga lighted into him. Now that we was alone he starts to boast of how he paid ten ponies for her to the Southern Cheyenne brave what captured her upon the Arkansas. The usual price for an Indian girl, paid to her father, was only three or four animals.
You might think I was sitting there gritting my teeth. I wasn’t. I felt as if in a dream, and says right calm: “That boy has pale skin.”
“And hair like the morning sun,” says Younger Bear. “His name is Medicine Standing Up, only we usually call him Potbelly. I think he will become the most powerful war chief of the Human Beings. You know the great Crazy Horse of the Oglala has light skin and fair hair, and he cannot be hit with a bullet.”
“You made this child?” I took a drag on the stone pipe and handed it back to him. I expected him to say he had, in the mood he was in then, but he looked into the fire for a time through half-closed lids and then replied: “No, his father was the same medicine bird that came to me at Sand Creek and said: ‘Stop being a Contrary! Run away! Do not care what people think. You have a greater destiny than fighting these bluecoats today. You must marry a woman with pale hair and rear my son!’ So that is what I did.”
Well, Olga and Little Horse come in again and cooked that dog and served him up, and my ex-wife bawled Younger Bear out from time to time and give me no more notice than she had before, and I reckon if Little Horse had told her anything about me, it was some fantastic story that would never remind her of Jack Crabb.
Somehow I ate enough to be polite and when done even extended the return invite that manners called for.