Arrow Keeper Read online

  In his vision, there was no wood for fires. The only way to save some of the infants was to slaughter ponies and remove most of the guts, stuffing the little ones inside to keep them from freezing. The old people froze with the death song still on their lips.

  But the vision also prophesied the rise of the long-lost son of the great chief Running Antelope—a son who had been reported killed along with his father and mother many winters earlier. That young warrior would gather his people from all their far-flung hiding places and lead the Cheyenne in one last great victory.

  Arrow Keeper understood the hopeful meaning of such a vision in the autumn of his long life. His body was still straight and leather hard. But it was also gaunt and worn from making so many medicine fasts to obtain special protection for the tribe. He was worried. Soon he would be called to the Land of Ghosts, and the tribe would be left to face its most difficult times without him. The young mystery warrior would be the tribe’s only hope.

  As Arrow Keeper was nearing camp, his pony suddenly nickered, and the old man was instantly as alert as a wading bird. Despite his age his senses were keen. He searched the trail and the thick growth between himself and his sister the river. Sniffing the air, he listened carefully for a note of alarm in the calls of geese and crows and hawks.

  He was an excellent tracker, able to read the bend of the grass and tell how recently a track had been made. But he found nothing suspicious when he swung down off his pony and bent to examine the trail. He was not even unduly alarmed when his exploring foot discovered a hidden dugout in a thicket. The hunters often cached them alongside the river.

  Nonetheless, a cool feather of fear tickled the bumps of his spine. Some danger—one not foretold in his Medicine Lake vision—was lurking nearby. Some grave threat to Yellow Bear’s Cheyennes was very near at hand.

  Arrow Keeper rode up the gentle grassy slope from the river and approached the camp circles. He was surprised that the crier was not riding throughout camp as usual to announce his return. Then he spotted most of the tribe crowded around the council lodge. The old medicine man urged his pony from a walk to a trot when he saw a young Indian holding a knife over another.

  “No!”

  At Arrow Keeper’s shouted command, Wolf Who Hunts Smiling froze with his blade already touching the unconscious young prisoner’s scalp.

  “Yellow Bear!” Arrow Keeper said, sitting his horse. His tone was respectful but disapproving. “Have I been gone a lifetime that you now kill our young men for sport?”

  “He is not one of us!” Black Elk said. But the headmen silenced the hotheaded young warrior.

  As Yellow Bear explained the circumstances of the stranger’s capture and the decision of the council, Arrow Keeper dismounted and crossed to where Wolf Who Hunts Smiling knelt beside the supine prisoner. After the slightest hesitation, Wolf Who Hunts Smiling reluctantly edged back out of the old man’s way.

  Arrow Keeper crouched, stiff knee joints popping. Unobserved by the rest of the tribe, his gnarled fingers brushed back the badly singed black hair over the youth’s left temple. Buried past the hairline was a mulberry-colored birthmark in the shape of an arrowhead.

  The old medicine man started when he saw the traditional mark of the warrior. For it was the birthmark of the lost Cheyenne chief whose coming was foretold at Medicine Lake! For a moment, the old man studied the unconscious youth’s handsome features, which the fire had blistered and singed. He hoped to find some resemblance to Running Antelope. But he had not met the great chief many times, and he could not be sure that the features before him were his.

  Rising, he addressed the headmen. “Brothers, hear me! Show mercy and spare this youth.”

  “Why?” Yellow Bear demanded, though in truth he was relieved. “The stones have spoken.”

  Arrow Keeper hesitated, noticing the hate in the eyes of Black Elk, Wolf Who Hunts Smiling, and other young men as they stared at the accused spy. If he simply announced that the prisoner was their new tribal chieftain by right of birth, the young man was as good as dead.

  “Brothers! I cannot yet speak words which you may put in your pockets and take away with you. Certain things have been revealed to me in a powerful medicine dream.

  “Brothers! Have I not always spoken one way to you? Do not be afraid of appearing weak if you grant mercy now. The beaver is gentle and lives on bark, yet do we not respect and value him greatly?”

  The headmen watched Yellow Bear for a sign, but the old chief’s face remained unreadable as he tightened his red blanket around his shoulders. He, in turn, watched Black Elk, for the spy had already been granted as a peace offering to the young Cheyenne braves.

  Black Elk’s angry glower and his crudely sewn ear combined to give him a fearsome aspect as he stared at the spy. But despite the bloodlust in his eye, Black Elk could not forget how Arrow Keeper’s big medicine had always blessed his shield and bonnet. And two winters earlier, during the Moon When the Snow Drifts Into the Tipis, had it not been Arrow Keeper who sat through the long nights, singing the sacred cure songs that saved Black Elk’s younger sister from the red-speckled cough?

  “Father!” he said to Arrow Keeper. “To you I will never speak in a wolf bark, but in plain words. Black Elk swears this. When I fall I will not hit the ground. My enemy will be under me.

  “Father! I hate this spy. But now I will do as you wish, for everyone knows your medicine is strong and your wisdom vast like the plains.”

  The headmen received Black Elk’s speech with approving nods. Yellow Bear too nodded his approval. But he said, “What, then, will we do with the prisoner? Banish him from our land?”

  Arrow Keeper’s eyes still studied the new arrival’s unconscious form. His shirt was torn and soiled, his muscular chest half exposed. “Now,” thought Arrow Keeper, “comes the most difficult moment. Now you will either live or die, young Cheyenne.”

  “If he survives his wounds, he will live with us,” answered Arrow Keeper. “Though he is older than the others, he will join Wolf Who Hunts Smiling and the other young men who are training to be warriors.”

  His words fell on the ears of his listeners with the force of Bluecoat canister shot. Yellow Bear saw the relieved look on Honey Eater’s face and told himself again, as he looked to Black Elk, that the stranger’s arrival was a bad omen.

  But the young warrior had turned his back on the proceedings. He had spoken and could not change his mind like a woman. Reluctantly, he called for Wolf Who Hunts Smiling to sheathe his knife.

  His young cousin obeyed. But only after vowing silently to himself that he would kill the Cheyenne who still had the stink of the whites all over him.

  Chapter Seven

  At first, it seemed that Wolf Who Hunts Smiling had achieved revenge after all. Within two sleeps, the prisoner lay balanced on the featheredge of death. Hunger, exhaustion, beating, and torture had so dangerously weakened the new arrival that a pitched battle between fever and chills wracked his body. His wounds and burns puffed up with infection, further weakening him.

  Taking personal care of the prisoner, Arrow Keeper heaped additional buffalo robes in his own tipi, which like Yellow Bear’s stood on a lone hummock separated from the clan circles. The medicine man’s rare mark of favor caused angry reactions throughout the camp. But Arrow Keeper knew full well that no one else in the tribe would care for the man they thought a spy; and if the prisoner was left to fend for himself, he would never last another night.

  To heal his patient’s wounds, Arrow Keeper carefully filled the open gashes with tobacco and balsam sap from spruce trees. He smeared the burns with a paste made from yarrow root. The old medicine man became alarmed when the youth’s stomach would retain no nourishment. It rejected even simple foods like mashed wild peas or small slices of beaver tail boiled tender. But all he could do was give his medicine and hope for the best.

  Then, on the third morning following the council’s judgment, Arrow Keeper lifted the flap of his tent to find a horn cup some
mystery visitor had left there. It was filled with wild-bee honey, a powerful curative—and the favorite food of Chief Yellow Bear’s daughter. A brief smile invading his wrinkles, the old man mixed the honey in hot yarrow tea for the semiconscious stranger. Much to his joy, the young man did not retch it back up.

  For Matthew, those three days were like riding through a dense fog. Most of the time he traveled blindly, only occasionally glimpsing a landmark or feature in the billowy confusion. His mind played cat and mouse with awareness. He was vaguely aware of the rhythmic sounds of Arrow Keeper’s constant chanting and his steady rattling of snake teeth in dried gourds. To the feverish youth, they sounded like noises heard through a thick wall.

  Then, on the fourth morning, his eyes eased open to meet the medicine man’s. He sniffed the air and smelled elk steaks cooking somewhere. The odor made his stomach growl with ravenous appetite, and when Arrow Keeper heard the rumbling, he knew the young buck would survive.

  But he was still too weak to move very far from his robes on his own power. During the day, he lay outside in the warm sunlight, growing stronger and watching the Cheyenne village go about its life. Soon he began to recognize a basic pattern in what had at first seemed chaos.

  Every morning, the hunters rode out early for game while some of the older women went to dig wild turnips. The younger males often rode out later with the warriors who trained them in weapons, tracking, or horsemanship. Likewise, Honey Eater and the other young women reported daily to a lodge made of skins stretched over saplings. There, older squaws taught them the highly prized domestic arts of the tribe.

  Matthew learned these things gradually from Arrow Keeper. The old medicine man knew some English, though exactly how much remained his secret. His English was stiff and halting and mixed with bastard French he had learned during his days of trading with mountain men. As he practiced the paleface tongue again, Arrow Keeper also began teaching his young charge the Cheyenne names for the parts of his body and the common objects all around him.

  Arrow Keeper had already stripped Matthew of his white man’s clothing and burned it. So one of the first things he taught the novice Cheyenne was how to make leggings and a breechclout out of soft kid leather. Frowning and poking his fingers so often they dripped blood, Matthew also learned to make his first pair of elk-skin moccasins by punching holes in the leather with a bone awl and split-sinew thread.

  But Arrow Keeper would not allow Matthew to don his new garments before he was purified. One night, wrapped in a buffalo robe, Matthew followed Arrow Keeper to a small, isolated hut near the river. The hut consisted of elk hides draped over a willow-branch frame.

  “White man’s clothing leave you unclean,” the medicine man said.

  Arrow Keeper went inside the hut first and started a fire to heat a circle of rocks. When they finally glowed white-hot, Matthew was instructed to enter and pour cold water on them. At first, the steam was almost too hot to breathe. Then, as rivulets of sweat began to pour off him, he felt the rest of his lingering sickness ooze through his pores.

  Outside, Arrow Keeper chanted and prayed the entire time. When Matthew finally emerged, glistening with sweat, the old man handed him clumps of sage and told him to rub his body down thoroughly. Then he sent Matthew for a cooling plunge in the river. Only afterward did Arrow Keeper allow him to dress in his Cheyenne clothing.

  That same night Arrow Keeper taught Matthew how to build an Indian-style fire. The white men, he explained, put the centers of the logs in the flames, which was foolishly wasteful. Indians put the ends in first and pushed the logs inward as they burned, using their entire length.

  As they sat before the fire, the old man reached for his clay pipe, and Matthew started to cross toward the fire to fetch him a piece of burning punk with which he could light the pipe. Before Matthew reached the fire, the old man’s skinny arm shot out to stop him, his grip like iron talons.

  “Never walk between Indian and fire,” Arrow Keeper warned him sternly, his profile hatchet sharp in the firelight. “This say you mean to kill enemy soon! Enemy then kill you first.”

  And so Matthew began to learn the customs of his people. But despite his growing friendship with Arrow Keeper, the rest of the tribe ignored him. He occasionally spotted Black Elk or Wolf Who Hunts Smiling riding in and out of camp with the other braves. But they proudly refused to glance in the direction of Arrow Keeper’s tipi.

  However, Matthew soon realized they were not truly ignoring him. For on the first night after he began dressing like a Cheyenne, he turned back his sleeping robes to find a handful of bloody white feathers that had been stuffed beneath them.

  “The young men call you coward,” Arrow Keeper told him frankly. “They say Cheyenne clothing not make you Cheyenne. They say right. Soon you train with them. Then they start think some different way.”

  But Matthew didn’t share Arrow Keeper’s confidence. There were spells when he felt so lonely and scared and hated that he would have given anything to be back home in Bighorn Falls. Even being savagely beaten by Boone Wilson wasn’t as awful as being tortured by vengeful Cheyennes. At those times, he would think of Hiram Steele’s hard, flint-gray eyes and his gravelly voice saying, “I mean it, boy—your kind is not welcome here.” And the memory cut him deeper than any of the Cheyenne’s insults—cut him plumb to the quick of his pride as a man. All these tangled thoughts left Matthew feeling trapped between the sap and the bark.

  Matthew refused to give in to his fears, however, and he worked to fit in to his new world. One of his first shaky journeys after his recovery was a trip down to the river for a bath. It was early morning, the time of grainy half-light just before the sun clears the treetops and burns the mist off the river. Because Matthew was still light-headed, his brain full of the cobwebs of sleep, he failed to notice that he had swerved toward a secluded copse formed by curved cedars that Arrow Keeper had warned him to avoid.

  Although Matthew heard faint splashing sounds coming from the copse, he thought they were made by big trout breaking surface. He stripped and pushed through the line of cedars, then his breath suddenly hitched in his chest. For the cedar brake hid a perfect little clear pool that had been dug from a natural buffalo wallow. In the center of the pool, standing naked in water up to her thighs, was Honey Eater.

  Just then, the sun sent its first golden shafts through the treetops, dappling the girl’s supple, coltish body. Unbraided, her thick black hair fell over her breasts, which were full and heavy with dark brown nipples that thrust through her dangling tresses. She was lean and fine limbed, her wet, naked skin like glistening copper.

  Only later would Matthew understand fully that the Cheyenne valued chastity and privacy more than any other Plains Indians. Unlike the Arapahoe or their Teton Sioux cousins, Cheyenne couples always placed flaps over their tipi entrances so lovemaking could be private. No self-respecting Cheyenne female would let a man see her naked unless they had both performed the squaw-taking ceremony.

  But as their guilty eyes feasted on each other’s nakedness, both Honey Eater and Matthew were powerless to move in the first shock of realization.

  Then, horrified, Honey Eater ducked down until only her head was above water.

  In his confusion, Matthew forgot the few Cheyenne words Arrow Keeper had taught him. “I’m sorry!” he stammered in English. But the strange language only frightened the maiden more. He turned and hurried away, his face flaming with shame—and another kind of heat burned his loins.

  That night Arrow Keeper informed him tersely that they were soon to make a two-day journey to Medicine Lake. He patiently ignored the youth’s questions. Instead he said, “No one with white man’s name touch water of Medicine Lake and live long. Tonight Matthew must die.”

  The words startled the youth. Then Arrow Keeper explained that it was necessary to give him an Indian name to fool Death. He led the boy back down to the sweat lodge, where Matthew purified himself again in steam.

  When he came outside, gle
aming in the brilliant moonlight, Arrow Keeper had dug a small hole. The Cheyenne, like all Indians, he explained, had two names. The first was given at birth, the second earned when they were older.

  “The first name your red father gave you,” said Arrow Keeper, his voice barely audible above the steady purl of the river, “now lost in big wind the white man call Time. So this night I give new one. You must earn second name later, much later. But first come many trials, battles, and long trail of tears.”

  Arrow Keeper prayed, shook his gourd rattle, then bent close to the hole and spoke the name Matthew three times aloud. He pushed the dirt back in the hole, burying the name forever.

  “Now,” he declared, “white man in you gone under forever. Never speak that name on tongue or in heart.”

  “But then who am I?” The youth’s voice was almost a whisper in the moonlit darkness.

  Still kneeling, Arrow Keeper looked up at the towering youth. From that angle, he seemed almost a giant, as if his head and shoulders were supporting the cloudy home of the Great Spirit. Recalling his vision at Medicine Lake, Arrow Keeper knew what to call him. He spoke the Cheyenne name. Haltingly at first, his young companion repeated it several times until it came off his tongue easily.

  “What does it mean?”

  “That Matthew is dead. Tonight you join Yellow Bear’s Shaiyena people as he who is called Touch the Sky!”

  The Pawnee scout named Fleet Foot observed the old man and the youth with curiosity. What, he wondered, had caused the camp’s surprising change of heart toward their prisoner?

  He stood behind a deadfall only thirty yards from the sweat lodge, but the steady chuckle of the nearby flowing river drowned out the words spoken by the two Cheyenne.

  Fleet Foot had rubbed his shaved skull with river mud to cut reflection from the bright moonlight. It did not matter what the old man had spoken to soften the tribe’s heart toward the youth, he thought idly as he gnawed on a strip of dried venison. All would die soon enough—or wish they had.