Читать книгу Heartsong - James Welch - Страница 9

CHAPTER ONE

Charging Elk opened hid eyes and he saw nothing but darkness. He had been dreaming and he looked at the darkness and for a moment thought he hadn’t come back. But from where? And where was he now?

He was lying on his back in the dark and he remembered that he had eaten soup twice during daylight. He had awoken and a pale woman in a white face covering had fed him soup. Then he awoke again and another woman with her face similarly covered gave him more soup. It was clear soup and it was good but he couldn’t eat much of it. But the second time the woman gave him a glass of orange juice and he recognized it and drank it down. He liked the orange juice, but when he asked the woman for another glassful, she just looked at him above the face covering and shrugged her shoulders and said something in a language he didn’t know. Then he fell back into sleep.

Now he propped himself up on his elbows and turned toward a light that entered the side of his eye. From its distant yellow glow he could tell that he was in a long room. He blinked his eyes to try to see better. Where was he? And why did the women cover their faces here? Gradually, his eyes grew stronger and he saw, between his eyes and the distant light, several lumpy shapes on platforms. He heard a harsh cough on the other side of him and he fell back and slowed his breathing. When the coughing stopped he pushed the covering that lay over him to one side and looked again toward the light. And he began to remember.

He didn’t remember much at first, just the two women who fed him soup. But now he remembered the room he was in. He hadn’t seen much of the room because he had been on his back on one of the white men’s sleeping beds. It was a big high-ceilinged room with a row of glass globes lit by yellow wires. There were high windows on the wall opposite his sleeping bed. Through one window he could see the bare limbs of a tree, but the others were full of gray sky.

He remembered waking up once sometime and a man in a white coat was bending over him, his face also covered with a mask. He was pushing something small and cold against Charging Elk’s chest. He didn’t look at Charging Elk but Charging Elk glanced at him for just a second and he saw pieces of silver metal disappear into the man’s ears. He became afraid and closed his eyes and let the man touch his body with the cold object.

How long ago was that? Before the women fed him soup? As he looked toward the yellow glow at the far end of the room, he remembered burning up with heat, throwing off the covers, struggling to get up, feeling a sharp pain in his side, and the two or three white men who held him down. He remembered trying to bite the near one, the one with the hairy face who roared above him and struck him on the forehead. Once, he woke up and he was tied down. It was dark and he grew cold, so cold his teeth chattered and violent spasms coursed up and down his back. He was freezing to death, just as surely as if he had broken through the ice on a river. He had seen the river for an instant, just a quick flash of silver in the darkness, and it was lined with bare trees, and tan snowy hills rose up on either side of it. But when he came up out of the river, it was light and he was in the sleeping bed in the big room and his back and side ached from the sharp spasms.

Charging Elk stared at the yellow light for a long time but he could remember nothing more because he could not think. He stared at the soft yellow light as though it were a fire he had looked into before, somewhere else, far away.

When he awoke again he lifted his head and watched the gray light of dawn filtering through the windows. A bird swooped down with high-lifted wings and lit on a ledge of one of the windows and Charging Elk recognized it. He had seen this kind of bird before. Sometimes it walked, always with many others of its kind, on the paths and cobblestones of the cities he had been in. When it walked its head bobbed and it made strange lowing sounds deep in its throat. He remembered a child chasing a band of these birds and how quickly they flew up and flashed and circled in unison, only to land a short distance away.

He had seen the big buildings of the cities—the houses that held many people, the holy places with the tall towers where people came to kneel and tell their beads, the big stores and small shops full of curious things. He had been inside a king’s stone house with many beds and pictures and chairs made of gold. And once, in Paris, he had accompanied a friend who had been injured badly to a house full of many beds.

Charging Elk knew now that he was in a white man’s healing house. And he thought he must have been there for quite a long time but he had no idea how long. Sometimes when he had awakened it had been light; other times, it had been dark. He had no idea how many sleeps he had passed there.

He was very weak—and hungry. He listened to his guts rumble and he wanted some meat and more of the orange juice. And some soup. He wanted sarvisberry soup, but he still didn’t know where it had been that he had tasted this soup, or even that it was made of sarvisberries. He only knew that he wanted the taste of something familiar.

He heard a hollow clicking from a long way off, the only clear sound in an undercurrent of breathing, snoring, coughing, and moaning. As he listened to the clicking come nearer, he lifted himself up on his elbows and his body didn’t seem as heavy as it had been in the dark.

The young woman glanced toward him, then stopped. Unlike the food women, she wore a stiff white cap with wings and an apron that came up over her shoulders. Beneath the apron, she had on a long gray dress with narrow sleeves. A flat gold cross hung from a chain around her neck. Charging Elk had seen this type of cross on other people and he almost knew where. He became interested in her.

“Bonjour, monsieur,” she said, coming to stand at the side of his bed. He recognized the greeting but not the rest of the words she spoke as she reached behind him to slap his pillow. She helped him to move his body back against the pillow so he was almost sitting up. A sharp pain stabbed his side, then eased to a hard ache. She said more words to him and he saw that her eyes were blue and the hair that was swept up under the cap was the color of ocher.

She made a gesture, clenching her hand like a claw and bringing it to her face mask. She repeated it a couple of times until he understood. He nodded rapidly as he had seen the white men do. Then she went away.

From his sitting position he could see better. He could see a building out the window and its wall was golden. Above, he could see that the sky was turning from gray to blue. The bird that bobbed its head when it walked was gone. He looked around the room and he could see many beds lined up against both walls, and many bodies. Some were sitting up like him; others were sleeping under blankets on the beds. He could smell the damp, ashy odor of the bodies mixed with the sharp smell of wasicun medicine. They were all men, all white men. They too were in this house of sickness. But where was this house?

The woman came back, carrying a glass of orange juice on a round tray. As he drank it down, he noticed crinkles in the corners of the woman’s eyes and he thought she might be smiling behind the face covering. He put the glass back on the tray, then pursed his fingers together and pointed them toward his mouth. The woman’s brows came down. He repeated the gesture and the brows shot up. She leaned forward and showed him a little timepiece pinned to her apron. She pointed to the timepiece and said something and he nodded. He knew about the wcuichus, timepiece. He pointed to his mouth again and the woman said, “Oui, oui,” then left.

Charging Elk leaned against his pillow and waited for his food. He watched one of the men opposite him throw back the covers, sit up, and swing his legs over the side of the bed. He sat like that for a moment. His face was stubbly, not exactly a beard, but the black stubble made his face look as white as the wall behind him. The man stood, holding himself up by the iron headboard. He reached for a robe that was hanging from a hook on the wall. Charging Elk looked behind him to the side and he saw a similar garment by his own headboard. As he watched the man slip his bare feet into a pair of soft shoes, he wondered if he had some of those too.

The man wandered off down the length of the room away from the place of the yellow light, stopping now and then to rest against a footboard. Then he pushed open a swinging door and disappeared.

Charging Elk began to have hope. He too could put on these things and walk out. He would eat something first, to give him strength, then he would leave. But as he thought this, he felt a slow, crushing fear enter his heart. Where would he go? He looked at his dark hands, which lay on the blanket on either side of his body. He was not of these people. He was a different color and he couldn’t speak their tongue. He was from somewhere a long way off. And he was here, alone, in this house of sickness. He tried to fight off the panic by remembering something about himself. He remembered night and he remembered bright lights and the sound of a voice loud and clear over many voices. When the big voice spoke the other voices grew to a roar, until the lights began to swim and he was falling suddenly and violently into darkness.

“Monsieur? Monsieur?”

Charging Elk opened his eyes.

“Votre petit dejeuner, monsieur.”

A young woman put a square tray on his lap. He glanced down and he saw a bowl of white mush, a piece of hard morning bread, and a glass of orange juice. The woman put a soft cloth over his chest, sat down on a stool beside the bed, then dipped a spoon into the mush. When she brought it toward his face, he moved his hand up to block it. She said something in a tone of voice that suggested she was used to this kind of behavior. Charging Elk kept his hand up but he looked at her pale hand and peculiar ice-green eyes and recognized her, in spite of her mask, as the first woman who had fed him soup. Now she held the spoon about six inches from his hand. He reached for the spoon and took it gently from her hand. He looked at the mush, smelled it, then took a taste. It tasted like nothing. It was neither sweet nor spicy. But it slid down his throat and warmed his belly. He had another spoonful and nodded to the woman. “Café,” he said.

“Non, non, monsieur,” she said in an excited voice. She said something else, then she rubbed her own belly and shook her finger.

“Café,” he said again.

She said something, then stopped. After a moment, she stood and hurried toward the end of the room where the yellow light had been the night before. Charging Elk watched her. Then he dipped the heavy iron spoon into the mush and ate. He ate half the mush and drank his orange juice. He left the hard bread—he had seen it before, a small slice curved on top and flat on the bottom, like the sign for sunrise—to dunk into his pejuta sapa, black medicine.

He thought of sunrise in another place. A place of long views, of pale dust and short grass, of few people and no buildings. He had seen that sunrise over the rolling simple plains, he had been a part of it and it had been a part of him. Many times he had seen it and he had been with his people.

Charging Elk suddenly moaned as he remembered the ikce wicasa, the natural humans, as his people called themselves. He remembered his mother and father, his brother and sister. He remembered the villages, the encampments, one place, then another. Women picking berries, men coming back with meat, the dogs and horses, the sudden laughter or tears of children, the quiet ease of lying in the sunny lodge with the skins rolled up to catch a breeze. He had been a child then too and he had spent his days riding his horse, playing games, shooting arrows at gophers, eating the sarvisberry soup that his mother made.

He remembered the big fight with the longknives on the Greasy Grass, the naked white bodies the women counted coup on with their butcher knives and axes. He and two of his friends, Liver and Strikes Plenty, had fought over a soldier’s agate ring. They had cut off his finger to get it. But one of the older boys, Yellow Hand, had taken it away from them.

Charging Elk lay back on the pillow and closed his eyes. He had been proud to be an Oglala then and he thought they would never surrender. The young boys talked about Crazy Horse and how he would lead them far away from the longknives. They would grow up to be hunters and to make war on their enemies. They would kill off the soldiers when they got old enough. Meanwhile the people spent the summer and fall moving from place to place, at first high up in the Bighorns and the Wolfs, then when the weather changed and the snows capped the peaks they moved back onto the plains. Sometimes they would camp for six or seven sleeps, sometimes only one or two. The scouts kept track of the longknives and they were never far away. But the game was plentiful during those warm times and the people didn’t suffer. Wakan Tanka, the Great Mystery, rode with them. The Oglalas seemed almost exhilarated, as though they knew this was to be their last time together as a free people and they were determined to make the most of it. They had won a great victory and they were prepared to face the consequences, even if death came to live with them. Charging Elk, in spite of his youth, felt this spirit and had never been so close to his family, his people, the land. He hung on to every experience, every change of country, every night under the stars or in his father’s lodge.

But when the weather changed, everything changed. The buffalo seemed to disappear soon after the first snowfall, the deer and elk, even the rabbits and prairie hens, grew scarce, and the winds blew bitterly and constantly. Many of the people grew sick, some died, and they became frightened of what lay ahead. When the soldiers finally caught up with Crazy Horse’s band on the Powder River that winter, the people escaped into a blizzard with few casualties but the sentiment around the meager fires now was more about coming in to the fort on the White Earth River rather than remaining free, which amounted to running and running. But Crazy Horse refused to listen to this talk. He began to spend more time away from the camp, riding off by himself into the surrounding hills—some said he was searching for a vision that would save the people; others thought he didn’t like to be around their suffering. Charging Elk’s own father said that Crazy Horse was too stubborn to be a good leader, that he put his own pride before the welfare of the people. Still, Charging Elk and his friends vowed to follow Crazy Horse, even to death if he wanted it that way. Like most of the young ones, they idolized Crazy Horse and thought he could bring forth a miracle when spring came. He would lead them somehow to a land where there were no white people, a land filled with blackhorns and berries and good water. There would be plenty of enemy horses to be taken, many enemies to be struck.

But that spring Crazy Horse led the weary, ragged people to Fort Robinson and Red Cloud Agency. They surrendered their horses and weapons, everything but their garments, cooking utensils, and lodges. The piece of paper that the leaders marked was dated May 6, 1877. Four months later, in the Moon of the Black Calf, Crazy Horse was killed by the soldiers with the help of some of his own people.

Charging Elk sighed and opened his eyes. The tray and the woman were gone, but two men in suits stood at the foot of the bed, looking at him.

“Bonjour,” said one of them.

“Hello,” said the other.

Charging Elk recognized both greetings but he said nothing.

The one who had said hello said, “Charging Elk?”

Charging Elk considered a moment. He knew it would be futile but he asked how long he had been in the sickhouse. Both men just exchanged glances. The one who had said hello was dressed in a bulky brown suit. He had a mustache that curled down around the corners of his mouth. The other wore a dark neat suit. His tie was neatly knotted between the collar points.

“Canyou speak English? American?” The man in the brown suit leaned closer, and said again, in a loud voice, “American? Do you speak American?”

Charging Elk gestured toward himself with his hand. “American. Lakota.” As he thought of something else to say, he remembered how he had gotten there. “Pahuska. Buffalo Bill.” Then he remembered the Lakota who had been appointed the chief of the show Indians. He had no power over the Indians—only the white bosses did—but the wcbticuruf, the fat takers, liked him because he was very handsome and his buckskins were heavy with beadwork. Surely these men would know him. “Rocky Bear,” he said. “Big medicine. Oglala. Wild West.”

“Buffalo Bill, yes. But you are Charging Elk.” The man spoke slowly and loudly.

“Charging Elk. Yah.” But it was becoming clear that he would not be able to communicate with these men, even though he knew of their languages. He could do nothing but look at their suits, even though his eyes took in their somber faces.

After Crazy Horse’s death, the Oglalas were taken from the Red Cloud Agency to their own agency at Pine Ridge. The children were put into the white mans school, and so Charging Elk became a student and learned some of the American words. But less than a year later, when he was thirteen winters, he and Strikes Plenty ran away and went to live with Strikes Plenty’s people at the Whirlwind Compound, far from the agency and the school. Later they would move again, when the wcwichud threatened to come get them, along with the other children. They moved to a place in the badlands called the Stronghold, a long tall grassy butte with sheer cliffs on three sides that could be easily defended. But the white men, soldiers and settlers alike, were afraid of the Stronghold. The Indians out there were considered bad Indians, even by their own people who had settled at the agency and the surrounding communities. Charging Elk and Strikes Plenty lived off and on at the Stronghold for the next nine years, hunting game, exploring, learning and continuing the old ways with the help of two old medicine people. Sometimes they rode into the Black Hills, Paha Sapa, and stole things from the gold miners. They visited Bear Butte, a lone cone-shaped holy hill where many Oglalas had sought their visions in the past but which was now surrounded by settlers and mining claims. Charging Elk had had his hanblechia in the badlands surrounding the Stronghold. He had been prepared well by his wiccua wakan, an old man who made many prayers in the sweat lodge, and when he turned sixteen he went out and made many prayers to Wakan Tanka to help him dream his power animal. He never told anyone what the animal was, not even Strikes Plenty, but he later killed a badger and made a small necklace of its claws.

Now Charging Elk tried to ask the two men what happened to the necklace, and he suddenly remembered the holy card the white woman had given him in Paris, which became his wasichu medicine, but he knew it was impossible. For the first time in his life, he wished he had stayed in school and learned the brown suit’s language. “Buffalo Bill,” he said, without hope. “Wild West.”

After the two men left, Charging Elk sank down into himself. He was alone, and the enormity of what that meant hit him hard. He had no friends here. He couldn’t tell the men in suits where his home was. But they had to know that he was an Indian and he came from across the big water as part of the Wild West show. He was an Indian, an Oglala from Pine Ridge, his home.

Even in his despair, Charging Elk found his mind clearing and he remembered more things. It was like waking up after a night of drinking mni wakan, the white mans holy water, but this night seemed to have lasted a long time.

Charging Elk almost felt the impact again as he remembered falling from his horse and landing on the packed earth. That was the last thing he remembered before he was brought to this healing house. He had been chasing the small buffalo herd around the arena with his friends, an act he had performed hundreds of times since coming to this country of the Frenchmen. They liked to see the wild Indians chase the buffalo because it was one of the few acts in the show that was dangerous. And the Indians themselves made it more dangerous by eventually catching up and riding at headlong speed among the thundering animals. Charging Elk remembered a young bull, one that he had become familiar with in the several moons they had performed in the big Paris arena, suddenly swerve and swing its head. Its horn caught the horse on the left shoulder and the horse squealed and almost went down and Charging Elk tumbled past its head. And that was all he remembered until he got to the sickhouse.

But he had been sick before the evening’s performance and he became more ill during the course of the several acts. The night chill of December went right into his bones and his back was so tight it felt like someone had strapped a lodgepole to it. But he had performed the several acts before the chase—burning the settlers cabin, chasing the Deadwood stage, fighting with the soldiers in the big show of Custer’s Last Fight. But as he waited behind a barrier for the buffalo to be released, he suddenly felt very weak and almost fell from his horse as he leaned over and vomited. He knew then that he had the sickness that had swept through the Indian camp as well as the village of the white performers and workers. Badface had eased his horse next to Charging Elk’s and he asked if Charging Elk was all right, but just then the gateman pulled back the barricade and the Indians leaped forward, digging their heels into their horses’ flanks, yipping and yelling to the roar of the crowd.

But there was another Oglala in the sickhouse when Charging Elk arrived. As the helpers were lifting him into the bed, he had a sudden moment of intense pain which cleared his head and he saw a friend in the next bed. It was Featherman, an Oglala who had three winters on Charging Elk and who had caught the sickness two sleeps ago and now was quiet and unmoving as his eyes followed the activity of the helpers as they lifted Charging Elk from a rolling bed. The eyes seemed not to know what they saw.

Even as the pain of movement was subsiding into a deep ache, Charging Elk had looked over at Featherman and seen that his friend was going away. “Featherman,” he whispered as he looked into the flat eyes. “Stay. Don’t leave me.” But he could not hear his own words and soon he too was gone.

But Charging Elk did come back, several times, and now he knew he was back to stay. He knew he was back by the heavy throbbing pain in his left side. Now he felt that side, those ribs, through the bandage that had been wrapped around his torso. His breath wasn’t so shallow now, even though the bandage was tight against his chest. He had broken some ribs before in another fall from his horse. That time had been in the badlands, a hot summer day, when his running horse had stepped in a badger hole. He and Strikes Plenty were heading for the Stronghold after some trouble with the miners in Paha Sapa. Sometimes the miners shot at them, either to keep them away or just to kill them. Charging Elk had been laid up for a few days with those broken ribs but they healed up, with the aid of the yuwipi’s medicine, and he soon was out riding again. Sometimes he and Strikes Plenty sneaked back to Pine Ridge Agency to visit his parents. They would make the two-day ride and wait for dark before entering the small settlement.

And always it was the same. His parents would try to talk him into staying. They told him there would be no punishment, that the white chief just wanted the young ones to come back and stay go to school and learn the ways of the white god. They lived in a one-room house with a door and two windows, neither of which contained glass. Squares of canvas were tacked to the top of the windows and rolled up to let in light. They had a table and two chairs and a white man’s sleeping bed. And a cross on the wall beside the cooking stove. But no children. Charging Elk’s brother and sister had died, a year apart, one of the great cough, the other of consumption.

Charging Elk loved his mother and could understand why she wanted him to come live with them and go to school and to holy ceremonies. He was all she had left. Sometimes he felt guilty and thought how it would be to eat her food and watch her do her quill-work. But he couldn’t figure out his father. Scrub had been a shirtwearer, one of the bravest and wisest of the Oglalas. He had fought hard at Little Bighorn and had provided meat when the people were running from the soldiers. But that winter when the people were starving and sick, he had become a peacemaker, just like the reservation Indians who were sent out by their white bosses to try to talk the band into surrendering. Charging Elk had been ashamed of his father that winter. And when he saw his father sitting idly in his little shack, drinking the black medicine and sometimes telling the holy beads, he could not believe his father had gone from shirtwearer to this. It was always this image of his father that drove Charging Elk time and time again back out to the Stronghold.

Charging Elk had to take a leak and he did not want the iron pissholder. It shamed him to have one of the healing helpers roll him onto his side so he could hit the slop pan. And it was hard to piss with the helper standing there, looking away but listening. He didn’t like their face coverings. Although he had become adept at looking at their eyes without them seeing, he couldn’t tell the hidden expressions and this troubled him. Furthermore, he hadn’t taken a crap since coming to the sickhouse but he still didn’t need to and this worried him.

He pulled himself higher in his bed until he was sitting up without the aid of the pillow. His ribs ached and the bandage seemed even tighter against his chest, but the pain was bearable and he could breathe a little deeper. He watched another man get out of bed, put his robe on, and walk down the corridor between beds. He too disappeared through the swinging door at the end of the room.

Charging Elk threw back the covers and tried to swing his legs over the side of the bed. It was the first real bed he had slept in in his life. Even in France, the Indians slept in blankets and robes in their lodges. Charging Elk and his friends used to make fun of the soft white men who needed to sleep in feathers on a platform of wood or iron. Now, Charging Elk couldn’t make his legs obey him. He pursed his lips into a straight seam, put his arm under one knee, and pulled it sideways. A sharp pain in his side made him inhale sharply, deeply, almost a cry, but he kept his lips tight. He lay back on his elbows and worked his legs one way, his upper body the other, until he could feel the cold floor with one foot. He stopped, panting, and looked around, but nobody seemed to pay attention. He worked his other leg over the side and, with a sharp intake of breath, he slung himself up, until he was sitting on the edge of the bed. The pain in his ribs was intense, his whole side seemed on fire, but he held himself rigid, eyes and lips closed tightly, trying to concentrate on staying conscious. Then he opened his eyes and looked down to the other end of the room, where at night he saw the yellow light. He expected someone, maybe the woman with the white wings and gold cross, to come running. But again, he was undiscovered.

He stood slowly, awkwardly, using his hands to push himself up from the bed. He leaned against the bedframe for a moment, then drew himself up to his full height, aware of the stiffness in his back. His legs were heavy and his head felt light, but he could breathe easier and his ribs didn’t hurt so much. He knew he would have to move soon, before one of the healing helpers spotted him.

He took the robe from its hook and wrapped it over his shoulders. He was wearing a thin gown and the heavy robe felt good on him. He glanced down and saw the shoes tucked under the bed. He slid into them and they felt stiff and fuzzy, but warm. He slowly turned and began to make his way down to the foot of the bed, where he grasped the footboard and looked up and down the long room.

He was surprised to see so many beds, maybe a hundred of them, virtually all of them occupied. As he surveyed the room, he suddenly remembered Featherman. The night he had come to the sickhouse, Featherman had been in the next bed. Now there was a wasichu with a waxy face and thick sandy hair in the bed. But where was Featherman? Had he really been there? Or had he been a dream? Charging Elk’s heart fell down as he remembered the dull, flat eyes. Yes, he had been there. And now he was dead. But perhaps there were other Buffalo Bill Indians in the other beds. His heart lifted again and he thought he might shout “All my relatives!” in Lakota, but he knew the healing helpers would come running if he did. So he began the slow journey down the aisle between beds, moving from one iron footboard to the next. Each time he stopped to rest he would glance at the faces in the beds. Most of them had beards or mustaches, all of them were pale. Some of the faces watched him with great curiosity, perhaps even apprehension. By the time he reached the end of the beds, his heart was as heavy as his legs.

The thin hope that someone from the Wild West show, perhaps the interpreter, Broncho Billy, along with a couple of white chiefs, or even one or two of his Oglala friends, would come and take him away with them was a flickering, surely impossible dream. He knew that the show was only scheduled to be here in this town for eight or nine sleeps before moving on to another land. He felt certain that those sleeps were gone and he had been abandoned. He almost collapsed from the weight of such a thought and he thought how foolish he was to want to travel with Buffalo Bill. He should have stayed at the Stronghold, in the badlands, where he knew his way around. He thought of those sunny hot days with Strikes Plenty, riding to who knows where, but free to go. Not like the reservation Indians. They had laughed and mocked those Indians who had given up and lived in the wooden houses at the agency, collecting their meager commodities, their spoiled meat, learning to worship the white man’s god, learning to talk the strange tongue. Now he would have given all his good times, all his freedom, to be one of them, home in the little shack with his mother and father in the village of his people.

Two nights later, Charging Elk sat up in his bed, alert and considerably stronger. He looked down at the yellow light and could just make out the shape of a human being. He had explored that part of the long room that afternoon and knew that there was a smaller room with a cage for a window and a door that they kept closed. Here the healing helpers sat, smoking, talking, making marks on their paper. They were very comfortable in this room, but he noticed that they became quiet and attentive when one of the women with the white wings came among them. These women seemed to be yuwipis, but even they became obedient when the man with the steel in his ears was around. He was the real wicasa wakan.

But he was never around at night, only one or two helpers. And they never left the caged room unless one of the sick ones cried out in pain or panic, which happened often. Charging Elk had kept awake most of the night before, watching their routine, but there didn’t seem to be a routine, just the response to a sudden commotion.

Charging Elk had also scouted the big hall outside the sickroom that afternoon. The toilet room was on the other side. After he took a long painful shit, his first in many days, he wandered down the hall toward a large window at the end. If the helpers caught him, he would pretend that he was lost. But his eyes were as sharp as a horsetaker’s in an enemy camp. He noticed the doors that led off the hall, some of them closed, others open. One room in particular interested him. It was a long narrow room, darkly lit by a single yellow wire, and it was filled with hanging clothes.

At the window, the hall turned in opposite directions. One way was long and looked exactly like the hall he had come down. The other way was short and led to a pair of swinging doors that went from the floor to the ceiling. Each door had a small window. Charging Elk walked quickly toward the doors. He stopped and touched one of them. It moved slightly. Then he looked through the window.

It was a large room. Unlike the sickroom, it was as wide as it was long and it was filled with soft chairs and soft longseats. A few people sat on this furniture, some reading, some talking, some just looking off into the distance. To the right, Charging Elk could see a long wooden platform, about waist-high. He could see two heads behind the platform, but they were bent over, looking at something behind the platform. Neither of the women had white wings on her head but they seemed to be of higher station than the helpers.

No one had indicated to Charging Elk that he was a prisoner in the sickhouse, but he knew if the women saw him they would call for the helpers. And if he protested, they would strap him down again. No, he had to be cunning and wait for his opportunity. These people who didn’t know him, who gave him the orange juice, the food, and lately the coffee, would become his enemies if they knew he wanted to escape.

Charging Elk looked again across the room and he saw large windows and beyond them trees, a road, and a building across the way. He saw horse-drawn carriages and men pulling high-wheeled carts. He saw women in their strange dresses with the big butts. Then he saw an omnibus go by, with its two levels of passengers, and he remembered that he and some of the other Indians had ridden in such a wagon before, when the interpreters took them on the rare tour, first in Paris, then once in this city. He remembered that they had been afraid to ride on top, out in the open, exposed to danger. But after they became used to these high wagons, they never rode inside. Featherman had liked to ride in front, just behind the driver. He liked the smell of the big horses. He would make jokes about the driver in his high hat and wave at the women with big butts and feathers on their heads. He made the others lighthearted, and sometimes they would all wave, or whoop, at a pretty woman or a cart full of meat. There was never enough meat. But the young Indians enjoyed the spectacle of themselves reflected in the astonished eyes of the French people.

Charging Elk returned his gaze to the room and he saw instantly what he had been looking for. Past the wooden platform, at the far end of the room, were two large glass doors which let out onto the cobblestone walking path. Even as he watched, an old one was being helped inside by two women. He had a white beard and a small black cap on his head. One of the women held a cloth to his mouth.

Late that night, two of the men helpers came into the dark room, pushing one of the wheeled beds. They were very quiet as they passed Charging Elk’s bed. They stopped three or four beds away and turned the platform so that it came to rest between two beds. Then they made small whispering noises, a bed squeaked, and something made a heavy thump. Then the platform rolled down the aisle in the opposite direction, toward the yellow-lit room.

Charging Elk could just make out the body beneath the white cloth. One of the helpers, a fat one, was breathing hard and grumbling in the French tongue. The other one was tall and thin and bent over the platform, pushing it slowly and quietly, indifferent to the fat one’s complaints.

As Charging Elk watched the strange procession make its way to the yellow-lit room, he felt his whole body shiver, as though he had once again pulled himself out of the icy river in his country. For the past two sleeps, he had again harbored a desperate hope that someone from the show would come and get him; or that the two men, the American and the Frenchman, would take him home across the big water. But now, seeing the dead body spooked him and he thought that he would get sick again, that this healing house was really a deathhouse, and the only way he would leave it would be on a rolling platform covered with a white cloth.

He thought of poor wretched Featherman. To die here alone! What would happen to his nagi, his spirit? How would it find its way to the other side, to the real world beyond this one? And what about himself? His own nagi would run restless over the land here, far from his people, far from the real world. He could not stay here, waiting to die. He would not wait. With the help of Wakan Tanka, he would find his own way home.

As Charging Elk threw on his robe and slipped his feet into the fuzzy shoes, the thought struck him that the Wild West show was still on this side of the big water. They were going to tour all winter and summer, even until next winter—that’s what the white bosses told him when he drew his name on the paper back at Pine Ridge. Maybe they weren’t so far away. Maybe they would come back for him. If he left this sickhouse, how would they find him?

He sat down on the edge of the bed. His ribs didn’t hurt so much now. He took a deep breath, then sighed, caught somewhere between hope and despair. He thought of his mother and father and their little shack; he thought of his dear friend Strikes Plenty, and their wanderings in Paha Sapa; and he thought of the old wiccua wakan at the Stronghold, who had prepared him so well for his han-blechia. He trembled to think that he had lost possession of his badger-claw necklace, his war medicine. He had no power. But that wasn’t true—he had his death song. If he sang it well at the proper time, there was a chance that his spirit would make it to the other side, even if he didn’t.

Charging Elk stood and looked down toward the room with the yellow light. He had made his decision. He wouldn’t stay in this deathhouse one more sleep. As he walked silently between the rows of beds in the other direction, he felt alert and expectant.

He crept down the dim hall to the room with the clothes, flattening himself into doorways, looking, listening, but he saw and heard nothing. He began to feel lucky, just as he had that night he and Strikes Plenty had sneaked into the gold miners’ tent while they slept and stolen their rifles, a box of bullets, and their work boots. Charging Elk smiled in the dim light, and it was his first smile in many sleeps. He smiled to remember that several miles away they had thrown the boots into a ravine. They had laughed to think of the miners waking up and trying to find those boots. Then discovering that their rifles were also missing.

Charging Elk wished that Strikes Plenty were with him now. Together, they would know how to get back to their country. Strikes Plenty was good at finding his way home to the Stronghold.

The door to the clothes room was closed, and Charging Elk’s heart fell down for a moment. He knew that the white people liked to keep things locked up, that they stole from each other whether they were enemies or not. He was almost resigned to returning to his bed but he grasped the knob and turned it and his luck held. The door swung open with a soft creak. Charging Elk quickly slipped inside the room and fastened the door behind him. The click sounded very loud to him.

The room was pitch-black and Charging Elk stood for a moment, not breathing but listening. The shoes these wasichus wore made loud noises and you could hear them from a long way off. But he heard nothing and as he stared into the darkness, he wondered how the white men made the yellow wires glow. He felt to one side of him and grabbed a heavy cloth object. It was hanging from one of the sloped wires that they used for coats. It was a coat. Charging Elk shrugged out of his robe and put the coat on. But the shoulders were too small and his arms stuck out of the sleeves.

Charging Elk was a big man, one or two inches over six feet. He and the other Oglalas had towered over the small people of this city. The people here were shorter than the ones in Paris—and darker. Rocky Bear, who had toured much with Buffalo Bill and considered himself plenty savvy, said these people came from a jungle in another land. The people in Paris and New York and another city he had been to, London, were the true wasicuns.

Charging Elk finally found a coat that would almost fit him—roomy enough in the shoulders and the sleeves only a little short. It was a heavy coat, and he was grateful as he remembered how cold it had been that night in the arena when he had gotten sick.

He moved deeper into the room but now he couldn’t see a thing. He walked back to the door and, after listening for a moment, opened it a crack and let the dull glow from the hall in. Then he moved back, brushing his fingers along the coats, until he found a series of shelves. And here he found the other things he was looking for. He tried on four of the white men’s trousers until he found a pair that again almost fit him. They were a little loose, so he took the cord from the robe and tied it around his middle. He searched for the other things that the wasicuns wore—the shirts and shoes—but all he found was a round brimless hat. He was grateful for it, because he had been thinking that his long hair, which was now loose, would attract attention when he got outside. Now he tucked his hair as best as he could under the soft hat until it bloomed like a black bladder on his head.

He was ready. He had no shirt, but the striped gown, tucked into the pants, looked almost presentable. He would have to make do with the fuzzy slippers on his bare feet.

Charging Elk’s escape was surprisingly easy. At that hour, the big room was empty, save for one couple and a woman. The couple were staring out the window at the dark street and the woman had her head down, asleep. A basket lay on the soft seat beside her, and she held two needles. Charging Elk had seen women in Paris making thick cloth with the two needles as they sat in cafés or parks.

There was only one head behind the tall platform and it was bent over. A light came from somewhere behind the platform. Charging Elk crouched and sneaked close beneath the lip of the platform. He could tell that the head was that of a woman by the smell. Once past the platform, he turned a corner, stood tall, and walked quickly out of the deathhouse into the cold night.

As he gulped in the sharp air, he looked up and down the street and, for the first time in a long time, he wanted a smoke.