About three paces to the west of the pole there was a buffalo skull, lying on a cushion of sagebrush. It faced east. Behind the skull, on two forked sticks, lay a long Indian pipe. The stem of this pipe, like the buffalo skull, faced east.
Chance returned his attention to the young Indian.
Obviously it had a meaning, to someone if not to Chance. As he continued to watch, somewhat to his uneasiness, his feelings of fascination, of horror, became gradually replaced with a certain, if not awe, respect.
It was a ceremony.
This place was holy.
The pole and the cruelty and the blood were holy.
What do I believe in, Chance asked himself, for which I could dance like this, and he answered his question simply, nothing.
No bear would do this, said Chance to himself, no wolf, no bird, no animal.
Only man.
And Chance, seeing this man suffer, doing nothing to relieve his pain, smoking quietly in a cottonwood grove in South Dakota in the year 1890, thought he understood more than he had found in the books of anatomy, more than he had found in the dissected cadavers in Cambridge, more than his professors had known, or than he had ever thought that he himself would know. Something here had given him, he felt, perhaps mistakenly, perhaps not, a short, terrible glimpse of something deep and possible in the race of which he was a member, something perhaps long buried and generally forgotten, something that might be akin to the meaning and the essence of man, in all its ugly, splendid keenness.
“Hea!” cried the young Indian, a shout in no language, more an animal cry than anything, something between victory and laughter.
As the hair climbed on the back of Chance’s neck, he heard the beginning of a faint, ugly tearing sound. The sound became louder. “Hea!” cried the boy again, laughing and hurling himself backward.
There was a sudden, sickening rip and the young man had fallen backward to the grass. He was sprawled unconscious on the grass, free at last, lying outside the dusty, bloody circle.
He’s loose, said Chance to himself, getting up. Chance’s legs were stiff. He had watched a long time.
The two pegs on their rawhide strips dangled against the pole making a little knocking noise in the wind.
Chance went to the boy, whose chest was open and thick with new blood. It was coming through the flesh, rising like red spring water through sand. Chance took off his brown corduroy shirt and shoved it against the wounds, anything to stanch the flow, which must be done immediately.
A quarter of an hour later, Chance gave the boy a sip of water from his canteen.
Joseph Running Horse looked up at Chance. “I have watched the sun,” he said. “For three days I have watched the sun.” Chance nodded, understanding nothing. Joseph Running Horse lapsed back into unconsciousness.
Chance didn’t ride on that night, but stayed in the grove of cottonwoods, near the tiny creek.
He wrapped Running Horse in his blankets to prevent shock, and built a fire which he tended during the night.
The chest wounds, unsanitarily clotted against the material of Chance’s shirt, would close in their own fashion. The Indian would not allow Chance to use the curved needle and the catgut thread to close the wounds.
“There must be scars,” Running Horse had said.
He would not even allow the physician to dress the wounds with clean bandages.
The next day, to Chance’s surprise, Running Horse was eating, and could walk about the grove. He seemed weak, but that was all.
The young Indian gathered together the paraphernalia of the dance.
The soldiers must not find it.
He built a fire, throwing into it the branches wrapped in bark which he had fitted into the fork of the cottonwood pole. They were the branches which he had cut from the cottonwood to make the pole. It was only right that the whole of the little cottonwood should have participated in the holiness of the dance. Chance noticed that the meat, before Running Horse threw it into the flames, was tied into the humped shape of a small buffalo. Next to be given to the flames was the small rawhide doll, which was the figure of a warrior, and which, Running Horse told him, would give him victory over his enemies. Then Running Horse burned the tobacco and twigs, and the tobacco bags and wands which he had planted around the pole and elsewhere as offerings to Wakan-Tonka, the Mystery. Lastly he burned the pole itself, with its pegs and rawhide strips. The buffalo skull he placed in the bushes. This left only the long Indian pipe, which lay on its forked sticks with its stem pointing east.
But Running Horse did not touch the pipe.
He left it resting on the forked sticks in the small clearing, inside the dusty stained ring that marked the path of his dance. He looked at the pipe, and then at Chance, but did not touch the pipe, nor did he speak to Chance.
That night, Chance made coffee over their small fire and, on a sharpened stick, cooked pieces of a prairie chicken which Running Horse had struck down with a rock.
“You have seen me look at the sun,” said Running Horse. “Let that be good medicine for both of us.”
“All right,” said Chance, not understanding.
After the two men had finished the prairie chicken, Chance swigged some of the coffee which he had boiled in the pork-and-bean can, and then handed the can to Running Horse.
Running Horse took a swallow of the coffee, a large swallow which must have burned his mouth, but he said nothing. He swirled the black, hot fluid about in his mouth, holding it for a time, and then gulped it down.
Chance winced.
Running Horse grinned. “Perjuta sapa,” he said.
“Purjuta sapa,” repeated Chance, hesitantly. “That is coffee?”
“Yes,” said Running Horse. “Sioux for coffee.” Then the young Indian grinned again. “It really means black medicine.”
Chance laughed.
He had also learned his first word of Sioux.
The two men had eaten together, and shared the coffee. Chance felt that this meant something important to Running Horse, but he didn’t know what.
Chance asked for some other Sioux words, for the common articles about them.
Surprised, Running Horse had told him.
Chance was the first white man he had known who was interested in learning to speak his language. Not even the schoolteacher at Standing Rock, the pale white woman with blond hair, had done this.
Chance took out his briar, and after he had lit it, Running Horse took it from him and lifted it to the stars, and to the winds, and then to the earth.
Running Horse took a long puff, and then another, and handed the little briar back to Chance, who took it and smoked it.
“I have smoked your tobacco,” said Running Horse.
“Yes, you have,” said Chance, wondering what was going on.
“I have smoked your tobacco,” repeated Running Horse, looking at Chance.