Again Chance said nothing.
Hearing of a white buffalo puzzled Chance. He had never seen one, certainly, but for that matter had seen only a handful of buffalo of any sort, thin, scraggy creatures, unsteady and afflicted by parasites, remnants of the great herds that had once covered territories, now curiosities in traveling circuses. A white buffalo, Chance supposed, would be an albino. But why should an old man hunt an albino buffalo?
But now the old man had forgotten about Chance and was lost among the cottonwoods of the place of scaffolds. Chance could hear him singing his prayers to the Mystery. Once Chance saw him with his hands against the trunk of a tree in whose branches there was fixed one of the oblong, dark, burdened platforms, leaning against the tree, his head down.
At last the old man returned to his pony.
“We will now leave,” said Old Bear.
Chance did not help the old man mount.
He untied his own horse, slipped the carbine into the saddle boot, loosened the Colt in its holster.
At the edge of the grove, both mounted, Old Bear turned to Chance.
“Once,” he said, “I was War Bear.” His dim eyes seemed to blaze fiercely for a moment. “Do you believe that?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Chance, speaking in Sioux, “your tongue is straight.”
Suddenly the old man smiled, and then laughed, throwing back his head.
He leaned over his pony’s neck, speaking in Sioux. “Once no young man of the Hunkpapa would do what Drum has done. They would not let me ride under the guns of an enemy. Do you understand what I am saying?”
“Yes,” said Chance, also speaking in Sioux. “I hear the words of a father of the Hunkpapa.”
Old Bear laughed again and he lifted his bow happily. “Come!” he shouted in Sioux, “Let us ride together!”
And so together Chance, a physician from New York, and Old Bear, once of Sitting Bull’s White Horse Riders, left the place of scaffolds, on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in South Dakota, in the late afternoon of a Sunday in 1890, and rode together into the open prairie, toward Drum, the son of Kills-His-Horse, and two braves, who rode slowly to meet them.
Winona, the daughter of Old Bear, was making her way back to the Grand River encampment.
Head down, leading her pony by the nose rope, she was in no hurry to return home. The two travois poles dragging behind the pony left a double track in the prairie dust, but not a deep one, for the travois was empty.
No rations had been distributed at the ration point.
Yet it had been, yesterday, the second Saturday, and every second Saturday was ration day.
Like several of the other women, Winona had even stayed the night at the ration point, but it had been to no avail. This morning they had been told to go away.
There had been rations, but the soldiers and the Indian police had not permitted them to be distributed.
Winona recalled the abundance of sides of beef, lying in the dirt, spotted, stinking, but meat; and the piles of bulging flour sacks, and the bolts of cloth; some blankets; but nothing had been given to them, though they were the children of the Great White Father, and he had promised them these things made holy by being written on paper and signed by men in white collars and black coats, who were subchiefs of the Great White Father himself.
Winona wished she could speak to the Great White Father. She would tell him what his people had done, and he would be angry.
But he was far away, like Wakan-Tonka, the Great Mystery, and Winona wondered if there was a Great White Father, or if the white men were only lying again.
Perhaps there was a Great White Father and he was like the other white men, and would laugh at her and not give her the rations.
No rations unless your men come! That had been what the half-breed interpreters in their plaid shirts and white-man hats had said, with their hair cut short.
This was to stop the Ghost Dancing.
Near the ration point the soldiers from Fort Yates had been practicing with their big guns, running about them, and shouting, but not shooting them. If the men had come the soldiers would have shot the big guns, off into the prairie, so the men would remember that they had the big guns. But the men had not forgotten, and did not need to be reminded. But only the women, with their ponies and travois, came to the ration point, so the soldiers only ran about the guns, and shouted and pretended to shoot them.
The soldiers were to protect the Indians, she had been told. Suppose bad Indians came to kill them and steal their rations and take their scalps. Then the soldiers would drive the bad Indians away.
The pony Winona was leading snorted uneasily, but Winona did not notice.
Warriors should not come to gather rations.
That was woman’s work.
If you had to hunt something, that was different. But why should a warrior come to the ration point, just to pick up a piece of meat and put it on a travois? A squaw could do that. But you will not get your rations, had said the half-breeds, unless your men come.
The men would be angry when the squaws came back without rations. They might beat them with sticks or they might bring out the little clay bowls hidden in the cabins, with paint, and their hidden feathers, and come for the rations themselves, on their ponies with knives and guns.
Maybe that was what the soldiers wanted.
In the past few months, in an effort to make the Sioux more independent, the amount of rations distributed to them had been steadily decreased; now there were no rations distributed at all; and supplies were low in the Standing Rock camps. Although the decrease in the supplies distributed was apparently a violation of treaty arrangements, the rationale of the action was apparently to make the Sioux more independent.
The Sioux themselves, of course, took the words of treaties seriously, and furthermore regarded the diminishment of supplies as a deliberate attempt on the part of the white men responsible to starve them into submission, to make them be what the white men wanted them to be, for example, to be good Indians and stop the Ghost Dancing, but the Ghost Dancing was the wish of Wakan-Tonka, Who was greater by far even than the Great White Father himself, who was only as dust beneath the feet of Wakan-Tonka, or little noises in the trees when the wind blew. The dancing was holy, and must not stop. White men did not know the prayer of the dance. What would they do if the Indians told them to take down their churches and stop singing their own holy songs? They would not like it. They would be angry.
One Indian woman at the ration point had tried to steal a piece of meat and one of the soldiers had thrust a bayonet into her hand. She had stood in the dirt, her feet planted wide, sucking her hand, making obscene gestures at the soldier with her other hand.
How could the Sioux grow their crops when the white farmers could not do so themselves, and that was their way of life, as buffalo had been to the Indians?
The Sioux had asked for their own cattle and horses, like the white ranchers, but this had been refused. Indian cattle would overload the market and white men, for some reason, were unwilling to give the Sioux horses.
How could the Sioux be farmers?
They were hunters, and warriors, not farmers.
And it did not rain, nothing grew. The white farmers could leave the land, get on wagons and iron trains, and go away. But the Indians could not leave.
They must stay, and now there were no rations.
Did the Great White Father wish his children to die?
Maybe the buffalo will come back in the spring, thought Winona to herself, as Kicking Bear has said, if the dancing does not stop.
Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, had said the woman with a nose and head like a chicken at the ration point, with bright eyes and scrawny hands, bear your crosses, blessed are the poor in spirit, live not by bread alone. And then the woman, with her black hat wrapped about her face, in her black dress, had pressed a little book into her hands, telling her to love all men.
I am hungry, thought Winona.
She had dropped the little book at the ration point, leaving it behind in the dust under the hoofs of the ponies, the poles of the travois, the milling feet of the angry squaws.