The Story Catcher, page 1
Books by Mari Sandoz
published by the University of Nebraska Press
The Battle of the Little Bighorn
The Beaver Men: Spearheads of Empire
The Buffalo Hunters: The Story of the Hide Men
Capital City
The Cattlemen: From the Rio Grande across the Far Marias
Cheyenne Autumn
Christmas of the Phonograph Records
Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas
The Horsecatcher
Hostiles and Friendlies: Selected Short Writings of Mari Sandoz
Letters of Mari Sandoz
Love Song to the Plains
Miss Morissa: Doctor of the Gold Trail
Old Jules
Old Jules Country
Sandhill Sundays and Other Recollections
Slogum House
Son of the Gamblin ’Man: The Youth of an Artist
The Story Catcher
These Were the Sioux
The Tom-Walker
Winter Thunder
This book is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, places, and incidents either are productsof the author’s imagination or are used in a fictional setting. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright 1963 by Mari Sandoz
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Sandoz, Mari, 1896–1966.
The story catcher.
“Bison.”
Summary: A young Sioux warrior earns the right to be called historian for his tribe after numerous adventures and trials which test his ability to tell the story of his people with truth and courage.
[1. Dakota Indians—Fiction. 2. Indians of North America—Fiction]. I. Title.
[PZ7.S22St 1986] [Fic] 85-31810
ISBN 0-8032-9163-9 (pbk.)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8032-9388-5 (electronic: e-pub)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8032-9389-2 (electronic: mobi)
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Dedicated to the Bad Heart Bull Family,
a long line of story catchers,
and particularly to Amos Bad Heart Bull,
artist and great historian of the Oglala Sioux.
Contents
1. THE LITTLE REE
2. THE PIT AND THE SURROUND
3. CROW BUTTE
4. THE HOLE
5. IN THE RIVER COUNTRY
6. THE CLOUDBURST
7. SUN DANCE AND BEAR BUTTE
8. HARD WINTER AND THE MOOSE YARD
9. A FIGHT AND A DECISION
1 / The Little Ree
YOUNG LANCE first noticed the small track in the fan of earth below a washout. He had slipped away from a scouting party with only his hunting bow, as one went for game, for meat. He had ridden his buckskin horse because the color was harder to detect in the fall breaks and gullies that he followed, trying to keep out of sight as much as possible as he watched the sky. Finally he saw what he sought, an eagle circling, very high up, like a wisp of soot from a campfire, floating on the wind. Over there must be the place, over where the eagle soared, the young Sioux thought, but because enemies might be watching, he held himself to caution and swung his horse far out around, to approach against the wind.
When he neared the spot, he got off and crept to the top of a low ridge. Head well down, eyes at the grass roots, he peered over into a little valley. There, on the wide creek bottoms below him, the eagle’s shadow moved slowly over the yellowed grass, over the trampled place where the fight had been, with buzzards now quarreling at the dead horses, torn and dragged apart. Off to the side a big gray wolf was feeding at another carcass, alone and watchful, alert.
Suddenly the wolf leaped back, his nose lifted into the wind, his tail an erect plume. Then he was gone up a draw, the only sign of his passing the fall of a hovering magpie to the horse where the wolf had fed. But the big gray had not looked in the direction of Young Lance. His head had turned toward the low yellow line of brush along the creek. Unblinking, to miss not the slightest movement of a skulking enemy, the Indian youth held his eyes on the brush. He saw nothing except the passing shadow of the eagle still circling high above, and heard nothing more than the noisy squabble of the buzzards feeding where half a moon ago—two weeks by white man time—the hunters from his village had destroyed a small party of Rees trying to steal their horses. But the Sioux had lost a good man too, wounded here, to die on the way home. Now Young Lance had come to walk over the ground where this had been done, to think a little about the death of the man who had taught him and other youths to make good arrows, the iron points very sharp and secure, the feathers fastened carefully to balance the flight, each shaft painted with the owner’s design.
Young Lance prepared carefully for his ride down the slope into the stink of the dead little battlefield, perhaps into an ambush. With a moccasin toe hooked over the back of the buckskin, one hand grasped into the black mane, the other with his bow and an arrow ready, he clung close to the side of the horse so that from far off there would seem to be no rider at all, and from near he would be hard to hit. As the horse plodded into the valley, the youth peered cautiously over the neck, trying to discover what had scared the hungry wolf away.
When he passed a group of dead horses where the Rees had made a stand, the buzzards lifted sullenly from their feeding, flew a short, awkward distance and settled along a cutbank to wait, their ugly naked heads bobbing in impatience. Lance found the spot where some men had fallen, and lay for a while, the marks of their bodies still plain, the earth darkened with their wounding. At least seven Rees were killed in the dawn attack that the Sioux scouts had discovered was coming, and turned into a trap. The returning party reported that they had cleaned out all the enemy they saw, but no one remained to search the weeds and brush after Arrow Man was found where he had been dropped by one of the first shots, struck in the throat.
The Ree bodies were all gone now, carried away for burial. Plainly the enemy knew of this place and might be watching to avenge themselves on any returning Sioux. Uneasy, Lance squinted his eyes carefully all around the ridges on both sides of the low valley and along the brush where something had scared the wolf. Seeing nothing to disturb the long-tailed magpies and the buzzards except himself, he began the search for the spot where Arrow Man fell and was carried away.
It was while the young Sioux rode back and forth examining the ground carefully that he saw the track in damp earth at the mouth of a washout—one fresh footprint, a little like a big raccoon’s or a bear cub’s, but not quite the same. The toes were short and stubby, without claws—the bare foot track of a man-being, small but certain, and very fresh, the track of an enemy here, now.
At this realization Lance slid down the far side of his horse again for protection from arrow or lead ball. He peered cautiously through the black mane of his horse, afraid that hesitation might bring an attack, afraid too that any move might take him straight into an ambush, with only his hunting bow, and all alone. Nobody knew where he was. None would carry him away, wounded as Arrow Man had been, or even find his body except by watching the eagles and the buzzards flying.
To fool at least a far observer he guided his horse to wander in a sort of aimlessness, grabbing a mouthful of grass here and there on the way to a deep gully, up which one might escape if attack came. Then Lance saw something creep from the brush of the bottoms into a clump of russet slough grass. It was a naked Indian, but very small, either dwarfed or a child that seemed not over four years old, and grasping a knife that caught one ray of the sun and was lost. The little Indian kept hidden only a moment before he peered from the tall growth and began to crawl again, from clump to clump, afraid but coming closer.
Something about the movement, so like a shy but curious young creature, a fawn or a cub, made Lance less cautious. The small one seemed such a wildling too, a lostling, alone. Gently the youth urged his horse around, but the little Indian, suddenly alarmed, rose and ran stooping back into the brush and was gone with scarcely a tremble of a browning leaf to show his hiding place.
For a long time Lance watched the autumn rosebushes, until he remembered that there must be other Indians around. Swiftly he glanced over all the death-smelling little valley and back to where the small boy had flattened down like a young quail taking on the color of the growth around it. In the quietness the buzzards stalked back to their angry feeding, and finally the small Indian, too, seemed to lose his fear.
The bushes shook a little, a reddened leaf fell, and an eye peered out, staring and plain. It was so funny that for a moment Lance forgot the danger and forgot that he was a budding young warrior before an enemy. He laughed aloud, slipped from his horse and dove for the boy, who slashed out with his knife and scurried away, dodging back and forth, quick as a little fox in the long grass. Finally, Lance had the naked body about the waist, and grabbing the boy’s hand, made him let go of the knife. The Sioux got a good raking of fingernails down his cheek, but with the small hands tied behind the boy’s twisting back with a rawhide thong, Lance squatted down and smiled into the furious, frightened little face. Slowly he spoke the Sioux word for Ree, and made the corn-shelling motion with the hands that was the sign for the tribe. Then he added the sign for friendship, his hand raised, palm out—the left one because it was nearest the heart and had shed no man’s blood.
“You are a lost one!” he exclaimed.
The voice if not the words seemed to make the boy realize his helplessness. He stopped his chewing, the wasna in his hands forgotten as he pulled into himself, shrank together as a frightened bird caught in closing fingers.
When the sun began to settle behind the ridge where a wolf came to wait and two coyotes slunk in and out of a draw, Lance decided it might be safe to start back through the shadowing slopes and breaks. He tied a rawhide string around the boy’s middle, fastened the end to his own elbow and lifted the light little body to ride behind him on the buckskin. He had hoped to sneak in through the darkness without facing questions from Jumping Moose, the scout leader, about where he had been, but that was impossible now. Even Arrow Man, the one he had come to mourn, seemed forgotten under the song Young Lance found himself humming to the gentle lope of his horse until he felt the boy behind him slyly working at the knot in the rawhide string that held him. He turned and managed to grab the little Ree before he could slip off, hide in the tall, shadowed grass. With the boy swung around before him, and set hard across the horse, to be held firmly there, Lance realized he would have to watch this brave and designing little captive very carefully for a long, long time. And what about the mourning relatives of Arrow Man? Would they welcome an enemy Ree into the village now, even this small one?
Lance thought about these things as night crept out of the canyons. “Your name—perhaps it will be Arrow Boy, for the man killed there, but everybody will call you the little Ree, or even Little Left Behind one. You will be one more small Sioux at our fire, to sit beside my little blood brother, Laughing Cub—a sort of twin with him, like my twin sisters—”
Lance said this in Sioux, and the little Ree would not have understood if he had heard. By now he was heavy on the arm of his captor, sleeping in the warmth of a robe for the first time in the cold nights of October, of the Moon of Falling Leaves. So the two rode into the scout camp, the boy scarcely waking when Lance handed him down to the men gathered around. They had risen angrily from their hidden evening coals to demand an explanation from the youth they had taken along only to please his father. Now they stood around the boy, talking back and forth over his drooping head, letting Young Lance know that his sneaking away was not to be overlooked. It might have brought an arrow to his heart and even now was endangering the whole scout camp by alerting the enemy to their presence. Then for the time of a star’s fall they showed elation over the enemy caught, a young Ree who might be made into a good Sioux if what Lance said about him proved straight and true—a very resourceful and strong Sioux, even though he was scarcely big enough for his first rabbit bow.
But the kind of man he became, and whatever his presence among them brought upon the people would be the responsibility of his captor, Jumping Moose, the young war chief of the seven scouts here reminded Lance. “We will hold you for any bad thing he does. You gave him life when you should have killed him, killed your first enemy to bring honor to your mother and your sisters in the ceremonial dancing. You denied them this honor, this pride, and lost the avenging of Arrow Man, your second uncle.”
Jumping Moose said this so fiercely that the small Ree awoke. Seeing all the men tall about him in the night, he clutched at Lance for protection and in the comforting, the young Sioux felt a warmth run through his arms, and a hardening determination as he stooped to shelter the thin, shaking little body.
“I will make him a Sioux, and my relatives will dance his coming, dance it in joy,” Lance replied. It was a bold speech, as the young Indian knew, remembering that his mother was wearing ashes in her hair, and gashes on her arms for the death of Arrow Man by the Rees.
The two were hastily fed a little roasted meat, the boy half asleep yet still afraid, looking around the dark, light-touched faces of his enemies as he chewed until his eyes fell shut and his jaws stopped. By then the horses had been brought in, quietly but swiftly, and the camp began to move, one rider after another disappearing into the darkness. The little bed of fire coals was ringed with upturned sod to prevent a spread into the dry prairie, but left glowing for a long while after everyone was far away. The Rees would make a rescue attack as soon as they knew the boy was alive, certainly as soon as scouts or mourners found tracks at the fighting ground. There might even be a big pipe-carrying to the other tribes, particularly the Pawnees, to raise a great war march against the Sioux, one that could wipe out this insult.
Jumping Moose headed his party of scouts southwest-ward in the clouding night. Young Lance carried the sleeping little captive before him, holding him safe but without triumph now. He realized that the sudden breakup of the scouting was his fault and that whatever came of this failure to watch for enemy war parties would be upon him. He rode in the middle of the single file, the place for any who could not be trusted, any who must be watched. Several times Lance looked back into the blackness that lay over the ancient country of the Rees, the Arikaras, who carried many old angers against the Sioux, and now had these new ones.
Jumping Moose camped his party through the daylight time in broken country, hiding so no enemy scouts could see their retreat from the borders of their hunting grounds, know that they were no longer out guarding. There were some angry eyes turned toward the little Ree, and Young Lance realized that an enemy glimpse of the boy would bring an attack, perhaps an overwhelming attack, upon their small party here, eight men counting himself if his arm could prove a man’s in a fight. So they must keep hidden, and a relay of watchers out while the rest of the party slept a little. Lance had tied the Ree to his left arm, the knots next to his ribs where a touch would bring a tickling. Worn as the boy must be, Lance felt him lying awake, holding himself still, and so the young Sioux loosened the rawhide thongs and began to whisper friendly sounds to the little captive. The boy stared at him with eyes as unmoving as the black glass from which the old ones had made knives—without warmth, only the cold hardness of courage.
After a while Lance sat up and smoothed the dust before him. With a weed stalk he drew the picture of a lean, fox-faced boy, the eyes big and round, the pupils ringed out to show them staring. As Lance worked, the little Ree watched, squatting and silent, until suddenly a small laugh escaped him, but he clapped a thin hand over his mouth, his eyes still the smoky dark of an enemy.
Lance pulled out the piece of wasna left in his belt pouch, laid it on a rock and struck it with his knife blade, cutting it into two parts. He motioned with the point toward one of the pieces. The boy reached for it, but cautiously, as though afraid of an equal blow from the knife. Lance pretended he did not see this fear. Instead, he made the offering of his piece toward the sky, the earth, and the four directions, and began to gnaw at it. So they ate together, but the boy seemed to stiffen once more, perhaps remembering. To make the Ree laugh again, Lance made a picture of a small Indian chasing a rabbit that popped into a hole, and of another one sneaking a piece of meat from the drying racks, and a woman after him with a burning stick from the fire. He, drew a horse race, the winner a boy sticking on like a wildcat, with all four feet and hands, the scrubby little pony running with his belly almost to the ground, his long, straggly tail sticking straight out, all the other horses in the whirl of dust far behind.
Slowly the little Ree put out a finger and drew the figure of a boy, just straight lines for the body, the legs and arms, and a circle on top for the head, with braids. It was a riding boy, riding behind a stick man on a running horse drawn the same way. Then he made another picture, of a woman, lines too, but with a skirt, a woman standing all alone. A moment the small boy looked down upon his pictures and then threw himself over them, sobbing silently.
