"SITTING-ALWAYS"
Among the many odd and unexpected things which Dusty Star found in the new life in the camp, one of the most peculiar and unaccountable was a grandmother, whose name was Sitting-Always.
Up to the present, a grandmother had been entirely wanting in the arrangement he called the World. That there was a great Spirit called the Sun, he knew. He also knew that there was another less great one called the Moon. And there were the stars. These also were spirits. They sat about in the sky and generally had a good time. If you watched them carefully against the tops of the lodge-poles, you could see that they gradually did their sitting a little higher up, or a little lower down; and sometimes, especially in the Mad Moon, they actually ran. To watch a star run swiftly down a steep place in the sky and disappear, made your heart jump. When the running stars which did not fall off into the dark reached the prairie, they turned into the puff-balls the Indians called "dusty-stars."
But a grandmother, it appeared, though neither a spirit nor a star, was a Great Power to be reckoned with. There were days when she painted her face bright yellow. These were solemn occasions. If you made a noise or got in her way, she would wrinkle her skin till the paint cracked. If you continued the annoyance, she would smack. As a painted curiosity Dusty Star observed her with awe.
His first introduction to her was not on one of her painted days. Without wanting to be rude he thought her face looked more like raw buffalo hide than anything else he had yet met. Her hands also seemed of that material, and did not feel pleasant when they felt his arms and legs. Dusty Star objected to being mauled, even by a Great Power; but he bore it as well as he could, because his mother told him to stand still; only from that day onwards his grandmother's hands were the part of her body he most thoroughly distrusted.
The second time he saw her was when she came to the tepee on her way to take part in a medicine-bundle ceremony. She was very grandly dressed in a beaded buckskin robe, and her face was thickly coated with the famous yellow paint. Dusty Star was squatting with Kiopo at the back of the tepee, watching his mother making pemmican, when this yellow vision peered in upon them through the opening. He stared at it with astonishment. He was not afraid, but it made him feel uncomfortable. It was as if his grandmother's face, like the maple leaves, had gone yellow with the Fall. And from the middle of the yellow, her sunken eyes glared blackly in the hollows of her head.
Kiopo also disapproved of the vision. That was very plain by the way his hair bristled along his back, and his upper lip curled back to show his fangs while he snarled.
The yellow face of Sitting-Always scowled between the eyes, and made the paint crack. She declared she would not enter the tepee unless the husky was first driven out. When Nikana explained that Kiopo was not a husky but a true wild wolf, and that when he snarled through his teeth it was best to let him be, Sitting-Always was more displeased than ever. Like most old Indians she firmly believed that the wolves had a "medicine," and by a "medicine" she meant a power that was stronger than either wolves or men. She herself was a great believer in "medicine." Half the things with which her tepee was stuffed were supposed to possess a medicine of one kind or another. Only she infinitely preferred tame medicine—the sort you stored in painted parfleches—to the wild kind on four legs that bared its fangs and snarled. So when she had shot out a few biting remarks about beasts and boys in general, she took her yellow face out of the opening and stalked angrily away.
After that Dusty Star saw her quite often when Nikana took him with her on visits to her tepee, and the yellow maple-leaf face had given way to the buffalo-hide one, and her teeth were the only yellow things she had in her head. By degrees, his awe of her wore away, till one day when she presented him with a rich plateful of sarvis-berry stew, he arrived at the conclusion that, after all, a grandmother, like the buffalo, could have her uses, and be very nearly pleasant when she did not paint her face.
Kiopo, however, never changed his mind. Not even the richest stew could have made any difference. With or without her paint, his deep wolf wisdom taught him that here was an enemy, and whenever she came near him, he always showed his teeth.
It was in the moon that the Indians call the Mad Moon, or, as we call it, November, that Kiopo began to take on strange ways, and to stay away, for days together. When he returned from these mysterious absences, he was in the habit of sneaking back into camp under cover of the darkness. In the morning, when Dusty Star spoke to him very plainly, and asked him where he had been, Kiopo would turn his head away with an uncomfortable expression in his eyes. Dusty Star began to watch the wolf's movements, growing more and more anxious to find out where he went. And the closer the human brother watched, the deeper grew the wolf-brother's cunning day by day. Neither going, nor returning, did Kiopo let himself be seen.
Dusty Star grew afraid lest he should disappear once for all, and never return. His fear was so torturing that he tied him with a raw-hide thong, and fastened it to one of the lodge-poles. There was a high wind that night, and the poles strained and creaked; but it was not entirely owing to the wind; and, in the morning, Kiopo had gone.
Those were the evenings when Dusty Star, lying awake in the tepee, could hear the coyotes raise that eerie song of theirs which they love to sing after sunset on the high buttes. It always began in the same way, with a succession of short barks, growing gradually louder and higher, and always ending with a long-drawn, squalling howl. And as the boy caught the high-pitched, yowling cries ringing out in the dusky air, he knew that God's Dog, as the Indians called him, was at his medicine-making again, making medicine with his voice. Through enormous spaces of the twilight, these uncanny cries set his brain spinning. The cries ceased to be mere coyote notes; they became voices crying the names of unfamiliar, yet unforgettable things; until at last, when the unearthly chorus became too piercing to be borne, he pulled the buffalo robe over his head, to deaden the terrible sound.
If the coyote cries affected Dusty Star so powerfully, they affected Kiopo equally, though in a different way. At times they made him angry, at others, wholly miserable. When Kiopo felt upset, he always wanted to get hold of something to worry with his teeth. So the raw-hide thong came in very useful, and after gnawing for half the night, Kiopo was free. Once his own master again, he did not waste valuable time sitting down to think. Softly as a trail of mist, he drifted out of camp, and not a husky of them all winded him or saw him go.
The very morning after Kiopo's departure, Sitting-Always was taken ill. She lay on her couch of antelope skins and moaned with pain. While Nikana went to summon the medicine-man, Little Fish, Dusty Star was left to watch his grandmother. He had never seen any one ill before, and the noises she uttered made him feel uncomfortable. When he asked her if the pain was in her chest, she said it was lower down. Dusty Star nodded his head wisely. He had suffered pain in that part himself. It was the place that made you wish you had not eaten berries before they were ripe. He observed his grandmother gravely for some time. Suddenly without warning, he doubled up his fist and thumped her on the spot where she complained of the pain. This he did, because he knew that if you hit things, they sometimes went away. He hoped that if he could hit his grandmother's pain right in the middle, it might drive it out.
Sitting-Always uttered a loud cry. Mistaking it for a shout of triumph, Dusty Star struck her again. This was more than she could bear, and she uttered such a piercing scream that the boy was startled. Still it seemed to prove that the thumping was taking effect. He was preparing to smite her for the third time when his mother came hurrying into the tepee.
With groans of pain and anger, Sitting-Always explained what had happened. Naturally Nikana was very angry. She could hardly believe that the boy could have dared to take advantage of his grandmother's helplessness to play her so evil a trick. Without waiting to hear his own account of the matter, she gave him a sound cuff or two, and ordered him to go at once and fetch Lone Chief, the medicine-man, since Little Fish had said he could not come.
Only too glad to escape, Dusty Star rushed indignantly out of the tepee.
Lone Chief's tepee lay at some distance from the camp, round the north-west corner of Eagle Bluff. He was understood to be a great medicine-man. His medicine, or Supernatural Power, was very strong, though it was not always that he could be prevailed upon to put it to the test. Among the many mysterious things about Lone Chief was that no one could ever say with certainty where he was to be found. Wandering across vast spaces or journeying to the edge of the world, had got into his feet. Hunters from the far west would bring tidings of his camp on the shore of the mighty lake that washes the feet of the Rockies for half-a-hundred miles. Deep in the North, on the lonely barrens where the wolves howled at sundown, and the red-fringed pools were a-glimmer in an unearthly light, his slightly drooping figure might be seen moving soundlessly in the windy twilight along the deep-worn trails of the caribou. Or in the torrid south lands where the salt lakes were caked with brine, and the antelopes, startled by the solitary figure, floated across the desert like vapours carried by the air, Lone Chief travelled till he filled his head with the roar of the gulf of Mexico.
To the tepee of this extraordinary, and much-travelled person, Dusty Star went with a reluctant tread, and a feeling, which, if it was not exactly fear, was certainly one of awe. When he came at last within sight of the camp, he saw that Lone Chief was at home, smoking his pipe in the doorway of his tepee.
Dusty Star advanced slowly. When he reached the tepee he sat down in front of the medicine-man. Neither of them spoke for some time, although no one had told the boy that this was the politest way of beginning a conversation, when it is not necessary to talk about the weather. So Lone Chief gazed politely beyond Dusty Star's head, and Dusty Star stared politely at Lone Chief's moccasins, while now and then a maple leaf drifted down beside them.
When the fourth leaf had fallen, Dusty Star explained the reason of his visit.
Lone Chief waited a little before he replied, because of his habit of being very sure about his thoughts before he made words to fit them.
And while Lone Chief made his words, his gaze struck into his visitor's face with the edge of a tomahawk. Dusty Star returned the look without flinching and noted the way in which Lone Chief painted his face. And indeed it was something to observe, for across his forehead and down his cheeks went bars of black and yellow and red, as if his face were a cage to keep his eyes from rushing out.
"My grandmother has a pain here," Dusty Star began abruptly, indicating the place.
He did not say any more then, knowing that Lone Chief would know quite well why he had come, so that any further explanation would be merely throwing words away.
"When did it begin?" the medicine man asked.
"She made many noises this morning," Dusty Star answered. "She is making them all the time when she does not like herself inside."
Lone Chief remained silent.
"Have they made any medicine for her?" he asked presently, with a shade of suspicion in his voice.
It was an awkward question. Dusty Star wished to be quite truthful. At the same time, he did not want to confess what he had done. He had intended the thumping for medicine, though it was hardly the same thing as the grown-up people made, particularly as he had performed it without saying any medicine-words with it. It was his grandmother who had said the words, and they differed considerably from what the medicine-men used.
"No," he said at last. "They have not used any medicine." He could not find courage to add. "But I thumped."
After which nothing was said by either of them for a long time. And the maple leaves went on falling.
At length Dusty Star thought it was time that Lone Chief should begin to make preparations to start, if he intended to visit his grandmother. So he looked into the painted face and said.
"The shadows grow longer."
Lone Chief understood.
"Yes," he answered solemnly. "When the sun goes towards his lodge, it is what the shadows are accustomed to do."
It was not the words themselves which told Dusty Star what was going on in the medicine-man's mind, but that unspoken knowledge which flashes, none knows how, from one prairie-dweller to another along the invisible trail. In an instant he realized that Lone Chief did not intend to come. Slowly rising to his feet, he gazed straight into the medicine-man's face. Then with a clear, ringing tone, he spoke in a voice that was almost a cry.
"I am sent to bid you to come to my grandmother Sitting-Always, who is not happy with herself inside. If you do not come, the pain will drive her along the wolf-trail; but she does not wish to go."
He ended abruptly, his body held very stiff, like a young larch-tree when there is no wind. And in his eyes, fixed upon the medicine-man's face with an unblinking stare, a spark glimmered as if his mind were set ablaze.
Lone Chief looked at him in astonishment. In the many thousand leagues his moccasins had travelled, he had never met anything like this. That a mere boy—hardly more than a child—should find the daring to address him, Lone Chief, the famous medicine-man, words which were like a command uttered by a full-grown man, was an astounding thing. In spite of himself, he felt uneasy. What was it, he asked himself, which made this boy so strangely different from other boys? The cunning eyes, practised to read the faintest signs on all faces and all trails, employed their utmost skill now to read the secret hidden in the boy. But that strange glitter in the boy's eyes baffled him; and when, after a long gaze, he looked away into the distance, he had a curious feeling that he had been questioning the eyeballs of a wolf.
He moved his hand in the direction of the sun, now almost touching the rim of the western hills, saying as he did so:
"When the sun has entered his lodge, I will come."
With a glow of triumph, Dusty Star knew that he had won. He also knew that Lone Chief would waste no more words. He simply bowed, to acknowledge his gratitude; then turned, and ran swiftly towards the trees. As he ran, the lithe movements of his body caught the medicine-man's eye.
"That way the wolves run, with their whole body," he murmured approvingly. "There is medicine in his feet."