The Sunset Trail

by Alfred Henry Lewis

[CHAPTER IX—THE MEDICINE OF LONE WOLF]

The Lone Wolf had lost his “medicine,” and that was a most serious disaster. To lose one’s “medicine” among the Indians is equivalent to losing one’s money among the Whites, and means just as bad a mess in one’s social and business affairs. One’s smell-feast friends of the day before go by one with averted or unseeing eye, while everything and everybody give evidence that one is beneath the notice of a self-respecting world.

Thus it was with the Lone Wolf when now his “medicine” had left him. Bear Shield, his chief, looked over him or through him without sign or word that might be construed into an admission of his existence. Fellow Cheyennes who had sat with him in the council or rode knee to knee with him in the charge no longer knew him by mark of face or sound of name. His squaws moped over the camp-fire with bowed heads; his pappooses whimpered with the shame of what they felt but did not understand; his dogs, cowed and dispirited, crept about with craven tails clewed close between their legs; even his ponies made a disgraced band by themselves, cropping dejected grass apart, as though unfit to mingle with the reputable mustangs of mankind.

This situation was all the more a jolt to the sensibilities of the Lone Wolf, since he had been a personage of eminence and place. His voice had been high in tribal powwow, his strong hand resistless in war. He was rich in robes and ponies, in pappooses and dogs and wives. The records of the “medicine” lodge showed him entitled to sing of the conquest of four scalps—one Pawnee, two Sioux, and one the former headwear of a drunken teamster of Sun City—which four topknots were drying on his tepee pole. By these one may know how to measure the heights from which the melancholy Lone Wolf had been hurled.

The Lone Wolf had lost his “medicine” without fault, that is fault from the standpoint of a paleface. He came down to the ford at the Beaver, when storms to the west had rendered it boiling and bank full. By reason of the boil and swirl, and the shifting quicksands under hoof, his pony lost its foothold and went down. In the splash and water-scramble that ensued, the Lone Wolf and his half-choked pony reached the shore; but his “medicine,” torn from his neck in the struggle, was swept away. There was no argument for a search. In the turbid toss of that ten-mile current the “medicine” was as hopelessly lost as though it had exhaled.

And yet, while the Lone Wolf could relate this blameless story of his vanished “medicine,” it availed him naught. There is no such word as accident where one’s “medicine” is concerned. One’s separation from it, no matter by what means brought about, is neither to be honourably accounted for nor condoned. One has lost one’s “medicine”; and one is thereby and therefore destroyed. It would be a stain, as even the half-opened paleface eye may see, were it taken from one by the conquering arm of a foe. It is as deep a stain to part with it, as the Lone Wolf parted with his. Such manner of loss makes plain that, because of crimes or cowardices unknown, the justice-loving ghosts have interfered to strip a villain of this basic requisite of a warrior and an honest man. Only in this way can the ghosts of good Cheyennes gone before, having the honour of their tribe in dearest mind, furnish word to their children of him in their midst, so flagrantly vile that a least association with him provides disgrace, while bordering narrowly on actual sin itself.

In a far day a leper cloaked his head and hung a tinkling bell at his girdle, so that hale men might have warning of his evil case and hold aloof. For kindred reasons the Lone Wolf, when now his “medicine” was lost, killed his pony, broke his pipe-stem, and blackened his face. In this sorrowful guise he went afoot the long journey to his home village on the Cimarron, and all who met him by the way knew him at sight and turned their backs upon him, for that thing below a caste, a man who has lost his “medicine.”

The Lone Wolf’s “medicine” had been an exceeding strong “medicine,” and this served to give his loss an emphasis. He had worn it through a dozen battles, and it so cunningly protected him that, while others fell about him knocked over like ninepins, nothing save and except one bullet from a Gatling was able to leave its mark upon him. The Gatling had nicked him; and the furrow it turned was visible on the cheek of Lone Wolf. This untoward scratch was solvable only upon a theory that the “medicine” of what paleface fired the shot must likewise have possessed uncommon potentialities.

When boyhood ceased for the Lone Wolf and he trembled on the threshold of existence as a full-blown buck, in deference to Cheyenne custom he had wandered abroad and alone upon the blizzard-whipped plains, and frozen and starved and prayed and mourned for seven nights and days. In the end, cold and hunger and self-hypnotism did their work, and the Lone Wolf began to see shapes and hear voices. These told him how to compound his “medicine,” so that thereafter he should be wise as the owl in peace, fierce as the eagle in strife.

The “medicine” bag was to be sewed from the skin of an otter, dressed with claws and tail and head and teeth as though filled with grinning life. Inside the otter-pelt “medicine” bag were to be hidden charmed tobacco, slips of sacred cedar, a handful of periwinkle shells, as well as twenty other occult odds and ends, the recondite whole, together with the otter-skin pouch, to be and remain his “medicine” forevermore.