When the tree flowered

by John G. Neihardt

“Yonder! He is standing up! He is waving a spear! It is the Cheyenne, Little Horse! Hoka-hey! Hoka-hey! It is a good day to die! It is a good day to kill and die! Poof!” He clapped his hands like gunshots. “The brush and the gullies are alive! There is noise everywhere—cries everywhere. We are swarming up along the sides of the ridge. The arrows are a cloud. They are grasshoppers clouding the sun. The soldiers’ horses are feathered. They are screaming in the evening that the arrows make. They are crowding back up the hill in the smoke of the guns. Saddles are empty; feathered soldiers are falling. They are fighting hard and falling, full of arrows, and the kicking horses upon them are sprouting feathers.

“They are all dead at the ford.... Halfway up the ridge they are dead.... They are huddled together fighting at the top with the dead around them—and they are dying. A great cry goes up and they are covered with warriors swarming in.

“It is over.”

The old man strove to light his pipe, his bony hands trembling as with palsy. I steadied the bowl and held a lighted match to it. “Thank you, Grandson,” he said, in a voice gone thin and quavering on a sudden. For some time he sat studying the ground through the slowly emitted smoke. Then, handing the pipe to me, he continued. His voice had lost its former tone of harsh immediacy and seemed weary with its burden of dead days remembered.

“There was a dog—a soldier-chief’s dog. He was tall and thin and long-legged, and he was crying and running towards the soldiers’ town. Somebody shouted: ‘Let him go and tell the other dogs back there!’ But many bow-thongs twanged, and he went down rolling in a cloud of feathers.

“A storm was coming on. The sun was covered, and the wind came very strong and very cold.

“I remember when the warriors came back to the village. The night was cold and dark and the wind was howling. There were many voices shouting louder than the wind out there, and the sound of many hoofs. When I ’woke, I thought the soldiers had come to kill us all when our warriors were away, and I was afraid. But my mother said: ‘It is our people, and they have killed many enemies. Do you not hear them singing?’ She stirred the fire and fed it, so that it would be bright and warm for my father. Then she went out into the dark full of shouting and singing and the wind; and I listened and was afraid again, for I could hear women’s high voices mourning.

“But my father was not dead. There was one at his head and one at his feet when they brought him in and laid him on a robe beside the fire. His face looked queer when he smiled at me, and it was not the war paint. He was almost somebody else. His hands and feet were frozen and there was an arrow deep in his hip—a Cheyenne arrow. When they cut it out, he grunted but he did not cry. He shivered and shivered by the hot fire until a wichasha wakon came and made sacred medicine. Then it was morning and my mother was still sitting there beside my father, and he was sleeping.

“There was mourning in many of the lodges—high, sharp voices of the women crying for those who died in the battle and the wounded who died coming home. Oosni! Lela oosni! It was cold, very cold.”

For some time the old man sat with his eyes closed and his chin on his chest. At length he said, as though muttering to himself: