CHAPTER II
WHY "DUSTY STAR" WAS
They called him "Dusty Star" because he happened in the night. All over the prairies of the immense West you might find here and there, in the old buffalo times before the White men ploughed, those little circles of puff-balls that weren't there yesterday and which began under the stars. "Dusty Stars" the red men called them, in their strange prairie tongue. The name, like other Indian names, was very ancient. It was a word that went walking in the beginning of the world.
Dusty Star, unlike his name, was very young. But he was big—very big for his nine years. Even in the star-time he must have done a lot of growing, for when the morning light crept into the tepee, he was seen to be a considerable-sized baby—extra large for a papoose. And the thoughts in his head were like the bones in his body—big, very big! He soon grew tired of lying in his little beaver-skin hammock, slung so cunningly from one lodge pole to another, and listening to the prairie larks as they sang in the blue morning. He did such tremendous things with his fat arms that the lodge-poles creaked. And he screamed with the sheer force of being alive. When he fell out of the hammock and all but broke his neck, his mother thought he would be safer if she let him crawl. Even in his crawling days, he learnt a lot about the world. He learnt how grasshoppers jump and prairie mice run. He wanted to crawl right out along the prairie into the middle west. His mother caught him just in time. After that, she fastened a deer-thong round his middle. It wasn't fair, and stopped him being one of the greatest explorers—for his age—which the world has ever seen. But it probably saved his life.
After that he grew up as all prairie children grow, with a great deal of play by day, and a huge deal of sleep by night. And the sun and the wind were great companions, and meant very much to him; and the sun baked him to a fine redness, and the wind searched him, and seemed somehow to send gusts along his blood. And often and often he would fall asleep, listening to the eerie whisper and whack of it, when the poles creaked and the lodge-ears tapped; or to the long sobbing chorus of the coyotes, far out where the prairie humped itself to blackness against an orange-coloured sky, and the east began to be hollow for the rising of the moon. And where the wind ran, and the moon walked, and the coyotes chorused, was to him a magical country, with edges as sharp as the prairie ridges, that girdled all his dreams.
On the day that he was nine years old, Dusty Star sat outside the tepee, blinking in the sun. From where he sat he could look far across the prairies, and so observe anything that might be moving over its immense expanse. For a long time he saw nothing at all. That was not strange, since in that vast apparent flatness there were thousands of hollows where all manner of four-footed Cunningnesses could go about their business and never show so much as the tip of an ear to any human eye.
It was the middle of the afternoon, and many of the prairie people were not yet risen from their noon-day sleep. Presently, over the high butte to the north, he saw a buzzard on wide motionless wings, "sitting" in the blue. The circles he made were so immensely wide and slow that he scarcely seemed to move in that high watch-tower of the air where he scanned the world for carrion. Next, a pair of hawks came into sight, skimming above the clumps of sage and bunch-grass. And now Dusty Star knew by their busy flight that the smaller prairie folk had begun to follow the runways in their eager search for food. Then, as he watched, came a flash between the sage bushes, as a jack-rabbit dashed to feed on the juicy leaves that grew under the alder thicket by the stream.
After that, nothing happened for some time, until suddenly he saw something very far off that was like the figure of a horseman riding over a swell. It was only visible, for a moment or two before it disappeared, but Dusty Star's piercing eyes had seen it long enough to make him sure that it was Running Wolf, his father, returning from the chase. The boy looked eagerly for his father's reappearance. He had been gone for some time. Whenever Running Wolf returned from good hunting he always brought much game with him, and there was feasting many days. When Running Wolf came into sight again, he was so close home that Dusty Star could make out quite clearly the form of a buck lying across the pony's shoulders. Also, his father carried something small and dark that cuddled against his left side. When Running Wolf had reached the tepee and Dusty Star had seen what it was that he had brought home, and when he had finally realized that the little wolf-cub was to be his very own, there were no bounds to his delight. To be the owner of a cub that would one day be a grown-up wolf—this was a thing beyond his wildest dreams!
Henceforward the cub was the centre of his little world. He called it Kiopo, because that was a name that meant for him all sorts of wolfish things, which he could not otherwise express and which he could never have explained to anyone grown-up; which, indeed, he could not explain even to Kiopo himself. He talked to Kiopo a good deal, and when he was not telling him of matters of the highest importance, he was plying him with questions. It did not discourage him in the least that Kiopo received the information with the utmost unconcern, and never answered one of the questions. Dusty Star concluded that baby wolves were like that. They might indeed be full of wisdom, but they expressed it solely by means of their teeth.