That was the state of mind in which after a while I pulled a number of animal skins and dirty blankets over me and tried to sleep. The women and children had also retired, but the fire was banked with enough logs to keep it burning all the night, otherwise we would have froze even within our multiple wrappings, for frigid air entered between the door-lacings and from beneath the lodge skin. Occasionally I could hear my pony stamp against the cold outside. I had picketed him near the entrance rather than meadowed with the rest of the herd. Being he was my sole animal at this time, I couldn’t afford to have no Pawnee run him off; though I had not heard of any in the area.
As to the report of a soldiers’ trail by Younger Bear, I took that to be some more of his foolishness. We was down here now on the reservation assigned to the Cheyenne at the Medicine Lodge council, so why should they be after us? I mean Old Lodge Skins’s band. If they looked for anybody, it would be that war party that had come in to the villages downriver. But the whole business was unlikely in this weather. Nobody fought in the winter, least of all the U.S. Army, whose big horses could never negotiate that crusted snow.
I thought about a lot of stuff like that, for I couldn’t get to sleep. I might have determined to be done with the matter of Olga and Gus, but it was far from done with me. The veins in my temples was throbbing, and my groin was giving me trouble. I mean it felt as if I was pursing up there, like a dried apple. After a time it occurred to me that I was feeling lust in a different form from any I had hitherto knowed, especially while with the Indians. I have told you it was Sunshine who was ardent, rather than yours truly. Well, now I reached over for her, completely forgetting her present condition.
What I touched was the summit of her big belly, through the robes, and she was awake right smart, getting out her hand and rubbing mine.
She says: “Wunhai’s feelings are hurt by what you said.”
That was the sister what offered to sell her beaded dress for meat. Her name meant “Burns”; maybe she had singed her finger when a girl or something. She was right comely and the youngest of Shadow’s offspring, a couple years beneath Sunshine and favoring her as to the eyes and glossy hair but slim as a willow wand. When I thought of it she recalled for me my old girl friend Nothing before she got married and turned fat and ill-tempered; poor Nothing was another killed at Sand Creek.
Anyway, I had up to now regarded Wunhai as a sister-in-law, white fashion, never having adapted the Cheyenne view of such things. What Sunshine meant had hurt Wunhai’s feelings was that statement I had made earlier to the effect that I would not lay with any of them other women.
I patted Sunshine’s belly and withdrew my hand. As usual, my trouble lay in deciding whether I was finally white or Indian. If the former, I had ought to go to sleep: Olga’s having went savage was her problem, not mine. On the other hand, I commenced to realize the responsibility I had for Sunshine’s sisters: it wasn’t enough to support them. On account of me they was old maids. I had ought to do something, for they was a good bunch of women. Maybe I was being hypocritical, I don’t know; you figure it out. Next I remember, I had rose and slipped through the fireglow halfway around the circle of the tepee and was kneeling by Wunhai’s robe. Her eyes gleamed through the shadow I threw across her.
“I’m sorry for what I said,” says I.
She says: “I hear you.” And opens up her covers on that side and I enters thereunder, against her slight brown body, which happened to be naked and burning hot after my chilly journey without my breechclout. There was a sweet girl. It turned out she had never knowed a man before, being a real fine example of the high morals of the Human Beings, but her instincts was sound. My oh my. I reckon she was about eighteen years of age and very lithe.
Well, I won’t hazard a guess on how long I was engaged in discharging my brother-in-lawly duty, but it was a spell, and finally come a point when little Wunhai had received sufficient apology to drop off to sleep in my arms. O.K., I climbed out and tucked her in, experiencing an odd sensation when a cold draft flushed through my loins. I reckon I shivered, and another sister-in-law of mine who slept nearby sat up and beckoned to me.
When I come to her she whispered: “Shall I put more wood upon the fire?”
“It’s all right,” says I, quaking away, for I had got up a sweat beneath Wunhai’s robes and it now felt as if it was turning to ice.
“Well,” she said, “you better get in here before you freeze.”
