Little Big Man полностью

The Far West had started to unload its stores, and I spotted a Ree what had come up to where that sutler was setting up his barrels of whiskey. This Indian was a dumpy fellow, dressed in filthy buckskins, and I would have took him for a degenerate imbecile the way he was a-studying them barrels.

But some trooper says to me: “Looky there at Bloody Knife, will you. He’d cut his Ma’s throat for a shot of red-eye. You would never know he is Hard A—” He broke off, on account of he didn’t know who I might be, being as I wore civilian clothes: among the herders and teamsters was Boston Custer, the General’s youngest brother, and his nephew Armstrong Reed. The trooper had been going to say “Hard Ass,” but changed it. “You wouldn’t guess, from looking at him, that he was the General’s favorite scout, would you?” He snorted. “Goddam old drunk.”

But Bloody Knife wasn’t drunk at that minute, nor for some time thereafter, for not even scout Indians was allowed openly to drink whiskey in front of white men. So he hung around hopelessly awhile and tried to talk to people in sign language, and at last, not able to stand and study them barrels without a chance to break into one, he trudged off as though from the burial of a loved one, so grief-stricken was his dark face.

I caught him up and, never speaking Ree, says in the signs: “You want a drink?”

He says: “All right.” So I got a canteenful of that red-eye dispensed by the sutler, and me and Bloody Knife went on out one of the many ravines that cut up the country at the mouth of the Powder and set behind a sagebush, after the Indian had emptied his bladder so as to have a full capacity for drinking the whiskey. This pissing also served to run out a rattlesnake who had been sunning himself in the area: rattlers was abundant in that region.

I give Bloody Knife time for a good swallow and then took back the canteen. I says, watching a couple drops run down his chin and neck and flush out some bugs what lived in his collar, “What is Long Hair going to do?”

The Ree just kept his black eyes upon that canteen. “He has cut his hair,” he says, making the slicing sign with his two dusky hands.

I signaled that I knowed that, but never saw what it had to do with the issue.

“It means,” he says, “that he is going to die.”

I give him the canteen again. I don’t have to tell you at this point what importance an Indian sets upon human hair. Scalps are taken for a more important purpose than just trophies: a man without a skull-cover is considered powerless even when he reaches the Other Side. And whenever Indians saw a white man balded by nature, they believed him a coward who had deliberately shaved his head. I realized Custer had made a bad mistake for his own interests.

“That was not a good thing to do,” says Bloody Knife, who was getting more depressed with every swallow. He looks up at the sun and signals to it: “I shall not see you rise many more times.”

I knew that if I let him continue on that note he would commence to sing his death song at any minute and then I’d never get anything else out of him, so I says right quick: “But that will not happen until all those barrels of whiskey are gone, so drink up.”

At which he was some cheered and filled his fly-trap again.

“Many Sioux and Cheyenne out there?”

He says: “Numerous as stars on a clear night.”

I pointed back towards the camp. “But look at all those soldiers. And more will come from the west and south.”

Bloody Knife shook his dirty head of tangled hair. It was graying some at the temples. “It does not matter,” he says. “We will all be rubbed out. Long Hair will never be the Great Father in the chief village of the white men, as he wishes. I like him a lot, but his medicine has turned bad.”

He goes on that Custer had come to him and the other Ree a night or so since, give them presents, and said he would whip the entire Sioux nation before the month was out, in return for which the American people would make him President.

Well, Grant was in trouble on account of them crooks in his Administration, and when you figured he had got to the White House by whipping the Rebs, a similar result might transpire for the man who sent the Indians under, for they was the only outstanding enemy of the U.S.A. at this particular time in the hundredth year of our Independence from the tyranny of the Old Country.

“I reckon he would like to get it all done by the Fourth of July,” is what I wanted to say, but that is a hell of a difficult speech to make by signs. The Cheyenne know July as “the Moon When Buffalo Are Mating,” but I didn’t know what the Ree called it. However, I made the buffalo-horns, and the motion for screwing—which is the same as used by every white schoolboy—and for moon, and for the fourth day thereof. Still, what would a Ree know of the historical meaning. So I says the day when the soldiers made a lot of noise, shooting cannon and the like.

A look of dim recognition come over his dark face. “And get drunk?” he asks.