Little Big Man полностью

I sat down in that wolf suit, which I was glad to have for its warmth alone, and sure didn’t grieve none that I was not en route into the camp. On the other hand, if I’d had to go, I couldn’t have picked better comrades than them four. I had started to get a glimmering of what the Cheyenne meant when they always talked about dying: I began to understand the loyalty to friends, but what I didn’t have was the feeling that I myself was disposable.

Now that the rest had gone, Younger Bear took up his grumbling again.

“They should not have done this to me,” he muttered. “I should have gone along. You could hold six ponies alone.”

“For that matter,” says I, “you could hold them all, and I might go.”

“You would be scared,” he comes back at me. “Your medicine may be big in play camp, but it wouldn’t fool a Crow. This is the time to be a man.” He was standing there with his chest puffed out as usual, though he wasn’t so husky as formerly, having gone into the skinny lankiness of the teen years.

I don’t know what I’d have been forced to do at this point so as not to let that Indian outface me—probably would have dropped them halters had he refused to take them, therewith losing the horses, and run towards the enemy camp to join the raiding party, thereby losing my life and throwing those of the others in grave jeopardy.

I was saved in a curious fashion. Suddenly an enormous Crow sprang over the bank onto the floor of the draw and knocked Younger Bear senseless with a war club. This in utter silence excepting the impact of his moccasins on the sand, which was scarcely noisy, and the sound of the club against Bear’s head, just a sort of neat chock! like when you throw a stone against a keg.

In a flash his knife was out and his left hand drawing Bear’s braids tight so the scalp would begin to pull off as it was being cut.

Then I was at the Crow, who hadn’t taken notice of me because he maybe thought I was a real wolf that Bear was talking to—an Indian wouldn’t have seen that as funny—I was at him and on him as if I was climbing a tree, for he was monstrous large with all his sinews in tension, skin rough as bark. But now I was there, I didn’t know what to do with the son of a bitch. I was now too close to shoot a bow, which anyway I had dropped, and I was clawing for my knife but that wolfskin was all bunched up and I couldn’t find it.

Of course the Crow was not exactly waiting in amused toleration. The big devil flexed his hide and flung me against the other side of the draw, and I was knocked cold by the meeting of my chin with my own right knee.

I come to within the next second, when the point of his knife had already broken skin above my right ear and begun sawing round towards the back of the head. I started some and the knife scraped bone. That makes the goddamnedest sound, reverberating to your testicles.

Now my hair was longer than when I had been with my white kin, but not nearly so long as an Indian wears his. The reason for this is that it grew naturally like snagged wire: let it go a month and I’d look neither Indian, white, male nor female, but rather like the belly of a goat that had been tracking through fresh dung, for along with the tangle the ginger color would darken, the more the hair, and go to brown, and any kind of animal fat laid on it would streak in green.

That was why I’d hack it off now and again when it got more than halfway down my neck. So this Crow, he was already in the act of scalping me when he hesitated for the briefest space on account of the funny feel of that short hair, which sure belonged to no Cheyenne by birth.

This break in rhythm brought me out of the spell I was under, quietly suffering the top of my head to be sliced off, the warm blood running into my right ear. I couldn’t wrestle him, I didn’t have no weapon, Younger Bear so far as I knowed was stone dead, and the other Cheyenne was in the village by now, too far away to help, and if I made a noise the rest of the Crow would be roused and murder my friends. This was the kind of thing for which Old Lodge Skins had told us boys that story about Little Man fighting the Snakes. Sooner or later he knowed it’d come in handy. I couldn’t let a Crow do this to a Human Being!

I jerked back and bared my teeth.

“Nazestae!” I hissed. “I am Cheyenne!” It would have sounded more impressive could I have afforded to shout it as battle cry; I have explained why I couldn’t.

But do you know, with that the Crow pulled away his knife, fell back on his haunches, and covered up his mouth with his left hand. His thumb had slipped on my movement and run across my forehead, opening up a white streak through that paint made of soot and buffalo grease. He didn’t understand what I said, for Crow and Cheyenne have different tongues, but he spoke as if in answer to it and in English:

“Little white man! Fool poor Crow! Ha, ha, big fooling. You want to eat?”