After recounting my exploit at great length in a poetic fashion that would just sound silly in English, he said: “This boy has proved himself a Human Being. Tonight there is weeping in the Crow lodges. The earth shakes when he walks. The Crow cry like women when he comes! He is a Human Being! Like the great Little Man, who came to him in a dream and gave him strength to kill the Crow, he walks!”
This was exaggerating some, but as I told you I did think of Little Man and jerked away from the knife, which caused the Crow’s hand to slip proving I was white. I had told Old Lodge Skins only about the inspiration of Little Man, figuring it would please him. He took it from there.
After some minutes of the foregoing stuff, which didn’t embarrass me none, for everybody was beaming at me, including some of the young girls who was allowed to peek under the tepeeskin—I was getting some interest in girls at this point of my life—after that, the chief said:
“This boy’s medicine comes from the vision of Little Man. He is himself little in body and he is now a man. But his heart is big. Therefore his name from now on shall be: Little Big Man.”
That was it, and that’s how I was called ever after by the Cheyenne. True to Indian ways, no one used my real name; no one even knew it. It was Jack Crabb.
The horse-stealing expedition was also in its other respects a job well done. Them four warriors had slipped into the Crow village without rousing a soul and took thirty horses, more or less, driving them back to our camp through what remained of the night into early morning. When they reached where me and Younger Bear was, Bear had come to with a knot on his head but otherwise O.K. Lucky for us that Crow had been wandering without his bow, else we’d both been plugged from the top of the draw and never knowed the difference. So they tied me to my pony and brung me in.
I got four horses from the common loot, thereby becoming a man of certain substance, but had a greater thrill when a little lad, eight or nine, named Dirt on the Nose, asked me: “Now you’re a warrior, can I tend your ponies?” Meaning I could stay in bed of a morning now when the kids got up for chores. Maybe I could, but it was not the Cheyenne way to press your advantages. Shadow That Comes in Sight, for example, the veteran warrior who had led the raid, took a share of three horses, kept the least for himself, giving the best to Old Lodge Skins and the next to Hump—not because they was chiefs, for that cut no ice as such; no Cheyenne kissed the arse of authority—but because they had advised him well. Then Bird Bear and Cold Face each give one of their ponies to Yellow Eagle, who though he made a mistake had done the right thing to correct it. Then I gave him one of mine, for the same reason, and since I had been involved. Then I offered another to Left-Handed Wolf, who refused because you aren’t supposed to be paid for treatment. But it was O.K. to present it to his brother, which I did.
Therefore I answered Dirt on the Nose in this wise: “Killing one Crow does not yet make me the equal of the great warriors among the Human Beings. I shall still tend my own horses, but you are a good boy and I am going to give you that black I have been riding.”
Everybody said: “How, how.”
So none of us who took our life in our hands ended up a hell of a lot richer except in pride and honor, but a Cheyenne would die for them things any old day.
Younger Bear never showed up at the feast, I think the reason is obvious. It went on far into the night, and I ate a good deal too much of boiled dog, which was the fare: I had got a taste for that victual by now but had never developed an Indian’s capacity for gorging on the one hand, and then fasting on the other. After the shebang was finally done, I went out into the prairie and relieved myself and then set for a spell on a nearby rise. The moon was a hair skinnier than last night, but riding clear. Nevertheless, it would rain towards morning: you could feel that in your nose and through the soles of your moccasins against the old autumn grass and even through your haunches on the ground. Nobody ever told me that sort of thing. You learned it naturally living in our manner, like a man in town knows from the look of a storefront that they sell tobacco inside.
About a mile away, a coyote barked for a while, then yelped, then howled, then whined in several different notes. It sounded like a whole pack, but was just one animal, for they are natural ventriloquists. He was answered from the north by the long, sorry wail of a timber wolf—or Crow raiders imitating the same, for that is one of their specialties; but it continued off and on for an hour in the same location, so must have been the real beast.
