At my greeting he turned, not unfriendly, but instead of saying the Cheyenne hello, he says goodbye. Then, the way a person who has just took a bath will sit upon the bank to dry, he goes into the creek and sets down in the water. I guess it made sense, seeing how he had just washed with dirt. I realized he was doing everything backwards, and understood then what he had become.
Later I had this confirmed by Little Horse, who put aside his beadwork and left the crowd of women he hung out with ordinarily to chew the fat a spell with me.
“That is true,” he says. “Younger Bear became a Contrary last year. He bought the Thunder Bow from White Contrary.”
I have to explain. You know the ordinary Cheyenne is a warrior the peer of which is hard to find. But a Contrary carries it even farther. He is so much of a warrior that all of life apart from fighting, he does backwards. He don’t walk on the trails, but rather through the bushes. He washes with earth and dries off in the water. If you ask him one thing, he does the opposite. He sleeps on the bare ground, preferably an uncomfortable bit of terrain and never on a bed. He cannot marry. He lives off by himself some distance from camp; and when he fights, he fights alone, not with the main body of Cheyenne. He carries the Thunder Bow into battle, which has a lancehead afixed to one end. When it is in his right hand, he may not retreat.
Well, there is a million other rules to it, I expect, and because it is so special, you’ll only find one or two Contraries around any camp.
“Then,” said Little Horse, “you remember Coyote. He was killed by the Pawnee. The Ute killed Red Dog.…” He went on with the news, which was fairly bloody. Then he said, looking somewhat arch: “I am thinking of moving into the lodge of Yellow Shield as his second wife.”
I congratulated him and give him a little shaving mirror I carried on the trail, with which he was greatly pleased, and after we parted he sat for hours admiring his appearance in it.
But before that, I asked him about my old girl friend Nothing.
“That is who White Contrary married,” he said. “She is big with child.”
I saw her a little later, sitting before her lodge mashing up some berries. It was remarkable how that girl had changed in a couple of years. She would have been right fat even without the pregnant belly. Her nose had spread across her whole face, and I could not recall that she had had that greasy look in the old days. What had used to be shiny black hair now looked like the tail of a horse that had been rid through a thorn patch.
But the most remarkable change seemed to have taken place in her personality. When I come upon her she was bawling out a dog in as brawny a voice as I ever did hear, and then her husband come out of the tepee and she lit into him. Cheyenne women make fine wives, but sometimes they are also great scolds.
I reckon you might say the saber charge upon the Solomon’s Fork saved me from having to listen to that for the rest of my life.
Well, after a bit they begun to strike that camp and prepare for the move north. Old Lodge Skins and me stood there and watched the women take down the tepees and make pony-drags of the lodgepoles and pack them full. He was wearing the sombrero, which owing to the difference in our head sizes sat a little high above his braids. Since that was really only a replacement of that plug hat of his that I had lost, I really hadn’t give him anything yet, so now I felt there was nothing for it but to present him with my Colt’s Dragoon pistol. On the one hand, it was little enough. On the other, that left me without a pony or a weapon of any description, without a hat, without a jacket—my own of which I give to Hump—and in return I had received a blanket, a stone pipe, a string of beads, and suchlike, with which to rejoin them unfriendly mule skinners and traverse the rest of the mileage to Denver.
“Grandfather,” I says, “I cannot go with you to the Powder River.”
“I have heard you,” answers Old Lodge Skins, and that was all there was to it. He would never ask the reason.
Yet I couldn’t leave it at that. Maybe it was myself I had to convince, for I noticed on this second day with the Cheyenne that they was already a little less unattractive to me. I was getting used to the smell of camp again. It was conceivable that in time I might have gone back to what I had been earlier.
Maybe not, but I felt the threat. The important thing was that I had been doing right well in Denver. I had got onto the idea of ambition. You can’t make anything of yourself in the white world unless you grasp that concept. But there isn’t even a way to express the idea in Cheyenne.
