Evan Hunter - The Chisholms - A novel of the journey West

The shaggy beast must’ve weighed fifteen hundred pounds at least; took the whole family to roll him over so Bobbo could make his cut from belly to chest. He realized he’d never get the hide off in one piece, so they rolled the animal over again, and Bobbo made another cut from the neck over the hump to the tail. The bull was on the ground on his belly now, his legs spread and already peeled, looking like somebody’d taken off his black wool stockings but left on his black fur coat. Bobbo surmised by now that there’d been no need for peeling the legs at all, but he’d already done that, so there was no use fretting over it. With Hadley’s help, he pulled and sliced and yanked both halves of the hide loose from the animal and then Hadley chopped off the head with an ax, just behind the ears, same as he would have a deer.

This was no dainty little deer they were carving up here, though. It was instead a beast could feed a regiment, and they became speculative butchers on the spot, chopping the animal up the middle with the ax and then quartering it, and seeking out what they thought were the choicest cuts, Minerva hovering and advising, telling them to save this or that organ till to all intents and purposes they were keeping for food all the Indians themselves might have kept, save the eyeballs and the other balls Bobbo’d cut off first. Minerva even had them keep for marrow the leg bones Bobbo had meticulously exposed when he’d still thought he was dealing with a doe or a buck, and she asked him now to rescue whatever blood he could from spilling onto the ground; said it would make a good rich gravy later on.

There were buffalo chips everywhere, scattered among the bright yellow sunflowers. They made their fire, and fed it with the dried and weathered dung, and then put up steaks to fry, three inches thick. Hadley lifted his cup and said, “God bless this land of ours, God bless it.”

On a hill some three hundred feet above where they sat around the fire and raised their cups and echoed Hadley’s toast, partially hidden by a conical peak sculpted by wind and rain, an Indian watched them.

The scout was called Otaktay.

He was one of the braves in a Dakota war party of four. The organizer and leader of the party was an eighteen-year-old named Teetonkah. He was the oldest of the four; the youngest was only sixteen. Teetonkah had still been a small boy many years before when during the Moon of the Duck Eggs, a Pawnee war party attacked his village and captured half a dozen Dakota women, who, it was rumored, later caused the smallpox epidemic in the Pawnee nation, killing countless numbers of their children. Teetonkah had been on many war parties since that time; raids were constant, the war between the tribes was incessant.

When he decided to organize this war party, he did so because he wished to gain more honor for himself by capturing Pawnee horses. And Pawnee women. He liked Pawnee women. His first experience had been with a Pawnee woman captured by his uncle. Teetonkah had taken her fiercely and proudly. She had whimpered beneath his assault. There were now four Pawnee women in the village, and he found all of them more comely than any of the women in his own tribe. He wished to own a Pawnee woman of his own. Perhaps two. Horses as well. A dozen horses perhaps, and three or four Pawnee women.

He sat at the fire now and listened in astonishment to Otaktay’s report. Otaktay had removed the white scouting cloths from his head and shoulders, and was sitting on his haunches to the right of Teetonkah, who was his cousin. In the first quarter of the Moon of Moulting Feathers, Teetonkah had invited him and two others to his tipi. He told them first that he knew them all to be courageous and venturesome and that he trusted each of them well. He then went on to explain that at the time of the Wood-Cracking Moon last year, a band of Pawnee raiders had stolen from his older sister Talutah a pony she had dearly loved, and she had been crying over the theft since that winter past, and this made Teetonkah’s heart very bad. He wished now to ride out against the Pawnee and find their horses where they were and take them away as they had taken Talutah’s.

He said this was an auspicious time for such a raid since it was at this very moon a year before that the tribe had attacked the Pawnee in vast numbers and taken many scalps and many horses. Teetonkah asked his cousin and his friends to join him now in this quest that would heal his sister’s broken heart. He wished as well to capture some Pawnee women, whose skills were surely being wasted planting seeds when there were strong Dakota braves eager to plant within them seeds of quite another sort. All the young men laughed. They had all sampled the treasures of Teetonkah’s uncle’s captured Pawnee maid.

The young men talked long into the night about the route they would take to the Pawnee village, though the route was familiar to all of them. Teetonkah, as organizer and leader, scratched a map into the earthen floor and promised to leave his uncle a drawing on buckskin of their exact route, indicating which rivers and hills they expected to cross or climb, so that they could be found at any time by others in the tribe. In acceptance of Teetonkah’s plan, they smoked the pipe he proffered, and left the village on horseback early the next morning. There was no grand farewell as they rode out south. There would be time for celebration if and when they returned victorious. With horses. With women.

Teetonkah was carrying several pairs of moccasins, and a wooden bowl attached to his belt with a leather thong; on the warpath each man ate and drank from his own dish. He carried, too, a leather pouch of vermilion paint and grease, with which to decorate himself and his horse before he rode into battle. A wolfskin was draped over his left shoulder, the animal’s nostrils threaded with the leather thong at the end of Teetonkah’s war whistle. A medicine bag was tied to his horse’s bridle. There were herbs in this leather pouch that could be ingested by horse and man alike to cure toothache or lameness, stomach trouble or pains of the heart. None of the four who rode out that morning had any intention of meeting with the white man or engaging him in battle. They were off to steal Pawnee horses and Pawnee women; this was the only war they expected to make.

“A wagon alone,” Otaktay said.

The others looked at him.

“Alone,” he repeated.

“It is a trick,” Teetonkah said.

“I saw nothing else wherever I looked. If there are others, they are hidden better than I can find them.”

“Yes but it is a trick,” Teetonkah said, and then immediately asked, “How many are there in the party?”

“Five that I could see.”

“And how divided?”

“Two men and three women.”

“Horses?”

“None. But two mules drawing the wagon.”

“We are far from home,” one of the others said. His name was Enapay, and he had been named for his courage. “Were we to attack the white man, we would have to abandon our plan against the Pawnee.”

“Why do you say that?” Teetonkah asked.

“We would have captives,” Enapay said. “We would take the women captive, would we not?”

“Yes,” Teetonkah said.

“Then we would have them with us when we rode against the Pawnee.”

“No,” Teetonkah said. “We would ride home with them first. Then later—”

“While others in the village—”

“—ride against the Pawnee.”

“While others in the village enjoy what we have risked our lives for,” Enapay said.

“There are those we trust,” Teetonkah said.

“I trust no one where it comes to a woman’s belly,” Enapay said. “White women secrete a musk that can be smelled even by horses. I have seen horses pawing at lodges where white women were kept bound within.”