Another reason why it was easy for me to melt into that tribe was that none of the Indians wanted to think about the incident of the wagons. As we have seen, my brother Bill never reported the massacre to Fort Laramie, and the soldiers didn’t come, so the Cheyenne had no worry about that. What bothered them was that while drunk they had nearly killed some of themselves; that’s the worst thing a Cheyenne could do: kill another Cheyenne. Being drunk is no excuse. It is always regarded as murder, and the murderer rots inside his guts, giving off a stink to other members of the tribe, soiling the Sacred Arrows, and driving the buffalo away. Such a fellow cannot smoke the pipe, nor will anyone eat from a dish he has touched; he is generally run out of camp.

Now I know at this point you figure you have one on me. The way I described the whiskey fight, it looked as if some of the Indians were killed: for example, I surely said Pile of Bones blew off the back of White Contrary’s head and the latter’s brains run out. I swear that insofar as anybody could have told on the spot, that is what happened. But imagine my surprise when on that first morning in the Cheyenne camp, directly after the bath we boys took in the creek, who should show up waiting for us to take him to his horse but White Contrary, big as life and twice as ugly, and showing in no particular that he had ever been hurt. I trailed along behind him, taking a special interest in the back of his head, but if there was a hole in it, you couldn’t prove it by me. I saw a louse or two crawling along the part of his braids, but not even a crust of dried blood. And it was White Contrary, all right, for he had an unmistakable wart on the left flange of his nose.

Maybe you are beginning to understand, when I pulled the arrow-out-of-arse trick, why it didn’t occur to none of the children that I was hoaxing them. That is because Indians did not go around expecting to be swindled, whereas they was always ready for a miracle.

IT AIN’T BAD to be a boy among the Cheyenne. You never get whipped for doing wrong, but rather told: “That is not the way of the Human Beings.” One time Coyote started to laugh while he was lighting his father’s pipe, because a horsefly was crawling on his belly. This was a serious failure of manners on his part, comparable to a white boy’s farting loud in church. His Pa laid away the pipe and said: “On account of your lack of self-control I can’t smoke all day without disgusting certain Persons in the other world. I wonder if you aren’t a Pawnee instead of a Human Being.” Coyote went out upon the prairie and stayed there alone all night to hide his shame.

You have got to do things right when you’re a Cheyenne. A baby can’t cry just for the hell of it-the tribe might be lying in concealment at the moment and the sound would give away their position to the enemy. Therefore the women hang them cradleboards on bushes some distance from camp until the youngsters inside develop the idea that crying don’t do no good, and get the habit of quiet. Girls need to be trained to control their giggle. I seen Shadow That Comes in Sight line his little daughters up before him and tell them funny stories at which they was supposed to restrain laughter. At first they all flunked, shrieking like birds; then they got so as to only smirk and simper; and finally, after many sessions, they could hold a stony look towards the most hilarious joke. They was free to enjoy it but not to make a demonstration. At the proper time they could laugh their guts out, for an Indian loves his humor and Shadow That Comes in Sight was a great wit.

Other than for that special instruction, the Cheyenne didn’t run a school. They never read nor wrote their language, so what would be the purpose? If you wanted a point of history, you went and asked an old man who kept it in his mind. Numbers got boring when you run out of fingers, so to report the size of an enemy war party you had spotted would go something like this: “The Ute is near the Fasting Place Butte. They are as many as the arrows that Sticks Everything Under His Belt shot at the ghost antelope in the time when the cherries was ripe.” This being a famous story, everybody in Old Lodge Skins’s crowd would know within one or two the number of Ute referred to-and in a moment of emergency, when a person tends to fear the unknown, they could connect it up with something familiar.

A Cheyenne believed his animal was also Cheyenne and knew it. “Tell your pony,” Burns Red would say, “that the people will talk about his bravery all over camp. Tell him stories about famous ponies and their exploits, so that he will try to do as well. Tell him everything about yourself. A man should keep no secrets from his pony. There are things he does not discuss with his brother, his friend, or his wife, but he and his pony must know everything about each other because they will probably die together and ride the Hanging Road between earth and heaven.”

The trouble with me was that I felt like a damn fool, speaking to a dumb beast. That’s the difficulty in being white: you can’t get away with much. Nobody expects more of an Indian; with him fool things are, so to speak, normal. You’d be disappointed in an Indian if he didn’t talk to horses, the way I look at it, for he is born crazy. But being white, I knowed too much even at the age of ten.

You understand that I can’t give no day-to-day account of my upbringing. It must have took a couple of months to learn to ride without being tied on, and longer to get real proficient with the bow and arrow. But now I got to go back to that very first morning and wake up Old Lodge Skins, who we left dead to the world. That Indian got up intending to fast for twenty-four hours. He had had another dream about antelope. Coming on top of the one of the day previous, it meant he had to get to work.

In the afternoon the chief went up the creek maybe three hundred yards and just beyond the brush erected a little tepee about the size of the play-lodges we kids had, just big enough for him to sit in. He went inside at sunset and did a number of secret things till dawn the next day.

While he was in there, throughout the night certain other Cheyenne would go and beat upon the outside of the tepee cover. What went on here concerned the preparation for a gigantic antelope surround. If when them other men pounded on the lodge skin any quantity of antelope hair fell off the cover, the hunt would be successful.

While this was taking place, a party of Ute run off the whole horse herd, and next morning the only Cheyenne ponies left was the few that their owners had tethered right outside their tepees. However, quite a mess of antelope hair was laying on the ground about the medicine tent, so the lookout was good.

Old Lodge Skins emerged from the little tepee next morning. He looked somewhat different from usual in that his eyes seemed to be focused miles away in whatever direction he turned. He was carrying two short black poles, each with a hoop on its end and decorated with raven feathers, and when he walked into open country, the whole camp trooped along behind-men, women, children, and dogs. I have told about antelope as we encountered that little herd the day before at the buffalo wallow: they can run a mile in one minute and will stampede on a change of wind.

This quick beast has one flaw against living to old age: he is nosy. Show an antelope something that flutters and he can’t resist it. That is the practical side of those poles-and-wheels that Old Lodge Skins was carrying: the Cheyenne called them antelope arrows, and they were deadlier than if equipped with iron points, for they made the skittish beast so curious he would run himself and his kin into suicide for a closer look. Admitting that, there was still a lot to a surround that made no sense except as magic.