Free Little Big Man by Thomas Berger Page A

horizon, but the prairie underhoof was slowly turning purplish. A person who knows that land can fix his look on a square foot of turf, never turning to the sky, and tell you the hour of day at any moment from the general cast of light upon it. I mean a white man. An Indian don’t keep that sort of time because he ain’t, in the white sense, ever going anywhere. You can imagine Columbus saying, “I better get started: it’s 1492 and I got to get across the ocean blue before midnight on December 31st or else America won’t be discovered till ’93,” but a redskin computes in another fashion. The sign-language term for “day” is the same as for “sleep.” Now, looking at a patch of earth, an Indian would see which animals had stepped there during the past two weeks, what birds had flown overhead, and how far it was to the nearest water—this in addition to a lot of supernatural stuff, because he does not separate the various types of vitality one from the next.
    So if I say Old Lodge Skins went along in a coma, I mean as far as we were concerned. He knew where he was, all right, and at one point caught the attention of the scouting brave—whose name I might as well give: Burns Red in the Sun—pointed ahead to rising ground, and showed a hooked finger. Burns Red traveled in from the left flank and slipped off his pony, undoing the single rein of therawhide war bridle from his belt and tying it to a lance which he drove into the earth. He dropped his blanket and stripped off his leggings. In his breechclout and carrying bow and arrows, he snuck up the long swell of which we others waited at the foot, flopping to his belly just before the point of divide. The grass hereabout had been trampled flat by a great herd of buffalo and not long before, it not having sprung back yet, and you could see him snaking all the way until his moccasin soles tipped up and disappeared.
    Shortly there came on the wind, blowing from him to us, the thunnng, thunnng of two arrows leaving the bowstring, a rush of little hoofs, and then Old Lodge Skins trotted up and over, me and Caroline naturally hard behind. There, squatting at a buffalo wallow half filled with water, was Burns Red in the Sun. Alongside him lay a pronghorn antelope whose panting throat he was in the act of cutting, the animal having been felled but not killed by a shaft to the left haunch. The other shot had missed altogether; still, Burns Red had done a nice piece of work, creeping to within fifty feet of the little pack, the remaining four of which were now at the distance of a quarter mile and still going. That creature can run.
    The next thing Burns Red did was to cut off that black and white rosette of tail from the antelope’s behind, which he would keep for decoration, it being a cunning little item. Then he slit open its chest at the division between the ribs, and plunging in his fist, he ripped out the gory heart, hot and still palpitating. This he shoved at me.
    At the sight of that dripping offal, I shivered off, but Burns Red seized my nape with one hand and pushed the heart in my mouth with the other. That was actually a mark of preference, for he was mighty fond of fresh antelope heart himself, to which he owed his prowess as swiftest runner in Old Lodge Skins’s band, but of course I didn’t know that then. However, I was scared of Burns Red in the Sun, who had the peculiarity mentioned in his name, as many Indians do though some others are almost black, and to protect his cheeks he daubed them with a coat of clay that dried a wolfish gray-white, from which his eyes peered little and glittering like a serpent’s.
    So I gnawed off a hunk of bloody heart, which was not the easiest work owing to the stringy vessels that run through it, and he relieved me of the rest and gulped it right down. My nausea disappeared once I fully swallowed the raw morsel, the taste of which I can only describe as live and fleet. Immediately the calf-muscles ofmy legs started