Little Big Man by Thomas Berger Page A

feathers from the wild turkey. Bythe way, in their spoken language Cheyenne don’t ever call themselves “Cheyenne” but rather Tsistsistas , which means “the People,” or “the Human Beings.” What anybody else is doesn’t concern them.
    After our bath, them boys fetched bows and we played war in and out of a buffalo wallow near camp, shooting one another with arrows that didn’t have no points. And then we did some wrestling, at which I was none too good and somewhat shy to try too hard, but after getting badly squeezed, I turned to boxing and bloodied at least one brown nose. The latter was the property of Younger Bear, and the event caused him to receive a good deal of jeering, because I’d say Indians are given to that trait even more than whites. I felt sorry for Younger Bear when I saw the ridicule I had let him in for.
    Which was a big mistake: I should either never have hit him in the first place or after doing so should have strutted around boasting about it and maybe given him some more punishment to consolidate the advantage: that’s the Indian way. You should never feel sorry about beating anybody, unless having conquered his body you want his spirit as well. I didn’t yet understand that, so throughout the rest of the day I kept trying to shine up to Younger Bear, and the result was I made the first real enemy of my life and he caused me untold trouble for years, for an Indian will make a profession of revenge.
    The next thing I remember us boys doing was to go and play camp with a number of little girls. This game is a mimicry of what the grownups do. The girls set up miniature tepees and the boys act like their husbands, going out on war parties and having mock buffalo hunts in which one boy, playing the animal, carries a prickly pear at the end of a stick. The hunters shoot their arrows at this fruit, and are considered to have brung the buffalo down if they strike the target. Whoever misses, the buffalo lad gets to swat on the hind end with the prickly pear. You can see that whatever the Cheyenne do has a threat of pain in it, if not the realization thereof.
    In the earlier doings I had fell in on equal terms, but it wasn’t so when it came to play camp, and that I believe was due to Younger Bear, who was by common consent war chief of that establishment on account of he could shoot an arrow exceptionally well and he was very convincing when braining a make-believe foe with a nasty-looking war club he had fashioned himself. That’s the way a man gets to be a war chief among the Cheyenne: he can fight better than anyone else. He is a chief only in battle. For peace they have another kind of leader. You take Old Lodge Skins, he was a peacechief. The principal war chief of our bunch was Hump. These fellows got along fine, except you’ll recall at the whiskey fight as soon as they had a few in their belly, they went for each other. However, when Skins’s gun blew up, they forgot about it and went their separate ways.
    Anyhow, Younger Bear was at about eleven years of age already very well advanced towards his true profession, and he was a big tall fellow who walked with his chest arched out. I’ll say this about the fight I had with him: he could have killed me except that he knew nothing about boxing. But his ignorance wasn’t my responsibility; I ain’t never been big, but I’m shrewd.
    In those first days I was dependent on what the other boys would lend me: bow, arrows, and the certain type of stick they ran with between their legs as if it was a pony. But when it came to war games under Younger Bear’s direction, off they’d ride, even Little Horse, leaving me behind with the girls and the littler kids who were supposed to be the babies of the play camp. Now after them boys did that until it got to be a habit, they started to call me “Antelope Girl,” because there I was, helping to dismantle the toy tepees, which is women’s work.
    The sun dance was another adult pursuit the