Huck Out West(28)
I warn’t feeling too steady, so I closed my eyes again, and when I opened them, I was in a tepee and that cannibal with the long black hair was setting beside me. He was smoking something sweet and give me a pull off his pipe. He told me his long Lakota name and it was all a jumble to me, but the last part was “Eeteh,” and he says to call him that. He pointed to the lady who’d been slapping me and says she was now my wife. I didn’t know how that happened, but he says she’d be taking care of me, so maybe it come with the job. She also had a long name like Eeteh’s that I couldn’t never learn, but the first part was “Kiwi” and that’s what I called her. I was slowly getting my senses back, and knowed better what’d been happening. I thanked Eeteh and he shrugged and give me another pull on his pipe.
CHAPTER XII
T TOOK SOME while to clean out the snake pison, and meantimes, me and the tribe growed comfortabler with each other. None of them was happy I was there, but they seen I was mostly harmless, and I was Eeteh’s friend. I warn’t so afraid a them as before, though life with them warn’t never easy. They was forever pegging at a body to join them in jumping around and beating on theirselves as a way of putting their Great Spirits in a good mood, and there were more dismal strictions than when I was trapped in a house with stiff-necked old Miss Watson. Eeteh had calculated how to duck the warrior life by becoming a kind of clown, so they seen me as one, too. They used me for laughs, and there warn’t much Eeteh could do about it because they treated him the same. The no-nose lady was one joke and the horse was another. As Eeteh says, nobody’d ever managed to ride neither of them without considerable bruising, and most everybody had tried.
Kiwi was a Crow lady the tribe had captured in a raid. She come with her nose still on, was took as the fourth or fifth wife of one of Eeteh’s older brothers to help with the weaving and back packing, then got her nose clipped for cheating on him, or else just for being difficult. She’d been living ever since with a couple of cranky old Lakota women, in-laws of some sort, and she was mostly glad to be shut of them. She didn’t speak no American, but she was good at sign language, specially when it included a whack or a punch. I generly stayed out of her way, sneaking off with Eeteh for a smoke and palaver, or setting outside the lodge in my new breechcloth, deerskin leggings, and moccasins, thinking about how Tom Sawyer would a wrote about this adventure and how he would make it turn out. I don’t think he would a thought up what happened next.
Somebody decided I should ought to pay more attention to Kiwi, and ordered up a love potion from the medicine man. Like enough it was them two old busybody women who done it, but it seemed everybody knowed about it. When the medicine man come to see me in the lodge, most a the tribe had already gathered round outside. He warn’t wearing nothing but an old tattered elk hide and elk antlers on his head near as tall as he was. He pointed to where my old snake wound was and then at the potion. It warn’t hurting no more so I tried to shake him off, but he started hollering and wailing fit to bust. The tepee cover was rolled up and the people all round was shouting and carrying on like the wild savages that they was. Kiwi warn’t far away and I was afraid she might start swatting me again, so I swallowed the potion down. The medicine man begun to grin and then everybody was grinning.
It was near as fatal as the rattler pison. My eyes stopped working together and my tongue flopped out and I broke into blisters from my neck to my knees. An awful itch was killing me and made it hard to keep my leggings or breechcloth on. I warn’t able to set nor lay down, I could only yip and whinny and kick out and bounce around like a startled-up rabbit. The medicine man started bouncing with me, and then all the others, too, kicking out when I kicked out, bouncing when I bounced, and fairly laughing their bones loose.
I thought I seen that wagon train hellion coming after me. She was kicking and bouncing like the rest, but she was also dead still and tears was running down her pretty cheeks. Her nose was there and it warn’t there. Please help me, sir, she says, and she reached out with her roped hands to scratch my itch. Then she give me a blow that flattened me out and she jumped on me and all the others piled on top as well. The itch was driving me crazy and my eyes was wheeling around on their own, so I can’t say what happened after that, but it tired me most to death. I warn’t able to get up and walk again for three days.
When they took me to ride the horse, I reckoned it was another mean joke, but Eeteh says even if it was, the horse was a gift and I couldn’t not take it without making the whole tribe mad. This animal warn’t no half-pint cow-pony. He was a big dark stallion, fifteen or sixteen hands tall, and so wild they had to fence him apart not to sicken the herd with his contrariness. They kept him in a corral made a poles and brush, and when I stepped into it, he raired up over my head and snorted and punched his hoofs at me like to box my jaws. I ducked back, feeling about six inches tall.
He come with just a cinched pelt on him, no saddle or bridle, he wouldn’t tolerate them. What they wanted was for me to sivilize him by breaking his wild spirit. All I really wanted to do was open the gates and set him free, but that warn’t a choice I had. The tribe liked to say they warn’t crippling the animal when they broke it, but was welcoming him into the tribe as a trained warhorse and a fellow hunter, and I had to think like they thought. Which was the way the folks back in St. Petersburg most thought about me.