The Sundown Man Read online

  The Arapaho people were shouting “Ota,” and other words I didn’t know at the time. At one time I heard the word “Uintah” as well, but it made no sense to me. I had never heard any of these words spoken before. But I knew that we were being attacked by a tribe of Indians who were not Arapaho. They looked different, with round moonlike faces and stocky bodies, and the beadwork on their loin-cloths and moccasins was different. So too, the paint patterns on their faces.

  I looked around for a weapon so that I could defend myself or at least help ward off the savage attack. I found a lance and picked it up. That lance was like a magnet. The minute I had it in my hands, one of the marauders turned his pony and charged straight at me. He held a war club above his head and I knew he meant to brain me.

  My scalp tingled when I saw him close the gap between us. I almost didn’t have time to think. When he came within a few yards of me, I drew back my arm and hurled the lance with all my might. I was surprised that the weapon ran true, striking the warrior in the stomach, just below his ribs. The force of the lance pushed him backward. Blood gushed from his body. I dodged his pony as it ran by, dropping the warrior at my feet. There was a surprised look in his eyes. I stood there, frozen, as he squirmed. Blood bubbled up out of his mouth and his eyes glazed over and then closed.

  I began to tremble all over. The trembles turned into violent shakes. I had killed a man. With my own hands, I had taken a human life. I lifted my head and gulped in air. The din around me began to diminish as the smoke got thicker. Then I heard hoofbeats as the invaders galloped off. Some were carrying women under their arms, and I saw a child wriggling as he lay across a pony’s back, a warrior pinning him down in front of him.

  Then it was quiet for just a second.

  I breathed in air to try and get over the shakes.

  That’s when the Arapaho women began trilling with their tongues. There arose the sound of a terrible keening as people stumbled around, checking to see who had been kidnapped by the attacking Indians.

  One Dog emerged out of the smoke and made a sign for us to follow him. I learned that most of the horses had been run off, stolen, and that two young women had been kidnapped, along with a small boy. Those were the ones the Arapaho counted. But there was one other person missing, and my heart sank like a stone in water when I learned of it.

  The attacking Indians had also taken my sister, Kate.

  We ran through the smoke, over burned and burning ground, until we were well away from the flames.

  All of the travois, the teepees, the clothing, weapons, food, and utensils had been burned up. We were afoot. Even those horses that had belonged to my parents had been taken. The tribe had four ponies left, and that was about all.

  That night we slept on bare ground in the open. I cried myself to sleep.

  Kate was gone and I feared the worst. I sobbed and sobbed, wondering if I’d ever see her again.

  Six

  Not everything is burned in a fire. Any fire. After the flames burned out and left the land charred, the women and children went back to the place where we had been attacked and sifted through the ashes. They retrieved flint and steel, flint arrowheads, some clay utensils, some skin water bags, knives, and other tools and implements. Unknown to me, the Arapaho had already begun to track the marauders, who I learned were members of the Ute tribe.

  We all followed the tracks after that, and I began to pay close attention to each pony’s hoof marks and the shod tracks of my father’s horses. I watched the Arapaho trackers, listened to them talk, and learned a great deal. One Dog left me to myself, as if he no longer cared, and perhaps that was because all of my books had burned in the fire. I found a few charred pages, but none were whole, and there was nothing to do but leave them on the burnt prairie and put them out of my mind.

  It was sad to see what the prairie fire had done to the camp, and I began to feel sorry for the Arapaho who held me prisoner. The looks on the women’s faces as they picked through the rubble became indelible in my mind. Although they did not weep or pull their hair, their eyes showed their sorrow, not only for the loss of their belongings, but for the loss of their children. I learned that the Arapaho looked upon children as belonging to the entire tribe, not to just one family.

  One Dog’s attitude toward me seemed to change after the attack. He told me he was sorry that the talking papers had been burned up, but said he hoped that I would tell him what was in the books and continue to teach him to read and write.

  “I will have to write on dirt,” I told him in sign language. “You will have to write on dirt.”

  “That was always the way with my people,” he said, using both sign and speech.

  I wondered if he knew that I could understand his language almost perfectly. If so, he said nothing about it, but I noticed that he began to talk more to me as we walked along, following the trail of the Utes.

  He told me that a man could always walk down a horse and he said we would find the Utes and punish them, get back his ponies.

  “The Ute,” he said, “have ears of stone. They sneak like the snake and their hearts are as cold as the winter moon. They do not have good eyes, but are like the moles that live under the ground. They are blind.”

  “They found us,” I said.

  “As the mole finds the grasshopper. We did not see them coming. We did not hear them. We were like moles. But we have eyes now. We will find them and tear their hearts out and feed them to the wolf.”

  We did not find the Utes that day, nor the next. But from the freshness of the tracks, we were getting closer. On the third day of tracking, we did find something, something that still makes my blood run to ice.

  The young Arapaho boy was lying on a rock, his arms and legs splayed until he resembled a disemboweled X. He had been gutted and scalped, his private parts cut away, his heart snatched from the center of his open chest. He was a ghastly sight, and I vomited for five minutes while the women screamed and trilled their death songs.

  One Dog’s face was an inscrutable mask, but his dark eyes glinted like moonstruck agates, flashing a hatred that was almost palpable.

  The boy’s body was still warm, whether from the sun or his recent death was uncertain. But I touched his neck, and it was still supple and bore heat, although his head was cocked so that this part of him was in the shade. His eyes had been plucked out too, and I nearly vomited again when I saw the empty sockets.

  We were traveling south, very near the mountains now, and the Ute tracks got fresher with every moment that passed.

  “They make the horses run,” One Dog said. “The Ota will kill the horses.”

  There were Arapaho scouts ahead of us, out of sight, running, walking, running again, to close the distance. I hoped the Utes, or Ota, as the Arapaho called them, would not kill Kate like they had killed that poor Arapaho boy.

  I began to fully realize what had been festering inside me for some time, even when we were back in Kansas City, before my family ever dreamed of going west. The world wasn’t what I was brought up to believe, a benevolent place where neighbors were kind to neighbors and violence was something that happened far away and always to someone else. Even back there, in civilization, I had an inkling that what I had been taught in Sunday school, to follow the Ten Commandments, to obey the law and mind my parents, was only a set of rules and guidelines that very few humans followed.

  When I was about seven or eight, the man across the street, who had always seemed quiet and kindly toward all of us, murdered his entire family one night. He hacked his wife to death with an ax while she was asleep, and then stabbed his two little daughters and his son, and for good measure, slit their throats. People said he was crazy, and that accounted for the atrocity as far as they were concerned. But I later found out that the man was a philanderer. He had a mistress and she didn’t want his children, only him. So, he killed his family. They were obstacles in his path.

  Later, as I grew up, I began reading the newspapers my father brought home.
In their pages they listed all sorts of crimes, and many of these involved murders, usually among family members. When I asked my parents about these things, they called them aberrations of society, and said that most people were honest, hardworking, and law-abiding. But I began to form a picture in my mind that this was not entirely true.

  Some men held up the bank in our town and they murdered innocent people. Eyewitnesses, as reported in the newspaper, said there was no need for the robbers to kill anyone. A little boy murdered his playmate. I went to school with both boys. The killer said he wanted a toy the other boy had and when he wouldn’t give it to him, he picked up a rock and smashed the kid’s head so hard it split open, and the murdered boy bled to death.

  In the short time I had spent out West, I learned that not only did animals hunt other animals for food, but everything seemed to feed on everything else, and tribes of Indians not only killed whites, but fought among themselves, killing, not for food, but for horses, trinkets, goods, and trophies such as scalps.

  Now, after seeing that splayed bloody boy on the rock, I measured my world in a different way. All people were born killers. Some killed out of necessity, self-defense, while others killed for greed or other kinds of gain. Some just killed out of pure hatred, and I had seen those kinds of murders in the newspapers too. At the taverns, there were always fights and some men died by knife or gun.

  And now, I had killed a man myself.

  I wondered if my motive was survival, or had I killed out of anger, rage?

  It was a question that would puzzle me for some time, but there was blood on my hands now and it was something I knew I had to deal with if I was ever to come to terms with it. Deep in the pit of my being, I knew I was going to kill again. I just didn’t know when.

  There were signs that the Ota ponies were tiring. The hoof marks showed signs of dragging, an indication of weariness. The two shod horses seemed to be faring better. They were larger, they were shod, and they weren’t being ridden apparently.

  One of the scouts rode in, late in the afternoon. His spotted pony bore streaks of sweat, showing that he had ridden fast during some part of his quest. I moved close to One Dog to hear what the Arapaho warrior had to say. He didn’t use words, but forked the finger of one hand with the other, indicating a rider on horseback. He moved his hands to show the direction. Then he pointed to the mountains.

  So, the Ota had changed course. They were now heading for the mountains. Perhaps there, they planned an ambush or would find better means of concealment. One Dog grew excited, and he spoke to those braves still with us, and to the women and children. He too used sign language, and we immediately started angling toward the mountains.

  Then another scout rode in, leading the horse of another. And draped over the back of the other horse was an Arapaho brave, dead or unconscious. People rushed to take the body from the horse while the rider who had led it in spoke to One Dog telling him what had happened.

  The Ota, or Utes, as I had learned they were called, had doubled back and attacked the scouts in flanking movements. They had come close and smashed the limp brave with a war club. The brave’s name was Walking Wolf. He was still alive, but there was a bloody clot behind his ear, covering a deep gash. They laid him out and people stood over him to give him shade. The women washed the wound and applied some leaves and mud to the wound. Some of the women chanted, praying to the Great Spirit to spare the life of Walking Wolf.

  But an hour later, the young man died. He went into convulsions and no amount of chanting could bring him back.

  We continued our pursuit of the Ota, all the while edging toward the mountains. I could feel them loom closer. The foothills stood out in stark relief as the day wore down and the sun hung above the snowcapped peaks. A wind came up, and it seemed to come from those high peaks. It was fresh and cool. The shadows of the foothills stretched out toward us. We were no longer following tracks. The Arapaho seemed to know where the Ota were going. So I figured that this was familiar territory to both tribes.

  I worried about Kate, and the knot in my stomach tightened. I thought about my dead parents and their dream of going to Oregon. Where, they said, the grass would be greener.

  I was not so sure that there existed any such place.

  What I was finding out was that the grass was not greener on the other side.

  The grass was bloodier.

  Seven

  The Arapaho carried the body of Walking Wolf into the foothills. Scouts came back with cut poles and they built a scaffold before sunset. They placed the dead warrior’s body atop the scaffolding, prayed and chanted quietly, then moved on, deeper into the hills. We spent the night on top of a ridge, with scouts riding in and out of camp all night. I knew they were looking for the Ota, but the thought gave me no peace. Kate was out there somewhere too, perhaps being ravaged by moonfaced young men who had never plumbed a white girl before. The thought twisted me inside so tight I could not eat nor sleep.

  To my surprise, after all that had happened, One Dog still wanted to learn the English language. More than that, he showed a keen interest not only in Greek mythology, but in plumbing the depths of the white man’s mind. He asked a great many questions while the braves were tracking the Ota, and at night, when we ate fresh-killed game, deer, partridge, quail, rabbit, and antelope.

  “You have many spirit beings,” he said during one of our talks. “Those who are called gods.”

  “No. The white man has only one god. The Greeks, and the Romans, had many.”

  “The people have many such gods too,” he told me.

  “But only one who is chief.”

  “Yes, that is true.”

  “It is the same with the Greeks. One chief, many gods. They have a god of wind, of the big water, hunting, and growing food to eat.”

  “That is good,” he said. “It is good to have many gods. Many spirits, but only one Great Spirit.”

  “So, the people are like the Greek people.”

  “You have much wisdom for your few years.”

  He knew my name, could pronounce it, but when he asked me its meaning, I could not give him an answer. One Dog thought that very strange.

  He decided that I must have an Arapaho name, but I was against it. I did not want to become an Arapaho, and I suspected One Dog harbored fatherly feelings toward me. When I told him I did not want a name by which his people would call me, he said only that he would call me “White Man,” Hinen Namaacaa’, and I accepted that as descriptive rather than nominal. But of course, I did not tell One Dog my feelings. I still harbored a deep hatred of him and his people, although something inside me was beginning to change as we hunted the even more terrible Ota, who had kidnapped my sister, Kate.

  Much as I resisted being named by a savage, that very act by One Dog affected a profound change in me, despite my resistance to any change in my thinking concerning the Arapaho people. Or perhaps it was the language that began the subtle movement toward change in my mind. Language, I realized, was a key to understanding foreign people. In order to understand the Arapaho, I had to think as they did, no matter how difficult that might be. And in thinking like them, I wondered if I was not becoming like them.

  The Arapaho became human.

  I realized that when I lay down that night after One Dog had given me an Arapaho appellation, if not an outright name. In seeing these people as human beings like myself, it seemed I was no longer a prisoner, no longer living with an enemy. I thought of the women of the tribe, how the mothers sat quietly as their daughters combed their long hair, and when a mother would comb her daughter’s hair, I saw my own mother running a comb through Kate’s tresses at night, and Kate gently and tenderly combing my mother’s hair, tirelessly stroking the strands with the teeth of the comb until my mother’s hair was sleek and shiny, glowing in the amber lamplight like spun gold.

  The women and girls of the Arapaho tribe suddenly had faces and eyes I could look into and see that they loved one another and cared for each
other, just as Kate and Mother had loved and cared for each other. I did not see tender signs of affection from men toward the women, their wives and daughters, but I saw the light in the women’s eyes when they looked at their husbands, their fathers. They were like the secret looks I saw in my mother’s eyes when she looked at my father, and like the light in Kate’s eyes when our father patted her hair or gave her a compliment.

  I lay there, wrestling with such thoughts, unable to sleep, wondering about myself, the changes in me that had crept into my being without my knowing, unbidden, unforeseen. These people, the Arapaho, were my enemies. They had murdered my parents, stolen us, and had set in motion the events that took Kate away from me. I was an orphan and felt sorry for myself, and I was ashamed that I thought this, felt this.

  I began to wonder about One Dog, what kind of life he had lived. Were his parents dead, perhaps killed by white men or Indians from another tribe? Was he too an orphan? I could not yet fathom any of the relationships between the men and women of the tribe. I could observe the women, the girls and boys, but I did not know their feelings for one another. They did not seem expressive toward one another, yet I could feel those strong bonds between parents and children. Indeed, the children belonged to each older member of the tribe, and that was a puzzle to me. That was an expression of love, of deep love, yet it remained almost unfathomable to my young mind at that time.

  I was even beginning to put names to some of the faces of my captors, making them seem even more human to me. It was easy to look at strangers and dismiss them as not worth my attention. What was difficult was finding the humanity in the lowliest of God’s creatures. And when the Arapaho took me, I considered them nothing more than savage animals, without feelings, without morals, and without conscience. On that long thoughtful night, however, I began to look at the Arapaho much differently.