“Well, I’ll be jiggered!” he breathed. “A bloomin’ redskin! This is a rum dream and no mistake! And wounded, too. Well, I suppose that’s my job, is it – to patch him up?”
“Yes, please,” said Omri.
Without more ado, the soldier put the bag on the floor and snapped open its all-but-invisible catches. Omri leant over to see. Now he really did need a magnifying glass, and so badly did he want to see the details of that miniature doctor’s bag that he risked sneaking into Gillon’s room (Gillon always slept late, and anyway it wasn’t seven o’clock yet) and pinching his from his secret drawer.
By the time he got back to his own room, the soldier was kneeling at Little Bull’s feet, applying a neat tourniquet to the top of his leg. Omri peered through the magnifying glass into the open bag. It was amazing – everything was there, bottles, pill-boxes, ointments, some steel instruments including a tiny hypodermic needle, and as many rolls of bandages as you could want.
Omri then ventured to look at the wound. Yes, it was quite deep – the pony must have given him a terrific kick.
That reminded him – where was the pony? He looked round in a fright. But he soon saw it, trying forlornly to eat the carpet. “I must get it some grass,” thought Omri, meanwhile offering it a small piece of stale bread which it ate gratefully, and then some water in a tin lid. It was odd how the pony was not frightened of him. Perhaps it couldn’t see him very well.
“There now, he’ll do,” said the soldier, getting up.
Omri looked at the Indian’s leg through his magnifying glass. The wound was bandaged beautifully. Even Little Bull was examining it with obvious approval.
“Thank you very much,” said Omri. “Would you like to wake up now?”
“Might as well, I suppose. Not that there’s much to look forward to except mud and rats and German shells coming over … Still. Got to win the war, haven’t we? Can’t desert, even into a dream, not for long that is – duty calls and all that, eh?”
Omri gently picked him up and put him into the cupboard.
“Goodbye,” he said. “Perhaps, some time, you could dream me again.”
“A pleasure,” said the soldier cheerfully. “Tommy Atkins, at your service. Any night, except when there’s an attack on – none of us gets any sleep to speak of then.” And he gave Omri a smart salute.
Regretfully Omri shut and locked the door. He was tempted to keep the soldier, but it was too complicated just now. Anyway he could always bring him back to life again if he liked … A moment or two later he opened the door again to check. There was the orderly, bag in hand, standing just as Omri had last seen him, at the salute. Only now he was plastic again.
Little Bull was calmly pulling on his blood-stained leggings.
“Good magic,” he remarked. “Leg better.”
“Little Bull, what will you do all day while I’m at school?”
“You bring bark of tree. Little Bull make longhouse.”
“What’s that?”
“Iroquois house. Need earth, stick posts in.”
“Earth? Posts?”
“Earth. Posts. Bark. Not forget food. Weapons. Tools. Pots. Water. Fire—”
There were no quarrels at breakfast that morning. Omri gulped down his egg and ran. In the greenhouse he found a seed-tray already full of soil, well pressed down. He carried that secretly upstairs and laid it on the floor behind the dressing-up crate, which he was pretty sure his mother wouldn’t shift even if it was her cleaning day. Then he took his penknife and went out again.
Fortunately one of the trees in the garden had the sort of bark which came off easily – a silvery, flaky kind. He cut off a biggish strip, and then another to make sure (how long was a longhouse?). He pulled some grass for the pony. He cut a bundle of thin, strong, straight twigs and stripped off their leaves. Then he went back to his room and laid all these offerings beside Little Bull, who was seated cross-legged outside his tepee, arms folded, eyes closed, apparently saying his prayers.
“Omri!” came his mother’s call from downstairs. “Time to go!”
Omri took out of his pocket the corner of toast he’d saved from breakfast and cleaned out the last of the corned beef from the tin. There was some corn left as well, though it was getting rather dry by now. He filled up the Action Man’s beaker with water from the bathroom, pouring a little into the pony’s drinking-lid. The pony was munching the fresh grass with every sign of enjoyment. Omri noticed its bridle had been replaced with a halter, cleverly made of a length of thread.
“Omri!”
“Just coming!”
“The others have gone! Hurry up, you’ll be late!”
One last thing! Little Bull couldn’t make a longhouse without some sort of tool beside his knife. He’d need an axe. Frantically Omri rummaged in the biscuit tin. Ah! A knight, wielding a fearsome-looking battle axe. It wasn’t right, but it was better than nothing and would have to do. In a second the knight was locked in the cupboard.
“Omri!”
“One second!”
“What are you doing?”
Crash! The axe was being used on the inside of the cupboard door!
Omri wrenched it open, snatched the axe from the startled hands of the knight, who had just time for one horrified look before he was reduced to plastic again by the slamming of the door. Never mind! He had looked most unpleasant, just as knights must have looked when they were murdering the poor Saracens in Palestine. Omri had very little time for knights.
The axe was a beauty, though. Shining steel, with a sharp edge on both sides of the head, and a long heavy steel handle. Omri laid it at Little Bull’s side.
“Little Bull—”
But he was still in a trance – communicating with his ancestors, Omri supposed. Well, he would find everything when he came to. There was quite a trail of spilt earth leading behind the crate. Omri flashed down the stairs, grabbed his anorak and his lunch-money and was gone.
The Chief is Dead, Long Live the Chief
He got to school early by running all the way. The first thing he did was to head for the upper school library shelves. He felt that a Ladybird book on Indian tribes would not meet the situation; he wanted a much more grown-up book. And to his joy, he soon found one, under the section labelled ‘Peoples of the World’ – a book called On the Trail of the Iroquois.
He couldn’t take it out because there was nobody there to write him down for it; but he sat down then and there on a bench and began to read it.
Omri was not what you’d call a great reader. He couldn’t get into books, somehow, unless he knew them already. And how, as his teacher never tired of asking, was he ever going to get to know any more books until he read them for the first time?
And this On the Trail of the Iroquois was not exactly a comic. Tiny print, hardly any pictures, and no fewer than three