The whole of the night we listened to such whispers. Then just before the light of false dawn, the whisper rose and walked toward the grave poles. By this time it was completely dark, for the voice had insisted the campfires should burn out, and the moon was new. The medicine man censed the air and everyone fell asleep on the ground where they lay.
I awakened about noon. I hoped to discover who had brought about this ghastly imposture. I nudged Baptiste.
“Ben morning, Monsieur Cataline. What a night, eh?”
“You know the voices of these people, Ba’tiste. Who perpetrated this hoax?”
“Why do you say hoax, Monsieur Cataline? Did you not hear the Pi-jonse-ec-head’s parle last night?”
“I heard the voice of someone pretending to be Pigeon’s Egg Head, but what he told were lies. I can’t imagine Menewa and Andrew Jackson sitting down for a treaty.”
“Of course it is lie, Monsieur Cataline. It is a wonderful lie—a bon motte—that a dead man should lie that he is alive is the most sacree lie of all.”
“But you don’t think—”
“I tell, Monsieur Cataline. My father’s people say they worship the God of truth and love so they lie and kill. My mother’s people don’t even have a word for lying. So I don’t think too much. If I think in French I have to lie. If I think in Crow I cannot even have heard what I heard. And if I think in English I think of teaching a great man to whistle ‘Yankee Doodle’.” Baptiste wagged his head in disgust.
Baptiste returned to sleep. I prowled about the village. There were some scraps of winding cloth on the grave poles, but this could be a tribute to the thoroughness of the hoaxters. I hoped the hoaxters were not agents of the American Fur Company.
And I thought about the lies. This hope was a bad thing. I abandoned hope. When I studied the law I had hope. I dreamed of a kind of Eden, which we could return to. Once we got the facts right in a case we could return things to their original state. With enough facts we could go back to the garden. Then I practiced law and my hopes diminished. I defended petty thieves accused by pettier merchants. I tore apart families by settling wills written by men grown cruel with their familiarity with death. I helped fat smelly bankers deny the possibility of homesteads to honest men. And the judges I argued before were stupid lecherous men whose tiny knowledge of the law was only slightly greater than their capacity for fairness, and both of these qualities required a hand lens to observe. At first I thought these cases were freaks, sports, accidents; but as I came to know my fellow man I saw that these ugly creatures would never find their way to any paradise—that their mere presence would end any paradise they walked into.
I began to sketch their greedy faces. I have never told you—and perhaps there is imprudence in making such an admission to my publisher—that I have never received a day’s instruction in art. I learned to sketch in the courtroom. From sketches to paintings and with these paintings of ugly venal men to the death of hope. I made a huge bonfire of the studies and I lit out for the prairies.
W.O., I do not think of the Red man as some sort of Nobel Savage. But they are of a different culture and that wall between us helps me from seeing their ugliness.
I wouldn’t let a hoaxter create such lies. These people would have their hopes crushed soon enough. Soon the whites would come and they would be in a world they couldn’t ever run from. I resolved to shoot the hoaxter so I traveled to the Fort to purchase a gun.
I have never needed a gun while traveling among these people. One night while staying with a Piegan chief I asked him if it was safe. And he said it was safe—there were no white men in two days ride.
Night came. Many were hungry for the village was overfull, but none were willing to miss out on the lying medicine. I shared out such supplies as I had brought with me and concealed my pistol beneath a blanket. The medicine created sacred space with six streamers of tobacco smoke. Then the shadowed one came. It was even darker this night for no campfires had been lit. I rested my hand on cold steel.
The voice began by telling of the submarine, a steel ship which could sink to the bottom of the sea, an invention of Mr. Fulton, the steamship man. It terrified many white men to see the depths with sparkling corals and fish big as tipis and underwater volcanoes—so Fulton had crewed his ship with Mohawks, who aren’t afraid of anything. The Navy now had several of these ships each with a Mohawk crew with a Mohawk medicine man as chaplain, wearing a blue coat such as he had worn on his return. He had ridden in one of these vessels from the Potomac to Plymouth in England. He had been very frightened. Some of the Mohawks had put on strange diving suits and ventured forth to collect many-armed fishes. They had invited him to accompany them on their hunt, but he had refused—saying that he had never eaten anything with more than four legs and he was sure such meat would frighten his stomach. The trip to Plymouth lasted four days and upon their arrival some of the Mohawk braves had wanted to go ashore to carve a rock showing that they had come and that this land was now theirs, but he counseled against this—pointing out that white men have no sense of humor. So they merely observed the wooden hulls of the British fleet and returned back to Washington to report. During the trip back to Washington, he became brave enough to taste the eight-legged fish, which he said tasted just like passenger pigeon. But he did not brave the deep.
During this tale, which was much longer than I have recorded it—for I was focusing on my stalking—I had managed to get quite close to the voice. I didn’t want to kill anyone save for the hoaxter, so I needed point-blank range. I knew the tribe would apprehend me, but Indian justice is not swift and when morning revealed the imposture I would be set free. I could see the audience by the starlight but the voice was elusive. I circled and circled coming closer to the center. I came to the point where I must have been five feet away from him and still he wasn’t clear to me. There was a cloud of uncertainty from which issued a voice. I very carefully took aim on what seemed to be the center of the cloud and a hunk of metal bashed down on my head. For a moment the pain sent comets of red white and yellow through the sky and I seemed to see a wrapped corpse before me, and then the ground came up.
When I came to everything was blurry. There was a gray blur like cloud and a brown blur roughly shaped like a man and a triangular blur light and dark. It smelled like mourning in a tipi.
“Eh bon Monsieur Cataline. You are not mort. I thought I hit you too hard.”
“Ba’tiste. Why have you done this? I would’ve exposed him.”
“We need this medicine, Monsr. Cataline. In the Beginning was the Lie. Think on this my frien’.”
Everything swirled and I slept. When I opened my eyes again I saw the tipi plainly. Baptiste had left some brandy and pemmican—both of which have great restorative powers. If you ever wish to grow rich in London you should sell them to over indulgers of all kinds.
Baptiste looked in to see about me. Unlike the crystal clarity with which I saw things, he remained blurry and indistinct.
“The chiefs want to know if you will be good or if they need to tie you to a tree. What do you say?”
“Tell them I will be good. I won’t draw a gun on their false prophet, but I would like to speak with them.”
“They will not hear you. They no longer want old talk. They are looking for a new way.”
“And what about you, Ba’tiste? Don’t you make old talk?”
“I will not after today, Monsieur Cataline. I think this other world is better.”
“You are a fool, Ba’tiste.”
“Mebbe so, Monsieur Cataline.”
I ventured from the tipi before nightfall. Many slept and those who moved about did so slowly, slowly. The peculiar effect, Baptiste’s blow had wrought, continued in that I could focus on tipis and grave platforms,