“Only for the bow and arrows.”
Patrick was now looking at him as if he’d gone completely screwy.
In the afternoon, mercifully, they had two periods of handicrafts.
Omri had completely forgotten to bring the tent he’d made, but there were plenty of scraps of felt, sticks, needles and thread lying about the handicrafts room and he’d soon made another one, much better than the first. Sewing had always bored him rigid, but now he sat for half an hour stitching away without even looking up. He was trying to achieve the patched look of a real tepee made of odd-shaped pieces of hide, and he also found a way of bracing the sticks so that they didn’t fold up every time they were nudged.
“Very good, Omri!” remarked his teacher several times. “What patience all of a sudden!” Omri, who usually liked praise as much as anyone, hardly heard her, he was concentrating so hard.
After a long time he became aware that Patrick was standing over him, breathing through his nose rather noisily to attract his attention.
“Is that for my Indian?”
“My Indian. Yes.”
“Why are you doing it in bits like that?”
“To be like a real one.”
“Real ones have designs on.”
“So will this. He’s going to paint proper Iroquois ones.”
“Who is?”
“Little Bull. That’s his name.”
“Why not call him Running Nose?” asked Patrick with a grin.
Omri looked up at him blankly. “Because his name’s Little Bull,” he said. Patrick stopped grinning. He frowned.
“I wish you’d stop this stupid business,” he said peevishly. “Going on as if it weren’t a joke.”
Omri went on looking at him for a moment and then went back to his bracing. Each pair of sticks had to have another, short stick glued between them with Airfix glue. It was quite tricky. Patrick stood a minute and then said, “Can I come home with you today?”
“No. I’m sorry.”
“Why not?”
“Mum’s having guests,” Omri mumbled. He didn’t tell lies very well, and Patrick knew at once it was a lie and was hurt.
“Oh, all right then, be like that,” he said, and stalked off furiously.
The afternoon ended at last. Omri accomplished the walk home, which with normal dawdling took half an hour, in a little over ten minutes. He arrived sorely out of breath and greeted his surprised mother (“Have you developed a jet-engine, or have you been expelled?”) with a lot of gasping and a request to eat tea in his room.
“What have you been up to, up there? There’s an awful mess on the floor – looks like bits of grass and bark. And where did you get that beautiful little Indian tepee? I think it’s made of real leather.”
Omri looked at her, speechless. “I—” he began at last. Telling lies to Patrick was one thing. Lying to his mother was quite something else and he never did it unless the emergency was dire. But mercifully the phone rang just then, so he was spared – for the moment. He dashed upstairs.
There was indeed a fair old mess, though no worse than he often left himself when he’d been working on something. Little Bull and the pony were nowhere to be seen, but Omri guessed where to look – behind the dressing-up crate.
A wonderful sight met his eyes. A longhouse – not quite finished, but no less interesting and beautiful for that – stood on the seed-box, whose smooth surface was now much trampled over. There were hoof- as well as moccasin-prints. Omri saw that a ramp, made of part of the bark, had been laid against the wooden side of the box, up which the pony had been led – to Omri’s delight (odd as it may seem) a tiny pile of horse-manure lay on the ramp as proof of the pony’s passing. And there he was, tied by a thread to an upright twig hammered (presumably) into the ground, munching a small pile of grass which the Indian had carried up for him.
Little Bull himself was still working, so intently that he did not even notice he was not alone. Omri watched him in utter fascination. The longhouse was about half finished. The twigs, which had been pliant ones taken from the weeping-willow on the lawn, had been stripped of their bark, leaving them shining white. Each one had then been bent into an arch, the ends thrust into the earth, and cross-pieces lashed to the sides with thread. More and more twigs (which were stout poles to the Indian) had been added, with never a nail or a screw needed, to strengthen the structure, and now Little Bull had begun to fix flakes of bark like tiny tiles, on to the cross-pieces.
He was seated on the roof itself, his feet locked round the main roof-pole which ran the length of the house hanging these bark-tiles, each of which he would first carefully shape with his knife. The knight’s battle-axe lay on the ground beside an unused pile of twigs. It had clearly been used to chop and strip them and had been made to serve Little Bull’s purpose very well.
At last Omri saw him straighten up, stretch his arm towards the ceiling, and open his mouth in a tremendous noisy yawn.
“Tired?” he asked him.
Little Bull got such a fright he almost fell off the longhouse roof, and the pony neighed and tugged at his rope. But then Little Bull looked up and saw Omri hanging over the crate far above him, and grinned.
“Little Bull tired. Work many hour. Look! Make longhouse. Work for many braves. I make alone. Also not good tools. Axe Omri give heavy. Why no tomahawk?”
Omri was getting used to his Indian’s ungrateful ways and was not offended. He showed him the tepee he’d made. “I suppose you won’t want this, now you’ve got your longhouse,” he said rather sadly.
“Want! Want!” He seemed to have decided tepees had their uses after all. He circled it. “Good! Give paints. Make pictures.”
Omri unearthed his poster paints. When he came back with them, he found Little Bull sitting cross-legged on the earth, facing the figure of the Chief which Omri had put next to the tepee. Little Bull was clearly puzzled.
“Totem?” he asked.
“No! It’s plastic.”
“Plass-tick?”
“Yes. I bought it in a shop.”
Little Bull stared at the figure with its big feather headdress.
“You make magic, get bow and arrows from plass-tick?”
“Yes.”
“Also make feathers real?” he asked, with a gleam in his eye.
“You like that headdress?”
“Little Bull like. But that for Chief. Little Bull not Chief till father die. Little Bull wear feathers of Chief now, spirits angry.”
“But you could just try it on?”
Little Bull looked doubtful but he nodded.
“Make real. Then see.”
Omri shut the Indian Chief into the cupboard. Before he turned the key, he leant down to where Little Bull was examining the (to him) enormous pots of paint.
“Little Bull, are you lonely?”
“Huh?”
“Would you like a – friend?”
“Got friend,” said the Indian, jerking his head towards the pony.
“I meant, another Indian.”
Little Bull looked up swiftly, his hands still. There was a long silence.
“Wife?”