When he awoke again he lifted his head and watched the gray light of dawn filtering through the windows. A bird swooped down with high-lifted wings and lit on a ledge of one of the windows and Charging Elk recognized it. He had seen this kind of bird before. Sometimes it walked, always with many others of its kind, on the paths and cobblestones of the cities he had been in. When it walked its head bobbed and it made strange lowing sounds deep in its throat. He remembered a child chasing a band of these birds and how quickly they flew up and flashed and circled in unison, only to land a short distance away.
He had seen the big buildings of the cities—the houses that held many people, the holy places with the tall towers where people came to kneel and tell their beads, the big stores and small shops full of curious things. He had been inside a king’s stone house with many beds and pictures and chairs made of gold. And once, in Paris, he had accompanied a friend who had been injured badly to a house full of many beds.
Charging Elk knew now that he was in a white man’s healing house. And he thought he must have been there for quite a long time but he had no idea how long. Sometimes when he had awakened it had been light; other times, it had been dark. He had no idea how many sleeps he had passed there.
He was very weak—and hungry. He listened to his guts rumble and he wanted some meat and more of the orange juice. And some soup. He wanted sarvisberry soup, but he still didn’t know where it had been that he had tasted this soup, or even that it was made of sarvisberries. He only knew that he wanted the taste of something familiar.
He heard a hollow clicking from a long way off, the only clear sound in an undercurrent of breathing, snoring, coughing, and moaning. As he listened to the clicking come nearer, he lifted himself up on his elbows and his body didn’t seem as heavy as it had been in the dark.
The young woman glanced toward him, then stopped. Unlike the food women, she wore a stiff white cap with wings and an apron that came up over her shoulders. Beneath the apron, she had on a long gray dress with narrow sleeves. A flat gold cross hung from a chain around her neck. Charging Elk had seen this type of cross on other people and he almost knew where. He became interested in her.
“Bonjour, monsieur,” she said, coming to stand at the side of his bed. He recognized the greeting but not the rest of the words she spoke as she reached behind him to slap his pillow. She helped him to move his body back against the pillow so he was almost sitting up. A sharp pain stabbed his side, then eased to a hard ache. She said more words to him and he saw that her eyes were blue and the hair that was swept up under the cap was the color of ocher.
She made a gesture, clenching her hand like a claw and bringing it to her face mask. She repeated it a couple of times until he understood. He nodded rapidly as he had seen the white men do. Then she went away.
From his sitting position he could see better. He could see a building out the window and its wall was golden. Above, he could see that the sky was turning from gray to blue. The bird that bobbed its head when it walked was gone. He looked around the room and he could see many beds lined up against both walls, and many bodies. Some were sitting up like him; others were sleeping under blankets on the beds. He could smell the damp, ashy odor of the bodies mixed with the sharp smell of wasicun medicine. They were all men, all white men. They too were in this house of sickness. But where was this house?
The woman came back, carrying a glass of orange juice on a round tray. As he drank it down, he noticed crinkles in the corners of the woman’s eyes and he thought she might be smiling behind the face covering. He put the glass back on the tray, then pursed his fingers together and pointed them toward his mouth. The woman’s brows came down. He repeated the gesture and the brows shot up. She leaned forward and showed him a little timepiece pinned to her apron. She pointed to the timepiece and said something and he nodded. He knew about the wcuichus, timepiece. He pointed to his mouth again and the woman said, “Oui, oui,” then left.
Charging Elk leaned against his pillow and waited for his food. He watched one of the men opposite him throw back the covers, sit up, and swing his legs over the side of the bed. He sat like that for a moment. His face was stubbly, not exactly a beard, but the black stubble made his face look as white as the wall behind him. The man stood, holding himself up by the iron headboard. He reached for a robe that was hanging from a hook on the wall. Charging Elk looked behind him to the side and he saw a similar garment by his own headboard. As he watched the man slip his bare feet into a pair of soft shoes, he wondered if he had some of those too.
The man wandered off down the length of the room away from the place of the yellow light, stopping now and then to rest against a footboard. Then he pushed open a swinging door and disappeared.
Charging Elk began to have hope. He too could put on these things and walk out. He would eat something first, to give him strength, then he would leave. But as he thought this, he felt a slow, crushing fear enter his heart. Where would he go? He looked at his dark hands, which lay on the blanket on either side of his body. He was not of these people. He was a different color and he couldn’t speak their tongue. He was from somewhere a long way off. And he was here, alone, in this house of sickness. He tried to fight off the panic by remembering something about himself. He remembered night and he remembered bright lights and the sound of a voice loud and clear over many voices. When the big voice spoke the other voices grew to a roar, until the lights began to swim and he was falling suddenly and violently into darkness.
“Monsieur? Monsieur?”
Charging Elk opened his eyes.
“Votre petit dejeuner, monsieur.”
A young woman put a square tray on his lap. He glanced down and he saw a bowl of white mush, a piece of hard morning bread, and a glass of orange juice. The woman put a soft cloth over his chest, sat down on a stool beside the bed, then dipped a spoon into the mush. When she brought it toward his face, he moved his hand up to block it. She said something in a tone of voice that suggested she was used to this kind of behavior. Charging Elk kept his hand up but he looked at her pale hand and peculiar ice-green eyes and recognized her, in spite of her mask, as the first woman who had fed him soup. Now she held the spoon about six inches from his hand. He reached for the spoon and took it gently from her hand. He looked at the mush, smelled it, then took a taste. It tasted like nothing. It was neither sweet nor spicy. But it slid down his throat and warmed his belly. He had another spoonful and nodded to the woman. “Café,” he said.
“Non, non, monsieur,” she said in an excited voice. She said something else, then she rubbed her own belly and shook her finger.
“Café,” he said again.
She said something, then stopped. After a moment, she stood and hurried toward the end of the room where the yellow light had been the night before. Charging Elk watched her. Then he dipped the heavy iron spoon into the mush and ate. He ate half the mush and drank his orange juice. He left the hard bread—he had seen it before, a small slice curved on top and flat on the bottom, like the sign for sunrise—to dunk into his pejuta sapa, black medicine.
He thought of sunrise in another place. A place of long views, of pale dust and short grass, of few people and no buildings. He had seen that sunrise over the rolling simple plains, he had been a part of it and it had been a part of him. Many times he had seen it and he had been with his people.
Charging Elk suddenly moaned as he remembered the ikce wicasa, the natural humans, as his people called themselves. He remembered his mother and father, his brother and sister. He remembered the villages, the encampments, one place, then another. Women picking berries, men coming back with meat, the dogs and horses, the sudden laughter or tears of children, the quiet ease of lying in the sunny lodge with the skins rolled up to catch a breeze. He had been a child then too and he had spent his days riding his horse, playing games, shooting arrows at gophers, eating the sarvisberry