She says: “I hear you.” And opens up her covers on that side and I enters thereunder, against her slight brown body, which happened to be naked and burning hot after my chilly journey without my breechclout. There was a sweet girl. It turned out she had never knowed a man before, being a real fine example of the high morals of the Human Beings, but her instincts was sound. My oh my. I reckon she was about eighteen years of age and very lithe.

Well, I won’t hazard a guess on how long I was engaged in discharging my brother-in-lawly duty, but it was a spell, and finally come a point when little Wunhai had received sufficient apology to drop off to sleep in my arms. O.K., I climbed out and tucked her in, experiencing an odd sensation when a cold draft flushed through my loins. I reckon I shivered, and another sister-in-law of mine who slept nearby sat up and beckoned to me.

When I come to her she whispered: “Shall I put more wood upon the fire?”

“It’s all right,” says I, quaking away, for I had got up a sweat beneath Wunhai’s robes and it now felt as if it was turning to ice.

“Well,” she said, “you better get in here before you freeze.”

This girl’s name was Digging Bear, and she was a few years older than Sunshine, maybe about twenty-three or four, very wide across the horizontal centerline of her face, an effect that was made more so by her sometimes wearing the braids behind her ears. She had positive features but handsome and was firm as a mare. She wore her dress in bed but had it lifted by the time I joined her. She was the only sister shorter than me; still she was right powerful of muscle. Having admitted me to the field of battle, as it were, she made me struggle over the outcome, and for a long time thereafter, the calves of my legs bore bruises where she had dug in with her heels as if riding a pony upside down.

Afterward she wanted to talk: “I heard that white woman with Younger Bear is ugly and has a funny smell. I knew that she could not be your wife. Nobody but a coward like him would keep a woman of that type.” Etc., etc.; she was the malicious sister, but I’ll tell you that a nasty streak ain’t the worst quality for a woman in bed. Adds a touch of seasoning. The best kind of war pony always has some meanness in him and so escapes being hitched to a travois.

I was a bit hung over by the time I pulled away from Digging Bear, and having been recharged by her own comments, she was clutching at me for another go.

“Stay here,” she whispered. “Corn Woman is too tired.”

This referred to the remaining sister, the widow. I swear I had not thought of her until then. She was the biggest, the plumpest, the oldest, being maybe twenty-eight, with them two kids on adjoining robes.

“So am I tired,” I tells Digging Bear. “And you should be too. Go to sleep.” But I could feel her watching me as I went back to my bed alongside Sunshine, and I had to lay there awhile in pretense before her head disappeared beneath the covers and I could steal out again and over to Corn Woman.

Yes, tired I was and sore, but whatever had sent me on those rounds was not extinguished while one sister remained. Whatever, Corn Woman was sleeping when I got there, and I didn’t go through no ceremony, just flung back her robe and got inside. She clasped me without rightly awakening: she had had a husband and two kids, and this wasn’t no novelty as with Wunhai nor a fierce exercise like with Digging Bear, but as natural as eating a meal. She was warm and soft, and I found her mighty soothing for a skinny, nervous fellow like myself.

Who was best? None of your business. I maybe said too much already, for I cannot impress upon you too earnestly that my activities that night were by Cheyenne standards the opposite of loose morals. These was all my wives, and I was doing my duty towards them.

I could hardly walk when that was done, but a great calm had descended upon me. I still wasn’t sleepy, but no bitterness nor unresolved problems kept me awake. I put on my breechclout and leggings again-I had worn my shirt through all of it-wrapped a blanket around me, and went outdoors.

It hurt some to breathe deep, so cold and merciless clean was the air. A dog yapped a mile away, in Younger Bear’s village: you could hear it perfect. The moon had set by now and all was dead black, for the dawn would soon rise. I had consumed the night in delivering my masculine services. There could be no doubt that I had once and for all turned 100 per cent Cheyenne insofar as that was possible by the actions of body. I might have planted a new human being or two by that night’s work, and I never thought about how they would be little breeds, growing up into a world fast turning uncongenial even to fullbloods. No, all seemed right to me at that moment. It was one of the few times I felt: this is the way things are and should be. I had medicine then, that’s the only word for it. I knew where the center of the world was. A remarkable feeling, in which time turns in a circle, and he who stands at the core has power over everything that takes the form of line and angle and square. Like Old Lodge Skins drawing in them antelope within the little circle of his band, but concentric around them was all other Cheyenne, present and past, living and ghost, for the Mystery is continuous.

It was a grand moment, and into it, out of the night, stepped Sunshine. I smelled rather than seen her, for the blackness was absolute.

“You cannot sleep?” I asked, believing she had come from the tepee.

“I was in the woods,” she said, and took my arms and put between them a tiny parcel in a blanket. It felt like a warm coal, but was a newborn child. She had gone out and had it while I was bedding with her sisters. “Another son for you,” she said. “He will be a great speaker. Did you not hear his powerful cry?”

But of course, with them sisters, I had not been listening. I had not knowed she had even left the lodge.

“I hope our enemies are far away,” she said, “for when he came to life he had great lungs.”

Well, this was no break in my medicine feeling but rather a richening of it. I held the little fellow to me and Sunshine leaned her head upon my shoulder, and then this thing happened. A burning golden ball appeared on the dark horizon, and as it slowly clumb into the sky, it changed through marvelous colors, vermilion to yellow to emerald green, turquoise to intense blue, then into purple and indigo and bright again, like a moving peephole through the roof of the world onto the great rainbow outside down which the chiefs ride in ceremonial array in the Other Life. Finally, when it got well up, there was a moment of mother-of-pearl and then the colors burned off into full radiant white.

“That is his name,” said Sunshine. “Morning Star.”

I handed my son back to her and she went into the lodge to feed him.

As it happened, another person was also provided with a name by that heavenly display, which he was watching at this same moment from behind the hills overlooking the valley of the Washita. I reckon he took it as a favorable portent of the fate what had made him a general at the age of twenty-three. And maybe he was right, for in a few moments now he would ride to the greatest victory he ever knowed.

In later years his Crow Indian scouts would call him Son of the Morning Star. His real name was George Armstrong Custer.

CHAPTER 18 The Big Medicine of Long Hair

FIRST LIGHT COME OUT of the east not long afterward. I was still out of doors and full of wonder, so much so that I was actually considering to go break the ice on the river and take me a Cheyenne plunge. But my pony, tethered near, was stirring for a morning drink. Actually-you won’t believe this-he looked at me out of his big clear eyes and said: “Father, take me down to the water.” I don’t mean he spoke in words, but he said it. Then he said: “We are in for a big fight.” To hell with what you believe. He said it. I was there.