The buffalo head seen me stirring and tried to shovel a spoonful of something from out of a clay bowl into my mouth. It looked like it might have shriveled fingers and deer scuts in it. I thought I might still be alive and he was trying to pison me, so I clinched my teeth against him. A big native woman without no nose reached down and slapped my face. I held the old man off, but after the demon woman whopped my jaws a couple of licks, I decided I likely WARN’T alive, so it wouldn’t do me no harm to take it even if it WAS pison. It was even horribler’n I thought it would be, but I begun to feel a little better. My leg had swelled up and was a nasty color and it was hurting again, but leastways it was letting me know it was still there.
I warn’t feeling too steady, so I closed my eyes again, and when I opened them, I was in a tepee and that cannibal with the long black hair was setting beside me. He was smoking something sweet and give me a pull off his pipe. He told me his long Lakota name and it was all a jumble to me, but the last part was “Eeteh,” and he says to call him that. He pointed to the lady who’d been slapping me and says she was now my wife. I didn’t know how that happened, but he says she’d be taking care of me, so maybe it come with the job. She also had a long name like Eeteh’s that I couldn’t never learn, but the first part was “Kiwi” and that’s what I called her. I was slowly getting my senses back, and knowed better what’d been happening. I thanked Eeteh and he shrugged and give me another pull on his pipe.
CHAPTER XII
T TOOK SOME while to clean out the snake pison, and meantimes, me and the tribe growed comfortabler with each other. None of them was happy I was there, but they seen I was mostly harmless, and I was Eeteh’s friend. I warn’t so afraid a them as before, though life with them warn’t never easy. They was forever pegging at a body to join them in jumping around and beating on theirselves as a way of putting their Great Spirits in a good mood, and there were more dismal strictions than when I was trapped in a house with stiff-necked old Miss Watson. Eeteh had calculated how to duck the warrior life by becoming a kind of clown, so they seen me as one, too. They used me for laughs, and there warn’t much Eeteh could do about it because they treated him the same. The no-nose lady was one joke and the horse was another. As Eeteh says, nobody’d ever managed to ride neither of them without considerable bruising, and most everybody had tried.
Kiwi was a Crow lady the tribe had captured in a raid. She come with her nose still on, was took as the fourth or fifth wife of one of Eeteh’s older brothers to help with the weaving and back packing, then got her nose clipped for cheating on him, or else just for being difficult. She’d been living ever since with a couple of cranky old Lakota women, in-laws of some sort, and she was mostly glad to be shut of them. She didn’t speak no American, but she was good at sign language, specially when it included a whack or a punch. I generly stayed out of her way, sneaking off with Eeteh for a smoke and palaver, or setting outside the lodge in my new breechcloth, deerskin leggings, and moccasins, thinking about how Tom Sawyer would a wrote about this adventure and how he would make it turn out. I don’t think he would a thought up what happened next.
Somebody decided I should ought to pay more attention to Kiwi, and ordered up a love potion from the medicine man. Like enough it was them two old busybody women who done it, but it seemed everybody knowed about it. When the medicine man come to see me in the lodge, most a the tribe had already gathered round outside. He warn’t wearing nothing but an old tattered elk hide and elk antlers on his head near as tall as he was. He pointed to where my old snake wound was and then at the potion. It warn’t hurting no more so I tried to shake him off, but he started hollering and wailing fit to bust. The tepee cover was rolled up and the people all round was shouting and carrying on like the wild savages that they was. Kiwi warn’t far away and I was afraid she might start swatting me again, so I swallowed the potion down. The medicine man begun to grin and then everybody was grinning.
It was near as fatal as the rattler pison. My eyes stopped working together and my tongue flopped out and I broke into blisters from my neck to my knees. An awful itch was killing me and made it hard to keep my leggings or breechcloth on. I warn’t able to set nor lay down, I could only yip and whinny and kick out and bounce around like a startled-up rabbit. The medicine man started bouncing with me, and then all the others, too, kicking out when I kicked out, bouncing when I bounced, and fairly laughing their bones loose.