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THE GAGGLE of fancy-dancers that had been at the refreshment stand was now bunched at the passageway gate beyond the chutes, where the rodeo clown and anyone else who needed access to the arena could come and go. Wishing me luck—“Git out there and show ’em how the cow ate the cabbage,” said the one; “Let Manitou be in moccasins with you, hah?” said the other—Louie and Herman left me to it, and so, ankles tinkling and snuff lids clattering, I shuffled down the passageway to join the gaudily outfitted assemblage.
Not that the group of them, waiting for their time of glory in the arena, could particularly hear me coming. They jigged and jangled and jiggled and jingled—maybe other jittery j words, too, but I don’t know what those would be. These were some wound-up kids. Nonetheless, I couldn’t help but be noticed as I tucked myself in with them. The biggest one of the bunch, an ornery-looking high school kid with a jackknife face, spotted me at once, my black-and-white wing outfit standing out amid their feathers of the mere golden eagle, dime a dozen out there on the plains. Enviously he looked down that long blade of nose at me, his eyes narrow as the rest of his unwelcoming mug. “Who’re you? Little Beaver?”
Ordinarily those were fighting words, but these were not ordinary circumstances. Trying to make nice, I started to respond, “Donny Cam—” and just in time managed a coughing fit. “Sorry, frog in my throat,” I barely rescued the name situation. “Anyway, Donny, but my dancing name is Slewfoot.”
“Tanglefoot is probably more like it.” The ornery kid, head and shoulders taller than me, suspiciously eyed what he could see of me under all the costume. “So, Donny Frog in the Throat, where’d you dig up the bald eagle rig?”
There comes a point, in something like this, where you just do not want to take any more crap. “That’s for me to know and you to whistle through the hole in your head to find out,” I retorted to Jackknife Face.
“Gotcha there, Ferdie,” the other rigged-up kids hooted, more curious about me than hostile. Giving me a good looking-over, they concluded: “You’re not from here.”
“That’s for sure,” I verified, and let drop: “Heart Butte.”
“Blackfoot,” Jackknife Face snickered. “That explains a lot.”
The others, though, were as impressed as I’d hoped. “Whoa, the war whoop hoopsters, like in the papers! Neat! You play basketball?”
“Damn betcha.” I may have fluffed my feathers some in composing the brag. “We shoot baskets for an hour after school every day. Everybody does, even Shorty the janitor.”
“Bunch of crazy gunners,” my skeptic tried to dismiss Heart Butte’s famous basketball proficiency. The others hooted again. “Yeah, they shot the living crap out of you, Ferd. What was that score the last game, about 100 to 20?”
The jackknife-faced one was back at me. “So, baldy. What are you, an apple in reverse?”
Not up on that in Indian talk, I dodged. “Ever hear of speaking English?”
“Come on, pizzlehead, you know—white on the outside and red on the inside?”
“Oh, that. Sure, why didn’t you say so.” That fit fine. Maybe he was going to acknowledge me as an honorary Indian after all, and that would be that.
“I still don’t go for this,” Jackknife Face took a turn for the worse, though. “We’ve practiced our butts off together and you just show up to do the eagle dance, big as you please? Why should we let you horn in?”
Uh oh. That didn’t sound good. If I got kicked out, I was right back to being searched for all over the rodeo grounds by every Indian policeman. In a fit of desperation, I started to protest that the rodeo chief himself had let me into the fancy-dancing, but Jackknife Face was not about to give that a hearing. Pointing to me, he called out to the dance leader waiting at the gate, a tribal elder with a skin drum, “Hey, Yellowtail, how come he gets to—”
He was drowned out by a shout from Henry Swift Pony, up on the platform. “You there, bird boy! I thought I told you to stay at the back.”
“See you at the dancing,” I told Jackknife Face as I scooted to the rear of the bunch.
“And now, a special treat, courtesy of Crow Fair,” the announcer’s voice crackled in the nick of time, “for your entertainment, the fancy-dancers of the Crow nation, junior division!”
“Here we go, boys, do yourselves proud,” the dance leader intoned, simultaneously starting up a rhythm with his drum like a slow steady heartbeat, and the entire group of dancers—with one exception, me, the straggler in more ways than one—burst into “Hey-ya-ya-ya, hey-ya-ya-ya.” I caught up, more or less, as the whole befeathered and jinglebob collection of us pranced into the arena, and in the soft dirt each began to dance to the chant and drumbeat.