Hute's Story

When I was a boy, we moved along the water you call the Missouri River. It was in the days of the buffalo. There was a life to it. When you are a boy, you do not know what life is good or bad. When you are a man, you know life is good or bad. It was a good life. There was what you call a tribe when I was a boy. There was a large tribe.

The white men had started to come then but it was not bad. They did not know about the buffalo, that kind of life. When first came the white men, they wanted only to grow things in the ground and have a house. We could not tell why they wanted this life, but it was not us who attacked them. It was what you call other tribes. If white men want to have this kind of life, we thought, let them have this kind of life. They would leave the buffalo alone. We did not care.

I thought, as every boy does, that life would never change. Why would a life change without a reason to change a life? For twenty days’ travel in each direction was our long home. It was trusted enough in those days that we would bury things and come back to them later. You must imagine it as a long home. We had food and furs. We had things to trade with other what you call tribes. We wanted for nothing. When we were thirsty we went to the river and when we were hungry we ate the buffalo. In winter we built fires and in summer we ran naked. We were what you would call wealthy enough, so that we could quit moving in our big home. If we had to. If a woman was with child, if the old grew sick. Sometimes for no reason at all. Sometimes so that we could stay in one part of our home that was giving us happiness.

When I was close to becoming a man things changed. Many more white men came. It was not bad for us, as far as the river went. We split up our home. There were places we did not go, where many of the white men came to get water, but for a while it did not matter. The problem was the wars the white men had with other what you call tribes. That drove these tribes closer to the river. Our house became smaller still. Large parts of our home disappeared. Either we had to fear the white men or we had to fear what you call tribes. But we still lived well enough.

Could you not live in a smaller home? Could you not stay in one room if the others were on fire?

I was old enough to notice that my life was becoming less than before. Some kind of spirit led us to know that we should have a smaller family, what you would call a tribe. And so we had a smaller family. But this was not so bad. There was still happiness in it, even if it was a smaller thing.

When the buffalo became thin many became very worried, but I now know that they were thinking of the wrong thing. This is the wisdom of becoming an old man. You learn that there are many ways to live. You find and know that you could even do things like the white man, if you have to. You can grow things in the ground and stay in one place. Though there is much work in that, and suffering, there could still be happiness. A home.

The great sickness is what ended it. The great sickness started the spots on the skin and then the cough. It seemed that each year we were halved and halved again. For some reason, I could survive the sickness, a very rare thing. I was sick as the rest and was sure I would die too, but I lived for a moon and then another moon and by the third moon I was strong again. The first that it ever happened to. They began to call me Magic Blood. They asked for my blood in what you call a tribe and I gave it, but it was of no magic to anyone else.

Finally one day in the middle of a winter so cold that even the water you call the Missouri River froze from one end to the other, I awoke and went to make a fire. I called out for help, or to see who would eat, and no one answered. We were only ten by then but no one answered. One by one I went to see them and found them all dead. They looked peaceful and at rest finally, free of the great sickness. I remember being glad there were no flies to touch their bodies, but not glad because I could not make the mounds for their graves.

There was no more reason to stay. I took what I could and began to walk along the water you call the Missouri River. For two days I saw nothing or no one. On the third day, I started to find places like the one I left. All the people dead from the great sickness and frozen and gone. No flies. I took what little food they had and kept it with me and walked more.

On the seventh day the freeze broke in the morning. The water ran. By the time the sun was peaked in the sky it felt like spring, very warm, though it wasn’t time for that yet. I came to a trail cut deep with many wagon tracks, heading east. I was out of food for two days. There was no buffalo left to hunt. I knew the white men were close, somewhere at the end of this wagon road. I planned to get close to them and wait for dark. Then I could decide how to get food. I knew well then how the white men went about life. I had talked to people from other what you call tribes and I learned that they stored great much of food. I learned other things about their tribe.

I hid in a row of trees near the road. On the last tree, the one next to the road, I found a piece of paper nailed to a tree. I could not read the paper –white man language – but there was a picture on the piece of paper. A Great Spirit was drawn upon the piece of paper, an evil-looking spirit that I had never heard talked about. The sun was going down and the dark was coming up. I was curious to know what this piece of paper had to say. Why were the white men making a piece of paper with such a thing on it? I had heard only that they had some kind of god, some perfect god for them, but nothing like this. Down the road there, I saw a new graveyard. It was some miles from the town. It had many new graves dug, many new graves with new wooden crosses planted. This surprised me because I figured it had to be the great sickness. But I had learned some years before that the great sickness could not touch the white man.

It was a quarter moon that night, I remember. I stayed well off the road, still afraid that someone might come along it even this late in the night. When I came to the graveyard I decided to pass through it. I guessed that no one would come into a place like that in the middle of the night except for me.

The Great Spirit from the piece of paper arose from the graveyard. It was yellow. It was larger than a bear, very muscled like a bear, but no hair. It was the height of two men tall, and very muscled like a bear. The Great Spirit spoke the Otoe language like he had been in what you would call our tribe all of his life.

“So you are the demon hunter?” he asked. His voice was very deep, like a buffalo that could speak, and he laughed when he spoke.

“I am Hute,” I told him. “I am no demon hunter.”

The Great Spirit sniffed at the air and laughed again deep and like from the body of a buffalo. “You don’t know what you are?”

I told him my name again. This made it smile even wider. The Great Spirit threw his hands together and began to shake. I felt the ground under me began to move. The Great Spirit changed his color, from flesh-yellow to only yellow. This yellow color began to glow like a golden corn.

That’s when I turned and ran.

I was very fast then, very young and fast. I was flying through that graveyard. I did not look back but could hear and feel his feet smashing the ground, getting closer. When I looked down, I noticed that the ground was yellow too, though it was only a quarter moon. At the last grave of the white man graveyard I fell over the new dirt of a new grave. My head hit a great stone and blood flowed from me as if I were shot through with the arrow. As I raised up to run again, I put my hand to my head, trying to stop the blood. If the Great Spirit did not kill me, I knew I would die soon from the blood.

The Great Spirit grabbed me with the strength of a dozen ancestors around my waist. He twisted me around and pulled me to him. The Great Spirit was now even a brighter yellow, a glowing yellow, like a reflection of the sun off the water you call the Missouri River. He pulled me up to his face and his jaw unhitched like the snake king. I saw many rows back, many teeth in rows back. I figured I was dead. For a moment of that time, I felt glad of it. I would feel no more hunger or sickness. I would watch no more of what you call a tribe turned to frost from the great sickness. I would not follow wagon trails in the middle of the night to steal meager food. I would join the others and we could have peace again, a house as long as the spirit world.

But the moment passed. It passed into another moment – a moment of anger. If I was not long for the world, I thought, I will have one more strike at this world. I will hit this evil world as hard as I can - for all that it took, for all it had killed, for all the wrong it had done to me. And if this Great Spirit was the last the last thing there was, and the only time I had left, I would strike the Great Spirit.

So I pulled my hand from my bleeding head and struck the Great Spirit across the side of the face. It screamed loud enough that I began to bleed from my ears, but he dropped me. When I hit the ground I nearly hit a great stone again, but I now saw that this one was split down the middle. The Great Spirit fell beside me. It was then I noticed all the crosses on the graves were cracked. And I could see a great scurrying in the town of the white man off in the distance. I knew they would have their wagons here soon, down along the wagon road.

The Great Spirit recovered. It came to a knee and then it got both its legs under it. When the Great Spirit stood again it was not as tall as before. It was not as bright. Its teeth were fewer and it did not laugh anymore. It smiled, though. The Great Spirit did not seem capable of a low feeling. It walked towards me, its muscled arms pounding against its legs.

“So you are the demon hunter,” it said. This time it was not a question.

It went to grab me by the hip again. I had my hand up on the bleeding spot on my head and had to pull it away again. The Great Spirit pulled back its fist. Then it went to grab my other side. I used my left hand but it was useless. The Great Spirit pinned that hand to my hip and pulled me up again. It unhinged its jaw. The rows were fewer but they would still shatter me like axe to shale. I kicked with both my legs, the nose, the eyes, the cheeks of the great beast but it did nothing. The Great Spirit pulled me forward. I was to be eaten.

I jerked and twisted. I tried to jump back. In my wildness, I hit myself in the head with my free right hand. I opened the bad cut even wider, like ripping a tear in buckskin. I bled even worse, freely, like water pouring from a cut pouch. Drops and lines of this new flowing blood landed on the Great Spirit and I was dropped again.

I knew what I had to do before I hit the ground. And this time, I hit the ground solid. Not like a falling rock but like a bird settled onto a branch of a tree. I grabbed at the blood that flowed and rubbed it on all my open flesh – my hands, my face, my ankles. The Great Spirit began taking steps back. It shrunk to the size of a man, a man smaller than me. I stalked after it with all the anger of all my life right there and dripping from my fingers. The first of the white men arrived in wagons, but I did not care. I could see their torches and the tips of their long guns, but I did not care. I saw the Great Spirit, still muscled, still two rows of teeth, but I did not care. One strike. One good strike against everything that was wrong and then this Great Spirit could kill me or the white man, and I did not care.

I ran to the Great Spirit and leapt and got both my hands around the back of its neck. My feet wrapped around its waist. I threw my head, still pouring blood, right onto the rows of teeth. And the Great Spirit screamed, louder this time, louder than even the sound of thunder. And all the stones broke. And all the crosses of the graveyard were crushed to powder. And the metal which held the white man’s wagon together was turned to liquid and fell to the ground and their long guns too, and they were on the ground with me when I lay there on the newly-frozen earth.

The Great Spirit was gone. Not a tooth of it remained. There was, though, a strange yellow glow on the horizon. And the smell of bad eggs.

I had nothing left inside me. I rolled over on my back to look to the stars and wait for the spirit world. I knew it would not be long now. I had bled too much. I figured that all of my blood was on the ground around me. I longed for what you call a tribe to come around me and take me. I wanted to see the long house in the spirit world. I wanted to dig up what we’d hidden in places along the way.

But a white man appeared above me, blocking the way. He put a cloth to my head and waved his hand back to the others. The last thing I remember, before falling asleep, is a white woman above me. She had a needle and thread.