was quiet, only one taxi entering a street angling off to his right. Charging Elk listened carefully for a loud voice, a cheering crowd, but all he heard was the clopping hooves of the horse pulling the taxi through the narrow, echoing street.
Charging Elk crossed the roundabout, circling around the big stone statue that spit water. On the other side, he hurried up a wide street on the edge of a large park until he reached the field across from the greensward where the show had set up.
There was nothing there. Not one tent, not one hawker’s stand, not even a fire pit where the Indian village had stood. He walked over to the large trampled circle of earth where the portable arena had been set up. The ground had been raked smooth. There was not a hoofprint on it, not one sign that the Indians, the cowboys, the soldiers, the vaqueros, the Deadwood stage, the buffaloes and horses had acted out their various dramas on this circle of earth.
Charging Elk stood on the edge of the circle, not wishing to disturb its raked perfection, and looked across the wide street into the vast park. There was not a soul among the trees and rolling grass hillocks. The walkways and green meadows were empty.
He looked back across Rond Point du Prado and he saw yellow lights coming from some of the windows in the buildings above the storefronts. The light was failing now and he dreaded another night in the big town. Especially this night when the people had disappeared. Just as he felt a wave of despair grip his heart, as it had so often in the past several sleeps, he remembered the train station. It was a foolish hope, but the foolish hopes seemed to come as often as the despair, and he realized that he had become weary with the suddenness and frequency of both emotions. Up and down, up and down went his heart until he walked numbly through the streets without a thought or feeling.
But he felt obliged to follow up on this slim chance. As he crossed the field to the street that led to the station, he noticed that his fuzzy slippers had become wet with dew. He almost chuckled at this latest problem. Wakan Tanka was not content with just the hunger and weakness of his pitiful child—now he was giving him cold feet. Charging Elk looked up at the sky to beseech the Great Mystery and he saw rain clouds where once had been sun. Nevertheless, he stood at the edge of the field and sang a song of pity and prayed with all his heart that Wakan Tanka would guide him home to his people, to his own land. He asked for a little food too. Then he began to walk again.
And he could not believe what had become of him in such a few short sleeps. Just a little while ago, he had been on this very street, dressed in his finest clothes—dark wool pants with painted white stripes, black sateen shirt with his father’s hairpipe breastplate over it, brass earring and armbands, and two eagle feathers hanging from a beaded medallion in his hair. His badger-claw necklace hung around his neck, he had the holy card the French woman had given him in his breast pocket, and he had painted his face with his own medicine signs and had tied three feathers in his horse’s mane, just behind the ears. He knew he was quite a sight.
He was one of over seventy Indians in the parade from the iron road to the field at Rond Point, most of them Lakotas, principally Oglalas. And they were just part of the larger procession of cowboys, soldiers, vaqueros, and wagons filled with elk, deer, and buffaloes. There was even a brass band on horseback, the Cowboy Band, filling the street with such noise that Charging Elk had to keep his horse’s head high and back to keep him from skittering all over the cobblestones. Still he couldn’t help feeling a great pride that he was part of such a spectacle. People were lined up in throngs on the broad walkways on either side of the street.
Of course, Buffalo Bill rode at the head of the procession on his great white horse, waving his big hat and bowing to one side of the street, then the other. Annie Oakley, the one Sitting Bull had named Little Sureshot, and her husband and the big bosses rode behind him. Then came the cowboys, some with the woolly chaps, and the soldiers with their neat blue uniforms and the vaqueros with their big upturned hats. And finally, the Indians, led by Rocky Bear, who had been designated chief by the bosses. From the Paris shows, Charging Elk knew that next to Buffalo Bill, the audiences wanted to see the Indians most. They called the Indians Peaux-Rouges—redskins. When the Indians rode by, the people whooped and pointed at the dark painted faces. Some of the women threw flowers, but the Indians rode by without recognition of such enthusiasm.
Charging Elk remembered that day as one of the longest of his life. They had ridden the iron road all night after a performance in a big town somewhere south of Paris. It was late night when the workers finally struck the tents and grandstands and awnings, packed up the food and furniture from the large eating tent, shut off the generators, and took down the lighting and the immense rolls of canvas backdrop painted with endless scenes of mountains and plains and rivers and villages and forts. They disassembled the booths and seemingly hundreds of other small structures and took it all by wagons to the train station. There they loaded up the thirty-eight big wagons of the special train with equipment and animals and human beings for the all-night trip.
Some of the Indians complained because they had been to this side of the big water before and they knew that, unlike the white performers and crew, they were riding in third class, where the benches were harder and the wagons noisier and rougher. Charging Elk noticed that Rocky Bear was not among them. On this side of the water, the big bosses treated the chief well because the French people liked him better than the Americans had and considered him a noble leader. But the bosses didn’t hesitate to lodge the other Indians in the last wagon before the animals and equipment. Even Featherman, the iktome who joked, grumbled as he tried to stretch out on a bench.
The show had reached Marseille an hour before first light and all the wagons were unloaded and the equipment was taken to the field to be set up. Charging Elk had been surprised to see the crowd of people watching the predawn activities.
By then Charging Elk was a seasoned performer. The show had not only played in the American town of New York, but had played for close to seven moons in Paris. He was used to the curiosity of the big town people—in both New York and Paris, they had wandered among the lodges of the Indian village, watching the women cook or sew or repair beadwork. They stood over the squatting performers and watched them play dominoes or card games. Some even entered family lodges, as though the mother fixing dinner or the sleeping child in its cradleboard were part of the entertainment. Rocky Bear said that Buffalo Bill and the other bosses approved of this rudeness because it made the people hungry to see the Indians in the arena.
At midmorning, the performers lined up to begin the parade. It was a cold, gray day, and Charging Elk, like the other Indians, wore his blanket over his shoulders. He was tired and sleepy and he wasn’t looking forward to performing that day.
But when the Cowboy Band on their matching white horses broke into the song they called “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” a song he had heard hundreds of times, and the procession began to move slowly forward, Charging Elk folded his blanket and draped it over his horse’s shoulders. And by the time the Indians entered the street, and the crowd gasped and applauded, he felt a familiar shiver of excitement that made it difficult to sit his horse as calmly as he wanted. Nevertheless, he managed because he knew the French people wanted the Indians to be dignified. And too, the young Indians wished to be thought of as wichasa yatapika, men whom all praise, men who quietly demonstrate courage, wisdom, and generosity—like the old-time leaders.
As Charging Elk rode his painted horse in the procession, he couldn’t help but think how fortunate he was. Instead of passing another cold, lonely winter at the Stronghold, or becoming a passive reservation Indian who planted potatoes and held out his hand for the government commodities, he was dressed in his finest clothes, riding a strong horse, preparing himself to thrill the crowds with a display of the old ways. Of course, he knew that it was all fake and that some of the elders back home disapproved of the young men going off to participate in the white man’s sham, but he no longer felt guilty about singing scalping songs or participating in scalp dances or sneak-up dances. He was proud to display some of the old ways to these French because they
