The Story Catcher by Mari Sandoz

Author:Mari Sandoz [Sandoz, Mari]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8032-9388-5
Publisher: Nebraska Paperback
Published: 2014-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

The spring days around the trading post at the Laramie River were gay ones for the young people. There were several other Sioux and some Cheyenne and Arapaho villages camped on the worn earth, so worn that most of the horse herds were out two or three sleeps to the north and northwest, with strong warrior guard.

There were big bull trains coming up the Platte with the usual goods for the spring Indian trade, including the dark-blue blankets that the chiefs were taking up in place of the heavier buffalo robes. There were traps too, for the few beaver left, and for the otter, mink, and wolf, but these were usually loaned to the Indians, to assure the trader the pelts they caught.

After the closed-in winter, the Indians liked to wander through the trader houses in the daytime, wishing, planning. Evenings, even the older ones went to the dances in one camp or another or perhaps stopped to look in where their friend Frenchy played the fiddle and one of his helpers the pull box—the accordion—for the white man’s way of dancing, the cloth skirts of the pretty breed girls flying out as they whirled past in the arms of the white men. This year Lance kept away from both kinds of dancing and took his turn with the nearby horse herd the first night that Sun Shield camped near the traders, when no one else wanted to go. The next day he wandered around the houses a little, looking, and was ready to leave when Star Woman, whom he had taken to the Loafer village, called to him.

“For the young man who helped get us away from the whisky fighting,” she said, holding out a slender black box, the lid raised. Inside was a row of color sticks, two each of yellow, red, blue, and black. “For the drawings, the pictures.”

Lance stood holding the box, still open, just as he had accepted it from the woman. “One is thankful,” he said gravely, and backed away. He walked slowly at first, watching his limp, then faster and faster, until he was taking great leaps on his good leg. He had not known that there were such color sticks in all the world, fine bright colors, each longer than a finger.

He saw the little Ree playing with Cub and other children at the river and called to him. Lance had been warned to keep the boy hidden around the trading post, where every tribe might come, and many traders on their way to the northern posts. In the shade of a leafing cottonwood Lance tried the color sticks, the little Ree making odd designs new to Lance, pictures that he said were corn—long ovals like corn ears, but marked off by cross lines, the squares filled in with red and blue and yellow. Lance gave the boy one of the two red sticks to keep, to show his right to the colors too. Then he turned Cub over to the other

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