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“Can you bring your bag and climb out? I need your help.”
The soldier now managed a rather sickly smile and tipped his cap in a sort of salute. “Right you are! With you in a tick,” he said, and picking up the bag, clambered over the edge of the cupboard.
“Stand on my hand,” Omri commanded.
The soldier did not hesitate a moment, but swung himself up by hooking his free arm round Omri’s little finger. “Bit of a lark, this,” he remarked. “I won’t half enjoy telling the fellows about this dream of mine in the trenches tomorrow!”
Omri carried him to the spot where Little Bull sat on the carpet holding his leg which was still bleeding. The soldier stepped down and stood, knee-deep in carpet-pile, staring.
“Well, I’ll be jiggered!” he breathed. “A bloomin’ redskin! This is a rum dream and no mistake! And wounded, too. Well, I suppose that’s my job, is it – to patch him up?”
“Yes, please,” said Omri.
Without more ado, the soldier put the bag on the floor and snapped open its all-but-invisible catches. Omri leant over to see. Now he really did need a magnifying glass, and so badly did he want to see the details of that miniature doctor’s bag that he risked sneaking into Gillon’s room (Gillon always slept late, and anyway it wasn’t seven o’clock yet) and pinching his from his secret drawer.
By the time he got back to his own room, the soldier was kneeling at Little Bull’s feet, applying a neat tourniquet to the top of his leg. Omri peered through the magnifying glass into the open bag. It was amazing – everything was there, bottles, pill-boxes, ointments, some steel instruments including a tiny hypodermic needle, and as many rolls of bandages as you could want.
Omri then ventured to look at the wound. Yes, it was quite deep – the pony must have given him a terrific kick.
That reminded him – where was the pony? He looked round in a fright. But he soon saw it, trying forlornly to eat the carpet. “I must get it some grass,” thought Omri, meanwhile offering it a small piece of stale bread which it ate gratefully, and then some water in a tin lid. It was odd how the pony was not frightened of him. Perhaps it couldn’t see him very well.
“There now, he’ll do,” said the soldier, getting up.
Omri looked at the Indian’s leg through his magnifying glass. The wound was bandaged beautifully. Even Little Bull was examining it with obvious approval.
“Thank you very much,” said Omri. “Would you like to wake up now?”
“Might as well, I suppose. Not that there’s much to look forward to except mud and rats and German shells coming over … Still. Got to win the war, haven’t we? Can’t desert, even into a dream, not for long that is – duty calls and all that, eh?”
Omri gently picked him up and put him into the cupboard.
“Goodbye,” he said. “Perhaps, some time, you could dream me again.”
“A pleasure,” said the soldier cheerfully. “Tommy Atkins, at your service. Any night, except when there’s an attack on – none of us gets any sleep to speak of then.” And he gave Omri a smart salute.
Regretfully Omri shut and locked the door. He was tempted to keep the soldier, but it was too complicated just now. Anyway he could always bring him back to life again if he liked … A moment or two later he opened the door again to check. There was the orderly, bag in hand, standing just as Omri had last seen him, at the salute. Only now he was plastic again.
Little Bull was calmly pulling on his blood-stained leggings.
“Good magic,” he remarked. “Leg better.”
“Little Bull, what will you do all day while I’m at school?”
“You bring bark of tree. Little Bull make longhouse.”
“What’s that?”
“Iroquois house. Need earth, stick posts in.”
“Earth? Posts?”
“Earth. Posts. Bark. Not forget food. Weapons. Tools. Pots. Water. Fire—”
There were no quarrels at breakfast that morning. Omri gulped down his egg and ran. In the greenhouse he found a seed-tray already full of soil, well pressed down. He carried that secretly upstairs and laid it on the floor behind the dressing-up crate, which he was pretty sure his mother wouldn’t shift even if it was her cleaning day. Then he took his penknife and went out again.
Fortunately one of the trees in the garden had the sort of bark which came off easily – a silvery, flaky kind. He cut off a biggish strip, and then another to make sure (how long was a longhouse?). He pulled some grass for the pony. He cut a bundle of thin, strong, straight twigs and stripped off their leaves. Then he went back to his room and laid all these offerings beside Little Bull, who was seated cross-legged outside his tepee, arms folded, eyes closed, apparently saying his prayers.
“Omri!” came his mother’s call from downstairs. “Time to go!”
Omri took out of his pocket the corner of toast he’d saved from breakfast and cleaned out the last of the corned beef from the tin. There was some corn left as well, though it was getting rather dry by now. He filled up the Action Man’s beaker with water from the bathroom, pouring a little into the pony’s drinking-lid. The pony was munching the fresh grass with every sign of enjoyment. Omri noticed its bridle had been replaced with a halter, cleverly made of a length of thread.
“Omri!”
“Just coming!”
“The others have gone! Hurry up, you’ll be late!”
One last thing! Little Bull couldn’t make a longhouse without some sort of tool beside his knife. He’d need an axe. Frantically Omri rummaged in the biscuit tin. Ah! A knight, wielding a fearsome-looking battle axe. It wasn’t right, but it was better than nothing and would have to do. In a second the knight was locked in the cupboard.
“Omri!”
“One second!”
“What are you doing?”
Crash! The axe was being used on the inside of the cupboard door!
Omri wrenched it open, snatched the axe from the startled hands of the knight, who had just time for one horrified look before he was reduced to plastic again by the slamming of the door. Never mind! He had looked most unpleasant, just as knights must have looked when they were murdering the poor Saracens in Palestine. Omri had very little time for knights.
The axe was a beauty, though. Shining steel, with a sharp edge on both sides of the head, and a long heavy steel handle. Omri laid it at Little Bull’s side.
“Little Bull—”
But he was still in a trance – communicating with his ancestors, Omri supposed. Well, he would find everything when he came to. There was quite a trail of spilt earth leading behind the crate. Omri flashed down the stairs, grabbed his anorak and his lunch-money and was gone.
6 (#ulink_58257471-1b78-55eb-93fc-344f62cdf160)
The Chief is Dead, Long Live the Chief (#ulink_58257471-1b78-55eb-93fc-344f62cdf160)
He got to school early by running all the way. The first thing he did was to head for the upper school library shelves. He felt that a Ladybird book on Indian tribes would not meet the situation; he wanted a much more grown-up book. And to his joy, he soon found one, under the section labelled ‘Peoples of the World’ – a book called On the Trail of the Iroquois.
He couldn’t take it out because there was nobody there to write him down for it; but he sat down then and there on a bench and began to read it.
Omri was not what you’d call a great reader. He couldn’t get into books, somehow, unless he knew them already. And how, as his teacher never tired of asking, was he ever going to get to know any more books until he read them for the first time?
And this On the Trail of the Iroquois was not exactly a comic. Tiny print, hardly any pictures, and no fewer than three hundred pages ‘Getting into’ it was obviously out of the question, so Omri just dipped.
He managed to find out one or two fairly interesting things straight away. Iroquois Indians were sometimes called ‘The Five Nations’. One of the five were the Mohawks, a tribe Omri had heard of. They had indeed lived in longhouses, not wigwams, and their main foods had been maize and squash (whatever they were) and beans. These vegetables had, for some strange reason, been called ‘The Three Sisters’.
There were many mentions of the Algonquins as the Iroquois’ enemies, and Omri confirmed that the Iroquois had fought beside the English while the Algonquins fought for the French some time in the 1700s, and that both sides had scalped like mad.
At this point he began to get really interested. The book, in its terribly grown-up way, was trying to tell him something about why the Indians had done such a lot of scalping. Omri had always thought it was just an Indian custom, but the book seemed to say that it wasn’t at all, at least not till the White Man came. The White Man seemed to have made the Iroquois and the Algonquin keen on scalping each other, not to mention scalping White Men, French or English as the case might be, by offering them money and whisky, and guns … Omri was deep in the book, frowning heavily, several minutes after the bell had rung. Someone had to tap him on the shoulder and tell him to hurry in to Assembly.
The morning lasted forever. Three times his teacher had cause to tell Omri to wake up. At last Patrick leant over and whispered, “You’re even dreamier than usual today. What’s up?”
“I’m thinking about your Indian.”
“Listen,” hissed Patrick. “I think you’re having me on about that Indian. It was nothing so marvellous. You can buy them for a few pence in Yapp’s.” (Yapp’s was their local newsagent and toyshop.)
“I know, and all the equipment for them! I’m going shopping at lunchbreak; are you coming?”
“We’re not allowed out of school at lunch unless we eat at home, you know that!”
“I’m going anyway. I’ve got to.”
“Go after school.”
“No, I’ve got to go home after school.”
“What? Aren’t you staying to skateboard?”
“Omri and Patrick! Will you kindly stop chattering?”
They stopped.
At long last lunchtime came.
“I’m going. Are you coming?”
“No. There’ll only be trouble.”
“I can’t help that.”
“You’re a twit.”
Twit or not, Omri sneaked out, ran across the playground, through a hole in the fence (the front gate was locked to keep the infants from going in the road) and in five minutes, by running all the way, had reached Yapp’s.
The selection of plastic figures there was good. There was one whole box of mixed cowboys and Indians. Omri searched till he found a Chief wearing a cloak and a full feather headdress, with a bow in his hand and a quiverful of arrows slung across his back. Omri bought it with part of his lunch money and rushed back to school before he could be missed.
He showed the Chief to Patrick.
“Why get another Indian?”
“Only for the bow and arrows.”
Patrick was now looking at him as if he’d gone completely screwy.
In the afternoon, mercifully, they had two periods of handicrafts.
Omri had completely forgotten to bring the tent he’d made, but there were plenty of scraps of felt, sticks, needles and thread lying about the handicrafts room and he’d soon made another one, much better than the first. Sewing had always bored him rigid, but now he sat for half an hour stitching away without even looking up. He was trying to achieve the patched look of a real tepee made of odd-shaped pieces of hide, and he also found a way of bracing the sticks so that they didn’t fold up every time they were nudged.
“Very good, Omri!” remarked his teacher several times. “What patience all of a sudden!” Omri, who usually liked praise as much as anyone, hardly heard her, he was concentrating so hard.
After a long time he became aware that Patrick was standing over him, breathing through his nose rather noisily to attract his attention.
“Is that for my Indian?”
“My Indian. Yes.”
“Why are you doing it in bits like that?”
“To be like a real one.”
“Real ones have designs on.”
“So will this. He’s going to paint proper Iroquois ones.”
“Who is?”
“Little Bull. That’s his name.”
“Why not call him Running Nose?” asked Patrick with a grin.
Omri looked up at him blankly. “Because his name’s Little Bull,” he said. Patrick stopped grinning. He frowned.
“I wish you’d stop this stupid business,” he said peevishly. “Going on as if it weren’t a joke.”
Omri went on looking at him for a moment and then went back to his bracing. Each pair of sticks had to have another, short stick glued between them with Airfix glue. It was quite tricky. Patrick stood a minute and then said, “Can I come home with you today?”
“No. I’m sorry.”
“Why not?”
“Mum’s having guests,” Omri mumbled. He didn’t tell lies very well, and Patrick knew at once it was a lie and was hurt.
“Oh, all right then, be like that,” he said, and stalked off furiously.
The afternoon ended at last. Omri accomplished the walk home, which with normal dawdling took half an hour, in a little over ten minutes. He arrived sorely out of breath and greeted his surprised mother (“Have you developed a jetengine, or have you been expelled?”) with a lot of gasping and a request to eat tea in his room.
“What have you been up to, up there? There’s an awful mess on the floor – looks like bits of grass and bark. And where did you get that beautiful little Indian tepee? I think it’s made of real leather.”
Omri looked at her, speechless. “I—” he began at last. Telling lies to Patrick was one thing. Lying to his mother was quite something else and he never did it unless the emergency was dire. But mercifully the phone rang just then, so he was spared – for the moment. He dashed upstairs.
There was indeed a fair old mess, though no worse than he often left himself when he’d been working on something. Little Bull and the pony were nowhere to be seen, but Omri guessed where to look – behind the dressing-up crate.
A wonderful sight met his eyes. A longhouse – not quite finished, but no less interesting and beautiful for that – stood on the seed-box, whose smooth surface was now much trampled over. There were hoof- as well as moccasin-prints. Omri saw that a ramp, made of part of the bark, had been laid against the wooden side of the box, up which the pony had been led – to Omri’s delight (odd as it may seem) a tiny pile of horse-manure lay on the ramp as proof of the pony’s passing. And there he was, tied by a thread to an upright twig hammered (presumably) into the ground, munching a small pile of grass which the Indian had carried up for him.
Little Bull himself was still working, so intently that he did not even notice he was not alone. Omri watched him in utter fascination. The longhouse was about half finished. The twigs, which had been pliant ones taken from the weeping-willow on the lawn, had been stripped of their bark, leaving them shining white. Each one had then been bent into an arch, the ends thrust into the earth, and cross-pieces lashed to the sides with thread. More and more twigs (which were stout poles to the Indian) had been added, with never a nail or a screw needed, to strengthen the structure, and now Little Bull had begun to fix flakes of bark like tiny tiles, on to the cross-pieces.
