The People: And Other Uncollected Fiction by Bernard Malamud Page B

according to an ancient rule of the tribe. One Blossom, in torn garments, hacked off her braids with a knife and threw them into a fire that burned near where the old chief lay. When Indian Head saw her hair burning he bit his lips. Nor could Jozip bear to look at the burning braids of the beautiful young woman. She had changed; her figure was firmer, no longer plump. She lived in a world without a father. Indian Head told Jozip that she made his life joyous. Yet her eyes saddened as though she had looked at something she did not care to see.
    After two days, Tuk-Eka-Kas, wrapped in deerskin by the women of the tribe, was lifted up by the braves and laid on six long poles.
His woven bier was raised on the shoulders of four warriors, Jozip permitted among them, and it was carried to the grave site that four braves and Indian Head had dug in the earth. A dozen women followed the bier, tearing their hair, mourning, sobbing. One Blossom was among them.
    The warriors, with Jozip’s assistance, holding hemp ropes, lowered the corpse into the newly dug grave, the chief’s head turned to the east. Amen, thought Jozip; they walk to the west with their heads turned east.
    The medicine man then spoke a mournful mouthful about the old chief who now lay in his new grave. The shaman called him a noble man. Once he had confronted a mother bear hunting for a lost cub. She approached Joseph, smoking his pipe in the woods, with a roar that fluttered his eardrums; but he had frightened the bear away by blowing a mouthful of the buffalo-dung smoke into her eyes. She had galloped away, stopping only to roar at the brave chief.
    And once Chief Joseph, hunting bear in the forest, had come upon another hunter who had been struck by a fallen tree and was pinned under it. Straining to lift the huge tree and hold it off the warrior, the good chief gave the wounded man, whose head was bloody, a moment to crawl forth, and then carried him in his arms to be treated by the medicine man, who snapped his bones into place and massaged his wounded back. In a week the hunter had recovered. Thus had Joseph rescued his brother in the tribe.
    When the shaman had completed his eulogy, One Blossom tossed six of her most treasured trinkets into her father’s grave. Indian Head had contributed a long bow and six sharp arrows. He bowed to the east.
    Then several braves filled the grave, scooping up handfuls of earth, and the squaws and unmarried women wailed for the dead chief.
    Afterward an old brown dog of the tribe—he belonged to no one and used to go along with the other dogs to hunt buffalo—lay on the chief’s grave as the dead man was growing used to death. The shaman screamed at the dog but Jozip asked him to stop lest he disturb the sleep of the old chief. “The Great Spirit has sent the
animal here out of love for the good Chief Joseph. He will not take away his dog.”
    But to keep the ghost of the dead man from bringing madness to those who were still alive, the tepee of Joseph was moved fifty feet to the west. The medicine man then blew smoke from his pipe across every corner of it to remove the ghost-spirit before Jozip began to live alone in his new tepee.
    A moon passed, then One Blossom and Indian Head held a feast in the old chief’s honor, at which a pair of his worn buckskin trousers and other personal belongings were given away to five of the assembled guests.
    One Blossom gave the new chief a leather shirt that she had once made for her father, and Indian Head gave him a swift silver arrow to hunt buffalo when meat was scarce.
    After the burial ceremonies, at Indian Head’s whispered suggestion, Yozip, who now openly called himself “Jozip,” although he thought of himself still as Yozip, gathered the braves together for a long ride over the Montana mountains to hunt the fat buffalo and store smoked and jerked meat for the long winter.
    So now I am a real Indian, Jozip sadly, yet not unhappily, thought. So what can I do for my