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tell in various places.
    â€œI did once. I can’t help it if they moved.”
    â€œThey must move a lot. The bartender said they were camped an hour’s ride back just last night.”
    â€œYou can’t believe everything a bartender says.”
    â€œYou should know.”
    Half a mile farther on we spotted scattered fires in the distance, and another twenty minutes found us on the outskirts of a village of primitive lodges and skin tents. The usual menagerie of yapping mongrels heralded our arrival. Despite the racket, the dogs were all that crowded around us, snapping at the horses’ heels as we made our way through the camp. I was unprepared for this reception, or lack of it. Where I came from, a visit by whites to an Indian camp was an event worthy of note, if it was anything less than suicide. A brave who let a stranger, any stranger, within a mile of his lodge without raising the alarm wasn’t worth his feathers. We had gone a hundred yards before we came across the first sign that the place was inhabited at all. This was a boy with long black hair cropped straight across the back of his neck at the nape, wearing a bright calico shirt and new Levi’s cut down and stuffed into the tops of calf-high moccasins (the only part of his attire that could have come from inside the village), who was busy sewing up a rip in the side of a lodge covered with scraped buffalo hides. He paid us no attention as we rode up to where he sat cross-legged on the ground bent over his labors. Although he couldn’t have been older than ten or eleven, he manipulated the bone needle and gut thong with the assurance of an old squaw stitching a new ornament onto her warrior’s tunic.
    â€œWe’re looking for Pere Jac,” Hudspeth announced.
    The boy looked up uncomprehendingly. The light of the torch that blazed before the lodge fell across a set of features finer than I’d expected, set off by flashing black eyes and lashes that swept his dark cheeks. The marshal repeatedthe query, or one like it, in bastard French. After a moment the boy nodded and pointed with the needle toward the rusty glow of a large fire east of camp. Hudspeth thanked him and we moved off in that direction. The boy resumed working.
    â€œDo they all get that excited over white men?” I asked the marshal.
    â€œWhat did you expect? They’re more than half white themselves.”
    The métis, I was to learn, were no less mongrel than their pets. Also called
bois brûlés
, or “burnt wood,” because of their swarthy complexions, most were descended from Huron or Algonquin women and foreign trappers who had come west in the middle of the last century and married into the tribes. Since then interbreeding had become a way of life, until now there was precious little to separate them from the equally dark French Canadians who were prevalent in the area. Nevertheless they retained their essentially Indian ways. They were nomadic and depended for their existence almost entirely upon the buffalo of which they were undisciplined butchers. They also knew every rock and bush in Dakota territory by its first name, which was the reason we were here.
    Whatever was going on inside the circle of firelight, it was receiving the full-throated approval of the colorfully clad mob that surrounded it. Their shouted encouragement was a stew of English, French, and one or two other languages I couldn’t identify. It was so loud it almost drowned out the sound of blows.
    The free-for-all was well in progress by the time we got there. In the center of the circle, cheered on by the howling spectators, half-naked men shining with the sweat of their exertions wrestled and fought in a tangled throng, grunting, snarling and muttering oaths in a variety of tongues as colorful as their audience’s garb. Kicking seemed to be in, as was biting and eye-gouging. It was an elimination contest. Every now and then a man battered and