“I was a hunter. I was a soldier for my people. What did I know about planting seeds?” He sighed, and unfolded his arms. “And so we left the lands of my youth and came across the Big Greasy, hoping to find a life here among our old enemies.”
Storm Arriving leaned in to speak. “But now the vé’hó’e have come across the Big Greasy. Now they are in our lands.”
“Yes,” Knee Prints by the Bank said. “And they will take your land. Hill by hill and tree by tree.” He pointed to Two Roads and the others in turn. “They will take your land, and push you back, farther and farther. And you will give up that land for their promise of peace, and then they will come again, and you will give up more land. You will give up land until you can give no more, until you have to fight them, but by then you will be too tired and too sick, and you will have no more room to move because the vé’hó’e will be all around you.”
The lodge was silent but for the hissing of green wood in the flames. The men sat, thinking, and Storm Arriving hoped that what they heard had upset them as much as it had him.
“Two Roads,” he said. “Honoring the spirits and Maheo’o is fine. But let us do so while we act.”
The leader of the Kit Fox soldiers took a slow breath; his quiet way of asking for the attention of the others. “I think,” he said evenly, “that we should move, and move quickly. We must send riders to the other bands now, before the spring comes, and we should speak to our northern neighbors, before the vé’hó’e send bluecoats against us.”
The others concurred, even Long Braid.
“Good,” Two Roads said. He rose, and all stood with him. “My thanks to you, Knee Prints by the Bank, and to your family. I would like to send my daughter to you, if I may. It seems that you have not been shown the best places to gather deadwood for your fires.”
Knee Prints by the Bank stood a little bit taller. “We would welcome the instruction.”
They left, and headed back across the snows. “Spread the word,” Two Roads told them. “Tell your friends and neighbors what you have heard here. We shall pay heed to the word of the Council and the peace chiefs, but we neglect the necessities of war at our peril. We meet again at sunrise.”
With that last phrase, Storm Arriving knew that he had been successful, for to meet at sunrise was to meet for action. This winter would not pass before the Kit Foxes were in action.
At the sledding hill, they separated, each heading back toward his family and colleagues. Whistling Elk gave him a quick hug before loping off to spread the word. Storm Arriving headed back alone toward the lodge where One Bear still conferred with his like-minded friends, for it was among One Bear’s family that Storm Arriving made his home.
He walked up to the main lodge but hesitated. From within, he saw the light of a low fire. On the lodgeskins, he saw the shadows of those men who had remained behind. He heard their voices, speaking in quiet conversation, still deliberating the details of their decision.
There was no point to his reentering that discussion. They had all made their choice; they had all selected the path they would take. For One Bear’s faction, they chose the course of prayer and inaction. For Stands Tall in Timber—and now for Two Roads as well—it was the path of movement, of change, and yes, of war. But Storm Arriving was not worried by war. He had walked the path of war since his youth, working to keep the lands of the People free from incursions, and to weaken the threats from other tribes and from other races. Crow People, Wolf People, or vé’hó’e, it made no difference.
War was war.
He walked away from the meeting place and headed toward his own lodge. It glimmered with firelight, and the designs he had painted on the skins—handprints over lightning bolts and hailstones—rippled like living shadows. He pulled open the doorflap and stepped inside.
Speaks While Leaving sat near the hearth, tending the fire. Her hair was loose across her shoulders, as she liked to comb it through before she bedded down for the night. Close at hand lay their daughter, the infant Blue Shell Woman, swaddled in skins and furs, with only her rounded cheeks and brow visible in the firelight.
But Speaks While Leaving did not look up to greet him as he entered, and Storm Arriving knew that this was not a good sign.
“What have you done?” she asked him as she poked at the sleepy coals with new wood. Her hair fell across her cheek and breast, dark as the breath of night, and all he could see of her face was the breadth of her brow, the depth of her eyes, and the strong line of her nose. She was no longer young—neither of them was—but the firelight was her disciple, and when it touched her features, she was no more than twenty summers old. Watching her, gazing back into flame-lit time, he remembered their courtship and the difficulty it had brought, for not only had Speaks While Leaving been the daughter of a chief, she had also been touched by the spirits and given to visions of great power. In courting her, he had risked the displeasure of both worlds.
But courted her he had, and despite a seven-year argument during which neither of them spoke to the other, they had eventually reconciled, married and, in time, created a daughter.
A daughter he wanted to keep safe. A daughter he wanted to see grow and thrive, and, in years to come, marry and have a child of her own.
“I have convinced Two Roads that we must move before the spring thaws.”
She glared at him with angry eyes, an affront he would have accepted from none other than his wife. “You have committed yourself to leaving us again,” she said. “To leaving your wife and child behind, while you place yourself in danger.” She hugged her knees and rocked gently, back and forth. “How long will you walk the path of war? Why must it always be you who leads them into battle? Why won’t you leave fighting to the younger men?”
He knew this was difficult for her; it was difficult for him as well, but he did not think she would believe him if he said so, and so he did not say it. “I lead them,” he said instead, taking another route, “because younger men do not know how to fight.” She looked up, wondering what he meant, and he continued. “If I left everything to them, they would go out to fight, and they would die. They would die because they do not know how to fight properly.” He shrugged, wanting her to understand. “I am needed, for as long as the vé’hó’e enter our lands, if for no other reason than to make sure our soldiers fight their best, and stay alive as long as they can.”
“But what of us?” she asked him. “What of your daughter? What of me? How shall we live without you here?”
“You have your family,” he said. “Your father will be here. He has decided against the path of war.”
“But I don’t care about them. I want you here!”
“Why?” he asked, exasperated, torn between duty and family. He pointed out beyond the skin walls. “Haven’t you heard any of the people who have been coming up to me, asking that I go back out to war? They ask for vengeance. They ask me to bring back the hands and ears and scalps of the men who killed their own. They ask me to go out and even the tally for their losses. And it will be an honor to do so. Why are you not like a normal wife, begging me to go out against the bluecoats? Why do you want to keep me here like an old man instead of out fighting for our land and our pride?”
She wept openly, and her words were broken by sobs. “I want you here...because I...because I am...afraid.”
“Of what?” he said, pushing on her hurt with his own. “What are you afraid of? That I might gain favor among your clan? That some might come to esteem me more than your father? Or that they might esteem me more than you?”
“No!” she cried.
“Then what? What are you afraid of?”
“I am afraid that you might not come home!” she said in one agonized wail. “I want you here. With our daughter. With me. I want you here.”
“And I cannot be!” he shouted at her. “The vé’hó’e send the bluecoats against us. Last year it was small raids of ten and twenty men, but this year it will be more. I cannot be here because I must go
out to meet them, to stop them before they reach you and our daughter.”
She looked up, and he saw the gleaming streaks of tears on her cheeks. She stared up through the smokehole at the nexus of the lodgepoles. “This is not right,” she whispered. “This is not what my vision showed me.”
“Eya!” he said. “Your vision.” When she spoke of her visions, there was no argument that he could bring against it.
“Yes,” she said, her sorrow turning to anger. “My vision. My vision of the yellow metal that we mined, and of the Iron Shirts. Not a vision of killing bluecoats, or of slaughtering vé’hó’e while they sleep.”
Her scorn hurt but did not dissuade him. “You have your visions, my wife, and I have mine.”
“But your visions are wrong!”
He turned away from her and refused to look back.
“I did not mean that,” she said, knowing she had gone too far. “I meant only that....”
Still he did not look at her. “I will not risk your life, or our daughter’s life, on any vision, yours or mine.”
“Yes,” she said. “I understand. But I only ask, do not do anything right away. Wait until One Who Flies returns.”
“Why?” he asked. “So he, too, can tell me that I am wrong?” He stood and walked out of the lodge, not caring even to close the flap after him. He stalked off into the snow and the cold and the darkness, but with every step he felt her questions and her doubts follow him.
Her visions. All her life she had been given them, and all her life she had been proven right, in time. Visions of storms, of raids, of floods, and droughts. She had foretold the cloud-that-fell and the coming of One Who Flies, and of his helping the People to overcome the bluecoats.
But where was he now? Where was One Who Flies? It had been over a moon since riders had come in with news of his release from the vé’ho’e prison. But though he had returned to Alliance lands, no one from any of the bands had reported seeing him.
Storm Arriving knew that his wife was worried for their friend, worried because of her affection for him, but also because of his tie to the realization of her visions. She had never been wrong, in the more than twenty years since the spirits first came upon her. But now, with One Who Flies long overdue, and another year of war with the bluecoats ahead, her vision that tied him to the Iron Shirts was in doubt. For the first time, she was looking at the failure of one of her visions.
It does not matter, he told himself. I cannot decide what is right based on her visions. I must decide based on what I see, and on what I know. And I know that the bluecoats are coming, and that we must make our land clean of them.
He turned back toward his lodge. He had to pack his things, if he was to leave with Two Roads in the morning.
Chapter 5
Big Hoop and Stick Game Moon, Waning
Fifty-seven Years after the Star Fell
Winter Camp of the Closed Windpipe Band
Alliance Territory
Speaks While Leaving stood in the dawn light, an elk hide draped over her shoulders and over the cradleboard she carried on her back. The hide kept both her and her infant warm, but it was the elk’s spirit that kept her calm. The sun’s light poked through the dark pines and touched the golden fur, awakening the elk’s lingering memories of open fields and green grass, filling Speaks While Leaving with the echo of peace. She sighed, and her breath hung in the air, as still as a cloud in the flat rays of sunrise. Mouse Road, her husband’s sister, stood beside her, silent, sullen, and yawning, having been kept up most of the night by the wolf songs sung by the warriors who, with her brother, were now preparing for yet another ride on the path of war.
The men tied bundles across the backs of their whistlers, the large, lizard-like mounts that would carry them on their journey. They packed furs and blankets for warmth, satchels of food and supplies for sustenance, and both traditional and vé’ho’e weaponry. They carried knives, lances, hatchets, or clubs, each item a deadly tool beneath the decorations of fur, beads, and feathers. Some men also tied on the horn-and-sinew bows and the full quivers that in the past had been the mainstay of a soldier’s power, but which were now falling into disuse, having been supplanted by the weapon that no man was without: the Winchester repeating rifle. The vé’ho’e rifles, plundered from a hundred raids and battles against the bluecoats, were crucial to the Alliance’s ability to defend itself against the vé’ho’e incursions.
As they strapped these tools of war across their whistlers’ backs, medicine men walked among them, treating the mounts. These old, patient men would dig two fingers into a deerskin pouch and put a powdered pinch of dried whistler-medicine root in the whistler’s mouth. Then the man would put a second pinch in his own mouth, moisten it, spit it into his hand, and rub it along the whistler’s muzzle and bony crest. If the whistler shook his head, the treatment had worked, and the mount would prove long-winded and spirited in battle.
But when Stands Tall in Timber arrived with his wife, Shining Hair, who carried the bundle with the Sacred Arrows, everyone fell silent. The Sacred Arrows were gifts from the spirit world brought to the People ages ago by Sweet Medicine. Shining Hair carried them in a quiver of coyote fur that was wrapped in the hide of a four-year old buffalo killed with a single arrow, and she held them as she would an infant, cradled in her arms.
Stands Tall in Timber and Shining Hair walked among the soldiers. At each man, they stopped and allowed the soldier to speak to the Sacred Arrows, for any word a man said to the Arrows was heard by the spirits. The soldiers prayed to the Arrows for health, for victory, for glory, and Speaks While Leaving heard their prayers as clearly as if they were speaking directly to her. The clearing smoked with the power of the Arrows, the prayers, and the emotions of parting families.
Whistlers groused and squalled at the cold while the quiet ceremony moved from man to man. Some of the beasts fluted in anticipation, sending their rising tones through the long, bony crests that curved back from their heads. They changed the colors of their skin. The drakes flashed aggressive bars of white and crimson along their snouts, while the hens mottled their flanks with stripes of grey and dark green, camouflage amongst the snowy trees.
As Speaks While Leaving watched the solemnities, she had to admit that the war party was a fine sight. The men were the prime of the Closed Windpipe band, and comprised of men born to the tribe as well as some of the Wolf and Fox People who had come across the Big Greasy. They were adorned with tall feathers that shivered with every step and furs of rich colors: chestnut otter, white stoat, grizzled marmot, the contrasting stripes of badger, and the golden richness of elk. Earrings of silver and copper winked in the dawn, and shells and claws rattled from necklaces and pectorals. Fifty men, from eighteen to forty summers old, all strong, lean, and fierce of eye. She felt a tightening of her throat. Though the least among them was a man to be feared, that would not save them all. The shadow of war was with them and it would not let them return unmarked.
Finally, Stands Tall in Timber stood before Storm Arriving. Speaks While Leaving saw her husband stand proudly, as leader of the war party, and then turn to retrieve a small parcel from within the packs on his whistler’s back. He opened the deerhide and revealed four eagle tailfeathers, a gift for the Arrows, which he presented to their keeper. Stands Tall in Timber accepted the gift in his left hand, went to one knee, and rubbed his right hand on the ground. He passed his hand over the gift twice, then switched hands and repeated the motion with his left hand. Standing, he gave the gift back to Storm Arriving and told him to tie it to the sacred bundle. He turned to Shining Hair, and tied the feathers to the bundle with a thin strip of leather, speaking to the Arrows as he did.
“Please keep the People safe,” he asked them. “And give us the courage to succeed.”
Stands Tall in Timber put his hands on Storm Arriving’s shoulders and then, smiling, turned and began to sing an old war path wolf song. The others all joined him.
Take courage.
Do not be frightened.
Follow where you see me riding.
My whistler will sing us home.
The singing faltered, and everyone turned.
“Eya,” Mouse Road breathed, and sidled up next to her sister-in-law, hiding.
Speaks While Leaving looked and saw a group of men approaching the soldiers, their feet crunching through the snow. Leading them was her father, One Bear, his face dark with suppressed emotion. With him were the other peace chiefs of the band, faces seamed by old age and new worries. They walked up to Stands Tall in Timber, who stood with Storm Arriving.
“Do not do this,” One Bear said without preamble.
“I cannot send them out without protection,” said Stands Tall in Timber.
“It is not what needs to be done.”
“How can you know?” Storm Arriving asked him. “We are faced with an enemy the likes of which we have never seen. How can you know what needs to be done? Have the ma’heono come to you and shown you what needs to be done? Do you have visions now like your daughter?”
Every man was silent, made suddenly aware that Speaks While Leaving was among them. She said a prayer to the great spirits who had sent her visions of the future.
Do not ask me, she prayed.
One Bear turned to his daughter, and she saw on his face the realization that he had not, in all his deliberations, in all his long discussions, ever thought to ask her opinion on the subject. Never had he asked her which of the two paths fit best with the vision the ma’heono had given her.
The Cry of the Wind Page 5