Farther in the distance, Bouyer saw a scaffold mounted in the branches of a young tree. A body, a small body, was up there. Crazy Horse was shifting his gaze between the woman’s image in front of him and the funeral scaffold with the same strange look.
His left arm exploded, ripping his attention from the man. How could cold steel cause such heat? Bouyer wondered with the dwindling sanity left to him. Agency steel. He would have laughed if he could have. Agency steel and cavalry leather.
The warrior held up the knife, showing Bouyer the red blood dripping off the blade, his blood, then lowered it. Bouyer felt the tip touch just below his sternum. He sucked in his stomach, desperately trying to pull away from the blade, the rough wood of the pole he was bound to scraping along his back.
He screamed again as the point punctured skin with a ripping noise. He felt his stomach muscles part. The warrior held a handful of thick, knotted red rope under Bouyer’s face. It took Bouyer a second to realize those were his guts. The warrior yelped-and walked back toward the nearest fire, pulling Bouyer s intestines with him and dropping what he had into the fire.
Mitch Bouyer woke to utter darkness and a feeling of being buried alive, his scream echoing back right at him. He blinked several times, but there wasn’t the slightest hint of light. After a lifetime on the frontier he had learned to trust his inner clock and he had no doubt it was after dawn, yet there was no sign of daylight.
He could feel his breath hitting something just in front of his face. He tentatively reached up and felt the wool blanket he had placed over the trench he’d dug in the snow the previous evening. It was less than four inches from his face, although it had been two feet above when he’d put it in place. It also didn’t move, as if it were weighed down by snow.
Bouyer remained still, trying to get his panicked breath Hiller control. He closed his eyes. He knew Crazy Horse was somewhere not far away. He’d always bad a sense for his half-brother’s presence. But it wasn’t his brother who he needed to go to now.
Southeast. In his mind’s eye, Bouyer could see the vast stretch of plains in that direction. Across the Colorado Territory, Kansas, into the Indian Territory just north of Texas. A river winding through a snow-covered plain. A river that ran with blood. And the officer he had seen in the dream. Bouyer knew he was down there somewhere.
Had the dream been something that would happen or something that could happen? That was the question Bouyer always had when he had a vision. As he got his breathing under control, Bouyer thought about what he had “seen” and decided it was something that could happen but shouldn’t. After all, his fate as foretold was to die nobly, not tied to the stake. Perhaps the vision was a warning letting him know that if he did not stay true to his fate, things would turn out worse.
Also, there was the Army officer. He was important.
Bouyer shoved his arms upward, the blanket and snow slowly giving way. He stood up. It had snowed during the night. And the ground was now covered with almost three feet of white powder.
Bouyer gathered his gear, wrapped it in the blanket and pushed his way through the snow to the tree where his horse was tethered. He tied off the roll behind his saddle and swung up onto the horse. The skull, still retaining a slight blue glow, was wrapped in a leather satchel underneath the bed roll.
He knew he needed to go to the southeast. But there was someplace he needed to stop by on the way. He nudged his horse’s head and began to move.
*****
Crazy Horse knew something was wrong as soon as he entered the village. He had been gone for a month, chasing Crow warriors who had stolen some ponies. During that time the village had moved, something he’d been apprised of when he met a hunting party two days ago. The movement was normal, as ponies ate grass and a village could not stay in one place for long before the available grazing was gone.
Although others in his party carried scalps, Crazy Horse, despite killing two Crow in battle, did not. His mother had told him never to partake of the custom, and. it was one of the few things she’d said that he took to heart.
No one would meet his eyes. That was what told him there was bad news. He knew Black Robe, his wife, had the white man’s wasting sickness. She’d been coughing for more than five moons now and was not expected to last much longer. As he slid off his horse in front of his lodge, he was prepared for the bad news of his wife’s death.
He threw back the flap to the lodge and paused, seeing his wife seated by the fire. Wrapped in several robes in a vain attempt to get warm. She, too, would not meet his eyes, and he felt a pain rip through his heart as he wildly looked about, not seeing his young baby girl anywhere.
“Where is she?” he demanded.
“At the last camp,” Black Robe whispered, before breaking out in a spate of coughing. “The quick draining death disease.”
Crazy Horse sunk to his knees. His only child, dead of another of the white man’s fevers. He had not seen this. Why? Why was she taken?
Black Robe finished coughing, wiping the thin stain of blood from her lips. “I am sorry.”
Crazy Horse ignored her. She was not the woman he had wanted for a wife. His face bore the scar where a bullet had punched through his left jaw when he had been with Black Buffalo Woman, the one he had always desired. But Black Buffalo Woman belonged to another man, and Black Robe had born him the one thing he had cherish above all else—his daughter.
Crazy Horse howled, the yell echoing across the village. He was cursed, of that he had no doubt. The woman he loved was with another man. The child he loved was dead. The wife he didn’t love. But lived with, was dying, and could not even look him a decent meal or bear another child.
Crazy Horse staggered to his feet. He left the lodge. Many were gathered about, wondering what he would do. He was known as a strange man. one who had visions, who often rode off alone. Who took no scalps, yet was brave in battle. Who bad pursued another man’s wife beyond the bounds of Lakota law. Who had been shot in the face because of it yet had not wreaked revenge on the man who shot him.
Crazy Horse ignored them all and jumped on his horse. He knew the previous location of the village. Almost seventy miles away. He didn’t bother to get water or food. He rode out of the village, pushing his horse mercilessly through the new snow.
*****
Bouyer felt the urge pulling him to the southeast, but he resisted it He sat cross-legged in the glade near the small stream, whispering the Lakota prayers Bridger had taught him. He heard a horse coming upstream, breathing hard. But he didn’t turn his head.
The rider stopped between him and the scaffold. Bouyer watched Crazy Horse run forward, even as his horse collapsed in the snow. The Lakota warrior climbed up the tree that held the end of the scaffold until he could look down at the small wrapped bundle tied to it. Gingerly, Crazy Horse laid down next to his daughter, holding her to his chest. Bouyer didn’t move the entire time.
And as the sun arced across the sky and day turned into night, neither man changed positions.
When dawn came, Bouyer stiffly got to his feet and gathered wood. He built a large fire and waited by it. It was late afternoon before Crazy Horse rose from the scaffold and climbed down. The warrior seemed drained to Bouyer, empty of any energy, even of the anger Bouyer bad always felt coming from his ‘’brother.’’ Crazy Horse walked up to the fire and stared into it.
“I am sorry,” Bouyer finally said.
“Why are you here?”
“I felt your pain.” Bouyer paused. “And your anger.”
“Why are you here?”
“I can always feel your anger. Sometimes strong, like the full moon, sometimes weak, like a distant star in the sky. But it is always there. This is the first time I’ve felt your pain.”
“My daughter is dead. My wife is dying. All because of your people.”
“And my people will make your people pay in turn,” Bouyer said. “Where does it end?” He didn’t wait for an answer as he angrily turned toward Crazy Hor
se. “Your anger is selfish. All you care about is how you feel. Why is it always about you? It is your daughter who is dead. You should mourn her, not be angry. But your anger makes you feel better, so you give in to it.” Bouyer reached across and slammed Crazy Horse in the chest, surprising the warrior, who staggered back a few steps. “Until you let go of the hardness in there, you will not be a great leader, nor will you fulfill your destiny. I have seen what happens to me if I do not fulfill the destiny foretold. It is terrible. I would imagine your fate would be as terrible if you do not do what is foretold.”
Crazy Horse stared at Bouyer for several seconds and then surprisingly sat down, with his back to the fire, facing the burial scaffold. “I have nothing left but my people, and I am told they are doomed, too.” He glanced over his shoulder at Bouyer. “You are going somewhere?”
“I have had a vision,” Bouyer acknowledged.
Then go. Leave me to my mourning in peace.”
THE WASHITA RIVER, INDIAN TERRITORY: 1868
“General, what if we find more Indians than we can handle?”
The object of the question spit into the snow. “All I’m afraid of is we won’t find half enough. By God, there aren’t enough Indians in the entire country to defeat the Seventh Cavalry.”
Mitch Bouyer’s expression of disbelief was masked by the scarf wrapped around his face, leaving only his dark eyes visible. He stared hard at George Armstrong Custer, the commander of the newly formed Seventh Cavalry. One of Custer’s officers had asked the question. And Bouyer thought it a valid one.
The cluster of officers, scouts and Bouyer were standing on the near side of a bluff overlooking the Washita River in the Indian Territory. It was night, but there was good visibility due to star and moonlight reflecting off the foot of newly fallen snow. They were here because a day ago one of the scouts bad discovered the trail of a war party running across the Canadian River and beading southeast toward the Washita. They were in the Indian Territory, south of Kansas and north of Texas. It was a bleak land. Scoured by wind, with few trees, usually only along the riverbeds, which were few and far between.
Custer had pounced on the report and ordered his command in pursuit. A winter campaign was something new for the Army in the west, but it was a sign of the pressure being put on the War Department by outraged civilians throughout the western territories. Particularly Kansas. Which had been hard hit by Indian raids the past couple years. There was also l report that one of the tribes in the area had white captives—women and children--which added to the urgency.
Bouyer had arrived just two days ago, after a week of hard riding from Colorado. On the second day he’d sensed Crazy Horse’s presence behind him like a trailing storm, never closing, but not falling very far behind, either. Where before the sense of his “brother’s” aura bad always been red, of anger, there was a blackness now about Crazy Horse that worried Bouyer.
He’d booked up with Custer and the Seventh at Camp Supply, an outpost on the Canadian River. He’d hired on in his usual position as hunter, something the outfit had desperately needed as it moved through the bare wintry terrain. His time with Bridger, who bad often scouted for the Army, held him in good stead with the few Army people who had some time on the frontier and remembered the old mountain man and knew anyone that bad ridden with him was an asset.
As soon as he had seen Custer, Bouyer had known not only that he was the man in his vision. But that he was also part of Bouyer’s future. It worried Bouyer greatly that such an apparently ignorant person was wrapped up in his fate, even though the exact nature of that fate still eluded him. Worse, the timing was also uncertain. Could it be today? Bouyer sensed Crazy Horse was not far away, but not close by, either. He definitely was not in the village that was Custer’s target. Bouyer knew his ‘’brother’’ was an integral part of whatever would Ultimately happen.
The crystal skull he’d been given by Earhart was in a bag tied off to his saddle, hidden by his bedroll. Despite knowing Crazy Horse wasn’t in the immediate area, Bouyer didn’t have a good feeling about what was going to happen.
The village that slept on the other side of the bluff, along the banks of the Washita, was Cheyenne, led by Chief Black Kettle. Bouyer’s brief look at it in the dark during the reconnaissance made him tend to agree with the officer who had questioned Custer--there were many lodges in the village, indicating at least a hundred warriors, along with perhaps three times that number of women and children. Also, he’d listened on the way here, to both whites and Indians he met, and Black Kettle had just gone to Fort Kearny on a peace mission. Why Was Custer so anxious to attack his camp then?
*****
Custer was issuing orders, dividing his command into four columns, directing his subordinate officers to maneuver in such a way as to surround the village and attack at dawn. Having no official position in this matter, Bouyer decided to shadow Custer. He didn’t think much of the Colonel’s tactical plan. It presumed there would be no coordinated resistance. Also, it ignored the fact that there were several other Indian camps farther upriver. Custer seemed more concerned with the Cheyenne running than fighting.
Then Custer did something that struck Bouyer as coldhearted. He had all the dogs--a common thing for a cavalry unit was to have an assortment of strays follow along on the march--killed. They were muzzled with ropes and strangled. He knew Custer was afraid the dogs might bark and give away the advance, but he could have easily leashed them out of earshot. Custer even had his own two prized dogs killed, indicating how anxious he was for a victory.
Bouyer had heard stories of the yellow-haired regimental commander. How he had his own men who deserted shot down, much like he was killing the dogs. How he’d been court-martialed for leaving his command to go to his wife two years ago at Fort Hays. How he’d shot his own horse in the head while hunting buffalo.
However, Bouyer did have to give Custer credit for one thing-leading the blue-coat cavalry out in this weather. He knew the Cheyenne would not suspect the white soldiers of doing that. Balancing that advantage was that Bouyer had seen the trails for several different tribes in the area--not just Cheyenne, but Kiowas, Comanche’s, Apaches, and Arapaho. Winter was a time when tribes had to put aside animosities and share the best places for camps. In this desolate country, the riverbed was the only option.
*****
Crazy Horse stood, throwing off the snow-covered blanket. He walked over to his pony and untethered it. Shaking the snow off the blanket, he threw it over the pony’s back and then slid on top. He headed east along the top of the bluff.
As he rode he thought of his daughter, nursing the black feeling it brought. Dead because of the white man. Not by bullet or knife, but the bad air the whites brought with them. In just one generation, the Lakota had been halved in numbers due to the bad air. The same was true everywhere he traveled. The medicine men were powerless against the diseases the white men brought with them.
Crazy Horse did not understand why the white men weren’t satisfied with the land they already had. Why did they always want more? And was there no end to their numbers?
How could his mother have talked of glory and a greater good in the midst of the destruction of her people? A greater good for whom? It could only be for the whites if his people were destroyed.
The only good Crazy Horse could see was to kill as many of them as possible.
*****
Bouyer watched as the columns separated to surround the village. Bouyer followed Custer’s column, moving on foot, leading their horses along the river bluff, keeping their, horses between them and the village, hands over their muzzles to keep them quiet.
A first sergeant next to Bouyer leaned close. “Stay by the general. You’ll see how he did in the Rebs during the war.”
Bouyer knew the first sergeant was a Custer man. The “general” reference for Custer indicated that Custer had been a brevet major general during the Civil War. By the time of the surrender at Appomattox, Custer had been leading
the Third Cavalry Division at only twenty-five years of age. But Bouyer had listened to others in the past couple days enough to know things that the first sergeant didn’t or chose not to believe. That Custer’s division had had the highest casualty numbers of all Union divisions during the war. That despite a dozen horses shot out from underneath him, Custer had never been scratched. That Custer had risen so fast in rank and had so much success that perhaps he had lost touch with soldiers he commanded and with whose blood he had won his glory.
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