“Let’s pray to the animal spirits, Wolf’s Blood,” Zeke suggested as he lit his pipe. “You draw your strength and wisdom from the wolf, I draw mine from the eagle. Our animal spirits were shown to us in our own separate visions. Now there has been suffering, and it is a time for hard thinking and praying, especially for you, son.”
The man drew on the pipe, then held it up to the sky in honor of Heammawihio, the Wise One Above. He exhaled the smoke, considered a breath of prayer, then drew on the pipe again, exhaling the prayer smoke as he pointed the pipe toward the earth, toward Ahktunowihio, the God Who Lives Under the Ground, then offered the pipe to the four directions, east, west, north and south, in a sacrifice called Nivstanivoo, in prayer for long life. He closed his eyes then and handed the pipe to his son, breathing deeply and allowing the spirits to fill him as his son performed the same ceremony with the pipe. The sweet odor of the kinnikinnick hung in the still air. Both prayed quietly for several minutes before Zeke finally tamped out the special tobacco and slid the precious prayer pipe into its soft, deerskin covering to protect the polished stone bowl and delicately carved cottonwood stem from scratches.
He drew the pipe bag closed and sighed. “If not for Abbie and the children, I’d go with you, Wolf’s Blood,” Zeke told the boy, already knowing there would be no stopping his son. “But I would know, just as you must already know, that it would be a pointless battle. I would go anyway, because it is right, and because a man must do those things. But I see the Cheyenne dying, Wolf’s Blood; I see all Indians dying. Those who are not shot down by white man’s bullets will die of starvation, for just as the white man kills off the buffalo, he kills off the Indian. I am sorry it cannot be like the old days for you. You will grow up in these troubled times, wanting to be part of something that is dying. It saddens my heart, but one day the choices will be made for you and you will have no control over them.”
“Then I will fight until that day comes, or until they kill me,” the boy replied staring at the flames of the small fire. “It can be no other way for me, Father, at least not for now. Perhaps in time I will be able to come home again. I cannot say.”
Zeke nodded, a lump in his throat. They had been so close over the years. From the time Wolf’s Blood was big enough to get on a horse and until the last few months when he started spending most of his time with the Cheyenne, he and his father had made a daily ritual of riding off together early in the morning, feeling the wind in their faces, galloping free and far, talking and worshiping. Wolf’s Blood had been the only child who had shown a desire to be totally Indian, and he had even participated in the torturous Sun Dance ritual to prove his manhood at the tender age of fifteen.
“You’ll never really get over Morning Bird,” Zeke was telling the boy, “just as I never got over my first wife’s death. But you are young, and you will love again. Love will do much to soothe your aching heart and ease your bad memories. Abbie has brought me great joy and warm comfort. Sometimes I feel that she has suffered from being married to me. I wish I could change that, but she loves me and doesn’t seem to mind.”
Wolf’s Blood poked at the fire with a stick. “How did you bear it, Father, finding your first wife tortured and raped, your little boy dead? I can hardly bear the thought of Morning Bird being dead, and it was so much worse for you.”
Zeke stared at the flames for a long time. “Who knows where people find the strength to bear some things. Maybe, at first, it’s anger that keeps us going. I had no thought except to find the men who did it and make them suffer … and they did, one by one, until I got every last one of them.” His dark eyes glittered with remembered hatred. “Then I knew my only hope of having a reason to live again would come from finding my Cheyenne mother, finding my people, so I came out here where I belonged. I hated Tennessee. People there treated me like something less than a dog. But I was Cheyenne, I was proud, I knew I was worth something! I lived for a long time among my own people after that, but fate often led me back into the white man’s world and I felt the same prejudices whenever I was around them … until I met your mother.” His eyes softened. “There are some good whites, Wolf’s Blood. You should remember that. Not many, but some. There’s my brother, Lance, and my other brother, Dan. There’s Bonnie Lewis, who was kind and loving enough to take Crooked Foot and adopt him and see to it that he got those operations. And years ago one of my best friends was white—an ornery mountain man called Olin Wales. I still miss Olin at times. Then, of course, there was our former ranch hand, Dooley, who died trying to protect your mother from Garvey’s men. Dooley and I had been friends for a long time.”
“But they are just a few. We both know what most whites want—this land, all of it, and they want it free and clear of Indians. To get that they will ride through us and slaughter us like animals. What I saw at Sand Creek will burn in my belly for many years, Father!”
“I know, son. That’s why I’ll not stop you if you want to go north.” He met the boy’s eyes again. “But it will bring great sadness to my heart to be apart from you, Wolf’s Blood.”
The boy blinked back tears and looked away. “It will be the same for me, Father. Yet I cannot stop myself, just as you could not keep from going after those men who killed your first wife, even though you knew every lawman in Tennessee would come after you, just as soldiers will come after me and my uncle and the others I ride with. It does not matter.” He looked at his father again. “You once told me we must all be ready to die, that to die in battle was the only honorable way. I am a good fighter, Father. I will be careful and I will not die, but perhaps it will be God’s will that I do. If so, I will die bravely and with honor, and I am ready to walk Ekutsihimmiyo.”
Zeke reached out and grasped his shoulder. “I’m sure you are. But I will pray daily for your health and safety, and for the day you come back home.”
The boy put a hand over his father’s. “And I will pray for my father. I—” He stopped talking when Zeke suddenly put up his hand to be still and looked past Wolf’s Blood toward a distant hill.
“Someone is coming,” he said quietly. “Do you feel the horses’ hooves?”
Wolf’s Blood sat quietly for a moment, then rose and began kicking out the fire. “There are not many … maybe four or five,” he said as Zeke shoved the pipe into his parfleche.
“That’s my guess, too. Whoever it is, let me handle it, son. You aren’t healed yet. Any kind of strain could break you open all over again.”
They picked up their gear and threw it on the horses, just as four men appeared at the crest of the hill. The men stopped as Zeke and Wolf’s Blood mounted their horses. For a tense moment they all just sat looking at each other.
“Don’t try to ride off,” Zeke told his son quietly. “They’ll just chase us down out of curiosity, and I don’t want you riding hard. It could kill you. Besides, if they’re going to come after us, I’d rather be facing them than riding off with my back to them. See that extra long rifle across the neck of that one horse? That’s a Sharp’s rifle, the Big Fifty. They’re buffalo hunters.”
Wolf’s Blood’s face hardened more and his horse pranced restlessly. Buffalo hunters were probably the Indians’ worst enemies. They were slowly, but surely, destroying the very livelihood of the Indian. There was not a waking, sleeping, eating, hunting or fighting moment that the Indian did not use or wear something made from some part of the buffalo. Yet with the need among white settlers and railroad workers for meat, and with the new demand in the East for hides, the whites had allowed professional hunters full rights to slaughter every buffalo they could find.
“I hope they come!” the boy hissed. “It is a good day to kill buffalo hunters.”
Zeke grinned. “I agree. But you stay out of it unless I get myself into more than I can handle. You don’t have to prove your fighting skills to me, son. You saved my life with them once down in Kansas.”
The four men moved in a slow trot down the hill, and Zeke gripped his Henry .44 rifle allowin
g it to rest casually across his lap as he waited for the men to come closer. Wolf’s Blood had no weapon. He had lost everything at Sand Creek, except for the fancy Bowie knife Zeke had given him as a gift after he’d endured the Sun Dance ritual. He gripped the knife now, reaching inside his robe but leaving it in its beaded sheath that hung on a belt about his waist. His father had taught him well how to use that weapon.
The men came within several feet of Zeke and Wolf’s Blood. All of them were unkempt. They wore buffalo robes made from hides not fully dried and cured, and Zeke could smell them from where he sat. One was a very big man, too big for the poor horse that had to carry him. He was not only tall in the saddle, but wide and fat as well. Two of the others were of medium build, and the fourth was spindly looking. When he grinned at Zeke, he had two teeth missing in front. All sported unshaven faces and hands covered with dirt and buffalo blood.
“Out for a morning kill, are you?” Zeke asked. His horse tossed its head and whinnied as the four men studied him and Wolf’s Blood, eying them as Indians, for there was nothing about the appearance of Zeke and his son to suggest white blood.
The biggest man spit tobacco juice. “That’s right, Injun’,” he replied. “But it don’t necessarily have to be buffalo we kill.” He looked Zeke up and down. “Kill a buffalo or an Injun’—makes no difference to the white folks. So I expect we’ll take back more than just buffalo hides to camp tonight.” He looked at Wolf’s Blood and grinned. “We might maybe take the young one there alive. With no women in these parts, we could make use of him.”
That was all the goading Zeke needed. He had intended to try to convince the men to move on and then just leave, but visions of Sand Creek and the filthy words of the buffalo hunter combined to trigger that part of him that was wild and savage. In a quick flash his Henry .44 fired, its barrel shining in the morning sun as a hole exploded in the big man’s throat and he flew backward off his horse. It had happened so quickly that the other three men were confused. One man’s horse reared at the sudden gunshot, and the other two whinnied and pranced backward in startled fear. In that instant, Zeke’s gun clicked as he reloaded the chamber of his lever-action rifle, and he fired again, suddenly filled with rage at the harm men such as these brought to the Indians. A second man went down. The other two men turned their horses, not expecting this sudden and skillful reaction from one man who faced four threatening buffalo hunters.
Zeke let out a war whoop and charged after the two men, who began riding off, afraid now for their own lives and not caring to stick around and have it out with the Indian. Wolf’s Blood merely laughed at the entertainment as Zeke rode down hard on one of the hunters, taking out his wicked knife and slashing out when he got close enough, ripping the blade through the man’s neck with one mighty swipe and half cutting off the man’s head. The man fell, his hand on a handgun he had been unable to get from its holster in his fright.
The fourth man whirled and managed to fire his Sharp’s rifle. A glancing blow to Zeke’s upper left arm only tore his robe and the buckskin shirt beneath it, grazing the skin, but its force literally whirled Zeke’s body, making his horse whirl with him. The animal stumbled and went down, taking Zeke with it. Wolf’s Blood saw his father go down, and his heart pounded with dread as he headed his own horse toward the confrontation, but before he got there Zeke was on his feet, too far from where his rifle had fallen to reach it before the fourth man started to fire again. Zeke saw the rifle barrel in that quick second and he dove away as the gun boomed again. He rolled to the front legs of the man’s horse and quickly rose up before the man realized Zeke was right underneath him.
Zeke reached up and literally yanked the rifle from the man’s hands, pulling the man down from the horse when he tried to hang on to the weapon. When the man was on the ground, Zeke tossed the rifle aside and stood there knife in hand, panting and grinning. The man froze and stared up at Zeke.
“Get on your feet, white scum!” Zeke growled as Wolf’s Blood rode up beside him.
“Father, are you all right?” the boy asked anxiously.
“I’m just fine,” Zeke hissed, his eyes on the buffalo hunter. “But this man won’t be for long!”
Wolf’s Blood backed off as Zeke held his arms out to his sides in a menacing stance, the big, ugly blade still gripped tightly.
“I… I don’t want no quarrel with you, Injun!” the hunter pleaded, slowly getting to his feet.
“That’s too bad, you smelly bastard!” Zeke rumbled. “Because I have a quarrel with you! The last few days have made me damned angry and I’m not about to leave you alive now to run to the soldiers and tell them who killed your friends! You can go for your gun and die like a man, or you can just stand there and die like a woman! I’ll make it easier for you. I’ll put my knife back in its sheath!” He shoved the knife into its holder and grinned at the hunter.
The man swallowed and backed up. “Look, I… I won’t say nothin’.”
“Like hell you won’t! Go for your gun, you boy-loving son of a bitch!”
Sweat poured from the buffalo hunter’s face in spite of the cold, and there was a long moment of stand-off before he finally decided the Indian was going to kill him so he’d best try to save his own hide. He went for his gun, but Zeke Monroe’s reputation with a knife was well earned. Faster than the hunter could draw and fire, Zeke’s knife was out and thrown. It landed with a thump in the man’s heart. The hunter staggered backward, his eyes wide with horror. Then he slumped to the ground, his eyes still wide and staring.
Zeke stepped forward and yanked out the blade. It had been a long time since he’d had the pleasure of ripping a deserving man from throat to belly. The vision of these men touching his son, and of their killing not just buffalo but Indians, was all the fuel he needed. The big blade tore through the man’s torso. Then the Indian in Zeke came to the forefront, and he reached down and grasped the man’s long blond hair, deftly cutting off a section of scalp.
He turned and held up the scalp to Wolf’s Blood. “Put that in your belt and take it north with you,” he told the boy, his voice still hot with anger. “Tell my brother Swift Arrow that your father is still not and never will be totally white, and that at least four buffalo hunters will not live to kill buffalo or Indians again!”
Wolf’s Blood took the piece of hair and held it up, letting out a war whoop while Zeke removed a small hatchet from his gear. He took the tool and used it to chop up and destroy the hunters’ Big Fifties. Perhaps it was only a small ripple in a large lake of more hunters to come, but he had done what he could for the time being. He shoved the hatchet back into his gear and slid up onto his horse with ease, feeling a hot sting in his left arm where the bullet had fallen short of felling its target.
“Let’s go home!” he told Wolf’s Blood. “We’ll head down and follow the Arkansas for a ways, keeping to the water so if anyone comes upon these bodies and tries to follow, they’ll lose our trail. Let the soldiers and settlers wonder who did this.” He rode up next to his son. “One good thing about being out here away from the towns is a man can still get away with self-defense without getting hung for it. I’m afraid that won’t last forever either, son. This damned open territory is getting more and more settled all the time.”
“We should leave quickly then, Father. Perhaps, if we are lucky the vultures and wolves will take care of the flesh so that anyone who finds them won’t even know who they are.” He tied the scalp into his horse’s mane. “I would have helped you, Father, if I’d thought you were in trouble. But I have seen you fight before. I was not too worried.”
Their eyes met and they both laughed lightly. It had been a good day after all. They urged their mounts into a gentle gait and faded into the hazy morning horizon.
Abbie curried down her favorite Appaloosa, after taking an afternoon ride to exercise the animal and try to free her own mind of worry. Wolf sat outside the entrance to the stables. He was not allowed to go inside because his presence spooked the horses.
The animal seemed to have an uncanny sense of what he could and could not harm, so the Monroe horses were spared his fangs.
The wolf had been home for five days now, five days of agonizing waiting for Abbie, who tried to sort out in her mind what she would do next. Should she send someone to search for Zeke? She had to have some answers soon. The afternoon ride had relieved her tension and fear only temporarily. Now as the sun began to sink, so did her hopes.
“There, Pepper,” she said softly to the mare. “Aren’t you beautiful now?” She smiled and patted the animal’s rump, admiring the perfection that Zeke Monroe had bred into nearly all of his horses. They were the man’s most valuable possession, and they were their security for the future. Abbie was graterful for Zeke’s talent with the animals; sometimes it seemed that was what kept the man going. She knew his mind and heart were heavy with sorrow over what was happening to the Cheyenne—to all Indians. But the ranch, the horses, and his large family gave him reasons to go on. Sometimes Abbie suspected if it were not for these things, Zeke Monroe would be out there with the Cheyenne, probably raiding with the worst of them, fighting to the death to keep the freedom they’d once had. That was where a man like Zeke belonged, riding free and wild, and she well knew it. Only love for his woman and the children she had borne him kept him within the confines of the ranch; and even at that, there were times when he seemed to make up any excuse to go riding off somewhere, but never for long—not since their terrible parting during those awful months he’d gone off to the Civil War. For this reason she was even more worried. She knew Zeke would come back as quickly as possible after he found Wolf’s Blood. Perhaps both of them were dead, or perhaps one or both of them were wounded.
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