Cries from the Earth

by Terry C. Johnston

  Two Moon realized these people were like a pack of hungry mountain lions now, the scent of blood become strong in their nostrils.

  To all of those clamoring noisily around the horsemen, those most hungry for talk of war, for the joy of any victory, Big Morning repeated over and over, “This is the horse and this is the gun the young men have brought back!”

  As he shook the rifle in the air, the throng erupted anew. Then he shouted, “You must all remember that we have to fight now!”

  There at the center of the swelling crowd stood the fomenters, those who thought only of their selfish pride, men like Toohoolhoolzote and the other tewats, the shamans of the Non-Treaty bands’ Dreamer faith. These medicine men were awash in glory now.

  On all sides long-suppressed anger and resentment were boiling to the surface. Feelings of unbridled excitement at the prospect of war animated some in that growing crowd, while alarm and dismay cloaked the dark emotions of others. Only those who were overjoyed at the certainty of war could exult at this sudden turn of events in their lives. The rest knew not what to do. Where to turn. Who to follow.

  Two Moons moved along the fringe of the gathering as it continued to swell. It had taken very little time for the entire village to stream into the open—women returning from their root digging, men coming in from their work among the horses—everyone converging on the vanguard of the procession where Big Morning harangued the warriors, where many hot-blooded young men began to clamor for someone to lead them on a second revenge raid.

  Suddenly, Big Morning halted his horse in the jostling crowd and twisted around, pointing now at his younger brother. “He is the one to lead us! Sun Necklace will take us to kill those who have wronged us! Sun Necklace!”

  Immediately the warriors in the throng set up the chant: “Sun Necklace! Sun Necklace!”

  It was plain to Two Moons that it did not take much to convince Sun Necklace that he should lead the second raid. He looked over those who clamored around Sun Necklace to go along—many of them untried, untested youngsters. It was one thing to do what the three had done when the whites were not expecting trouble. It would be something altogether different now that the Shadows had raised the alarm and would be prepared for warriors to sweep down on them.

  So besides his son and Shore Crossing, Sun Necklace asked Toohoolhoolzote to ride along, then carefully selected seventeen of those whom he could count on to protect his own life in battle. Counting his brother, Big Morning, that would make for twenty-one who sprinted back to their lodges to snatch up paint and weapons, shields and bullets.

  If any man should lead this second raid, Two Moons ruminated sadly, then Sun Necklace was that man. No one had ever questioned either his courage or his judgment in battle. In fact, his reputation had been made some summers before when, along with Looking Glass and his warriors, Sun Necklace had sculpted his standing by counting many coups during a battle far away in buffalo country that pitted their friends, the Crow, against their inveterate enemies, the Lakota.

  Two Moons saw the young man headed his way at a sprint now, eager anticipation written on his smooth, unlined face. He put out his hand to stop the youngster.

  “Stick-in-the-Mud, you have been asked to go on Sun Necklace’s raid?”

  The man nodded, his eyes wide, bright with exhilaration. “We will strike back now, after all these winters. We will give back blow for blow!”

  He let Stick-in-the-Mud go.

  As he turned and watched with misgiving, Two Moons noticed that none of the young men of the Wallowa band were clamoring to join Sun Necklace’s war party.

  It is good, Two Moons brooded. They must realize how terrible it would be to make themselves a part of this blood-letting after their chief has worked so tirelessly to hold war at bay.

  “Where is Joseph?”

  Two Moons turned to find the old woman, Tissaikpee, the midwife to Joseph’s woman, stopping at his elbow when she asked her question.

  He said, “He is across the Salmon.”

  Tissaikpee wagged her head. “He is not part of making this war, is he?”

  “No.” Two Moons explained, “He and Ollokot went back to butcher some cattle so they would have plenty of meat for their families before we go on the reservation in two days—”

  Then he stopped talking suddenly, realizing what he had just said. And he recognized the dismay clouding the old woman’s face.

  “But now…,” and his voice trailed off for a moment, “now we won’t be going to the reservation.”

  She said nothing more to him but turned slowly away, raising her arms to the sky and beginning to wail as she started back to the birthing shelter.

  For many, many seasons now, these bands had been suffering outrages at the hands of the whites. Two Moons realized that this call for war was not a sudden and unexpected event come with the return of the three brash young instigators. No, because of all the wrongs that had been done them, these Nee-Me-Poo people had been made ready for a long, long time. And now that they were enjoying their last few days of freedom, talking of the old life, celebrating as they would never celebrate again—these Nee-Me-Poo had grown angrier and angrier.

  They were a people who were hardened for war by years of abuse and deceit. But Two Moons knew they were also a people in no way prepared for what this war would do to them.

  “Joseph,” he whispered sadly under his breath as he turned from that tumultuous gathering of the warriors who were beginning to return from their lodges, young men eagerly streaming toward Sun Necklace with their ponies and their weapons. “Joseph, where are you now that your people need your steady hand?”

  Without him here, Two Moons knew, the war fever would run amok. Without Joseph here to talk for those who could not defend themselves, the brash, strutting, bellicose war-talkers had no one to cool their ardor.

  Two Moons felt his eyes sting as he watched Sun Necklace and the strident Toohoolhoolzote lead the war party out of camp, headed south from Tepahlewam for White Bird Creek and the Salmon River settlements.

  He felt his heart grow heavy as he trudged away from the throngs, watching a woman here, and a woman there, hoist herself up on the back of an old, steady travois pony to yank the lacing pins from the front of her lodge. One by one, the women yanked those long, peeled shafts from their holes, slowly unfurling the heavy buffalo hides … preparing to flee this place at first light.

  A short while after the bold war chief and the brazen tewat led the raiders out of camp, White Bird and Looking Glass called for another council. Some who were already infected with the war fever protested that the question had been settled. There was nothing left for the chiefs to debate. War was at hand. All that was left to do was prepare for the soldiers.

  Yet steady hands like Old Rainbow cautioned reason and restraint. By the time a gibbous moon had risen and the council dispersed, most of the leaders had decided it best to wait and see what the white men would do now. There might yet be a chance for peace.

  And if all hope for peace was ruined, the least they could do was pray that their best warriors would return from the buffalo country soon.

  But, no matter what, they had to abandon Tepahlewam now. Evil had visited this place. Some expressed that they would return to their homes in the valleys far from this once-sacred ground, and others said they would climb higher into the mountains now, making it harder for the soldiers to find them. Come morning, they would finish striking their lodges and go.

  No telling how Sun Necklace’s war party would tear through the white settlements now, making all the more trouble for the Nee-Me-Poo.

  Two Moons needed to find Joseph, to bring the chief back before the clans scattered to the winds. Dispersed in those small bands, the soldiers would easily slaughter them, Two Moons realized. With so many of the chiefs pulling in so many different directions, thinking only of war and fighting—they needed Joseph here now to think about the good of the women and children.

  But by the time the council broke up
it was too dark for him to start for the Salmon. In the gray before morning came, the old man decided, he would ride for the river. This might well be the only chance the Nee-Me-Poo had to make some kind of peace with the Shadows.

  Joseph was a patient talker, an accomplished diplomat. If any man could fashion something out of this tragedy, Joseph would.

  Chapter 12

  Season of Hillal

  1877

  Joseph found it hard to sleep that last night of their trip to the Salmon. He tossed beneath his blankets, mostly lay staring up at the starry sky dusted with clouds—thinking of Ta-ma-al-we-non-my back at Tepahlewam.

  Any day now she was due to deliver their child.

  Her name meant Driven Before a Cold Storm, and he grew so anxious to get back to her that he finally decided that it was futile to try sleeping any longer. Arousing the others in the cold darkness, Joseph spurred the two women into packing up their blankets and the small hunting lodge, while he helped his brother and the four other men load the butchered beef onto a trio of travois and the backs of several packhorses.

  Joseph’s party had been here beside the river for the better part of six days, having returned to the east bank of the Salmon from the rendezvous meadow by the lake to slaughter some of the cattle the Wallowa band had left behind to graze in the tall grass after they crossed the river in their journey to Tepahlewam, and eventually to the reservation. When they abandoned this wandering life Joseph and Ollokot wanted to have plenty of meat for their families. There was no way of telling what they would face when they crossed the Lapwai boundary tomorrow.… There it was again.

  That word—tomorrow.

  Up from the Salmon he led the party, climbing the steep slopes that carried them ever higher toward the Camas Prairie, where the Nee-Me-Poo women were harvesting this season’s crop of kouse and camas roots they came to dig from the ground early every summer near the Split Rocks. Reaching the entrance to the Rocky Canyon, Joseph turned and gazed back at the others strung out along the wide trail the Wallowa had used for countless generations. But this was to be their last journey here.

  Good that his child should be born free, in these final days before their freedom would be no more.

  Catching his breath, he watched Ollokot’s wife, Wetatonmi, and Joseph’s own nearly grown daughter, Hophop Onmi, whom he had named Sound of Running Feet because of how the tiny one had loved to run about with wild abandon as soon as she had learned to remain stable on two feet. With those two women and their three travois ponies walked Welweyas, the half-man, half-woman of the Wallowa who for nearly all his life had preferred to wear the traditional dress of a woman.

  Farther back down the trail came the men with the nine other horses laden with beef: Joseph’s old friend, Half Moon, and his young nephew, Three Eagles; also the warrior whom missionaries had once given the Christian name of John Wilson before he abandoned the white man’s faith for good, returning to the reservation and the Dreamer religion. Behind them all rode Ollokot, bringing up the rear protectively.

  Joseph smiled in the gray light of day-coming. He did not have to see Ollokot’s face to know for sure who it was at the end of the procession. It would be his brother. They made an able pair, these two, he realized again. He himself always stepped to the fore, to be the first into whatever his people confronted. And Ollokot—his loyal, steadfast brother—always saw to it that the rear was protected, that no stragglers were left behind in the march, that … that no one could attack those at the end of the column without suffering his wrath.

  They really were two of a kind, he decided as he put his pony into motion, starting into the canyon of the Split Rock. Both of them knew that should they be required to offer their lives up for their people, each of these brothers would willingly give that ultimate, and most sacred, sacrifice for the Wallowa band.

  When they reached the camp, Joseph decided he would let the others continue on to Ollokot’s lodge with the travois and those quarters of butchered beef. But he himself would peel off and hurry for the squat separation lodge a Nee-Me-Poo woman would erect away from the rest of the village when she was nearing her time to deliver.

  Closer and closer he felt himself drawing to her now at this hour when she might need him most. Close enough that the faint smell of woodsmoke tickled his nostrils. Some of the bands must already be up and rekindling breakfast fires.

  But when he studied the eastern sky ahead Joseph realized it was far too early for the camp to be rising for the day. There was no reason to make an early march; there was nowhere for them to go for this one last day of freedom. Strange that he should smell woodsmoke this early. But perhaps it was only the remnants of last night’s lingering fires rising from the lodges, fanned to a fury while the people sang and danced, courted and coupled, before the Nee-Me-Poo fell upon their robes for that next-to-last night of freedom.

  Each time Joseph thought about it—and he could really think of little else except the child’s coming—Joseph sensed an immense pain in his heart. So he did his best to push aside the utter sadness of these last steps toward the reservation, these last steps away from all that their life had been … thinking of the child that was coming to them. Be it a boy or be it a girl, this infant would not live the freedom its parents knew, but it would certainly know love—

  “Thunder Traveling!”

  Suddenly he was aware of the horseman riding out of the brush ahead, bursting into view on the trail taking them to Tepahlewam. It had to be one of his people, to call him by his given name rather than the Shahapto, or white, Christian name first given to his father. Like most of the Wallowa, Joseph had renounced the white man’s religion when it failed to protect his people from the greed of those pale-skinned Shadows who first brought the Book of Heaven to the Nee-Me-Poo, along with plows to cut up the ground and their shovels to scratch for gold.

  “Two Moons!” Joseph cried with no little joy. It was good to see this long-time friend, an older warrior and respected counselor. “You are up and about early! Going off to hunt here as the sun has barely begun its journey across the—”

  “I came looking for you,” Two Moons interrupted stonily.

  “M-me?” he stammered a moment, instantly afraid. “It isn’t … trouble for Cold Storm?”

  “No,” the older warrior said. “Your wife is in no trouble—”

  “Has she delivered our child?”

  “No, not that I know of.”

  Nonetheless, something in his belly gave him warning. “Then why do you come looking for me here before the rising sun has even entered the canyon?”

  “To bring you back from the river,” Two Moons declared. “Our people need you.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “The camp is breaking up this morning, going back to their homes—”

  “Going back?” Shaking his head in confusion, Joseph said, “We don’t have to leave Tepahlewam until tomorrow—”

  “They are fleeing. Last night they began to take down their lodges and bring in their horses—”

  “Fleeing?”

  “Some are going back to their homes,” Two Moons explained. “But others say they are planning to go higher and higher still into the mountains where the soldiers won’t find them.”

  He heard the women coming up behind him with those three laden travois, the poles scraping the canyon trail as his belly twisted with alarm. “Sua-pies? What of the soldiers?”

  Two Moons let the tragic tale pour out, from the beginning of the taunts suffered by Shore Crossing to the return of the three killers with the horses and rifles of those white men they had murdered. “As soon as they reached our camp yesterday afternoon, nearly everyone cheered what the three young men had done to cover themselves in blood to start this war.”

  “How many Shadows did these foolish ones kill?”

  “Five, I think.”

  “It—it doesn’t have to be war,” Joseph ruminated, his mind racing on what to do as Ollokot and the others came up to them. />
  Two Moons protested, “It’s too late—”

  “No, surely it’s not too late. We can go to Monteith, have him send a runner to bring Cut-Off Arm here before the soldiers come looking to punish any of us.”

  “When the murderers returned, a few in the camp began to grieve because of what we knew would happen,” Two Moons explained. “But most of the people went into celebration. Toohoolhoolzote and Sun Necklace organized a war party that rode off to seek out more of the white men who have wronged our people—”

  “How many went with them?”

  “Two-times-ten, no more than that.”

  His heart sank. Quietly he asked, “And what of old White Bird, and Looking Glass? Did they call for revenge and the blood of white men too?”

  Shaking his head, the older warrior replied, “No. They did their best to stop things—but sadly most of the young men came from White Bird’s band, the rest from Toohoolhoolzote’s.”

  Overwhelmed with despair, Joseph reached out and grabbed a handful of Two Moons’s shirt. “Did … did any of our people join this war party?”

  “Only one, Geese Three Times Lighting on the Water.”

  Releasing his friend’s shirt, Joseph only realized how angry he had become when that anger started to subside, the fire slowly being replaced by an undeniably hollow ache for what he now sensed was irrevocable, by a despair for what was now utterly inevitable.

  “Perhaps as you say, we can still make some sort of peace,” Two Moons advised gravely, the look on his face betraying his words of hope.

  “We must pray it will be so.” Joseph wanted to join in that hope with all his heart, but of all the Shadows he had known, there wasn’t one he could turn to now. Not one he felt he could trust.

  So Joseph rested his hand on the shorter man’s shoulder and told Two Moons, “But even if we talk to Cut-Off Arm and make some sort of peace with him, because of what these three fools have done—because of what Sun Necklace’s war party is on their way to do now—the white men will certainly take away everything we were going to have on the reservation. Now the soldiers will greedily strip us of what little would have been left us for our new life among the Treaty bands, just as the soldiers always do to those they defeat.”