by Andy Conway
Some of the men were away on a war party, when an Oglala scouting party came and told us they had seen Crow in the area. Everyone looked to the horses, knowing they would steal them if they could sneak into the camp at night. We could have moved, but it was winter and the horses were thin, and it was the time to stay put and huddle up against the cold.
I wished we had moved camp. So I might never have seen what happened.
No one slept soundly that night but the children, though I had drifted off into a dream when the first shot rang out.
I rushed out.
Others were running, knowing it was the Crow, ready to fight them.
The horses whinnied and cried in panic.
Cries of triumph from the corral.
Young braves rushed to the spot, shooting their rifles into the air, children and women following, all of us running towards the danger.
What we saw, on the edge of the corral, was the body of a Crow man who’d been shot, a red wound in the middle of his chest.
He was dead. But they did not care that he was dead.
They were hacking at his body with knives and hatchets. Men and women pushed and shoved to edge their way close to him so they could raise their weapon and hack at his dead body.
I staggered back, as if my womb had fallen out of me onto the snow.
They pulled something from him and it flew up into the air over the heads of the mob, landing in a bloody mess by me. I thought it was a branch, but there was a moccasin attached to it and a patch of smooth bark I realized was an ankle.
His leg.
They cut off the other leg, and both of his arms, and I couldn’t turn away because I’d sunk to my knees, frozen in terror and disgust. Through a gap in the bodies I saw his bloody face and a knife tear off his scalp in one neat flash of steel that sent up an ululation of triumph.
They threw the sticks they’d used to beat him with and lit a fire and began a kill dance.
The flames that shot up from the bloody sticks lit up his torso, which they strung up on the corral fence. The men began using it for target practice, shooting arrows and bullets into him. The women took his arms and legs and tied them up in the trees.
I ran from them, gagging a silent scream. Little Star chased after me, trying to explain.
“This is called counting coup. It’s a great honour!”
“They’re cutting him to pieces!” I spat.
“It’s our custom. So our enemy will have the same body in the Spirit Land.”
“I don’t care! It’s inhuman!”
“What do you think we are?” he yelled. “Docile, milk-fed spotted buffalo you whites can slaughter? We are warriors!”
I pushed him away and my arm hit him square on the nose. He stared at the blood on his fingers and burst into tears.
My tears flowed too, but I did not stay to comfort him. I ran off into the snow.
Walking up Wolf Mountain
I WALKED ALL NIGHT through the snow but did not feel the cold, burning as I was with rage and shame and horror. With each step I made, my moccasins crumping through the thick snow, I heard the knives and clubs hacking at the Crow horse thief’s body.
It was dawn before I stopped to look around me. I was far from the camp and all alone, a single speck of life in a great white frozen expanse. Through the clouds of my breath, I saw there were scars of grass far off, and woods, and the brown green smear of hills rising, and the stump of Wolf Mountain in the distance.
It drew me towards it like a beacon, beckoning, calling, urging me on, and my feet trudged their way towards it as if they weren’t connected to me. I stopped only to scoop handfuls of snow into my mouth to quench my thirst, but did not rest or sleep all day as the mountain slowly rose to fill my sight.
Within those hills lived the ‘below powers’, as the Lakota called them. These were the forces that took physical shape in the bear and the buffalo, and they could see into the future. But what use were they to me? I only wanted to see into my own past.
I had to escape the Lakota. I had to cast off Bright Star Falling and go find Katherine.
The meaningless words of my dreams became a mantra. Touchstone. Birmingham. Danny. Hudson. Mitch. Empty words. Mocking me.
As night fell, I heard the scuffling of steps behind me, panting and whimpering from several directions.
I was being tracked by wolves.
They followed, wary, hunting me down as a pack. All I had was my knife, which I used for cutting up meat and whittling branches. I could only use it once they were upon me, when it would be too late.
I grabbed a fallen branch from the ground and tested its swing. It would serve as a decent club to keep them at a distance, but it would hardly fend off a pack of determined wolves. I wondered if I might tie the knife to the end of the branch and fashion a spear, but there was no twine that I might gather quickly enough. I thought of cutting off my hair and using that to tie it.
Walking on through the snow, I sensed them getting closer, and heard one of them yelp. I didn’t know the language of the wolves so couldn’t know if it was a signal passing between them, but I sensed they were coming in for the kill. I turned and stood my ground, the branch held tightly in my hand and my breath spurting in clouds from my face.
I was tired, cold. So weak. The horror that had driven me on to the foot of the mountain now deserted me and I felt the full weight of the day and night of walking with no food or sleep.
They came from the shadows, their fangs glowing white in the dark, snarling, vile snouts slathering, circling, prowling their threat and fear.
The biggest of them was the first to rush at me, his powerful flanks pounding and a guttural snarl almost a battle cry, as he ran for me and pounced.
This was the moment of my death.
A surge of anger coursed through me. For everything that had happened and whatever cruel god had brought me to this end.
I planted the branch into the snow and cried out and was blinded by a flash of light and fell headlong into a blue void as the wolves pounced.
The ladybird and the tornado
I AM A GIRL AND I AM looking up at a brilliant blue sky.
I am girl and I am standing on a busy street in a town that I do not recognize.
I am a girl wearing a dress of blue cotton, white socks and brown shoes.
In my hand I have a coin, with an old woman’s face on it.
I do not recognize this street but it feels so familiar. I would think this was the town of my childhood, but it’s the kind of town I’ve never seen.
The sun shines brightly on a grass triangle at a crossroads. There are iron wagons that speed past without horses. Their magic is great.
The rows of buildings seem to belong to traders. Some of them have fruit and vegetables displayed outside. All have windows showing their wares.
I enter one of the shops and a bell chimes as I walk in. The shop sells newspapers and candies in brightly coloured paper, there are books too, and there is one book that calls to me, as if I have been here before and looked at it many times.
I take it from a rack and hold it in my hands.
The scene painted on the cover is a confusing jumble of colour and I focus on the red bug which sits in the top corner, as if I expect it to open its wing casing and fly away at any moment. But it does not because it is not a real bug, only a drawing.
When I look at the rest of the picture, I make out that it shows a scene of blueshirts fighting Indians. There are three Indian braves coming in from the left, one on foot holding a pistol, a shirt wearer on a white horse wearing a war bonnet, and a lance bearer riding in. There are other Indians in the background and they seem to be surrounding the blueshirts, some of whom are lying dead, others fighting desperately, one of them even using his rifle as a club.
One of the blueshirts is not wearing a blue shirt, but is dressed entirely in buckskin, with a red neckerchief at his throat. He holds two pistols and has short golden hair and a long golden moustache.<
br />
Though he looks nothing like the man I once saw, I know that he is the one we call Long Hair. Custer.
There are big letters on the cover and they say Battle of the Little Big Horn Custer’s Last Stand, and this is when I realize I am in a vision.
The shop goes dark, as if the lights have dimmed. I look to the windows. A strange yellow light outside. It is the sky that has darkened.
I rush out, the book in my hand. The wind is fierce and almost knocks me off my feet. The sky is bruised yellow. A great column of dust comes tearing down the street, ripping up trees.
It is coming for me.
Dizziness sweeps over me. I look down at the book in my hand and I see that one of the Indians is waving a club above his head, like when I fell to the plains and Little Star rode towards me, pretending to be a warrior.
The tornado rushes across the village green toward me. A swirling fury of death.
It snatches me up and I swoon through a hole in the sky, the book yanked from my hand, and I open my eyes with a yell of loss and find myself face down in the snow.
It is as if I have fallen from the sky all over again and I know that the thunder beings have taken me to the heavens to give me my vision.
I struggle to my feet and see dead wolves all around me.
Wágli
THE BRANCH I’D STABBED into the ground still stood there, charred, as if it had acted as a lightning rod and taken the thunder beings’ fork of white fire.
The wolves’ fur was singed, and the scorched tang of their flesh made me ravenous. I made a fire with dry twigs and dug the chert stones from my pouch, pounding them with frozen fingers to spark flames that eventually caught. It took a while but I got a good fire going and fashioned a spit. I drew out the knife I hadn’t needed in fighting the wolves to cut apart the largest of them that had pounced first.
His meat speared on a stick, his fat dripped into the fire and sizzled and it took all my willpower to wait for it to cook before shoving it into my mouth. I am lying. I did not wait. I cut raw flesh from him and chewed on its bloody pulp while the rest of him cooked over the fire.
As I ate and came to my senses, the fever of hunger left me. What had struck down the wolves? Had the thunder beings sent down lightning to protect me? Or had I simply been lucky? Attracted a bolt of lightning the very moment I planted the stick in the ground?
I knew it was neither of those. I knew it was a memory. Perhaps a memory of a vision. That girl was Katherine. That girl was me. That place was where I had come from.
Touchstone. Birmingham. Danny. Hudson. Mitch.
I had to get back to that place, that village green, and find out who I was. Find out what those words meant.
Once I had filled my aching belly with wolf meat, I cut up some more and thought about preparing wasna, the dried meat that would last through winter, but I had no kettle and no time to spend hours making the preparation. The mountain was hostile. It was foolish to stay here alone: wolves, wild cats or a bear might take me for food.
So I cooked a little more over the fire on a stick and packed it away in my pouch, and began to make my way from the shadow of the mountain, walking back to the camp by Hanging Woman Creek, holding my vision, my memory, my mission, close to my breast like a newborn child. It was mine and mine alone.
The Great Father’s hand
KILLS HIMSELF CREEK. FEBRUARY, 1876. When I returned, the camp had disbanded, and only a lone tipi stood. Little Star was waiting for me. He ran to embrace me and kissed my face.
“Bright Star Falling, my sister. I’m so sorry for shouting at you!”
I told him I was sorry too, and we never talked again of the Crow who was butchered at Hanging Woman Creek. Even as we packed, I didn’t look in that direction, where his torso still hung, the foul smell of him drifting on the cold wind, his legs and arms swinging in the trees.
“A crier walked through the village the morning after you ran away,” Little Star said. “The camp has moved south to Kills Himself Creek. I stayed behind all alone because I knew you’d come back.”
He fussed over me, combing my hair and cleaning my face, and made me change into a cleaner dress which he’d already picked out in anticipation of my return, till he’d spirited away all the bad things that had happened to me.
As we left that blood-stained smear of a place and rode through the pristine snow, I thought of my vision and the strange event with the wolves. I might have dismissed it all as a dream but for the fact that we stopped to eat and boiled the meat in a kettle and ate it with fry bread.
“This is wolf meat,” Little Star said.
“Yes.”
“You found a dead wolf?”
“No. I killed it.”
He stared, wondering what kind of evil spirit I might be, but he ate the rest.
I didn’t tell him about my dream. That would mean telling him I was leaving him.
We found the camp the next morning. The women were wailing grief and the men openly crying.
“Are they mourning the Crow horse thief?” I asked.
Surrounded laughed at such a crazy notion. “The band of Wagluhe who set out on the war party were all killed. Those Crow horse stealers we drove from the village came across the seven Wagluhe and murdered them. Only Young Iron escaped. He was scouting and returned to find them all dead.”
There were dark whispers around the camp that Young Iron had run and deserted his brothers, even though he’d been the leader of that band and should have stayed fast until death, like a lance carrier. But the Oglala elders believed his story.
Though there was an uneasy feeling between us and the Wagluhe at that time – they were the ‘loafers’ who lived off the white man’s scraps, like overgrown sons that will not leave their mother’s tipi – on that morning we mourned the death of them as if they were family.
They made meat and hides with us that winter, but once it became clear that we would join Crazy Horse’s camp on the Powder River, the Wagluhe left us and headed back to the nearest fort.
Crazy Horse meant trouble.
Crazy Horse would get into a fight with the whites.
Crazy Horse was not safe to be around.
Before they left, one of their band came to the camp from Fort Laramie and stayed a while. He brought the news that the Great White Father had ordered all the Lakota and Cheyenne to come to the agencies on the reservation by the end of January to negotiate the sale of the Black Hills.
It was February now and none of us had gone to negotiate, so the Great White Father would deliver no more spotted buffalo meat to the reservations.
The Indians would sell the Black Hills or starve.
Sitting Bull laughed at this and said, “What do we, who live free on the plains and hunt the bison, care about the white man’s stinking spotted buffalo?”
The Wagluhe scout shrugged and said, “The longknives will cover the ground like ants and wipe us from the Plains and take the Black Hills anyway.”
I looked out to the horizon, as if I might hear the sound of the ants coming. Miles and miles of snow-covered plains surrounding me, vast and white.
I was thinking of how I might escape across those plains and get back to my village green. How I might be Katherine again. It would mean leaving the camp, setting out and hoping to find a fort, and from there to make my way to a town.
All without being killed by wolves.
Or longknives.
Or the freezing cold.
I knew I would have to wait till the spring.
The Battle of the Powder River
POWDER RIVER, MARCH, 1876. The soldiers did not come. Not at first. Not for us.
We heard nothing at all until a month later, just as the snows were beginning to melt. Then one morning we saw something else approaching.
Scouts had warned us, but we did not believe it until we saw it with our own eyes.
Hundreds of them, walking in slow file. It was Crazy Horse’s camp, but with them were Cheyenne men, women an
d children, the young and the old — an entire village on ponies and tramping on foot.
At first, we thought Crazy Horse’s camp had been attacked by the longknives, and it chilled our hearts to think that the greatest warrior of the Oglala could have been defeated.
But this was not so. The Cheyenne who came with Crazy Horse had ponies, but no other belongings: they dragged no tipis on travois frames, no rawhide boxes of wasna that would feed them through the winter, there were no kettles, no lodge poles, no belongings of any kind, only the clothes in which they stood.
It was a grand procession of the walking dead.
We ran to them and many of them collapsed into our arms, frozen and weak from hunger. All were caked in mud, some in blood, all limped on with frozen feet.
Little Star recognized a winkte friend and dragged him to our tipi. He was an old man, I thought, though I couldn’t tell if it was years that had aged him, or whatever disaster had befallen them.
Little Star wept for his old friend. His name was Pale Mouse and he spoke Lakotan. I threw more branches on the fire to warm his broken soul and fed him soup. After a few days, his fever subsided, his soul returned to his body and he could talk again as a human.
All around the camp, broken Cheyenne were telling the same story.
“We were camped by the Big Powder River. We felt so safe from attack that many of our braves were away on scouting missions. Only a few men remained, and eight lodges of Oglala braves who were staying with us at this time. Crazy Horse’s friend, He Dog, was one of them.
“In the morning an old woman shouted that the soldiers were here. The shooting began. They stole the ponies. Braves shot back. The women and children and the old people ran for their lives as the soldiers’ bullets rained through the lodges.