by Andy Conway
I followed Little Star, determined to drag him back into the safety of the camp, not knowing why he was so foolish as to run towards the guns.
He was singing as he ran and came to the edge of the village. Already the boys who’d been racing their ponies were riding towards the soldiers. They whooped and shrieked on their eagle bone whistles.
Little Star held up his fists to the bright blue sky and shouted out to them, “I have ten enemies here in my hand! Who wants them?”
There was no time to answer his cry.
A bullet took the side of his face off. A cloud of red mist spurted from his head and he fell down dead in the dirt.
Thechihila
THERE WAS NO LAST WORD from him. No meaningful look. He did not stroke my face and say his goodbye, nor did he squeeze my hand.
I did all of those to him. And yet he heard nothing. His spirit had departed his body with the cloud of red mist that sprayed from his head. I kneeled in the dirt and kissed the side of his face that was still there, bullets fizzing past my head, searching me out or killing others. I puzzled for a moment at a smear of blood I left on his cheek. My face was covered in his blood.
He had painted me for battle.
I said goodbye to him.
“Thechihila.”
I love you.
But it was all in a long, wounded howl of pain.
Then I picked him up and threw him over my shoulder and carried him back into camp.
A woman was screaming and crying, “Where is my son!” but I did not stop to help her. I walked on with my dead sister on my shoulder.
I passed Sitting Bull’s tent and hardly noticed the great man crying over his dead horse. I heard later that he had gone out to negotiate with the soldiers and they had shot his favourite horse from under him.
“It is like they have shot me,” he cried. “Attack them!”
The cloud had come from the east. The soldiers were falling into the village. They would have no ears.
Gall ran past me, heading for his chief.
Did he know already that his wives and children were lying dead down the river?
I could not be the one to tell him.
I walked on with my dead sister on my shoulder.
I stepped over a soldier lying with his skull caved in, a group of braves surrounding him, including Crazy Horse. The other was a few yards away, already stripped and red as raw meat. The two riders whose horses had carried them into the camp.
Crazy Horse was in no hurry. While the camp whirled around him, he was the calm centre of the tornado. He prepared his horse and himself with slow, deliberate ceremony.
The men around him, those that had all vowed to follow him anywhere into battle, urged him on, desperate to join the fight. He ignored them, as if none of this was happening around him, weaving sweet grass into his hair.
I walked on with my dead sister on my shoulder.
A horse thundered through the village and almost knocked me over. As it flashed past me, I saw the face of Moving Robe Woman, one of the beautiful winyanpi I secretly loved, heading towards the sound of the guns. Somewhere, I knew, Buffalo Calf Road Woman was also riding to attack.
I would not run with the wailing wives to the safety of the hills.
I would carry my sister back to his lodge, wrap him up in his buffalo hide blanket and put him to sleep on the travois outside so he might see the sky.
I would take my horse and my rifle, ride out to the soldiers and kill as many of the bastards as I could.
Buffalo hunt
I PUT LITTLE STAR TO bed, promising to return and bury him properly, wiped the tears from my face and prepared myself for war.
I had shared this lodge with him for two years. He would share this space with me no more. He was dead. I slapped myself and shouted, “Stop crying!”
My cheek burned. Outside, there was an acrid stink of gunpowder.
I quickly dug through Little Star’s bag of clothes, mostly his dresses, and found what he wore when he wanted to be a brave — what he’d been wearing that first moment, when he’d charged at me, waving a tomahawk around his head — a pair of buckskin leggings and a war shirt decorated with beads and quills.
I doffed my dress, standing naked for a moment as the screams and cries raged outside the walls of the tipi.
A bullet came through, whining past my head, and out the other side, leaving two neat holes, through which a thread of sunlight hung.
I quickly threw on his clothes. There was no time to paint my face. It was already painted with his blood and that would be my magic.
I grabbed my Winchester repeating rifle and shoved bullets into the cartridge till it was full. Ten shots. I filled my pockets with more bullets and wondered how many lives I might take in revenge this day, before my own life was taken.
As I stepped out into the light, I thought once more of that little girl with her book called The Battle of the Little Big Horn and wondered if it had always been my fate to die here.
I unhitched the pony that Surrounded had gifted to me — a fitting horse on which to ride into battle — and whispered encouragement to him.
It was not the greatest preparation for war, but my face was painted red with the blood of my sister. A tight ball of anger clutched my throat. I thought only of counting coup for him.
Riding through the camp, I followed the direction that most braves were running, cutting across the streams of the old, women and children running west to the safety of the neighbouring hills.
The line of soldiers fired into the village – again and again – as braves gathered on a hill to the west of the camp.
As I sped across the open valley, now thick with dust and smoke, I saw braves lying dead, shot down in the first attack: the boys who’d been racing their ponies.
These were the first they had killed: young boys, women and children. Only the weak and vulnerable, the helpless.
But now they were about to face the men, and yes, the women too. We gathered around Crazy Horse on the hill.
I looked out at the line of soldiers. A hundred or more, firing on us, though their bullets could not hit us. They would realize and close in. Why was Crazy Horse not attacking? I saw activity to our left: braves pouring into the ridges, along the banks of the river, through the timber, slowly surrounding the line of soldiers.
Still Crazy Horse waited.
He rode up and down in front of us, telling us to be calm. “We must wait for the soldiers’ guns to heat up so they will not work so well!” he cried.
Impatient anger etched the faces of the braves. They wanted to charge at those soldiers who had already killed so many, and I was the angriest of all. I wanted to ride right at them and kill every single one of them.
But I noticed, even as Crazy Horse said it, that the blueshirts were shooting at no one in particular, some of them firing into the air.
We watched them as they shot at bees and wasps. When we charged, they wouldn’t have enough bullets left for us all.
They rearranged their line, moving closer to us. Some of them rushed to the river. They had seen the line of Hunkpapa moving towards their horses.
“Do your best,” cried Crazy Horse. “And let us kill them all off today so they may trouble us no more!”
Everyone cried out, “Hoka hey!” and split the air with the shriek of hundreds of eagle bone whistles.
I couldn’t hear the guns as we thundered towards them. They were not firing on us. They scattered, heading for the timber, heading for their horses.
Would they run without fighting? I thought wildly. It didn’t matter. I would kill them as they ran.
But they fell back into a trench and fired again.
The first wave of our horses veered away and I had no choice but to go with them, pointing the Winchester at their lines and shooting a couple of bullets before we arced off. We circled and retreated, in waves, each retreating attack replaced by a new wave of warriors shooting on them.
They repelled us fo
r a while but each time I circled round and shot at them, I noticed less and less men were firing on us, till on the ninth circle there seemed to be only a single man.
He too ran and with that all the soldiers tore from the timber on their horses, heading for the river.
The shriek of eagle whistles went up again, and the roar of anger.
We rode after them into the timber that screened the winding banks of the river.
And now it was a charge through a jungle.
The blueshirts were running on foot and stampeding on horse and it was all I could do to hold onto the reins and hope my pony knew enough to avoid the trees that leapt at us.
The woods sheltered the soldiers and looked to be effecting their escape. As suddenly as we had chased them into the timber, there was no sight of them. The roar of gunfire ceased and I noticed Hunkpapa braves flitting through the undergrowth all around me, creeping up on them as if hunting wild boar.
The soldiers had gone, and anger surged in me again. I would have my revenge on Little Star. I nudged my pony forward through the timber, every other moment blinded by the bright sun dappling through the leaves.
A clearing opened up and ahead of us I saw a blueshirt officer with a thick brown moustache who strangely wore a red bandana around his head. In the split second I raised my rifle, I thought he had been wounded and using it as a bandage. Next to him was the Arikara scout, Bloody Knife.
My finger twitched on my trigger. Bloody Knife’s head exploded like a pumpkin. For a moment I was shocked that so light a touch had fired the gun.
A brave came speeding past me, crying out in victory and I knew I had not shot Bloody Knife. Was it Gall? Had he taken revenge on the massacre of his family?
I couldn’t see.
A volley of fire and smoke blinded me and my horse reared and wheeled round. I thought I was dead. They spat their venom in our faces and we reeled in confusion. I thought the officer in the red bandana had jumped from his horse, then just as quickly mounted it again before tearing away. I lost sight of him. He was gone and the rest of them scrambled after him.
In moments we were riding among them, like we rode among the buffalo, and I picked a soldier ahead who was whipping his horse with a stick.
They should have been faster than us. Their horses were bigger and stronger than our ponies, but they ran as if through water, weighed down by packs and their ribs showing through their flanks. They were tired and hungry, while our ponies were well fed and carried no heavy weight.
We flitted among them like hummingbirds.
Raising one arm, gripping the reins tightly, I rested the rifle across the back of that arm, and waited till I was close enough to smell the soldier I would kill.
He stank of sweat, whisky and terror.
I pulled the trigger.
The bullet shot through him and his guts spurted out the other side. He rode on till I tapped him with my rifle and sent him crashing into the undergrowth.
My first coup.
I screamed.
And suddenly the rage left me.
I pulled my horse up and watched the blueshirts chased upriver, some of them diving into the water, followed by our braves, both on foot and horseback. There were too many of us for them.
It was easy to be carried on that tide of hate, but I remembered the ford by the Miniconjou camp and the coulee that emptied out from the bluffs on the other side of the Little Bighorn. It was a mile down the river. I saw again that vision of a snake’s head emerge from it. That was where the real attack would take place. All of this was a feint to draw the warriors out.
We were chasing them far out of the camp and there was no one left to defend it.
I could not call out to the braves who were hunting the soldiers down. None of them would have heard me, and those that did would not have listened.
So I turned my horse and galloped back to the village. Someone had to be there to stop them when they crossed that ford.
Miniconjou Ford
THE VILLAGE WAS DEATHLY quiet as I galloped through. It was as if a spirit had come from the sky and taken everyone but a few weeping women looking for their children. Though I knew there was a battle raging upriver, I couldn’t hear it. It was as if the whole village slept and I was the first to wake.
A handful of braves stood at the ford by the Miniconjou camp. They had thought the same as I, that here might be where Long Hair would march into the empty camp and take it, along with all the women and children fleeing downriver.
White Cow Bull scanned the bluffs above us, and it was the first time I had ever seen him not chasing the shadow of the beautiful princess Monahsetah. Instead, he held a rifle in his hand and was discussing animatedly with a couple of Cheyenne braves.
“What’s happening?” I cried.
White Cow Bull pointed with his rifle across the river to a ridge straight ahead.
A great wall of blueshirts on horseback stood there, watching us.
He pointed to Greasy Grass Ridge to the north.
“Crow,” he said. “Three scouts.”
They had appeared on the hill and fired a few shots. The men had watched them make their way along the ridge to rejoin the soldiers watching the camp.
“Many soldiers. If they come now, they will take the camp and all the women and children.”
“But they wait,” said one of the Cheyenne who knew a few words of Lakota. “They wait and watch their soldiers fighting over there.”
“That battle is won,” I said. “They’re running away.”
“Still,” said White Cow Bull, “if they come now, they will take the camp.”
“We need the braves back here,” I said.
“We have sent a man to call them back.”
I wondered if anyone would hear him in that mad buffalo run as they hunted down the blueshirts scrambling through the timber, desperate to cross the river. A few gunshots and cries echoed upriver to us, as if from a memory of a dream.
“This is where they’re going to attack from!” I cried. “We have to—”
White Cow Bull held up a hand and hissed.
A sound, echoing to us. The rumbling of a wave, approaching, reverberating eerily. Something was coming down to vomit from the coulee’s mouth. I half expected a giant wave of blood to emerge, or the head of a monstrous great snake.
But I knew it would be none of those things. I knew it would be soldiers, riding into the camp, not upside down, as in Sitting Bull’s vision, just normal soldiers in their blue shirts with their long knives, and their guns, and their hate, and with murder in their eyes.
So it was a surprise when a group of Oglala braves on ponies spurted from the mouth of the coulee, whooping and screaming.
We dropped our rifles for a moment, wondering if these were Crow or Arikara scouts at the head of the soldiers.
White Cow Bull said something to the Cheyenne braves and I knew he was telling them not to shoot. That they were unmistakably our own.
Their ponies galloped the rough patch of flatland between the mouth of the coulee and the river and they splashed through the shallows that formed a ford and were by our sides in no time.
“Soldiers!” one of them cried. A scout who’d been sent out days ago. “Hundreds of soldiers!”
We turned to the mouth of the coulee and raised our rifles once more as they gushed out.
A band of cavalry, all blue-shirted, a red and white guidon flapping, and at the head an officer in a buckskin suit with a red neckerchief and a white hat. He was perched on a sorrel horse with four white stockings. All of these things I noticed as they stormed towards us, as if time had slowed down and I had the heart of a hummingbird.
We raised our rifles and fired on them, in one single explosion, and then more and more, till there was hardly a moment of silence to be heard between each shot.
They did not expect such resistance.
They fired on us, but their rifles were not as fast as ours, and I noticed they fired a few shots and then h
ad to reload. Did they not have the same Winchester repeaters that almost every brave in the village had?
How could the US army not have the very best weapons with which to kill us? How could we so easily outgun them when they had brought this type of death to our land?
They paused, and then charged across the river, the officer in the buckskin shirt at the head.
It’s Custer! I thought. There was a vague resemblance, but I couldn’t be sure.
Half way across the river, he slumped over his horse’s neck.
White Cow Bull claimed him with a war cry.
Another blueshirt fell from his saddle, but I couldn’t be sure I had shot him. I felt the rifle writhing and rearing against me like an angry horse, as well as hammering my shoulder with each shot.
They paused, splashing in confusion, and three rode out to rescue their officer, two flanking him and one snatching the fallen reins of his horse. He was clutching his side, not yet dead, but his face had gone mushroom white. They pulled his horse away with them, retreating and scattering, not back up the coulee from where they’d come, but northwards up the deep ravine that would lead eventually to the high hill where Sitting Bull had prayed last night.
If it was Custer, his last stand was already over.
A good day to die
WHITE COW BULL WHOOPED with joy and looked all around, as if he hoped to see Monahsetah witnessing his triumph
“I killed him!” he cried. “Did you all see that? I killed that white chief!”
“Do you think it was Long Hair?” I said. “It looked like him.”
“Long Hair?” they all cried. “That is who we fight?”
I nodded gravely. “Those are Long Hair’s soldiers. That is who we fight today. And he will die today. It is written.”
They looked on me with fear for a moment, and then the Cheyenne braves whooped with delight. They had the greatest reason to hate Long Hair. Not one of them said his name and failed to spit on the dirt.
Gunfire echoed over the river. It was impossible to tell where it was coming from, there were so many gulleys and ravines in the hills on the far bank. An echo could fly down a coulee and convince you a gun had fired a mile away.