by Andy Conway
Many of the women around me who were burying their brothers and husbands had already cut their hair short. But for some of them, that wasn’t enough to show their grief. They drove wooden pegs through their arms. One cut off half of her little finger, screaming in agony and holding its spurting stub high in the air.
I took Little Star’s knife and lopped off a great shank of my bronze hair that he liked to comb so much, knotted it, placing it in his dead fist, twining it round his fingers, swapping it for a lock of his hair.
Every grieving woman took a lock of hair from the dead and did as I did: placed it in a leather bag and wore it around their neck.
This was the white ghost.
We would carry it around with us for a year, talking to it, praying over it, and only burying it after twelve moons of mourning.
The lament of the women filled the air now. The procession was keen to move on and they were about to leave behind their loved ones forever.
I cried aloud with the rest of them, and packed my things on my three horses, and turned away from him and rode on, unable to see anything through my tears.
Once were warriors
WHEN WE LEFT OUR DEAD behind, the great river of Lakota and Cheyenne divided into many streams.
The elders had decided that splitting up would confuse the soldiers who would now come to chase us. The Cheyenne left us, somewhere among them Monahsetah, both mourning and celebrating the death of her boy’s father, and White Cow Bull, who would probably never be her husband.
Crazy Horse and his Oglala band set off for the Wolf Mountains and I shuddered at the memory of the pack of wolves that had attacked me there.
I remembered the wakan that flared within me and killed with a flash of blue lightning. What was it in me that could have such devastating power? And why could I not find it inside me when I wanted to kill every soldier on that hill above the Little Bighorn?
We Hunkpapa headed north to the Tongue River, and though we followed Sitting Bull, I felt alone. We were now a few hundred in number, not thousands, and the plains seemed bigger, wider, and scarier.
There was no way now than I could make my escape east to the Red Cloud reservation. That way was barred to me. I was Bright Star Falling, a winyan, a Lakota warrior. I had killed blueshirt soldiers. I was bathed in their blood. I carried the notebook of a dead soldier in my pouch. I could not escape to my old life. Katherine was a million miles away, and I knew I might never get back to her.
All I could do was follow the great migration of Hunkpapa northwards. All I could do was follow this path to the bitter end.
Flying towards that battle on the banks of the Little Bighorn, it seems I remembered every day, every moment. But as I fled from it, the days blurred through the wash of tears.
A warrior will remember every moment of battle and carry them to his deathbed. Once we ceased to be warriors, the white men robbed us of our moments, robbed us of our time, and as Sitting Bull had foretold, we were cursed to wander the land, rootless, homeless, starved of everything, and cursed to fight no more forever.
Stray dog
ASHLAND, OCTOBER, 1876. I don’t remember when I stopped crying for Little Star. It must have been after four days, as was the custom, but I don’t know that I ceased my tears before or after the other women.
It didn’t matter which.
What happened after would have happened anyway.
I only remember that we were riding with tears in our eyes and my throat hoarse with mourning, and then we were riding in silence.
We camped, of course, and I suppose I even talked with others, even though my tipi was mine alone now. We hunted and ate and even danced and sang around our fires at night, but I remember nothing of that, only the loneliness and the unending miles of the plains.
At some time on the long march, as we snaked our way northwards, I became aware of the whispers.
It was after the moon of the ripening, perhaps even as late as the moon of the brown leaves, when I noticed a cluster of women huddled in a group, casting glances my way. I ignored it at first, as I was content in my loneliness, until I heard a child shout out that I was a bad heart.
This was a terrible thing to say about a man, but worse for a woman, who were always described as good hearted. A man with a bad heart was a man to be feared. He was a man grieving the loss of someone; a man who could only make his heart good again when he killed someone, anyone. A man with a bad heart was a man to be avoided.
A woman with a bad heart was worse.
And if the children were saying this about me, then I knew it had come from the women.
It was Red Flea who stared and sneered the most. Even though Surrounded now shared her tipi, and this made him her husband, she still glared at me like |I was a prairie dog that might sneak into her lodge and take off with her baby.
The whispers grew louder and, after the moon when the wind shakes off the leaves, the whispers turned into jeers and catcalls whenever my back was turned.
I remembered that afternoon in Sitting Bull’s lodge, when he had told me everyone thought I was White Buffalo Calf Woman returned to bring doom to them all. It had seemed absurd then, but I could see that they believed it and wanted no more of me.
I could not see Sitting Bull to talk with him. He wanted nothing to do with me. Why would he, when every time he looked at me he saw the end of his people?
He was a sad and lonely a figure in those months, as I was myself, even with his family all around him. He was the chief of a tribe that had cursed itself and, though he led us to escape this doom, he saw that no matter how far we rode, it was always there behind us, hunting us down like the pack of wolves that had hunted me down on Wolf Mountain.
In the moon when winter begins I asked Surrounded why his bitch of a wife was spreading bad words about me.
He shrugged and looked away, when he had always seemed so keen to look into my eyes, and pulled his blanket closer around him and murmured, “It is all over the camp. You are the one that has brought this disaster upon us.”
“That stupid White Buffalo Calf Woman story,” I said. “Even the children know it’s nonsense.”
“It’s not that,” he said.
Somewhere across camp, a stray dog yelped.
“There are stories about the battle of the Greasy Grass. You were seen running away from the battle. When our braves were running out of the camp to rout the first attack that came from the south, you were seen riding in the opposite direction.”
Fury burned in me.
“I was riding back to the ford to warn the others that Custer was coming to attack the village.”
“How would you know that?”
My vision of the serpent coming out of Medicine Tail Coulee. “It doesn’t matter how I knew. I rode there to stop Long Hair’s attack. I held that ford with Cheyenne braves and White Cow Bull. They can all tell you this.”
He shrugged as if to ask where they were in this camp. They were hundreds of miles away, somewhere over the plains, or maybe even already caught by the soldiers and killed or forced onto a reservation.
There was no one here who’d fought alongside me on that day. No one but the man in front of me.
“You saw me fighting,” I said. “I was one of the first to fight them and the last to leave the battle.”
“I know the truth,” he said, but shrugged again, as if it didn’t matter, because he was just a man who could no more stop these stories than he could tell the wind not to blow the leaves from the trees.
I had run from that first part of the battle, but only when it was already won, to protect the same women who now spread poison about me.
Red Flea came from her tipi and unleashed a shower of curses on his head. He did nothing but shrink back inside without giving me another look.
She turned her hate on me. “Get away from us, White Snake Woman! Take your bad heart from us!”
I walked back to my tipi, ignoring the clod of earth she threw at my back, suppressing
the ball of rage that formed in my chest and threatened to explode from my mouth, wondering if I might kill her dead just as I’d killed those wolves on Wolf Mountain.
Little Star had told me many times, that when a brave had a bad heart, to make his bad heart good again, he would go out and kill someone. Anyone. This was why a man with a bad heart was to be avoided.
What would make my bad heart good again? I’d killed five men at the Greasy Grass but I didn’t feel any less bad.
That night, I didn’t share a fire with the others, and when we moved on I followed the camp like one of the stray dogs.
I had always wondered why the dogs stayed with us, when they might end up in the fire, cooked as a winter stew.
And now I knew.
They stayed because they had nowhere else to go.
Eating the ponies
LODGEPOLE, DECEMBER, 1876. At some point on this slow march north, round about the time of the moon when the deer shed their antlers, when it was cold and light snow covered the plains, we became aware that a small band of Indians were tracking us.
The scouts that circled the camp in all directions came back reporting a party of no more than five Indians tailing us, a mile or so behind. Sitting Bull and his elders talked for hours over what to do, whether to push on in haste and hope to shake them off, or to go meet them and kill them.
All thought they must be Arikara scouts, and Gall was ready to go meet them alone. Even though his great enemy Bloody Knife was dead, he still burned to avenge his wives and children. It would be many a year before his bad heart turned good again.
Others warned they might not be Arikara, scouting for the blueshirts, but perhaps fellow Lakota hoping to join us.
In the end, we left behind three war parties, who waited silently to gather them in behind us.
Sure enough, the band of five Indians came traipsing along in our wake and their leader waved to the hills either side, letting them know he had seen them and was not concerned. So they surrounded them and brought them to the camp.
They were not Arikara, as we thought, but Wagluhe, and again my eyes met those of Red Shirt.
It had been two years since I’d seen him, striding through the river to join the council that would discuss the president’s offer to buy the Black Hills, and I remembered Little Star cooing over how handsome he was.
I had thought never to see him again, but when our eyes met, it felt like I had never been away from his gaze.
A smile flickered at the edge of his lips, but there was great sadness in his look, and I knew he felt sorry for me, for us, for what we had been reduced to — a warrior race now running like stray dogs.
Red Shirt and his men came in peace and smoked the pipe with Sitting Bull in the council lodge and everyone gathered at the edges, trying to overhear what was being discussed, our breath in clouds around our faces.
They stayed for a day and Sitting Bull offered them his protection, even though many whispered that it was best to kill them, for they might go back and tell the blueshirts where we were.
But Red Shirt made it clear he was here at his own decision. They had left their reservation on the pretext of a hunting trip, and he only wished to bring an end to the war.
Sitting Bull politely declined, and neither man would point out that the war was already lost and won, with only the terms of peace to be decided.
Red Shirt gave the news that the president had passed a new act that demanded the Indians sell the Black Hills and all their lands, or they would starve all the Indians living on reservations. There would be no more Government food.
“Then leave the reservations and hunt the buffalo,” said Sitting Bull.
“The buffalo are gone,” said Red Shirt.
He was the first man I heard say it. Everyone had thought it. Each summer the herds had grown thinner and harder to find, and there were rumours and dark warnings that the buffalo had left the earth and returned to the Spirit Land. This meant the end of the Indians.
There had been so few buffalo this season that we had already turned to eating the ponies. A few had already been slaughtered and eaten around the fire, some of their meat salted and hardened for the long winter months ahead, and I had already looked to which of my ponies I would have to kill.
Others had no doubt been thinking the same thing, which was why I had heard fewer whispers and taunts of late. They still hated me, but I had food.
“So now the white man steals our land,” said Sitting Bull. “At first he promised it to us forever, then he asked to buy it, then he sent his soldiers to take it. What kind of friend is this?”
Red Shirt shook his head sadly. “I know only that I want my children to live without hunger and death, and they must live in this white man’s world. We are building a school for them to learn the white man’s ways. Even if I would rather die with a spear in my hand, I cannot condemn them to the same. We have to give them a chance to live in this new world where there are no buffalo to hunt.”
Some laughed at this, behind their hands — of course a Wagluhe would say this, a loafer who hangs around the fort and is too lazy to hunt — but I saw too that many did not laugh. Cold and hunger and the loss of everything had brought some of these Hunkpapa braves to consider the unthinkable: perhaps the Wagluhe had been right all along and there was no point but to live side by side with the white man.
“Not all white men are the same,” said Sitting Bull, and there was much wonder at this.
He signalled one of his followers, who presented a small box, which Sitting Bull opened to reveal a set of gold and silver coins with coloured ribbons. He held them up for all to see.
“These are war medals. When the white men fight their wars they give their best warriors these tokens to mark them out as the bravest and most loyal of all the fighters. These medals were given to my grandfather many years ago by Grandfather England, the king called George the Third, who was king over England and Canada and half the world. He gave these to my grandfather because we Hunkpapa fought alongside the soldiers of the king against the longknives of the Americans.”
A whisper of wonder went through the assembled crowd, and Red Shirt too gazed at the medals in awe.
“And now that king is dead, like my grandfather, but his granddaughter is queen. Grandmother England. And I am chief of the Hunkpapa. And these medals prove the bond between our people and the subjects of Grandmother England.”
And here it became clear.
We were riding north to cross the border, to escape the president and his army of longknives, to escape to Canada and the protection of Grandmother England.
Red Shirt nodded and smiled. Finally he said, “I wish you good luck with your journey. If you feel you belong with Grandmother England across the border and not with the president here, that is your choice, and I respect it. I have come only in friendship.”
Again dark threats flitted around the edge of the crowd. Better to kill Red Shirt and his followers now, or he would return and tell the longknives our plan.
Red Shirt reached out to hold Sitting Bull’s hand, the medals hanging from them.
“As I have said, I came here in secret, to offer my help, and I shall return in secret and say nothing to anyone of this meeting. By the Great Spirit, I wish you well on your journey, that you may find happiness and buffalo and be free from pain.”
Sitting Bull stood up and held Red Shirt’s hand aloft, crying, “Let all here take Red Shirt’s good wishes for our journey and hold them in their heart. We wish him also a safe journey back to his reservation, and we thank him for his concern.”
Red Shirt and his men stayed with us that night and ate around our fires. Sitting Bull made a great show of generosity, giving them food to take with them in the morning for their long journey home, even though there was precious little in the camp. We faced perhaps another few months of bitter cold and hunger before we could find our way across the border.
That morning, Red Shirt came to me as I was striking my tipi
all alone and called out, “Good morning, white woman with golden hair. May I ask you a question?”
I did not avert my gaze, as was the custom, but stared into his piercing eyes, losing myself in him, my heart sinking into my belly.
“You are Red Shirt. Your name travels before you. I will answer any question you ask of me.”
With a sweep of my hand I indicated he might step inside my tipi. He shook his head. Anger flashed in my breast at his refusal.
We talked, our blankets huddled around us, in plain view of everyone and within hearing of them all, and I realized it was not my hospitality he wanted to spurn: he was making sure no one would turn on me after he’d gone.
“I have seen you before and it intrigues me so much that I must know how a white woman comes to live with our friends, the Hunkpapa?”
I told him my story and he expressed polite surprise that I hadn’t been taken by a war party from an ambushed wagon train, but had appeared lying on the ground, as if fallen from the sky, with no memory of who I was or any life I had before.
“A curious tale,” he said, looking to those around us as if to share the quality of the story, in the way one might agree on the quality of a drawing or a shirt design. “I shall tell this tale to our people at the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. They will marvel at it.”
And with that he got on his horse and rode away.
I thought for a moment of panic that I should run and follow him. I could go with him to his reservation, and then on to find Katherine.
But all around me, they were striking the camp and moving on, with a renewed excitement now it was clear to everyone that Sitting Bull had a plan and had not been fleeing aimlessly. We were going to Canada and Grandmother England.
Something about it glowed warmer in my breast with the hint of promise. Perhaps Katherine had come from Canada. Or from England.
And I could not leave Sitting Bull. He had taken me in with his words, “We are all related.”