As he grappled with what his plan would be, the mounted chargers pulled off, followed by a half-dozen riderless ponies still heaving at a gallop in the chase. High-Backed Bull cursed: the white men had broken their concerted charge. And for that failure dead and wounded warriors lay less than the length of two arms from the sandbar. The half-a-hundred now forced the horsemen back to their old way of fighting: the circle. The spinning, whirling wheel that pitted each warrior, solitary and alone with his own medicine, against those hated white men hunkered down on the grassy island behind the bloody carcasses of their big American horses and mules.
Behind the leg-flung carcasses the enemy scraped at the sand, clawing up chunks of grass and knotted roots, beginning to scrape their way down.
While a new charge formed itself.
“Stop!” Bull warned, knowing as he did how senseless was his warning.
Instead he could only watch helplessly the blur that wound itself up like the spinning of a dust devil whipping mindlessly across the sun-blistered prairie. Down the horsemen tore into the glittering riverbed, beating their way past the north shore of the island, across the riverbed to leap their ponies onto the south bank, back up the bank in a grand sweep, and into the riverbed once again in a whirl of color and numbing noise. From beneath their snorting ponies’ necks they fired arrows, but it was mostly rifle and pistol fire, each horseman dropping from the far side of his little pony at the critical moment approaching the end of the sandbar.
While the white man’s repeaters kept up a steady racket, unshod hooves reverberated against the dry riverbed in a thunder of terror and noise, the screeching of the horsemen matched only by the cries of their wounded ponies as the animals reared, fought, and pitched sideways as each successive bullet struck.
And on the island, those mad curses muddled with grunts of angry, scared men, scrambling and scratching at the sand—with every precious second digging lower and lower still, like frightened burrow mice as the hawk swoops overhead, claws outstretched.
Still he recognized the squeal of the last of the frightened animals as it struggled, reared, and lunged back to fall on its handler—flinging up cascades of golden, gritty, blinding sand as it went down. Here and there the island cracked with the sharp blasts of the white man’s Colt’s pistols.
Eerie, the young Shahiyena warrior thought as he watched, that humanlike screaming of the horse as its rider shot a bullet into its head, bringing that last of the big animals down in a resplendent spray of sand and blood. It fought to the last: biting, hurling phlegm and piss as it thrashed headlong into the grass, legs still fighting as a second bullet crashed into its brain.
The white man lunged behind his huge brown barricade, safe from the oncoming charge. Another rush came from the north bank, the white men frightened by the quirts slashing, slapping pony rumps as the horsemen tore past. There was more deafening sound now, thunderous and numbing to the young warrior as he grappled with how to reach the trio of white men huddled beneath the bank. To ride until he drew near … or do it all on foot.
Frightened voices filled the steamy air above the island. Though he could not understand it all, Bull did know some of the white man’s tongue: what he had learned from his mother—even more, what he had learned from the white man who had fathered him. Those words he believed he knew best: the profane, desperate prayers. The cries of men hit and bleeding, calling out for help.
It took no special talent to know the warriors had severely hurt and crippled the half-a-hundred in their first few charges, in less time than it took a man to light and smoke a small pipe bowl of tobacco. But they had failed to squash the enemy the way they had planned. It had not been the quick work they had whipped themselves into believing it would be.
For now it became nothing more than hot, gritty labor—the white men having plopped down behind the heaving carcasses of their dying horses, laying their hot-barreled many-shoots rifles over the still-quivering bodies of their dust-slaked, bloody, arrow-pocked barricades. Gray-black powder smoke drifted like a smudge against the blue sky above the sandbar. Below erupted clouds of spurting yellow dust as warrior bullets struck here and there, yet to find a target.
And in the midst of the sandy riverbed lay the naked bodies, most not moving any longer, picked off by the white men on the island, perhaps finished by the three under the bank in their burrow.
The hair on his arms tingled at the faint bugle call from upstream, brassy and clear on the cool air of that dawn. Likely it was one of the renegade turncoats who proudly carried his shiny medicine at all times—soldiers once themselves.
That one who called himself Kan-sas. Cly-bor was his white name. But the Dog Soldiers who had taken him in when he had deserted the pony soldiers called him Kansas. He carried his shiny gold horn on a leather cord over his shoulder. It was likely he who called with his horn for another charge now because many of the horsemen were milling upstream, as if waiting for someone to take control of them.
“Where is Roman Nose?” Bull wondered aloud, reining about and moving out upstream to see for himself. Porcupine would be with him, he knew. No matter what the other war chiefs might try, it remained for the Nose to bring order out of the chaos of those first few charges.
And now near the upstream end of the island, the bullets from Shahiyena snipers began to fall among the hastily dug rifle pits behind the carcasses. Some of the brown-skinned horsemen had abandoned their ponies, diving among the reeds and willow along both sides of the sandy riverbed. There they parted the brush and fired at anything that moved on the sandbar. Still, Bull considered as he gazed along the shallow, sandy riverbed, the white man had exacted his terrible damage on the horsemen. Across the sand and in the lapping river itself lay not only the wounded and dead warriors, but the dying, squealing war ponies as well.
The gall rising in his throat, his decision was made, and with a savage yank on his rein, Bull brought his own animal around abruptly.
“Maiyun!” he called to the mysterious ones. “Help me!”
Instead of forcing it down into the riverbed as the others had, he chose to race along the edge of the north bank. Then, surprising the trio who hid in their burrow, he cut sharply to the right, pushing his reluctant animal directly for the badger’s hole where the three white men waited.
One of them turned and broke as soon as the warrior was but twenty feet from the overhanging bank. The other two attempted to bring their rifles up to fire, but Bull was into and over them before they drew sight on him. Swinging his war club, screaming his death song, he knocked a rifle from the hands of one of the whites, hurling the man aside like white water sliding past a midstream boulder as his pony raced by.
Then Bull found himself in the shallow river again, alone this time. And on the shore he watched the many warriors rise from the willows and plum brush, holding aloft their rifles and weapons, cheering his brave, heroic ride as his pony sidestepped, fighting the grit and water, frightened of the bullets that hissed all about him now that he forced the animal into the teeth of the enemy guns.
“Wimaca yelo!” Bull cried back at those who cheered him. “I am a man!”
Pounding his heels into its flanks, Bull abruptly nosed the pony straight for the sandbar, its small hooves clawing at the side of the island, vaulting over the breastworks of two horse carcasses and down into the midst of the improvised rifle pits where the enemy dived and lunged out of the path of the lone, crazed horseman.
He astonished himself as well as his cheering brothers as he reached that lone cottonwood at the far end of the island without a bullet having touched him. He had taunted naevhan, sneered at death. His heart pounding like never before, High-Backed Bull urged his snorting, sidestepping pony into the stream, crossing to the north bank, where he reined it for a low hill. It was there he halted at last, stopping to survey the white men imprisoned on the sandy island.
Then he heard the raucous cheers of the women and children and old men gathered on the next ridge. They had wat
ched his daring ride and celebrated that small victory with High-Backed Bull.
“Hotoma! Hotoma!” they cried, showering him in their celebration of the mysterious medicine bravery of the Shahiyena warrior.
As his wind-stung eyes cleared of the tears and dust, he scanned the slopes of the surrounding hills. On the crests of most had appeared spectators from the villages. Besides women and the little ones come to watch, came the old ones and the boys eager but too young to fight. The chiefs proved themselves wise once again—bringing their people here to watch the battle.
With an audience of his family and friends, not to mention the young women a young warrior hoped to court—all of them there to cheer him on from the nearby bluffs—what man would not redouble his efforts to make a grand show of rubbing out the half-a-hundred?
Then as Bull watched, the cheers and war cries came of a single purpose. Most of the spectators on top of those ridges were turning, as if watching the approach of something. Or someone.
And in his heart High-Backed Bull realized it could be but one whose arrival caused such a thunderous reception: Roman Nose.
In his heart Bull cried for his war chief. Knowing the end had come for this the greatest ever to lead the Dog Soldiers.
Though he knew his medicine was gone now the way of the shortgrass in spring, his power gone the way of puffball dust on a summer wind, the great Shahiyena war chief had come at last to lead his faithful, trusting warriors, lead them down on that sandbar and the half-a-hundred.
While his heart leapt with joy at the arrival of Roman Nose, High-Backed Bull’s heart also sank. The white man’s iron fork had sealed the terrible, unstoppable fate of this bloody morning.
Clearly Bull knew there remained no way to alter the course of the war chief’s destiny. With his charge into the teeth of the white man’s guns on that sandy island, Roman Nose was fated to die.
11
Moon of Black Calves 1868
THERE HAD TO be at least a thousand warriors in the valley, counting the Dog Soldiers of Tall Bull and White Horse. Why, Roman Nose led at least half that number himself.
The fight should have been over sooner than it would take a man to eat his breakfast.
How was it that they hadn’t rubbed that sandbar clear of those half-a-hundred?
Why was it taking so long?
He glanced at the sun, found it halfway on its climb to zenith. A half day’s time lost and no scalps for any of them to brandish. That lay in his belly like the cold pig-meat the white man gave the reservation Indians imprisoned far to the south and east.
The taunting grew louder from the warriors sniping back in the cover of creekbank undergrowth, and for the next hour or more things quieted over the island while the Lakota and Shahiyena marksmen did their best to keep up a steady rattle of rifle fire from their brushy shelters. On the steamy sandbar, High-Backed Bull could watch the figures burrowing down like den mice as the white men silently scratched at the sandy earth with their hands, knives, tin cups … anything they could use to claw holes in the ground and scoop up walls of the damp sand against the snipers’ bullets. From time to time the half-breed son of trader Bent taunted the enemy in their own tongue. Charlie Bent cursed them, lured them, told the white men what awaited them when at long last Roman Nose’s charge came to ride them down.
Intrigued, Bull watched how those fragments of English spoken at them caused the white men such confusion, such enjoyable consternation. And for a few moments he wished he had paid better attention to his mother and sister, learning the white man’s tongue from them, if not from the man who had fathered him. To know more of it just might serve some real use one day soon, he decided: to be able to speak the language of the man who had fathered him, the language of the man he would seek among the whites.
Tying the long war club behind to the latigo on his pad saddle, he brought his Springfield carbine over his head and shoulder, where it hung from the rawhide sling. He never carried that many of the heavy lead balls, nor much of the powder the weapon took. Still, he itched to get a clear crack at one, just one, of those white men. Any of them. Like the snipers, waiting, waiting for the chance to blow a man’s head off.
He dismounted and tied his pony to some brush, where it could browse as he moved along the north bank at a crouch, slowly parting the willow with the rifle barrel to peer at the island. It struck him then just what a feat he had accomplished—riding onto the sandbar, over the carcass barricades and rifle pits, all the way to the end of the island—
Of a sudden, unshod hooves hammered the sandy riverbed. More than ten horsemen broke from the nearby trees shading the creekbank, darting into range of the sandbar, racing past the north side of the island. As they galloped closer to the enemy, one of the group swooped toward the near side of the island.
One of the whites, a man with a black beard hung to midchest, suddenly bolted up from his rifle pit, aimed, and fired. As the puff of dirty smoke spat over the rifleman’s head, the daring warrior pitched sideways into the shallow creek.
On instinct Bull aimed down the barrel at the cloud of gray smoke, at the bearded one, and snapped off his shot.
The smoke wreathed his own head as he angrily swiped it away, just as a man would swat at a troublesome buffalo gnat. Bull saw the bearded man slowly collapsing in his pit, a hand clamped at the side of his head while others lunged to help him. Bright crimson seeped across the man’s shoulder, shiny and mirroring the brightness of midday light.
The rest of the daring horsemen completed their rush past the sandbar before circling back to regather upstream. But without stopping, they made another sweep beneath the jaws of the white man’s guns. No warrior fell in this daring ride into the maw of death.
As the last rider turned and urged his little pony onto the north bank, another bugle’s blare resounded up the valley. Obeying the call, the milling horsemen turned and slowly made their way beyond the first bend of the shallow river. Other warriors appeared on both banks, hundreds upon hundreds of them, emerging from the cottonwood and plum brush where they had been waiting, every one of them now nosing his pony toward the mouth of a gorge hidden beyond the trees, just past that first bend upstream.
Bull’s eyes stung with salty sweat as he glanced once more at the sun’s position, then continued reloading the single-shot Springfield carbine taken at the base of Lodge Trail Ridge two long winters before when the warrior bands had wiped out the hundred-in-the-hand.
Already the day was hot. And they weren’t in the heat of it yet.
For the longest time that morning, bullets had kicked up the sand and slammed into the still, bloating horse carcasses the white men huddled behind as the temperature rose. But after that insistent bugle had called the horsemen to disappear beyond the river bend, the snipers slowed their racket.
Ramming the lead ball home, Bull gazed at the umber ridges that hemmed in this valley, studied the sunburned bluffs and grass-cured hills where the women, children, and old men gathered to watch the coming slaughter. Then he peered at the tall grass and scrubby brush on the sandbar, at the bodies of those horsemen who had not made it out of the riverbed. Less than five yards from the island itself lay a half-dozen painted naked warriors, some of them still crumpled just as they had struck the sand. One was crushed beneath a dead war pony. The rider who had gotten closest to the white men in their burrows Bull recognized as a Shahiyena, from the magpie the warrior tied to his greased hair. He was not a young man, for the iron of many snows had begun to fleck the man’s hair, and from where Bull stood, he could plainly see the deep crow’s-feet scoring the corners of the warrior’s eyes that stared blankly at the pale sky.
“Nohetto!” Bull prayed. “There is no more.” The man had lived many seasons and died as a warrior must—killing whites.
Just as Bull now renewed his vow.
The hot, still air fell all so quiet now that the horsemen had ceased circling and disappeared upstream, now that the snipers on both banks had silenced their w
ithering fire. In the summer crackle and the rising heat, flies droned and other winged tormentors hovered over all.
He stared again at the island, hoping for another chance at one of the white men. Then his eyes were pulled magnetically to the dead warrior once more. The body lay in the shallow flow of yellowish water that this late of the season seeped slowly down the middle of a wider channel it had cut between rows of cottonwoods and scarred cutbanks of grassy sand at spring’s flood stage. Except for that narrow flow of water itself, the riverbed lay as dry as uncured rawhide here late in the Moon of Black Calves.
Bull’s head pounded with the heat, and the droning, buzzing silence, and the waiting—for it seemed the broad, corn-silk-yellow sky overhead and the shimmering sand of the river bottom conspired with the undulating, heat-shimmered hills to form a bowl reflecting like a mirror down on this narrow valley. As he lay watching the mice busy in their island burrows, the hot, suffocating breezes nudged the dry, brittle grasses where he remained hidden, waiting. The stalks irritated one another, the way the cricket talked mating with its legs. And from time to time he listened to the murmurs of pain and fear and frustration from the enemy on the sandbar.
Tiny voices whispering in Bull’s head told him to stay put. To watch.
That his time was coming.
Another brassy bray from that deserter’s army bugle raised the hair on the back of Bull’s neck.
Its echo floated downstream toward the island. Looking now at the trees near the mouth of that ravine at the great bend in the riverbed, he found he could not see anything to give him the faintest clue what Roman Nose and the other chiefs were doing with the hundreds of horsemen who had disappeared from view what seemed like a long, long time ago.
From the corner of his eye, Bull caught the movement against the pale sky and turned to see a handful of feathered war chiefs crowning a nearby hill, all of them gazing at the sandbar, as if studying the defenders on the island. Then, as suddenly as they had appeared, they too slipped out of sight.
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