Stone Song

by Win Blevins

  The four shirtmen sat on new robes at the center of the lodge. Beautiful robes, Black Buffalo Woman noticed, luxuriously thick and tanned very soft.

  Two old men spoke of the duties of the shirtmen. The first named the traditional duties that everyone knew—leading the warriors responsible for order in the camp and on the march and helping to protect every person’s rights. This fellow stressed that a man who agreed to live with others was not entirely his own. That consent obligated him to take note of the good of all. For a shirtman the common good became paramount. Shirtmen were called to a higher standard than ordinary people.

  The second old man urged them even further. “Think of the welfare of the poor, the weak, the widows and orphans!” he cried. In fact, he declared, the Society of White Horse Riders had decided upon new and greater duties for these initiates, the first shirtmen in a long time. “When you meet enemies,” he said, “advance toward them boldly—death is better than corruption. Think no ill of others,” he beseeched them, “and repay not ill with ill. Many dogs will lift their legs at a leader’s lodge. An ordinary man might respond with anger, but a shirtman has a higher duty. He must be above disputation, above retaliation, above envy, above greed. If this sounds difficult,” implored the counselor, “remember that we call you to be great-hearted.”

  Black Buffalo Woman thrilled to the nobility of these words and to the thought that her lover, Crazy Horse, would rise to fulfill them. She knew perfectly well that her husband wouldn’t.

  When they brought the shirts to the new servants of the people, she was stunned by their beauty. The older shirtmen themselves had made them, each from two skins of bighorn sheep, dewclaws left dangling. Bands of quillwork decorated the shoulders and arms, and the shirts were painted in upper and lower halves, two red over yellow, two blue over yellow. The sleeves of each shirt were fringed with hair, a lock for every war honor—a coup, a wound given or received, a horse stolen, an enemy killed, a comrade rescued.

  Crazy Horse stood to put his shirt on, and the crowd gasped. Hair hung from his sleeves thick as needles on a pine tree. “Over two hundred and forty locks,” people whispered.

  Black Buffalo Woman looked sideways at her husband. She looked back at Crazy Horse. Suddenly the child in her belly felt heavy, and the one holding her hand seemed a nuisance.

  In his ceremonial shirt Crazy Horse felt vulnerable, naked. He took a moment to look deeply at these hundreds of people, people he was responsible for now, and responsible to. He felt their admiration, which was also expectation, and obligation. He let his eyes circle slowly, for he needed to see them.

  The feeling welled up in him unexpectedly. As his eyes traveled around the circle, his spirit rose. He never had many words for his feelings, but one now was pride, great pride. Emotion surged through him, and for once he did not mind if people saw. Thanks, thanksgiving, other words. He wanted people’s acceptance and their praise and was indescribably grateful to have them for this moment.

  He held back a chuckle. Maybe his life path forbade him honors because he would get drunk on them.

  He let his eyes move on around the circle, giving acknowledgment and receiving it.

  His eyes met Black Buffalo Woman’s. The glow of emotion there gave him a stab. But now he could no longer feel jealous of No Water, or rivalrous. Just today he had been called to nobler feelings. Now he must be Black Buffalo Woman’s brother only. He promised himself that he would be.

  And now he felt… a flutter of apprehension.

  SOLDIERS INTRUDE

  Morning Star watched the Oglala warrior come up at a gallop. He knew who it was. Our Strange Man, his people called him, and Morning Star smiled, thinking strange was too mild a word for him. Morning Star was wary of getting seared by the man’s intensity. He was one of those men who seemed to look for edges to live on. He was lean and hungry and dedicated and impassioned. He should marry, Morning Star thought, learn the solace of a woman and a permanent lodge fire, and get a little extra fat on him. Morning Star knew his advice would be dust in the wind, so he would never give it. That tickled him.

  Morning Star had an amiable outlook on life. He thought some men were too dedicated to what you could not eat, get warm by, make love to, or go for a fine canter on…. Well, such fellows were getting too serious.

  Crazy Horse galloped right in among the Sahiyela men and nodded at the four chiefs in greeting. Morning Star, Two Moons, Red Arm, and Black Horse said, “Hau!” to him. Morning Star noted with some satisfaction that the warrior’s pony was half-gaunt from hard riding. This fellow was known far and wide never to have owned a first-class horse and to destroy the half-decent ones he got. Any number had been shot out from under him.

  Morning Star motioned for Crazy Horse to ride alongside him. He would tell the warrior a few good stories and have the pleasure of keeping the news the fellow wanted from him until tonight, by the fire.

  Morning Star told it baldly, Crazy Horse saw, not slanting the story for the people like himself, a Sahiyela leader who preferred peace. Morning Star and the three other Sahiyela leaders had told the silver eagle chief, Carrington, that the Lakota, Sahiyela, and Mahpiyato of the Shifting Sands River country would tolerate no further white intrusion. The soldiers might keep the one outpost on Shifting Sands River they’d already built, Fort Reno. They could not build farther north. There was to be no traffic through this country, especially no wagon trains along what the whites called the Bozeman Trail. But most of all, they repeated, no forts.

  Morning Star smiled ironically. Crazy Horse liked the man’s spirit. “The silver eagle chief knows how to give an eloquent answer,” the Sahiyela leader allowed. “While we were talking, his men were unloading the big naked tree trunks for the main posts of the fort.”

  He let that sit. “His answer in words was that he had instructions to make a fort there on Piney Creek. He must carry out his orders.” Morning Star underlined these words with sardonic humor. To the warriors nothing was more peculiar about the whites than the way they were always refusing responsibility by saying they were following orders. No Lakota or Sahiyela took orders from another in that way. “As he spoke, I looked into his eyes, and saw that he understood nothing we had told him.”

  Morning Star looked at the other chiefs. Every face spoke mocking amusement. “You tell a man to stop or you will hang his hair on your lance. He smiles at you like you are a child. You have ten warriors for every one of his.” Morning Star shrugged. “What do you say next?”

  Crazy Horse sat his pony on a knoll and watched the soldiers build the fort. Standing there was an act of warning, even of provocation. He didn’t leave the pony below the hilltop and watch from the grasses because he wanted to be seen. He would have liked for them to chase him. He felt like killing a soldier, or a dozen.

  Now he could tell his comrades that, yes, he had seen it with his own eyes.

  His warrior’s eyes told him the fort was very vulnerable. It sat in a low place between enclosing hills, so the Lakota and Sahiyela would have the high ground. It was too far from the timber the wasicu needed for building, and the wasicu had to leave the enclosure even to get water. A poor site, it seemed, but maybe the wasicu had their peculiar reasons. In any case, he thought, the young men of the Lakota, Sahiyela, and Mahpiyato would come and kill the soldiers, however many hundreds there were, and burn the fort to the ground.

  Everyone had heard the story, for it showed what the wasicu were like. In the last moon the wasicu had called one of their big talks. Since the massacre at Sand Creek the prairies had been aflame with Indian anger. The white peace talkers wanted to make things right, they said, to help everyone forget Sand Creek. And they wanted to talk about Shifting Sands River country, although they called it Powder River.

  The Lakota who went to the talk were mostly loaf-around-the-forts or people who didn’t live in Shifting Sands River country. But since this country was theirs, Man-Whose-Enemies-Are-Afraid-of-His-Horses went for the Hunkpatila and Red Cloud for the Ba
d Faces.

  They kept themselves busy saying no. No road along Shifting Sands River, no wagons along Shifting Sands River, no forts along Shifting Sands River. Part of their old country, along the Shell River, had been spoiled by Fort Laramie and the Holy Road. They would not let the same thing happen to Shifting Sands River. If they did, how would they feed their children?

  During the talk soldiers they’d never seen came in from the east. Their leader, the silver eagle chief, came to the talk to meet the chiefs. With a few questions Red Cloud had found out what his mission was—to build forts straight through Shifting Sands River country and offer protection to wagons traveling that road. The silver eagle chief thought he was coming to the council to meet the Indians who would be his neighbors!

  Crazy Horse had seen Red Cloud’s face when he told what he said next, alive with delight at the stupidity of the whites. “See?” the war chief asked rhetorically. “While they sit here asking us for Shifting Sands River country, they send soldiers right past the council, heading north to take it!”

  He and Man-Whose-Enemies-Are-Afraid-of-His-Horses warned the silver eagle chief and walked out. Whatever the other chiefs might say or sign, those chiefs of people who didn’t live along Shifting Sands River, that was of no concern to Red Cloud or Man-Whose-Enemies-Are-Afraid-of-His-Horses.

  Now the silver eagle chief was building his fort anyway. Every blow of a hammer smacked his declaration of will over the rolling hills.

  Very well, this place, Piney Fork, would be where it was decided.

  Crazy Horse turned his pony away.

  So Red Cloud sent around a canupa for war, and the rest of the summer the warriors harassed the whites. When the soldiers sent wagons to the mountain foothills for timber, the Indians attacked the trains. Every man who built, went for water, or cut wood or hauled it needed another man guard him.

  Crazy Horse supposed Red Cloud was devising his stratagems or consulting his medicine. Red Cloud was accepted as the war leader—everyone was willing to follow him. The six shirtmen were also leaders—six because the Bad Faces had held their own ceremony of the Society of White Horse Riders and named two more owners of the people from their own band, He Dog and Big Road. Crazy Horse was glad, because these were good men.

  Several hundred warriors came and went from around Piney Fork. Red Cloud thought they could put together 1,500 men, or even 2,000. Crazy Horse said he thought they could enforce discipline this time, and hurt the whites badly.

  Crazy Horse wondered why they didn’t go ahead and do it. The moons went by, the Moon When All Things Ripen and the Moon of Ten Colds. Yes, they harassed the whites during these moons, killing soldiers when they could, annoying when they could. During those two months the 700 soldiers were reduced by about 50. But Crazy Horse was impatient with Red Cloud’s tight rein.

  In the Moon When the Leaves Fall the people hunted buffalo instead of white men—they had to make meat for the winter. But the Winter Moon also slipped by, and it wasn’t until the beginning of the Midwinter Moon that Red Cloud got all the Lakota and Sahiyela and Mahpiyato together.

  As at the Platte Bridge, they tried to decoy the soldiers into a trap. This time the young men kept their discipline, but the whites were wary and hung back.

  So the warriors schemed again. This time Hump would be the leader on the field. This time the decoy must work. To make sure of it, Hump chose a man he knew would take any risk needed: Crazy Horse.

  Near the end of the Midwinter Moon they once more crafted the trap.

  Crazy Horse purified himself in the sweat lodge. Outside the lodge, naked in the bitter winter night, he sat as in a trance and watched his vision of Rider once more, galloping into battle, the bullets flying toward him but evaporating into the air, galloping forward untouched.

  He was preparing for the venture into that place of spirit between life and death. Tomorrow morning he needed to enter that arena of clarity. There he would know what to do with a knowing in all of his body and spirit. He would feel what was to happen before it happened. And Hawk would soar.

  When he had finished picturing Rider, he made some decoy medicine from the dirt of a gopher hole. Tomorrow morning he would sprinkle it on his horse and on himself. He had to make the decoy work. He would think of the power of the gopher to deceive, and he would invoke his wind medicine, which led enemies into confusion. He would risk himself.

  Fortunately, Hump had given him a job he could do in his individualistic spirit, decoy the soldiers over the hill.

  The Mniconjou had sent a winkte, one of the men who lived as a woman, out into the hills north of the fort. This winkte had a way of seeing the future when she rode her horse in a zigzag pattern she had seen in a dream. She came back to camp and said she had caught a few soldiers. The Mniconjou sent her back out to dream more. She came back saying she had caught more than she could hold in both hands. “A hundred in the hands!” she said.

  “Hoye!” cried the Mniconjou fighting men. Good!

  Yes, it was good, thought Crazy Horse. Maybe this time he could make the decoy work and dance the dream into reality.

  Tomorrow morning he would tie the Inyan creature behind his ear more securely, check Inyan on the thong next to his heart, and retie his third stone, the one in the tail of his bay warhorse, so that it would not be shot beneath him like the others. While he attended to this medicine, he would give thought to the age of Inyan, the ancientness of life they spoke of, and would remember his willingness to hear whatever they had to say. He would paint the streak of lightning and the hail spots on himself, pondering the lightning he had seen in his vision, the thunderstorm he had survived after the killing on the Blue Water, and the Wakinyan he had seen during snow, and the power of the West, the Wakinyan, which flowed through him. He would put the skin of the red-tailed hawk on his head and think of Hawk flying above him into battle.

  He would let the strength of his arms and legs, the keenness of his eyes and ears, the figurings of his mind be gathered into these larger powers he participated in, be gathered into Spirit, and find voice in the point of his lance.

  Finished, he sat a while longer, silent, thoughtless, attending to Hawk. She was at peace.

  “Cold as the cellar of the colonel’s heart,” Paddy the sentry sang, “and dark as the cell of his skull.” He sang it over and over to a stupid little tune someone had made up, or whispered it when his voice got tired, or hummed it, keeping time by tapping his feet in the stirrups. Sometimes he even waved his arms like he was directing the fort band. No telling what his horse thought. Or what the German thought. Paddy and the German always seemed to draw this duty together, and the German never said a bloody word, or smiled at Paddy’s jokes, or did anything but glower. Paddy couldn’t swear he spoke English.

  The sentries had been singing this foolishness for months, for Colonel Carrington was a soldier who talked constantly about rules and regulations and procedures and orders, and cast scarcely an eye to the welfare of his men. They sang it here on Pilot Butte because not a man was within a mile to hear them, at least no wasicu. They sang it on the catwalks inside the fort, sometimes with the real words and to the devil with the colonel if he heard, or to doggerel they improvised, every man jack of them knowing what the real words were.

  The words about it being dark didn’t apply now, of course, today being sunny and bright and clear as any colleen’s eye, and cold as her nay-saying lips. Bitter, freezing, ball-breaking cold it was, a cold that his native Ireland couldn’t match, a cold for more than itinerant Irishmen and taciturn Germans, a cold worthy of epic heroes and great deeds at arms.

  Four days before Christmas it was, when his ma would be making holiday pudding back in Galway, and here he was in a wasteland eyeballing a bunch of savages for the village idiot.

  Except for the dimness in the colonel’s skull, they wouldn’t have to stand watch out on this butte. Colonel Carrington had put the fort in a hole, so you couldn’t see out and the enemy could look in from every angle. Ah, l
ads, an officer’s brain is made from what they mucked out of the stalls.

  As it was, though, sentries stood on this hill a mile south of the fort from dawn to dusk every day, to provide intelligence of the enemy. Actually, thought Paddy, any Injun what killed me now would be doing me a favor. He wiggled his toes and banged his hands together. At least hell would be warm.

  Sounds of… yes, by God, gunfire.

  He put the telescope to his eye and brought the wood train into focus. The fort was so far from wood for buildings, the lads had to make expeditions for it nigh every day. With the woodcutters protected by soldiers.

  Aye, he saw them now, the bloody savages. Aye, charging the wood train, the soldiers shucking their axes for their rifles.

  Paddy looked ironically at the German. The fellow was off his mount and squatted there, as usual, like he was blocked of bowel. He’d paid no attention to Paddy using the glass. So Paddy ignored him and raised his semaphore flag. In big motions he signaled the fort: WOOD TRAIN UNDER ATTACK. It warmed him a bit to flail his arms about.

  “Sir, I respectfully request command of this mission!” snapped Lt. Col. William Judd Fetterman.

  Carrington thought, There’s nothing respectful about almost roaring at your superior officer. But he didn’t say so. He looked at Capt. James Powell. Carrington had sent for Powell, but Fetterman had pounded in practically on the captain’s heels. Carrington had calmly started telling Powell that the wood train was under attack again and forty-nine infantrymen and twenty-seven cavalrymen were mustering for the rescue. These rescues had gotten to be nuisances. Though the Indians couldn’t do any real damage, they swooped down on the woodcutters a couple of times a week.

  “Sir, I respectfully request this command!” Fetterman looked apoplectic, but then he always did.