by Darryl Brock
Striding eagerly toward a likely-looking gravel area, one of the goldbugs was about to step over a log onto what looked like dried-up sludge. Goose yelled and pulled him back just in time. Using a fallen bough as a pole, Goose plunged it through the crust to reveal a watery ooze rimmed by yellowish curds. The bough, about five feet long, nosed beneath the surface and vanished with a faint sucking sound. Goose said that even bears sometimes drowned in such swampholes.
That night we huddled beneath our tarps as lightning seemed to strike on all sides at once, illuminating the trees and pinnacles above us. Goose took out a bone flute and sounded long, quivering notes in a haunting pattern, as if talking back to the thunder reverberating wildly off the peaks.
“Wakinyan,” he said solemnly after a particularly deafening salvo.
“What does that mean?” I said.
“Near as I can tell,” Linc replied, “some kind of bird whose voice is thunder.”
Another cataclysmic bolt lit the world and shook the earth.
“Is the bird friendly?”
“Does it sound friendly?”
We made our way along Whitewater Creek, where canyon walls rose hundreds of feet and dozens of tributary streams made for slow headway. Quartz outcroppings and gravel bars electrified the goldbugs. We were starting to see prospect holes and claim placards curled around spikes, and in one place it looked like foundations had been laid out for cabins. We grew increasingly jittery, and Goose took to scouting far out in front.
“Looks like everybody just up and left,” Linc mused.
“Maybe the army took ’em out.”
“That was at least a month back,” he said. “There’s been folks here since.”
“Hey!” One of the goldbugs held up his portable scale. “I’m settling here! Three bucks’ color in one pan!”
He promptly changed his mind when Goose returned with the news that he’d found another corpse. Unlike the wretch who’d had his vitals burned out, this one was more recently dead. Goose led us to a shallow gully where a large white man sprawled face down, his shirt soaked with blood from what looked like puncture wounds. Linc rolled him over. He was cold and stiff but hadn’t been mutilated by his killers or worked on yet by animals. His face was bloated almost beyond recognition.
Almost.
We were staring at Dyson.
Linc concluded that he’d died within the past 24 hours, a reckoning that further deepened the ambient gloom of the place. Cait shuddered and turned away. Goose dug at the spongy earth until the feathered shaft of an arrow emerged. It had been driven so deep that nobody else spotted it. He examined it in a manner that seemed almost reverent.
“Tasunke Witko,” he murmured.
Linc frowned. “He’s saying it’s Crazy Horse’s.”
“How can he know that?”
“Because it’s gooseberry wood and because of the markings—see that red zigzag on the shaft?—and how the feathers are attached. Every Lakota’s arrows are different; it’s how they prove buffalo and other kills.”
Goose said something and pointed downward.
“He says that not taking the scalp and driving the arrow in the ground is Crazy Horse’s way of showing contempt. He’s positive it was him.”
In my youth I’d admired the Lakota chief as a romantic figure in old west stories. It was a vastly different experience to be staring down at one of his victims. Like admiring mountain lions in the abstract—then finding one in your yard.
When Linc and I informed the goldbugs that Dyson’s group had once numbered more than a dozen, they argued over whether to get out of the Hills at once. The issue was resolved within the hour, when we came across two more corpses. These were in worse shape but I recognized another of Dyson’s bunch, this one a boy. He’d played against us in the Fourth of July game that now seemed a thousand years back.
“Crazy Horse again?” I said.
“Linc shook his head. “Goose says wasichu did these.”
One victim had taken a shotgun blast. The other, the boy, had had his throat slashed. I felt my neck hairs prickling.
LeCaron.
“Signs are easy to read,” Linc reported. “Five men got off their horses here. The dead ones were done in by the other three, who took their time leaving. They weren’t worried about being followed.”
I asked how Goose could know that they took their time.
Linc pointed to tracks leading away. “See how clear that print is? You can make out every nail in the shoe. The faster a horse steps, the longer and blurrier the prints get.”
He bent to examine some boot tracks. “Goose is right, whites did it.” He looked up grimly. “I’ve seen this print before—it’s one I tracked out of O’Neill City. This is the bunch that took Tim.”
“Can you tell if Tim was one of the three?”
Linc shook his head. Goose likewise couldn’t determine if any of the prints were a boy’s.
“Goose says he’ll track ’em alone,” Linc reported. “He’ll come back when he locates them. Meanwhile, he wants us to send the goldbugs away. By stealing gold from his mother, the earth, they helped bring on this terrible medicine. He says things’ll go bad for us if they stick around here.”
“We could use their firepower in a fight,” I pointed out.
“That wasn’t part of their deal,” Linc answered. “Anyhow, Goose says either they go or he goes.”
Which made it a no-brainer.
I felt a hundred times more vulnerable the instant Goose disappeared into the trees. And more vulnerable yet when the goldbugs trooped off southward toward Custer City, where they hoped to find Pollack’s troops and a safe escort from the Hills.
After burying the murdered men, we waited with weapons at the ready. Linc seemed calm enough, but Cait and I started at every unexpected sound. In late afternoon, Goose suddenly reappeared. He’d tethered his pony and approached on foot, and I had no idea he was near until he made a soft cough behind me.
“Christ, Goose, you took a year off my life!”
The Lakota’s hooded-eye glance probably signified that I was a moron. Through Linc he related that the men we sought were holed up in a sacred place with very powerful medicine. It was called Cave of the Winds, located halfway up a bluff, with slate walls all around. Only one trail in. Anybody coming could be seen, and they were watching constantly.
“Is Tim there?” Cait asked in choked tones.
Linc nodded. “Not bound, but watched close.”
She slumped against me in relief and said fervently, “I take back what I’ve said about Goose.”
Looking imperious, as if he understood, the Lakota folded his arms.
“Is Tim healthy?” Linc asked.
Goose shrugged.
“How many altogether?” I asked.
“Just three besides the boy.” Linc passed on Goose’s descriptions: “fire hair” (McDermott); “iyeska” or mixed breed (LeCaron); and “hair mouth” (a man with a goatee or beard).
“Can we get behind them?”
Goose didn’t think so.
“What do we do?” I said. “Try to starve them out? Go get the army?”
Linc shook his head. “They’d use Tim against us.” He asked Goose’s advice and then looked thoughtful. “He thinks the best thing is to ask the spirits to drive them into our hands.”
A silence followed.
“Anybody got a better plan?”
That night Goose took a solitary sweat and told us afterward that it was now time to talk about Little Hawk and Curly. Through Linc he explained that “Curly” was the name Crazy Horse was called when they were boys. Little Hawk was Curly’s kid brother.
As part of their preparation for becoming warriors, teenage Lakota boys joined akecitas, or fraternal societies. Goose and Curly had belonged to the Crow Owners Society. Little Hawk, several years younger and probably the most daring of all the young Lakotas, also joined. He and Goose became fast friends—and then more.
In Lakota culture t
here was the Hunkapi tradition, or Making of Relatives. No sacrifice was too great among those who made hunka to each other, as did Goose and Little Hawk. The bonds were so strong that not even death broke them.
“Often when a brave died,” Linc translated, “his hunka took responsibility for his family.”
A suspicion dawned in me. “Are you about to tell us that Little Hawk is Lily’s father?” I said. “And Goose is some kind of half-brother to Crazy Horse?”
Linc answered that being part of Little Hawk’s tiyospaye, or bigger family, did indeed link Goose to Curly. But things had begun to change when Goose didn’t like the cruelty employed by the akecita in warrior games. Hurting others made his heart sick. One night the moon came to him in a dream and held out a warrior’s bow and a woman’s pack strap—and told him to choose one.
“Which did he pick?” Cait asked.
“He couldn’t take either one,” Linc replied.
When Goose announced that he was leaving the warrior path, his akecita scorned him, saying that since his spirit called him to the ways of women, he should act and dress like a woman. It was believed that he was a winkte, though Goose himself had not made that decision. He was given a tepee in the outer ring with the widows and orphans.
“How does the baby come into this?” I said.
“Goose and Little Hawk were still hunka in spite of everything,” Linc said, and related that after the deaths of Little Hawk and his squaw, Goose considered mothering the baby himself, but that wasn’t his nature either, and by then he was sick from the white man’s liquor. He’d become a hang-around-the-fort Indian because he was an in-between person. Not a warrior. Not a woman. Neither mother nor father. And finally not even a true Lakota. Just a drunk.
“Right before we showed up in Bismarck,” Linc finished, “Curly and Little Hawk came to him together in a vision and told Goose to journey here to restore himself. So when he saw us, everything seemed to fit together and Goose figured it was his destiny.”
“Will he want to take Lily back,” Cait asked, “when he’s restored?”
Hearing the urgency in her voice, I realized how much she, too, had bonded with the infant, who from all signs was destined to have an entire town as her family. Which, if you thought about it, was what Lily would have had with her tribe.
“So Curly—Crazy Horse—has come up here to take revenge on whites?” I asked. “For killing his brother?”
“That would be reason enough,” Linc reported, “but whites not only killed Little Hawk, they caused the death of Crazy Horse’s beloved daughter, who died of cholera, a wasichu disease. So, yes, he comes here alone and leaves his telltale arrows by his victims. The army doesn’t know he’s the one, but all the Indians do.”
Goose informed us that while we slept he would pray for a vision of how to proceed against our enemies.
In the morning we would hold a war council.
TWENTY-SEVEN
The ceremonial pipe had belonged to his father, and until now Goose had never smoked it. He offered it to the four directions, to the sky and the earth. Saying it represented the universe and must move in a circle before being smoked, he passed it gravely to me. The two-foot stem was decorated with beads and horse hair, its bowl carved from red stone polished to a sheen with buffalo grease.
Hadn’t the ball also represented the universe?
Yes, he answered, as did many things.
Cait strode up to where we sat cross-legged. “It’s quite the sight you make in your circle,” she said. “The famous ‘war council’—and you intend to hold it without me?”
“Not for squaw,” Goose said distinctly, the first English I’d heard from him besides “give money.”
“I’m nobody’s squaw,” Cait retorted. Dark circles underlay her eyes. I knew she hadn’t slept much, because I hadn’t either. Exhaustion and strain were taking a toll on us. “ ’Tis my son all of you are talking about, and I’ll be included!”
Goose sat in stubborn silence, arms folded.
“Well, shit,” Linc muttered.
Cait removed a revolver from her jacket as she plopped herself down between Linc and me. She held the weapon loosely at her side, not exactly training it on anyone.
But pointed more toward Goose than anybody else.
They stared at each other.
I said soothingly, “Cait …”
The barrel did not waver. In the trip’s early stages, when we weren’t as worried about making noise, Linc had worked with her in handling the revolver and our Winchesters. Recoils gave her some trouble, but her first shots invariably were accurate. And she stayed cool.
After a long interval the Lakota shrugged and turned to Linc. “He thinks maybe some of Bear’s spirit has entered her.”
I breathed normally again as the pipe resumed its passage. Cait duly took her puff, though she looked like she’d as soon kiss a rattler.
After smoking, Goose tied his hair in elaborate braids, daubed his face with red clay from a nearby hillside, and added dark stripes from dye in a beaded pouch.
“Red for bravery in battle,” Linc said. “Black for facing death.”
I’d been having a few mortality thoughts myself.
We watched while Goose spread sweet grass and sage on the ground, then prayed over them. He did the same with an eagle’s talon, shards of animal skulls, a wad of buffalo hair, several flat rocks and a crushed tin can.
“What are those for?” Cait asked.
“Medicine bundle,” Linc answered. “The stones are to give him hardness.”
“And the tin can?”
“Sometimes new things can have the power of Bear.”
We’re in big trouble, I thought, watching while the skinny little Lakota daubed zigzag patterns on his pony’s flanks and circled its eyes in black. From a saddlebag he produced an old-style tomahawk (mass-produced ones were now available with metal blades) that was elaborately tied with sinew and covered with ornamented buckskin. He hefted the stone head and lifted his eyes skyward.
“Asking his father’s spirit for guidance,” Linc said, “because today Goose expects to become a brave.”
“What’s his plan?” I asked. So far, our war council had produced no strategy or tactics.
“Most important of all, he says, he’ll count coup today. Do you know what that is?”
I had a flash of memory from my boyhood reading. “To show bravery by touching an enemy?”
Linc nodded, his face not revealing much.
My misgivings immediately multiplied. LeCaron would require one hell of a lot more than a mere touch.
“His plan is to drive ’em from the cave to a place where they can be destroyed.”
That sounded better, if vague, but it didn’t take Tim into account. I started to say something caustic, then checked myself. Where did I get off being irritated? Why should Goose have to do everything? He’d gotten us into the Hills. He’d found the kidnappers. He was guiding us to them. What more should I expect?
Very soon it would be up to Linc and Cait and me.
The afternoon was muggy, the sky piling with cumulus towers that seemed to be thickening like cream. Our footing on the shale slope was unstable. We moved up it laboriously, step by cautious step, seemingly taking forever to climb a few hundred yards. Goose had us tie ropes from tree to tree as we ascended. He said we might need to go down in a hurry, maybe in the dark. Finally he pointed to a craggy outcropping on the opposite side of the canyon.
“The entrance is through those boulders,” Linc said softly.
We peered cautiously through the trees, seeing nothing but the sheer canyon walls and those giant rocks. Two hawks circled in the middle distance.
“Somebody’s there,” Cait whispered.
The head of a bearded white man materialized among the boulders. He studied the trail below the outcropping for several moments, then he emerged, a rifle balanced in one hand. It took me a few seconds to recognize him as Brown Hair, McDermott’s cardplaying confeder
ate. After him came a smaller figure. Cait clutched her stomach and groaned. We were too far away to see Tim’s expression, but the boy’s scarecrow thinness and slumping movements, reminiscent of POWs in old newsreels, left no doubt that he was in bad shape. Head down, Tim moved a few paces from the entrance and urinated. Brown Hair kept his eyes on the trail and scarcely paid him any attention. Not once did he look across the canyon in our direction.
“I think maybe I could drill the bastard,” Linc said, assessing windage and distance.
“Tough shot,” I said. “And if you dropped him, what next? Tim looks too worn out to run.”
As the boy moved with painful slowness back toward the entrance, Brown Hair kicked at his leg to hurry him along.
“Oh God,” Cait moaned.
Goose offered pinches of powder from his medicine pouch to the Four Winds, the Earth, and the Sky.
“He’s fixing to talk to the spirits in the Cave of the Winds,” Linc told us, “and call forth the voice of Wakan Tanka, the thunder god, to bring our enemies outside.” He pointed down the slope. “Remember that swamphole where Goose sank a branch? There’s another one down there and he thinks maybe we can use it.”
I glanced at Cait. She was nodding in agreement as if this were a fixed military operation instead of what I feared it was—a lot of wishful thinking.
Goose spoke, then motioned to Cait and me.
“He says you’re to pile brush for a fire on the trail beneath that overhang.” Linc pointed to a portion of the cliff wall screened by forest from the cave. “The swamp hole’s right near it, so take care. I’m to stay here and cover you. When you’re finished, come back up. Later, when Wankan Tanka speaks, we’re to light the fire.”
I looked overhead. The clouds showed some yellow and purple tints but no sign of rain. I was having trouble trying to stifle my misgivings. But the sad fact was that I lacked anything else to suggest.
“Hokahe!” Goose exclaimed, then moved laterally along the slope and out of sight, chanting in sing-song tones.