Pretty Singer listened and feigned happiness. In his younger brother’s curious, dark eyes he read a caution now. Wanikiya jumped when he came across him alone at the creek or in the woods.
All the while the world changed around them. The buffalo disappeared. Leaders of other tribes signed away territories without consulting Seeing Stone’s small band: Traverse Des Sioux, 1851. The years and names, meaningless to them. Every day more and more whites filled the valley, eating up all the fish from the creek, hunting out the lands, digging homes for themselves in the sod where they lived like rodents.
One such family moved directly across the river from where Seeing Stone’s band lived. There was a tall, hair-faced man who carried a great toothlike gleaming thing he used to hew down a part of the hardwood forest that sheltered the people in winters of the past. He had a wife so hugely pregnant she waddled when she walked, a pale-skinned woman who wore a headpiece that made her nearly blind. Both had fine yellow hair and pink skin which they must have been ashamed of to cover up in so many layers of clothing. These wasicun squawked like prairie chickens and ran whenever any of the tribe came on their land. Worse, they had a huge, lumbering bear of a dog they would turn on the people who approached their side of the river.
One day a girl named Whispering Cloud went across this river to gather teepsinna —a juicy, delicious tuber that grew in the marshes over there—and was mauled by the bearlike dog. She ran screaming through the camp, blood soaking through her dress, one of her ears dangling by a single shred of skin. The injury, so close to his own mutilation, enraged Pretty Singer.
That very night Pretty Singer went over to the other side carrying with him some pemmican to feed to dog. Once the animal learned to trust him and grew greedy, Pretty Singer coaxed it to come forward and then plunged his knife into the animal’s chest. He held onto the shuddering dog until the last low death rattle rumbled up out of its throat. Every single moment of fear and uselessness in his life felt purged by this dog’s blood. This was what he could have done with the bear. This was the power that the Canotina’s song should have given him.
Pretty Singer did not stop with their dog. He entered the sod stable where they kept the clumsy four-hoofed creatures they used to tear up the black earth. The smell of the sod around him returned him to the memory of his prison cell and his vision. The oxen inside shied at the strange smell of this man, the iron scent of dog’s blood on his knife. But each was in its own pen and had nowhere to run. One of them began to bellow in fear. The lowing of this beast filled the small room. Pretty Singer opened the stall’s door and stroked the ox’s bristling fur, whispering soft things in the animal’s ears. “I am Tatanyandowan,” he told it. “Be still.” Then he drew the knife across the wide throat and the great ox went down on its knees, spilling blood in a torrent through the sod barn. The other oxen began to panic and kick at the solid earthen walls. In the darkness their eyes glazed over with a terror that paralyzed them before the man with the knife.
Within his cabin, the settler heard the sound of the frightened oxen and his wife encouraged him to go out and check in case wolves were bothering the stock again, but he had been chopping wood all day and was too tired even to lift his arms.
One by one Pretty Singer killed the trapped cattle. Then he went into the grove of remaining woods and lay down in a spot of grass to watch for morning.
It was the wife who found them. She went down to water the stock before the sun’s first rising. There was a silence in the barn, a smell that prickled the hair on the back of her neck. She held onto her huge belly and waddled through the door. In the slick warmth inside she slipped and fell, turning as she went down to avoid landing on her stomach. The black mud and straw kept her glued to the ground, but as the breath came back into her lungs she looked across the stall and saw the flat eyes of one the dead oxen looking back at her and knew then what she was lying in. She screamed and managed to scramble up out of the sod barn. She screamed as she ran all the way back to the cabin, her dress saturated with gore, her voice going hoarse.
All of this took place in 1857 by the reckoning of the white world. The Swedish family, the Gustavsons, who had lived in this place, abandoned the square-house they had made from the trees and returned back to where they came from.
Still drenched in blood, Pretty Singer returned to the camp, delighting in the fear he saw in his brother’s eyes and those of the medicine man, Hanyokeyah. He had learned that he did not need to wait for the Canotina. That night in the sod barn, he had fashioned his own medicine from blood. When he returned again, he would complete the vision that he had seen so many winters before.
Fearing the soldiers would come for him again, he fled that winter out onto the prairies to live with another renegade, a Wahpekute named Inkpaduta, whose father was said to have killed a chief. He did not wait to see whether Hanyokeyah urged the council to exile him from his own people.
Wanikiya stood before the old man, his chin tilted up, while a charcoal stick coated his throat and chest with blackness. Hanyokeyah’s hands were steady. He darkened even the boy’s face, drawing careful ovals around the eyes. Both of them wore only breechclout and leggings even though their breath rose in white clouds around them on this chill spring day. Seeing the preparations for this fasting ceremony, a few of the camp’s children danced around the boy with freshly cooked meat, taunting and tempting him.
When Hanyokeyah finished with the charcoal he stepped back and studied the boy before him. He looked in his eyes for that flicker of the father that Good Star Woman had said dwelled inside him. The boy watched him in return, not speaking, oblivious even to the children waving strips of meat under his nose.
A burrowing owl the boy had rescued from the prairie danced on his shoulder and squawked at this new creature his master had become. It fluttered up to perch on the boy’s head, the talons fixing a hold near the single lock of silver in the boy’s hair. The boy lifted it back down on his finger, speaking to it softly. Watching them together, the old man rec- ognized that the boy loved this pet more than anything in the world. An orphan, like him. It would make a suitable sacrifice for the Great Mystery when the boy was ready.
A few flecks of icy drizzle spat from a low gray sky, but the old man made them leave the striped woolen trader blankets behind. Both he and the boy would wear only breechclout and leggings even as squalls of black clouds passed over the wintry sun and the north wind grew teeth and claws. They walked through the winter-dry prairie grasses and found a place to lie down on the opposite side of the still-frozen river.
Red Otter had reported that a new family had come to live in the place the whites abandoned after Pretty Singer killed their animals. The old man hoped to teach the boy lessons about watchfulness today, and also to discover just what sort of people this new family would prove to be.
He and the boy cut strands of waving bluestem and wove this through their headbands. Hanyokeyah left the two feathers he had earned in battle against the Ojibwe waving in his hair. Any who saw this from the distance would think him no more than a grouse or prairie chicken. Then he and the boy hunched down in the grass to get out of the wind.
They were not there long before some of the white family came down. The family followed a beaten path down to the river, past stumps of the trees the last white had cut out of the grove. Nearest the river, a dense matting of burr oak branches tossed above their heads like nests of dark serpents. The underbrush rustled with chickadees flitting about to stay warm.
They watched as the largest of the whites, a tall boy with gold hair and lean, hawklike features, chopped through the ice with a pickax to get at the water rushing beneath. Hanyokeyah felt Wanikiya shudder beside him at the sound of ice breaking. The taller boy leaned over the rim and dipped in a bucket he passed to another boy beside him. This boy was shorter, slightly bowlegged, with bright red hair and speckles on his skin. Neither child paid any attention to their surroundings except for a few nervous glances at the woods around them. A
n entire war party could have lain on this prairie and they would not have seen them. The old man told himself to make sure to point this out to Wanikiya later. Fasting taught watchfulness. The world never stopped being perilous and the leaf-dwellers were no more than kit foxes in a land of wolves and ravenous eagles.
A new figure emerged on the far bank, a girl with dark hair, her long dress thrashing in the wind. She came down the bank along with the boys and gazed out from the woods into the span of golden grassland that stretched around the watchers.
Her eyes quickly found the old man and Wanikiya. Hanyokeyah saw her jaw go slack with fear. This is the moment she will yell and scream , he thought. He lay low and placed a hand on the boy’s back to make sure he didn’t move. He imagined sending out his mind to the girl standing on the far shore. I am only a bird in the grass , he said. And later he wondered if it was only his imagination when a voice came back and answered his own, saying: You are not. I see you . Hanyokeyah sat all the way up in the grass, his head cresting above the waving tips. The two boys with this girl were still engrossed in their task. The older one laughed as he climbed back up the bank, water sloshing around him. But the girl stayed where she was, pale in her dress, her fists on her hips. Then he realized that she was doing what they had come here for. She was trying to understand how much of a threat they were to her family. She saw them because she had looked with the eyes of her heart and did not believe the disguise they had made. Finally, the girl scrambled up after her brothers and hid behind one of the trees.
In case she might run and tell the others and they had dogs or worse, Hanyokeyah took the boy away. There were enough lessons for him already in this encounter. They ran quickly through the tallgrass, keeping low. The old man cast one backward glance and saw the girl as she came out of hiding. Afterward he would wonder at her strange behavior and the gesture she made: the fingers spreading open and waving back and forth as though to clear the air around her.
After they were gone, the girl came down the slope and crossed the frozen river. The golden grass was pressed to the earth on this far side and she knelt and touched the ground and felt the remains of their bodies’ warmth. She was not frightened even though the shopkeeper had shown them the article about Abbie Gardner seeing her entire family killed before her eyes. They had been hiding so close she could see the shine of the bear grease in the boy’s braids and the glint of something silver. She thought if the Indians were going to kill them all they would not send one grizzled looking old man in dark paint and a boy. They had just been crouching there in the grass, black and glossy as crows. She hadn’t sensed any menace in them.
A spotted white feather was nestled in the boy’s place. Hazel knew when she took it in her hands that she would see him again.
STRANGERS
IN THE
TERRITORY
THE SENGER FAMILY had arrived on a bitter day in April of 1859. Snow whirled out of low clouds before the wind caught it and whipped it past their eyes, the flakes small and hard as fragments of broken glass. They could hear the ice breaking up like bones beneath the hull of their steamer, the Independence , the first boat to make it upriver to New Ulm that spring. The family hunched down behind rain barrels to keep out of the wind. In the tallgrass prairies along the shore the wind moved like a ghost army, bending down the stalks in a relentless march, flowing and moaning as they came, before dying with one final shriek. The sun was a white disk above them that vanished in clouds of mixed sleet and snow.
When the wind relented the children stood again near the rails as the steamer carried them into a heavily treed valley terraced by grassed knolls. Jakob called it a vision of the Old Country, the way his father had always spoken of it. If there had been stone castles on the highest hills, the vision would have been complete. They would have traveled from their old home, a family on the run, into a place out of a tale.
But instead of castles there were scaffolds: lean structures of lashed beams tied with fluttering red cloths where a man told them the Dakota laid their dead. They hadn’t seen a single live Indian but their dead were all around the family, and when the great droves of blackbirds took flight from the leafless woods, the children were left with an uneasy sense of eyes watching from the trees. This was the false spring the girl had dreamed about when she touched the Judas flower. In a few days the river would grow a new skin of ice and trap the steamer upriver in New Ulm.
They came here, all the way to Minnesota, because of Jakob’s paper. Back in Missouri, while recovering from his burns, Jakob had picked up the advertisement for the escaped slave, trying to remember her face. He saw this ad printed beneath it:
Land out of the Bible! Rich virgin prairie soils are now open to homesteading after Dahcotah Indians sign peace treaty.
Wooded draws and dark, alluvial soils capable of growing the crop of your dreams. Good wheat country and river transportation.
Come to land where sickness is unknown and the summers cool and bounteous.
The advertisement included a man’s name: Flandrau of New Ulm. With his printing press wrecked and an entire town incited against him, Jakob did not have to think long about taking his family to a new place only a month’s travel out of St. Louis.
There were few difficulties but along the way they lost Kate, his wife of two years. One morning, soon after they set out, while traveling wet spring Missouri roads and camping out beneath the buckboard by night, they awoke to find her blankets empty, and Jakob reasoned she’d gone back to her father and the only home she knew. But she’d left her children with him, and for Jakob there was no going back to Saline Springs. A month’s travel took him to meet Flandrau, the land agent, face to face, and from him he bought a section of land abandoned the previous winter and, with the last of his wife’s money, supplies. He was told that there was a cabin already on the property.
It was also from Flandrau they first heard the name of Inkpaduta and of the massacre his tribe caused: forty settlers dead down near Spirit Lake in Ioway territory.
Hysteria had gripped New Ulm. The streets were empty and quiet. The newspapers the children read in the store while their father haggled over land and supplies, told only half the story. The children saw Inkpaduta, drawn to look like a monster, and the picture of Abbie Gardner. “She looks like you,” Asa told Hazel. While snow dripped from their patchwork cloaks as they huddled around a cast-iron stove in the store, they read of Inkpaduta’s rage. His brother, Sintonamaduta, was murdered by the horse trader, Henry Lott. Lott was a man of wicked inclinations and deserved punishment. When Inkpaduta took his complaint to Granville Berkley, the prosecuting attorney, the man responded by nailing Sinto’s head to a post.
Then came a winter with snowdrifts as high as the cedar hills, a time when the settlers and a renegade band of Indians living outside the reservation boundaries were forced close together. Corn disappeared from cribs. In their hunger and fear, the whites took the Indians’ guns and forced them to go alone out onto the prairies, unarmed and exiled, possibly to die in the snow. But Inkpaduta and his Wahpekutes, the leaf dwellers, had no intention of leaving.
As she read, the girl could see it. In her mind’s eye she saw the severed head of Inkpaduta’s brother leering eyeless from the post, a tongue swelling from the jaws. She saw grim, white-faced women rustling past in dark dresses, shielding their children’s eyes when they walked by the head. Her awareness of her physical surroundings vanished. She couldn’t feel her feet or hands. She was inside the vision and the severed head turned to watch her, as in her dream, and then turned past her to gaze at the horizon where darkness spread like spilled ink. Behind them a dark swarming cloud blotted out the sun, birds and more birds descending, and people turning toward this eclipse of the light, their faces pale with terror.
Forty dead when Inkpaduta’s men were done, and the girl carried out onto the far prairies after seeing her family slaughtered. A troop from Fort Ridgely sought to track down the outlaw band, but all they caught was frostbite, two
of their own men vanishing in the treacherous pools of snow on the prairie. Inkpaduta . The name haunted those frightened people in New Ulm and would haunt the Senger family. Don’t stay out too late, they haven’t yet caught Inkpaduta. Don’t play with Indians or you’ll end up like Abbie Gardner.
The family didn’t know what to expect when they came through the valley. Hazel rode in the buckboard beside her father while the boys ran alongside the wagon, anxious to arrive. Back in New Ulm they had purchased a new wagon, an iron stove, various pots and pans, one washboard, tin plates and cups, a barrel of buckwheat flour to grind in the coffee mill, salted pork, and the seed potatoes and corn they hoped to plant in May. They had four oxen to pull the wagon, a brindled milch cow tied to the back, and four laying hens in wire boxes. The cow moaned, pained or homesick, while they rode along. Of Kate’s four hundred dollars, they had a smattering of silver remaining.
As they rode along, shafts of sunlight split the clouds hovering low over the prairie and touched the bluestem grasses with tawny light. The oxen came along, slow and relentless, following grooves in the ground marked by Indians’ travois in their ceaseless migrations. Clouds of prairie chickens erupted in front of the wagon wheels. Colors sharpened in the unseasonable cold, ice glazing the gold grass, stark black trunks of trees bordering rigid creeks and steep sloughs. There were no people visible. Smoke spiraled from an occasional cabin set near the road. A few mangy dogs came out and barked at the entourage, but were too lazy to give chase.
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