Embrace the Wild Land

by Rosanne Bittner

  He puffed on the pipe again and Wolf’s Blood watched him. “Did that woman love you?” he asked curiously.

  Zeke thought for a long moment. Anna Gale was exceedingly beautiful, a wasted woman who might have turned out differently if not for her childhood. “Perhaps,” he replied. He puffed the pipe again and turned to face the boy. “At any rate I wanted to do something for Anna for helping us out of a bad predicament. She’d been kind to Abbie at a time when Abbie was helpless and alone in a strange city, her husband in jail and her son badly wounded and lying in the street. If not for Anna, God only knows what might have happened to Abbie that day, or to you. So I gave Anna a weapon to use against Winston Garvey, because she hated the man, and I hated him, too. After seeing his son again and hearing from Anna how demented the boy was, I knew the last thing Winston Garvey would want would be for his own son to discover he had a half-brother who was part Indian. So I gave Anna a weapon to use against Garvey and free her of her indebtedness to the man. I only told her enough to threaten Garvey. I told her that he had a half-breed son. I told her nothing more, and since Garvey has no idea I was in Denver and that the information could have come from me, it isn’t likely he would ever make the connection. But there is always the possibility, which is why you and I and your mother must never reveal we know anything about a half-breed boy born to Yellow Moon. Yellow Moon is dead, and as far as we are concerned, never had the child. If anyone should ever ask about it, you know nothing of it. Understood?”

  Wolf’s Blood nodded and rose. “I understand, Father. I understand many things now. I am glad you told me of this so that I will never deceive my cousin, Joshua. And more than that, I understand better about men like Winston Garvey.”

  Zeke took the pipe from his mouth and walked closer to the boy. “Always remember the warnings I give you this day. Men like Winston Garvey don’t know the meaning of love. They have no heart. They marry for power and money, and their children are nothing more than something to be nurtured in the ways of evil so that they can carry on the father’s empire. The Winston Garveys of this world think they are better than other people, destined to rule and own; and if he thinks someone like myself is in the way of his climb to glory, he’ll try to cut me—or you—down. He uses people for his pleasure and then disposes of them. His kind will cry out publicly against the Indian and then turn around and sleep with slave squaws. He pretends to be pure and pious, but he is filth on the inside. Such men know nothing about being one with God and the elements—about the joys of being free, of hunting alone, watching an eagle, talking to the animals, sleeping close to the earth with the smell of grass and wild-flowers in your nostrils. Such things are riches to us. But they are nothing to men like Garvey. He hungers only for wealth and power. And I predict right now that his son, Charles, will be worse than the father. Remember that—and remember his name.”

  Wolf’s Blood nodded. “I will remember all these things, Father. I hate such men. I remember that day in Denver. It burns in my stomach! I hate such men the way my uncle, Swift Arrow, hates them. And if they ever come and try to take me away to their world, I will kill them! And if those I do not kill still want me, they will have to catch me first. Just let them try to catch Wolf’s Blood!” He smiled haughtily, even though his eyes were watery. “They will never catch me. And I will never go to that world, Father. Do not ever make me go there!”

  Zeke reached out and put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “I’ll never make you go there, son. You aren’t made for those places. You’re made for freedom, and because you are the way you are, your heart is pure and your soul will be free, and the wind will always be at your back.” He bent down and picked up the infamous knife, holding it out to the boy. “Grab hold, son, and get a feel of the balance.”

  Their eyes held in a new understanding. Wolf’s Blood slowly reached out and grasped the buffalo jawbone handle of his father’s notorious weapon.

  “I want you to get your mind off that other world, son,” Zeke told him. “This is your time—the year you have chosen through your own vision to become a man and suffer the Sun Dance ritual. Because of what you know about your enemies, you are even stronger now—wiser. It is good that you know these things so that when the celebration comes, your eyes will be open to good and evil. This is important. Evil lurks in all of our hearts, Wolf’s Blood. It is up to each man to decide which side shall win his soul—the good or the evil. The evil side is the easy way. To truly be strong, to truly be a man, means standing up for what is right, against all odds. It means fighting a power worse than all the evil that surrounds us. It means fighting the evil inside ourselves and being strong from within. It is my own inner strength that has pulled me through many bad experiences and saved me in all the times that I came close to losing my life in battle. And when a man finds his own inner power and strength, then he chooses a weapon as a warrior, a weapon that represents his strength, an extension of a man’s power. For me this weapon is the knife. Now you yourself have been practicing with it. I have watched you. In so many ways you are like me. Perhaps you also will choose the knife as the extension of your power.”

  The boy looked at his father again. “I want to learn more,” he said, his eyes suddenly strangely cold. “I want to be as good as you with the knife. I am good with a lance, but a man cannot easily carry a lance every place he goes. A knife can be taken wherever I go.”

  Zeke nodded. “Exactly.” He closed his eyes and breathed deeply, drinking in the fresh air of a land that was still relatively virgin. Yet he knew that even on this very spot where he stood, whites would one day stand and claim the land for themselves. Where would he be then? Where would Wolf’s Blood be? It was too painful to contemplate. He could only hope such a thing was a long time in the future. Perhaps his son would be an old man by then. Yet he knew it was a foolish hope.

  “Come, Wolf’s Blood. We’ll do some knife throwing,” he spoke up. “Get a feel of the knife, son. Always remember that whenever you sharpen your blade, it changes the balance of the knife. Always get a feel of it again after you’ve sharpened it.”

  The boy nodded, gripping the knife eagerly. Smoke looked up at them from his comfortable position, not bothering to get to his feet. He was too comfortable, lying stretched out in the soft grass with the Colorado sun warming his back. Let the two men practice with the knife. That was man’s perogative. Today was a good day for an animal to stretch out and sleep.

  Somewhere a bird sang, and Zeke’s and Wolf’s Blood’s horses stood nearby nibbling on tall grass. It was one of those rare moments that Zeke suddenly drank in with his eyes, a moment he realized would for some reason hang in his mind forever, a sweet morning when the air made him drunk, and his nostrils were full of the smell of grass and the sun heated his skin—a moment when for a brief time it seemed his life was standing still, and he and the animals nearby, the grass and the sun and the air and his son were all one entity. A moment when the spirits walked with them.

  Nine

  It was called the Homestead Act, and Congress could not have enacted a more devastating bill for the Indian. The act officially opened the West to thousands of hungry settlers, offering land tracts of 160 acres to anyone over twenty-one who would live on the land for five years and farm it, or for $1.25 per acre outright. The Indians were neither warned nor even consulted in the matter, even though thousands of them already occupied the land and survived on its natural offerings. Suddenly, with no aid or advice, no explanations of any kind, the Indians found themselves inundated by thousands of new settlers who diminished hunting territory and who considered picking off Indians at random just one of the “necessary” means of settling “their” land, just as one would shoot a nest of foxes or skunks they might find when clearing their property.

  Indian reaction was to be expected. They were frightened, starving, dying of white man’s disease. They were desperate, and desperate men do desperate things. To the Indians’ logical thinking, the whites did not belong there. It was as sim
ple as that. There was only one way to make them go back home, and that was to show Indian strength and power, to literally “scare” the whites into getting out. Of all Indians, the Sioux were the most successful at accomplishing their objective—raiding, raping, burning, taking captives, and in general, sending most new settlers fleeing back to where they came from. The worst raids were in Minnesota, but many spread to the Dakotas and into Nebraska.

  A wind rushed down from the Black Hills, a hot summer wind that blew sand against the bare back of Swift Arrow. He was sure he could hear the strange moaning again that he often heard in the wind: the land crying out; his people crying out. Yes. The land and the people and the animals were all weeping. The white people who lived in the little house below the hill where he sat would also weep—before they died. He watched with a hardened heart as Sioux and some Northern Cheyenne rode hard toward one of the hundreds of new soddies that had been built on the Dakota plains. These people had to be stopped. He did not always like hurting them. But he, too, had been hurt. He had seen his own people shot down like animals, his women raped, his villages ravaged—all in the name of the white man’s progress and settlement. There had been no reason for any of it. It was criminal and illegal, and the white man seemed to listen to none of the Indians’ pleas. This was the only thing the white man understood. Brutality. Violence. If that was what the white man wanted, that was what he would get.

  Swift Arrow was a handsome man, but a lonely man. His lips were pressed hard together in bitterness, his once-warm brown eyes now glazed with hatred. The screaming below only made him smile. His deep brown skin was painted vividly for war, and in his hair he wore many coup feathers and other grand decorations. He was an honored Dog Soldier of the Cheyenne. Many women wanted him, but he wanted none of them. There had been only one woman he’d wanted since his first wife had died of the white man’s disease. But that woman could never be his, for she came from the world that he hated.

  He urged his painted pony into motion and headed toward the already burning settlement. Indians circled below, waiting for the settlers inside to come out of their smoke-filled soddy. Flaming arrows had been carefully aimed and shot through the windows, which had no glass or even any boards to cover them, for the soddy had been freshly constructed. By the time Swift Arrow reached the bottom of the hill, several Sioux were riding off with the settlers’ livestock, and a woman and little girl came running out of the soddy, screaming, followed by a man with a rifle. In the next moment the man was dead, an arrow in his chest.

  The woman fell to the ground and covered her little girl. Swift Arrow was very close by then. One of the other braves rode up to the woman and raised his lance, but Swift Arrow had noticed her dark hair, and the red glint to it in the afternoon sun. In that brief moment it reminded him of another white woman’s hair.

  “Stop!” he commanded, using the Sioux tongue when he did so. The Sioux warrior with the lance looked at him in surprise.

  “Why do you tell me to stop? They must all die!”

  “Wait!” Swift Arrow again commanded. He motioned for the man to see what else he could find to steal, especially any food. The people were starving to death. Little children cried with stomach pains.

  The Sioux warrior scowled and rode off, and Swift Arrow looked down at the weeping, shivering white woman. “Get up,” he told her quietly.

  She slowly raised her head, shocked by the fact that this savage Indian standing before her had spoken to her in English. They stared at one another for a moment, and he was struck by how much she looked like another woman—like Abbie. How many years had it been since he had seen the wife of his half-brother? It was easier living here in the north, where he did not see her often, for Abbie was too easy to love, even for a Cheyenne warrior. He studied the white woman before him haughtily. He could rape her. He could kill her and scalp her. He could take her back and make a slave of her and the little girl, or use them as ransom to get supplies from other whites. There were many options. “I told you to get up!” he repeated.

  She rose, pulling her little girl close to her and staring at him with wide, terrified eyes.

  “I speak your tongue,” he told her. “My mother was Cheyenne. But once, before she married my Cheyenne father, she was the woman of a white man. She learned the language. And so I learned it also.” His eyes moved over her. Then he reached out and lightly touched her cheek. She closed her eyes and shivered, sure that he would do something horrible and degrading. But he only touched her gently. “Why is it that you whites cannot just leave us alone?” he asked, surprising her with the strange question. “Why do you make us hurt you?”

  She opened her eyes and tried to speak, but the words would not come. Her throat was tight and dry with fear. Another brave galloped up to them.

  “We go now!” he told Swift Arrow in the Sioux tongue. “We must kill the woman or take her captive. Which shall it be?”

  “She is mine!” Swift Arrow stated flatly. “All of you can leave! I will stay and take my pleasure with her—and with the girl. Then I will come.”

  The other warrior smiled. “As you wish, Swift Arrow. We go now.” The man rode off and the others followed, yipping and yelling and shooting off rifles. They had taken many horses and had found food. It had been a good raid. Swift Arrow watched until they disappeared over a hill. Then he turned dark eyes back to the woman, who still stared at him. Again he was struck by how much she reminded him of Abbie.

  “I told them I was going to stay here and rape you,” he told her matter-of-factly. He saw more color drain from her face, and her lower lip trembled. Then to her utter astonishment he smiled, not evilly but warmly. “But I lied,” he added. “I will bring you no harm. The best I can do is take you to the nearest settlement and let you off. You can go there for safety. But I cannot guarantee what will happen to that settlement after that, or that you will not be attacked again. You would be wise to go back where you came from, white woman. This is a bad place to be. A very bad place.”

  He reached down and grasped the little girl, lifting her and plopping her onto his mount. Then he turned to help the woman up.

  “Why?” she asked, stepping back a little. “Why would you help me?”

  His eyes moved over her again. “Because you remind me of someone. Another white woman. She loves the Indians. Understands them. She is gentle and full of goodness. She reminds me that there are some whites who are good, some who can be trusted. But their numbers are few.”

  He reached out for her again and she stepped back once more. “My man. I can’t … leave him lying there.”

  “You have no choice. When I get you to safety you can send men back to bury his body. We must go. If the warriors come back and catch me helping you bury your man, they will not only kill you and your child, but they will kill me also, for being weak. Even I am ashamed of my weakness. But I cannot harm you. The spirits tell me it would be bad for my soul. Your God is with you this day.”

  She began to tremble, and tears spilled out of her eyes. She suddenly covered her face and broke into frantic sobbing. In the next moment she felt strong hands grasping her about the waist and she was being hoisted to his horse. Then he jumped up behind her and the little girl, reaching around her to grasp the reins of his mount. Her hair brushed his face and smelled sweet.

  “Go ahead and weep, white woman,” he told her. “There will be much weeping in the years to come. Our women weep also. They weep over their little dying children who are starving because the braves can no longer find game, dying also of white man’s diseases. They weep because they are raped and humiliated by the white man, and because their own men are shot down like dogs. They have many reasons to weep. Once we lived in peace, happy to be just as we were. But the white man will not let us have peace any longer.”

  She wiped at her eyes and held her little girl close, praying this savage man would not change his mind about helping her. “My God … will bless you … for helping me,” she whimpered, hoping the words
would keep him calm. He only laughed lightly.

  “I do not need the blessings of your God. I have suffered too much to ever think I can be happy again.” He got his mount into motion and smiled at the realization that what she had said was very much like something Abbie would say. “I do not help you out of the goodness of my heart, white woman. If you did not look so much like another, you would probably be dead now.”

  If there were such a thing as hell on earth, Danny Monroe had found it. It was as though the devil had come to this place called Shiloh and was laughing, for as Danny lay in agonizing pain and surely dying, surrounded by the groans of Confederates and Federals alike, he could see the outline of the little Methodist Church against the sky whenever the lightning flashed. Surely God had deserted Shiloh this night.

  He tried again to crawl, but in his confused state he didn’t even know which way to go, and so much blood had left his body that he had no strength. The torture of the pain in his side and the terrible thirst that always follows a gunshot wound was only enhanced by the terrible screams and groans of the men around him. The Federal stronghold, called the Hornet’s Nest, had been taken: but Danny wondered if it had been worth the price in human bodies that had been paid. The Federals were still holding out farther back, and Danny lay with the hundreds of other wounded, Federal and Confederate alike, in “no man’s land,” a vast area between the two factions that the remaining fighting soldiers would not enter. No help had been sent for the wounded of either side, and to add to the misery of the wounded, a cold spring drizzle started at nightfall, turning to a harder rain mixed with sleet as a cold wind from the north whipped the storm into a more brutal attack on the wounded.

  They lay there helpless, the cold rain soaking their clothes at a time when they should have been kept warm because of shock. All through the night screams for help tortured Danny’s ears, made worse by the sounds of grunting hogs that began licking at the field of blood and feasting on some of the dead bodies. When lightning flashed, Danny could see bodies everywhere, some heaped one upon the other, blue and gray uniforms lying side by side. Some men sobbed. Most only moaned, unable to find the strength for anything more. There would be no help. This place called Shiloh would go down in history as one of the bloodiest battles of this brutal war, and Danny wondered how he had let himself get involved.