The Spirit of Thunder

by Kurt R A Giambastiani

  “What?” Red Bear was furious. “Of course we should attack them. Why else are we here?”

  “To do what damage we can,” Storm Arriving said. “But they know we are here, and they will be waiting for us to come back. You were not here the last time we attacked one of these forts. You do not know how bad it was.”

  Red Bear would not be put off. “We are here to kill the bluecoats. I will not leave here without doing that. I will not face my people and be called a coward.”

  Storm Arriving moved his mount a step forward and spoke right into Red Bear’s face. “Is that what you think I mean? Do you think that I am afraid to fight the bluecoats?”

  Red Bear sneered as he spoke. “I do not see you wanting to fight them.”

  “No. Not now. A good chief picks his battles wisely. I do not want to kill our soldiers.”

  “Or yourself, it seems.”

  Storm Arriving put his hand on his knife. “I will not permit you to speak of me so.”

  “But you would attack me before you will attack the bluecoats?”

  Sees Far rode in and pushed the two men apart. “Stop this!” he ordered. “We must be of one mind or we will surely fail.” He glared at each of them. Storm Arriving and Red Bear snarled at one another, teeth bared like wild dogs. “Stop. And act like grown men.”

  The moment subsided and Storm Arriving retreated a step. Red Bear’s smile was haughty and cruel.

  “As I suspected,” he said.

  Storm Arriving kicked his whistler forward. He grabbed Red Bear by the tunic and pulled him off his mount. Red Bear fell to the snowy ground and Storm Arriving leapt down after him. He had his knife out of its sheath and pointed up under Red Bear’s ribs. With his free hand Storm Arriving pulled open his own tunic, exposing his chest and the rectangular scars he bore there.

  “Do you see these, Red Bear? Do you see these scars?”

  Sees Far spoke quietly, as if he were dealing with a rogue walker. “Storm Arriving. Do not be a fool.”

  But Storm Arriving was not listening. He ignored Sees Far and he ignored the other men who were gathering around the scene as well. He saw only Red Bear, heard only Red Bear. He smelled the scent of Red Bear, even through the winter’s cold, a scent hot and pungent with sudden panic. Red Bear’s eyes, full of stark fear, were fixed on Storm Arriving’s face.

  “Look, Red Bear. Look at my scars.”

  Red Bear tipped his head downward but kept his gaze on Storm Arriving’s face. Then, at last, he looked down and saw the two shiny patches of skin, each the size of a child’s hand.

  “Do you know what those are?”

  Red Bear swallowed hard but did not speak.

  “They are the marks of the skin sacrifice,” Storm Arriving said. “From when I hung by my own skin under a full day’s sun and then had it sliced off as a sacrifice to the spirits. From when I rode with One Who Flies to the City of White Stone and counted coup on the bluecoats and their warchiefs. Let me see if you carry such scars.”

  He pulled open Red Bear’s tunic. The skin across Red Bear’s chest was smooth and unmarked.

  “No,” Storm Arriving said. “I see no such scars on you.” He put his knife back in its sheath and stood up. “Nor will I, I suspect.”

  Red Bear got up but Sees Far put him back on the ground. “That is enough,” the older warrior said. “The bluecoats are too strong in this place. They will be prepared for us, and we will accomplish nothing except the death of good soldiers. Storm Arriving is right; a good chief picks his battles. I choose against this one.”

  Red Bear got his feet underneath him and shook the snow off his clothes. “Then what are we to do here?,” he asked, frustration cracking his voice. “Are we to go home? Without even striking a blow against the vé’hó’e?”

  Storm Arriving looked out through the failing light. Out beyond the snowfall was the bluecoat fort, but beyond that? What of the land beyond that? “Why are the bluecoats here?”

  “What?” Red Bear asked. “I don’t know why they are here. They are here because they want our land.”

  “For whom?” Storm Arriving asked. “For themselves?”

  “No,” Sees Far said. “For other vé’hó’e. Like the ones already out there. Two Tailfeathers and the others from the last patrol, they spoke of the bluecoat forts, but they also spoke of wooden lodges out on the prairie.”

  Storm Arriving signed his agreement. “One Who Flies once told me that his people are not like us. We are what he calls nomads, an always-traveling people, but the vé’hó’e. Once they stop in a place, they stay there.”

  Red Bear collected what dignity he had remaining, standing tall and resettling his deerskin tunic across his broad shoulders. “Then we must make sure that they don’t stop here. And if they aren’t here, then there’s no reason for the bluecoats to be here.”

  “No,” Sees Far said. “No reason at all.”

  Storm Arriving frowned into the snowy darkness. He thought of the vé’hó’e that lived out in the distance beyond the gloomy circle of his sight. There were families out there, he knew; fathers and sons, but mothers and daughters, too. Perhaps, just as with his and his wife’s family, the vé’hó’e lived with their old ones as well, grandfathers and grandmothers, other-mothers and uncles. Out there, living together in their small wooden lodges, raising their animals and growing their crops.

  On our land, he reminded himself.

  “We should leave this place and bed down until the weather passes. Tomorrow...tomorrow we will be very busy.”

  The sputter of gunfire echoed up the valley and Speaks While Leaving felt her heart skip a beat.

  “Bluecoats,” she breathed. She left the rabbit she was skinning and ran inside the lodge. “Bluecoats,” she said to her family.

  Her grandmother frowned. She and Magpie Woman began to douse the fire. Speaks While Leaving’s father reached for his quiver and bow.

  The sounds of shots were closer now, but along with them Speaks While Leaving heard voices; whoops and howls. Her father heard it, too, and stopped to listen.

  “Not bluecoats,” One Bear said and smiled at his daughter. “The war party is home.”

  Speaks While Leaving tried to smile, but her fear was still with her. Though the possibility of danger to all was gone, there still remained the possibility of danger to one—a very important one. She did not like the return of patrols and war parties, for always, riding in ahead of them was Anxiety, and often, riding in behind came Sorrow. So far, Sorrow had never come riding in for her, but someday...someday.

  “Come,” her grandmother said, sensing her worry. She wiped the dust from her hands. “Let us go and meet your husband.”

  Speaks While Leaving took a deep breath and signed her agreement. The gunshots were close now, and she could hear whistlers around the camp singing to returning friends and mates.

  “Whistlers never worry when family comes home,” she said.

  Healing Rock Woman took her granddaughter by the hand. “Whistlers are always glad to see old friends,” she said. “Whistlers are lucky that way.”

  They left the lodge, stepping out into the powdery snow. The towering tops of dark conifers swayed in the wind and wisps of smoke danced through the branches. Other people were leaving their lodges and heading down toward the clearing at the bottom of the camp. Speaks While Leaving looked back and saw her mother and father step out of the lodge. Her mother was still forbidden by custom to speak to her new son-in-law, and her father, as a council chief, needed to keep himself apart from the activities of war. They would wait at home and be satisfied with hearing stories around the family fire. They waved and Speaks While Leaving waved back.

  The two women—one young, one old—walked down the snow-covered path. They got caught up in the flow of people, and Healing Rock Woman did her best to keep pace. The whoops and shouts of men were joined by the ululation of women. Gunsmoke filled the air. The clearing was thronged when they arrived, and Speaks While Leaving held back, using
the vantage of higher ground to find her husband amid the crowd. Healing Rock Woman looked, too, and the two women held on to one another as they stood on tiptoe and craned their necks.

  More riders were arriving. Speaks While Leaving saw bound wounds and limping whistlers, but she also saw bloody scalps tied to belts, blankets and trader cloth bundled on whistler-back, and many tired smiles. Then, there he was, riding slowly up the forest path.

  He rode with the older soldiers, and Speaks While Leaving saw right away the difference between them and the younger men who had ridden in first. The young men were smiling and already trading stories, and showing off their trophies and weapons to family and friends. They laughed. They teased. They corrected one another, making large or small of the particulars of their tales.

  The older men were stern-faced, solemn. They held their heads high, but did not smile. Speaks While Leaving looked and noticed that their belts did not carry trophies of scalps or ears, and their whistlers carried no booty, no prizes from vanquished foes. Their eyes did not hold the fire like their younger comrades, and what they did hold was something Speaks While Leaving could not divine, but remained masked and hidden from view.

  Storm Arriving searched the crowd. Speaks While Leaving and her grandmother waved and he saw them. The fleeting smile that he showed them touched only his lips. His furrowed brow and the darkness that encompassed his eyes remained.

  He rode around the crowd and dismounted before them.

  “What is it?” Speaks While Leaving asked immediately.

  “What kind of greeting is this?” He chuckled and smiled again, but still the shadow dimmed his features.

  “Something is wrong,” she said. “I can tell. You can’t hide these things from—”

  Her grandmother had put a hand on her arm. Healing Rock Woman shuffled forward and touched, too, the arm of Storm Arriving. “My heart is glad to see you,” the old woman said to him, and then with a sidelong look at Speaks While Leaving, “We are all glad to see you.”

  “Yes,” Speaks While Leaving said, and forced herself to smile. “Of course we are. Are you hungry?”

  For a moment the shadow left his face. “Very hungry,” he said.

  “Good,” Healing Rock Woman said. “That is good.”

  Speaks While Leaving did not think her grandmother was speaking of Storm Arriving’s hunger.

  At the family camp, Storm Arriving begged off joining the others in her father’s lodge.

  “I am too tired,” he said.

  “As you wish,” she said, and went to make her apologies to One Bear.

  Later, after he had eaten, he went to lay down on the bed.

  “I am tired,” he said when she asked what was wrong. “Just tired. That is all.”

  “No,” she said calmly, carefully. “You are lying to me.”

  Her harsh accusation stung and he sat up. She sat by the hearth, legs folded to one side. She looked at him through the heat of the fire. He shimmered and wavered and seemed like a spirit being: handsome, broad of shoulder, his chest and arms scarred by battle and sacrifice, his black hair frosted with the gray of maturity. His dark eyes danced with firelight, but his mouth was a firm line, taut with concealed emotion, and his fingers clenched the fur of the buffalo pelt that covered the bed.

  “If you want to sleep,” she said, “then sleep. If you do not want to tell me what is wrong, then do not. I cannot tell you what to do.” She looked down, escaping the intensity of his gaze. She looked into the firepit, at the coals that glowed with auroral light. “But if you lie to me, I will call you a liar.”

  She heard him take a deep breath and let it out slowly.

  “I do not want to tell you what is wrong,” he said. He laid down and pulled the covers over him. “I want to sleep.”

  She left the fire and went to the bed. He lay on his side facing away from the fire. She tucked the blankets in around his feet and pulled them up to cover his shoulder. She brushed a few loose hairs away from his face and leaned over to kiss his cheek.

  “I love you,” she said.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  She put a few more sticks on the fire and then left to spend the evening with her family.

  It was late when she left her parent’s lodge. She stepped out into the cold and the moonlight, her moccasins crunching in the new snow. The sky was clear and star-shot. The trees were shadowy giants and the lodges around the valley were children hiding behind skirts that glowed with the yellow light of fading hearthfires. A coyote up on the ridge cried out, singing to the moon. Another joined in from farther away and their songs mingled, echoed, and died. She breathed the night air into her lungs, felt it cold in her nostrils. Somewhere down toward the valley floor, men were singing, probably one of the soldier societies in a late night feast. She sighed and her breath came out in a cloud.

  The fire was low when she stepped inside, the coals glowing dimly through their blankets of ash. Storm Arriving still lay in bed, on his side, facing away from the fire. She fed the fire a few pieces of wood and then took off her moccasins and her leggings. She sat down on the empty side of the bed and listened to her husband’s breathing. It was slow and even, but not deep enough for sleep. She reached out to touch his shoulder but halted herself. Instead, she untied her belt and slipped her dress over her head. Then she was under the blankets and up against him. He was cold, and she pressed her body against his back. Her arm stole across his side and over his belly. Wordlessly, he sighed and held her hand close to his chest.

  The flames bit into the new wood. She watched the single shadow they made as the firelight made it move and jump on the inner lodgeskins. She felt his breathing shorten and hold, as if he wanted to speak but wouldn’t. She did not say anything, did not move. She waited. The fire spat once and hissed, then subsided.

  “The stories you will hear about this trip,” Storm Arriving said quietly, “they will not please you. You will hear of things done that have no honor.”

  She did not reply, not knowing what to say, afraid that the wrong word would stop him.

  “Things were done, that should not have been done,” he said. She could hear the emotion in his voice, feel it in his breathing. “Families were killed. Wives and children. No prisoners were taken. Nothing was left behind.” He paused a moment for control. “We...we wiped the prairie clean of them. All of them. All except the bluecoats. The bluecoats—” His voice broke and she could feel the tension grip his body. “They never even left their forts,” he said through clenched teeth. “Even when we dragged the bodies up to their gates, they would only fire at us from atop their walls.” He took a shuddering breath. “There was no honor on this trip. None.”

  Words, she now knew, could not help him, and so she simply held him. Offering neither condemnation nor approval, she held him as his silent weeping tore at her heart.

  “No, not there!” Vincent shouted in French, then swore. “I mean, Nóxa’e. Anoo... Tabarnaque! How do you say that again?”

  George chuckled and hefted his own box of explosives. Vincent’s struggles with the Cheyenne language had done nothing to improve his demeanor during the nearly two weeks it took them to travel from the Closed Windpipe camp to the winter camp of the Tree People. George stepped up the hillside toward the lonely lodge at the limits of camp, looked inside, and saw the problem. He motioned to the other side of the hearthpit and spoke softly to Gets up Early.

  “Tsêhéóhe, néséne. Énánôtse tsêhéóhe.” Over here, my friend. Put it down over here. “And gently, too,” he added.

  Gets up Early stepped away from the square crates and put the keg of black powder down on the other side of the lodge floor. Vincent wiped the sheen of sweat that covered his forehead in spite of the deep cold. Gets up Early simply shrugged, but George understood. Never having seen the materials he carried in action, the Indian had little appreciation for what these parcels contained.

  The other men brought in their loads and set them down. Then they all trudged back
downhill to the creek where George and Vincent had left the wagon. The wagon had barely made it to the winter camp, and would never have made it up the steep sides of the ravine to the storage lodge. One by one they carried the heavy crates and kegs more than a mile uphill from the creekside. After several more trips, the last of the cargo was safely up the hill, far away from the rest of the community.

  The small kegs of black powder on one side of the lodge were lashed together. Then the men covered them with an oilcloth tarpaulin and tied that closed as well. The crates of ammunition and the small boxes marked “EXPLOSIVES” were assembled into a low, stable pile. The coils of corded fuse were stored on top in parfleches, and they covered those with tarpaulins, too. When they were done, there was little room left in the lodge. George closed the doorflap as they exited and tied it closed with a strip of leather.

  Vincent shook his head. “I’d feel better if it were all in storage up in a Winnipeg warehouse.”

  George thanked the men who had helped them and then started walking back toward his own lodge. “We had to get it out here sometime,” he said to Vincent. “Better to make one trip than two.”

  “All right,” Vincent said. “Then I’d feel better if I was in storage up in a Winnipeg warehouse. At least until spring.”

  George laughed. “Anytime you want to go,” he said. “But that ends our deal. And with the dynamite plus the extra men that Three Trees Together has agreed to let help, well, that’s just a whole lot to miss out on.”

  Vincent scowled. “You are a heartless man,” he said.

  They walked on down the hillside path and George watched chickadees chase one another from tree to tree, knocking snow to the ground as they flew. Young boys hollered as they slid down the snowy slope on old buffalo hides. Down at the frozen pond, the women and older girls played a sort of football with a deerskin ball and sticks.

  “Actually, I’m not,” George said. “I’m just happier here is all.” He smiled at Vincent’s doubtful look. “You may yearn for the city and all the hubbub—”

  “The business, you mean!”