Winter Rain

9

Moon of Black Calves 1868

FAR, FAR AWAY on the distant edge of the awakening land a thin smear of gray bubbled along the horizon like marrow scum risen to the top of blood soup brought to the boil.

High-Backed Bull and Bad Tongue had led the others around the base of the bluffs and ridges in this rugged, naked country heaved up with dark monoliths and black blottings against the paling, starlit sky that wheeled nonstop overhead in the land’s incessant crawl toward the coming day of blood on the sand by the Plum River. Once they had stopped to water the ponies, watchful not to let the animals have too much, only enough to slake their thirst. Then the horsemen crossed to the north bank of the river on foot, remounted, and set out again to the east.

The big bear among the stars lay but a hand’s width from the horizon when Bull touched Bad Tongue’s arm and signaled the rest to halt behind them. He sniffed at the air.

“Smell,” Bull whispered.

The rest drew the cold, high desert air into their noses noiselessly.

The Brule said, “Fire.”

He nodded to Bad Tongue. “The breeze has come around out of the south.” Bull pointed. “Beyond those ridges, we will find them.”

“The big American horses,” Bad Tongue growled in his poor Cheyenne.

“The half-a-hundred who have dared follow our camps,” Bull corrected. “The half-a-hundred who will lose their scalps for it.”

“Do not spill your own blood on this ground,” Bad Tongue admonished. “So anxious to spill the white man’s are you.”

Bull snorted derisively. “The rest of you can go get what you want now. And I will ride in for what I came for.”

Bad Tongue clamped a hand on the Shahiyena’s arm to stay the Dog Soldier. “Porcupine and Roman Nose—any war chief would say for one or two of us to spy on the white man’s camp first before riding in blind.”

Bull gazed at the starlit face of the Brule and could find no reason to dispute the Lakota’s fighting wisdom. “All right. You and me.”

“On foot.”

Bull nodded and slid from his pony, handing the rawhide rein to Starving Elk. He strode off without waiting for Bad Tongue, nor did he look back. He only heard the warrior off to his left.

At the crest of the second ridge, the odor of burning embers, of fried meat, the wind-carried fragrance of fresh horse droppings, all became so strong that they bellied to the side of the slope rather than crawl directly at the top. There below, a matter of a few flights of an arrow, lay the eerie reddish glow of the white man’s camp. From time to time dark shadows blotted the crimson into the black of the prairie momentarily until the glowing embers of their old fires reappeared. Perhaps they were the enemy’s pickets moving back and forth between the warriors and the distant fire pits. Perhaps some of the bigger shadows were animals.

A snuffle, then another, was heard in the middle distance. Most of the animals were actually grazing closer to them than High-Backed Bull had expected: off to his right hand and just below the base of the high bluff that overlooked the white man’s camp. He smiled, tapping Bad Tongue in their mutual silence—then pointed down to the main body of the herd as one of the mules released a caustic, metallic bray. There came an uneasy shuffling of hooves before all fell silent again.

“There is one guard I can see,” Bad Tongue whispered. “That means there will be at least two.”

Bull agreed. “At least one you cannot see.” He pushed himself backward until he was behind the edge of the slope and got to his feet. “Now the rest of you can go steal your big American horses.”

Bad Tongue raised himself before the Shahiyena. “And you—you can take advantage of our noise, High-Backed Bull. Looking for scalps to take.”

In silence they hurried back to the rest, coming out of the darkness as the gray boiling back in the east broadened, stretching into a more definitive line that strung itself from north to south. Full darkness would not last much longer. It was time to strike.

He mounted while Bad Tongue explained the position of the horse herd to the rest. Bull looked at the two brothers. While they listened to the Brule, their eyes were nonetheless on High-Backed Bull. He waited until Bad Tongue finished his clipped instructions, then nodded at Starving Elk.

“You and Little Hawk—go with the Burnt Thigh. Help them run off the horses.”

“Where are you going?” Starving Elk asked, his voice a pitch higher in the starlit darkness.

“I will meet you across the river. On the south side when you have started the horses and mules, driving them back to our camp.”

He would wait for no more questions. Bull reined away abruptly, moving east along the base of the sharp-sloped ridge. Without any thought other than instinct, he decided to race into the white man’s camp, charging among the half-a-hundred from the east, as the rest raced into the herd. That way, he considered, the white men would have their attention on the west when he came lunging up their backs. No doubt he would be backlit by the sun’s coming—but High-Backed Bull calculated that the surprise he would create would be more than enough to outweigh that danger to himself.

At the first break in the bony ridges that reeked of alkali, the Shahiyena brought himself up short, finding that he had not come east far enough to begin his attack. Instead, Bull found himself still to the west of the crimson fire pits and those few shadows moving against the pale, red lights. Still, he was closer to the enemy camp now than before—able for the first time to make out clearly the black mounds of sleeping men curled in their blanket cocoons across the gray ground.

He reined about and urged the pony on east.

It was then that his ears brought him the sound of muted voices from the camp, brought him the first hint of pony hooves hammering the cold night wind that tortured this high desert land.

Bull smiled and hurried his pony toward the graying east just as the night split with the bellow of a white man, a warning from the far side of camp where Bad Tongue and the others would be making their attack.

“There’s one of the sonsabitches!”

Unprepared that the rest should be discovered, Bull was forced to bring his pony around sharply, sawing the rawhide rein so savagely, he nearly spilled the pony. On the far side of the crimson fire pits and the dark mounds erupting from the ground, a white man had bolted to his feet, throwing a rifle to his shoulder.

“Don’t shoot!” another hollered, up and sprinting for the first shadow.

Bull sensed his heart rise to his throat, the blood’s fiery cadence hammering in his ears as he sat there atop his pawing animal, the wind grown strong in his face, the light coming up on his left shoulder, and the camp below him exploding into life. More of the mounds stirred. Harsh, whispered voices exchanged words among those who had been gathered feet to the fires only moments before, abruptly brought to life as the hammer of hooves on the sunbaked prairie brought its sunrise song to the unsuspecting white men.

Then the riders broke over the last rise. In the space of a moment, all was a furious blur, like a reflection on the surface of a wind-chapped pond. Bull saw them against the horizon in the graying light, more like wisps of shadow, like curls of greasy smoke from some creosote-soaked sagewood fire—black and mobile, stark and streaking between the carbonite earth they moved across and the starry sky that served as their only backdrop.

One after another each shadowy form raced fluid as spring water off a midstream boulder, sliding down the high ground on horseback, feathers in a breeze-whipped spray clustered at each warrior’s head as the eight emerged from the top of that far knoll. The sky oozed red of a sudden, smothering the gray of night, coming the dusty crimson of sunrise. Below the riders as those horsemen drove their animals down the long slope, beginning to screech at the top of their lungs, the valley of the Plum River lay drenched in bloody gray light.

“Here come the rest of ’em!” came a shout from among those at the far side of the white man’s camp.

Bull watched two more of the enemy bolt into motion as if they had been shot out of a gun. The curses of those coming awake of a sudden were now lost among the pounding of footsteps and the hammering of unshod pony hooves distinct on the cold morning wind.

The war cries cracked the air like fragmented shards of thunder, distant but drawing closer with every beat of a man’s heart.

“They’re after the horses, men!” a high-pitched voice cried out from among those on the west.

For Bull it was time to ride.

That same voice again hurled itself over the throbbing camp, men and animals startled into motion, curses and orders and shouts and cries of confusion creating pure bedlam.

“Turn out! The bastards are after our horses. Turn out! Get hold of the—”

For Bull the white war chief’s last few words were drowned under the onrush of the pony thieves. Bad Tongue and his Brule, along with Starving Elk and Little Hawk, all tore into the west side of the white man’s camp, every last throat of theirs shouting and shrieking. They flapped blankets and rattled dried buffalo hides, one of the Lakota beating on that small drum, the rest blowing on eagle wing-bone whistles they carried about their necks—making noise enough for twice their number.

A new voice bawled as Bull tore into the camp unheard for the deafening racket. “Get your asses up and moving, boys! Indians!”

“Turn out, men!” someone else ordered, a tall, thin one suddenly in the midst of the camp a heartbeat later.

It was he that Bull chose for his first ride-down on that sandy ground, as the figures ahead of him dropped to their knees, throwing rifles to their shoulders, spitting bright, blinding orange flame from the muzzles, a noise no louder than the pounding of his own heart in his ears.

White men—and he had his pick of them as he leapt the pony over a mound of baggage.

“I dropped that bastard!” someone yelled far ahead across the camp.

Then of a sudden the first of the white men turned, finding the lone warrior among them, the stone club at the end of his arm swinging in a red-orange, dizzying blur out of the coming sunlight.

“Jesus-God! The Injuns behind us too!”

Ahead of him the white men dived this way and that, some struggling to control their rearing horses as he rode them down. Again and again he swung the iron-studded war club, driving it at any target: white enemy, his horses and mules.

Across camp, on the west, one of the red horsemen trembled, then toppled from his pony onto the gray, unforgiving plain, where he was lost in the darkness of the grassy sage.

“Less’n a dozen of the bastards!”

“Hold those horses! Hold those—”

Bull’s throat hurt with the cry he bellowed at the white men—unable to remember when he had started to holler, knowing he had never stopped once he had begun that charge into their camp.

“Goddammit—shoot when you got something to shoot at!”

Bad Tongue and the rest of the warriors were rushing toward Bull, having reached the far western edge of the fire-dotted camp itself, having spooked the big horses and the braying mules.

Screeching horsemen rattled their rawhide and blew their shrieking, frightening death whistles, joining the whinnying horses and brass-lunged pack animals, along with the sporadic gunshots from the pickets—that entire camp thundered into instant pandemonium. Every white man had come to his feet and gone among the animals, furiously pulling at hobbles and reins. Likely some of the white enemy had lashed their horses to their belts through the night rather than trust to picket pins. As Bull charged among them screeching his war song, some of the white men waved pistols at him, seeming unsure of their shots as others stomped at the coals of their fires to kill the bloody backlight.

His pony collided against a big American horse, almost going down, High-Backed Bull nearly unhorsed as the pony careened sideways, then regained its legs. He whirled about, sawing the single rein.

“Get the sonofabitch!”

A bullet whistled past, close enough to call out his name with its high-pitched whisper. He sensed the heat of its passing flight. Surrounded for the moment by the animals yanked and prodded, rearing and snorting, High-Backed Bull pounded his heels against the pony’s flanks as more of the blurred shadows closed in on him.

Horses yanked their handlers about like grass-filled antelope-skin dolls, legs and arms flung akimbo. A white man scampered by, vainly clinging to the reins of his horse that succeeded in dragging its owner through a glowing fire pit. The ground around the yelping white man erupted into a shower of red-orange pricks of light.

In the sudden swirl of blinding motion as the cursing men closed in on Bull, one of their big horses bucked, knocking aside a white man holding another two of the animals … and into that sudden aperture the warrior shot as quickly as the owl snatches up a den mouse in its claw.

His leap through the breach blinded him momentarily. Gunfire roared in his ears, the bright, flaming blasts of the enemy’s guns both blinding him, then lighting his way through the camp as he raced to join the others. Rattling hides and crying out their yipping, brave war songs, the eight swept off the western horizon between the river and those low, inky bluffs north of that camp—come ablaze in sunrise’s crimson-tinged whirl of noise and the clatter of hooves.

He pulled among the horsemen with his next ragged breath—his throat hurting from the strain of his cries. Bad Tongue had turned them all at the bank of the shallow river, leaping their ponies into the water, sand erupting in billowing cascades, droplet diamonds splaying from every flying hoof like scarlet mica chips in their crossing at the west end of a narrow sandbar. At its far end stood a lone cottonwood, perhaps no taller than a man.

Yet the eight young warriors urged no herd ahead of them as they clambered up the south bank of the river and plunged through the plum brush and swamp willow, where the shouts of the white men and the crackle of their guns faded on the far shore behind them.

Two only could they claim: a pair of the enemy’s ribby mules noisily dragged their picket lines through the brush, frightened and braying, with the warriors close on their tail roots.

Two only. Bad Tongue’s stampede had proved a failure.

Angrily Bull reined up, bringing his pony around. He watched the backs of the other young warriors disappear to the west, heading upstream with their two hard-won prizes. They had really won nothing at all—save for alerting the enemy.

“What’d they get?” a voice bellowed across the river.

“Two of the damn mules!”

“Ammunition?”

“No, sir.”

A new voice warned, “They’ll come now that it’s light, Major!”

“Saddle up, men!” the high-pitched voice shouted above the clamor of cursing men, their frightened animals still being quieted. “Sergeant, have these men stand to horse!”

As the white men sorted themselves out on the far side of the river, Bull turned slowly, letting his ears guide the position and pitch of his head, sensing something coming. Then, there it was. He listened to the distant coming of thunder: a sound to stir a warrior’s heart.

On the far bank it appeared very few of the enemy heard it too—its faint presage given birth out of the western horizon. Now his young heart leapt, soaring with its day-coming song of death.

“Lookee here, Major!” a ragged baritone voice rang out across the shallow river.

“Damn you, Trudeau!” sang the high-pitched white war chief. “No one gave you the right to scalp that—”

“No one tell Pierre not to take scalp! Sioux, it is—”

“Get that damned thing out of my face!”

“At least it means I kil’t one of the red bastards!”

“Stand to horse!”

“Listen! You hear that?” someone asked at last. “Listen, goddammit!”

“I do. Goddamn!”

“Major! Best be moving your boys now!” one of them bawled loudly, already yanking his horse behind him.

Then Bull felt the hair rise on his arms as the rumble grew closer, like distant thunder rolling toward them out of the west. As he took his eyes off the far bank to gaze quickly to the east, the far end of the sandbar grew pale in the coming light, where the lone cottonwood stood.

“They’re coming!”

“To the island!”

“Cross to the island!” arose the chorus from more of the white throats.

Its urgent call was immediately echoed by the rest of the half-a-hundred in tatters of voices and the hammering of white men clambering to their saddles.

“Make the island!”

The heart-stopping thunder of more than a thousand hooves hammered the sun-cured prairie.

Bull thought he could see them now, at long last after the breathrobbing seconds of waiting, able only to hear their coming. The pulsing horde emerged from the dark like some swelling, ghostly apparition Bull couldn’t quite see yet—not really. More so did he sense its coming.

As the white men bolted from their camp beside the river, plunging their horses into the shallow water, fighting their way toward the narrow sandbar, others stood hollering orders, waving the rest into the river as the first phalanx of mounted warriors erupted with star-flung muzzle flashes, diamond light pricking the horizon of that crimson dawn.

Bullets whistled overhead, splattering in the water. The nearby river bluffs echoed the war cries from hundreds of throats.

“There they are! They’re on us now!”

“God—will you look at ’em!”

Then there arose yelps right across the river from Bull. Some of Roman Nose’s or Pawnee Killer’s warriors had chosen not to join in the general charge on the island, but instead had swarmed down across the flat near the river where the white men had been camped around their fire pits only moments before. These daring, willing-to-die warriors plopped to their bellies among the willow and plum brush only yards from that sandbar, there to begin their sniping at the white men milling about the narrow sandbar, confused and leaderless for the moment, their horses stumbling on the uneven, river-washed sand.

“Shoot the goddamned horses!” one of the enemy yelled.

“Bring ’em down!” came the echo again and again.

“Shoot the horses!”

As bullets whined over the willow where he hid, Bull watched the white men put their pistols to work, dropping their big American horses.

“This will turn Bad Tongue’s heart to fire,” he whispered to himself as he led his pony upstream quickly. “These white men kill what Bad Tongue wanted so badly.”

Behind him the hundreds of brown horsemen reached the upstream end of the sandbar, where they dropped to the far side of their ponies in a spray of grit and watery jewels, firing beneath the animals’ necks at the enemy trapped on the island. Here and there the white men began to return some fire poorly, but most started to dig in behind the heaving bodies of their dying horses, clawing frantically at the sand with their hands to form rifle pits.

In the red light’s dance across the valley that dawn, the full coming day reverberating off the ridges to the west, echoing with the curses and pain-filled yammer of the white men, the war cries and high-pitched victory calls of the eagle wing-bone whistles, the angry bellow of the horses and mules going down in a bloody spray of gore and bowel-ruptured, urine-soaked sand—Bull decided this had to be the most beautiful dance he had ever witnessed.

Now he had only to take his scalps from the dead when this day’s crimson dance was done.