Winter Rain

11

Moon of Black Calves 1868

THERE HAD TO be at least a thousand warriors in the valley, counting the Dog Soldiers of Tall Bull and White Horse. Why, Roman Nose led at least half that number himself.

The fight should have been over sooner than it would take a man to eat his breakfast.

How was it that they hadn’t rubbed that sandbar clear of those half-a-hundred?

Why was it taking so long?

He glanced at the sun, found it halfway on its climb to zenith. A half day’s time lost and no scalps for any of them to brandish. That lay in his belly like the cold pig-meat the white man gave the reservation Indians imprisoned far to the south and east.

The taunting grew louder from the warriors sniping back in the cover of creekbank undergrowth, and for the next hour or more things quieted over the island while the Lakota and Shahiyena marksmen did their best to keep up a steady rattle of rifle fire from their brushy shelters. On the steamy sandbar, High-Backed Bull could watch the figures burrowing down like den mice as the white men silently scratched at the sandy earth with their hands, knives, tin cups … anything they could use to claw holes in the ground and scoop up walls of the damp sand against the snipers’ bullets. From time to time the half-breed son of trader Bent taunted the enemy in their own tongue. Charlie Bent cursed them, lured them, told the white men what awaited them when at long last Roman Nose’s charge came to ride them down.

Intrigued, Bull watched how those fragments of English spoken at them caused the white men such confusion, such enjoyable consternation. And for a few moments he wished he had paid better attention to his mother and sister, learning the white man’s tongue from them, if not from the man who had fathered him. To know more of it just might serve some real use one day soon, he decided: to be able to speak the language of the man who had fathered him, the language of the man he would seek among the whites.

Tying the long war club behind to the latigo on his pad saddle, he brought his Springfield carbine over his head and shoulder, where it hung from the rawhide sling. He never carried that many of the heavy lead balls, nor much of the powder the weapon took. Still, he itched to get a clear crack at one, just one, of those white men. Any of them. Like the snipers, waiting, waiting for the chance to blow a man’s head off.

He dismounted and tied his pony to some brush, where it could browse as he moved along the north bank at a crouch, slowly parting the willow with the rifle barrel to peer at the island. It struck him then just what a feat he had accomplished—riding onto the sandbar, over the carcass barricades and rifle pits, all the way to the end of the island—

Of a sudden, unshod hooves hammered the sandy riverbed. More than ten horsemen broke from the nearby trees shading the creekbank, darting into range of the sandbar, racing past the north side of the island. As they galloped closer to the enemy, one of the group swooped toward the near side of the island.

One of the whites, a man with a black beard hung to midchest, suddenly bolted up from his rifle pit, aimed, and fired. As the puff of dirty smoke spat over the rifleman’s head, the daring warrior pitched sideways into the shallow creek.

On instinct Bull aimed down the barrel at the cloud of gray smoke, at the bearded one, and snapped off his shot.

The smoke wreathed his own head as he angrily swiped it away, just as a man would swat at a troublesome buffalo gnat. Bull saw the bearded man slowly collapsing in his pit, a hand clamped at the side of his head while others lunged to help him. Bright crimson seeped across the man’s shoulder, shiny and mirroring the brightness of midday light.

The rest of the daring horsemen completed their rush past the sandbar before circling back to regather upstream. But without stopping, they made another sweep beneath the jaws of the white man’s guns. No warrior fell in this daring ride into the maw of death.

As the last rider turned and urged his little pony onto the north bank, another bugle’s blare resounded up the valley. Obeying the call, the milling horsemen turned and slowly made their way beyond the first bend of the shallow river. Other warriors appeared on both banks, hundreds upon hundreds of them, emerging from the cottonwood and plum brush where they had been waiting, every one of them now nosing his pony toward the mouth of a gorge hidden beyond the trees, just past that first bend upstream.

Bull’s eyes stung with salty sweat as he glanced once more at the sun’s position, then continued reloading the single-shot Springfield carbine taken at the base of Lodge Trail Ridge two long winters before when the warrior bands had wiped out the hundred-in-the-hand.

Already the day was hot. And they weren’t in the heat of it yet.

For the longest time that morning, bullets had kicked up the sand and slammed into the still, bloating horse carcasses the white men huddled behind as the temperature rose. But after that insistent bugle had called the horsemen to disappear beyond the river bend, the snipers slowed their racket.

Ramming the lead ball home, Bull gazed at the umber ridges that hemmed in this valley, studied the sunburned bluffs and grass-cured hills where the women, children, and old men gathered to watch the coming slaughter. Then he peered at the tall grass and scrubby brush on the sandbar, at the bodies of those horsemen who had not made it out of the riverbed. Less than five yards from the island itself lay a half-dozen painted naked warriors, some of them still crumpled just as they had struck the sand. One was crushed beneath a dead war pony. The rider who had gotten closest to the white men in their burrows Bull recognized as a Shahiyena, from the magpie the warrior tied to his greased hair. He was not a young man, for the iron of many snows had begun to fleck the man’s hair, and from where Bull stood, he could plainly see the deep crow’s-feet scoring the corners of the warrior’s eyes that stared blankly at the pale sky.

“Nohetto!” Bull prayed. “There is no more.” The man had lived many seasons and died as a warrior must—killing whites.

Just as Bull now renewed his vow.

The hot, still air fell all so quiet now that the horsemen had ceased circling and disappeared upstream, now that the snipers on both banks had silenced their withering fire. In the summer crackle and the rising heat, flies droned and other winged tormentors hovered over all.

He stared again at the island, hoping for another chance at one of the white men. Then his eyes were pulled magnetically to the dead warrior once more. The body lay in the shallow flow of yellowish water that this late of the season seeped slowly down the middle of a wider channel it had cut between rows of cottonwoods and scarred cutbanks of grassy sand at spring’s flood stage. Except for that narrow flow of water itself, the riverbed lay as dry as uncured rawhide here late in the Moon of Black Calves.

Bull’s head pounded with the heat, and the droning, buzzing silence, and the waiting—for it seemed the broad, corn-silk-yellow sky overhead and the shimmering sand of the river bottom conspired with the undulating, heat-shimmered hills to form a bowl reflecting like a mirror down on this narrow valley. As he lay watching the mice busy in their island burrows, the hot, suffocating breezes nudged the dry, brittle grasses where he remained hidden, waiting. The stalks irritated one another, the way the cricket talked mating with its legs. And from time to time he listened to the murmurs of pain and fear and frustration from the enemy on the sandbar.

Tiny voices whispering in Bull’s head told him to stay put. To watch.

That his time was coming.

Another brassy bray from that deserter’s army bugle raised the hair on the back of Bull’s neck.

Its echo floated downstream toward the island. Looking now at the trees near the mouth of that ravine at the great bend in the riverbed, he found he could not see anything to give him the faintest clue what Roman Nose and the other chiefs were doing with the hundreds of horsemen who had disappeared from view what seemed like a long, long time ago.

From the corner of his eye, Bull caught the movement against the pale sky and turned to see a handful of feathered war chiefs crowning a nearby hill, all of them gazing at the sandbar, as if studying the defenders on the island. Then, as suddenly as they had appeared, they too slipped out of sight.

“I think they want to see how many of these white men can still hold a rifle,” he told no one but himself.

Something would spring loose soon, he prayed, now that Roman Nose had come. Then his heart sank. Of all the emotions Bull felt at that moment in the brush beside the island—anger, desperation, hate, even some fear—it was sadness that most filled his heart as his thoughts hung on Roman Nose, the way his legging fringe would catch on brambles, or snag on cockleburs. Sadness that Roman Nose had finally come to lead these warriors—when it meant his own death.

A part of him grappled with that—not wanting to believe, as Roman Nose believed, in the power of an old Lakota woman’s iron fork. Surely the might of Roman Nose would prove stronger!

Yet if the war chief’s water spirits had told him—it must be.

Bull’s heart sank again as his eyes peered across the riverbed to the far side. On both sides the banks rose slightly higher than the sandy island itself, giving the Lakota and Shahiyena snipers an ideal field of fire. All morning long they had forced the white men to stay hidden for the most part, down in their pits and low behind the bodies of their dead animals.

“That place where the white men burrow like mice will soon reek of rotting horses,” he said to himself in what little shade he had found in the brush as the sun rose directly overhead. And in saying it, he hoped the white men would all be killed long before the big carcasses began to bloat and stink.

He saw a few of the whites momentarily poke their heads from their rifle pits, staring upstream beneath shading hands flat against their brows. At almost the same moment, Bull felt it beneath him—sensed it in his legs: the electrifying pulsations trembling up from the ground into his own body. He felt them coming before he had even heard them.

The thunder of more than two thousand hooves.

He heard them scant heartbeats before he saw them.

Slowly rising to his feet there in the brush, Bull found the sight hard to believe, felt more joy than he sensed his heart could hold. Of all the pony raids, and scalp hunts, and revenge raids they had made on the frontier settlements … still nothing had prepared the young warrior for what it was that galloped around the far bend in the wide riverbed.

From bank to bank the front row of horsemen stretched some sixty warriors strong. Directly behind them came row upon galloping row of riders. Eagle feathers fluttered on the hot breeze. Scalp locks of many hues, tied to rifle muzzles, caught the morning’s wind. Their loose and braided and roached hair was plastered with grease, some standing as a provocative challenge to any would-be scalp-taker, all danced with the rhythm of the charge.

Even at this great distance Bull could see every pony had been painted with potent symbols. Still more many-colored scalp locks hung pendant from lower jaws, every tail was snubbed—tied up for war in red ribbon or trade cloth. Their bows, along with old Springfield muzzle loaders and a scattering of repeaters, were all brandished aloft as the horsemen came on in a splashy cavalcade, held in check by the only man on the northern plains who could hold these warriors in such an orderly, massed charge.

“Roman Nose!” Bull whispered in awe as his eyes found the tall war chief at the center of that front row.

He knew him instantly, not only by the horned headdress and the brilliant scarlet silk sash tied at the waist, but by the great gobs of red paint the war chief had used to encircle that summer’s pale pucker-scars fresh from the sun dance held on the banks of the Beaver River. On his face he had painted the patterns prescribed by the spirit helpers in the war chief’s visions: great streaks of ox blood across his eyes, yellow-ocher brushed across his cheeks, a black smear painted down his chin. Bright, unmistakable colors he had worn into so many battles. And this was to be his last.

“Aiyeee-yi-yi-yi!” Bull cried at the advancing front of copper-skinned bodies, choking on the sentiment he felt for the valiant war chief.

More so he raised his voice in salute to the one who rode to his death. Proudly. Bravely. A leader of his people to the last. A man who had refused to take a wife, to have his own family—believing instead that the entire tribe was his own to watch over and protect.

A sworn enemy of the white man.

And in that moment Bull felt the certainty of it reach the very marrow of him: come the death of Roman Nose, that powerful spirit, that all-consuming hatred of the whiteskins would come to seize control of High-Backed Bull.

Rifle fire suddenly crackled from the creekbanks, increasing to a fiery intensity. It was plain to Bull as he ducked back into the plum brush that the snipers intended to force the white men to keep their heads down under a deadly barrage of lead hail. Still, that roar of the guns could not drown out the growing crescendo of pounding hooves bearing down on that narrow, unprotected mound of river sand and summer-washed gravel in a riverbed the white man called the Arikaree.

Then as suddenly as the rattle of rifle fire from the banks had resumed, it withered away into a frightening, stone-cold silence. No more than a breath later arose the first of the wild cries bursting from the women and old ones gathered on the surrounding hilltops. Another breath and their eerie, keening blood-songs rose in volume, rose to become a swelling death chorus enough to chill the blood of any white man still alive on that island.

Swallowing hard, his mouth gone dry at the mere sight of the oncoming charge, Bull looked back to the oncoming horsemen. Lazy, oily smoke drifting from the silenced Indian rifles wisped in dark clots across the steamy riverbed as row upon row of horsemen followed Roman Nose downstream toward his appointed moment with destiny.

Something told Bull as he watched that advancing phalanx of brown-skinned cavalry that he was seeing history made. Not just the fact that Roman Nose would ride directly into the teeth of those white-man guns … but that no man, white nor red, had ever before seen Dog Soldiers execute an orderly, massed charge. Like the white man’s own yellow-leg cavalry!

They would talk of this day, speak of this moment for generations to come among the Shahiyena.

Then a flicker of movement at the end of the island caught his attention. One of the white men dressed in soldier-blue rose slightly, as if in pain, his pistol in his hand. Turning, he gazed over those huddled in the rifle pits dug in a rough oval along the length of the narrow sandbar.

The white war chief, this one, Bull decided.

He stood above his half-a-hundred and bellowed his order above the thundering approach of the two thousand hooves.

“Now!”

With that command, some forty guns exploded on the island, their muzzles spewing brilliant tongues of yellow and orange-tinted fire.

Their first volley unhorsed but two riders.

On came the rest with even more resolve, racing into the face of those forty guns. Kicking their ponies into a full gallop without slowing for the two who had fallen.

Roman Nose spat back at the white man’s rifle fire with an unearthly war cry, popping his hand against his mouth as he arched his head back, flinging his death curse at the heavens.

In no more than a pounding heartbeat that blood-crazed cry was taken up by the five hundred who rode with him. Above the riverbed charge the hilltops reverberated as the renewed chant thundered from the throats of the women and old ones.

“Again!” the white chief screamed.

A second volley roared from the sandbar. The smoke from all those weapons hung in tatters in the still, breathless air above the white riflemen, staining the pale sky an oily, murky, smutty gray.

“Fire, by damned!” And another white man in soldier-blue had risen to holler his order to the others.

More horsemen spilled this second volley, their riderless ponies coming on with the mass flanks of the rest. The whole of them charged without slowing, heeding not the rifles nor their own fallen. Those throaty cries for blood redoubled now as gaps were ripped open in their ranks—yet every bit as quickly those holes filled anew with warriors surging up from behind. The copper phalanx quickly made solid once more.

Bull’s heart swelled at the sight, burned with pride at the fearless oncoming despite the wavering of their snorting ponies. A few animals stumbled on the uneven river bottom and tumbled into others. But ever onward the slashing hooves pounded, new horsemen and mounts come to take the place of those who went by the wayside. Glittering diamondlike river spray and mica-fine rooster tails of gold dust cascaded heavenward in the high sunlight of this momentous day.

“Now!”

The first soldier chief’s command had barely escaped his lips before the sandbar ignited for the third volley into the face of the five hundred.

The phalanx surged even closer now. Bull judged it to be something less than two arrow-shots from the end of the island. Certainly killing range for the white man’s big guns. With every one of the white man’s bullets, surely the horsemen had to fall.

In what little Bull could see through that thickening, murky haze of yellow sunlight slanting through the musty powder smoke, the naked, painted warriors began to spill over one another with that third volley. Ponies pitched into the riverbed too, collapsing as if their cords had been cut in bloody, tumbling, spinning heaps.

Piles of blood and sand and bodies and carcasses built up, a sight that brought shrieks from the hillsides as the women and old ones watched the slaughter of their chosen. Yet, with as much damage as the white man was doing to the horsemen, still Bull saw the horde coming, felt the unmistakable thunder vibrating up through the hard surface of the ground beneath his moccasins, heard the reassuring reverberation of their charge still ringing from the hills. And the closer they came, it seemed the more furious they drove their ponies, the louder rose their war cries.

“Fire!”

With that fourth volley the warriors ceased their mighty screeching, having drawn deathly close beneath the guns’ fire-spewing muzzles. Most not already hollering in pain and frustration now rode on grim-lipped toward death’s call on the sandbar. Bravely, without question, they came on, as if possessed—following their chosen leader still a’horse at the center of that front line. Every rider of them weaving back and forth, making it hard for the white man to take a bead on a copper-skinned target.

Brazenly racing on into the face of his own death, Roman Nose raised his arm, exhorting the hundreds come behind him across the sandy riverbed, splattering water and grit and gravel in a huge, stinging curtain as they charged down on the half-a-hundred.

“Now!”

A fifth volley cleaved the air like summer thunder.

Smoke of a dirty gauze obscured the island as Bull plopped down at the edge of the plum brush, bringing the Springfield carbine to his shoulder. If he had a chance at this range, he would pick off one of the white men.

If only to do what one mortal could to turn the day, what he could to change the fate of Roman Nose.