Winter Rain (10 page)

Bull spat on every last thought of his white father.

“Until I can dance in your blood,” he vowed with a growl under his breath, madly smearing the crimson paint in lightning bolts on the rear of the pony to give it speed in the coming fight. A look of cunning played summer shadows across his face.

“Until I can dance in my own father’s blood!”

I
T’S TIME YOU
went dry,” Jonah told the warrior.

“Dry?” the Shoshone asked, anxiously raking the back of a hand across his cracked lips.

“You gone and emptied me of what whiskey I rode out of Laramie with. Ain’t no more.”

Two Sleep blinked into the bright light, wishing he wore a white man’s hat to protect him from this torturous sun, then straightened stoically. “Better now, we are. Got no whiskey for me.”

Hook nodded, a wry smile scratched in his features, merriment signaled in the deep crow’s feet clawing at the corners of his eyes. “Yes, better now. Neither one of us needs whiskey for what we got to do.”

“Tracking mens took your family.”

Without a reply Hook heeled his horse a bit, urging it to a slightly faster pace. They could afford to cover ground a little less carefully for the next few miles, the broken
country ahead making for less chance of being seen. Wasn’t much to tracking his prey now, what with the wide, scarred trail they had to follow. While not quite cold, the Danite trail was still a matter of a week old—about as long as he had been riding west with Two Sleep.

They were drawing close to the Green, beyond it Black’s Fork. Farther still lay Bridger’s old fort. From what he sorted out of the Shoshone’s talk, they might make the old post by tomorrow night. If not, the day after. Likely they’d run onto word of the Danites there. Those soldiers would know something. A band of white men passing by with an ambulance and a half-dozen high-walled Studebaker wagons wasn’t the sort of thing a few lazy-eyed soldiers would miss out in this lonely, desolate country.

“Never did get this far west myself,” Hook later admitted for lack of conversation as they made camp.

“Connor?”

“Naw. Protecting the wire from the Injuns. Was later we tracked Injuns for General Connor.”

“Connor jumped the wrong village, said many.”

Jonah screwed that around in his head for some time. “Seems I remember a few of the scouts saying something about that. Wasn’t Sioux or Cheyenne.”

“Indian tell you right. Connor wrong.”

A shudder passed through him, like old Seth shaking water off his back. “Not my affair no more. That’s three years gone now.”

Two Sleep seemed to regard him a moment, then took his eyes off the white man. They did not speak for some time until Hook offered the Shoshone a dark sliver of chaw. The warrior took the offering of tobacco, stuffed it inside his cheek, and nodded his thanks.

“Can’t for the life of me figure out why a man like Jim Bridger would want to build a fort here in the middle of all this nothing,” Jonah murmured. “Not when he traveled a whole lot of prettier country in his days—trapping beaver,
hunting buffalo. Don’t make much sense to me, him deciding to set down roots here when there’s a lot other country more pleasing to the eye.”

“Brid-ger see trail here. Brid-ger come here,” Two Sleep replied after some thought. “Trail here where the white man goes west to the sun’s bed.”

“California,” Hook added. “It’s called California … and Oregon too.”

“Two name for same place?”

Hook snorted. “Naw, two places.”

“Why all want to go there? So many wagon, so many people—that place fill up quick.”

“Naw, not fast. Lots of land, I heard. Good sun and some rain. Grow some crops.” Jonah could see that Two Sleep had himself grown bewildered. “Crops: like corn and wheat. Folks grow crops to sell.”

“Hard work, this grow?”

He nodded, pursing his lips a bit. “Hard, but good work.”

“Man work the ground alone?”

“Not if he can help it, he don’t.”

“Your boys, maybe you help them work the ground, you get back home.”

His belly went cold as winter ice. “They … they’re not back there. Not home no more.”

“Oh,” and the Shoshone fell quiet a moment. “They in front, ahead, out there with your woman, eh?”

With a shrug Jonah answered, “No. Last I got wind of ’em was in Indian Territory. Got sold off to some Mexicans.”

Two Sleep wagged his head sadly. “Comancheros take boys far away. Go to slaves.”

“Likely.”

“You work the land hard again some day. Grow crop?”

Hook gazed at the far hills, studying the sky tinted
with the strange mineral hues of sunset. “Maybe. Lot of doing between now and that time. Never really thought about farming again till you brought it up. Don’t really seem like something I wanna do without the boys, without my family around.”

“You work the ground, grow crops. Like a man grows his children, Hook. You work hard, grow your children. See them grow. Man always must say good-bye to them.”

“Don’t you understand? I didn’t see ’em grow. That’s the damned shame of it.”

Both of them went silent for a long time, Two Sleep broiling skewered venison over their greasewood fire, Hook jabbing at the burning limbs with a wand of green willow. Each deep in his own thoughts.

“Man grows crops, sell what he don’t eat. Money he gets?”

Jonah looked up, seeing the warrior’s old eyes bright. “Yes, money. Money to gamble at cards, you red heathen.”

The Shoshone wagged his head. “No, money to buy whiskey—what else for, you white heathen!”

A couple days back, Hook had owned up to liking the Shoshone more and more as the old Indian talked of a bygone time shared with Bridger and Sweete. Talked of those halcyon days at the end of the beaver trade and before the start of the white man’s war against himself back east. Those years were gone the way of dust now: a time when Two Sleep had learned the rudiments of the white man’s confusing language, learned better still the power of whiskey. Best yet, he learned the potent numbers and symbols emblazoned on the pasteboard cards the white man used to gamble. No carved pieces of bone, no painted sticks for this Shoshone. Those numbered, painted, powerful cards and their manifold combinations had fascinated him right from the start. They had been good days.

“I see why Shad liked you,” Hook said, right out of
the blue that evening camped among the cottonwood on the west bank of the Green.

“Sweete a bad gambler.”

“He was, was he?”

“Worse I ever see.”

“Damn good teacher, though, don’t you reckon?”

Two Sleep smiled at that, dragging a hand beneath his runny nose aggravated by the smoke from their cooking fire. “Damn good teacher, Hook. But not every man a good learner, like you.”

“Why—I figure that’s about the first compliment you’ve give me, you red heathen.”

Two Sleep grinned. “Better you know tracking and fighting and Indians, Hook. You no good learner at cards and whiskey.”

“How the hell you know? Way I figure it, you learned just what you needed to get along in the white man’s world, sure enough.”

“And you, Hook? You learn all you need to get along in the world out here?” The Shoshone swept one arm around in a wide arc.

“Likely I have. So there’s only two things left for me to learn.”

“Two Sleep know one thing you want to find: where your family go.”

Hook nodded in agreement. “That, and why they was ever took from me in the first place.”

The white men
had come riding into this river valley late in the raiding season, this Drying Grass Moon, following the Shahiyena trail. The white men hungered to find this string of villages clustered beside the Arikaree, hundreds of their skin lodges breasting against the summer-pale sky, their great pony herds cropping grass for miles around on the surrounding prairie, dropping their fragrant offal among that left in the timeless passings of the shaggy buffalo.

Upstream from the camps of Tall Bull and White Horse stood two large villages of Brule Sioux who rode under the bellicose Pawnee Killer—where High-Backed Bull now waited impatiently with the other young warriors for the council to conclude. Only then could they be about this business of killing the half-a-hundred.

It was Pawnee Killer himself who had brushed up against none other than George Armstrong Custer’s gallant Seventh Cavalry one summer gone now, when the short-grass time filled the bellies of the Lakota war ponies grown sleek and fast. And for this summer’s hunt, the Brule had joined the Shahiyena camps composed mostly of Dog Soldiers under fighting chiefs. Close by stood a much smaller camp circle, a few Northern Arapaho who traveled in the formidable shadow of the mighty Roman Nose.

For the sake of mutual strength following their independent raids on the settlements in Kansas, these warrior bands had come together with the rest to hunt buffalo here where the immeasurable herds still gathered in the great valley of the Plum River, what the white man called his Republican. Last moon, while celebrating their annual sun dance on a tributary of the Plum called Beaver Creek, roaming scouts from the villages had first reported spotting the half-a-hundred. From their dress, the fifty did not appear to be soldiers. Still, this was a season for some precaution. The news of the white men caused the bands to begin migrating to the northwest. Surely, the tribal leaders reasoned, if we see these white scouts on our trail, close behind will come the long columns of soldiers.

It was aggravating, yes, having such an annoyance on their backtrail. Still, the half-a-hundred were hardly worth the effort of putting on one’s paint and taking the cover from one’s shield, thought High-Backed Bull as he paced back and forth in the bright sun of that waning afternoon.

“These are fighting men, warriors—this half-a-hundred,”
declared Porcupine when he had finished tying up the tail of his pony in preparation of battle.

“They are not soldiers!” High-Backed Bull snapped, the unrequited tension pinching his face like the coil of a rattlesnake. “They are nothing more than ground-scratchers … the same sort of white men we have killed all summer long.”

Porcupine shook his head. “No. I think you are wrong, my young friend. I am afraid we will find this band of ground-scratchers is something very different from those who fought us beside their dirt houses.”

“How are they different?” Bull demanded. “Because this half-a-hundred comes looking for us? Like foolish old hens?”

“No. They are different because they are not soldiers, who are paid to fight. This half-a-hundred comes with some quarrel in their hearts for us.”

“Why would you fear some white men who might have a quarrel with us? We have left many to grieve after our raids across the white man’s settlements.”

“I fear any man who comes into a fight with the strength of his heart to make him strong,” Porcupine said. “Much better for me to fight a man who has only the power of his muscles, perhaps his cunning and wiles. But—the one I fear the most in battle is the man who comes to make his heart right. On and on that small band of white men has followed our trail, like a persistent wolverine intent on clawing its prey from their hole. Following … forever following.”

Try as he might, Bull struggled to put the warnings of Porcupine, his mentor, out of his mind. For a moment or two at a time he watched the Dog Soldier and Brule camps alive with the steady throb of war drums.

“This half-a-hundred poses no threat to us, Porcupine,” he declared a short time later when he squatted in the shade of a lodge, watching the chiefs gathered in
Pawnee Killer’s council a few yards away. “You confuse me. Those white men are so outnumbered that this time not one man among us will have to worry himself with protecting our villages while women, children, and old ones escape onto the prairie—just as Pawnee Killer’s band had to do when Long Hair attacked last summer.”

“Aiyeee!”
cried Hair Rope nearby. “This time we will work to even the score for Pawnee Killer. This time we will attack and wipe these half-a-hundred off the face of The Mother of All Things!”

“Hear this, for what I say are the words of a warrior of the Shahiyena!” Bull shouted in reply, his blood running warm. “Those white men. Those half-a-hundred. Some are wearing scalps that soon will hang from my own belt!”

By this time the Lakota and Shahiyena delegations had finished their proscribed meal and passed around the pipe. As well, the young warriors in all camps were now stripped of their hunting clothes, having donned their finest war regalia. In this warm season that meant most wore nothing more than moccasins and breechclout. Still, what marked each individual’s battle costume was not his clothing or lack of it—rather it proved to be his headdress, perhaps a simple hair covering fashioned of a stuffed bird or small animal totem, setting off his peculiar face and body paint, all of which added to those decorations each man had lavished on a favored war pony.

Bull stroked the muzzle of his animal after he had tied small eagle wing-tip feathers down the length of its mane. Small, fleet, wide-chested little cayuses we will ride this day, he thought to himself as he watched the imposing figure of Roman Nose from afar. These grass-fed ponies would now carry their owners into battle as the Lakota and Shahiyena butchered that small band of white men foolish enough to march squarely into the steamy gut of this ancient Indian hunting ground.

The white men had now become the quarry.

The afternoon dragged on so that by the time a young, flat-nosed warrior announced the council’s conclusion from the doorway of Pawnee Killer’s lodge, the sun had fallen well past midsky.

“We ride them down before the sun sets in the west!” the Brule chief exclaimed as he emerged from his lodge.

The immense Lakota village shrieked with renewed fever as the other war chiefs emerged into the afternoon light. Young boys scurried through camp, bringing extra war ponies in from the herds. Women chattered loudly, no one in particular listening, as they brought forth the weapons their men would use. Out into the sunshine of this battle day came the short-horn or Osage-orange bows, skin quivers filled with long iron-tipped arrows fletched with owl and hawk feathers. Out came axes, knives, and war clubs—some of river stone, others carved wood, a few nail studded like archaic maces. Long buffalo lances shadowed the ground, many more than ten feet long with tiny grooves radiating from the huge iron spear points, the better to drain a victim’s blood. Here and there the afternoon light glinted from a firearm, either pistol or rifle. These were white-man weapons bought with blood beyond the Lodge Trail Ridge two winters gone: a glorious fight when many of these same warriors had joined in butchering Fetterman’s soldiers, the hundred-in-the-hand.