Cry of the Hawk

The lights twinkled before his eyes. A dull thunk echoed in his mind, like a man driving a wedge down into a resistant chunk of timber. A wedge slowly cracking the wood with the sheer power of his sweating muscle. The lights glowed once more, showering sprays of meteors.

And he realized one of the warriors was beating his head in with a stone war club.

Artus put his hand up into the blackened blindness of what he could not see. His eyes filled with something hot and sticky, blinking them did not help. Put his hands up and then felt his throat opened up.

Sensing that last good breath of air. Struggling to feel, no—struggling to drag more of that shocking air down into his lungs. Gurgling. Gasping. The cool prairie air wheezing through the huge, gaping hole in his neck.

The club sank deep into the back of his head. And as he rolled over on his belly, his legs convulsing out of control, he cursed himself for pissing in his pants, for his bowels voiding.

Realizing that wasn’t a stone war club that had crushed the back of his head, driving his bloody face into the gravel of the graded roadbed.

That had been a huge, gleaming war-axe that had likely split his head open like a juicy melon ….

Near the small wagon that ran along the iron tracks before the warriors had tipped it over, two of Spotted Wolf’s men found the two rifles.

Piling wood on the tracks had worked. The small wagon had run into the timber and gone tumbling off its tracks.

Turkey Leg watched the young warriors finish off the two white men, strip their victims, then mutilate the bodies when the two warriors came over with Spotted Wolf and the rifles.

“These are broken,” the war leader told Turkey Leg.

“Broken when the wagon fell off its tracks?” asked the chief.

“Perhaps.” Spotted Wolf held one of the rifles across his two hands. “I was looking at it, claiming one for myself, touching the rifle when it broke in half. Like this.”

“Perhaps it is bad medicine for us,” Turkey Leg tried to explain. “We are not meant to have these rifles—I am sure of it now. They are broken. Leave them here, with them,” he said, pointing at the naked, bloody bodies as the last glimmer of the sun’s fading light drained from the far western sky.

“We go back to the village now?”

“No, Spotted Wolf. Come morning, we will finish our work here.”

The leader of the war party grinned in the deepening twilight. “To tear up these iron tracks the smoking monster rides upon?”

“When these two do not return, there will be more coming,” Turkey Leg said. “We will prepare a welcome for them when they do.”

In the cool before sunup the next morning, Spotted Wolf’s warriors were busy over the iron tracks: building fires on the wood ties, a few yards away using two long iron bars found on the small pump-handle wagon to pry at the rails themselves, doing their best to bend the rails upward. One after another of the young warriors joined the group, grunting and struggling together as they pitted the muscle of their bodies against the iron strength of the white man’s smoking monster.

They succeeded in twisting the bent rail and were whooping their joy when Porcupine hollered out from atop the nearby hill where he had gone to watch both east and west along the path of the iron monster.

Porcupine signaled east with his outstretched arm. “The morning star is rising! It is brighter than ever before.”

Others turned to see. Turkey Leg did not think it was the morning star at all.

“No,” the Cheyenne chief said to the muttering group. “That light comes from one of these smoking monsters we have seen with our own eyes. Not the morning star—”

“Look!” Spotted Wolf shouted. “There are two of these far-off stars. And they draw closer all the time!”

True, there were two lights, pulsating in the distance, there on the far edge of the horizon where the sun was spreading pink-orange mist before its rising for the day. Two morning stars emerging from the bowels of the earth where the sun would itself greet the morning.

“Two smoking wagons,” Turkey Leg said.

“The iron monsters?”

“Let us prepare a welcome for them, as Turkey Leg has told us!” hollered Spotted Wolf.

With yelps like young coyotes ready for their first hunt with the pack, the warriors gathered up their ponies and weapons and rode behind the low hills where they would await the coming of the white man’s noisy wagons.

“Send three riders east,” Turkey Leg said, turning to Spotted Wolf. “When they have seen the iron monsters coming, seen that these are indeed the white man’s wagons, tell them to ride back here as fast as they can and tell us so that we might be ready for their arrival.”