Winter Rain

What a fight it had been. Something that lived on in the bitter recollections of the warriors who recounted their bravery in covering the retreat of their people against the overwhelming numbers and the total surprise of the yellow-leg attack. From their hiding places behind trees and boulders, the Kwahadi men disappeared, melting into the chill dawn mist strung in a gauzy veil over the narrow creek, flitting away like cave bats come the rising of the sun. With their women and children climbing out of the canyon, with the Tonkawa and Seminole trackers in full possession of most of the Kwahadi pony herd—there was nothing left to do but flee. To escape so they could fight another day.

So the gall of their defeat kept gnawing away at the men through that fall and into the time of cold. There in the canyon that morning they had been given no time for the women to gather up the travois ponies, to drag down lodges, to pack clothing and utensils, dried meat and robes, to ward off the coming winds of winter. Most everything had been lost to Three-Finger Kinzie.

Doing what they had done time and again against this same soldier chief. Tall One and Antelope had joined the Kwahadi men in falling back slowly, firing, holding the soldiers at bay while they could. From every crevice in the canyon walls, behind every rock and tree big enough to give them cover, the warriors dogged and deviled that solid blue phalanx.

Through the heated minutes of that fight the gray-eyed war chief was among them—Kiowa and Shahiyena as well as his own Kwahadi. He had exhorted them, rallied them, bolstered them as they fell back—urging them to hold the line a little longer. Many times during that hard winter Tall One recalled with great pride how he had stood with the war chief, he and Antelope some of the last to retreat.

“For our women and children!” the gray-eyed one cheered first in one tongue, then in another. “For our families! For them we leave our bodies here to protect the ones who flee!”

Back, back across the yucca and tiny prickly pear, across the white quartz studded in the red earth, the last holdouts had retreated, slowly scaling the upvaulted rock formations as red-tailed and swainson’s hawks drifted overhead on the morning’s warming air currents. For more than four twisted, tortured miles of that snaking canyon they had held the soldiers back. From afar Tall One had recognized the low, grumbling charge of the cavalry washing their way, so much like the sound of an old mare with her paunch filled with bad water. In the end it came time for the last of the warriors to disappear into the narrow washes and bent-finger arroyos like so many eye-corner wrinkles off the main canyon.

“Flee!” the war chief hollered at them there at the last, waving his warriors away with his rifle. “We will regroup at the top.”

It was there at the top of the canyon walls as that autumn day’s sun grew weary and desirous of seeking its rest beyond the far mountains that Tall One watched the gray-eyed war chief confront the headmen of the Kiowa and Shahiyena who said their people had suffered enough, who said they were turning away from the struggle. Would at last the Kwahadi join them on their road back to the agencies?

“No, I will not join you in turning my back on my country. I will never join you in giving up the life of my father on the free prairie,” he told them. “How can you presume to ask that of me—the one who had never taken a mouthful of the white man’s food! How could I ever consider the reservation my last option? When I am the lone chief here who has never set my foot on the white man’s agencies—never held out my hand to accept one of his thin blankets, or his rotten pig meat, or his bug-infested flour.”

The end had come there on the lip of that great crevasse as the Kwahadi war chief asked of those who were going in, “In your wisdom, tell me what my people are to do now. Is it better for me to lead them into the reservations now? Or better for us to continue this fight?”

In the cold, bitter, hungry days that followed, many more voices took up the questions as the Antelope People argued among themselves.

“Should now we be forced to walk the road those Shahiyena and Kiowa take? To follow their steps to the reservation, where the Kwahadi have never retreated, forced to turn over our weapons just so our starving women and children have something to fill their empty bellies now that these winter winds come slashing across the cold breast of our land? How do we expect the little ones, the old ones, and those who are sick to face this onslaught of winter bravely without lodges and blankets and robes, even spare moccasins for their frozen feet—when all was left behind?”

Time had altered their way of life as much as had the white man.