Winter Rain

Small wonder the white man had decided to sleep late. There was little sunlight to awaken him, and all that he had to look forward to was a day of rain. The late days of summer in this country could be like that, Two Sleep had mused as he watched some stirrings of movement in the camp below, the plains grown hot as the bottom of a cast-iron skillet, the air cooling in the high, snow-covered places rising all around this land. Clouds created above those high places were ultimately sent scrambling over the hot valleys to spill open their rain-swollen bellies accompanied by noise and torment.

It had come and gone—that storm battering the distant rider for more than two hours along the westward trail before he gave up and sought some shelter among the cottonwoods beside the narrow river. At those first drops Two Sleep had slid from the back of his pony and stripped himself naked—everything but his moccasins—then rolled his dry clothing up within the blanket covered by a small piece of oiled hide.

Soon he grew used to the cold of the rain, the hammer of the cold drops pelting his unprotected body. Soon it began to feel good, cleansing.

He wondered if the lone white man knew about bathing. So many didn’t. Two Sleep thought on all the white men he had known, most of them encountered along the Holy Road that took the whites to the western sun, or those men met at Big Throat’s fort near the Shaded River. It was the one called the Green by the white men. Among them Big Throat was known as Bridger. He was called Big Throat among most of the tribes because of the swollen flesh of the goiter at the old scout’s neck.

It had not been all that long since Two Sleep had heard rumor that Big Throat had abandoned the mountain West, had gone to Fort Laramie and beyond, even beyond the string of forts along the Platte River Road. East, it was said, to a home Bridger had not visited for many, many winters.

“I call you Two Sleep,” Jim Bridger had said many winters before to the young Shoshone warrior distantly related to the mountain fur trapper through marriage. Big Throat was the husband to Two Sleep’s cousin, cementing a bond with the Snake Indians many, many summers back in time, when both Bridger and Two Sleep had been younger and full of the rising sap of youth.

“Why you give me this new name?” the Shoshone had asked as he passed the pipe on around the circle of warriors come to visit Bridger where the white man had erected his log fort.

Bridger had smiled, his eyes merry. “Because I have never known you to sleep, my friend. On our hunts, when I go to sleep, you are still awake. When I wake up, you are already awake. So I think when you finally go to sleep, you will sleep for two men, eh?”

The old men had liked Big Throat’s reasoning, giving their approval to the name. So it was sanctioned, this new name: Two Sleep.

From that wedding day Chief Washakie had added his blessing not only to Bridger’s marriage, but to Two Sleep’s new name as well. The two men became even closer friends. Hunting together, making war on the enemies of the Shoshone together, loving their women and the Snake people and this land the tribe fiercely called its own.

“I will fight alongside you, Big Throat,” Two Sleep had told the trapper when word came that white men were riding out of the south against Brid-ger.

The old trapper had gathered a double handful of his old friends, all men who had spent years among the mountain snows and valley streams with Brid-ger, men who moved a little slower these days but still aimed true and shot center. Those few punished the other white men come cocky and bold on their big American horses, giving the attackers a solid drubbing, these old warrior friends of Brid-ger’s did. It was these that Two Sleep came to know as friends when the Shoshone warrior came to live among the whites, instead of living among his own.

But in the end some of those old friends abandoned the country. Some went west, some back to the east, where it was rumored the white man numbered like the stars above Shoshone country. Still, Big Throat and Sweete had stayed on, guiding for the pony soldiers who marched against the Lakota and Shahiyena warrior bands. It was good work for the friends of the Shoshone to do—this tracking and guiding, leading the soldiers against the camps of the Snake’s most hated enemies.

Only Big Throat and Sweete had stayed on in this country spread high and wide beneath the setting sun that now dipped out of the clouds like a raindrop slowly loosening itself from a cottonwood leaf. For a moment the land flared red-orange as the sun appeared, then lost itself almost as quickly behind the far foothills and vaulted peaks.

Gone was the day.

Like the rumor said of Big Throat. He was gone east, back among his original people, the ones he belonged to before he had been adopted by the Shoshone.