Winter Rain

High-Backed Bull ground his teeth at that—impatient to whirl about and confront the half-a-hundred by himself if he had to—just to fight them was everything now. To take a scalp or two for his own honor. To see the fear well up in the eyes of the enemy, to know the white man’s heart had turned to water and he had likely soiled his pants at the mere sight of the Hotamitanyo—the mighty Dog Soldiers of the Shahiyena.

Roman Nose dismounted and handed the rein over to Bull. “Paint yourself, my friend. Make your medicine and that for your pony here. We ride as soon as this council is over!”

“To kill the white men? Kill all of them?”

“Does not the badger kill the field mouse when it tires of the chase?”

“Keee-aiyeee!” Bull yipped. “None left standing! None left to tell the tale.”

As Roman Nose disappeared into the council lodge, High-Backed Bull dropped from the back of his pony, taking it and the war chief’s toward the shade of the awning where the women chattered and brought their kettles to a boil. From a fringed pouch he carried over a shoulder, he took out three small skin bags, along with a fragment of mirror he had taken from a looking glass broken during a recent raid on a white settlement. Propping the shard of mirror in the fork of a nearby plum brush, Bull mixed the first of his dried pigments, earth colors all, with grease from the nearby Lakota kitchen.

Black. The color of victory.

From his hairline down to the middle of his nose, the young Shahiyena painted the entire top half of his face with black, from ear to ear. Next came yellow, color of the Life-giver in the sky above. He applied the yellow in long vertical stripes, each a fingertip wide, that ran down the lower half of his face until they reached his jawline.

Last to be applied was the brick-red ocher earth-paint, its crimson smeared between the yellow lines until the lower half of his face was striped with both the power of the sun and the provocative color of war. The color of blood.

For a moment more he admired his reflection there in the midday sun, the bright, greasy patterns smeared against his earth-colored skin there in that fragment of a mirror stolen from a smoking sod house a white family had raised along the Saline River, where for many generations the Shahiyena had hunted their buffalo.

Yes, Bull thought, smiling, approving of the work he had done on his paint. He strode over to paint potent, powerful symbols on his pony.

This face of mine will be the last sight many of those white men see this day! he told himself as he painted red circles around his pony’s nostrils, to give it the power of breathing wind this day.

Then I will open their bellies, rip out their hearts, and smear myself with their warm blood. I will revel, dancing on their steaming entrails, then smash their heads to jelly after I have torn their hair from their heads! How I will celebrate in the spilling of their white blood!

Of a sudden Bull’s hand stopped above its painting of the hailstones on the pony’s rear flanks, coldly remembering his own white blood. Half of his heart was white. Half of his blood. It made the sheer exultant happiness of this moment instantly turn to gall in his mouth, a taste so sour that he choked on it.

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!”

6

September 1868

IT’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.