Winter Rain

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.