Winter Rain

“Get the sonofabitch!”

A bullet whistled past, close enough to call out his name with its high-pitched whisper. He sensed the heat of its passing flight. Surrounded for the moment by the animals yanked and prodded, rearing and snorting, High-Backed Bull pounded his heels against the pony’s flanks as more of the blurred shadows closed in on him.

Horses yanked their handlers about like grass-filled antelope-skin dolls, legs and arms flung akimbo. A white man scampered by, vainly clinging to the reins of his horse that succeeded in dragging its owner through a glowing fire pit. The ground around the yelping white man erupted into a shower of red-orange pricks of light.

In the sudden swirl of blinding motion as the cursing men closed in on Bull, one of their big horses bucked, knocking aside a white man holding another two of the animals … and into that sudden aperture the warrior shot as quickly as the owl snatches up a den mouse in its claw.

His leap through the breach blinded him momentarily. Gunfire roared in his ears, the bright, flaming blasts of the enemy’s guns both blinding him, then lighting his way through the camp as he raced to join the others. Rattling hides and crying out their yipping, brave war songs, the eight swept off the western horizon between the river and those low, inky bluffs north of that camp—come ablaze in sunrise’s crimson-tinged whirl of noise and the clatter of hooves.

He pulled among the horsemen with his next ragged breath—his throat hurting from the strain of his cries. Bad Tongue had turned them all at the bank of the shallow river, leaping their ponies into the water, sand erupting in billowing cascades, droplet diamonds splaying from every flying hoof like scarlet mica chips in their crossing at the west end of a narrow sandbar. At its far end stood a lone cottonwood, perhaps no taller than a man.

Yet the eight young warriors urged no herd ahead of them as they clambered up the south bank of the river and plunged through the plum brush and swamp willow, where the shouts of the white men and the crackle of their guns faded on the far shore behind them.

Two only could they claim: a pair of the enemy’s ribby mules noisily dragged their picket lines through the brush, frightened and braying, with the warriors close on their tail roots.

Two only. Bad Tongue’s stampede had proved a failure.

Angrily Bull reined up, bringing his pony around. He watched the backs of the other young warriors disappear to the west, heading upstream with their two hard-won prizes. They had really won nothing at all—save for alerting the enemy.

“What’d they get?” a voice bellowed across the river.

“Two of the damn mules!”

“Ammunition?”

“No, sir.”

A new voice warned, “They’ll come now that it’s light, Major!”

“Saddle up, men!” the high-pitched voice shouted above the clamor of cursing men, their frightened animals still being quieted. “Sergeant, have these men stand to horse!”

As the white men sorted themselves out on the far side of the river, Bull turned slowly, letting his ears guide the position and pitch of his head, sensing something coming. Then, there it was. He listened to the distant coming of thunder: a sound to stir a warrior’s heart.

On the far bank it appeared very few of the enemy heard it too—its faint presage given birth out of the western horizon. Now his young heart leapt, soaring with its day-coming song of death.

“Lookee here, Major!” a ragged baritone voice rang out across the shallow river.

“Damn you, Trudeau!” sang the high-pitched white war chief. “No one gave you the right to scalp that—”

“No one tell Pierre not to take scalp! Sioux, it is—”

“Get that damned thing out of my face!”

“At least it means I kil’t one of the red bastards!”

“Stand to horse!”

“Listen! You hear that?” someone asked at last. “Listen, goddammit!”

“I do. Goddamn!”

“Major! Best be moving your boys now!” one of them bawled loudly, already yanking his horse behind him.

Then Bull felt the hair rise on his arms as the rumble grew closer, like distant thunder rolling toward them out of the west. As he took his eyes off the far bank to gaze quickly to the east, the far end of the sandbar grew pale in the coming light, where the lone cottonwood stood.

“They’re coming!”

“To the island!”

“Cross to the island!” arose the chorus from more of the white throats.

Its urgent call was immediately echoed by the rest of the half-a-hundred in tatters of voices and the hammering of white men clambering to their saddles.

“Make the island!”

The heart-stopping thunder of more than a thousand hooves hammered the sun-cured prairie.

Bull thought he could see them now, at long last after the breathrobbing seconds of waiting, able only to hear their coming. The pulsing horde emerged from the dark like some swelling, ghostly apparition Bull couldn’t quite see yet—not really. More so did he sense its coming.