Winter Rain

As the white men bolted from their camp beside the river, plunging their horses into the shallow water, fighting their way toward the narrow sandbar, others stood hollering orders, waving the rest into the river as the first phalanx of mounted warriors erupted with star-flung muzzle flashes, diamond light pricking the horizon of that crimson dawn.

Bullets whistled overhead, splattering in the water. The nearby river bluffs echoed the war cries from hundreds of throats.

“There they are! They’re on us now!”

“God—will you look at ’em!”

Then there arose yelps right across the river from Bull. Some of Roman Nose’s or Pawnee Killer’s warriors had chosen not to join in the general charge on the island, but instead had swarmed down across the flat near the river where the white men had been camped around their fire pits only moments before. These daring, willing-to-die warriors plopped to their bellies among the willow and plum brush only yards from that sandbar, there to begin their sniping at the white men milling about the narrow sandbar, confused and leaderless for the moment, their horses stumbling on the uneven, river-washed sand.

“Shoot the goddamned horses!” one of the enemy yelled.

“Bring ’em down!” came the echo again and again.

“Shoot the horses!”

As bullets whined over the willow where he hid, Bull watched the white men put their pistols to work, dropping their big American horses.

“This will turn Bad Tongue’s heart to fire,” he whispered to himself as he led his pony upstream quickly. “These white men kill what Bad Tongue wanted so badly.”

Behind him the hundreds of brown horsemen reached the upstream end of the sandbar, where they dropped to the far side of their ponies in a spray of grit and watery jewels, firing beneath the animals’ necks at the enemy trapped on the island. Here and there the white men began to return some fire poorly, but most started to dig in behind the heaving bodies of their dying horses, clawing frantically at the sand with their hands to form rifle pits.

In the red light’s dance across the valley that dawn, the full coming day reverberating off the ridges to the west, echoing with the curses and pain-filled yammer of the white men, the war cries and high-pitched victory calls of the eagle wing-bone whistles, the angry bellow of the horses and mules going down in a bloody spray of gore and bowel-ruptured, urine-soaked sand—Bull decided this had to be the most beautiful dance he had ever witnessed.

Now he had only to take his scalps from the dead when this day’s crimson dance was done.

10

17 September 1868

HE GNAWED ON the bone, the same bone the big staghound clamped its jaws around, growling, hissing at him menacingly. Jealously wanting the bone for itself.

Jubilee Usher laughed, stroking the crown of the animal’s head. That only provoked an even angrier growl for its keeper, a growl drenched with all the more threat.

Glaring into the yellowed eyes of the vise-jawed staghound from his end of the bone, Usher met the dog’s gaze unflinchingly, knowing as he did that there were others gathering at the periphery of his vision to watch the standoff. They were interrupting their breakfast this morning as the colonel’s army went about striking camp, loading the four wagons and ambulance for the next leg of their journey back into the land of Zion. Those who had been with him from the start already knew they weren’t bound for family and friends among the Saints in the City of Deseret. At last night’s firelit meeting—half church service for the faithful, half an occasion to study his flock for the weaker of his avenging angels—Jubilee had begged understanding and obedience.

Without fail, without stop did Usher complete this chore of leadership: studying his ranks for those who might buckle at the knees this close to home, this close to all that they might remember

Now more than ever Jubilee needed to be sure of those closest to him. Now that word from the center of the faith said that Brigham Young drew his own faithful to him—as if the Prophet himself sensed the coming danger in those who flocked to the Usher clan.

So it was that Jubilee had moved this band of gun-toting, iron-hardened men last night beneath the stars, made this rough lot of scarred, unsentimental men get down on their knees as he strode among them, lightly touching their heads with his anointed hand, dipping that hand empowered by God Himself in water he told them had come from the river Jordan in far-off Palestine. From the land of Christ, he instructed, the land where the Gentiles of old had crucified the one and only Lord—hung him upon a cross to die in sweet, redeeming agony—before that Christ arose three days later so that he might appear to the ancients in America, their very own ancestors: the chosen Saints of this Latter Day.