Winter Rain

Bull reined up and watched a moment, horrified, three more heartbeats. Brown-skinned warriors crawled, wounded and bleeding, dragging themselves up the dry wash into the willow and plum brush, into hiding. Those that were spotted by the white men were shot where they crawled.

He had to let others know. Roman Nose … Pawnee Killer, anyone. Yet Bull reined up, knowing he alone was called upon to drive the three from their burrow.

His medicine alone had shown him where the trio hid, firing their rifles into the face of each renewed charge. His medicine alone had chosen him to wrench the badger from its hole.

As he grappled with what his plan would be, the mounted chargers pulled off, followed by a half-dozen riderless ponies still heaving at a gallop in the chase. High-Backed Bull cursed: the white men had broken their concerted charge. And for that failure dead and wounded warriors lay less than the length of two arms from the sandbar. The half-a-hundred now forced the horsemen back to their old way of fighting: the circle. The spinning, whirling wheel that pitted each warrior, solitary and alone with his own medicine, against those hated white men hunkered down on the grassy island behind the bloody carcasses of their big American horses and mules.

Behind the leg-flung carcasses the enemy scraped at the sand, clawing up chunks of grass and knotted roots, beginning to scrape their way down.

While a new charge formed itself.

“Stop!” Bull warned, knowing as he did how senseless was his warning.

Instead he could only watch helplessly the blur that wound itself up like the spinning of a dust devil whipping mindlessly across the sun-blistered prairie. Down the horsemen tore into the glittering riverbed, beating their way past the north shore of the island, across the riverbed to leap their ponies onto the south bank, back up the bank in a grand sweep, and into the riverbed once again in a whirl of color and numbing noise. From beneath their snorting ponies’ necks they fired arrows, but it was mostly rifle and pistol fire, each horseman dropping from the far side of his little pony at the critical moment approaching the end of the sandbar.

While the white man’s repeaters kept up a steady racket, unshod hooves reverberated against the dry riverbed in a thunder of terror and noise, the screeching of the horsemen matched only by the cries of their wounded ponies as the animals reared, fought, and pitched sideways as each successive bullet struck.

And on the island, those mad curses muddled with grunts of angry, scared men, scrambling and scratching at the sand—with every precious second digging lower and lower still, like frightened burrow mice as the hawk swoops overhead, claws outstretched.

Still he recognized the squeal of the last of the frightened animals as it struggled, reared, and lunged back to fall on its handler—flinging up cascades of golden, gritty, blinding sand as it went down. Here and there the island cracked with the sharp blasts of the white man’s Colt’s pistols.

Eerie, the young Shahiyena warrior thought as he watched, that humanlike screaming of the horse as its rider shot a bullet into its head, bringing that last of the big animals down in a resplendent spray of sand and blood. It fought to the last: biting, hurling phlegm and piss as it thrashed headlong into the grass, legs still fighting as a second bullet crashed into its brain.

The white man lunged behind his huge brown barricade, safe from the oncoming charge. Another rush came from the north bank, the white men frightened by the quirts slashing, slapping pony rumps as the horsemen tore past. There was more deafening sound now, thunderous and numbing to the young warrior as he grappled with how to reach the trio of white men huddled beneath the bank. To ride until he drew near … or do it all on foot.

Frightened voices filled the steamy air above the island. Though he could not understand it all, Bull did know some of the white man’s tongue: what he had learned from his mother—even more, what he had learned from the white man who had fathered him. Those words he believed he knew best: the profane, desperate prayers. The cries of men hit and bleeding, calling out for help.

It took no special talent to know the warriors had severely hurt and crippled the half-a-hundred in their first few charges, in less time than it took a man to light and smoke a small pipe bowl of tobacco. But they had failed to squash the enemy the way they had planned. It had not been the quick work they had whipped themselves into believing it would be.