Winter Rain

For now it became nothing more than hot, gritty labor—the white men having plopped down behind the heaving carcasses of their dying horses, laying their hot-barreled many-shoots rifles over the still-quivering bodies of their dust-slaked, bloody, arrow-pocked barricades. Gray-black powder smoke drifted like a smudge against the blue sky above the sandbar. Below erupted clouds of spurting yellow dust as warrior bullets struck here and there, yet to find a target.

And in the midst of the sandy riverbed lay the naked bodies, most not moving any longer, picked off by the white men on the island, perhaps finished by the three under the bank in their burrow.

The hair on his arms tingled at the faint bugle call from upstream, brassy and clear on the cool air of that dawn. Likely it was one of the renegade turncoats who proudly carried his shiny medicine at all times—soldiers once themselves.

That one who called himself Kan-sas. Cly-bor was his white name. But the Dog Soldiers who had taken him in when he had deserted the pony soldiers called him Kansas. He carried his shiny gold horn on a leather cord over his shoulder. It was likely he who called with his horn for another charge now because many of the horsemen were milling upstream, as if waiting for someone to take control of them.

“Where is Roman Nose?” Bull wondered aloud, reining about and moving out upstream to see for himself. Porcupine would be with him, he knew. No matter what the other war chiefs might try, it remained for the Nose to bring order out of the chaos of those first few charges.

And now near the upstream end of the island, the bullets from Shahiyena snipers began to fall among the hastily dug rifle pits behind the carcasses. Some of the brown-skinned horsemen had abandoned their ponies, diving among the reeds and willow along both sides of the sandy riverbed. There they parted the brush and fired at anything that moved on the sandbar. Still, Bull considered as he gazed along the shallow, sandy riverbed, the white man had exacted his terrible damage on the horsemen. Across the sand and in the lapping river itself lay not only the wounded and dead warriors, but the dying, squealing war ponies as well.

The gall rising in his throat, his decision was made, and with a savage yank on his rein, Bull brought his own animal around abruptly.

“Maiyun!” he called to the mysterious ones. “Help me!”

Instead of forcing it down into the riverbed as the others had, he chose to race along the edge of the north bank. Then, surprising the trio who hid in their burrow, he cut sharply to the right, pushing his reluctant animal directly for the badger’s hole where the three white men waited.

One of them turned and broke as soon as the warrior was but twenty feet from the overhanging bank. The other two attempted to bring their rifles up to fire, but Bull was into and over them before they drew sight on him. Swinging his war club, screaming his death song, he knocked a rifle from the hands of one of the whites, hurling the man aside like white water sliding past a midstream boulder as his pony raced by.

Then Bull found himself in the shallow river again, alone this time. And on the shore he watched the many warriors rise from the willows and plum brush, holding aloft their rifles and weapons, cheering his brave, heroic ride as his pony sidestepped, fighting the grit and water, frightened of the bullets that hissed all about him now that he forced the animal into the teeth of the enemy guns.

“Wimaca yelo!” Bull cried back at those who cheered him. “I am a man!”

Pounding his heels into its flanks, Bull abruptly nosed the pony straight for the sandbar, its small hooves clawing at the side of the island, vaulting over the breastworks of two horse carcasses and down into the midst of the improvised rifle pits where the enemy dived and lunged out of the path of the lone, crazed horseman.

He astonished himself as well as his cheering brothers as he reached that lone cottonwood at the far end of the island without a bullet having touched him. He had taunted naevhan, sneered at death. His heart pounding like never before, High-Backed Bull urged his snorting, sidestepping pony into the stream, crossing to the north bank, where he reined it for a low hill. It was there he halted at last, stopping to survey the white men imprisoned on the sandy island.

Then he heard the raucous cheers of the women and children and old men gathered on the next ridge. They had watched his daring ride and celebrated that small victory with High-Backed Bull.

“Hotoma! Hotoma!” they cried, showering him in their celebration of the mysterious medicine bravery of the Shahiyena warrior.