Winter Rain

One of the whites, a man with a black beard hung to midchest, suddenly bolted up from his rifle pit, aimed, and fired. As the puff of dirty smoke spat over the rifleman’s head, the daring warrior pitched sideways into the shallow creek.

On instinct Bull aimed down the barrel at the cloud of gray smoke, at the bearded one, and snapped off his shot.

The smoke wreathed his own head as he angrily swiped it away, just as a man would swat at a troublesome buffalo gnat. Bull saw the bearded man slowly collapsing in his pit, a hand clamped at the side of his head while others lunged to help him. Bright crimson seeped across the man’s shoulder, shiny and mirroring the brightness of midday light.

The rest of the daring horsemen completed their rush past the sandbar before circling back to regather upstream. But without stopping, they made another sweep beneath the jaws of the white man’s guns. No warrior fell in this daring ride into the maw of death.

As the last rider turned and urged his little pony onto the north bank, another bugle’s blare resounded up the valley. Obeying the call, the milling horsemen turned and slowly made their way beyond the first bend of the shallow river. Other warriors appeared on both banks, hundreds upon hundreds of them, emerging from the cottonwood and plum brush where they had been waiting, every one of them now nosing his pony toward the mouth of a gorge hidden beyond the trees, just past that first bend upstream.

Bull’s eyes stung with salty sweat as he glanced once more at the sun’s position, then continued reloading the single-shot Springfield carbine taken at the base of Lodge Trail Ridge two long winters before when the warrior bands had wiped out the hundred-in-the-hand.

Already the day was hot. And they weren’t in the heat of it yet.

For the longest time that morning, bullets had kicked up the sand and slammed into the still, bloating horse carcasses the white men huddled behind as the temperature rose. But after that insistent bugle had called the horsemen to disappear beyond the river bend, the snipers slowed their racket.

Ramming the lead ball home, Bull gazed at the umber ridges that hemmed in this valley, studied the sunburned bluffs and grass-cured hills where the women, children, and old men gathered to watch the coming slaughter. Then he peered at the tall grass and scrubby brush on the sandbar, at the bodies of those horsemen who had not made it out of the riverbed. Less than five yards from the island itself lay a half-dozen painted naked warriors, some of them still crumpled just as they had struck the sand. One was crushed beneath a dead war pony. The rider who had gotten closest to the white men in their burrows Bull recognized as a Shahiyena, from the magpie the warrior tied to his greased hair. He was not a young man, for the iron of many snows had begun to fleck the man’s hair, and from where Bull stood, he could plainly see the deep crow’s-feet scoring the corners of the warrior’s eyes that stared blankly at the pale sky.

“Nohetto!” Bull prayed. “There is no more.” The man had lived many seasons and died as a warrior must—killing whites.

Just as Bull now renewed his vow.

The hot, still air fell all so quiet now that the horsemen had ceased circling and disappeared upstream, now that the snipers on both banks had silenced their withering fire. In the summer crackle and the rising heat, flies droned and other winged tormentors hovered over all.

He stared again at the island, hoping for another chance at one of the white men. Then his eyes were pulled magnetically to the dead warrior once more. The body lay in the shallow flow of yellowish water that this late of the season seeped slowly down the middle of a wider channel it had cut between rows of cottonwoods and scarred cutbanks of grassy sand at spring’s flood stage. Except for that narrow flow of water itself, the riverbed lay as dry as uncured rawhide here late in the Moon of Black Calves.

Bull’s head pounded with the heat, and the droning, buzzing silence, and the waiting—for it seemed the broad, corn-silk-yellow sky overhead and the shimmering sand of the river bottom conspired with the undulating, heat-shimmered hills to form a bowl reflecting like a mirror down on this narrow valley. As he lay watching the mice busy in their island burrows, the hot, suffocating breezes nudged the dry, brittle grasses where he remained hidden, waiting. The stalks irritated one another, the way the cricket talked mating with its legs. And from time to time he listened to the murmurs of pain and fear and frustration from the enemy on the sandbar.

Tiny voices whispering in Bull’s head told him to stay put. To watch.

That his time was coming.

Another brassy bray from that deserter’s army bugle raised the hair on the back of Bull’s neck.