Winter Rain

In what little Bull could see through that thickening, murky haze of yellow sunlight slanting through the musty powder smoke, the naked, painted warriors began to spill over one another with that third volley. Ponies pitched into the riverbed too, collapsing as if their cords had been cut in bloody, tumbling, spinning heaps.

Piles of blood and sand and bodies and carcasses built up, a sight that brought shrieks from the hillsides as the women and old ones watched the slaughter of their chosen. Yet, with as much damage as the white man was doing to the horsemen, still Bull saw the horde coming, felt the unmistakable thunder vibrating up through the hard surface of the ground beneath his moccasins, heard the reassuring reverberation of their charge still ringing from the hills. And the closer they came, it seemed the more furious they drove their ponies, the louder rose their war cries.

“Fire!”

With that fourth volley the warriors ceased their mighty screeching, having drawn deathly close beneath the guns’ fire-spewing muzzles. Most not already hollering in pain and frustration now rode on grim-lipped toward death’s call on the sandbar. Bravely, without question, they came on, as if possessed—following their chosen leader still a’horse at the center of that front line. Every rider of them weaving back and forth, making it hard for the white man to take a bead on a copper-skinned target.

Brazenly racing on into the face of his own death, Roman Nose raised his arm, exhorting the hundreds come behind him across the sandy riverbed, splattering water and grit and gravel in a huge, stinging curtain as they charged down on the half-a-hundred.

“Now!”

A fifth volley cleaved the air like summer thunder.

Smoke of a dirty gauze obscured the island as Bull plopped down at the edge of the plum brush, bringing the Springfield carbine to his shoulder. If he had a chance at this range, he would pick off one of the white men.

If only to do what one mortal could to turn the day, what he could to change the fate of Roman Nose.

12

Moon of Black Calves 1868

THREE HEARTBEATS FROM the sandbar, Roman Nose ceased weaving.

His eyes locked on the great war chief from the riverbank willows where he crouched, High-Backed Bull watched Roman Nose clamp his legs tightly round his faltering pony. Dark splatters dotted the animal’s chest, each hole streaked with crimson.

With one breath Bull prayed the pony would not stumble and fall, pitching its rider into the sand, directly into the path of the row upon row, the hundreds rushing on the heels of Roman Nose.

And then he knew the hand of the Great Everywhere guided the war chief’s animal in this fateful charge—there was no faltering in the dying pony’s gait. Perhaps it was driven on by the sheer will of its rider, into the gaping jaws of the white man’s guns that continued to spew great tongues of fire at the onrushing ranks.

A flurry of movement at the far end of the island caught Bull’s eye. Turning, he saw a handful of the white men crabbing about in their rifle pits while the rest ducked back into their rabbit holes like tortoises. One of the brave chose to rise, emerging slowly from the dense, yellow-gray powder smoke, to stand and meet the charge every bit as bravely as those courageous Shahiyena warriors called “wanting to die.”

Roman Nose had seen the white man too.

Bull wanted to yell—scream—shriek—anything to distract the white man.

But before he could utter a sound, both men fired—their guns exploding at the same moment, the blast of their weapons swallowed by the roar of other gunfire, the cries of horses, and the screams of men going down in a spray of blood and sand and river water, all swallowed by the smack of lead against bone and sinew and flesh.

Roman Nose had not fallen. Like a war club he swung his own rifle from the muzzle as his wounded pony clawed its way up from the riverbed onto the edge of the sandbar. It faltered, pitching forward onto its front knees, then struggled back up unevenly, back into a ragged gallop right into the teeth of those first white guns. Sand coated its bloody chest where uncountable wounds stained its coat.

The solitary white man still waited, rifle at his shoulder, firing at the war chief as he leapt past.

When one of those bullets finally struck Roman Nose, it was as if Bull himself felt the course of its hot lead into his own body.

Could it be that this terrible event had occurred right before his eyes?

The sudden change in the pitch of those wailing cries from the nearby hilltops told Bull he had not been the only one to see it happen. The women, old men and children too … they had watched the fall of Roman Nose.