But Young Two Moon was an honorable warrior. Sadly, reluctantly—he took his place with his warrior society and kept everyone in the camp dancing and singing.
By the time he wearily reached his family’s lodge at dawn, it seemed everyone had already gone to sleep, so exhausted were they from that night-long dance, around and around and around the drum when instead the young men should have had fighting on their minds. Not young women.
It was dark in the lodge. And cold here too. He let his eyes adjust to the dim light as he squatted near his parents’ bed at the back of the lodge. And struggled for a moment more before he knew he had to speak what he had been fighting all night.
“Father.”
He waited a moment.
“Father?”
“What do you want?” Beaver Claws grumbled with fatigue.
“I want my family to get up and dress. Now.”
The man rolled toward his son, pulling the buffalo robe back from his face. When he spoke, his words became frost in the gray light of dawn-coming. “You want us to get dressed? We just came here to sleep! Be quiet and go to bed.”
“Please, father. Get the family up and dressed and come with me,” Young Two Moon pleaded, then turned slightly, hearing the rustle of blankets, finding his father’s second wife rising to an elbow to listen at the side of the lodge.
“The soldiers?” the older man asked.
“Yes. It will be soon,” he replied, his voice thinned by urgency. “Please hurry! The day is nearly here! We must go to the far end of the canyon, climb into the rocks where you will be safe!”
“All right,” Beaver Claws answered in a louder voice, then patted the woman beside him on the rump as he sat up, the blankets and robes falling from his bare chest. “Everyone! Get up! Get dressed! This young warrior believes the soldiers are coming—and I choose to believe him … because he has seen the enemy with his own eyes!”
Black Hairy Dog was not used to such cold as this.
For generations beyond count his people had ranged the southern plains. But now that the white man had rounded up the many clans and forced them onto the reservation in the southern country,* he had fled north with the Sacred Arrows once his father, Stone Forehead, had died.
Now the powerful objects were Black Hairy Dog’s responsibility. On his aging shoulders rested so much of the fate of his people. He was one to trust the visions of the old ones much more than he trusted the preening talk of the war chiefs.
There had been much strutting last night as the People gathered around the great, roaring skunk and danced shoulder to shoulder, sliding their feet a step at a time, the throbbing circle moving right to left, following the path of the sun.
Last Bull’s brash young men, drunk with their sudden power, swayed in the dance, singing out to boast of their war coups over the Shoshone. One of them held aloft the withered hand and arm of an enemy woman. Another cavorted about with a bag filled with the right hands of twelve Shoshone babies. Another, called High Wolf, proudly displayed his necklace of dried fingers. Flitting overhead in the fire’s light wagged some thirty fresh scalps tied at the ends of the long poles as the Kit Fox warriors and their wives sashayed in and out of the grand circle.
When the People warmed to the celebration, the older trophies came out. A warrior swirled into their midst wearing the fringed buckskin jacket he had taken from the body of the man he had killed in the terrible fighting at the north end of the hill above the Greasy Grass River. Another proudly sported the black hat emblazoned with the chevrons of a cavalry sergeant. Instead of a heavy blanket, another warrior pranced about in his soldier-blue caped mackintosh.
All around them voices sang and whooped until they were hoarse. And danced until their legs could barely move in those moments just before sunrise when the drum fell silent and the loudmouthed Kit Fox Soldiers told everyone to be off to bed.
“No soldiers are coming! Do not believe the Elk Scrapers—they are frightened old women! No soldiers are coming!”
So Black Hairy Dog laid his weary bones down in his robes and tried to sleep, but could not. Unable to shake the feeling deep in his marrow that for days had convinced him the village must be moved … time and again he remembered how nearly forty winters before a warrior society among his southern people had beaten the Keeper of the Medicine Arrows with their bows for publicly opposing them.
Again it was the power of the Arrows’ intangible medicine pitted against the might of angry and prideful young men.
He pulled his clothes back on, then clutched a robe around his shoulders as he went to the nearby brush where he had tied his ponies to keep them close. Knowing in his heart that the soldiers were coming. The soldiers always came.
Black Hairy Dog began to drive the ponies up the southeastern slope of the canyon, away from the village, when he heard the first yell break the cold, misty silence on the floor of the canyon.
Then heard that first shot.
And from that far end of the village he heard that first Cheyenne cry out as a woman spilled onto the bloody snow trampled beneath the onslaught.
“The soldiers are here!” Black Hairy Dog screamed, turning in the deep snow, tripping and falling—then picking himself back up to stumble down toward the village. “Hurry! Hurry! The soldiers are here!”
Damned funny, Seamus thought as the horse lurched beneath him, then fell back into its ground-eating stride.
For the life of him he couldn’t figure out why the first of the Cheyenne warriors appearing out of the cold mist were firing at the heights south of the village. They weren’t acting as if they realized the soldiers and their scouts were all but upon them. Instead, the warriors fired and dodged, dropped to one knee and fired, aiming at the Shoshone that Cosgrove and Schuyler had raced to the high ground. Up there Seamus could see the Snake dismounting, horses being led back from the edge of the cliff where the scouts plopped onto their bellies and began to pour some harassing fire down among the Cheyenne lodges.
Not far away, on Donegan’s right, he watched some of the Sioux and Cheyenne scouts peel off for the village, leaving Mackenzie and his headquarters group suddenly exposed. A moment later a Cheyenne warrior leaped to his feet atop the low plateau on the north edge of the valley, leveling a rifle at the soldier chief.
Seamus no more got his mouth open to shout a warning than the colonel’s orderlies all fired their pistols into the warrior. He was pitched back, spinning about, rifle tumbling out of his grasp as he disappeared into the brush, Mackenzie and his orderlies thundering on past.
To Donegan’s left Frank and Luther North led their Pawnee among the first lodges, which were pitched at the end of the camp near the mouth of a dry creek clogged with leafless underbrush and stunted alder. From their left, near the opening of that ravine, a blanketed form sprang up directly in front of Lute North, who whirled his carbine down at the target and fired at almost the same instant that Frank pulled the trigger on his carbine. The shock of both bullets at that range catapulted the Cheyenne warrior off his feet, back into the brush as the horsemen raced on by.
Behind them the Pawnee yelped their approval and praise for making that first kill, “Ki-de-de-de! Ki-de-de-de!”
Singing out, the coatless battalion pushed on for the village, hoping for plunder, ready to fight hand to hand for enemy scalps as they plunged through the camp, intending to meet Mackenzie’s soldiers on the far side and thereby seal off all chance for the Cheyenne to escape. But the delay caused by their recrossing the creek to join Mackenzie minutes before now doomed the colonel’s plan of attack to frustration, if not ultimately to failure.
Already Donegan could make out the dark forms of the Cheyenne spilling from the west end of village far ahead, making for the high ground like coveys of quail flushed from the protective undergrowth.