But this was what she was called upon to do. And Buffalo Calf Woman would sing the strong-heart songs as long as it would take. Vowing she would sing as long as her younger brother kept singing.
At dawn’s first cry, that first gunshot, those first hoofbeats that had startled everyone at the upper end of camp, she and some of her friends had been talking in those moments after the drum had fallen silent and the dancers had dispersed, everyone going off to their beds. When the dancing had started the night before, Buffalo Calf Woman had been knotted to five others by her mother with lengths of rawhide so none of Last Bull’s Kit Fox warriors could snatch them away.
At dawn they were still tied one to the others.
So with the coming of the soldiers and their terrifying scouts when the six of them had attempted to flee in six different directions—all of them had spilled onto the trampled snow as the hoofbeats and the war songs and the whistles and the snarling bullets drew closer and closer.
From somewhere an old woman appeared with her long and worn butcher knife. She slashed it down on one rawhide strand, up through the next, on and on until all six girls were freed to scatter as the enemy reached the top of the ridge south of camp—firing their rifles into the lodges.
To the door of her family’s home Buffalo Calf Woman flew, finding the interior dark and empty, a kettle filled with water beside the coals of last night’s fire, dried meat laid out, ready for boiling their breakfast.
“Flying Man!” she had cried in panic, her heart in her throat as she’d turned away from that abandoned lodge, women and children dashing past her, screaming, screeching, keening, and crying.
“Flying Man!” she hollered with fleeting hope through that upper end of camp until it was too late and two warriors had to drag her from the village before she was captured or killed by the enemy’s scouts. There at the far edge of the village she had found her mother’s body seeping a slush of blackening crimson onto the torn snow.
Yet it was no time for tears.
“I must find Flying Man!” she had tried to explain to the warriors who pulled her from the body. She was seeking her younger brother—the boy who was born with a dark blanket pulled over his eyes for all time.
Had he gotten out of the village in time? Had her mother taken him just so far and no farther in their flight? With her mother killed—what had become of Flying Man?
Reluctantly climbing the western ridge with the others, digging with her torn and bloody fingers at the rocks they pulled from the frozen ground, piling them one by one atop the other to erect breastworks—she kept looking for Flying Man. Kept asking each new arrival if they had seen her brother.
He would be frightened. Blind to the danger—able only to hear the terror in that village put on the run.
“Buffalo Calf Woman!”
Only faintly at first she had heard the voice, looking here and there until she heard it call out again—a little stronger this time. Then she found him, struggling up the long slope of the ridge, an old bent woman clutching his arm. The ancient one’s back curved so far that she had to twist her head to the side to look at anything but the ground; nonetheless, the woman clung to the blind boy and helped his feet to see every step of their way together.
He sang out again, “Buffalo Calf Woman!”
“I am here, Flying Man!” she shrieked, pitching down the slope in a mad run, skidding to a stop on the icy snow, clutching him to her breast, her tears spilling as she next brought the old bent woman within her embrace.
“I was so scared after mother’s hand was ripped from mine and then she would not answer me,” Flying Man said quietly, tears from his unseeing eyes spilling on his cheeks. “But the old one here found me and told me I must be strong for her—to take her to safety with me.”
Buffalo Calf Woman put out her hand and touched the wrinkled cheek of the old one, skin like the bark of a long-dead cottonwood. “You … you both were very brave.”
“We must sing, young woman,” the old, toothless mouth said with a raspy croak, the watery eyes blinking in the severe cold.
“Yes,” Buffalo Calf Woman agreed as she took her brother on one arm, the old one grasping her other. “We will go now to the top where we will sing for our men.”
All morning the three of them had been there together. The young boy, who raised his sightless eyes upon that valley where his people were fighting for their very existence. The old woman so bent with age and troubles and her many winters that she had to turn her head to fling her voice down to the warriors below them on the valley floor.
And Buffalo Calf Woman—not knowing where her father and older brothers were in the fierce struggle below.
Yet knowing her mother’s spirit stood beside them now—her mother’s voice giving them all its magic to sing the strong-heart songs behind the tears.
This old fur trapper reminded Seamus of Bridger. Ol’ Gabe. Big Throat. Jim Bridger.
For any man’s purposes, Bill Rowland was indeed cut of the very same cloth. A simple frontiersman who, like Bridger, had married an Indian woman and taken up with her people.
Donegan turned in the saddle and glanced over his shoulder at the high ridge behind them. Up there, south of the village, Tom Cosgrove and his friend, Yancy Eckles, both were squaw men among the Shoshone on the Wind River. But this Rowland had to be a hell of a lot older than those two Confederates. Been out here on the plains from the time of the buffalo-robe trade—when the tribes still dressed hides for the white man, before the time the hide men began to set about wiping out the herds.
The man must surely have grandchildren by now, Donegan thought as the two of them moved their horses cautiously out of the tall willow and headed west at the foot of the long plateau bordering the north wall of the valley.
“See what they’ve got on their minds, Rowland,” Mackenzie had ordered. “Take some of your relatives with you and see if you can’t convince these chiefs to call off their dogs.”
“You want me to tell ’em you’re fixing to call it quits, General?” Rowland had asked before he’d moved out with Donegan.
“No—I’m not calling off our attack. But you’re to find out if these Cheyenne want to surrender any of their women and children, the old people too—before we destroy everything they own.”
Rowland only nodded and turned away. His eyes brushed Donegan, watery they were. With a look in them that told Seamus the old frontiersman knew why Mackenzie was sending the Irishman with him.
That son of a bitch don’t trust me, those eyes said. So I don’t figure I got a damn reason in the world to trust you neither.
The four men Rowland quickly selected to accompany him regarded Seamus with those same eyes filled with wary distrust. Donegan knew that, unlike Three Bears’s Sioux scouts, these men very well might have relatives among the people in this camp they had attacked at dawn. Such a thing naturally made a man suspicious, nervous, downright uneasylike when he had come to wreak destruction upon his kinfolk.
Every now and then a high-powered rifle roared and its echo rocked back and back and back from the canyon walls. But for the most part the battle had reached an uneasy lull with the sun heading quickly for the southwest. Already the shadows of the rocks and brush were lengthening below their horses’ hooves.
“I figure we better go on foot from here,” Rowland advised, then turned and spoke quickly to the others in Cheyenne.
They all dismounted and the youngest among them gathered up the leads to the horses, taking the animals back a few yards to the mouth of a narrow coulee, where he would ground-hobble them with their single horsehair rein lashed around one fore hoof, which would allow the horses to graze under his watchful eye.