Bighead Woman gestured violently toward the naked corpse beside them in the dust. She waited for Monaseetah to speak.
“I thank you for your care this day, sister. I will stay here now. My son and I will stay to watch over the body until dark fills the sky. We will see that no harm comes to this man. You need wait no longer. Leave us now.”
The older woman reached into a small quilled pouch hung at her belt and removed a bone awl, its point hardened in fire and sharpened for punching holes in the thickest of bull hides. With that awl clasped in one hand, Bighead Woman twisted the white soldier’s head to the side. Monaseetah grabbed the woman’s hand to still it.
For a long moment they stared at one another, the older woman able to read what lay within the liquid depths of the young mother’s eyes.
“What I do now is not for you, my young friend,” Bighead Woman explained softly. “This I do for him. Hiestzi did not heed the words told him long ago during his days in those lands to the south. Eight winters it has been now since the elders of our tribe warned him not to attack the women and children and villages of the People. Yet Yellow Hair did not hear our clear, strong words. This I do for him. So that Yellow Hair may hear better in the life to come—I wish to open his ears up to the songs he should have heard long ago.”
Eventually Monaseetah’s fingers loosened their frantic grip on the older woman’s brown wrist. “It is understood,” she replied as she pulled her hand away in resignation.
Cautiously Bighead Woman inserted the point of the bone awl into the left ear canal, then suddenly rammed it all the harder when she encountered resistance. She brought the bone spindle out accompanied with a slight trickle of blood. When she had twisted the man’s head to the left, she punctured the right ear as well. Finally she wiped the bone awl on her dusty buckskin dress and dropped it back into her pouch.
“It is right, this that you do,” Monaseetah sighed. Her voice was like a dry wind that scoured the distant prairie home of her Southern Cheyenne people.
“Yes, it is right, little sister.” The older woman shakily rose to her feet. “Perhaps you will be granted another time together with Hiestzi. In another place, in some dream yet to come.”
“Perhaps.” Monaseetah did not look up to see her friend hurry away to join the others scurrying like maddened red ants across the yellow hillsides, where the heat rose in shimmering waves to the bone white sky.
Frightened still, her son looked down the slope. Here and there warriors had turned the fish-belly bodies of their white victims facedown after mutilation and desecration. He remembered the Cheyenne belief taught him by the old ones: It was bad luck to leave an enemy facing the sky, because his soul could more easily escape the earthly plane.
Many of the hairy tanned heads had been smashed to jelly. The congealing ooze was already attracting both crawling and flying insects. Some heads had been severed from the bodies. Among the sage and yellow dust lay other body parts: hands, feet, penises, legs, and arms. Practically every man’s torso bristled like a porcupine with a score or more arrows, most fired into the dead bodies by eager young boys or infuriated, wrinkled old men who could not remember ever celebrating such a resounding victory. Truly, this was a day for joy and singing the old songs.
Farther down the slope two older youths played a game of shinny-ball with a soldier’s head, batting the bloody trophy back and forth with discarded rifles that could be found beside every dead soldier. The bearded head rolled into the sticky entrails that had tumbled from another soldier’s belly wound. Suddenly the two youths had a new game to play. They yanked and pulled, tore and ripped the warm, snakelike intestines from the man’s belly.
The little boy turned away, his mind already numb to the shrieking crimson spectacle all round him. Even here at his feet he could not escape the gore. Here lay three of the white-bellies, looking like helpless fish flopped on the creek bank. All three had been stripped by the women. Yet while two had been desecrated and horribly mutilated, their genitals hacked off and tossed aside, their thighs gashed, a hand gone or foot cleaved away, heads scalped and pummeled to a sticky jelly—the hairy-face in the middle remained untouched.
Why had his aunt protected this one from desecration? Why had she stood guard while his mother hauled him up the hillside to view this body? Why would they want this one, solitary soldier out of all the others to hear better in Seyan—his people’s Life After Crossing Over?
This soldier’s face bore a look of peace.
The boy felt something very different boiling inside his own belly. In summer all he ever wore was the little breechclout and his buffalo-hide moccasins. The sun’s scorching fingers raked his naked back. Trickles of sweat coursed down his heaving chest. It seemed the sun’s rays grew hotter, the stench more suffocating. He imagined the white-belly corpses inching in on him here where he sat near the crest of the hill.
“Aiyeeee!”
He jerked up, his nose inches from the frightening glare of an ancient, shriveled woman. The skin on her face sagged, as did the wrinkled pair of old dugs he saw as he peered down the loose neckline of her ill-fitting skin dress. The boy swallowed sickly.
Her wild eyes darted like accusing black marbles from him, to the white soldier, to Monaseetah, and back to the soldier’s body again.
“You have not touched this one yet!” Her teeth showed black gaps from which burst a hideous odor.
“No.” Monaseetah placed a hand on the dead soldier’s chest, over his heart just above the bloody wound. “He is a … my relative.”
“Aieee!” Her head fell back as she cackled, and the boy feared it would fall off the old harpy’s shoulders. “A relative, sister?”
“You are Sioux—yes?” Monaseetah did not remove her hand from the soldier’s heart.
“Miniconjou.”
“I am Tsistsistas. I know this soldier from long ago. Several winters now. In my land to the south. This one, he was foolish to come north. But, he is my relative.”
Slowly the old one bent forward, studying the young mother’s face with a rheumy eye. “You see to him, Cheyenne sister.” The old hag peered at him closely a long moment before he pulled away, hiding behind his mother. “I want his boots, Tsistsistas. Only his boots!”
She cackled once more as Monaseetah scooped up the knee-high dusty black boots she had set aside for herself. The scuffed cavalry boots belonging to two other soldiers were nowhere near as tall as these. Running her hands over the soft, pliant black leather, the wrinkled one smiled now that the precious treasure belonged to her.
“These, little sister, will make fine bullet pouches … perhaps a quiver for some man’s arrows. Maybe a hiding place for a man’s love charms or war medicine. So very soft—”
“Take them and go, old one!” Monaseetah snapped. “Just go!”
Her fiery words caught the boy by surprise. He rarely heard his mother bark at others. She almost never shouted at him or his older brother—only when they had really deserved it.