Monaseetah guided his hand to stroke her own dark, silky hair falling unfettered in the hot breezes across her quaking shoulders.
“Black, my son. Sleek as the raven’s shiny wing when it snags the sun’s rays in high flight.”
She took the boy’s hand and brought it up to touch his own head. She held some of his own long hair before his eyes.
“Your hair is not like your mother’s.”
“I do not understand,” he said, quivering.
Again Monaseetah took his hand to touch first the soldier’s thinning, close-cropped hair. Then her own long, loose hair. Finally his own. Looking at it perhaps for the first time in his young life, the boy found himself growing scared, with a cold creeping right down to his toes.
“You were named Yellow Bird because of the color of your hair, my son.”
He watched her choke back a sob that made his mother shudder. She swiped at her wet cheeks before he worked up courage to ask.
“You are my mother, aren’t you?”
“Yes.” She smiled through the haze. “I am your mother.”
Anxiously Yellow Bird wrung his hands through his hair, not understanding, afraid to accept what his mother had told him. He did not like the feeling at all. He had been scared before, he remembered. Like last summer when his pony had been spooked by a rattler, bolting into the hills as he clung to its mane in desperation. Yet right now he was more frightened than he had ever been.
Yellow Bird bolted to his feet. As quickly his mother snagged his wrist and yanked him down beside her. He fell to his knees, sprawling over the naked pony soldier.
He cried out as his face brushed the pony soldier’s cold, bristling cheek.
Fiercely he clamped his eyes to shut off the flow of hot tears. In a flood he figured out what she wanted him to tell her. But Yellow Bird knew his mother wanted him to say the words himself.
Desperately he hungered for escape. The hillside filled his nostrils with the stench of blood and bowels released in death, gore scattered across the gray-backed sage and yellow dirt and dry red-brown grasses in savage, sudden, welcome death. At once Yellow Bird could not breathe.
“No!” he shouted. It scared him to hear the unbridled fear in his own voice.
“Yes,” his mother cooed. She cradled his little hands within hers, holding him in this place of terror.
“No-o-o!” Yellow Bird whimpered like a wounded animal caught in a snare.
Again and again he whipped his head from side to side, whimpering his word of denial.
“It is so, my son.”
Suddenly he let his tense, cold muscles go. Yellow Bird stopped fighting his mother. Instead he collapsed against her, sobbing as he stared down at the soldier. Once again he took up some long strands of his own loose, unbraided hair, lifting it into the bright, truthful sunlight. There before his eyes it shimmered, each strand much lighter than the dark, coarse hair of any other Cheyenne he had ever known in his few summers of life.
After what seemed like another lifetime, Yellow Bird brought his face away from his mother’s soft breast where his tears had soaked through her soft buckskin dress. Already the sun had begun to cast long shadows in its relentless march to the west.
“Yes, Yellow Bird,” Monaseetah said quietly. “This is your father.”
BOOK I
THE MARCH
CHAPTER 1
THE dawn air was filled with that heady, earthy fragrance of fresh dung dropped by a few of the hundreds upon hundreds of mules and horses crowding the parade ground.
Springtime brought with it at least one blessing to this land of tractless, far-reaching prairie: enough rain to hold down the thick yellow dust. But rain also brought mud and great, swampy puddles that collected across the swales and at the foot of every hillock. Those puddles in turn bred mosquitoes, winged tormentors soon to rise over this northland as they had for his last three springs here on the Missouri. Huge creatures swarming above these great grasslands in a dark cloak like the horde of locusts swarming above the Egypt of ancient pharoahs.
Still, it would take something far hardier than a plague of mosquitoes to drive him from this western frontier. Perhaps only a call to Washington City itself.
“Mr. Burkman.” He turned to his personal aide. “I see you scribbling in your little book again.”
The short, dark orderly looked at that tall soldier beside him with something akin to worship. “Yes, General.”
“So tell me what you’ve written about this momentous morning so far … a morning of which grand destinies are made, Mr. Burkman.”
The young private cleared his throat and glanced up at his benefactor nervously. “Uhhh, all I’ve written so far is Wednesday, seventeen May, 1876, sir.”
“Nothing else?” His azure blue eyes scanned the activity on the parade ground. “All this time here on the porch this morning, and all you’ve been inspired to write is the date?”
“There’s more, sir—but I’m a little at the loss for words, General. I’ve never been on a campaign before … it’s all a bit overwhelming to me right now.”
“I quite understand, Private,” the officer replied with that famous, peg-toothed smile of his, slapping his orderly on the back. “Tell me, then, have you scribbled anything else of note?”
“Only … Fort Abraham Lincoln, Dakota Territory,” John Burkman said. Then he uttered the rest more softly. “We prepare to embark on a mission of national importance, one that will spell the final subjugation of these plains for the settlement of white civilization, or the continuation of the Indian Wars, which have so long plagued this great land.”
The officer smiled beneath the bushy mustache that hung like corn straw over his mouth. “Very good, John. I like it. But—you ought to scratch the last part of that. We’re going to put an end to the Indian Wars once and for all.”
The young private licked nervously at the dulled point of his pencil, then set it to work, scratching across the sheet of his ledger, attempting to capture more of his commander’s words for history. “Yes, sir,” he replied absently as his hand flew across the page.
“Keep at it, Striker!” He patted the young man’s shoulder again. “You’ll have much to tell your grandchildren about this campaign. There won’t be a man, woman, or child across this great republic of ours who won’t know about the glory-bidden U.S. Seventh Cavalry.”
He stepped toward the edge of the porch, eyes raking the parade ground approvingly. Finally he stuffed his pale fingers into the skintight yellow doeskin gloves and tugged at the tall fringed gauntlets as he plodded down two steps and stopped, breathing deeply of the air of anticipation that hung thick over the parade.
“John, there won’t be a soul from Washington City to St. Louis who fails to know about George Armstrong Custer when the dust settles and my personal standard flies over the battlefield.”
“Yes, General!” Burkman hopped down the steps of the Custer home constructed just west of the massive parade ground so he would stand beside the taller man. He truly idolized the dashing “Boy General,” hero of the Union Army of the Potomac during the Civil War.
He turned to Burkman and again smiled engagingly beneath the bristly mustache. “St. Louis is the site of the Democratic convention next month.”
Burkman was purely muddled now. “I thought you hated politics and politicians both, sir. Why, after what President Grant and the Congressional Committee did to you—”