Red Horse echoed, “They now know we will hunt them down!”
“Yet—what of the great mystic’s vision?” asked Iron Thunder.
“Yes,” agreed Antelope Tail, worry cracking his voice. “What of Sitting Bull’s talk with Wakan Tanka?”
American Horse smiled. He had fought these white men many, many summers. Even winters too. In fact, thirty winters before his own father, Smoke, had met the famous white man Francis Parkman there beside the white man’s Holy Road that paralleled the Buffalo Dung River.*
“The soldiers will return,” he told them confidently.
Dog Necklace disagreed, still sour as gall. “The soldiers would not dare try themselves against our strength! As powerful as the mystic’s dream was, I nonetheless still find it very hard to believe soldiers will come to fall into our camps now.”
“But his vision was so vivid, in such detail,” American Horse protested. “The Hunkpatila warrior called He Dog has told me Sitting Bull says we should expect another fight.”
“Let us savor this victory first, old one,” Red Horse chided the aging war chief.
“Yes,” agreed Dog Necklace as he chuckled with disdain. “Even as stupid as the white man is, none of our people can seriously believe the soldiers would still be marching on our villages. Chasing us after the beating we gave them.”
“It will be a long, long time before we have to worry about any soldiers marching on us now,” Red Horse said.
“Yes. I think they have learned their lesson well and are running away far to the south, never to fight us again this summer,” Dog Necklace boasted. “The Great Mystery has taught the soldiers a painful truth: never again come to attack a village of women and children. If they ever try, only death and destruction await them.”
“But that’s just what the shaman Sitting Bull saw in his vision,” American Horse scolded the young warriors for forgetting. “Soon he reminds us—the soldiers will return to fall headfirst like grasshoppers into our camp.”
“Never again will we retreat!” Iron Thunder roared.
Antelope Tail joined in. “On the Rosebud we learned a mighty lesson! Never again will we merely fight long enough to cover the retreat of our women and children, protecting those weaker than ourselves!”
Once again American Horse sensed the stirrings of his own warriorhood—as it always stirred when his people were threatened, rising as surely as did the guard hair on the neck of the wild wolf when a challenger presented himself. It had been as Crazy Horse promised them when he led the hundreds south to meet Three Stars. Indeed, it had been a new kind of fighting for the Lakota and their cousins, the Shahiyena of the North. In that one day-long battle with the confused, retreating, frightened soldiers, the Lakota bid farewell to their old way of waging war wherein each man fought on his own for coups and scalps and ponies; each man riding out ahead of the others to perform daring, risky, and often foolish deeds in the face of the white enemy.
There was much talk of how Crazy Horse had orchestrated their great victory over Three Stars and his soldiers. Much talk that from now on the Lakota would never retreat—would instead stand and fight any army come against their villages in this new way Crazy Horse had taught them: to ride knee to knee in massed bunches, swarming together over the white man as the bee flies in swarms that blackened the sky, flinging themselves against the soldier lines in numbers that could not help but roll over every one of the helpless blue-shirted enemy soiling their pants in abject fear.
While most of the warriors turned north with the wounded late in that day of fierce fighting, American Horse and other Lakota, as well as some of the Shahiyena, stayed behind to keep watch on the soldier camp through that first night following the battle. They were as hungry and tired as the rest, for it had been a good day, a great fight, and only one of American Horse’s Miniconjou had been wounded seriously enough that he might die.
What a great victory over Three Stars and his soldiers!
The next morning the white men rose early and straggled south out of the valley, finally disappearing among the green hills. With the soldiers gone, the young warriors waiting on either side of American Horse atop a high hill kicked their ponies into motion, racing down to the trampled grass pocked with hundreds of tiny fire smudges, a creek valley dotted with the droppings of so many horses and pack-mules. Here and there they found an abandoned prize: a worn-out hat, a good pair of gloves, a belt pouch, a piece of bloody blue cloth cut from a wounded soldier’s trousers or shirt, and even such treasure as some bacon and crackers, along with coffee wrapped in waxed paper packets!
It wasn’t long before the young Oglalla called Black Elk after his father discovered the patch of earth the white man had dug up the night before, then trampled with many hooves to hide the digging.
“This is surely the ground where they buried their dead!” Dog Necklace shouted.
Almost at once the two dozen or more fell to their hands and knees, scratching and scraping at the pounded soil, howling like a pack of coyotes expectant of a feast. From the unearthed bodies the warriors took scalps, tore off the thin gray blankets, then stripped clothing and finger rings.
Later that morning they discovered the body of that wounded Lakota butchered by the Sparrowhawk People who scouted for Three Stars as the army retreated out of the valley.
“Wrap our brother warrior in one of those soldier blankets,” American Horse demanded angrily as he gazed down at the dismembered remains.
“Not mine!” protested Red Horse, clutching the gray army blanket.
“Then I will use my own,” the Miniconjou war chief said. “But I will ask your help.”
Three others dismounted to help American Horse gather the scattered flesh and bone of the mutilated warrior identifiable only from the porcupine quillwork decorating shreds of his bloody leggings.
“And you, Red Horse,” he said sternly, training his wide-browed glare on the young warrior who had refused to relinquish his army blanket for a death-wrap, “it is you I want to build me a travois so that we can return this man’s bones to his family.”
By the time American Horse and the others reached the great encampment the following day, most women in the many circles were already at moving camp, dropping smoked hides rich with fragrance from their darkened lodgepoles, loading travois with a family’s possessions, with the little ones still too young to walk or ride atop the backs of gentle ponies—travois that might also transport the aged whose numberless winters prevented them from walking or riding. Camp was being moved downstream a few more miles west toward the Greasy Grass.
There the great gathering of circles would have nothing more to worry about than where to find the buffalo and antelope the young men would hunt for meat and hides to put up against the coming winter. Winter always came to this land, and with its arrival always came the retreat of the soldiers. American Horse hoped that by whipping Three Stars and his men on Rosebud Creek, the soldiers would abandon Lakota hunting ground even sooner this season.
From the valley of the Greasy Grass the villages would move slowly southwest toward the Big Horn Mountains, where the hunting was always good. In those days to come the camp circles would slowly break apart, warrior bands and family clans drifting off on the four winds as the summer season slowly aged.
Just as a man aged with the seasons of his own life.
Across the seasons the Miniconjou had known him first as American Horse, later as Iron Plume and Iron Shield, later still as Black Shield because of a dream in which a spirit told him to make a shield he should paint black so that it would protect him from bullets. But even though he was nowhere near so well-known to the whites as Rain-in-the-Face or Gall; American Horse was well regarded among his own Miniconjou for his unquestioned bravery in battle and his steadfast protection of his people.