Bull’s eyes stung with salty sweat as he glanced once more at the sun’s position, then continued reloading the single-shot Springfield carbine taken at the base of Lodge Trail Ridge two long winters before when the warrior bands had wiped out the hundred-in-the-hand.
Already the day was hot. And they weren’t in the heat of it yet.
For the longest time that morning, bullets had kicked up the sand and slammed into the still, bloating horse carcasses the white men huddled behind as the temperature rose. But after that insistent bugle had called the horsemen to disappear beyond the river bend, the snipers slowed their racket.
Ramming the lead ball home, Bull gazed at the umber ridges that hemmed in this valley, studied the sunburned bluffs and grass-cured hills where the women, children, and old men gathered to watch the coming slaughter. Then he peered at the tall grass and scrubby brush on the sandbar, at the bodies of those horsemen who had not made it out of the riverbed. Less than five yards from the island itself lay a half-dozen painted naked warriors, some of them still crumpled just as they had struck the sand. One was crushed beneath a dead war pony. The rider who had gotten closest to the white men in their burrows Bull recognized as a Shahiyena, from the magpie the warrior tied to his greased hair. He was not a young man, for the iron of many snows had begun to fleck the man’s hair, and from where Bull stood, he could plainly see the deep crow’s-feet scoring the corners of the warrior’s eyes that stared blankly at the pale sky.
“Nohetto!” Bull prayed. “There is no more.” The man had lived many seasons and died as a warrior must—killing whites.
Just as Bull now renewed his vow.
The hot, still air fell all so quiet now that the horsemen had ceased circling and disappeared upstream, now that the snipers on both banks had silenced their withering fire. In the summer crackle and the rising heat, flies droned and other winged tormentors hovered over all.
He stared again at the island, hoping for another chance at one of the white men. Then his eyes were pulled magnetically to the dead warrior once more. The body lay in the shallow flow of yellowish water that this late of the season seeped slowly down the middle of a wider channel it had cut between rows of cottonwoods and scarred cutbanks of grassy sand at spring’s flood stage. Except for that narrow flow of water itself, the riverbed lay as dry as uncured rawhide here late in the Moon of Black Calves.
Bull’s head pounded with the heat, and the droning, buzzing silence, and the waiting—for it seemed the broad, corn-silk-yellow sky overhead and the shimmering sand of the river bottom conspired with the undulating, heat-shimmered hills to form a bowl reflecting like a mirror down on this narrow valley. As he lay watching the mice busy in their island burrows, the hot, suffocating breezes nudged the dry, brittle grasses where he remained hidden, waiting. The stalks irritated one another, the way the cricket talked mating with its legs. And from time to time he listened to the murmurs of pain and fear and frustration from the enemy on the sandbar.
Tiny voices whispering in Bull’s head told him to stay put. To watch.
That his time was coming.
Another brassy bray from that deserter’s army bugle raised the hair on the back of Bull’s neck.
Its echo floated downstream toward the island. Looking now at the trees near the mouth of that ravine at the great bend in the riverbed, he found he could not see anything to give him the faintest clue what Roman Nose and the other chiefs were doing with the hundreds of horsemen who had disappeared from view what seemed like a long, long time ago.
From the corner of his eye, Bull caught the movement against the pale sky and turned to see a handful of feathered war chiefs crowning a nearby hill, all of them gazing at the sandbar, as if studying the defenders on the island. Then, as suddenly as they had appeared, they too slipped out of sight.
“I think they want to see how many of these white men can still hold a rifle,” he told no one but himself.
Something would spring loose soon, he prayed, now that Roman Nose had come. Then his heart sank. Of all the emotions Bull felt at that moment in the brush beside the island—anger, desperation, hate, even some fear—it was sadness that most filled his heart as his thoughts hung on Roman Nose, the way his legging fringe would catch on brambles, or snag on cockleburs. Sadness that Roman Nose had finally come to lead these warriors—when it meant his own death.
A part of him grappled with that—not wanting to believe, as Roman Nose believed, in the power of an old Lakota woman’s iron fork. Surely the might of Roman Nose would prove stronger!
Yet if the war chief’s water spirits had told him—it must be.
Bull’s heart sank again as his eyes peered across the riverbed to the far side. On both sides the banks rose slightly higher than the sandy island itself, giving the Lakota and Shahiyena snipers an ideal field of fire. All morning long they had forced the white men to stay hidden for the most part, down in their pits and low behind the bodies of their dead animals.
“That place where the white men burrow like mice will soon reek of rotting horses,” he said to himself in what little shade he had found in the brush as the sun rose directly overhead. And in saying it, he hoped the white men would all be killed long before the big carcasses began to bloat and stink.
He saw a few of the whites momentarily poke their heads from their rifle pits, staring upstream beneath shading hands flat against their brows. At almost the same moment, Bull felt it beneath him—sensed it in his legs: the electrifying pulsations trembling up from the ground into his own body. He felt them coming before he had even heard them.
The thunder of more than two thousand hooves.
He heard them scant heartbeats before he saw them.
Slowly rising to his feet there in the brush, Bull found the sight hard to believe, felt more joy than he sensed his heart could hold. Of all the pony raids, and scalp hunts, and revenge raids they had made on the frontier settlements … still nothing had prepared the young warrior for what it was that galloped around the far bend in the wide riverbed.
From bank to bank the front row of horsemen stretched some sixty warriors strong. Directly behind them came row upon galloping row of riders. Eagle feathers fluttered on the hot breeze. Scalp locks of many hues, tied to rifle muzzles, caught the morning’s wind. Their loose and braided and roached hair was plastered with grease, some standing as a provocative challenge to any would-be scalp-taker, all danced with the rhythm of the charge.
Even at this great distance Bull could see every pony had been painted with potent symbols. Still more many-colored scalp locks hung pendant from lower jaws, every tail was snubbed—tied up for war in red ribbon or trade cloth. Their bows, along with old Springfield muzzle loaders and a scattering of repeaters, were all brandished aloft as the horsemen came on in a splashy cavalcade, held in check by the only man on the northern plains who could hold these warriors in such an orderly, massed charge.
“Roman Nose!” Bull whispered in awe as his eyes found the tall war chief at the center of that front row.
He knew him instantly, not only by the horned headdress and the brilliant scarlet silk sash tied at the waist, but by the great gobs of red paint the war chief had used to encircle that summer’s pale pucker-scars fresh from the sun dance held on the banks of the Beaver River. On his face he had painted the patterns prescribed by the spirit helpers in the war chief’s visions: great streaks of ox blood across his eyes, yellow-ocher brushed across his cheeks, a black smear painted down his chin. Bright, unmistakable colors he had worn into so many battles. And this was to be his last.