In these first days of summer, beneath the full Moon of Fat Horses, High-Backed Bull rode once more with the Dog Soldiers of Porcupine.
For much of last autumn and winter, he had journeyed far, hoping to discover word of the one who had fathered him, perhaps some whisper of where his mother had gone. But from the Little Dried River far to the south, to the Powder River country in the north, no one had heard of Shell Woman, or her daughter, Pipe Woman. More important, no one knew the whereabouts of the tall heads-above white man who had long ago hunted for beaver in the snowy mountains, the one who they said now scouted for the white man’s army in these troublesome days.
This hunt for him would take time, for Bull knew the man he hunted could disappear among the whites like a big fish diving through endless clusters of minnows.
With the coming of spring and the rising of the short-grass like a green blanket spread across the breast of the prairie, Bull had come across Porcupine and all his old friends. This season they rode with the Dog Soldier camps of Tall Bull and White Horse after last summer’s death of Roman Nose and the infuriating standoff on the Plum River. The winter was spent preparing for their new raiding season. As the Kiowa of Satanta and the Brule of Pawnee Killer had raided last summer, as they themselves had raided across the length and breadth of Kan-sas, the Dog Soldiers vowed they would again make the buffalo ground run red with the blood of white men. This year they would push even farther north, push into the country the enemy called Ne-bras-kas, sweeping wider, ranging farther east, before they finally cut south as summer’s long days waned and autumn made its coming known.
Only then would the Dog Soldiers retreat from the land stolen by the white settlers, leaving in their wake the dead and wounded, the slaughtered cattle and the charred ruins smudging the clean prairie sky. This would be a summer to drive the white man back to the east, where it was said he numbered like the blades of grass.
“I cannot believe this,” Tall Bull had declared haughtily when confronted with that frightening but questionable news by messengers from tribes who lived farther to the east. “Your words are only the scared talk of those who would rather run than fight the white man.”
“Neither do I believe it,” Bull had said. “As a child I grew up around the white man’s forts.” The war council grunted their approval of his statement. “I have never seen so many white men that they would even number the blades of grass where Tall Bull raised this lodge of his.”
He was proud of the smile those words had elicited from Tall Bull and White Horse both. And ever since, the Dog Soldier chiefs had seemed to desire the counsel of the young warrior of twenty-four summers, never failing to include Bull in those talks made to decide on which path the Hotamitanyo would take.
That recognition proved to be a pain-giving balm: soothing some of his self-loathing, taking his mind off his hatred of his own white blood. For too long had he wanted acceptance by his father’s race. When Bull did not find it among the whites, he returned to his mother’s people, only to discover that they too distrusted him, if not shunned him outright. Sired by a white man, born of a Shahiyena mother, and wanting nothing more than acceptance—for too long Bull found a home among neither people.
But now, it seemed, not only had the fierce and renegade Dog Soldiers made a place for him at their talks, they truly desired his counsel.
Quite by accident Bull had discovered that the only way he could find acceptance among the Shahiyena was to turn his back completely, irrevocably, on his white father and the white world. Although there were enough reminders of the mixed blood flowing through his veins, what Bull nonetheless hated himself for was the white taint to that blood. More than anything he feared that it would one day prove a stain to his medicine, his power, would ultimately undo his life.
Try as he might through that solitary journey of his last winter, Bull’s time alone had done nothing more than allow him to brood on just how much he differed from the rest of these young warriors crowding the camp. Though he stood taller, though he might be bigger, of greater muscle, Bull wanted none of that. More than anything, he wanted to be dark-haired, black-eyed like them. He wanted most to have a father he could walk with through this camp of Hotamitanyo. A warrior father. A father he could be proud of. Not one of the enemy.
So he sat and cleaned his heavy pistol this last day before they would ride forth at dawn, drawing the cleaning cloth in and out of the barrel of the Walker Colt he had taken out of the dead, frozen hands of a soldier near the pine fort two winters before at the place where the Shahiyena and Lakota had slaughtered the hundred-in-the-hand. Others had claimed the muzzle-loading rifles. Bull had instead rushed in to claim one of the many-shoots pistols: a powerful, destructive weapon.
“You clean that gun so much, you will wear it out,” chided Porcupine as he settled to his haunches in the shade beside his friend.
“Yours could stand some cleaning too,” Bull said sourly, not looking up from his task.
Porcupine sighed as he leaned back against the buffalo-hide lodge. “This magic that sent you riding into the teeth of last winter, it did not help you find the father you seek. Why are you so sure you will find him now?”
He stayed his hands, the powder-streaked rag protruding from both ends of the pistol barrel. “Last winter I hoped to find word of him, or my mother. The time of cold is a season when the soldiers do not march, when the army does not need its scouts—its eyes and ears to guide the soldiers to the sleeping Indian camps.”
“You believed you would find this father of yours in a lodge where you, would also find your mother?”
He nodded, then said, “But I found neither one of them,” as he dragged the oiled rag from the barrel. “So now I have greater faith in the journey we will make this summer. If we kill enough white men, capture enough women, steal enough of their spotted buffalo and bum enough of their dirt lodges—the pony soldiers will come after us.”
Porcupine snorted. “That is one certainty no man will gamble against, Bull. The white man always swats back at that which troubles him.”
Bull nodded. “Yes. But even more important—I know I will find my father this summer. If we kill and steal and rape and kidnap enough—then we will leave a wide and bloody trail for the army to follow.”
“And you believe your father will lead the soldiers on that trail we will leave them to follow?”
With a smile Bull answered, “My father will not be able to deny the smell of Indians in his nostrils. He will lead the pony soldiers after us.”
“Then you will find your father at last,” Porcupine said.
“No,” he replied. “I will kill him.”
16
Late June 1869
HIS OLD FRIENDS were going, one by one by one.
Compañeros and saddle-partners, trappers and frontiersmen, trackers and guides and scouts for the army like Shadrach Sweete—they were all dying off on Shad, one by one by one.
The end of the halcyon days of the fur trade had driven the first of them from this land. Some fled back east to what they could muster to live out their lives. Others like Meek and Newell pushed on to Oregon country. Shad tried that, and in the end came back to what he and Shell Woman knew best: living a nomadic life crossing the plains in the shadow of the cloud-scraping Rocky Mountains. A man did what a man must to provide for his Cheyenne wife and family. And for almost twenty years he had found work here and there, at times guiding for those long, snaking trains of emigrants bound for Oregon or California. Then too he had scouted for the dragoons in those pre-war days and built a reputation so that when the Army of the West came out here to stay. Shad Sweete had all the work a man needed.