There is no general sign, except to combine the signs for DEATH, BEYOND, and INHABIT, denoting a land beyond death and living . . .
It is impossible to learn at this late date what the Indians believed prior to our advent, but I am inclined to think they always pictured a hereafter of clear waters, white tipis, and good hunting. Our missionaries have earnestly sought to convince them that there is a hell of eternal torture, as surely as there is a heaven of endless bliss. Though Indians freely admit that whites may and probably will go to hell, I have yet to meet an Indian who believes in his heart that any Indians will go there.
-- Indian Sign Language, Capt W.P. Clark, 2nd Car, 1884
The Iron Road
We saddled up our stolen horses and rode south, leaving Lakota Country for Indian Territory. In four sleeps we were past Court House Rock, between the Forks of the Platte, old familiar territory to my husband. Summer heat cast hazy moats around the monuments. Riding knee to knee, we talked half in Sheyenna, half in English, still exploring each other's tongues, filling gaps with pidgin Lakota and sign talk, acting out words, smiling at each other's antics. Yellow Legs wore a stained Medicine shirt and plain leggings. I had on my white doeskin dress, slit for riding. Each morning he braided my blonde hair, painting it red at the parting to show the world how proud he was.
Raven trailed behind us, dragging a pony travois with Nothing on board, acting the dutiful Sheyenna wife, a role she relished more than anything--except maybe the baby behind her.
Yellow Legs had that aboriginal ability to memorize ground as effortlessly as a seasoned actor learning Shakespeare, and he kept up a running commentary--not on what we were seeing, but on what lay just over the flat horizon. What the country would be like. Where we would find water. It was one of his best Medicine tricks. He pointed out hidden creek beds, and the remains of an army camp where he and Crazy Horse had gotten many American horses with the Long Knife mark on their hips -- he traced a U.S. in the air with his finger.
Anything out of place got instant attention. A smudge of smoke or dust. A peculiar animal movement. Several times he saw the bones of buffalo that had not been there before. Each time Yellow Legs dismounted, piously turning the eyeless skulls to face the sunrise and rebirth, doing his part to assure the yearly return of the buffalo. On the ground he was bowlegged, from a life on horseback, but was still taller than I, taller than Crazy Horse, though not so tall as Touch-the-Clouds. I was just past twenty and desperately in love. Yellow Legs was only the second man I had ever known. He was over forty-- with gray in his braids and laugh wrinkles around his eyes--but I was only his second woman, and he always treated me as something precious.
When time came to camp, Yellow Legs would look at me, saying, "Get down, wife" -- a sentence not half as curt in Sheyenna as it sounds in English. "Get down" is a greeting. If a Sheyenna brave is not happy to see you, he would just as soon that you stayed on your horse. And to Yellow Legs "wife" was a term of endearment more tender than any of my names.
I was born Sarah Kilory, youngest daughter to a going-to-meeting Quaker, and a charming Bog Irish drunkard. But not even my husband bothered with my Christian name. Birth names were for babies. Who cared what meaningless sounds my parents cooed over me when I was weak and formless? Sheyenna kept hanging names on me, hoping one would stick. Not all were flattering. To some I was "That One." Or Enutah, "The Foreign Woman." Most commonly I was "American Woman," a name borrowed from Crazy Horse's Lakotas. Only Yellow Legs could call me "Wife."
Unpacking my travois, I pitched my little twelve-skin lodge next to Raven's bigger one. My tipi was plain and tiny by Sheyenna standards, just big enough for me and my husband-- when he came to call. But it was all mine. How often could a civilized woman say she had a home of her own waiting wherever she went? Raven got dinner going shuffling about with Nothing on her back, doing her gruff imitation of a grizzly with cub. Elk jerky simmered in the stewpot seasoned with rose hips and cactus greens cooked soft with the spines burned off. She fanned the cook fire with a crow's wing. Many Sheyenna would not touch a black bird of death-- but Raven's name gave her special powers over crows, kites, buzzards, and other Eaters of the Dead.
I served myself, not bothering to thank her. Buffalo Indians did not have, or need, a dozen different ways of saying "much obliged." To Raven, sharing stew was as normal as sharing a husband. When I first came into camp, I was a wide-eyed Wasichu, always thanking people for everything, trying to make friends. Raven was the one who pointed out that gushing over people for doing right sounded sarcastic, implying their natural impulse was to do wrong. Gratitude assumes a giver, not a sharer, and comes more easily to a Wasichu than to a Sheyenna.
She dipped into her stew with a chipped china cup -- my spur of the moment gift during that embarrassing moment when we discovered we were married to the same man. Yellow Legs had a way of letting the medicine work itself out, and did not manage to communicate that he had a wife until I arrived in Crazy Horse's camp, deep in Lakota Country -- where I could hardly stalk off in a huff. Nor did Raven get any warning. He had not told her, "I'm going to Red Cloud's Agency to pick up a couple of pounds of coffee and a skinny blonde wife." Her first hint that I existed was seeing me ride into camp side-by-side with her husband. She had yet to thank me for the cup.
Raven had round brown arms, and hips twice as wide as mine. Her raw energy could be frightening. A glutton for labor, she openly prided herself on being Yellow Legs' "working wife." I was plainly one of those silly indulgences that successful warriors wasted time with -- like a parade pony, painted and primped, but only ridden on special occasions. And she did it all with Nothing on her back, or propped in the shade, watching sleeping waking to nurse. If the baby fussed, Raven swooped down, smothering her cries with a tit. I once asked why she named her precious offspring "Nothing."
"A special baby needs a special name," she replied.
I asked what was so special about "Nothing."
"Nothing is special about Nothing. I am waiting for her special name to come." Pure Sheyenna -- the baby was too important to have a name.
On the fifth morning we mounted up, riding south through a booming prairie dog town, filled with plump dogs, plus all the shifty types that hang around a well-to-do dog town-- weasels, red-tails, and black-looted ferrets. A trio of little ground owls dived into an old dog hole as we rode by, clicking out exact imitations of a rattlesnake's rattle. Old Man Coyote and Mister Badger weren't fooled, one started to dig while the other watched the bolt hole. I broke up their joint hunt, shooing the moochers off, shaming them for hunting nestlings.
The coyote trotted a dozen yards, then turned, wearing a sly look, yip-barking back at me. Yellow Legs laughed. "He called you a meddling yellow-haired bitch."
"Really." I raised an eyebrow. My husband claimed to understand the speech of coyotes -- having learned it from a Snake boy who was raised by wolves.
"Of course -- but to Coyote that is a compliment. Bold light-haired females breed good pups."
In a couple of sleeps we reached the South Fork of the Platte. This late in the Big Dry Time the river had sunk down to a trickle in its mile wide bed, a thin film of water hiding bogs and quicksands. Of course we could not use the recognized fords -- where the Wasichu crossed -- but Yellow Legs saw that our horses barely wet their fetlocks.
On the high sweltering divide between the Platte and the Pawnee, Yellow Legs turned loose the ponies to graze and went hunting rabbits, while Raven collected buffalo chips to cook them on. (The treeless landscape had reduced us to burning turds) I lay alone on my travois, exhausted by the day's heat and the night's ride, slipping in and out of sleep. Then something incredibly curious happened.
Close to dusk, a coyote came trotting up. He was in no way special, looking much like the one I had seen at the dog town, a bit bigger than most, but with the usual pointed snout and graying piss-yellow fur. I wondered if he had trailed us all the way from the Forks of the Platte, hoping for a handout. He stopped, settling back on his haunches, giving me a smug slantendicular look.
"Go away," I told him.
"Why?" he replied.
Tired as I was, I nearly sprang off the travois. No matter how much my husband swore that prairie wolves could speak, I never expected to be talking to one. The words did not come out of his throat, but formed inside my head, clear as stream water, and in English if you please--somehow it would have seemed less outlandish if the beast had spoken Sheyenna. Too stupefied to answer, I sat up, searching frantically for Yellow Legs. No luck. He was still off rabbit hunting. Raven and Nothing were not in sight.
The coyote scratched himself, looking cockeyed at me. "American Woman. you are the one with far to go. Come follow me. "Turning half about, he trotted off at an angie into the hot twilight -- looking back over his shoulder, totally confident I would follow.
Which I did. Staggering to my feet, I stumbled after him in dreamy fashion, feet barely touching the ground. The phantom prairie wolf led me to the base of some gray rounded bluffs, strung along a stream like a row of burial mounds. Without being told, I knew the bluffs contained the Camp of the Dead. Father had given me bleary lectures about the Land Under the Hill inhabited by faeries and the dear departed. By one of those eerie coincidences, Buffalo Indians and Bog Irish both thought the Spirit World could be found inside some high place.
A creek ran along the base of the bluffs, looking just like the Greasy Grass, the stream at the sunset edge of Lakota Country-- the one whites call the Little Big Horn. A circle of men sat by the water, waiting to cross over and join the dead. Crazy Horse was there, playing poker for pony stakes with the Custer brothers--the General, Tom, Boston, and James Calhoun. With them was Bloody Knife, Custer's scout, and Colonel Myles Keogh. Crazy Horse had won all the ponies--and the 7th cavalry officers were having to throw in their clothes as well.
Men looked up from their cards. The General stammered a greeting. Brother Tom took off his undershirt, tossing it to Crazy Horse-- I recognized the big American Eagle tattoo on Tom's chest. Colonel Keogh got up, giving a courtly bow; a lovely Irish gesture, except that he was dressed in just his socks and the medal from the Pope he wore around his neck. He nodded at the shallow ford where Medicine Tail Coulee climbed the Little Big Horn bluffs, saying, "Ladies first."
Shivering, I started across the ford, though I knew that death lay up the coulee. I could hear my departed Mother calling to me, the way she used to call us home. I opened my mouth to answer.
Bluffs and water vanished, and I was back standing beside my travois. Coyote and the whole ghostly company were gone. By the time Yellow Legs returned I had firmly convinced myself it was all a mirage brought on by the heat, and my lack of sleep. Of course my husband would have none of that, blandly assuring me that I had talked to Old Man Coyote, and seen the camp of the dead.
I shut up-- bizarre dreams are a Medicine man's stock in trade. Besides, the dream's meaning was frightfully clear. Crazy Horse, Bloody Knife, Myles Keogh, and the Custers were all ticketed for the Spirit World.
But I was going to go before them.
I tried to put the whole business out of my head. Some sort of waking dream, no more. Not worth bothering with unless you were born Sheyenna.
Two more sleeps and we were in the Valley of the Pawnee, finding it badly picked over, looking like a panorama from an apocalyptic gospel. Rotting buffalo lay in heaps, beneath clouds of vultures. You didn't have to be Crazy Horse to tell it was the work of professional hide hunters -- skinning stopped at the hip. We passed quickly on. Not bothering to turn any skulls to the sunrise, or otherwise pay our respects. Heading down the Arikaree Fork, we turned south onto the open prairie, riding over grass turned blonde by the sun, straight into the worst of the Big Dry Time. Western Kansas is never wet -- now it seemed burnt over. Buffalo wallows which usually hold the rankest sort of water were caked and dry. But each evening Yellow Legs showed us where to dig, leading us from one dirt well to the next, finding the headwaters of streams that became big rivers farther east.
We crossed the lonely tracks of the Kansas Pacific, the last reach of civilization between us and Indian territory. Relieved to put this final rail line behind us, we rode higher in our saddles, looking for signs of buffalo. Ahead lay the vast short-grass prairie of southern Kansas where buffalo come together to carpet the earth. The great Southern Herd, the largest accumulation of meat on the hoof in the Americas, would be moving north to meet us. And south of the Flint it all belonged to the southern tribes -- Sheyenna, Snakes, Blue Clouds, Kiowas and Apaches.
Beyond the Flint, we could follow the North Fork of the Canadian into Indian Territory, where Yellow Legs would be on his proper reservation enrolled and legal. Just reaching the Flint would be a relief. The Medicine Lodge Treaty had made the south bank into Indian hunting grounds. With war brewing between Crazy Horse and Custer, I wanted my husband on the right side of every treaty ever written. Fresh meat would be a treat, but I would have eaten raw prickly pear if it got us closer to the Sheyenna Agency.
In shimmering noontime we topped a rise and saw the Flint cutting across the plain. Between us and the river lay something that was not in my husband's mental universe -- a fresh line of rails. Dark eyes narrowed and laugh wrinkles disappeared. "There was never an Iron Road here."
"It has to be the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe," I decided. When I came west to teach Indians, the line had been stalled somewhere in East Kansas. Now here it was, flung across our path, headed for southern Colorado, twin threads of steel connecting Topeka to nowhere.
The ground around the rails was dotted with alabaster mounds. Yellow Legs recognized the white objects first. His lips tightened, and I knew we were riding into trouble. Piled along the tracks were the bones of thousands of buffalo.
We crossed the tracks, and reached the Flint, watering our horses in a vast boneyard. The buffalo had been cut down as they came to drink. Wagon tracks and boot marks showed who had done the killing. When Coronado crossed Kansas his conquistadors had never been out of sight of buffalo -- not for a single day-- herds were so thick his army could not push through and had to march around them. But we had seen only bleached bones and empty wallows. Now we knew why. Buffalo hunters had turned the Flint River into a line of death, slaughtering the Southern Herd as it migrated north.
The Staked Plains
I was roundly shocked, but Yellow Legs had sensed disaster as soon as he saw the Iron Road. What puzzled him was why the Wasichu would kill all "their" buffalo in a single season, "leaving nothing for winters to come?" Not a paltry question -- and knowing my people better than he, I doubted the killing would stop at the treaty line. But hunters feeding the railway gangs could haul meat only so far. Spoilage alone would limit the swath cut by the Atchison-Topeka.
Putting the boneyard behind us, we pressed on, crossing the Cimarron Trail, then the forks of the river itself, entering Indian Territory. It made no difference. Dead buffalo were everywhere. Only here they were killed for hides alone, leaving the meat to rot. On the North Fork of the Canadian we found firepits and felled trees. Hunters had wintered on Indian land, leaving only when there was nothing left to kill. I took a moment to remind Yellow Legs he had sworn off the warpath. "Then we best not meet these buffalo killers," he replied. "My scalp shirt is trimmed with the hair of men who did me far less harm."
No longer surprised-- just monumentally sad-- I did my damnedest to hurry us down the North Canadian and onto the Sheyenna Agency. We were almost to Wolf Creek when Yellow Legs smelled smoke. He signed, "A small fire of buffalo chips, with bacon and coffee cooking. Maybe wolves for the Long Knives." By that he meant army scouts. It had to be an Indian fire, because I could neither see nor smell the smoke.
Leaving Raven and the baby behind, Yellow Legs and I wriggled forward, resting his brings' em-close-glasses on a bit of rising ground. He peered through-- then motioned for me to look. "Two wolves, probably Delawares. A Wasichu is with them." Through his field glasses I saw two Indians in army coats. Lord only knows how he figured them for Delawares. The Wasichu with them was younger, wearing a natty silk shirt, red bandana and black bowler hat. Despite being young and out of uniform, he was bound to be in charge. The youngest, greenest Wasichu generally outranked any Indians.
Setting the glasses down, I signed that I should talk to them. "No," Yellow Legs signed back, "too dangerous."
I insisted. We had to know why they were camped so close to the agency, and I could ride down and ask without causing trouble. Grudgingly he saw the logic in that-- there was no telling how two Delawares and a Wasichu would react to a lone Sheyenna. We were outside the States, on land promised to the Southern Tribes, but that might not mean a lot. Those two blue-coated Delawares were a sure sign the army was following in the boot tracks of the buffalo hunters.
Sliding back down the rise, I dusted off, went to the gully where we had hobbled the horses, mounted up, and rode cautiously forward. I caused a fair stir coming in. Both scouts grabbed carbines. The boy had a .50 Sharps, made to drop a buffalo at a quarter mile. "Howdy," I waved, feeling like William Penn preaching to the mouths of cannon. "No need for the artillery -- just a friendly morning call."
Seeing nothing more dangerous than me, the boy put down his Sharps and doffed his bowler. He had dark eyes and a cocky teenage smile. "Why ma'am, you look nearly white."
"Was when I woke up." My blonde hair was covered in dust and my face was smeared with paint to cut the sun, which was fairly relentless so late in the Big Dry Time. Dress and leggings were pure Sheyenna.
"I only knew of one white woman in these parts, an' she left in a hurry. "He meant that as a joke, but no one found it funny. Not me. And not the edgy Delawares, who neither took off their hats nor put down their rifles. That I was white and a woman did not make them a whit less suspicious.
He signed for them to lower their carbines. Reluctantly they obeyed. It takes more than a pretty face to fool a Delaware. "My name is Masterson William Barclay Masterson. My brothers call me Bat."
Dismounting, I told him my name was Kilory, and he could call me Sarah.
"More than pleased to meet you, ma'am." Bat scratched his head with his hat hand, trying to imagine what to make of me. "How can I help?" Any lone white woman was considered to be in some kind of distress.
"You could start by offering me coffee." I nodded toward his fire, acting anxiously natural. He poured black coffee into a tin cup. Real Wasichu coffee -- strong enough to float nails -- not the brown watery brew the Sheyenna make do with. One sip brightened the whole morning. I told him I was a Quaker, coming down to teach Indians at the Cheyenne and Arapaho Agency.
Bat chuckled at that ambition, pouring himself a cup, saying I'd find damn few Indians to teach. "The Cheyenne and Comanche have jumped their reservations. I'm scouting for General Miles, and can take you down to Camp Supply. The General can see you sent safely back to Kansas."
Not aiming to go back to Kansas -- safely or otherwise -- I asked if Bat had actually seen hostile Cheyenne. More people had told of Indian fights than had ever been in them.
"Seen hostiles? Hell, I fought them for three days."
"Where was that?"
He pointed his bowler upriver. "Out on the Panhandle -- Cheyenne, Comanches, Kiowa, maybe some Arapaho. They had us cornered at Adobe Walls. Killed three whites."
"They just went berserk and tore into the army?"
"No ma'am, no army. Just a couple of dozen scared white folks. I joined up afterwards. Figured if I was going to shoot Indians I should get paid for it."
"What were you doing on the Panhandle?" I had a fair idea, but I wanted to hear it from him.
"Hunting buffalo," he answered happily, "at least until that war party showed." I asked what he had expected, shooting buffalo in Snake territory. Called Comanches by the Spanish, the Southern Snakes were true blue Texans, homicidally wary of foreigners and death to trifle with.
Bat gave a wan smile. "I see now it wasn't so smart. At the start we thought it was a lark -- joking about, playing Indian to scare the greenhorns. But hell, buffalo are getting rare. You have to hunt them where you find them." He swore how Kansas was picked clean, but there were still "buff" out in Texas. Lots of them. Hunters shot until their guns got red hot. Then they poured canteen water down the gun, or pissed on the barrel, and shot some more. It would not stop until the buffalo were gone.
Furious, I told him how the whole prairie from here to Nebraska was starving. Homesteaders along the Pawnee were living on flour paste and belt leather, while Bat was feeding buffalo meat to the buzzards like some crazed bird lover. Bat looked back at me like I was too long in the heat, saying, "Hides are what the railroad pays for. Can't help it about the meat." No wonder Snakes and Sheyenna tried to lift this boy's hair. They are poor businessmen -- tell them buffalo meat is worthless and they will brain you out of plain frustration.
"What are Indians going to eat when the buffalo are gone?"
Bat shrugged, "I guess the government will feed 'em. This is Uncle Sam's coffee we're drinking, and government bacon on the fire. They pay me to shoot Indians. Someone else has to feed 'em. The buffalo are going. If you want to see them, you better look fast. If you want to get a buck out of them, better do it now." Such monumental extermination made the baby-faced killer reflective. "Don't know what I'll do when the buff are gone. Word's come to Camp Supply that Custer found gold in the Black Hills. Maybe I'll head north."
Right-- go north and rob the Lakota. Crazy Horse was going to love this boy. Disgusted, I got up to go.
He set down his coffee, stepping closer. "See here," he says, "I am truly sorry to upset you, but it would be loco for you to just ride off alone." Bat was a boy used to having his way by force.
I handed him my coffee, to keep his hands busy; young Mister Masterson looked to be the type who practiced his draw. Then I stepped back to clear the line of fire. Maybe Bat was not as mean as he made out, just a little nervous and a whole lot green -- all set to kill Indians, with an uneasy grin on his face and Yellow Leg's never-miss Medicine rifle pointed at his head. Bat's pistol was on his hip; his Sharps lay against a log. All he had in his hands was a bowler hat and a coffee cup -- and the brave drawing a bead on him already thought that buffalo hunters belonged in the Happy Hunting Ground. His two Delawares had read me better.
He hovered for a moment, without touching me -- held back by the Medicine of a Wasichu woman on the plains. Then he shook his head. "I see you're set on suicide, so you hardly need advice, but don't go down to Darlington Agency on your own." He painted a cheery picture of how the Sheyenna had finished off a pair of buffalo hunters, staking them out "with their heads propped up so they could see what was being done to 'em."
Bat gave me a last dubious glance, then looked down at the coffee growing cold in his grip. I must have seemed passing strange, but Bat was not a boy who pondered deeply on other people's problems. I walked the pony back to where my husband waited. We had come hundreds of dry, dirty miles to avoid the fight brewing in Lakota Country, only to find a full out war here in Indian Territory.
Nothing could provoke Yellow Legs into riding further down the Canadian. I scolded and ranted, reminding him of his promises to enroll at the Sheyenna Agency. He listened with arms folded and a wooden look on his face, the perfect image of a stoic warrior berated by his woman. Unable to beat him down, I stood fuming, watching him open his Medicine bundle and take out his black antelope bone pipe. Good move, Medicine man, but it was going to take more than a peace pipe to get me off the war path.
Slowly he packed his pipe, saying "I know you were raised in the Jesus way -- I respect that. If Jesus had been Sheyenna, he would have made a fine Man-woman, healing the sick and working in wood. But Jesus never had to worry about Long Knives coming to bum his camp and steal his women."
I was beyond arguing Bible stories. "I merely want to live in a place with no war -- where we can be at peace with our neighbors."
"Is there such a place this side of the Spirit World?"
"Yes, in Indian territory. Quakers run the agency. There we could live as husband and wife -- no one would question it."
He said he would like to see a place with only Sheyenna and Jesus people -- but he would not go down the Canadian so long as Bear Coat Miles and his Long Knives were paying Delawares and buffalo hunters to shoot Sheyenna.
Nor was Raven any help. "Let American Woman go alone," she advised, "they will not shoot a Wasichu." I snorted, saying she would not be rid of me so easily. Raven took my sarcasm seriously, saying she never thought to be easily rid of me. "Your white skin and yellow hair are like the sun on a frosty day. Because of you, our husband is no longer a warrior. Or a hard working horse thief. Because of you we must become farmers on some southern agency. But all winters give way to spring."
I told her to mind her baby, asking our husband where he intended to winter. Yellow Legs pointed his chin southward. "We will winter on the Staked Plains with Stone Calf's People."
"People" was what the Sheyenna called themselves-- everyone else being an afterthought in creation. He lit his pipe, offering it to the earth and sky, and the four directions, then taking a puff and holding it out to me. I was not in a mood to smoke, but I touched the pipe, showing that the argument was over.
That night we made up in my tipi, beneath the buffalo robes, on a bed of living blue stem. His skin felt smooth, softer than a white man's, almost like a girl's. No arrow, no bullet, no war knife had ever touched him. I knew, because I had made a thorough study of him, going over his body by candlelight, takinth brown hair. She moved slowly and seemed incredibly calm. "Roland's not here, Marina."
"Beaumont. But where --?"
"You're at Maculate Conception." The woman wore a yellow polo shirt and baggy jeans, not hospital scrubs. "It's a time of living by his own ragged Medicine made him desperately afraid of desertion. In that way he was very much like a woman, expected to be everything and secretly wanting someone to care for him.
Sharing a husband is not so bad as you might think. As the Sheyenna say, "Better to share a good man, than to have a bad one all to yourself." What I really wanted on my nights alone was a baby, a child who'd be with me every night. You'd think a Sheyenna Medicine man could perform that simple medical miracle, but so far it had been all fun and no family. What with Medicine rituals, hunting trips, his nights with Raven, and my own days apart, Yellow Legs sometimes had damn little Medicine left for me. Such are the hazards of following your heart.
We trudged back up the Canadian, through gallery forest and pokeweed meadows, then turned south into canyon lands cut by powder dry alkali creeks. Climbing past the line of cap rock, we struck out across the griddle hot plains at the heart of the Texas Panhandle. Raw unyielding prairie. No trees. No buttes or mesas. Not a hint Of rising ground, though I knew we were high in the air, higher than the hills at home. The cap rock atop the buttes along the Canadian formed the bedrock of these high plains. Scorched grass stretched from one end of the world to the other, making progress impossible to measure. Perspective vanished. A moving speck might be a cloud shadow, a herd of prong horn, or a rider ahead. The first Wasichu to see this tableland were Coronado's conquistadores. Fearing they'd be lost in such immense emptiness, the Spaniards marked their trail with tall upright stakes, that stood long after Coronado passed on, giving the vast expanse its name -- el Llano Estacado, the Staked Plains.
There were few trails. Stiff wiry short-grass sprang back as soon as it was trodden on, but Yellow Legs went about the business of searching for Stone Calf's band, finding dust prints and poking through horseshit. Snake ponies ate only buffalo grass. Barley seeds in the dung meant Long Knives. Corn kernels meant comancheros.
The Big Dry Time finally broke. Thunder clouds gathered, lightning arced in all directions, and frigid rains blew down, bleeding the life out of the landscape. Gray-white earth turned into gummy muck, bailing up on travois poles and ruining our moccasins. We ate little and slept less. Fever compounded my hopelessness. Too sick to walk or ride, I ended up flat on my back, being dragged along on a travois, seeing where we had been instead of where we were headed.
Late one afternoon we spotted figures on the plain, emerging gently out of the landscape, showing first as dots, then as three tall men on horseback. I did not need a Medicine dream or horse droppings to know that these were Snakes. At about rifle range, they vanished. We kept going, assuming they would reappear. Which they did, sitting patiently in a dusty buffalo wallow, as though we were of no concern -- which meant they had scrutinized us carefully and judged us harmless. Their ponies were hobbled lying down, bony flanks heaving quietly.
They greeted Yellow Legs, then came over to look at me. Sick and bedraggled, lying on a travois, I was still an object of interest. Staring down at me, these Snakes looked as tall as Crows, skinny men with scrawny horses. I won't say I looked much better, lying on my back, smelling like a dead moose. My last bath had been in a gravel pool on the South Canadian.
After several fitful sleeps I awoke in a Snake camp, brown dingy lodges with big ear flaps. strung along a shallow arroyo. Snakes are as casual as Kiowas are formal. Your best introduction is to unpack and set up camp, watching to see no one borrows your horses. I helped Raven with her tipi, so as not to look like an utter weakling. But once the lodge was up I collapsed inside, wrapped in a blanket, feeding twigs and dry grass into the fire. Raven took Nothing to find water.
My privacy only lasted as long as it took Yellow Legs to find someone to smoke with. He sauntered into the tipi accompanied by a tall, well-built warrior with grim blue-gray eyes and the wild confident air of a war chief. Clearly a person of consequence, though the Snake political system never pretends to be anything but anarchy-- Snakes follow whomever they please for as long as it pleases, exasperating both friends and enemies. I pulled my blanket tighter, and we pretended to ignore each other. A war chief does not waste Medicine eyeing other men's wives. And a proper Sheyenna wife does not stare at a visiting Snake as if he planned to pinch the silverware. Heaven knows there was no excuse to leap up and play hostess.
Yellow Legs insisted on making introductions. "This Snake's name is Quanah, which means Smells Sweet." For the first time since crossing the Flint I had to stifle a laugh. Snakes aren't prized for their aroma, and despite his blue eyes, Smells Sweet was all Snake. Seeing I was sick, he sent for a Medicine woman. I did not need anyone burning sweet grass over me, but it was pointless to protest -- to a Snake, impulse and action are the same.
Yellow Legs and Smells Sweet smoked up the tipi, and were still swapping stories when the Medicine woman arrived. She was as much Spanish as she was Snake, and Smells Sweet introduced her as "Curandera," the Healer. I could not tell if this was a name or title -- probably it was both. She went right to work, poking me unmercifully, asked with signs and simple Spanish how I felt. Dolor! Nauseas! Fiebre! When I did not understand, Healer acted out the symptoms.
She did not burn plants, paint me up, or put her clothes on backwards, but she did demand a full description of my dreams. Naturally my Coyote dream impressed her the most. I tried to pass it off as heat stroke, but that was hopeless. You cannot even discuss dreams with Buffalo Indians without laying claim to all kinds of vision power. The sign for "dreamer" is the same as the sign for "Medicine man," and a dream is "night-seeing" or "sleepwork." No one but me doubted that I had conjured up a full blown Medicine vision.
Healer signed her diagnosis. "She is Wasichu." Pointing at me with her chin, she drew her hand across her brow. The men puffed and passed the pipe, as though this observation were fairly profound. "I too am part Wasichu," she added. "There is much Medicine in the blood of Wasichu women. We do not sicken the way People do. A Wasichu can walk about when the whole camp is dying, then crumple up when the work is hard or the weather turns rainy."
The men signed that they too had seen this, Smells Sweet adding that his own mother had been white. On his mother's side he was a Parker, kin to some of the best folks in Texas society.
"She is also a bruja." Healer said it evenly in Spanish, making the sign for Medicine woman. A nice way of saying I was a witch. "Power whips around her like an unruly wind." Her hands swirled and she puffed her cheeks, blowing and making the signs for wind and Medicine. She promised I could look forward to whole new forms of dementia. Arguing Buffalo Indians out of their superstition is near impossible even when you're hale and hearty -- an invalid hasn't a shot at it. I merely pointed out there was no use to Medicine you could not control.
Healer chuckled. "To a Wasichu, everything must have a use." The men laughed, saying that was certainly so. "Take care and cultivate this Medicine, it will grow." Healer's hands shot up like a corn plant in the sun. "Deny it, and it will whirl out of control, carrying you off." She rummaged through her Medicine bag, producing powders and herbs. "I will give you a broth to drink now for your fever, and stronger Medicine to help you on your journey."
I signed that she had done plenty, and I felt wagon loads better, but Healer ignored my protests. Perhaps she was merely completing her own Medicine. "These are your helpers." Healer held out four small wrinkled cactus buds. "Keep them with you. The winter ahead will be a hard one. When you need them, scrape the hair off and eat one -- even though they are bitter." She combined the eating sign with a comical grimace.
I mumbled a muchas gracias, putting the buttons in my Medicine bag, among my herb teas and patent pills -- though by now our luck was so thoroughly bad a few cactus buttons weren't going to turn it around. Then Healer brewed up a broth that seemed mostly cayenne pepper, claiming it would clean my spirit and get me on my feet. Which it did--scorching my sinuses, and blistering my gullet, then getting me on my feet and out of the tipi at a run. I did not stop until I was out of camp squatting among the ponies. It even burned coming out.
When I recovered from that cure, we set off again, traveling between storms. Freezing rain turned to snow by the time we found an abandoned campsite in the buttes and canyons of New Mexico Territory. From a pair of moccasin prints and a turkey feather, Yellow Legs deduced the camp was Sheyenna. We followed their trail, and one snowy morning we came upon a hundred-odd lodges pitched beside a cottonwood creek. The air was so cold the limbs on the cottonwoods cracked like pistols going off. Yellow Legs signed, "Get down." Tipi markings told him this was Stone Calf's band of the Southern Sheyenna. Our winter home.
Catherine
By the moon of Frost in the Tipis, the hard winter Healer promised was here, and we all crowded into Raven's lodge to stay warm. Nothing cried constantly, tiny ragged breaths that misted in the frigid air. Raven was down with fever, so I had to care for the baby-- like Healer said, I was Wasichu, likely to be up and about when People lay sick in their lodges. Nothing had diarrhea, and her rabbit fur bundling was always dirty, but there was no way to wash fur in freezing weather. I replaced the sage padding, apologizing to her for the dirty fur. At least Nothing got to have her black and watery bowel movements indoors -- I had to do my business on the iron cold ground outside. When I finished, Raven took the baby to her hot breast. It was scary to see Raven so helpless; the woman who could do the work of ten Wasichu was weaker than I. I was now Yellow Legs' working wife. You could tell by the makeshift look of the tipi -- our robes were ragged, the fire was feeble.
Bad as things were, our tipi was paradise compared to most of Stone Calfs camp. No one had died in our lodge. Whole bands had come into camp worse off than we were -- trudging in, their feet wrapped in rawhide, having lost everything. No horses. No lodges. No warm robes. No meat for the winter. Long Knives were attacking the camps, burning lodges and winter stores. Bad Hand MacKenzie had taken a herd of captured ponies to Tule Canyon, shooting them with firing squads; a thousand horses lay in frozen heaps.
Nothing stopped crying and started to suck, a good sign. Raven still had milk. Tonight I meant to make bone soup, so she could get some calcium. Tucking a small ax under my blanket, I crawled out the entrance flap into the searing cold to look for firewood. Lodges stretched up and down the frozen creek, a chain of tiny snow-sided volcanoes, blackened at the tops where the smoke trickled out. The stunted cottonwoods along the creekbed were dying, stripped of their bark for as high up as a woman could reach or a pony could gnaw. Smaller branches were mostly gone, and the bigger limbs were cased in ice. Hanging among the crystal limbs were grisly little bundles dripping with icicles, the frozen bodies of children wrapped in swaddling skins.
Swinging the ax as high as I could reach, I chopped at skeletal branches, swearing that next time I would get Yellow Legs to do this. He was off seeing to the homes. The man could be a mountain of energy where horses were concerned. Every morning he dug under the snow to cut grassroots for our ponies.
I let my blanket slip, to get a good swing with the ax, not seeing the young Sheyenna until he was next to me, grabbing my wrist. I could barely believe I was being manhandled in camp, and thought he was making some fool attempt to help-- a Sheyenna version of courting behavior --though this was hardly the moment for some random brave to get romantic. Then he twisted hard, making me drop the ax. So much for courtship. The grinning bastard yanked my blanket off -- going right for a roll in the snow.
I gave up the blanket, grabbing my skinning knife left-handed, screaming, "Let me go," slashing his wrist.
His grin faded, and he let go, staring at his bleeding wrist. "You cut me."
Scooping up the fallen ax, I told him, "I will chop you too. Give me my blanket."
He let the blanket drop. Wind howled between us. There was a knife in his belt, but he seemed to have forgotten it, saying, "I thought you were the crazy Wasichu."
I waved the ax. "You are the crazy one. Attacking a woman in camp. Assaulting a guest of Stone Calf." I wanted this dumb brave to know he was the one in the wrong, the one who had broken the Peace of the Camp.
He looked hurt and stubborn. "I thought you were the crazy Wasichu who gathers wood for Long Back."
I had never heard of Long Back. Snatching up my blanket, I told him, "I know your face. I will tell my husband. I will tell Stone Calf. You will be driven out onto the prairie." He could stick his prick in a frozen gopher hole. I did not know if I could get this oversexed brave thrown out of camp, but it sounded good. Nothing confuses a warrior like threats that he cannot meet. -- especially from wild-eyed women. Now he had to worry about his standing. There were no coups to be had wrestling with another man's wife in the middle of camp.
I backed into our tipi, thoroughly shaken. It was the first time I had been menaced by a brave in camp. I had been freely threatened with mayhem and forced marriage out on the prairie, but the most miserable camp circle was meant to be a woman's haven. When Yellow Legs returned from his precious ponies, I told him to go gather the wood. "A man grabbed me. It is too damned cold to cut wood with someone going through your clothes." He looked properly aghast, seizing his Medicine gun, asking who this man was.
"No one I know personally." My husband's show of concern had me feeling better; I took away his gun and handed him the ax. "Here, cut some wood. I think it was some mistake." No reason to ticket my attacker for the Spirit World. Then I added, "Does anyone know of another Wasichu woman in camp?"
Ax in hand, he considered the question. "Someone might, but not me." He vanished through the tipi flap.
I sat back, cold and frightened. My attacker had not acted snowblind or stir crazy. He was convinced there was a Wasichu crazy woman in camp -ready to meet any man's demands. I had to find Long Back's lodge, and see for myself what the man was talking about. Raven was sick and asleep -- no sense in waking her. Pulling my blanket about me, I went looking for this Crazy Wasichu. Afraid of what I would find.
People glided like ghosts between the lodges. Dead ponies and mules lay sheeted in ice, half eaten by hungry Sheyenna. Dogs slunk about, looking for food while aiming not to become a meal.
Halfway down the creek an especially thin wraith emerged from a lodge. Wrapped in a threadbare blanket, she darted over to the bushes by the stream bed, tugged wildly at the brush, breaking off frozen branches with raw hands. Her feet were mud-spattered and blue with cold, but her ankles were white. I walked slowly over. Seeing me, she started like a frightened bird, then went back to work.
The glimpse I got was harrowing. She looked crazy; her hollow sunken eyes half hidden by unkept hair. And she was definitely white. Not a white Sheyenna, like Kiowa Woman, but a girl born and raised Wasichu. Like me. Calmly as I could, I asked, "What is your name?"
She stiffened. With my face greased and painted against the cold, I doubted she could tell I was white. Her soft child's mouth moved hesitantly. "My name is Catherine."
Shivering, she went back to ripping at the brush, frantic to tear off a few twigs of firewood. I bent down to help her, drawing my heavy knife, chopping at the branches. "How did you get here?" A dumb question but I had to ask.
She gaped at me. "I was captured."
"Where?"
"Far away. Up north. In Kansas."
We sure as hell weren't in Kansas anymore. She looked around, then bent down and bundled up her sticks, scrambling back toward the tipi she came from. Turning, I saw two men coming, not fast, but with easy confidence. One was the warrior who had grabbed me. Seeing the girl disappear into the tipi, they sat down a couple of paces off. When I stared, they turned their heads politely away. Going to get Yellow Legs, I kept looking over my shoulder. They sat on the ice hard ground, like Old Man Coyote and Mr. Badger covering the exits to a prairie dog hole, waiting for the poor creature to emerge.
Yellow Legs was back in the lodge, sitting proudly beside an immense pile of twigs. I told the whole terrible story, begging him to go to Long Back's lodge to try to get Catherine out. He could have my horse and anything else Long Back might want in trade. Yellow Legs took his pipe and left.
Raven was awake. After a long silence she spoke up. "It would be good to have another woman in the lodge, now that I am so weak. But we need your horse too."
I snorted. It was not as if we were riding anywhere. "I want that girl out of Long Back's lodge because she is being horribly mistreated. Men in camp are raping her."
"Some men will do that," Raven acknowledged. "It is a part of men's Medicine I never understood."
"No," I snapped, "it is not men's Medicine. It would be men's Medicine if they were raping each other. You would not accept it if she were Sheyenna."
"If she were not Wasichu, you would not be so worried."
Sweating and shaking beneath her buffalo robe, with her pitiful thin baby at her breast, my sister-wife was still full of fight. I thought of the men I had seen so set to kill; Bat Masterson, with his blind certainty, Crazy Horse and Custer with their smug warrior ethic. None of them were out here on the Staked Plains, gathering wood barefoot, being raped while they worked. Both sides boasted how they fought to protect their women, yet hardly a brave or soldier had died in this buffalo war. War parties fought when they felt inclined, while the army blundered about, raiding villages and peace camps -- pushing women and children into the front lines.
I told Raven, "Every camp makes its own Medicine, and the Medicine in this camp is terrible. Raping girls will not make it one whit better. No wonder children are dying." It was true. If you believed in bad Medicine, it was no surprise this was a death camp.
Yellow Legs entered, sitting down at the back of the lodge, dim flames lighting his dark features. "I smoked with Long Back. He is happy with his new woman, who fetches wood well enough-- though she is weak and cries at night. He says he does not need horses, though I offered him my war horse and my best buffalo ponies. Long Back would of course prefer a proper woman, a Ute perhaps, or even a Mexican-- but no one is offering one. He said to come when the grass was up, or there are buffalo to hunt. Then he might need more horses and fewer women."
Yellow Legs stared straight into the fire, then went on, "Long Back wondered why I wanted such a weak and clumsy woman. He claimed some men in camp were curious about how it felt to copulate with a Wasichu. He himself was not curious, being very happy with the wives he has. But to show he was generous, Long Back said I could take her out and copulate with her. I told him I was not curious."
There it was. A girl with sad scared eyes was being tortured in camp, and there was nothing to do about it. I wanted to scream.
Raven groaned and got to her feet, handing Nothing to our husband, then turning to me, "Help me go outside." I stared dumbly. "Help me go outside," she insisted. "I will talk with the women."
I helped her out of the lodge. Her flesh hung loose, but the frame beneath was still strong. She went first to a hollow in the creek bank, squatting in the snow with her dress pulled up. Frigid wind sang down the creekbed. From the color of the snow in the hollow the whole camp had diarrhea. Only the cold kept us from stinking clear to California.
When she was done we hobbled along the line of tipis, stopping at a big smoke-darkened lodge. Raven scratched at the entrance flap. We were ushered in by a wrinkled old scarecrow named Yellow Hair, the mother of a war chief called Medicine Water. With her were two sisters, Two She-Wolves and Stands Apart. Throughout camp families were doubled and tripled up.
We traded news. The sisters told how Gray Beard's camp had been raided by soldiers riding in wagons. Few were killed, but everyone lost food and lodges. Two She-Wolves and Stands Apart had brought their daughters to Stone Calf's camp hoping to find things were better -- by now they knew things here were almost as bad. Yellow Hair had trudged all the way to the Agency, but what she saw there sent her scurrying back to the Staked Plains. "Long Knives are taking away guns and ponies, locking people in corrals with only trash to eat."
More women came in, and half the stories had to be retold. The newcomers included Yellow Heir's daughter-in-law, Medicine Water's wife, a giantess with angry eyes called "Buffalo Calf." She must have grown some since her parents named her. "Buffalo Cow" would have been closer to the mark. I kept my blanket pulled up, saying nothing, waiting to see what Raven had planned. My sister-wife sat beside me, breathing softly, summoning her strength. Finally she spoke. "I heard there is a Wasichu in Long Back's lodge."
This non-question was directed at no one, but Buffalo Calf spoke up, saying that in the Big Dry Time she went with her husband to get revenge for the buffalo. They crossed the Flint, going as far as the Fat River, ticketing about a dozen Wasichu off to the Spirit World. Buffalo Calf only discussed those killings she had a hand in, but when she did her eyes lit up like hellfire, and she went into unnecessarily grisly detail, mimicking the sound an ax makes when it splits a woman's skull. At no time during this amiable romp was Medicine Water's war party in the least inconvenienced by Bear Coat Miles' cavalry, or the army garrisons in southern Kansas. The way war parties moved invisibly over the prairie helped make war on the plains so terrible. Baffled by the braves' invisibility, the army would attack the villages, turning the whole brutal show into an innocent-killing contest.
Eventually Buffalo Calf got around to tel ling how Catherine's family was massacred -- an easy stroll from the nearest army camp. Catherine and three younger sisters had been brought south, along with the guns and horses that signified a successful killing spree. Two She-Wolves and Stands Apart added to the story, saying the two youngest sisters were left behind when Gray Beard's village was attacked. The little girls were given to a boy, who left them sitting on a buffalo robe for the Long Knives to find. No one knew the boy's name, but I thanked God for him. He could as easily have killed the girls -- even wars of atrocity and annihilation have their heroes.
Raven spoke up again. "The one that is with us should go back with her sisters. She is bad for the camp Medicine. Men have been forcing her to copulate. Such things can happen among Utes and Crows, but we are People."
"She is not a Ute or Crow," retorted Buffalo Calf. "She is a Wasichu, a crazy woman who does not say no." Several others agreed, as if that explained it all.
But Raven refused to be put off. "If she is crazy, she does the camp no good."
Buffalo Calf glared at us from her place in the back of the dark tipi, making my face paint feel pretty thin. "You are northerners and may not know how we suffered. In the winter when White Antelope was killed, we made a peace camp in the Big South Bend, near to the Long Knives' fort. The Long Knives came anyway, raping and killing."
This was Chivington's Sand Creek massacre. We had passed Sand Creek on our way south, but Yellow Legs would not go near it-- "Too many ghosts." Buffalo Calf had hidden in the snow, watching Chivington's troopers drag women and children from her tipi -- "I saw three aunts and five sisters taken by the Long Knives. They copulated with the older ones, then killed and scalped them. A Long Knife chief took out his pistol and shot the little ones, one by one, while they screamed for him to stop. My whole family was murdered -- but even that did not make me crazy." Maybe not crazy, but awful dam close. One look into Buffalo Calf's eyes told the whole tale. She was never going to forgive Catherine's people, not while they were still busily destroying her tribe.
Two She-Wolves and Stands Apart said they too had fled the Sand Creek camp with their daughters. "We would have died in the cold and snow, but a coyote took pity on us. He caught hares for us to eat, and guided us to Gray Beard." Cynical as he was, even Old Man Coyote found winter war tough to stomach.
"Yes." Raven shivered. "But that was many winters ago, and even a coyote can have pity."
"A coyote can have pity," Buffalo Calf agreed, "but the Wasichu do not. If we have pity on this girl, will they have pity on us?"
I wanted to shout, "Yes, of course we would" -- but I knew the answer was most likely no.
"It would be better for People everywhere if this crazy girl never leaves the Staked Plains," reasoned Buffalo Calf. "If she lives they will use her words against us. And if she dies they will treat us no worse."
Buffalo Calf was actively hateful, but most of the others just had more immediate problems. Two She-Wolves and Stands Apart had their own daughters to protect-- there was no promise that the Long Knives would not rape them. They knew what had happened at Sand Creek. And Yellow Hair's son was dead sure to be jailed or hung, even if Catherine were handed over healthy, unhurt, and made into an honorary tribal princess.
But bless her stubborn heart, Raven would not give in. "I too have a daughter," she told them. "I do not want her to die on the Staked Plains. We are not Snakes to live on what the coyotes leave-- the young and weak must go in to the Agency. And they must have this girl, to trade for food and blankets." My sister-wife was coldly clever, driving a wedge between Medicine Water's family and the rest of the women. Yellow Hair had admitted that Medicine Water was likely to be hung no matter what. Raven held out the thin chance that by bringing in Catherine the others might get sympathy -slim odds to be sure, but Stone Calf's band was hard up for hope.
"Medicine Water is a warrior," she reminded them. "No one hounded him into going north, saying he must kill this girl's family. He chose the bow; for that we feed and honor him. But we do not shield him behind the bodies of defenseless ones." One by one women agreed to ask Stone Calf to lead them back to the Agency -- with the captives. Medicine Water would fight on all the better with only warriors to feed.
We return to our tipi. Tiny rivers of ice ran down the sides of the lodge from frost melting around the smokehole. Nothing was crying. I pulled back the entrance flap, waiting for Raven to worm her way in. The walk and talk had weakened her-- but she had showed me the proper line to take with the Sheyenna. I owed her for that.
Yellow Legs looked godawful relieved. Swiftly handing the baby to Raven, he sat back in his seat of honor at the rear of the tipi. Stoic courage and a Medicine gun cannot stand up to a sick child. I settled into the wife's place nearest him. This terrible winter had put new lines in his face, but I was going to have to add to my man's burdens. I told him we had to take Catherine's case to Stone Calf.
"Cath-er-ine." Raven drew out the Wasichu name, which meant nothing in Sheyenna. "If she were a Lite or Pawnee, you would not be so concerned."
I was tempted to say the Christian thing to swear I would be just as concerned. But winter on the Staked Plains stripped you of pretense, leaving little in the way of hope or hypocrisy. Raven deserved the truth. A Ute or Pawnee girl in Catherine's place would provoke compassion, but not the same urgency. Only snakes shed their skins. Catherine was white like me and never meant to be here. "She is Wasichu," I admitted. "That is why Long Knives and Buffalo Soldiers will come for her with wagon guns and many firing rifles. Do the Utes have wagon guns? Do you want your people broken like the Pawnee?"
Yellow Legs sighed, picking up his Medicine bundle. "We will speak to Stone Calf." He hated to have his wives fighting. Polygamy is not all frolicking under the buffalo robes -- just ask a Mormon.
In the peace chief's tipi I sat on the women's side, and Yellow Legs went to sit with the men. Stone Calf's wife, a woman with wide-set intelligent eyes and a proud pointed chin, served us token bits of dried mule, showing her husband was still a chief, even among beggars. Stone Calf looked as if he had aged twenty years in a single winter. Dog Soldiers and war chiefs had threatened to shoot his ponies. His son had thrown his life away fighting the buffalo hunters. Still he stood for peace and reason, sending runners to the agency, asking the army for terms. The answer was no terms. An unconditional surrender. No protection for the buffalo. No punishment for the hunters who had robbed the Sheyenna. Just reprisals against anyone who had left the agency.
I studied the worn edges of my long winter moccasins. Plainly the army aimed to crush the southern tribes. Sheyenna, Snakes, and Kiowas were going to be pinned to the agencies, while buffalo hunters destroyed what remained of the Southern Herd. The great pulsing heart of the southern plains would be stopped forever. Not everyone was as resigned as I was. Cloud Chief had come back from raiding into Texas, bringing guns and horses. More ponies were on their way from Mexico. Howling Wolf wanted to raid the Wichitas for guns. There was still talk of war when the grass was up.
But Stone Calf doubted many would live to see grass in the spring. "Tall Bull has already taken his family in-- when a Dog Soldier goes in, it must be near the end. Only fear of what will happen at the agencies holds us back." At Anadarko, Long Knives and Buffalo Soldiers had opened fire on the Snakes and Kiowas who came in to give up their guns and be counted.
This was my moment. Only I could pretend to speak for the Wasichu. But the unvarnished truth was not going to do anyone any good. Not Stone Calf. And certainly not Catherine. So I settled for fraud instead. "Go in," I told them. "Take Catherine with you. Bring her in alive and they will give you food. Enough to keep you from starving." Hell, I could have promised them hump ribs, heated lodges, and repeating rifles -- it wasn't conscience that held me back, but respect for their natural cunning. By now they knew us rather well.
"Do you really think this?" Stone Calf looked at me.
"Certainly," I lied, "they are bound to treat you better if you bring her back, and treat you worse if she dies. We Wasichu care about our children too." Silently I cursed myself -- one more well-meaning Wasichu making promises we would not keep. We were not going to stop killing off the buffalo, or whittling down the reservations, or cutting back on rations -- not out of thanksgiving for the return of one poor white girl. Catherine's story would only confirm white opinion. Buffalo Calf had realized that much, without being particularly sensitive to the Wasichu way of thinking.
But my brand of humbug was what this old chief wanted to hear. Stone Calf stood up and announced, "I will go to Long Back. Those who want peace can come to the agency with me. Those who want war can stay on the Staked Plains."
Someone had to say "no" to the fighting -- the war stops here, come what may. If my lies gave Stone Calf the ammunition needed to end the shooting, so be it. I would take whatever punishment providence dished out.
I do not know what Stone Calf told Long Back and the others but he returned with Catherine and her sister Sophie, who had been with Gray Beard's band. He put them up in a lodge next to his. In that lodge I learned enough of Catherine's story to know I did not want to hear all of it. Her sister Sophie was a few years younger, and treated rather better, but what she had been through was suitably horrible. Stone Calf led the trek toward the Agency, heading into the sunrise. Almost everyone followed. Even Buffalo Calf's tipi came down; Medicine Water was coming in. All the talk of fighting when the grass came up was just talk. Even the worst Wasichu haters were sick of bark broth and pony steaks.
At the edge of the Staked Plains we met some Blue Clouds coming the other way, climbing past the cap rock. The Blue Clouds had stayed resolutely out of the war with the buffalo hunters. "Everyone loves the Blue Clouds," was their boast. Lakotas called them "Wanders-Under-the-Cloudless-Blue-Sky." Somewhere or other they had picked up the name Arapaho. Squawmen liked them because their women never seemed to say "no" -- a tribe so goodhearted, one sign for them is to touch the left breast. But these Blue Clouds claimed Long Knives had come to Darlington carrying a paper with names on it. Everyone whose name was written on it was taken away. Hearing there were Blue Clouds on the list, they lit out for the Staked Plains-- without even finding out if the braves on the list would be hung, or merely locked in stone lodges. For people used to wandering under the blue sky, being buried alive or buried dead was a thin difference.
Naturally the Sheyenna wanted to know if there were any Sheyenna names on the paper. The Blue Clouds signed, "The Long Knives would not let us look at the paper, nor can we read their words." They neatly mimicked the act of writing to make the meaning clear. "But they spoke of one Sheyenna, a chief they especially wanted." They made the sign for rock hard, then for buffalo and birth -- together they meant "Stone Calf."
We were aghast. The Blue Clouds hesitated, then signed, "They claim he copulated with two female captives." Blue Clouds copulate pretty freely, and they seemed puzzled that the Wasichu would take this seriously. Several Sheyenna braves looked uneasy. I wondered if they had satisfied their curiosity on Catherine, and now regretted being inquisitive.
Stone Calf was unshaken. He was taking Catherine and Sophie to the agency -- a chief must be ready to sacrifice everything for the good of the camp. I myself was sick, seeing how seriously I had misled the friendly old peace chief.
Later, in our tipi, I explained the gruesome sense of it to Yellow Legs. "Stone Calf sent runners in saying he took the girls into his lodge. We Wasichu think that no chief would keep a young white woman except to copulate with her." By offering protection, Stone Calf had singled himself out for punishment. I promised to speak for Stone Calf. And Catherine would tell how he saved her. I pictured Catherine telling her story to some officer's wife -- a tea party I did not look forward to.
Yellow Legs stared straight ahead, hardly showing he heard me. "It is good you will talk for Stone Calf, since I will not be there."
"Why not?"
"I am staying here on the Staked Plains."
In times past I would have torn into him, reminding him of his promises. Now I could summon neither the energy nor the conviction. My pleasant little dream of a horse ranch in Indian Territory was swept away with the buffalo. Everyone who had been to Darlington agreed the agency offered only idleness and short rations. I merely pointed out that Raven and Nothing were too weak to winter on the Staked Plains.
"That is why you must take them into Indian Territory."
It shows how bad things were that I did not shriek at the notion of going off with Nothing and my big difficult sister-wife. I merely went, "Whoa?" in surprised Wasichu.
"I was a warrior." Yellow Legs spoke gravely, as if this were somehow news to me. "I have not touched the pen since Medicine Lodge. My name may be on the paper that the Long Knives are carrying around." Not an impossible thought. He was a well known warrior off his proper reservation -- and the army was clearly using this buffalo war to round out old scores. "But my family must go safely into Indian Territory. If you ride in the lead the Long Knives would let you through."
I had never thought of Raven, Nothing, and me as a family, but I suppose the idea came naturally to him. It was neatly laid out. I could go straight to the Quakers, taking Raven and Nothing with me. They were Northern Sheyenna -- no relation to Stone Calf's renegades. With a white woman to speak for them they should be utterly safe. No matter how I turned it about, Raven, Nothing, and I needed to go. He needed to stay.
We had figured in everything except my sister-wife. The woman whose health we were so concerned about listened dutifully to her husband--then refused. Raven was not leaving him. Not this side of the Spirit World. She thanked us for thinking of her, but she was not about to waltz off to Indian Territory with me for company. Starved, sick and exhausted, facing the death of her child, the woman was twelve times more stubborn than I could ever aspire to be.
So what could I do but stay? I had no desire to go on alone into Indian Territory, to take part in what was sure to be the final calamity of the Southern Sheyenna. I did not need a Medicine dream to picture the downward spiral they faced: disarmed, dismounted, subjected to disease and starvation on a steadily shrinking reservation. No ma'am, life is precious, but not to be bought at that price. We ended up sitting in front of Raven's tipi wrapped in whatever would keep us warm, barely speaking, watching Stone Calf's people march off in a straggling line over the snow. With hardly any horses and pitifully few possessions, the Southern Sheyenna were disintegrating even as they crawled in to surrender.
Catherine and Sophie walked with Stone Calf's women, behind the peace chief. It is impossible to imagine two more different people than Catherine and Stone Calf; one was a man, a hunter, a warrior and statesman, old and respected, who had spoken out for peace at Harvard College and at the Sundance councils. The other was an orphaned girl in her teens, despised, abused, and generally considered crazy. Yet each held the other's fate. Stone Calf had made himself Catherine's protector, and Catherine had become his alibi. If there was no new war when the grass came up, white families from Kansas to Mexico had Stone Calf to thank. But all the Wasichu would care about was Catherine's story -- she alone could save Stone Calf from prison or hanging. Somehow I trusted them both.
The last of Stone Calf's People disappeared into the damp morning, descending past the cap rock toward the plain below. The war to save the buffalo was over.
The Southern Herd
We were left behind in Stone Calf's last miserable little campsite on the lip of the Staked Plains, surrounded by blackened fire pits and the frosty stone rings where tipis had stood. Returning to Lakota Country would mean heading north into the teeth of one of the worst winters in memory -- something too ghastly to contemplate, with Nebraska starving, and southern Kansas a graveyard littered with the bones of the buffalo. Instead we headed west, into the direction of death and sunset, searching for Smells Sweet's Snakes.
And found nothing. No sign of game. No sign of Snakes. Nothing but empty rutted trails radiated out from the buffalo wallows. Veering south-east, we searched the heads of the canyons that split the plateau.
I fell ill again. Not with fever or diarrhea, but with the sick lassitude that signals starvation. My stomach shrank. I made soup for Raven and Nothing by boiling grass roots, rawhide, and crushed bone. They ate it, but the soggy mess did not tempt me. As I weakened, more work fell on Yellow Legs. Despite having two wives, he was the one who took down the lodge and made up the travois each morning. With one person doing most of the work -- and a man at that-- our little camp lurched across the bleak expanse, making less progress each day. But then we did not seem to be going anywhere special.
One dark silvery dawn the sun cut a new notch on the black horizon, but Yellow Legs did not leave the tipi, no longer having the strength to strike camp. Here it ends, I thought. We had six horses left, and we had to choose one to kill and eat. That would leave five starving ponies to carry the lodge, packs, and four people. You can get only so far feeding on yourselves.
Breaking the ice scum on a small arroyo, I drew breakfast water. Grass stalks were slippery with frost, and a dark mist hung on the northern horizon. More snow was coming. I could smell the damp smoky odor of a blue norther on the way. Beneath it was another smell, earthy and familiar, but harder to place. Back by the tipi I started a fire, searching through my Medicine bundle, looking for something that might give strength and flavor to the stew. All I found were the four cactus buttons Healer had given me.
Turning Healer's gift over in my hands, I thought how her most dire predictions had all come true. Now was the time to find out if she had given me a Helper, or merely hexed me. Scraping the fuzz off one with my thumbnail, I tested it in my mouth. The bud was bitter, with a sharp green undertaste. Chewing it puckered my mouth. Swallowing was like trying to put away the whole cactus, thorns and all. I washed it down with dirty ice-water.
Nothing happened. The bitter little button neither filled me up, nor tempted me to take another. So much for Healer's helper.
The wind picked up. Dead grass bowed back and forth, rippling like a cyclone was coming. Flecks of whistling sleet sizzled in the fire. Taking the horses around to the lee side of the tipi, I heard Nothing crying inside. My big, stolen American horse looked as poor and bony as any Snake pony. The others were in worse shape. I ducked into the lodge to see to the baby. Raven was asleep, and Yellow Legs was having a hapless time trying to calm his daughter. Smiling, I took the baby from him, holding her inside my blanket, against my milkless breast. Though Yellow Legs was a doting father, his daughter already treated me as her second mother.
As soon as I stepped back outside she quieted. Babies often react that way to light and air. By now snow was pouring out of the sky, smothering my fire. Time to go back into the tipi. But the bright snowfall had lulled the baby. By now I was resigned to never having the child I wanted, so I sat by the tipi hugging weak little Nothings-- my poor replacement. This was what my Medicine dream had meant. I was headed for the Hereafter. Ahead of Crazy Horse, Bloody Knife, Myles Keogh and the Custer brothers. Having no choice, I had to accept that. Starving and freezing were no worse than sleep.
But at least I was dying clean. By lying to Stone Calf I had saved Catherine, Sophie, and heaven knows how many Sheyenna children who would not have survived the Staked Plains. There was a certain rough justice in my being left behind, to false the fate my lies had saved them from. My Medicine felt lighter. I had a reason for coming all this way-- and I was ready to face the consequences. Searching my stock of Medicine songs, I found only one that fit such a desperate situation, and sang it softly to the storm:
Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now I'm found,
Was blind, but now I see.
As the words welled inside me, I felt a prickly anticipation, as though the cactus bud were spreading through my veins. The storm broke into a million colors. Rainbow flames raced along the white ground, then shot up to meet the snow, like a Fourth of July on the plains. Amazed and delighted, I sang louder, my voice carried upward by the colors:
T'was Grace that taught my heart to feel
And Grace my fears relieved.
How precious did that Grace appear,
The hour I first believed.
The storm seemed to slacken. The rainbow flames sank down, smoldering at my feet. I heard a stirring inside the tipi, as though Someone were fumbling with the entrance flap. Dark patches of smoke condensed in the whiteness, growing bigger, smudging the shimmering curtain of snow. Holding tight to Nothing, I sang to the dark patches in the storm:
Through many dangers, toils and snares,
We have already passed.
T'was Grace that brought us safe thus far
And Grace that keeps us all.
The nearest shadow thickened into the image of a great buffalo bull forging through the wall of snow, striding toward me in absolute silence. I did not think to flinch, knowing this midwinter mirage would dissolve in a moment, like Coyote and the Camp of the Dead. Instead I marveled at the minute detail in my Medicine vision. The black tips on his curving horns. The frost clung to his broad curly shoulders.
Then I felt his steaming breath puffing from flaring nostrils. My imaginary bull was about to trample me. I scrambled to get out of his way. He brushed past, real and solid, giving me a wary look from under long brown lashes. He was immediately replaced by a second bull, equally big, equally real. Another bull followed, then another. Shadow after shadow loomed larger, each one becoming a buffalo. Falling snow turned to steaming mist, melted by the heat of shaggy bodies.
Lurching to my feet, I saw brown backs stretching off on all sides, their living mass blocking out the storm. I pulled back my blanket so Nothing could see. The child was awake and squirming in my grip, dark eyes scanning the huge beasts, brown fingers holding tight to my dress. Yellow Legs stood up in the lodge entrance, hands quivering at his side, croaking in ecstatic Sheyenna, "It is the Southern Herd."
They plodded purposefully along, in no particular hurry, parting as they passed our lodge, each buffalo giving us a brief glance, before being replaced by another. Yellow Legs stepped out to join me. Raven sat up, propped in the entrance. Now we were among the cows and calves, strong young animals like we had hardly seen all summer. After so much hardship and horror, the great herd was here at last; the life blood of the southern plains flowed past us, warm, earthy and intoxicating. I could feel the deep rumble as millions of hooves mashed through the snow, shaking the Staked Plains clear down to the cap rock.
Morning melted into afternoon, and still they kept coming; uncurious, unafraid, unending. We sat huddled against the lodge alongside our horses, humbled by the sheer mass of the herd, lulled by the steady beat of its hooves. I napped, and awoke to the same scene; the buffalo passing, Yellow Legs sitting and smoking, Raven nursing Nothing; our hunger, our worries, our weakness, overwhelmed by this outpouring of life. I could barely remember how bleak and barren the Staked Plains had been.
Not until it was nearly dark, and the herd began to thin, did Yellow Legs dare bring down a cow with his bow. As her kin continued to pass, he said a short prayer for the spirit of this cow, and of every buffalo, then ripped open the belly with a two-handed pull of his knife. While I made a fire, Raven laid Nothing beside the steaming body cavity. The little girl giggled and moved about, licking blood from her fingers. I spread out a deer hide and Yellow Legs heaped meat on it: fatty back ribs, thick steaks, and the intestines, liver and kidneys. We roasted the meat on sticks, stuffing it half-cooked into our mouths, cracking the bones to get at the marrow. Wolves and coyotes padded past, a couple stopping to sit at the edge of our firelight, looking for an easy meal. Later, lying in the tipi next to Yellow Legs, I heard them snarling over scraps and bones.
Morning dawned bright and empty. Seeing the Staked Plains stretching from horizon to horizon, I might have thought the day before was a dream, but the snow around us was churned into frozen slush, dirty with buffalo dung. Yellow Legs collected the fat from our kill, boiling it in Raven's pot along with herbs and melted snow to make a Medicine soup. Which sounds revolting, but we soaked it up, swallowing it in great gulps. I felt a thousand times better. Lassitude and starvation fell away.
Yellow Legs and I broke camp, eager to be off. There was no question about direction. The Southern Herd was heading down off the Staked Plains toward Indian Territory. Descending past the line of the cap rock, we saw knots of buffalo grazing in the canyons. Two days before we would have greeted them with with shouts of thanksgiving, unable to believe our luck. Today we just noted how beautiful their bodies were, how sleek and majestic, then went on. Nothing would satisfy us except to see the whole of the herd. Our tired horses could not catch up until late afternoon. Coming out of the canyons I saw the herd again, this time from a distance under clear skies, a broad brown river flowing east toward the Big Muddy. The buffalo seemed to be headed for the agencies. I could not imagine a greater irony than a million buffalo arriving in mass, just as the southern tribes were being penned up to starve on stringy government beef.
In a couple of sleeps we were looking as fit and sleek as the buffalo. Raven gloried in her returning strength. Late in the evenings, rolled in my buffalo robe, I could hear the soft thunk, thunk of a scraper at work outside the lodge. Winter robes are the warmest, and it is easiest to scrape off excess flesh when the hide is stiff and frozen.
Crossing the Red River, we bid a grateful goodbye to the great state of Texas, entering Indian Territory. Lines on the map did not matter to the buffalo. The herd flowed straight for where the Wichita Mountains stood up on the horizon, deep within the reservation shared by the Kiowas, Kiowa-Apaches, and Honey-Eating Snakes. Rising straight out of the plain, the Wichitas form a granite gateway-- beyond them lay the Chisholm Trail, and Fort Sill. I remembered a Kiowa tale about how the buffalo fought the soldiers, going right onto the grounds of Fort Sill, trampling the fences and gardens, trying to drive the Long Knives away. I had thought this was wishful exaggeration, but now I was not sure. Were the buffalo going to throw their bulk against the fort? No army regiment carried enough bullets to kill them all.
We camped at the northern edge of the Wichitas, on a night filled with nervous expectation. About midnight I heard a soft padding outside the tipi. A now familiar voice called out inside my head, "American Woman, open up and give a friend some meat."
Lifting the entrance flap, I saw Old Man Coyote sitting on his haunches, looking smug and hungry. Raven got right up and began to cut bite-sized bits of jerky, while our husband produced his Medicine pipe -- both acting as if midnight calls from talking coyotes were the most normal thing imaginable. The greedy beast snapped up jerky as fast as Raven tossed it to him, basking in the smoke Yellow Legs blew his way. "Isn't it wonderful," he declared, "having the buffalo back?"
"But what does it mean?" By now I had given up treating Coyote like a dream. If anything the world seemed too real, too rich, balanced on the brink of some all consuming event.
Coyote laughed. "To a Wasichu, everything must have a meaning." Raven and Yellow Legs laughed with him, saying it was certainly so.
"But what is going to happen?" I demanded.
Coyote looked at me slyly. "It is your Medicine that has brought us here -- you o[ all people should know."
Yellow Legs and Raven thought so too, asking, "What will the Wasichu do? Will the Long Knives fight the buffalo? Will they let the Kiowa and Sheyenna hunt?" I was their resident sage on customs and folkways of the wild Wasichu, but I had no ready answer. The herd was certain to attract Kiowas, Snakes, and eventually soldiers. But even hard-bitten cavalry troopers had to be awed by this. The buffalo promised to bring peace and plenty to the starving agencies.
Suddenly Yellow Legs gestured for silence. "The herd is moving." We scrambled up, stepping out of the tipi. Under frosty stars I could feel the beat of hooves, moving off, fading away. It was unusual for a herd to move at night, unless they were spooked or stampeded.
Despite our weariness, we broke camp at once. Wanting to stay as close as possible to this moving miracle, we walked our horses through the darkness, following the broad trail left by the herd. Normally, night tracking is incredibly frustrating, but tonight it was ludicrously easy. We did not have to see, or even feel the million hoof prints that broke up the ground -- the rumble of the herd, the howl of wolves, the odor of buffalo all marked the way. By the time it was light enough to ride I was supremely exhausted, swaying in the saddle. Coyote loped along with us, his tongue hanging out.
The Wichitas have little in the way of foothills, rearing directly out of the flats. Morning light reflected off the peaks like giant granite prisms, turning the slopes purple, yellow and crimson. A thin patch of breakfast smoke hovered over a fold in the northern slopes, marking a Snake or Kiowa camp. The buffalo seemed undeterred by the mountain barrier, though they were prairie beasts and I had never heard of them climbing much of anything. The herd surged straight into the mountains.
As the ground rose up, I reined in, seeing a miracle more awesome than anything in my dreams -- easily the most amazing thing anyone ever saw sober. The largest and nearest peak in the Wichitas split at the base. The rent opened in dead silence, widening as it went upward. There was no earthquake, no lava, no volcanic action; the mountain just peeled back, like a tipi splitting along a seam. Instead of pumice and magma pouring out, I saw a world open up within the mountain, a world without snow or winter, a world filled with sunlight, where plums hung heavy on the trees.
This was the Spirit World. No question about it. Not a little glimpse like in a fever dream, but the broad land itself, laid out before me. The bards' undiscovered country that we are all headed for. Sitting there on my big American Horse, I watched the herd thunder into the gap in the mountain's flanks. I moved my mouth to speaks, wanting to say something to Yellow Legs, to get human confirmation. But he and Raven were already headed into the gap, not questioning what they saw anymore than the buffalo did.
Nothing had prepared me for this. Not my dreams and Medicine visions, nor my conversations with Coyote. Turning in the saddle, I looked back at the real world behind me. It was bleak and stark, locked in winter. Nearby was the morning smoke of a camp that might or might not be friendly. I could go back, alone, into a hungry world torn by war and hatred. Or I could go on into a world that vibrated with towering clouds, green leaves and ripe plums. Coyote trotted past, turning his head to ask, "Are you coming, American Woman?"
The plums decided it. My mouth ached to taste fresh fruit, to ease the bleeding sores beneath my tongue. Kicking my big American horse, I followed Old Man Coyote and the Southern Herd out of the cold gray morning, into a world where the summer sun stood directly overhead.
~~~~~~~~
By R. Garcia y Robertson
We close with our cover story, R. Garcia y Robertson's "Happy Hunting Ground." The story is part of Rod's novel, American Woman, which Tor will publish next year
Rod writes, "'Happy Hunting Ground' is based on Kiowa lodge tales, and 19th century accounts of the 'Buffalo War' -- most of the people in it are real -- they did what they said, and saw what they saw. I just put their stories together.
Rod makes it all sound so easy. But "Happy Hunting Ground" is more than a compilation of stories. It is a powerful story all by itself.
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