Chapter 3
Saturday, May 8th, AD 1886
Somewhere in Unorganized Territory
George was miserable. His head still ached. It had been a day of mindless plodding, and with each beat of his heart and each bobbing step of the beast beneath him, the whole of his head would throb, shot through with pain from the wound across his brow. He shivered with the cold as the wind clamped an icy hand around his rain-wet shirt and coat. Even his stomach assailed him, nauseated by the combination of hunger and the rolling, twisting gait of his mount. To add insult to his injuries, his legs had fallen asleep again and now, having resettled himself in a slightly different position, everything from his knees down was coming back to life in a storm of electric agony.
It was a symphony of wretchedness against which he could do nothing more than hunch over, tuck his hands under his arms, and suffer.
His captors seemed immune to the effects of the weather. Even though Storm Arriving had been dampened by the same showers and even though his long braid was lifted by the same wintry wind, the Indian, in only leggings and belted tunic of pale buckskin, rode tall through the gloom. Big Nose was dressed in a similar fashion but had draped Elisha’s coat over his shoulders. After several sidelong glances from the broad man, however, George believed the Indian wore it only to torment and not for any warmth it might impart.
As for the third man, Laughs like a Woman rode practically naked. His arms and upper body were exposed to the night as were his knees and calves. His breechclout and moccasins had been his only protection until an hour before when he had wrapped a buffalo hide around his waist. His only other apparel was a knife in a sewn-bark sheath, hung over his shoulder by a strip of leather.
The fortitude of the Indians only made George feel worse; yet another example of his own personal failures.
Storm Arriving was looking at him.
“What?” George asked, sullen.
“You should take off those clothes.”
“What?” George asked again, incredulous this time.
“Your clothes. They are wet. You should take them off.”
“And how is it different for you?”
“My clothes are not made of trader’s cloth. Once trader’s cloth gets wet, it stays wet. My clothing is not wet.”
George frowned. “You expect me to ride through the night like him?” He hooked a thumb towards Laughs like a Woman.
Storm Arriving and Big Nose both laughed. “No,” the tall man said. “He is a Contrary. I do not expect you to do anything that he does. Here.” He detached a rolled pelt from behind him. “Use this instead.”
George caught the hide and its sudden weight nearly pulled him off his whistler. It was a full-length buffalo robe, like one his father owned—a “souvenir” from one of The General’s western campaigns—only this robe was soft and supple and clean where his father’s had been old, stiff, and stained with….
George turned away from the memory only to see Big Nose inspecting the buttons on Elisha’s coat. He saw the butt of his own revolver protruding from beneath Storm Arriving’s belt. His memories of that old robe suddenly acquired a more sanguine hue.
“Souvenir,” he muttered, and began to remove his wet coat and shirt.
The activity had to be done with care, lest he tumble from his unsteady perch, and the shock of his damp skin exposed to the night wind did not help. He tucked his coat under the first rope and draped the shirt behind him to dry. The heavy pelt he wrapped around his shoulders. Amazingly, he was warmer and almost immediately so.
He tucked the robe beneath his legs and pulled it close before him. His shivering began to subside and, with that, the maladies of his head and gut and legs seemed likewise reduced.
“Merci,” he said to Storm Arriving. The Indian turned and gave a small nod.
To George’s left, a sprinkling of stars dazzled in the gap between clearing clouds. He recognized the constellations and discovered that they were traveling more northerly than he had thought. The Michigan Territory would be to the east, across the Missouri and Santee rivers. He wondered if he could handle the whistler in a free run across the prairie.
He felt a touch at his side. He looked to find Laughs like a Woman beside him, touching his arm with the handle of his long knife. The painted warrior stared with his fearsome gaze, dark irises moon-rimmed in a mask of night.
“I see by your eye,” he said in troubled French, “that you wish long here remain. Take gift, that you be without.”
George could not make complete sense of the words, but the offer was unmistakable. The man’s expression, however—jaw set, nostrils flared, gaze unwavering—was equally clear. His hand hesitated halfway to the offered knife.
“I would not suggest it,” Storm Arriving said. “A Contrary’s words do not reflect his meaning. He means that he sees you looking to the east. He sees you thinking of your home. He wants you to take his knife so that when you run, he can kill you with honor. It is not a coup to kill an unarmed man.”
Slowly, George took his hand back within the folds of the buffalo robe. Laughs like a Woman prodded him again with the handle of the knife, but George shook his head. The Indian sneered and thrust the knife back into the sheath that hung from the strap over his shoulder. Then he guided his mount away, returning to his position apart from the others.
“You could have taken the knife,” Storm Arriving said, riding close and speaking softly. “You could have taken it and not tried to escape.”
“And then any excuse would have been reason enough.”
Big Nose chuckled. “He is wiser than he looks, this vé’ho’e.”
“Why is he so contrary?” George asked.
“Laughs like a Woman? It is not the way he is. It is what he is,” Storm Arriving said. “He is a Contrary.”
“I don’t understand.”
“He is cursed,” Big Nose explained, drawing nearer so that they rode three abreast. “It was long ago, when I was fourteen summers old, during the Moon When The Buffaloes Are Rutting. We were all three of us of the Hooh-tsetsé-taneo’o then—the Tree People band—and we had known one another all our lives.”
Big Nose’s voice had assumed a quality that matched his gaze; distant, focused on the invisible horizon of long ago. Laughs like a Woman had ridden nearer, to share in the tale.
“Then the thunder beings, who live in the west, they sent down upon us a great storm. For three days it rained like it would never stop. For three days the people of the camp kept to their lodges. The children grew cranky and the parents became restless. The women played the seed game and the old men smoked their pipes. Still, it kept on raining.
“On the fourth day something happened. We heard a shouting in the center of the camp. We looked out of our lodges to see Strong Left Arm—” He pointed to Laughs like a Woman. “—for that was his name in those years. He was standing out in the rain, in the clear space before the council lodge. He stood with his legs apart and he screamed up at the storm above us. ‘Stop it now!’ he shouted. ‘That is enough! Go and bother some other camp!’”
The two Indians laughed at this memory, and George saw a smile touch the corner of the Contrary’s otherwise terse mouth.
“Then,” Big Nose continued, “the wind began to howl. Strong Left Arm jumped up and down and shook his fist at the stormclouds. The rain eased, but heavy hail began to fall, big as blackberries. Strong Left Arm shouted some more. Then he put an arrow to his bow and shot it up into the clouds.
“No one saw it come down. That was how high he shot it.
“It went up into the clouds where it must have struck one of the thunder beings because they threw down two bolts of lightning that hit the ground on either side of Strong Left Arm. The young warrior was knocked from his feet and he just lay there, shivering on the ground, as the thunder rolled over the camp and out onto the prairie.”
There was a pause in the narrative, and George looked at the men one by one. Gone was any sign of mirth. They were
each stern and silent. Finally, Big Nose took a breath and continued.
“The storm stopped then. The winds parted the clouds above the camp. But the thunder beings had sent down more than just lightning on the young warrior. They were angry at Strong Left Arm, and they sent down a terrible fear of their power upon him as a punishment. Over the years, he tried to fight this fear, but he could not. Finally, he accepted his fate. He took on a new name and took up one of the four Thunder Bows and became a Contrary. When the thunder beings relent and take this fear from him, he can return to the life of a man once more.”
Storm Arriving made a low noise, approving the tale. The sky had cleared above them, as it had in the story, and starlight glinted from the Indian’s earrings.
“But what does it mean?” George asked. “What is a Contrary?”
Storm Arriving answered him, saying, “A Contrary lives apart from all others. He does not marry. He has no band to call his own. He must speak and act in all ways contrary to the ways of normal men. In this way, he accepts the burden of the thunder being’s attention. From such sacrifice, the Contrary gains some of the thunder being’s power. The carrier of a Thunder Bow cannot be outmatched for bravery. Then, finally, when he has won the thunder beings’ pity, they lift from him his fear of their thunder.”
George chuckled and shook his head. “You can’t be serious. One has nothing to do with the other. I just don’t understand how—”
“You do not have to understand,” Storm Arriving said with a sharpness that brought him up short. “Your understanding is not needed. Nor is your ridicule.”
“I…I did not intend—”
“Enough.” Storm Arriving said no more. No one did. With a whistle, he increased their pace. They rode through the night in silence beneath the growing field of stars.
The bowl of night had begun to pale near the eastern edge of the world when the smell of smoke lifted George from his stupor. He straightened awkwardly and nearly slipped from his seat. He had fallen asleep, somehow, while his whistler walked onward. He rubbed his eyes and cleared the drool from his lower lip. Finally lifting his head, he looked about to see something he did not believe existed.
The Indians of the great interior plains had always been thought to be nomadic, following the immense herds of buffalo through their yearly migrations. Their villages, or camps as Big Nose himself had called them, were impermanent, raised up or torn down in a day. This was the way of all the tribes of the Alliance—the Cheyenne, Lakota, Dakota, and Arapaho—and all of the neighboring independent tribes like the Crow, the Blackfeet, and the Assiniboine who lived to the north and west of the Alliance’s territory.
This ever-moving culture had been the core of the Alliance’s greatest weakness. Because of it, they had formed no industry but that which could be transported easily in a satchel tied to the back of a whistler and relied on trade with the French and Spanish for more durable goods like iron and woven cloth. However, when combined with the Indian’s fierce battle tactics and the Union horse’s terror of the Alliance’s lizard-like mounts, this migrant lifestyle created a formidable foe; one that did not succumb to the Union’s standard methods of warfare.
That is what George had been taught at his father’s knee, and what his military education and experience had reinforced. It was considered the way of things out west, beyond the frontier.
Thus it was with a fair amount of shock that George took in the sights around him.
To either side of the trail—for it was a true path now, worn down to the red earth, and not just an antelope track through an otherwise unmarred grassland—lay fields of crop plants. They were riding parallel to a river. To George’s left, away from the river, were acres of maturing bean and berry plants. Ahead he saw the broad leaves and white flowers of tobacco. To his right, in the long, wide swath that lay between the path and the river, stood cornstalks already hip-high. They were planted not in rows but in circles like green ripples in a living sea. Past all these he saw other crops, low-growing, perhaps melons or tubers, he could not tell for sure, so great was their distance from him.
The greatest marvel, however, lay not in the extent of the agriculture but in what lay dead ahead. Upstream, the river curled left and then right in a long serpentine that wrapped around the low bluff on the far bank. On the near side, in the river’s ox-bow arms, lay what George could only describe as a town.
The homes were round with conical roofs like simple huts, but they were neither small nor impermanent structures. These were impressive buildings, some of them forty or fifty feet in diameter and up to twenty feet in height. The walls were of timbers and earth or clay. The low-pitched roofs were of wood, earth, or thatch as the structure’s size and use demanded. Smoke lifted quietly from the hole in the center of nearly every roof.
The houses were laid out in clusters that followed the arc of the riverbank. Each group was comprised of one large building surrounded by a few smaller houses. There was a huge building in the heart of the town—a meeting hall, George surmised—and he guessed that the whole of the town had over a hundred of the grouped clusters. There might be as many as a thousand inhabitants in this one settlement, far more than the Union had guessed might exist in any one place.
“I had no idea,” he said. Storm Arriving glanced over, a question on his face. “All this,” George explained with a hand that took in the fields and the town alike. “We thought you were all nomads.”
“Qu’est-ce que c’est ‘nomads’?”
“Ah, nomads. We did not know you built permanent homes. We thought you lived on the plains and followed the herds from place to place. Nomads: ‘always-traveling-people.’”
Storm Arriving signed his comprehension. “The People—the Tsétsêhéstâhese—we are an always-traveling-people.” He pointed to the town. “But this is a village of the Earth Lodge Builders, called the Ree or the Arikara. They live in lodges-that-stay.”
“And they grow these crops.”
“Yes. The People used to grow their own maize and beans, when we lived on the Big Water to the north, but we could not tend our crops and follow the buffalo, too. The Earth Lodge Builders—the Ree, the Mandan, and others—they have always been here and they have always been good traders. The People allied with them during my great-grandfather’s time, almost fifty years before the star fell. They raise the crops against the harsh winter moons. We protect the limits of the land and trade the buffalo for grain and tobacco. It is a good relationship.”
“What do you mean,” George asked, “‘before the star fell?’”
Storm Arriving looked at him as he’d just asked where the sun rose. “Don’t your people know of these things?” He sighed and looked forward once more. “There was a night, fifty-three years ago, during the Moon when Ice Starts to Form, when the sky was very clear. Often during that time of year you can look up and see stars move across the sky, but on this night there were so many it looked like the sky was on fire. Stars flew across the sky, more than a man can count, and the People came out to watch it. Some were afraid, but most just looked up in wonder.
“Then one star fell. It sizzled across the sky and hit the ground with a terrible noise. The next day, some people went to see the star that fell. My father was one of them. He told me that there was a place where the ground had been torn up in a big circle. In the center of the circle was a pit, and in the pit was a rock. It was dark and shiny and heavier than any other rock my father had ever seen. My father often wondered why if a star was so heavy, how did it stay up in the sky?”
Storm Arriving looked up at the last of the stars and did not speak for a few moments. “We call that year the Year the Star Fell, and we measure every year from that one. The time I was telling you of, when the People and the Earth Lodge Builders became friends, that was fifty years before the star fell.”
George nodded, and looked at the town they were about to enter.
The portico of each home was closed tightly against the night with buffalo-hide
doorflaps. As they rode nearer, sleeping dogs and somnolent whistlers leapt up from their posts to bark or shrill their warnings. Other animals throughout the town picked up the call. He heard more dogs and many more whistlers in the cool, still air of morning. From beyond the buildings, he heard the grumbling of hardbacks. Then came the sound of voices and here and there a few of the townsfolk pulled aside their doorflaps for a look.
George spied a few naked children with short, blunt-cut hair peeking out from behind adult legs. They were snatched back by men with the same haircut and who wore little more than the children. He saw no women.
They followed the path into and through the town. No one came to greet them. There wasn’t a soul in the street.
“What’s wrong?” George asked. “You said you were allies. It is like they are afraid of us.”
“They are afraid,” Storm Arriving said. “But of him.” He pointed to the Contrary. “Not of us.” That appeared to suffice as explanation, for the Indian said no more on it. George, last night’s rebuke still fresh in his mind, kept quiet. “It does not matter,” Storm Arriving continued. “We will not be meeting with them. We will be meeting with one of the People. He took a Ree woman for wife and lives here and keeps whistlers and hardbacks for trading.”
Ahead, the river ended its left-hand curve and began the long right-hand sweep around the bluff. Here, the town ended and a series of corrals began.
The corrals were of upright branches with woven nets strung between them. Within the netting, flocks of whistlers craned their necks around one another to catch sight of the arrivals. Tassels made of dried corn husks, feathers, or tin bells had been tied to the netting. With the tiniest breath of breeze or when a whistler came too close, they moved and rustled and jingled. The tall bird-like lizards kept a tail-length between themselves and the fence. Calls flew up the scales from throaty to piercing as the flock hailed the newcomers. George’s mount answered, as did the others, with chuffs and whistles of their own. The whistlers inside the corral challenged the arrivals with flashes of red and white. George’s mount and the others began to prance and color in return until Storm Arriving said something in his own language that calmed them all, corralled and mounted alike.
The Year the Cloud Fell Page 6
