Winter Rain

by Terry C. Johnston

  He didn’t want to like the Indian, didn’t want to trust him. But Jonah couldn’t deny that he was already beginning to do both. “Still, I ain’t yet shot a man I was drinking whiskey with.”

  The pony beneath him answered every urging he gave it with the elk-handled rawhide quirt, whipped across the mustang’s rear flank to keep him first among the riders returning to the camps with such great, momentous news: white men were stalking their trail, coming on fast, greedily eating up the ground between them and the great gathering of lodge circles.

  Already it had proved to be a memorable summer for High-Backed Bull, having sworn his allegiance to Porcupine, who in turn took his faithful warriors north to join with the great Shahiyena war chief, Sauts: the one known as the Bat. Among the white men, however, the muscular one was called Roman Nose.

  This summer the Northern Cheyenne of Roman Nose and Tall Bull and Two Moon were joined by the great Brule Lakota village of Pawnee Killer. Their alliance had proved fruitful in recent moons: ever since the shortgrass time in late spring, the young warriors had been striking out, raiding into the land of the white settlers as far south as the Solomon, the Saline, even south to the river the white man called the Smoky Hill, where the pony soldiers built their string of forts and the iron road for their smoking horse.

  As he reached the smooth, grass-covered brow of the last hill, High-Backed Bull saw the camp circles laid out in rings below him in the river valley, the River of Plums. The fighting bands had been following its course for the last three suns, slowly ambling to the north and west, in no hurry. It seemed they had come to dare the small party of white men to catch up with them.

  Behind the young Shahiyena warrior now, he heard the yips and cries of the others, mostly Brule, a few Dog Soldiers like himself. They raced over the ridge and sprinted this last slope at a full gallop, urging their ponies ever faster, calling out to the camps below, feeling across every inch of their bare flesh the excitement of the news they brought.

  Women at the river turned from bathing young children, washing clothing or cradleboards, or filling skin pouches with water. Still others rose from morning fires or scraping the skins pegged out across the prairie, hides surrounding the three great camp circles. Children began crying out in the contagious excitement, darting here and there with the news of approaching riders, while camp dogs set to the howl and yip. So much clamor was it all that the old men who sat in the shade of the lodges rose finally with wonder, shading their eyes from the late-morning sun.

  Then High-Backed Bull saw him—the tall, muscular one, emerging at last from his lodge near one horn of the camp crescent farthest to the east—the direction where the white man marched, coming on at a hurry.

  As High-Backed Bull yanked back on the single horsehair rein, bringing with it his pony’s jaw, the animal skidded to a lock-kneed stop, prancing in a wild circle around Roman Nose. The war chief grabbed for the rein and held on as he peered into the light of the high sun, and the face of the young scout.

  “You bring me good news?”

  Catching his breath, finding his tongue so dry from the race that it stuck to the roof of his mouth, Bull asked, “I am first?”

  Roman Nose nodded, impatient. “You are, High-Backed Bull. What do you, the first to ride in, have to tell me?”

  The pony hurled flecks of foam as it threw its head from side to side—at a full gallop seconds before, then suddenly commanded to halt and stand obediently still by both rider and the man on the ground.

  Bull gazed into the war chief’s dark eyes, wishing his own were as dark and truly Cheyenne as were those of Roman Nose. “The white men—”

  “Yes, the half-a-hundred?”

  Swallowing hard, Bull went on, “They are less than half a day behind now.”

  “Do you think you know where they will camp tonight?”

  Sensing pride that the war chief should ask such an important question of him, High-Backed Bull straightened on the pony’s back. “I cannot be sure, but I believe there is a place where they might find firewood along the shallow river, camp on the sandy bank.”

  “How far?”

  He thought a moment, rerunning the miles of race back through his mind. “Not far. I believe it would take us no longer than it would for a man to eat his supper.”

  Roman Nose smiled, gazing off to the southeast, into the distance, as the Brule riders brought their ponies to a halt around him, kicking up dust in rooster tails, bringing the barking dogs and yammering, excited children as magnets would draw a scattering of iron filings.

  “We must go tell Pawnee Killer!” shouted the war chief over the growing clamor. “Tell Tall Bull and Two Moon—get their ponies! We have a war council to attend.” He began to turn away into the crowd.

  This time it was High-Backed Bull who reached down and snagged the war chief’s upper arm. “A war council?”

  “Yes, my friend. We will plan our attack on the half-a-hundred who have followed us for many days, stalking our backtrail.”

  “Then … at last we will fight these white men?”

  For a considered moment Roman Nose stared back into the young warrior’s eyes, perhaps seeing there what few others might. “You hunger deeply to fight these white men, yes?”

  “Any white man.”

  Roman Nose nodded. “Perhaps for now any white man’s scalp will do, young one. Yet come a day, we both know you covet but one man’s scalp.”

  “Come a day very, very soon, Roman Nose.”

  “We will make quick work of these who follow us, like the meadowlarks follow the hawk … until the hawk finally tires of the game and turns—to strike!”

  Around them the entire camp became pandemonium with the news on every lip. Young boys brought up ponies for the Northern Cheyenne chiefs, who mounted amid the wild cries for revenge, cries to punish the white stalkers. The Shahiyena sent their leaders off to hold a war council with Pawnee Killer and the headmen of the Brule camped upstream no farther than ten arrow-flights.

  “May I come with you, Roman Nose?” Bull shouted above the commotion.

  Turning his pony about, the war chief smiled. “You will not be allowed to attend the council, but—yes. Come. You will hold my pony while I sit with the others.”

  “It will be an honor to care for your pony while you decide how the white men are to die.”

  The emissaries from the Shahiyena camp reined their animals from the camp circle and loped upstream where moments before the excited Brule scouts had arrived carrying the news. Already the Killer’s headmen were hurrying to the chief’s lodge, where the buffalo-hide cover was being rolled up on one side to allow the breeze to cool the shady interior.

  Just beyond the lodge stood a hide awning stretched across a framework of lodgepoles, providing shade for a half-dozen Lakota women scurrying about to start a fire to boil meat and fry bread for those attending the war council. First the men would fill their bellies, then smoke with prayers that the truth be spoken—and only then would there be talk of making a fight of it against the white men.

  High-Backed Bull ground his teeth at that—impatient to whirl about and confront the half-a-hundred by himself if he had to—just to fight them was everything now. To take a scalp or two for his own honor. To see the fear well up in the eyes of the enemy, to know the white man’s heart had turned to water and he had likely soiled his pants at the mere sight of the Hotamitanyo—the mighty Dog Soldiers of the Shahiyena.

  Roman Nose dismounted and handed the rein over to Bull. “Paint yourself, my friend. Make your medicine and that for your pony here. We ride as soon as this council is over!”

  “To kill the white men? Kill all of them?”

  “Does not the badger kill the field mouse when it tires of the chase?”

  “Keee-aiyeee!” Bull yipped. “None left standing! None left to tell the tale.”

  As Roman Nose disappeared into the council lodge, High-Backed Bull dropped from the back of his pony, taking it and the war chief’s toward t
he shade of the awning where the women chattered and brought their kettles to a boil. From a fringed pouch he carried over a shoulder, he took out three small skin bags, along with a fragment of mirror he had taken from a looking glass broken during a recent raid on a white settlement. Propping the shard of mirror in the fork of a nearby plum brush, Bull mixed the first of his dried pigments, earth colors all, with grease from the nearby Lakota kitchen.

  Black. The color of victory.

  From his hairline down to the middle of his nose, the young Shahiyena painted the entire top half of his face with black, from ear to ear. Next came yellow, color of the Life-giver in the sky above. He applied the yellow in long vertical stripes, each a fingertip wide, that ran down the lower half of his face until they reached his jawline.

  Last to be applied was the brick-red ocher earth-paint, its crimson smeared between the yellow lines until the lower half of his face was striped with both the power of the sun and the provocative color of war. The color of blood.

  For a moment more he admired his reflection there in the midday sun, the bright, greasy patterns smeared against his earth-colored skin there in that fragment of a mirror stolen from a smoking sod house a white family had raised along the Saline River, where for many generations the Shahiyena had hunted their buffalo.

  Yes, Bull thought, smiling, approving of the work he had done on his paint. He strode over to paint potent, powerful symbols on his pony.

  This face of mine will be the last sight many of those white men see this day! he told himself as he painted red circles around his pony’s nostrils, to give it the power of breathing wind this day.

  Then I will open their bellies, rip out their hearts, and smear myself with their warm blood. I will revel, dancing on their steaming entrails, then smash their heads to jelly after I have torn their hair from their heads! How I will celebrate in the spilling of their white blood!

  Of a sudden Bull’s hand stopped above its painting of the hailstones on the pony’s rear flanks, coldly remembering his own white blood. Half of his heart was white. Half of his blood. It made the sheer exultant happiness of this moment instantly turn to gall in his mouth, a taste so sour that he choked on it.

  Bull spat on every last thought of his white father.

  “Until I can dance in your blood,” he vowed with a growl under his breath, madly smearing the crimson paint in lightning bolts on the rear of the pony to give it speed in the coming fight. A look of cunning played summer shadows across his face.

  “Until I can dance in my own father’s blood!”

  6

  September 1868

  IT’S TIME YOU went dry,” Jonah told the warrior.

  “Dry?” the Shoshone asked, anxiously raking the back of a hand across his cracked lips.

  “You gone and emptied me of what whiskey I rode out of Laramie with. Ain’t no more.”

  Two Sleep blinked into the bright light, wishing he wore a white man’s hat to protect him from this torturous sun, then straightened stoically. “Better now, we are. Got no whiskey for me.”

  Hook nodded, a wry smile scratched in his features, merriment signaled in the deep crow’s feet clawing at the corners of his eyes. “Yes, better now. Neither one of us needs whiskey for what we got to do.”

  “Tracking mens took your family.”

  Without a reply Hook heeled his horse a bit, urging it to a slightly faster pace. They could afford to cover ground a little less carefully for the next few miles, the broken country ahead making for less chance of being seen. Wasn’t much to tracking his prey now, what with the wide, scarred trail they had to follow. While not quite cold, the Danite trail was still a matter of a week old—about as long as he had been riding west with Two Sleep.

  They were drawing close to the Green, beyond it Black’s Fork. Farther still lay Bridger’s old fort. From what he sorted out of the Shoshone’s talk, they might make the old post by tomorrow night. If not, the day after. Likely they’d run onto word of the Danites there. Those soldiers would know something. A band of white men passing by with an ambulance and a half-dozen high-walled Studebaker wagons wasn’t the sort of thing a few lazy-eyed soldiers would miss out in this lonely, desolate country.

  “Never did get this far west myself,” Hook later admitted for lack of conversation as they made camp.

  “Connor?”

  “Naw. Protecting the wire from the Injuns. Was later we tracked Injuns for General Connor.”

  “Connor jumped the wrong village, said many.”

  Jonah screwed that around in his head for some time. “Seems I remember a few of the scouts saying something about that. Wasn’t Sioux or Cheyenne.”

  “Indian tell you right. Connor wrong.”

  A shudder passed through him, like old Seth shaking water off his back. “Not my affair no more. That’s three years gone now.”

  Two Sleep seemed to regard him a moment, then took his eyes off the white man. They did not speak for some time until Hook offered the Shoshone a dark sliver of chaw. The warrior took the offering of tobacco, stuffed it inside his cheek, and nodded his thanks.

  “Can’t for the life of me figure out why a man like Jim Bridger would want to build a fort here in the middle of all this nothing,” Jonah murmured. “Not when he traveled a whole lot of prettier country in his days—trapping beaver, hunting buffalo. Don’t make much sense to me, him deciding to set down roots here when there’s a lot other country more pleasing to the eye.”

  “Brid-ger see trail here. Brid-ger come here,” Two Sleep replied after some thought. “Trail here where the white man goes west to the sun’s bed.”

  “California,” Hook added. “It’s called California … and Oregon too.”

  “Two name for same place?”

  Hook snorted. “Naw, two places.”

  “Why all want to go there? So many wagon, so many people—that place fill up quick.”

  “Naw, not fast. Lots of land, I heard. Good sun and some rain. Grow some crops.” Jonah could see that Two Sleep had himself grown bewildered. “Crops: like corn and wheat. Folks grow crops to sell.”

  “Hard work, this grow?”

  He nodded, pursing his lips a bit. “Hard, but good work.”

  “Man work the ground alone?”

  “Not if he can help it, he don’t.”

  “Your boys, maybe you help them work the ground, you get back home.”

  His belly went cold as winter ice. “They … they’re not back there. Not home no more.”

  “Oh,” and the Shoshone fell quiet a moment. “They in front, ahead, out there with your woman, eh?”

  With a shrug Jonah answered, “No. Last I got wind of ’em was in Indian Territory. Got sold off to some Mexicans.”

  Two Sleep wagged his head sadly. “Comancheros take boys far away. Go to slaves.”

  “Likely.”

  “You work the land hard again some day. Grow crop?”

  Hook gazed at the far hills, studying the sky tinted with the strange mineral hues of sunset. “Maybe. Lot of doing between now and that time. Never really thought about farming again till you brought it up. Don’t really seem like something I wanna do without the boys, without my family around.”

  “You work the ground, grow crops. Like a man grows his children, Hook. You work hard, grow your children. See them grow. Man always must say good-bye to them.”

  “Don’t you understand? I didn’t see ’em grow. That’s the damned shame of it.”

  Both of them went silent for a long time, Two Sleep broiling skewered venison over their greasewood fire, Hook jabbing at the burning limbs with a wand of green willow. Each deep in his own thoughts.

  “Man grows crops, sell what he don’t eat. Money he gets?”

  Jonah looked up, seeing the warrior’s old eyes bright. “Yes, money. Money to gamble at cards, you red heathen.”

  The Shoshone wagged his head. “No, money to buy whiskey—what else for, you white heathen!”

  A couple days back, Hook had ow
ned up to liking the Shoshone more and more as the old Indian talked of a bygone time shared with Bridger and Sweete. Talked of those halcyon days at the end of the beaver trade and before the start of the white man’s war against himself back east. Those years were gone the way of dust now: a time when Two Sleep had learned the rudiments of the white man’s confusing language, learned better still the power of whiskey. Best yet, he learned the potent numbers and symbols emblazoned on the pasteboard cards the white man used to gamble. No carved pieces of bone, no painted sticks for this Shoshone. Those numbered, painted, powerful cards and their manifold combinations had fascinated him right from the start. They had been good days.

  “I see why Shad liked you,” Hook said, right out of the blue that evening camped among the cottonwood on the west bank of the Green.

  “Sweete a bad gambler.”

  “He was, was he?”

  “Worse I ever see.”

  “Damn good teacher, though, don’t you reckon?”

  Two Sleep smiled at that, dragging a hand beneath his runny nose aggravated by the smoke from their cooking fire. “Damn good teacher, Hook. But not every man a good learner, like you.”

  “Why—I figure that’s about the first compliment you’ve give me, you red heathen.”

  Two Sleep grinned. “Better you know tracking and fighting and Indians, Hook. You no good learner at cards and whiskey.”

  “How the hell you know? Way I figure it, you learned just what you needed to get along in the white man’s world, sure enough.”

  “And you, Hook? You learn all you need to get along in the world out here?” The Shoshone swept one arm around in a wide arc.

  “Likely I have. So there’s only two things left for me to learn.”

  “Two Sleep know one thing you want to find: where your family go.”

  Hook nodded in agreement. “That, and why they was ever took from me in the first place.”

  The white men had come riding into this river valley late in the raiding season, this Drying Grass Moon, following the Shahiyena trail. The white men hungered to find this string of villages clustered beside the Arikaree, hundreds of their skin lodges breasting against the summer-pale sky, their great pony herds cropping grass for miles around on the surrounding prairie, dropping their fragrant offal among that left in the timeless passings of the shaggy buffalo.