He shuddered in the dawn breeze as light ballooned around him, the sun rising reddish-yellow as a prairie hen’s egg from the far eastern edge of the earth, a great blood-tinged benediction at the far edge of everything he had ever known.
It would not be a good thing to be found out, Tall One feared, for his people to think him no better than a lying, thieving, murdering white-tongue. Especially after yesterday when some far-roaming Kiowa warriors carried their news to the Kwahadi village of last winter’s struggle with the enemy soldiers far to the east in what was called Indian Territory. That sort of thing always made the pale-eyed war chief laugh, his white teeth showing as he threw his head back, hands on hips, finding it very funny that the white man would call a section of all of this country “Indian Territory,” when it all belonged to the Indians.
Long ago the Kwahadi themselves had roamed far to the north, where a few buffalo hunters were only beginning to shoot their way into the endless herds here and there beyond the banks of the Arkansas. Comanche war parties had wandered far to the east, where the tai-bos had driven the tribes from their native eastern lands, and clear to the south, where the pony soldiers and the Tehanno Rangers fought and struggled against the Mexicans. Just about everywhere now, tai-bo settlers wanted to grow their crops and raise their spotted buffalo.
On ground the Comanche had ruled for generations, making war and driving out the Caddo and Tonkawa. This was a land the speedy Kwahadi ponies ruled, they and their red-skinned war lords of the fourteen-foot buffalo lance.
Tall One had seen the older boys practice with those graceful, deadly lances, more a weapon for warfare than a tool for hunting nowadays. Riding in at a full gallop with the lance level with the undulating prairie, the young horsemen practiced spearing a burlap sack filled with grass and brush, rocks weighing down its bottom to give it the heft of a full-grown white man sitting saddle-high on a scaffold of mesquite branches. Each of them was taught to drive that grooved lance through the enemy’s chest, to use it as a huge lever as they picked up their victim and unhorsed him, leaving the enemy to lie writhing on the plain.
Oh, how he wanted to go to war.
“You are unhappy the pony soldiers did not attack us last winter?”
Tall One whirled with a start, surprised to find the pale-eyed war chief behind him, his voice fracturing the dawn silence of this broken country east of their village, where he had gone to take refuge with his thoughts. Here the dogs did not bark, the ponies did not snuffle or whinny. Here he had believed he would be alone.
“Yes.” Then he thought better of his answer. “No. I … just—”
“You want a chance at the tai-bo’s soldiers, just as an Kwahadi warrior docs,” the pale-eyed one replied. “Me too. Sometimes I want so badly that we ride them down and get this war finished once and for all time, Tall One. To wipe this land clean, return it to what it once was for ourselves and the buffalo. To drive the white-tongues out forever.”
He recognized that distant fire burning behind the pale eyes. Tall One grumbled, “The Kiowa messengers say the soldiers slaughtered the camp of Black Kettle’s Shahiyena camped on the Washita River.”
The war chief nodded. “Then those soldiers turned around and fled when the Kiowa and Arapaho camped downstream rose up and hurried to meet the attack.”
Tall One smiled at that. “How I would love to have been there to see the look on those soldier faces when they saw the warriors rushing to chew them up.”
A smile crinkled the corners of those pale eyes. “Still, even though those soldiers fled, they came back the following moon, to harry the Kiowa of Lone Wolf and Satanta. Almost hanged both chiefs from a tree.”
His throat constricted uncontrollably. “A terrible death, this hanging—for the soul cannot come out the mouth.”
He put a hand on Tall One’s shoulder. “You are learning well, my friend. And one day soon these will be more than mere words—they will be the feelings in your heart.”
Tall One felt stung, challenging the war chief. “I feel it in my heart now!”
“Easy, Tall One. No one questions that you are Kwahadi already. All I mean is that the more you learn with every day, with every turn of the season, the more you become one of the Antelope People.”
“You are my family now. The only … only family I can remember having.”
“When we brought you here, you became part of a larger family still, Tall One,” he said, gazing to the east as the red globe finally cleared the edge of the earth. “There are other bands of The People. Root-Eaters, Buffalo Followers, and Honey-Eaters. Others you belong to as well.”
“More than anything, I want to belong to the same people you do,” he said, yearning for the comfort of having his place.
The pale-eyed one looked down into the young man’s face with a kind smile. “Perhaps you have touched more truth than you know. Perhaps, in a way, you and I do belong to the same people. Yes.”
“Your mother?”
“You know of her?” He grinned. “Yes, of course you do. The others have told you, of course.” Then he turned away as a cloud of something dark passed over his face, gazing up at the cloudless spring sky above them as he spoke sadly. “Winter before last, I learned that my mother was dead.
“We knew she had been captured by the Rangers, knew they returned her to the white-tongues, the Pah-kuhs, the ones she lived with before my father captured her to live with the Kwahadi.
“The tai-bo who told me at the Medicine Lodge council with the peace-talkers—he said she died of a broken heart.”
Tall One’s eyes wandered to that cloudless spring sky above them too. He could more than imagine how it must feel to be so lonely for your people, filled with so much yearning that your heart seemed as empty as that cloudless sky overhead. How the woman must have mourned, yearning to be returned to the people she loved. There were times when Tall One had imagined he knew just how great such grief was.
But that was before he had come to this life with the Antelope People.
The war chief gazed down at Tall One. “Tell me, my friend—if the white-tongues come for you, will your heart be glad to go back to what you had before?”
The words stabbed him with panic. “No—”
“Or will you find your heart truly broken when they take you back, find yourself missing the rain and wind in your face, the smell of many fires on your skin, the feel of a pony’s muscles at the chase beneath your thighs? Will you long for the feel of this freedom no other man knows?”
“Yes. Yes!” he repeated eagerly. “I would remember. But—I am not going anywhere—”
He interrupted the boy by gently placing his fingertips on the youth’s lips. “I wanted to know. For my own heart. For, you see, Tall One—the soldiers did roam across this country all winter long.”
Tall One tugged the war chief’s hand from his mouth. “I know that as well as any. Our skill in hiding kept us far from the wandering soldier columns all through the winter, even after the camp of Kiowa-Apache and Honey-Eaters was attacked and driven from their lodges, forced to abandon everything they owned.”
“The soldiers are coming, Tall One. I want you to know that. Come a day soon, their Tonkawa eyes will find our village and the soldiers will attack. Come that day, what side will you be on?”
“The People!” Tall One answered strongly.
“Will you fight—and die alongside Antelope warriors—die to protect our women and children?”
“I will! I will!”
“There is nothing in your heart—no remembrance of your time among the white-tongues, nothing that will change what your heart feels now?”
“Nothing.” And then Tall One gazed steadily up into the pale eyes. “If the white-tongues take me by force, then—like your mother—I too will die of a broken heart. Knowing that I have been ripped from my true people, Quanah Pah-kuh. Unlike you, I alone will know that great pain your mother knew. Like her, I too will die of a broken heart.”
In these f
irst days of summer, beneath the full Moon of Fat Horses, High-Backed Bull rode once more with the Dog Soldiers of Porcupine.
For much of last autumn and winter, he had journeyed far, hoping to discover word of the one who had fathered him, perhaps some whisper of where his mother had gone. But from the Little Dried River far to the south, to the Powder River country in the north, no one had heard of Shell Woman, or her daughter, Pipe Woman. More important, no one knew the whereabouts of the tall heads-above white man who had long ago hunted for beaver in the snowy mountains, the one who they said now scouted for the white man’s army in these troublesome days.
This hunt for him would take time, for Bull knew the man he hunted could disappear among the whites like a big fish diving through endless clusters of minnows.
With the coming of spring and the rising of the short-grass like a green blanket spread across the breast of the prairie, Bull had come across Porcupine and all his old friends. This season they rode with the Dog Soldier camps of Tall Bull and White Horse after last summer’s death of Roman Nose and the infuriating standoff on the Plum River. The winter was spent preparing for their new raiding season. As the Kiowa of Satanta and the Brule of Pawnee Killer had raided last summer, as they themselves had raided across the length and breadth of Kan-sas, the Dog Soldiers vowed they would again make the buffalo ground run red with the blood of white men. This year they would push even farther north, push into the country the enemy called Ne-bras-kas, sweeping wider, ranging farther east, before they finally cut south as summer’s long days waned and autumn made its coming known.
Only then would the Dog Soldiers retreat from the land stolen by the white settlers, leaving in their wake the dead and wounded, the slaughtered cattle and the charred ruins smudging the clean prairie sky. This would be a summer to drive the white man back to the east, where it was said he numbered like the blades of grass.
“I cannot believe this,” Tall Bull had declared haughtily when confronted with that frightening but questionable news by messengers from tribes who lived farther to the east. “Your words are only the scared talk of those who would rather run than fight the white man.”
“Neither do I believe it,” Bull had said. “As a child I grew up around the white man’s forts.” The war council grunted their approval of his statement. “I have never seen so many white men that they would even number the blades of grass where Tall Bull raised this lodge of his.”
He was proud of the smile those words had elicited from Tall Bull and White Horse both. And ever since, the Dog Soldier chiefs had seemed to desire the counsel of the young warrior of twenty-four summers, never failing to include Bull in those talks made to decide on which path the Hotamitanyo would take.
That recognition proved to be a pain-giving balm: soothing some of his self-loathing, taking his mind off his hatred of his own white blood. For too long had he wanted acceptance by his father’s race. When Bull did not find it among the whites, he returned to his mother’s people, only to discover that they too distrusted him, if not shunned him outright. Sired by a white man, born of a Shahiyena mother, and wanting nothing more than acceptance—for too long Bull found a home among neither people.
But now, it seemed, not only had the fierce and renegade Dog Soldiers made a place for him at their talks, they truly desired his counsel.
Quite by accident Bull had discovered that the only way he could find acceptance among the Shahiyena was to turn his back completely, irrevocably, on his white father and the white world. Although there were enough reminders of the mixed blood flowing through his veins, what Bull nonetheless hated himself for was the white taint to that blood. More than anything he feared that it would one day prove a stain to his medicine, his power, would ultimately undo his life.
Try as he might through that solitary journey of his last winter, Bull’s time alone had done nothing more than allow him to brood on just how much he differed from the rest of these young warriors crowding the camp. Though he stood taller, though he might be bigger, of greater muscle, Bull wanted none of that. More than anything, he wanted to be dark-haired, black-eyed like them. He wanted most to have a father he could walk with through this camp of Hotamitanyo. A warrior father. A father he could be proud of. Not one of the enemy.
So he sat and cleaned his heavy pistol this last day before they would ride forth at dawn, drawing the cleaning cloth in and out of the barrel of the Walker Colt he had taken out of the dead, frozen hands of a soldier near the pine fort two winters before at the place where the Shahiyena and Lakota had slaughtered the hundred-in-the-hand. Others had claimed the muzzle-loading rifles. Bull had instead rushed in to claim one of the many-shoots pistols: a powerful, destructive weapon.
“You clean that gun so much, you will wear it out,” chided Porcupine as he settled to his haunches in the shade beside his friend.
“Yours could stand some cleaning too,” Bull said sourly, not looking up from his task.
Porcupine sighed as he leaned back against the buffalo-hide lodge. “This magic that sent you riding into the teeth of last winter, it did not help you find the father you seek. Why are you so sure you will find him now?”
He stayed his hands, the powder-streaked rag protruding from both ends of the pistol barrel. “Last winter I hoped to find word of him, or my mother. The time of cold is a season when the soldiers do not march, when the army does not need its scouts—its eyes and ears to guide the soldiers to the sleeping Indian camps.”
“You believed you would find this father of yours in a lodge where you, would also find your mother?”
He nodded, then said, “But I found neither one of them,” as he dragged the oiled rag from the barrel. “So now I have greater faith in the journey we will make this summer. If we kill enough white men, capture enough women, steal enough of their spotted buffalo and bum enough of their dirt lodges—the pony soldiers will come after us.”
Porcupine snorted. “That is one certainty no man will gamble against, Bull. The white man always swats back at that which troubles him.”
Bull nodded. “Yes. But even more important—I know I will find my father this summer. If we kill and steal and rape and kidnap enough—then we will leave a wide and bloody trail for the army to follow.”
“And you believe your father will lead the soldiers on that trail we will leave them to follow?”
With a smile Bull answered, “My father will not be able to deny the smell of Indians in his nostrils. He will lead the pony soldiers after us.”
“Then you will find your father at last,” Porcupine said.
“No,” he replied. “I will kill him.”
16
Late June 1869
HIS OLD FRIENDS were going, one by one by one.
Compañeros and saddle-partners, trappers and frontiersmen, trackers and guides and scouts for the army like Shadrach Sweete—they were all dying off on Shad, one by one by one.
The end of the halcyon days of the fur trade had driven the first of them from this land. Some fled back east to what they could muster to live out their lives. Others like Meek and Newell pushed on to Oregon country. Shad tried that, and in the end came back to what he and Shell Woman knew best: living a nomadic life crossing the plains in the shadow of the cloud-scraping Rocky Mountains. A man did what a man must to provide for his Cheyenne wife and family. And for almost twenty years he had found work here and there, at times guiding for those long, snaking trains of emigrants bound for Oregon or California. Then too he had scouted for the dragoons in those pre-war days and built a reputation so that when the Army of the West came out here to stay. Shad Sweete had all the work a man needed.
Like Jim Bridger had done, like Kit Carson.
Times like these, riding out ahead of an army column, searching for some sign of a hostile village on the move, made Sweete draw in and think on all that he had done in those glory days in the West, brood on all that had been taken from him.
Of late there had been more and more taken from the o
ld man.
The first real blow was Ol’ Gabe. Not until last winter did Shad hear that Bridger had give up and gone back east to Missouri, gone to live with a daughter back yonder, there somewhere. If it was so, that meant Jim had been gone from the plains almost a year now this summer. Going blind, some even claimed. Sawbones doctors didn’t rightly know how, but some ventured that too much high, bright sun made that happen to a man.
Ol’ Gabe going blind—after all the glory that them two eyes had seen?
“Wagh!” Shad had snorted the grappling roar of a grizzly boar. To think of the un-goddamned-fairness of it.
“Still, the army came to call on the legend,” Major Eugene Carr, commanding officer of the Fifth U.S. Cavalry, had informed Sweete before the whole shebang set out from Fort Lyon, marching south to drive the hostiles toward Custer’s Seventh Cavalry waiting east in the country of the Canadian River. “No less than General Philip H. Sheridan himself asked Bridger’s advice on waging a winter campaign against the Cheyenne and Kiowa riding out of Indian Territory to commit their depredations on the settlers in Kansas, Shad.”
“And what’d Ol’ Gabe tell that little pissant of an Irishman?” Sweete had asked.
“Word has it Bridger wanted an audience with Sheridan his own self, personally—to tell the general what a damned fool idea the winter campaign was.”
Shad had himself a good laugh at that, conjuring up that scene between the little banty-rooster of a general and that tall, rangy old trapper. “Had to come to Fort Hays his own self, did he? Just to tell Sheridan what the dad-blamed hell he was getting his soldiers into, I’ll bet.”
Later still that winter Shad had learned from army scout California Joe Milner that Joe had been at Hays to see it for himself when Bridger rode in from Missouri to have a palaver with Sheridan—been there to see the old eyes nearly gone a milky-white, to see how stooped Bridger had become with the crippling rheumatiz and joint aches, how all those years climbing cold mountains and wading through icy streams had made the man little more than a thinning caricature of the giant he used to be.
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