by Win Blevins
This last was the meaning in the name Tasunke Witko, acting in a preordained sacred manner.
It was a name handed down in the family from father to son, Curly didn’t know for how many generations. Seven generations, perhaps, the Lakota way of counting what the wasicu called a century.
For sure Curly’s grandfather had been named Tasunke Witko. Then this man gave the name to Curly’s father and took the name Makes a Song for himself.
If Curly could make himself a true Lakota, then his father, Tasunke Witko, would take some other name and call Curly Tasunke Witko.
Curly wanted to earn this name.
Curly snapped back into the present. The buckskin was jerking nervously at the lead rope. It didn’t want to go on.
Curly looked around. Was the horse afraid of the storm? The clouds were getting ominous, but there was no lightning yet. The village, low down in the creek bottoms, was almost in sight.
Then he saw the smoke. It was black and ugly. It smelled like grease or hides or flesh. It was coming from the valley of the Blue Water.
The village was burning.
He smelled gun smoke, too.
Lightning exploded.
When the wakinyan smacked him, his skin shuddered, and his stomach lurched.
The storm was roaring when he got to the creek. Thunder and lightning. Smoke everywhere, and a scorched smell. The smoke was from burning lodge covers—that was the acrid smell—but it came from upwind.
Squatting in a little wash, he started on what he had to do. A deep breath, and another, and another. If he was going to die now, he simply would. Whatever the wakinyan did, kill him or not, he had to find out what had happened to Little Thunder’s village. To Spotted Tail, his aunts and his cousins, his grandmother.
He hobbled his horses in the wash and went to where the circle of lodges had stood and looked at the tracks. He studied them carefully.
He wasn’t thinking about the wakinyan. He had made some sort of decision without words, some acceptance.
Probably the people were all dying anyway, and he would die with them.
Hundreds of Lakota horses and hundreds of shod wasicu horses had been everywhere. A riot of moccasin and boot tracks. Walking soldiers had come from the east, riding soldiers and wagon guns from the west, a trap.
Some people got their pony drags headed north, up the creek.
Some people went into caves on a hill on the west side of the creek. The tracks showed where the wagon guns had bombarded the caves. Even from below Curly could see that the caves were destroyed—half the hill was torn up.
Many villagers left on foot, maybe even opawinge, a hundred, walking toward the Shell River and flanked by the pony soldiers.
Captured.
He squeezed his stomach to keep it from churning.
The only big outfit of walking soldiers and mounted troops in the country belonged to White Beard, called Harney by the wasicu. The agent said White Beard had been sent out to punish the ones who had killed Grattan and his men. The agent said the peaceful Lakota would be left alone.
Little Thunder had always spoken strongly for peace. He supported the big talk paper from three winters ago, supported it so firmly that some of his own people disapproved. Yet the camp White Beard hit was Little Thunder’s.
Suddenly, unpredictably, as he was looking up at the cannon-smashed caves, the urge to kill shot through Curly. He noticed how it felt, like swallowing a red-hot stone. For a moment it was in his pores, in his hairs, in his finger- and toenails, in all of his existence. He hated the feeling. So did Hawk.
The tracks said the walking soldiers and the wagon guns had gone downstream with the captives, toward the Shell River, which the wasicu called the Platte. The pony drags and most of the people had gone upstream. So had the mounted soldiers.
Curly followed the people who were fleeing. Slowly, in the seep of light remaining, the pony picked its way along the wash.
The wakinyan sounded.
Malign spirits were everywhere. You could feel the air where their wings pushed it into your face.
Before he got to the place, it was black night. He couldn’t see. By the stink he knew it was the place.
Crack! The lightning made a cannon-burst of light, and Curly saw more than he wanted to see.
Then nothing. His eyes were blind after the blast of light.
The world emerged from his blindness.
He saw carnage.
Here at the foot of a sandstone bluff Little Thunder’s people had made a stand.
Carnage.
The lightning boomed again.
Curly waited to see. Soon he could make out a few details, humps on the ground. Rolled-up lodge hides, he thought, parfleches full of food and others full of clothing, robes, everything the people owned except what they wore, all of it scattered across the foot of this slope, most of it burning.
Now the smoke wasn’t so much, but the stench was awful, burning fat and meat, smoldering hide.
Mixed with the metallic smell of blood.
A whack of light.
At first he only guessed what he’d seen. Then his eyes adjusted and brought to him crumpled bodies slung across the sand, torn like rags and abandoned. Cradle boards here and there, some with flesh in them that once was human.
He rode up the slope where the soldiers had chased the people. Bodies of his people everywhere, shot, hacked with swords, blown to pieces, men, women, children flung down like garbage.
He retched.
He felt thankful his belly was empty.
He walked among the lifeless forms, turning them over to look at their faces. One might be Spotted Tail. Or one of his wives or children. Or Spotted Tail’s mother, Curly’s grandmother.
He recognized the dead face of a maiden from last summer’s sundance pole. Her skirt was pulled up, and she had been scalped between the legs.
He felt that he was walking in a nightmare. The ghouls and monsters always just on the other side of the thin membrane between the physical world and the spirit world—they had passed through and were running amok.
He shivered, a long spasm of cold, not the cold of physical death, but the death of spirit.
From a stone’s throw away, lightning knocked him down.
Lightning-gives-birth-to-sound bashed him.
He felt the air on fire. It singed his nostrils. His guts wrenched hard.
He grabbed for his pony’s reins. The horse was evidently too stunned to run off.
Curly got to his knees and looked around, blind, seeing nothing, his head reeling. He thought he remembered that the lightning had hit up the ridge a little, maybe a hundred yards. It had pounded the earth. Maybe there was a big hole where it had hit or a litter of powdered rock.
He would go on. He had surrendered his life already to the wakinyan. He wanted to find his grandmother. Somehow he was sure he would find the body of his grandmother.
He led the horse along the ridge.
Movement at the edge of a boulder, a ghost.
No, a coyote.
No, his grandmother’s mangy old dog.
Curly wanted living warmth. He called and reached, but the animal ran from him.
Or was it a spirit dog?
Suddenly he saw. His waking dream of a winter ago gushed into his eyes and his ears and his heart. In ten or a dozen consecutive flashes of lightning, Rider galloped through a rain of arrows and gunfire, untouched. The horse’s hooves were the roll of wakinyan. The figure on the horse was motionless, save for a fringe of buffalo beard on his moccasins. Now for the first time Rider had a distinct face, the visage of Light Curly Hair, properly known as His Horse Sees, son of Tasunke Witko, grandson of Makes the Song, Hunkpatila Oglala Lakota.
The lightning stopped, and for a moment the world was dark. Low bursts of light danced at the rim of the circle of the world. Distant wakinyan beat the drum-pulse of the earth.
Light Curly Hair rode into enemy fire, but the bullets and arrows didn’t touch him.
The rain came now, slashing, cold as hail.
He didn’t care.
He would ride toward the people and the soldiers, untouched.
The people were moving fast, the tracks showed, and the soldiers hard after them. After a while, though, the soldiers’ ponies were walking, not running. Finally their tracks veered off to the west. The people pushed on north.
Find the people, that was Curly’s first job.
Dropped robes, broken travois poles, and the occasional body of a horse marked the way.
And then a small figure next to a dropped bundle of robes.
He dismounted and looked carefully. A little boy, no one he knew. Dead, shot through the chest, cold.
Curly bent over the body.
And heard a mewling. There. From that pile of robes.
“Tanke,” Curly said softly. Sister. It was an offer to treat this woman like an older sister.
She was huddled pitifully under the robes, soaking wet, spinning out a soft whine.
“Tanke,” He said again, and touched her shoulder tenderly.
She didn’t respond. Her face was to the ground, her back to him, and she was shivering uncontrollably. Her crying was distracted, bizarre, perhaps lunatic, witko. A picture of his birth mother lightninged into his mind, witko with grief, hanging from a lodge pole by the neck.
He scourged the picture from his mind.
He rolled the woman back gently to see her face.
Then he saw what was beneath her. A baby, sucking at her breast. A just-born baby, still glistening with the juices of the womb.
Lightning smacked the ridge. It was so close Curly thought his hair must be singed, the white ends burning.
He ignored it absolutely. The wakinyan would do as they pleased.
The woman whined louder when the wakinyan ka-boomed.
A good sign, he thought. She was aware of the world around her, at least a little aware.
He wiped tenderly at her cheek. In the flash of lightning he had recognized her. She was not Lakota but a Sahiyela, visiting in the village with her husband. Curly didn’t remember her name.
He could see in his mind what had happened. Somehow she had gotten separated from her husband—maybe he was among the dead back at the bluff. She must have carried her dead son here, moving as fast as she could but falling behind, utterly unable to set the body of her son down, unprotected, naked to the storm and tomorrow to the birds and coyotes.
She would have slipped badly in the mud, been chilled by the rain, been terrified by the lightning. And hardly able to walk farther as her unborn child began to force his way into the world.
Curly turned the child slightly and saw that it was a boy.
She had lain here on the ridge, with the rain cutting at her, the lightning battering the earth all around her, the lightning-gives-birth-to-sound exploding in her mind. Alone. Terrified. Riven by these great forces, and the greater force that made her grow life within, she had brought forth a man-child.
The wasicu soldiers had taken one son from her. Life, its force rising within her belly, had given her another one.
Miracle.
Curly looked around at the dark earth, wet with rain and blood, scourged by lightning, and reached down without looking and touched the miracle child.
A great feeling rose, a wave cresting.
“Mitakuye oyasin,” he said softly but clearly to the universe. “Mitakuye oyasin,” he repeated. We are all related.
He went back down the ridge and hunted until he found two usable travois poles. He hauled them back up to where the Sahiyela woman lay, quiet now, as though her spirit was soothed a little.
He tied the poles onto his pony to make a drag and lashed a robe across them for a litter. When he lifted the woman onto the robe, she opened her eyes, looked into his face, and said tentatively, “The sandy-haired one.” He could not tell whether recognizing him made her more or less afraid.
He covered her and the baby with the other robes, except for one. He moved the dead boy to some rocks, wrapped him in the last robe, put him into a crevasse, and stacked rocks over the whole bundle. Now, when she was better, she could come and send his spirit on its journey in the proper way.
He led the pony on, following the trail of the people’s horses, not knowing where they would make camp. He didn’t care where. He didn’t care about the rain or the cold, or even the lightning and wakinyan. As Rider, he advanced into danger without trembling.
He was exhausted from riding all day and walking all night. But he felt useful, useful to the woman and child and to the larger forces that coursed through them and himself, useful to life.
He would deliver this woman and her son to the village. His act, his gesture, his service.
Toward dawn the rain stopped. The tracks split in many directions into the sand hill country. Curly knew the people were dividing, making it hard for the soldiers to find them all again, offering a fragmented target.
On one trail he saw big hoofprints that might be the tracks of a big American horse, maybe Spotted Tail’s favorite traveling horse. He followed these tracks.
Before long lookouts saw him. They led him to a village circle by a little lake. They took the woman and child to her family.
The hubbub of voices spoke the people’s mood—grief, wild grief. And fury, vengeful fury.
Curly headed for what they said was Spotted Tail’s lodge for a little sleep. When Curly woke, he would rise in anger too. He would fight back too. But something in him was a more private feeling, something of consequence. He would keep quiet about it but hold it and watch it: When he helped people, especially in desperate circumstances, Hawk was still, at peace.
AN ANGRY WASP
When he woke, his aunt Sweetwater Woman signaled him to stay quiet and brought him some soup. The hump in the buffalo robes must be Spotted Tail. “Wounded,” whispered Sweetwater Woman. Seriously, from her manner.
Curly looked around for the other wives, the children, and his grandmother.
Sweetwater Woman’s face contorted with a spasm of grief. “Spoon, Yellow Leaf, and Willow have been captured.”
Curly’s head jerked toward her. Sweetwater Woman’s face was impassive again. Willow was his grandmother. Spoon was Spotted Tail’s sits-beside-him wife, the eldest of the four sister wives. Yellow Leaf was their seven-winters-old daughter.
Taken by the soldiers! A picture lurched into Curly’s mind, the young woman scalped between the legs. Immediately he blacked it out.
“Many captured, many dead,” Sweetwater Woman said softly.
Curly’s heart twisted like a piece of hide wrung in the hands.
He decided to visit the Sahiyela woman and her boy-child while his uncle slept.
The boy in the cradle board held Curly’s finger and tried to suck it. His eyes didn’t go beyond the finger yet. Newborn babies seemed to have trouble seeing this new world, as though their minds were still whereever they came from.
Lark hovered. Lark was the sister of Yellow Woman, the Sahiyela mother. Her husband, Stick, was off talking with the men of the Badger Society. Curly was sure the men of all the societies, Foxes, Badgers, Brave Hearts, White Badges, Crow Carriers, Silent Eaters, and Wand Carriers, were meeting. They would be badly divided in their minds. They would want to make wasicu blood run like rivers in spring flood, and they would want the women and children back. A-i-i-i, they would need some wisdom now.
Yellow Woman was sleeping. Her Sahiyela husband, Lark said, had been killed by the wagon guns at the caves on the hill.
Curly nodded. It was as he’d guessed.
Curly looked into the eyes of the infant without thinking, just opening his eyes and his heart. He felt like a gift, this newborn man-child, a solace.
When Curly was small, during one Cannanpopa Wi, the Moon of Popping Trees, he had been shivering in the robes. A terrible storm raged outside in the darkness, wind and snow, the breath of Waziya, the white giant, blowing fierce
ly, trying to kill all it could touch. The one who gave him birth, Rattling Blanket Woman, heated two stones in the center fire. Then she wrapped them in deerskin and gave them to Curly and his sister. “Hold this to your chest,” she said softly. Curly hugged the warm stone and slept the night through.
Sometimes in his sleep now Curly still heard Rattling Blanket Woman’s loving voice. Sometimes she would touch him gently and he would start suddenly awake, and then remember. The sadness never left him, like dark, cold water pooled at the bottom of his heart.
Last night the wakinyan had sent warning blasts at Curly. The soldiers’ big-fire guns had shot terror among the people. But in the midst of these storms had emerged a warmth, this infant, newly come to the earth. The little boy was a heated stone to wrap in hide and hold against the chest on a bitter winter night. Not a reward, for Curly felt he’d done nothing to earn a reward. Instead a gift.
Curly had picked up this gift of life and brought the boy and mother to camp. Because Curly had treasured the gift, they would live.
Lark woke Yellow Woman gently, took the child from his cradle board, and laid him at his mother’s breast.
Yellow Woman noticed Curly and covered her surprise with one hand to her mouth.
“I’m glad you’re well,” he said awkwardly. “And your son.”
She inclined her head in acceptance.
He went out of the lodge. He stood in the open air and looked around at the ragged circle of the village. Families were living under bushes or in wickiups or small travel lodges. Their real homes had been destroyed down on the creek. It would be a hard winter now. The hoop of the people was not broken, but it was much tattered.
When times were terrible, that was when you needed truly to act like a Lakota. He had done that. It felt good. He liked the feeling, being one of the people.
Spotted Tail was shot in two places and saber-cut in two others. His wounds looked scary, but his spirits were martial.
“I’m not whipped,” he said. “Tomorrow or the next day I’m going to kill soldiers.”
