Stone Song

by Win Blevins

  Curly looked sideways at Buffalo Hump, also dipping his hands. Farther away, doing the same, stood the other young Lakota.

  All around them several hundred Sahiyela fighting men were dismounting, coming to the bank of the small lake, dipping their hands, mounting again. From this upland they could see for a couple of sleeps in every direction, including the valley of the Mahkineohe, the Creek of Turkeys, where they would meet the soldiers today. Power was big in the Sahiyela warriors, and the water of this lake made it huge.

  More sun stabbed through a cloud, and Curly saw the new light on his skin, and Hump’s. Hokahe! he said to himself. It is a good day to die.

  Now the Sahiyela riders reorganized themselves into their warrior clubs. They had ridden here behind Hail and Dark, the two wicasa wakan who had foreseen power for today and who sang and danced and prayed it into this world. The fighters would leave here riding not behind their medicine leaders but behind their war leaders.

  The dispute about whether to avoid the wasicu or fight them had been solved by Hail and Dark. The two wicasa wakan were young enough to be full of courage and seemingly too young to know power. These men wanted to fight, not run like cowards. They had discovered two kinds of medicine to make the Sahiyela invincible against the wasicu and gave it to the people in ceremonies.

  Everyone understood then that fighting was the right course, for victory was guaranteed. The people would teach the soldiers a lesson.

  Now the men were renewing the power Hail and Dark had given them.

  The first medicine gave power to the Sahiyela weapons. The men had only poor firearms, some smooth-bore flintlocks and old-fashioned Allen six-shooters. These weapons were scarce in camp, and they were inaccurate anyway. Hail and Dark blessed the powder the fighters loaded their guns with. Now, said the seers, every shot would strike home.

  The second medicine was even stronger—it would turn away the soldiers’ bullets. When the soldiers fired, their bullets would dribble out the ends of their muzzles and plunk to the ground, harmless. Or a Sahiyela need only lift a hand and the lead ball would bounce off like a pebble thrown by a boy. This medicine was the key. Instead of being overmatched, the warriors now were fighting an unarmed enemy.

  The men had danced to these powers. They had sung the songs taught them by Hail and Dark. They had connected themselves to strengths larger and mightier than the merely physical. The last gesture the seers had required was that they dip their hands in this small turquoise lake.

  Everything was in order. The Sahiyela had chosen the field of battle for their advantage, the broad valley of the Mahkineohe. Here they had plenty of room to maneuver. They were a day’s travel from camp, not so far they had worn out their ponies getting here, but far enough to protect the women and children. They could feel their own might rising in them.

  Curly had studied Hail silently, for this man was Yellow Woman’s brother. Curly wanted to understand a young Sahiyela who took the way of the wicasa wakan, as his own father had, the path of spirit sight more than the path of war. That was not Curly’s way, but he wanted to understand it. Unfortunately, Hail said little except in public, and Curly found his face unreadable.

  The Strange Man had another reason for wanting to understand. Hail was evidently a wakinyan dreamer—thus the name. He must have gone through a heyoka ceremony, but he was not one of the sacred clowns.

  Curly was a wakinyan dreamer, too, but he didn’t let his mind wander in that direction, now by the lake or any other time. He stood up, mounted his traveling pony, checked the spare pony on lead, and followed the Sahiyela to meet the soldiers.

  They waited in the sunpole trees at the east end of the valley. The soldiers would come at midday, said the Sahiyela wolves, or maybe not until midafternoon. Letting the horses graze, the Sahiyela lay in the shade, ate a little dried meat, and rested. They had painted themselves in camp this morning. Each man had long since invoked his personal medicine.

  Curly felt queasy. He had seen beyond and learned of powers that would help him. He should have been wearing lightning on his face, as Rider did, and hail on his chest. He should have mounted the skin of a red-tailed hawk on top of his head and an eagle feather pointed downward in his hair behind. He had done none of this. He wondered whether, because he went naked into battle, he would die today. He looked at the hands he had dipped into the lake, uncertain. He felt Hawk tremble in his chest.

  Suddenly men cried out. Everyone was looking at the bluffs at the west end of the big valley. The wolves were coming back at a gallop. From time to time they would ride their horses in a circle, the sign meaning the horse soldiers were here. The walking soldiers and the wagon-gun soldiers would follow.

  Quickly the Sahiyela formed into a long line and started forward. Then they separated into loose ranks across the width of the valley, the warrior societies together. Curly and his friends brought up the rear with the unproven Sahiyela youths. Finally the warriors stopped and waited for the soldiers. The hot wind made thousands of feathers flutter.

  Curly’s mind was on the carbines the horse soldiers would be carrying. The Sahiyela bore only bows and arrows and those pitiful few firearms. He reminded himself of the medicine Hail and Dark had given them. Then he thought he should be in front, like Rider, galloping boldly toward the enemy fire, his fellow warriors trailing behind. He swallowed hard.

  Buffalo Hump looked sideways at Curly. “Hokahe!” he barked.

  From a swollen throat Curly answered, “It is a good day to die.”

  Curly saw the horse soldiers canter forward across the flat valley floor. Two Sahiyela soldier societies rode off to the right and left in flanking movements. The soldiers rode out to force them back toward the center.

  A bugle sounded, an unfamiliar call. Suddenly sun flashed off the soldiers, bright slashes of light.

  The bugle sounded again, a different call, and familiar—the charge.

  The big cavalry mounts came to a gallop.

  The Sahiyela galloped straight at them.

  Soon they were close enough to see individual soldiers. Onward charged both sides.

  Suddenly Curly realized what was so strange. Over the roar of the hooves of hundreds of horses should have been another and different roar, a thunder—the sound of rifle fire.

  No such sound.

  Curly saw why. The horse soldiers were charging with their carbines put away and their swords raised.

  The medicine of Hail and Dark protected against bullets, not blades.

  All the Indian warriors seemed to make that observation at once. The men in front slowed, skittered about, turned. Others began to mill. Then the largest throng of fighting men the Sahiyela had ever put together bolted.

  The powers said this was not a day to fight.

  Warriors scattered in every direction.

  A SECRET PLEDGE

  Curly thought about that day all the way to Bear Butte.

  The Sahiyela broke and ran, which was simple judgment. They were not defeated, not routed, not terrorized. They were bewildered.

  No one had ever seen the horse soldiers make a charge with sabers instead of firearms. On the single occasion when the warriors were protected against lead, how did the wasicu soldiers know to choose steel?

  Nobody knew what it meant, but everyone could read a sign as plain as that.

  After the first moments, it had been a workable retreat. Arrows kept the soldiers mostly at a distance. The warriors scattered to give the soldiers plenty of fast-moving targets, not a single mark. Curly, Buffalo Hump, and the other Lakota rode a long way hard before they rested. When they circled around to the village later, families were dragging lodges as fast as they could go to the four directions to make many small camps. In their hurry they were leaving packs and packs of belongings on the ground. The soldiers would burn them. Even after the big hunts, people were poor again.

  But when you can’t fight, you have to run.

  The young Lakota men rode north with one Sahiyela village and ke
pt going north toward their own country. It was nearly time for the big council at Bear Butte anyway. The council had been two winters in coming. What had just happened to the Sahiyela only made it more urgent.

  The Sahiyela in that village talked only of one thing—the impossibility of what had happened. Right after the medicine lodge ceremony, when the people’s hearts beat strongest as one, how could their power have failed so utterly?

  Some of them blamed Hail and Dark, seers too young to understand the power they conjured. Others spoke bitterly of betrayal—someone must have talked loosely about the invincibility against bullets, and the soldiers heard it. Only betrayal could have led to such a calamity, they said.

  Curly thought about it all through the long ride to Paha Sapa, the Black Hills. He thought often about the possibility of betrayal from within. Sicangu themselves had told White Beard where Little Thunder’s village was, he knew, and the husband of a Lakota had guided White Beard to it. He remembered what he had seen beyond—Rider’s own people clutching at him from behind, pulling him back. Yes, your own people might betray you.

  And Curly wondered: If I’d gotten to charge into the wasicu soldiers at Creek of Turkeys, would Hawk have flown, and would my heart have soared with Hawk?

  But he didn’t know. All he knew for sure was appalling—medicine had brought the Sahiyela to disaster, and no one knew why.

  That didn’t help him much. You didn’t abandon power because it failed. Bowstrings broke, but you didn’t give up your bow and arrows. You fixed the string.

  Sometimes Light Curly Hair’s heart trembled with other thoughts: Maybe all Indian medicine was simply getting weak, like a person who was too old. Maybe the Lakota and Sahiyela people’s connection with power was feeble. Maybe the hoop of the people was broken, the Lakota and their allies the Sahiyela, too. Maybe for the Lakota it was the way they’d let their ceremonial life weaken the last twenty years. Maybe Spirit didn’t move in the world as much, and the field was left to the wasicu’s strange gods.

  Curly wondered about some things. Life was a changeling. There were old stories about how people used to live. Curly’s long-ago ancestors had had few buffalo and no horses, the tales said—they had lived by planting along the river bottoms. Then White Buffalo Cow Woman came and gave them a new way to find food, a better way.

  The wasicu didn’t always have fire boats and iron horses—they once had lived by planting and by herding sheep, so their stories said. The blackrobes told these stories.

  Life was a trickster, like Coyote. Maybe this was one of those times on the earth when the changeling life smiled at everyone and shrugged and shed its skin and took a new, unimaginable form. Curly thought such things happened. And what if, in the new form, Power abandoned the Lakota?

  A man couldn’t hold back the wind with his fingers.

  But Curly didn’t know. At the big council at Bear Butte he would look and listen, with his eyes and ears and with the cante ista, the single eye that is the heart.

  What he saw lifted his spirits as the invisible, rising, circling wind lifts the eagle.

  All the people were here together, all seven tribes of the Titunwan Lakota—his own Oglala, whom the wasicu called the Sand Throwers, his mothers’ Sicangu, the Burnt Thighs, the Mniconjou of his birth mother, Those Who Plant by the River, the Hunkpapa, Those Who Camp by the Entrance of the Circle, the Itazipicola, Those without Bows, the Oohenumpa, Two Boilings or Two Kettles, and the Sihasapa, Blackfoot, all within the hoop of the people.

  The big difference from the Sahiyela, who had all gathered together for their medicine lodge ceremony, was simply numbers. The Titunwan Lakota were a much larger group, and the Dakota lived to the east, between the Muddy Water, which the wasicu called the Missouri River, and the River of Canoes, which the wasicu called the Mississippi. Though the wasicu soldiers’ numbers approximately matched the Sahiyela fighting force at Creek of Turkeys, they could never match the Titunwan Lakota, much less the warriors of all the Lakota and Dakota.

  Curly could feel power throbbing in the pulse of his people. Power was in the circle after circle of lodges, in the beat of the drums night and day, in the babble of all the children playing, the murmur of the women talking, the men conferring, in all the embrace of the hoop of the people. The wasicu would not be able to push the Lakota around if the people stuck together.

  Curly also saw here for the first time the leaders he had heard about—Four Horns of the Hunkpapa, Long Mandan of the Oohenumpa, Crow Feathers of the Itazipicola. Little Thunder of the Sicangu and Lone Horn of the Mniconjou, one of his uncles, Curly already knew. He was glad to see these men and the Oglala’s Man-Whose-Enemies-Are-Afraid-of-His-Horses respected along with the other leaders. No one spoke of Bear-Scattering-His-Enemies, killed by the wasicu.

  The younger men were here, too, many of them shirt wearers, those who would be the leaders when they aged beyond the winters of war—Sitting Bull from the Hunkpapa, the seven-foot Touch-the-Sky from the Mniconjou, who was one of Curly’s uncles, and others. Red Cloud of the Bad Face Oglala was not a shirt wearer but was a strong leader in war.

  Across the meadow Curly heard the rising, heroic tones of an honor song:

  “Spotted Tail,

  your deeds are known.

  The people praise you.”

  Spotted Tail, his uncle! The Sicangu were riding into camp across the way. As the melody repeated, Curly ran toward the line of horses dragging travois.

  “Spotted Tail,

  your heart is big;

  your farseeing eyes are wise.”

  Curly had heard that Spotted Tail was out of the soldier prison, back among the Sicangu. But Curly had been living with the Sahiyela and hadn’t seen him. Few of these people of many council fires had seen Spotted Tail since he went east in shackles.

  Spotted Tail rode past the Itazipicola camp and into the grassy area where his people would pitch their tipis. As Curly caught up, he could see some people walking behind Spotted Tail, showing their esteem for him. The honoring song lifted once more, and this time some of the walkers joined in. But Curly could see that some of the Itazipicola turned their backs as his uncle rode past. Some of the Sicangu pushed their ponies to the far side, away from Spotted Tail, so they wouldn’t seem to join in the praise.

  Curly quickly covered his mouth in surprise. What way was this to treat Spotted Tail, the shirtman who threw away his life for the people?

  When he caught up to his uncle, Spotted Tail was dismounted, and the song ended. The big man didn’t seem to mind whatever had just happened. He grinned broadly and said, “Hello, Nephew. Do you want something to eat?”

  Though Curly wasn’t hungry, he sat and ate to spend a little time with the family. He was relieved to see the man utterly unchanged—big, hearty, full of fun. Curly had heard that prison undid men, made them gray of spirit, weak, uncertain, confused, no longer men. Spotted Tail seemed himself.

  He had been taken all the way to Fort Leavenworth and had stayed there the winter. He said everyone treated him well. He wasn’t penned up in a guardhouse or forced to wear chains. He lived with Sweetwater Woman. He went where he liked in and around the fort, talked to everyone freely, got to know many of the officers and even some of the wives. After a year they had let him come home, but Curly was off visiting the Sahiyela.

  Spotted Tail said the whites were lots of fun because they were so gullible. He himself had gotten a young white officer to eat mud. Truly, to eat mud. Spotted Tail’s eyes gleamed mischief. But he would have to tell that story later. Tonight—a-i-i-i, it seemed every night and every day, so there was no time for fun—he had to spend all his time consulting with the leaders of all the Lakota bands.

  Curly slipped away politely. He hadn’t gotten any clue why some Lakota people would not want to honor his mothers’ brother.

  The people built a double council lodge, and the leaders went there every day to speak of what was happening and what they would do.

  Since youngsters had no pl
ace at the big council lodge, Curly sought out Black Buffalo Woman. But he didn’t want to stand outside her lodge wrapped in a blanket, among other young men similarly wrapped, waiting for her to slip in beside each one (to pass one man by would give offense) and talk to each awhile in that way, with other young men and her family watching, especially her sisters. He had heard she had plenty of suitors and knew most of them would be older than he, men of more coups, and his standing there would cause talk. He wondered if any of his rivals among the Bad Faces went to court her, Pretty Fellow or No Water or Black or White Twin. They were all a winter or two older and would be more acceptable.

  So he stayed away in the evening and went instead to the Bad Face part of camp in the morning and watched until she went to the creek for water. When he called softly from the bushes, she came quickly, all smiles and little touches. As it turned out, she had a place already picked out where they could be alone. After she told her mothers some story, she met Curly there. They spent the afternoon talking a little and coupling a lot. With Black Buffalo Woman he even liked the talking.

  In English what he said would have been something like, “With this ring I make my pledge to you.”

  She watched him hesitate and was touched. “Among the Sahiyela,” he said, “young men and women who love each other say it by exchanging rings. The ring is a circle like a lodge, and it promises they will share one lodge for their lives. They wear their pledge on their fingers for everyone to see.”

  He handed it to her, rubbed and oiled to a high gleam now. They were stretched out on the grass side by side, his clothes off, hers in disarray, her hide chastity belt flung into a bush.

  She turned the ring around and around, her heart big. She focused at last on Hawk carved on the round, flat top. “Hawk perches in my heart always,” he said.

  She shot her eyes up at him, full of surprise. She knew he was telling her that Hawk was his familiar spirit, his guide. He was also hinting that he had seen beyond. In that place, he was saying, Spirit had appeared to him in the form of a hawk.