by Win Blevins
“We’ve had this discussion, Colonel.”
“Sir, I joined the army to fight.”
Yes, to whet your sword, to win glory and rank and the moist eyes of maidens, thought Carrington. Such soft eyes moisten only for fighters, men afflicted with the boyish yearning to be heroes and short of common sense. Like you.
He looked at Powell, who also wanted a chance and showed more good sense than his senior officer.
Carrington turned away from Fetterman. “Colonel,” he said, “they tell me you have a favorite boast, one you make when you think your fellow officers won’t hear. They say it’s: ‘Give me eighty men and I’ll ride through the entire Sioux nation.’ ”
Fetterman was visibly taken aback. He hesitated and blurted, “By God, sir, I would.”
Carrington looked wryly at Powell. So Fetterman didn’t even have sense enough to pretend to be prudent.
Carrington let his breath out in a rush. Well, he supposed so. He didn’t even want to look at Fetterman when he said it. “All right, Colonel, go rescue the wood train. The Eighteenth and Second,” the infantry and cavalry units, “must be nearly ready. I’ve assigned you two other officers, Captain Brown and Lieutenant Grummond, and the two scouts.” He reviewed the strategy briefly for the younger officer, still with his back to Fetterman. Carrington was thinking surely the scouts, former officers, would help him stay out of trouble.
Now he turned to Fetterman. The man looked so gleeful that Carrington wondered whether he’d heard a word of the instructions. “Colonel, your job is to rescue the wood train, not to engage the Indians unnecessarily.” Carrington was mindful of the possibility of ambush. “You may run them back a little, but not beyond Lodge Trail Ridge.”
From the look of him Fetterman was off rambling in his boyish fantasies of soldiering.
“Do you hear me, Fetterman? In no case beyond Lodge Trail Ridge.”
Fetterman nodded.
“Dismissed.”
Fetterman had trouble keeping his legs to a walk as he left the room.
“Colonel,” said Powell, “do you realize? Forty-nine men of the Eighteenth, twenty-seven of the Second, two officers, and two civilians. You’ve given him eighty men exactly.” Powell chuckled at the irony.
Carrington didn’t think it was funny.
THE BATTLE OF THE HUNDRED IN THE HANDS
Crazy Horse rode for his life, his quirt popping, the pony digging hard up the hill.
When Crazy Horse started, the others did the same. “We will be like a flock of birds scared up,” he had explained to them, “flying for our lives.”
He thought they were brave men with good sense. His brother, Little Hawk, and his friend Lone Bear, fellow Hunkpatila. Three Bad Faces, two Mniconjou, one each of the visiting Itazipicola and Sicangu.
He looked over his shoulder. The pony soldiers were coming at a gallop, whooping and hollering. They paid no attention to the wood train behind them, headed back. So maybe it was working. Yes, yes, we are like wounded animals! cried Crazy Horse in his mind. Come shoot at us and laugh.
He gave a moment’s thought to his medicine of the wind, asking it to confuse these enemies.
The pony soldiers stopped. Maybe they were waiting for the walking soldiers to catch up.
Crazy Horse rode back toward them, shouting, calling English-word insults he’d picked up. Spurts of snow burst up from the ground, but the fire was short of him. He rode closer and yelled louder and more mockingly.
The other decoys did the same. Some of them exposed themselves. Others yelled taunts. Others stood on their horses to offer conspicuous targets.
Now the pony soldiers came on at a canter. The decoys retreated to the top of the hill, circled around waving blankets, and trotted toward the next hill.
The pony soldiers stopped on the crest.
Now Crazy Horse rode badly, his weight too far forward and fighting the mouth of his pony a little, so that the pony slipped and squirreled its way down the hill. He was falling behind the others.
The pony soldiers came on. The pounding of the hooves of the big American horses sounded like one of the rolls of their drums.
Crazy Horse quirted his warhorse to the crest of the hill. He judged he was too far ahead of the soldiers. The other decoys were out of their sight. From the next hill they would follow Lodge Trail Ridge into …
He charged the soldiers. The picture of Rider sustained him. Closer and closer he got. He heard bullets kicking dirt and rock and snow all around him. He pictured them evaporating into the air.
The soldiers charged him. He spun his pony and scrambled up the hill.
Fetterman stopped on the crest of Lodge Trail Ridge. The Indians were scooting around below like spooked sage hens, birds without brains.
That nervy one came back once more, not as far this time. The bugger was pushing his luck. The U.S. Army was going to put an end to all that luck in just a few minutes.
Fetterman thought of his orders. He was at the limit. But there were command decisions in the field. Even a strutting cock of a constipated colonel had heard of command decisions in the field.
“Lo, the poor Indian!” Fetterman shouted. It was his battle cry. The scout Wheatley and Captain Brown grinned at Fetterman. Fetterman wondered if that was fear hiding behind their flashing teeth. He couldn’t tell and he didn’t care.
Orders were for followers. In the War between the States he had learned that if nothing else. A soldier saw his destiny and he seized it. See and seize. That was it.
Over and over he shouted it as the other cavalrymen came up. “Lo, the poor Indian!” he would roar, and stand up in his stirrups and wave his pistol like a flag. He had heard the ridiculous and sentimental phrase all his life. Today he would make some Indians poor, very damned poor.
He would show that coward Carrington. And put something on his record that would mark him down for the future, yes. Now he felt the wind in his face, he smelled burnt powder, he saw his quarry, and his blood was up.
The head of the infantry column, his particular command, was getting close now.
He wanted to get that Lo who was strutting about showing off, thumbing his nose at the whites. He would make that son of a bitch pay.
“Is that him, Wheatley?”
“Yessir.” The scout claimed that Lo was the one named Crazy Horse, a man who stood tall among them.
Well, Lt. Col. William Judd Fetterman was about to make that Injun stand shorter by the height of his scalp.
Orders were for cowards.
He put his spurs to the horse. His heart quickened to the rhythm of horseflesh between his legs. Oh, LordJesusGodAlmighty, wasn’t it all fine, so fine!
Crazy Horse looked back at the soldiers. Over the ridge they swarmed and down toward the forks of Peno Creek, the pony soldiers first and finally the walking soldiers in their column like ants. His decoys were riding straightaway along the creek now, a file on either side, as he had instructed.
He looked back and he looked around. Soldiers back, snow and sagebrush to the side. Snow and sagebrush and death.
He put his eagle-bone whistle to his mouth and blew the call. With his breath he cried out to his decoys, “We have done it.”
The two lines of the decoys simply crossed, making an X.
That was the signal. Fifteen or twenty hundreds of Lakota and Sahiyela and Mahpiyato warriors rose as one, twenty warriors against each soldier. Feathered arrows made the whistle of eternity in the air.
The decoys turned and sprinted back into the thick of the fight. The walking soldiers were firing their long guns to little effect. Quickly the warriors would be among them, and they wouldn’t even have to use their little powder and lead. Arrows would be enough. And then clubs and tomahawks and spears and knives.
The fighting looked fiercest in the midst of the pony soldiers crouched behind their horses or behind rocks, where the two wasicu who weren’t soldiers were shooting with their many-times-firing rifles. As Crazy Horse came up, he saw the Mnico
njou Eats Meat gallop straight into the white line. As he tried to bolt out the other side, he went down.
Crazy Horse felt his medicine rise in his chest again and quirted his warhorse straight at the wasicu. Hawk’s wings thrummed in his chest to the beat of the hooves of Rider’s horse, and he felt his invulnerability. Over his head Hawk screamed primally, “KEE-ur-r-r, KEE-ur-r-r!” He sailed straight over one kneeling soldier and through the line and out the other side.
As some of the Sahiyela tried to ride through the line, Crazy Horse used two of the only four shells he had and sent one trooper rolling down the icy slope.
He saw that the soldiers were starting to use their guns as clubs. He smiled grimly to himself. The warriors would have plenty of firearms after today, but no ammunition.
He turned his horse and cantered over the battlefield, surveying. He felt that he flew like Hawk over the snowy plain far below. He saw everything. He swooped down where he pleased. When he liked, he wheeled high and watched.
They had done it.
He flew down to earth.
He looked at bodies, mere corpses now, no longer men. They were ugly. The positions of arms and legs were ugly. The wounds were ugly. The expressions on the faces were ugly.
He murmured, “Human beings without spirit are ugly.”
He dismounted. He wanted to walk the killing field, smell the bloodletting, stroll among the deaths.
We did it, he thought.
Next to the body of an infantryman he bent down. Blood was dribbling down from a gut wound. He touched the liquid on the uniform, still warm. He touched it on the snow, congealed, icy. He shook his head regretfully.
Yes, we did it.
THE WAGON BOX FIGHT
After they killed the hundred in the hands, the Lakota kept the big camp together. The Midwinter Moon, when the days are shortest and the snow deepest, was no time to be moving the villages. The hunters went out every day, but there was not enough game in one area to feed so many people. This was one of the hungry winters.
In the Snow-Blind Moon the camp split into smaller villages. The village of Crazy Horse, which people now called the Long Face camp after Worm’s brother, went up to the headwaters of Shifting Sands River. The living there was hard, but Crazy Horse told his uncle Long Face he wanted to keep an eye on the soldiers in Fort Reno, which was nearby. Maybe the wasicu would fill their Shifting Sands River forts with many more soldiers. Maybe they would get out of the country. He wanted to know which.
He and Little Hawk rode long and cold every day, hunting for meat. They wore moccasins with the hair on and thick blanket coats and as always rubbed soot mixed with fat on their cheeks to prevent snow blindness. Crazy Horse had the joy of the hundred in the hands to keep him warm.
These were his days. Hardship, yes, that was a warrior’s life. The fighting wasn’t the worst for him, or the hunger, the bitter cold, the exhaustion. The loss of friends and relatives was painful. Lone Bear had died at the fight of the hundred in the hands, and that death hurt him. All deaths hurt him, Lakota, Sahiyela, even wasicu. But this was a warrior’s time, and he chose to glory in it.
One day when they were going up toward Crazy Woman Fork, their ponies played out. The brothers put on pine-bough snowshoes and kept going. Finally, in some broken country, Crazy Horse spotted a herd of about a hundred elk in a little canyon. They got downwind and crept as close as they could. When the elk finally smelled them, the beasts thrashed through deep drifts toward higher ground. Before they got away, the brothers killed eight stragglers.
When the fire was built and some meat roasted, Crazy Horse cut off a piece and held it out. “To the west,” he said, “where the wakinyan live. To the north, home of the white giant. To the east, home of the sun. To the south, where we are always looking.” He made this gesture not only in thanks for the eight elk that would feed his family and some of the village’s poor ones, but for the herd that would feed the village. “Father Sky, Mother Earth,” he said, “pila maya.”
He had other reasons in his heart for gratitude. Now he wouldn’t have to hunt food anymore this spring. He could turn his mind to war.
He also had a thought he didn’t dwell on. He would give the teeth of these eight elk to Black Buffalo Woman. Nothing decorated a ceremonial dress more beautifully than elk teeth. It would cause talk, but he didn’t care—he had a right to make a woman a gift, even another man’s wife.
He thought of her every day. The Hunkpatila and the Bad Face camps had been together this winter, and she had always been in his eye. She had teased him about being so old and such an important man, yet having no wife. No Water even kidded him about living with Grandmother Plum. “Hey,” he gibed, “why isn’t the woman in your lodge young and eager? Why aren’t you making sons who have your courage?”
They were acting like cousins, sort of. Black Buffalo Woman meant him well and seemed still to feel guilty about the way she’d acted. No Water would probably sleep better if he felt sure Crazy Horse was dreaming about another woman. But he wasn’t dreaming of another, and never would.
Yes, he would give her the elk teeth.
He spent his days watching Fort Reno and his nights in cold, lonely bivouacs. Now that his family was fed, he acted homeless. He built no fires and ate only pemmican. He watched for the couriers, the men who went out hunting, those who made trips for water or wood. He approached them as silently and as fiercely as Hawk attacking from the air. Swiftly and mercilessly, he killed them.
He left their bodies to the ravens. He didn’t scalp them. He didn’t leave any kind of signature. His people would know well enough who slew without scalping. And it didn’t matter if anyone knew. To their companions the dead men simply disappeared.
These killings were for Lone Bear, who had died because wasicu came into his country, where they had no business being. It didn’t matter that the hundred in the hands died. They offended, so they died. Lone Bear had been defending his home and deserved to live.
Crazy Horse didn’t count his kills, because it didn’t matter. The days of watching in silence, waiting with meditative patience, approaching in a warrior’s way, and attacking with Hawk soaring—these mattered.
At the sun dance, in the fullness of the Moon When the Chokecherries Ripen, the talk was of the forts in Shifting Sands River country.
Man-Whose-Enemies-Are-Afraid-of-His-Horses had gone in to talk to the whites at their request. He told them the Oglala didn’t want peace—they just wanted the Shifting Sands River road closed. Plus guns and ammunition. When could they trade for more guns, he asked, and more ammunition?
The warriors smiled as they told it. It was good to see the whites’ faces when their headmen stood up to them.
And that, thought Crazy Horse, is what comes of giving the wasicu a good whipping.
The whites said a hundred weren’t killed on Peno Creek, but only eighty-one. Crazy Horse and others answered that the soldiers were a gift from Spirit, a realization of the dream of the winkte, and when Spirit gives you something, you don’t count the number.
Red Cloud went in to the talk also, but he kept his mouth shut. People nodded approvingly. This was good. Though the whites were treating him like an important man, Red Cloud was not a chief but just a war leader and should have nothing to say in council with the whites. But some people muttered that he was working to make himself a big man with the officers and Indian agents. Maybe he wasn’t thinking of kicking them out of Shifting Sands River country, these people said, but only of seeing how much he could get for giving the country away.
Crazy Horse held his tongue. No one could give the Shifting Sands River country away.
He heard that some headmen agreed with whatever the whites said about this or anything else. His uncle Spotted Tail seemed to be one of these. Last summer Little Thunder had given up leadership of his band of Sicangu to Spotted Tail. He was a big man now and all for living on a reservation, hunting where the whites told him to, trading only at the agency, and in general a
cting obedient. He was willing to sign away the hunting grounds of Shifting Sands River, where he didn’t live anyway.
Crazy Horse wondered if Spotted Tail would even sign away Paha Sapa, the special hunting country of the people, which the whites called the Black Hills. No, he decided, that place belonged to all the Lakota. More than any other place, it was where Lakota men and women went to seek visions and to raise their dead on scaffolds. It was sacred.
Crazy Horse tried not to think about it. Spotted Tail was his mothers’ brother. The teenage Curly had loved the man. He had taught Curly hunting and war and much about life. A shirtman, he had shown himself willing to throw down his life for the people. He had seemed to vibrate with aliveness. Yet since he had come back from captivity, he had acted like a dog hanging around the whites’ camp hoping to be thrown scraps.
The rest of the talk among the warriors was of how they would run the whites out of Shifting Sands River country this summer. No whites from Paha Sapa to the Shining Mountains, from the Elk River, which the whites called the Yellowstone, to the Shell River! Lots of warriors had a plan, and the war leaders consulted closely. The warriors wanted to know what Crazy Horse was going to do—many of them wanted to follow him, whatever he did. The war leaders kept talking, but no one decided anything.
Worm watched his elder son light the canupa and accepted it from his hands. He drew deep, puffed the smoke out, and watched it rise toward the center hole of the tipi and Father Sky beyond. He handed the canupa to his younger son.
He was honoring his sons by coming to their lodge, making them hosts, and they knew it. He looked at each of them and their friend Buffalo Hump obliquely, not directly in the eyes unless they invited it. The ropy, slender Crazy Horse with his light hair always had his eyes on something no one else could see. The bigger, huskier Little Hawk, a contrast to his older brother, was impulsive, impatient of nuances. The handsome Buffalo Hump, tall, beautifully muscled, was quick to laugh, quick to flirt, quick to fight.
Worm had encouraged the setting up of this lodge, where his two sons lived with their grandmother Plum. Neither of them was married, the younger twenty-one winters old, the elder nearly thirty and a shirtman. Men of that age didn’t belong in their parents’ lodge. For an old woman to take care of their lodge, that was the best way. By good luck their grandmother needed a home and had always had a special connection with Crazy Horse.
