Climb the Wind: A Journey Into Another Past

by Pamela Sargent

  “Did he drive them from his own lands?” Crazy Horse asked.

  Touch-the-Clouds touched the small medicine bag of amulets hanging around his neck. “He did more than that. He became their chief. He took their lands for his people.”

  Crazy Horse pressed his lips together. “We do not need the lands to the east,” he said at last. “That is not why we fight. We fight for our sacred hills and our grazing grounds and to save the buffalo—we fight for what is ours, for what even the Wasichu call ours in their treaties before they break their promises. We fight to live as men should, to be free and to wander our hunting grounds.”

  Grisha seemed about to speak, but Crazy Horse looked at him then, and he kept silent.

  “That is also why I fight,” Touch-the-Clouds said, “to preserve what we have. But sometimes a man must strike at his enemy, and take more from him even than he wants to take, in order to keep what he has.”

  Crazy Horse said nothing.

  “After I had my first vision, this Yellow Hair came to me and told my vision to me, told me what I had seen, before I had spoken of it to him. Have we not made allies of old enemies? Are we not stronger than we were? Does that not prove the truth of what my visions have shown me?”

  “I remembered something before riding here,’’ Crazy Horse said in a low voice. “I say remember because that is how it seemed, that my thoughts were turning to the past and what had happened then. I remembered a man riding to me to tell me of a long-haired Blue Coat and his men who rode down on Black Kettle’s camp and killed everyone there—the women, the children, the old men. But I also remembered Black Kettle being left in peace, and a strong feeling—a knowing—that he was still alive came over me.”

  Touch-the-Clouds murmured, “Black Kettle and the Cheyenne who camped with him were killed at the Washita River by the Blue Coat called Long Hair Custer.”

  “I know that.” Crazy Horse shook back his hair. “Yet this memory that he was still alive came to me, and that is what it was—a memory. It was not a vision, taking me from this world and showing me what is true, and yet it held the power of past truth. It was as real to me as my memory of my first buffalo hunt, or my first vision. I recalled the words of the warrior who told me of the massacre clearly. I knew that Black Kettle had left this world, and yet it was not so. I saw a world where he still lived, where his people still lived, and only after a while did I remember that it wasn’t so. And I do not know what this means, this memory that was not a true memory.”

  Katia made a small sound in her throat. The gaze of Touch-the-Clouds shifted to her. “Get away from here, woman,” he said harshly.

  She fled.

  Near sunset, Crazy Horse rode away with his band. The men, Grisha among them this time, had gone back inside the tepee of Touch-the-Clouds. Graceful Swan followed White Cow Sees back to their husband’s tepee, wondering what had passed between the men.

  Grisha came out of the tent, stood up straight, and said, “Crazy Horse is still our brother.”

  White Cow Sees smiled. “Of course he is. He only had to speak to my husband again to know that.”

  “I will be leaving soon,” Grisha said to Graceful Swan in English as White Cow Sees stooped to enter the tepee.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “I do not know yet, but Touch-the-Clouds will be more at ease if I leave his camp for a while.”

  That night, Graceful Swan’s monthly bleeding came upon her. She kept away from her husband for four days until the bleeding stopped. Grisha had remained in the camp. On the day he was to leave, at the beginning of the Moon of Red Cherries, he came to her tepee.

  “Go to your husband,” Grisha told her, “and tell him that you are coming away with me.”

  She gaped at him, too startled to speak, wondering if Grisha had grown jealous of her husband. Perhaps he had come to love her, to regret seeing her married to Touch-the-Clouds. She felt confused.

  “Have you lost your wits, Katia?” He spoke in English now. “He thinks that you now may be of more use to him away from here. You will still be his wife—he knows that there is nothing between us. Even if there were, you would have the right to leave him.”

  “I don’t know what to tell him,” she said softly.

  “Tell him that it has been hard for you to live your old life, that you have grown used to the white world, that there are people and places you want to see before you return to him. Tell him whatever you like, Katia. He wants you to go, and I have agreed to take you. He is only trying to save you from being shamed in front of others by letting you leave him, instead of having him hand you over to me.”

  For a moment, she could not breathe. Something swelled inside her and she began to shake. She wanted to scream, to rage at Grisha and her husband for what they were doing, for treating her this way.

  “You take me away and teach me how to live in your world,” she said, keeping her voice low. “Then you bring me back here and I have to remember my name and find my old life and now that I’ve found it, you want to take me away again.”

  “Are you so sorry to leave? Have you not tired of the work? Do you love your husband so much?”

  Katia looked at him from the sides of her eyes. “I know that he does not love me.”

  “You can see visions. You have medicine in you, strong medicine, that the chief might be able to use. You know how to live in the world of the Wasichu, and perhaps he can use that, too. If he wins his battles, you will be honored and rewarded for any part you play in his victory.”

  She made her hands into fists. “You care nothing for me, either.”

  “I am concerned for you. I would not willingly see harm come to you.” Grisha showed his teeth. “It is true that if you had been an ordinary, simple girl with no gifts and no beauty and nothing I could use, I would have left you in this camp when you were still a child. Do you think you would have been happier then?”

  She was still trembling. Her gorge rose; she wanted to lash out at Grisha, to strike him and curse at him. She had not known that she could feel such rage.

  “You have a chance now,” he went on, “to help Touch-the-Clouds avenge your mother and father and all of your people, to see that the Wasichu never commit such crimes against other red men again, but you must let others decide how to use you in that struggle.”

  She struggled to control her anger. Rage would not help her. If Grisha and Touch-the-Clouds planned to use her, then she would have to find a way to gain something for herself in whatever they intended for her.

  Grisha said, “Go to your husband and tell him that you are leaving him.”

  She turned and walked toward her husband’s tepee. It was strange that she felt no pain at knowing that Touch-the-Clouds wanted her to leave him, but she had seen all along that he did not care for her. She was not carrying his child, so he did not need her here, she was useless to him here. He needed her for some purpose of his own, something connected to Grisha and the Lakota battle with the Wasichu.

  It came to her then that she would miss White Cow Sees much more than she would miss her husband. Leaving her would be like losing her mother all over again.

  SIX

  Black Eagle had encountered many wonders in Washington. In the house of the Great Father, he had seen tiny fires flickering inside crystal ornaments that glittered on the sides of walls and hung down from high ceilings into vast rooms. He had seen places with more houses and walls and people than he had ever believed could exist in the world. He and Red Cloud and the other chiefs had ridden the Iron Horse from their lands to the place called Chicago, and Black Eagle had marveled that one city could hold so many people. Later, he had traveled through other cities that were even bigger than Chicago.

  The Iron Horse, with its shaking and its panting and its thick black smoke, had at first terrified him, and the masses of people rushing about in the Wasichu cities had made him even more fearful. But nothing on the journey to the East had frightened Black Eagle as much as returning
to his own land knowing that he would have to ride to Touch-the-Clouds to tell him of what he had seen.

  Touch-the-Clouds, he told himself as his horse trotted over the grassland, was one of the greatest of the Lakota chiefs, surely as great as Crazy Horse or Sitting Bull. He was, many now said, the equal of any chief who had ever lived, but Black Eagle preferred to admire his greatness from a distance.

  Black Eagle reined in his horse. By the time the camp of Touch-the-Clouds was visible on the western horizon, thin gray streams of smoke rising from tepees crowned by the fans of the poles that supported them, his mount was moving at a trot. He now wished that he had never promised Touch-the-Clouds that he would report to him on his journey. When he had made that promise, he was expecting to see Wasichu in settlements much larger than their forts and outlying towns, and more signs of their power and wealth, but not the mobs of white people, the buildings that seemed to touch the clouds, and things that he did not understand, ornaments of glass and metal and tubing that made strange sounds and that he could stare at for a long time without being able even to guess at what they were. In the great rooms where they had lived while in Washington—he and Red Cloud and Spotted Tail and all the other chiefs who had gone there at the Little Father’s invitation—he would stare at the carpet under his feet and the pictures on the walls and wonder how they had been made. He had wondered at times if he were still in the real world.

  How could he speak to Touch-the-Clouds about that? How could he tell the other chief that his visions might have misled him about how to fight the Wasichu?

  His horse slowed to a walk. Touch-the-Clouds would wonder why Black Eagle had come alone, why he had not brought his brother, his son, or some of his men with him. It was because he was far more afraid of Touch-the-Clouds than of anything he had seen among the Wasichu, and did not want anyone close to him to suffer if Touch-the-Clouds grew angry with him about what he would have to tell him. Touch-the-Clouds, everyone knew, had killed his own brother for raiding a Crow village, even though the Crow had long been their enemies before promising peace. No Lakota had dared to call his brother’s death a murder, or to point out that his brother had had unfinished business with the Crow chief he had attacked, and that some would consider his raid justified.

  Black Eagle did not want to think of what Touch-the-Clouds might do to a man who was riding to him to tell him that his battle was lost before he even fought it.

  Touch-the-Clouds welcomed Black Eagle into his tepee, seating him in the back, in the place of honor, under a leather shield that hung from a horn set into a pole. His wife, White Cow Sees, set out food. Black Eagle expected that others would come there to make speeches of welcome and to hear what he had to say, but when they had finished their meal, Touch-the-Clouds looked directly at him and said, “Tell me about this new treaty between Red Cloud and the Wasichu.”

  “It is not a new treaty,” Black Eagle replied, dismayed that the other man obviously wanted to speak to him alone. The presence of other men and the smoking of a ceremonial pipe might have brought Touch-the-Clouds to swallow his anger and restrain himself. “It is the same treaty offered to the Lakota before we went to Washington. Since we and the Wasichu are in agreement about what it says, Red Cloud and any of the Lakota who wish to live in their hunting grounds may do so. It says so in the treaty, whatever we were told before. We can stay by the Powder River, and do not have to live by the Missouri. We do not have to stay on the reservation or trade there.”

  “That is what the Wasichu say now,” Touch-the-Clouds said in a small voice. When his voice got that small and that soft, Black Eagle was even more afraid of him than when he shouted. “Later their interpreters will tell us that the treaty says something else again.”

  “It was the Little Father who told us we were right about what the treaty says,” Black Eagle said, “and the Great Father agreed with him.”

  White Cow Sees sat in the shadows to their left with her two sons, one of them a baby and the other a boy of five years. “Tell us of what you saw in the East,” she said after a long silence.

  He spoke of the Iron Horse and the cities that were like anthills and the strawberries and cream they had eaten at the Great Father’s White House, and then Touch-the-Clouds waved a hand impatiently. “I don’t want to hear tales of one wonder after another and of how you filled your bellies. I want to know what you think of the Wasichu.”

  Black Eagle had been dreading that demand. His eyes shifted uneasily toward the large medicine bundle on the right side of the tent as he silently sent up a prayer for protection. “What I think of them?” he asked, trying to put off what he must say.

  “What you think our chances are against such an enemy. How strong you think they are. How the chiefs who traveled with you think we could fight such an enemy if the treaty is broken again.”

  “We would fight them as we have before.” Touch-the-Clouds would have seen that answer coming; he was probing for something else. Black Eagle had seen him do it before when meeting with other chiefs, asking questions that everyone else believed were already answered, as if the true answer to what he was asking had to be flushed from the thicket of words like a rabbit from under a bush.

  Touch-the-Clouds leaned forward. “You mean that we must fight them here, drive them back from our lands.”

  “How else can we fight them?” Black Eagle asked. “All we can hope to do is to keep what lands we have and make the Wasichu honor their treaties. But we may be able to do that without fighting, with the Little Father to speak for us in the councils in Washington. He is our friend.”

  “When he was traveling near our lands, up the Missouri, I did not go to see him. Perhaps I should have, so that I could see for myself what kind of man he is. His comrade stayed in another camp for a short time, and I did not go to see him, either. The Little Father, Ely Parker, calls himself our friend, but what I see is that he is asking our people to live on only whatever lands the Wasichu will allow us to have. He wants much the same thing as the Wasichu want from us. The only difference is that he does not lust to kill us and will give us more time to resign ourselves to giving up whatever the whites want to take from us before we are forced to live as diggers of soil, as men tilling the ground.” Touch-the-Clouds turned his head and spat.

  “He is our friend,” Black Eagle said again, but the words sounded more hollow this time.

  Touch-the-Clouds drew up his legs and rested his arms on them. “Tell me of your meetings with him.”

  “But you know what happened. You know of the treaty, and—”

  “I want to hear it in your words, Black Eagle.”

  “It is very simple.” Black Eagle sucked in some air. “When the treaty was first said to us in our own tongue, by the white chief called Secretary Cox, Red Cloud said that it was not the treaty he had agreed to earlier. He said that the words were wrong, that the interpreters were wrong. The Wasichu Cox disagreed. Red Cloud grew very angry. At last we went back to the rooms in the great house where we were living and Red Cloud said that we had been lied to and would have to go home. I said that if we went home then, we would have to tell everyone that we were deceived, and that I would rather die in Washington than do that.” He let out a sigh. “But the Little Father Parker told us that he would set things right, and so he did. We went to another meeting with the man Cox, and were told that the treaty was as we understood it, that the interpreters had been wrong when they translated it for us.”

  Black Eagle paused. “Go on,” Touch-the-Clouds said.

  “That’s all there is to say. From Washington, we went to New York, and Red Cloud went before many Wasichu, and he saw that many of them were willing to be our friends. You would have marveled at the sight of so many, crowding into a big room to hear the words of Red Cloud, to hear him say that all he wanted was peace and what is already ours. Many of the Wasichu stood up at the end and shouted that what he said was the truth.”

  “And now Red Cloud is inviting all the chiefs to a council a
t the Wasichu fort of Laramie, and they think they will decide on where we will go to trade.” Touch-the-Clouds frowned. “They think that they will get the Wasichu to agree to a post along the Platte, and not force more of the Lakota to live near the Missouri. Red Cloud has already sent Man Afraid of His Horses to ask me to ride to the fort, to give in and say that I will agree to this new wording of the treaty.”

  Black Eagle heard the hardness in the other man’s voice and wished again that he had not promised to ride here. “And what did you say?” he managed to ask.

  “Tell me what you agreed to do, Black Eagle.”

  “I said that I would go to Fort Laramie. What else could I say?”

  Touch-the-Clouds leaned closer to the fire. “I said that I would not go, that the Wasichu have cast bad medicine over Red Cloud’s eyes, and that now he sees only what they want him to see. When I said that, Man Afraid of His Horses told me that Sitting Bull had said the same words to him, that Sitting Bull won’t go to Fort Laramie either.”

  “And I would have given the same answer as you did,” Black Eagle said quickly, “if I had not gone to Washington and seen the Little Father for myself. We do not have only the word of the Wasichu, but also the promise of Parker. He is on our side.”

  “And how long do you think his promise will last?” Touch-the-Clouds stared into the fire. “Yes, the Little Father Parker may be our friend. At least he sees himself that way. That much I believe, because he is also the friend of the Yellow Hair Rubalev. But Parker has enemies, and they will not let him stand in the way of what they want forever. So Yellow Hair Rubalev has told me.”

  “You won’t trust the Little Father, but you will listen to that Wasichu Rubalev.”

  “I think that the Little Father spoke truly to Red Cloud, but also that the Wasichu will work against him. I trust Rubalev only because I can use him.”