Climb the Wind: A Journey Into Another Past

by Pamela Sargent

  “Touch-the-Clouds will have moved his camp to the Yellowstone River by now, to wait for others to join him for the hunt.”

  “Send a message to Bismarck,” Katia said, “and to White Eagle’s camp. White Eagle will find a way to get it to Touch-the-Clouds. War will come. Touch-the-Clouds has to be told.” She was speaking in a whisper now, so softly that he could hardly hear her.

  He slipped an arm around her shoulders. “Stop it, Katia. What’s happening is frightening, it’s almost impossible to believe. But it’s the South that’s more likely to suffer now than the West. Stanton is—”

  “Do not speak to me of that. A vision has come to me, Lemuel. I am seeing it now—flames and Blue Coats all around us and people screaming and a war in which the Lakota will have to fight. I hear them fighting all around me, I hear them singing their war songs. They are as real as the spirits I saw in the Black Hills and at the Greasy Grass, as real as the warriors I saw riding in the street in New York.”

  She had never told him about any vision in New York. Her face contorted; he saw her struggling to contain herself. “The war will be carried here,” she said, “if Touch-the-Clouds does not act. Promise me, promise me that you will have this message sent.”

  “I promise,” Lemuel said. He could grant her that much, and leave it to White Eagle as to what to do with her message. “What do you want to tell him?”

  “War is coming, my former husband,” she said. “This vision is as true as the vision of Sitting Bull and Custer at the Greasy Grass. You married me for my visions and now I have seen the vision you must follow. You must prepare to fight, and you will need every comrade you can find to fight with you. Do not wait. Prepare yourself, and tell all of your allies to prepare for war.”

  “The treaty—”

  She looked at him and he saw terror in her eyes. “The treaty will be broken. You must know that, even if you pretend it isn’t so.”

  He thought of how immaterial the town of Elysium had looked as he was riding toward it.

  “I see flames,” Katia said, “burning around me.”

  “I’ll have the message sent for you,” he said, trying to console her. “Your vision is only a warning, Katia. It doesn’t have to come to pass.”

  The crowd was dispersing. Toland had gone back inside, perhaps to receive another message. “Come with me,” Lemuel said as he led her toward the telegraph office.

  Dancing Girl saw the dust cloud in the distance as she sat outside the talking wire tepee. She and Yellow Bird had been listening with the men to the messages from Bismarck the day before, and then the messages had stopped.

  She had known what the talking wire was telling them before the men translated the messages aloud. The Great Father was dead, and now the chiefs of the Wasichu in Washington were three Blue Coats. A fourth chief, Four Star Sherman, had been found dead at his home, with a Wasichu medicine man saying that the evil spirit that had killed him had struck at his heart, and now Three Star Sheridan had been relieved of command. Many men, more than could be easily counted, had also been hanged in many places in the South. More men in the Eastern cities were being summoned to put on the blue coats of the army and fight. The men in White Eagle’s camp had been hearing such messages for nearly a week now, and then the spirits in the talking wire had suddenly stopped speaking to them.

  The silence disturbed the men. Why would the wire to Bismarck fall silent? A fierce wind had torn across the land the other day, from behind the rise to the west that sheltered the camp. Maybe the wind had brought down the talking wire. The talking wire was often silent in winter, usually for moons, when the snow came and tore the wires from their poles. But the wire was not often silent in summer.

  Dancing Girl’s father White Eagle had listened to the silence for a time, then told Denis Laforte that morning to ride east and scout around Fort Lincoln. Four days ago, a message had come telling her father that the former wife of Touch-the-Clouds, Graceful Swan, was having visions of war and warning the chiefs to prepare for battle. White Eagle had sent a rider to an Arikara camp a day’s ride west, telling him to relay the message of war to Touch-the-Clouds.

  Her father might be thinking of that vision now, Dancing Girl thought.

  To the north, a black cloud had formed on the horizon. A storm might suddenly come upon them; storms could come almost without warning on this flat, empty land. A gentle breeze was still blowing. She sniffed at the air, then guessed that the storm would not reach them until night and might miss them altogether.

  Looking east, she cupped a hand over her eyes and stared at the dust cloud. She could make out the form of Denis Laforte; that was the way the Wasichu Sapa sat in the saddle, and he was riding awfully fast, at a full gallop. Far behind him, almost at the eastern horizon, she saw another dust cloud, a much larger one.

  “Someone’s coming,” Yellow Bird said to her, “a lot of people.”

  Her father was standing with some of the wire warriors near the talking wire pole, having a palaver about the coming buffalo hunt. White Eagle gazed in the direction of the dust cloud and watched it for a while, then let out a cry.

  “Aieeee!”

  Another man took up the cry. “Aieeee!”

  “Fuck,” White Eagle said in English, “son of a bitch,” and then in Lakota, “It is a good day to die.” He spun around and waved his arms at Dancing Girl and Yellow Bird. “Tell the women to take what they can and get away from here.”

  Dancing Girl ran toward the tepee of Young Spring Grass, then turned to look back. Laforte was still far ahead of the second dust cloud, but she could now see bits of blue color amid the brown and yellow of the dust and the red and white of a Wasichu flag. Blue Coats were riding here. Soldiers were not supposed to be in this land, not this far west of Bismarck. They were breaking the treaty by riding here without warning, without first asking if they could come here.

  “Go on, Dancing Girl!” Yellow Bird screamed at her. “I will get the horses!”

  “The Blue Coats are coming!” Dancing Girl shouted as she ran toward the circle of tepees. It came to her suddenly that she had shouted the words in the white man’s tongue. “The Blue Coats are coming!” she shouted in Lakota. Two women darted out of their tepees, one with a child in her arms. “Get away from here as fast as you can!” She could hear Laforte’s cries, carried to her by a wind that was starting to pick up. He was warning them to run for cover on the rise and make their stand there.

  “It is a good day to die!” a warrior shouted in the distance.

  Lemuel had ridden out with Dives Backward to keep watch along the river. The prevailing mood in the town of Elysium, and in St. Joseph across the Missouri River, was one of fear and apprehension. The memory of Quantrill and his guerrillas, who had slaughtered so many in the name of the Confederacy during the Civil War, was still fresh in this region. Another band of cutthroats might form to take vengeance against any whose allegiance was to the Union.

  The Union, Lemuel thought, wondering if anything still existed that could even be called the Union, if three generals with the sanction of the chief justice of the Supreme Court could be considered a legitimate government. He also worried about how long the peace of the Plains territories would endure. The sooner the cabal in Washington managed to crush the Southern resistance completely, the sooner they could turn their attention to the West. The railroad men and the bankers had probably already slipped some of their stocks and bonds to the cabal, knowing that the stocks would become more valuable only after the Plains were open to development.

  Stanton was another matter. Stanton was a stern, unyielding zealot, which probably meant that he was even more dangerous than someone who was merely greedy.

  Dives Backward reined in his horse. “Maybe go back,” the Cheyenne said in English. A half-breed Kansan had ridden into town two days ago claiming that he had seen at least two hundred men, all armed and many in the blue coats of soldiers, less than a half-day’s ride south of Elysium, not far from the river. Since
then, the Indians camped there had sent out a few scouts and other men were taking turns keeping watch along the roads that led to the town.

  “Maybe go back,” Dives Backward said again. His English was not fluent, but his Lakota was even worse.

  “We might as well,” Lemuel said. Except for a stagecoach heading toward Atchison, there had been little activity along the road that followed the Missouri south along the low bluffs overlooking the river. The half-breed had been quite agitated about seeing men in the blue coats of soldiers, but a band of guerrillas fighting for the South might want to disguise themselves.

  They rode north. Dives Backward began to sing in Cheyenne; Lemuel understood enough to make out his words. “We fought the White Chief with Yellow Hair,” Dives Backward sang, “we fought the one called the Son of the Morning Star. Now his spirit rides over the Plains, now God has made his spirit watch over us and protect us so that the treaty is not broken again.” Dives Backward had not been at the Battle of the Black Hills, but Lemuel had heard other Indians sing of Custer; they had made him into a legend.

  “His spirit must watch over us,” Dives Backward sang, and Lemuel recalled the vainglorious man who had been so quick to rush into battle.

  The dream had come to her before, and now she knew that she would not escape her dream this time. The fire was all around her, and people were screaming.

  Katia let out a cry and was suddenly awake. Someone called out in the night; the bell in the nearby church was ringing.

  “Fire!” a man’s voice cried out. “Fire!”

  Katia rolled out of bed and ran to her window. Across the road, the small wooden church that had been put up by a group of Elysium’s Negroes was burning. She looked up the street and saw more flames leaping from the roofs of other buildings.

  She slipped into her deerskin boots, grabbed a short cape from a hook on the wall, and hurried to her door. She yanked at the knob, pulling the door open, and ran into the sitting room.

  The room was filled with smoke. Jenny Catcher, the Cherokee woman who had rented Katia and Lemuel a bedroom in her house, had her face covered with a cloth. Katia stumbled toward the other woman and took her by the arm. The smoke was so thick and the room so dark that she could barely see the door.

  The church bell across the way had stopped ringing. Katia let Jenny lead her to the front door. As they made their way outside, she saw that a bucket brigade had formed down the road to fight the fire, in front of the general store. The telegraph office was burning, and there were other fires; she saw fires and the billowing pale smoke rising from the flames to the night sky. Much of the town was on fire, she realized. How could the flames have spread so fast? She gulped air, nearly choking on the smoke.

  People ran from the nearby buildings. “We’ve lost it!” a man with a bucket shouted as a blackened wall of the church collapsed. More people were running into the street, some carrying bundles of belongings.

  Katia was still hanging on to Jenny Catcher’s arm. The Cherokee woman turned to watch the flames dancing on the roof of her small house. “It’s all going to burn,” Jenny muttered. Her voice was steady for a woman who would lose everything, who would be left with nothing but the nightgown she was wearing.

  The roof of the telegraph office suddenly caved in, sending showers of sparks and pieces of burning wood over the men fighting the fire. “Come on,” Katia said to Jenny. “We aren’t safe here.”

  A wagon rattled past them. They followed the stream of people heading away from the center of the town. She felt as though she was still in her dream. She opened her mouth, but no sound came out; inside her head, a part of her was screaming. The crowd had reached the livery stable when, in the distance, Katia heard the short, sharp sounds of gunfire.

  The stable was on fire. She heard the shrieks of the horses inside. Two men led two horses through the open stable door; the horses reared.

  Men rode toward them out of the darkness. In the light of the burning stable, Katia saw their blue coats and the yellow stripes on the sides of their trousers. She watched numbly as a man aimed his rifle into the crowd; others were shooting at people with revolvers.

  The crowd surged toward her. Katia lost her grip on Jenny and nearly fell to the ground. She stumbled toward the side of the road just as a rider bore down on her. His horse reared; she saw him take aim. She leaped toward him; the gun barrel caught her on the side of the head.

  Katia was lying on the ground. She managed to sit up. There were three of them around her now, all in blue coats, all with their rifles and revolvers trained on her. Everything seemed to be happening very slowly. She had known that war would come again, and had feared it, but she was no longer afraid. The spirits had spoken truly to her in her dreams and visions, and she had served their purpose. She thought of the vision of victorious warriors she had seen in New York and knew then that this war had to come.

  “Hoka hey,’’ she said to the men who would bring death to her, “It is a good day to die,” and then a bullet caught her in the chest.

  The people of White Eagle’s camp had made it to the rise before the Blue Coats were within range. The women had led the way through the trails among the rocks, then concealed themselves behind boulders. The men followed, taking up positions on the slope of the rocky rise. Three of the younger boys herded the horses into a small clearing sheltered by a rock outcropping. The horses were growing skittish. The boys tethered them and moved among them, rubbing them down and soothing them.

  Dancing Girl was behind a rocky boulder with Young Spring Grass and Yellow Bird. She peered over the rock. There had been barely enough time to ride here, to reach safety and secure the horses, and to have a place from which to fight.

  “This is good,” Young Spring Grass murmured beside her. “We have the higher ground, and the men have many weapons.” So did several of the women; Young Spring Grass had brought her Winchester rifle, while a few of the other women were armed with Springfields. If the Wasichu woman Unlucky Jane could use such weapons and go into battle with men, perhaps other women should learn how to use the white man’s firesticks. So Young Spring Grass had reasoned, and Lakota and Cheyenne warriors could now make or acquire enough firesticks of their own to allow the women a few.

  Dancing Girl stood on her toes and peered over the rock ledge. The sky was growing darker, and not only from the sun setting behind them; the black clouds to the north were thickening. She still could not tell if the storm would reach them or miss them.

  Out on the plain to the east, where the camp had been, the Blue Coats had chased off the rest of their horses, smashed up the telegraph, and set the tepees on fire. A plume of black smoke rose from what had been Dancing Girl’s home, but the tepee did not matter. What mattered was that the women had only what food and water they had hastily grabbed, and the men had almost none, while the Blue Coats probably had enough to last for some time. There had to be nearly forty of the soldiers; not so many, but there were only fifty people with White Eagle, and that number included the women and children.

  What also mattered, Dancing Girl thought, was that the Blue Coats would have more firesticks and more bullets for their weapons. They would try to get the people they had driven to the rise to waste their ammunition.

  “Bastards,” Young Spring Grass said in English. “Big ugly Wasichu sonabitches.” She had learned some words in English during her time as Long Hair Custer’s woman. “They must have meant to attack us in the night, or maybe just before dawn,” she continued in Lakota. “That is how they fight. They would have crept up on us and started to kill us before we were hardly awake, when we would not be able to defend ourselves or escape. If Buffalo Man Laforte had not seen them—” She let out a sigh.

  Denis Laforte was farther down the slope, behind a rock with White Eagle. Goose Beak, who was crouched with her daughter behind a rock just below them, was whispering to another woman. She turned and looked up at Young Spring Grass. “Red Fox Woman tells me that the Wasichu Sapa Laforte saw the
Blue Coats before they saw him,” Goose Beak said. “He says that the Blue Coats must have cut the talking wire, so that we could not send signals to Bismarck.”

  “Of course they would have cut the talking wire,” Young Spring Grass muttered. “They must have severed it before they rode out from Fort Lincoln, so that no one could warn us.”

  The Blue Coats were galloping toward the rise now. “They must be very angry,” Yellow Bird said. “They expected to surprise us. Now they will have to wait out of range of our firesticks and see what happens.”

  “They could try to take the rise,” Dancing Girl said.

  The boy shook his head. “They would lose a lot of men that way.”

  “But they could also make us spend many of our bullets that way, and the medicine powers in our firesticks would have to be at their strongest for our bullets to hit all of the men our warriors aim at, or even to hit most of them. The soldiers will be furious, because trying to surprise us didn’t work. They’ll be so angry that they will want to kill us all.”

  “Be quiet,” Young Spring Grass said.

  Some of the soldiers had hitched abandoned pony drags to their horses. Perhaps they would use the poles of the drags to help shield themselves, Dancing Girl thought, when they were closer.

  Red Fox Woman was chanting. Dancing Girl realized that she was calling to the wakinyan, the thunder beings. Red Fox Woman was trying to call down the storm. Dancing Girl shivered; even for a medicine man of much power, calling down a storm was a dangerous business.

  “Red Fox Woman has strong medicine,” Yellow Bird whispered. Dancing Girl had heard such rumors about the older woman, although she had never seen signs of any such medicine.

  “Red Fox Woman is crazy,” Young Spring Grass muttered as the chants grew louder. “She can’t call the storm down on the Blue Coats without calling it down on us, too.”