Bill Dugan (21 page)

The medicine man nodded his approval, and returned the smile. “That’s enough for today,” he shouted. He might not have been outdone, but he had certainly been matched.

C
RAZY
H
ORSE WAS GROWING
more and more withdrawn. His moods were deep and black, and there was not much that could overcome them. His friends were worried. They knew there was much on his mind, and they knew how much each of those things hurt. But they also knew that he had to let go of the sorrows. The loss of Hump, the loss of Black Buffalo Woman, the loss of Little Hawk—each one a blow from a heavy hammer, and each one had done its share to flatten him, to pound him down as if he were a piece of soft metal.

He Dog was probably his closest friend now that his
kola
and his brother were gone. He thought long and hard, trying to find something, some idea, no matter how wild, that could help cheer Crazy Horse a little, that could bring back the friend who seemed to be slipping away from him.

On an overnight hunt with Red Leaf, He Dog stayed up late, poking the campfire with a stick, watching the swirling sparks swarm like fireflies. Red Leaf, too, was close to Crazy Horse, and he knew what was on He Dog’s mind.

Joining his friend at the fireside, he grabbed a stick of his own and started to poke the coals.

“What are you doing?” He Dog asked, looking up after a moment.

“The same thing you are,” Red Leaf told him. “Looking for a way to lighten Crazy Horse’s heart. He is gloomy too much of the time.”

“His heart is broken,” He Dog said.

“I know that. And I know why. He misses Little Hawk.”

“And Hump.”

“Yes, and Hump. And Black Buffalo Woman.”

He Dog snorted. “She had another baby, I have heard. And the baby has light skin like his. And light hair.”

“Does he know?”

“He knows. How could he not?”

“What will he do? Will he try to take the baby to his own lodge?”

He Dog shook his head. “No. He knows it would make trouble again, and he doesn’t want that.”

“He needs a woman. He needs someone he can talk to about those things he keeps between his heart and his ribs, those secret things that we talk to our women about.”

Red Leaf was right, and He Dog had been thinking the same thing, but one couldn’t just decide to get a friend married and then make it happen. Or could he?

“Your sister is about his age, isn’t she?”

“Black Shawl? I don’t know. I suppose so.”

“And she isn’t married, either.”

Red Leaf laughed. “She has a strong back and a will to match. No man is good enough for her. Or
that’s what she thinks. It’s how she acts, anyway.”

“She is a good-looking woman.”

Red Leaf was skeptical. “You’ve seen the way the girls look at Crazy Horse. They follow him with their eyes when he goes past. They stop working, sometimes their hands hang in the air like hawks, barely moving, until he disappears, then they start working again just as if they had never stopped. Crazy Horse could have anyone he wants.”

“Except Black Buffalo Woman.”

Red Leaf nodded. “Yes, except Black Buffalo Woman.”

So it was decided. No one bothered to tell Crazy Horse until the arrangements were well under way. If he was pleased, he didn’t show it. If he was annoyed, he didn’t show that either. His expression barely changed when He Dog gave him the news, and then there was just a momentary flash, as if a fleeting pain had stabbed somewhere deep in his body. He Dog knew it was a memory of Black Buffalo Woman, but said nothing.

The marriage was low key, and Black Shawl seemed happy with it, as if the right man for her had somehow fallen out of the sky, despite the fact that he had been there all along.

Crazy Horse settled into the match, and it wasn’t long before Black Shawl was expecting. Crazy Horse spent the long evening hours by the fire, playing with the village children, as if preparing himself for impending fatherhood. He had always liked children, and had never been too busy to take time out to spin a tale or give a lesson.

Now, though, he seemed to relish the role of teacher. His hunts were not so solitary as he took
one or two of the boys with him, teaching them everything he knew about the habits of the deer and the elk, the rabbit and the duck and, of course, the buffalo. He taught them to make bows and how to fashion arrows, fixing the points perpendicular to the feathers for use in war, so they could slide more easily between a man’s ribs, and parallel for hunting.

In the evenings of the long winter, the boys gathered in his lodge, sitting in a circle at his feet as he told them tales of the heroes and of times long ago, those times he was trying so desperately to preserve for them. The children never seemed to get enough. One of them, a boy named Black Elk, seemed to pay special attention, as if he were not just listening to the words, but soaking them up, absorbing sound and meaning through every pore.

And finally the baby came. She was a girl, and he named her They Are Afraid of Her. She seemed to fill the huge void in him the loss of friend, brother, and lover had created, one small, frail child to take the place of three people, and yet she was enough.

Black Shawl watched him cuddle with They Are Afraid of Her, and smiled as she worked with skin and bead. She made moccasins and shirts, breech-cloths and buffalo robes. Her mother had come to live in the lodge, and she helped with They Are Afraid of Her, leaving Black Shawl free to tend to the tipi and the food. According to Sioux custom, Crazy Horse was not permitted to look at his mother-in-law, but it presented no problem since the older woman was used to the tradition.

Hunting as always, and as always providing for those who had no one else to care for them, to supply them with food and horses, Crazy Horse seemed even more the shirt-wearer now that the title had been taken from him. He still went on occasional forays against the Crows and, sometimes, led small war parties to harass the bluecoats down on the Yellowstone, where the iron road was growing like a snake that had no head and no tail, just stretching every day longer and longer, winding its way through the valleys. The Northern Pacific was another nail in the Sioux coffin, and Crazy Horse seemed to realize it, but for the moment he was content to be the family man.

Sometimes at night he would wake up suddenly, jerking his arms as if some invisible force were holding them. He would hear Hump laughing or see Little Hawk lashing his pony to get out ahead of his older and more famous brother, anxious to catch up, to build a reputation as great as Crazy Horse’s own.

And sometimes, not often, but sometimes, he would wake up crying. Black Shawl knew that it was those times when he missed Black Buffalo Woman, but she said nothing, contenting herself with wrapping her grieving husband in her arms and helping him forget. She loved her husband, and knew that he had come to love her, too. That helped ease the pain, but didn’t expunge it altogether. Time would do that for Crazy Horse, she thought. And sometimes she prayed that time would work its magic soon.

But there was a shadow on the horizon, one that
Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull watched the way they would watch the advance of a tornado’s funnel. The bluecoats were pushing deeper into the Yellowstone country. With them were surveyors who were busy plotting the next stretch of track for the Northern Pacific.

Scouts kept track of them, and the two leaders spent several days planning their response. The best approach would be an ambush, and Crazy Horse made two surveillance trips, looking for the perfect place. It was obvious that the surveyors wanted to plot a track that would require as little trouble with the mountains as possible, and once that was clear to him, Crazy Horse found the perfect place.

In early August of 1873, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, and three hundred and fifty warriors crouched in wait as the bluecoats set up their camp at the mouth of the Tongue River. Looking down on the camp from the top of a bluff, Crazy Horse saw the commander dismount, unsaddle his horse, and proceed to remove his red shirt, then bunch it up to cushion the hard leather of the saddle which he used for a pillow. While Crazy Horse watched, the officer lay down to nap in his long underwear.

Through a spyglass, he watched the sleeping man for a moment, then handed the telescope to Sitting Bull. “The long-haired one does not seem to be afraid of the Sioux,” he said.

“Maybe we can teach him,” Sitting Bull answered, as he peered through the glass.

Crazy Horse took back the glass and scanned the terrain ahead, on the far side of the sleeping officer
and his camp of eighty-five cavalrymen. A stand of timber, easily large enough to conceal all three hundred and fifty Sioux, was the best place from which to launch the attack.

The cavalry mounts were grazing, unsaddled, and ambling through the lush grass. The timber stand was upstream, and Crazy Horse suggested that a small party of warriors try to stampede the horses. The bluecoats would have to follow to get them back. If all went well, they would chase their animals into the trees, where the advantage of their new rifles would be neutralized to a degree.

It took some time to maneuver the warriors into the trees after a long detour, and when they were ready, it was early afternoon. The unrelenting sun was hot and the air filled with dust and swarms of flies. Crazy Horse led five warriors on a dash toward the American horses, but one of the half-drowsing pickets spotted them as they neared the herd, shouted the alarm, and opened fire.

With surprise lost, and the fire heavy, the decoy party was forced to fall back. Most of the soldiers, even though they were on foot, rushed toward the Sioux, and their repeating rifles made any approach hazardous. Even the sleeping officer, still dressed only in his long underwear, woke up, grabbed a rifle, and sprinted toward the herd.

The Sioux returned fire, but they were few, and had only ancient weapons. Crazy Horse had a newer rifle than most of the others, but even it was no match for the new guns of the bluecoats. When the decoy held its ground, the officer dressed
quickly, then detailed twenty men to chase down the Sioux, and led them in their chase.

The decoy team rode confidently, never allowing itself to get too far ahead of the pursuing bluecoats. The closer they came to the trees, the more wary the soldiers became. Three of them sprinted out ahead while the rest of the detail watched. The decoys moved a few dozen yards, then stopped. The three soldiers stopped, too. When the decoys moved, the soldiers moved. By this point, it was obvious to Crazy Horse that the plan would not work. The bluecoats were either too nervous to follow him, or they suspected a trap.

For several minutes, the two parties stared at one another. There was no exchange of insults, as was usual in such confrontations.

The warriors in the timber included a few Cheyenne. One of them recognized the officer, and whispered to another, “Remember him? From the Washita? It’s Long-Hair! The one they call Custer.”

The word spread rapidly among the Cheyenne. Many of them had been at Black Kettle’s camp. Some had even been there as children with Black Kettle at Sand Creek. That massacre burned in their guts like water from an alkali spring. And memories of the Washita attack stoked the fire. There was no holding them back as they broke into the open, firing their guns and launching a shower of arrows.

If the ambush had had a chance, even for a few of the bluecoats, that chance was gone now.

Custer wheeled his horse and galloped back toward the rest of the pursuit detail, looking over
his shoulder. He wasn’t watching the Cheyenne, though. His gaze was locked on the pale Sioux with a single hawk’s feather in his light brown hair. We’ll meet again, he thought. I can feel it.

C
USTER LED AN EXPEDITION
into the Black Hills in the summer of 1874. There were rumors of gold and, in the aftermath of the Panic of 1873, whites were desperate for more of the precious metal. Despite warnings that the Black Hills were sacred to the Sioux and that any entrance would provoke hostilities, Custer had been ordered in, to accompany a geological team. It didn’t seem to occur to anyone in Washington that the Black Hills had been declared permanent Sioux territory by the treaty of 1868, and that by its terms, no whites were permitted to enter the region without Sioux permission.

The column consisted of ten cavalry and two infantry companies, accompanied by one hundred Indian scouts, mostly Arikaras. The supply train was one hundred and ten wagons long. Smoke signals filled the air along the route of march, a sure sign that the Sioux knew he was there.

But if Custer was worried, the natural beauty of the region more than assuaged his fears. He wrote reams of letters to his wife extolling the perfection of the Hills. He hunted every day, doing more than his share to supply fresh meat for the command,
and he fell in love with the region. And when gold was discovered in unimaginable volume, all fears of the Sioux, and any concerns about violating the treaty’s terms, were forgotten.

But unexpectedly, Custer and his command encountered only a small band of Sioux, and they were peaceful residents of the Red Cloud Agency, under the leadership of Red Cloud’s son-in-law, Stabber. Custer tried to enlist Stabber as a guide, but he was refused, and that was the last he saw of the Sioux during his three-week exploration.

The one the Sioux now, like the Cheyenne, called Long-Hair gathered animals for his traveling zoo, while the troopers roamed through the valleys gathering flowers by the armful. So smitten was he with the Edenic riches that he had the company band play a concert in the middle of a valley filled from ridge to ridge with flowers.

Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull were far to the west, in the Powder River country. If they knew of Custer’s intrusion, they made no attempt to stop it. Crazy Horse was so wrapped up in his family, spending hour upon hour with They Are Afraid of Her, that he was seldom away from the village for more than a day or two to hunt.

Sitting Bull spent the idle time making speeches, trying to rally the hostiles for another war on the white soldiers, but Crazy Horse paid little attention to politics, preferring to stay in his lodge and play with his daughter. She had brought him a serenity he had never known, and he relished it.

In early July, he stirred himself just long enough to lead a small war party westward to raise a little havoc among the Crows. On his return, he found
that the village, near the Little Bighorn River, had moved after he left. Pointed sticks on the ground at the village site led him toward its new location on the Tongue, and he pushed his pony and his men hard. He wanted to get home, to resume the tranquillity that increasingly absorbed him.

The next two days seemed to take forever, and he drove himself harder and harder, desperate to cover the last few miles. Finally, the smoke from campfires came into view, and Crazy Horse lashed his pony into a full gallop.

Slipping from his pony as he entered the village, he raced toward his lodge, but Worm intercepted him, grabbing him by the arm and holding on, despite Crazy Horse’s attempt to pull free.

He knew then that something was wrong, and searched his father’s face for some clue.

Worm lowered his eyes and shook his head. Clearing his throat, he whispered, “They Are Afraid of Her …”

“What? Tell me, Father …”

Worm sighed, then shook his head once more. “The white man’s sickness, the one they call cholera. She …”

Crazy Horse ripped loose then and dashed into the lodge. Black Shawl looked at him and her face was a mask of grief. Her eyes were red and swollen, and she fell apart as he rushed to her. Kneeling on a buffalo robe, she reached up to her husband, and Crazy Horse sank to his knees beside her. He wrapped his arms around Black Shawl and she buried her face in his shoulder. Sobbing uncontrollably, she tried to tell him the details, but couldn’t stop the quavering of her voice. Crazy Horse patted
her back and stroked her hair, but she continued to tremble, the sobs wracking her body again and again.

“Where is she?” he asked.

Worm had come into the lodge, and he reached out to touch Crazy Horse on the shoulder. “You can’t go to her scaffold, son. It is too far from here, deep in Crow country now.”

“Where is it?” Crazy Horse said, without looking around. “I want to know.”

“If I tell you, I know you will go there, and …”

“Where
is
it?” Crazy Horse snapped. It was the first time he had ever used such a tone with his father. Both men seemed to recognize it, and Crazy Horse turned then to look at his father, tears streaming down his face. “I have to know.”

Worm started to speak, then thought better of it. He knew that he could not forbid his son to go. They were way past that. And he knew that he could not ask his son for a promise that Crazy Horse would be unable to keep. “I’ll tell you,” he said. “But you must promise to take someone with you. Don’t go alone, please.”

Crazy Horse nodded. He said nothing, but the shake of his head was enough. He had given his word.

He left in the morning. With him was Frank Grouard, the old white scout. The two were friends, and Grouard knew enough about Sioux customs, and about his friend, that he made himself invisible on the seventy-mile ride. Crazy Horse said not a word on the two-day trip.

Near sundown on the second day, they found the scaffold right where Worm had said it would
be. Etched against the darkening sky, solid black as if drawn with a piece of charred wood on gray paper, the scaffold frame trembled when Crazy Horse climbed up, wrapped himself in a buffalo robe, and lay down.

For three days, he lay there. Grouard moved a mile away, to camp near a small creek. Each night, just before sunset, he would climb the hill. But when he drew close enough to hear Crazy Horse sobbing, he would turn and head back down the hill.

Lying there motionless, except for the quaking of his body during the fits of weeping, the great warrior stared at the sky. It reminded him of his vision quest, how he had lain so long on the rough rock overlooking the lake, how the blue seemed to grow deep and still, how the clouds drifted slowly across his field of vision, changing shape like magic creatures from some other world and, at night, how the stars had seemed so cold and far away.

His serenity was gone now, as distant as those stars, and replaced by a rage as deep and dark as the night sky. They Are Afraid of Her was so tiny, and she had brought him such peace, and now she was gone, a victim of the white man every bit as much as if she had been killed by a soldier’s gun. She had never hurt a soul, never done anything but give him joy, and she had been taken from him.

Someone would pay for her loss, and pay dearly.

Crazy Horse ate nothing and drank nothing for those three days. Instead he fed on the rage that tormented him, even as it fed on him, burning its way toward the surface from someplace deep inside, a place where nothing and no one except They Are
Afraid of Her had ever been able to touch before, and no one would touch again as long as he lived.

On the morning of the fourth day, he climbed down from the scaffold. His eyes were dry, and his face was made of stone. Only the scar above his lip, whiter than usual over the clenched muscle of his jaw, betrayed what he was feeling.

Leaving the buffalo robe on the scaffold, he looked once more at the platform where his daughter lay, then at the sky as if giving it one last chance to explain the unexplainable, then he turned and walked downhill. Behind him, still almost black against the pale blue sky, stood his daughter’s burial platform, like a grim monument to his tranquillity. That tranquillity was dead, too, a thing of the past, and only the willow poles and small, frail body of They Are Afraid of Her remained. Soon they would be gone, too.

He saw Grouard waiting for him, saw his pony, Grouard’s horse, the pack horse, the small fire, but most of all he saw Grouard’s skin, darkened by the sun, but still white. For a moment, the rage boiled up inside him and he wanted to hurl himself on the old scout, wrap his fingers around Grouard’s throat and throttle him until his tongue lolled, turned purple, and his eyes protruded from their sockets.

But he caught himself. Grouard had done nothing to hurt him, or to hurt They Are Afraid of Her. He remembered seeing the little girl, even smaller alongside the tall, lanky white man, her little hand wrapped in Grouard’s gnarled fist, as they walked to a creek to go fishing. And he understood then that it wasn’t the whiteness of a man’s skin that made him an enemy, but the blackness of his heart.

And there was no way to tell that until you gave him a chance to get close, close enough to do you damage. That only made the hurt worse. And he thought then of No Water, who had hurt him, too, and No Water wasn’t a white man. The secret then was not to make choices on the color of skin, but to keep everyone at arm’s length, to hold them far enough away that they couldn’t reach you at all, couldn’t touch you in the only place that mattered.

Grouard nodded. He said nothing as he looked up at the warrior, and only then did Crazy Horse notice the twin strands of silver filigreeing the old man’s weathered cheeks. The tears laced and interlaced as they wound their way down to his chin and dripped onto the buckskin shirt, making patches of dark wetness on the pale beige of its chest.

Crazy Horse felt his own eyes well up, and made no attempt to stop the tears as they ran down his cheeks. Neither man spoke, neither made a sound. But the grief was shared, and Crazy Horse knew again that Frank Grouard was a friend.

They broke camp in silence, and rode the seventy miles in silence, stopping only twice, neither time for more than a few minutes. Only the steady clop of the horses’ hooves broke the stillness, and it seemed to Crazy Horse that it was like a drum beat, or the beating of his own heart, some inescapable rhythm that would be with him until the day he died.

When he returned to the village, Black Shawl greeted him warmly, but there was a reserve about her now, as if the place where They Are Afraid of Her used to be was now some unbridgeable chasm, a great void across which they could see each other
but where even shouted words were swallowed by the yawning silence.

He returned to the old ways, going off alone for days, even weeks at a time. No one knew when he would leave and, once he had gone, no one knew when, or if, he would come back.

The people started to hear stories about miners found in the Black Hills, dead, a single arrow stabbed into the ground beside their stiffened corpses, their hair still intact. Most Sioux took scalps. But Crazy Horse did not, and the people all seemed to understand, without one of them saying a word, that this was the revenge of Crazy Horse, his way of exacting payment for the incalculable loss of his little girl.

Black Shawl tried to get him to talk, to tell her if it were he who was leaving the bleak reminders strewn across the holy ground of the Paha Sapa, but he said nothing.

While Sitting Bull tried to rouse the people, Crazy Horse kept to himself. He made plans when there was a war party, but said nothing more than was necessary to make those plans understood. The rest of the time, he kept to himself, alone in his lodge with Black Shawl and her mother.

Red Leaf accompanied him on hunts once or twice, but felt isolated, even when riding beside the man he idolized. After the second time, Crazy Horse went alone. No one knew where he went. They knew only that when he came back, he had food for the old ones.

And they saw that in battle he was a different man. More reckless, they said, worse than Little Hawk. Worm heard the stories from He Dog and
Red Leaf and Little Big Man, and he knew what drove his son. It was not vengeance so much as the unspoken wish that something would put an end to his pain, that a white man’s bullet or a Crow arrow would send him off to be with Hump and Little Hawk and Lone Bear again. And, most of all, where he could sit under a tree beside a perfect stream, with They Are Afraid of Her curled in his lap, her tiny head on his shoulder.

And Worm lived in fear that that wish would be granted.