Murder at Medicine Lodge (8 page)

In the first twelve hours, the body cools enough to feel cold to the touch. During about half of those twelve hours, blood settles in whatever position the body is left to lay. If it's on the back then blood will seep in that direction, but the blood will not collect in the places of contact. For example, if the body is on a hard surface, like the ground as in the case of Buug-lah, then the shoulder blades, the buttocks, the back of the calves, and the heels will be flat and white while the remainder of the body will look a vivid red.

Also in the first twelve hours the body becomes rigid, beginning in the jaw and neck, finally making the body as stiff as wood. Oddly enough, after another twelve hours the body goes limp again and the blood which was like a jellied mass, will turn liquid again, weeping from cavities like the ears, eyes, and so on—anyplace excess blood can escape. It is not unusual to find bloodred tears on a dead man's face, or to see blood trickling out of the mouth. This display will not tell you how the man died; it merely gives an idea of how long the man has been dead.

When a body is two to three days old, the lower abdomen becomes puffy and the leached skin around the abdomen will seem to have been painted with the colors purple and green. Two days more—making four total days since death—the veins are huge, grossly distended. Also, the purple and green colors are no longer confined to the trunk, but have spread like a blotchy disease toward the neck and limbs. In this stage, the body has become fully bloated, which explains why the dead man's clothing looked too tight, prompting Hawwy's idiotic guess that the body was some other poor soul done up in Buug-lah's ill-fitting clothing.

Take all of this and apply it ten times over to a corpse left out in the grueling sun, totally exposed to the sun's relentless blaze. The skin not covered was blackened, causing the victim to appear as if he had been tortured with fire before being killed. This hadn't happened, but not even Hears The Wolf was ready to believe that one—another reason he'd immediately captured the Blue Jackets.

Actually, his doing that was a good thing, for if the soldiers had gotten away and reported even half of what they had seen, Medicine Lodge would have become the site of an unprecedented massacre. At Medicine Lodge we had almost as many generals as there were soldiers, plus important Washington men, and newspaper reporters. The loss to the white culture would have been staggering. I can only guess that the ensuing rage against the Kiowa Nation would then have been met with the aim of our total extermination. So, as things worked out, it was to everyone's benefit that Hears The Wolf had moved so quickly to capture those soldiers and tie them up good and tight.

But Hawwy had another concern. He was still on about the too-tight clothing, and like one of the hardheaded mules he had handed over to secure his marriage with Cherish, he would not be persuaded from that opinion.

From what I had learned about Haw-we-sun, he had been in the war between the Blue Jackets and the Gray Jackets. As a doctor, he had seen hundreds of dead and dying soldiers. The problem was, he had never seen them in the advanced stages of death. The common soldiers were promptly buried, whereas the bodies of the officers had been ingeniously preserved to allow shipment back to their homes for burial. And even then, as Hawwy had explained, the caskets had been sealed. No one, not the doctors and most certainly not the grief-stricken families, ever saw the dead in a moldering state. He did assure me, however, that he had dealt with dead people in a place he called Medical College. In this place, they cut open corpses in order to examine the internal organs. Isn't that gruesome?

As Hawwy was so determined to take a wife from among the true humans, he needed a good talking-to, needed to be told that bragging about cutting up the dead was an improper thing to do. But, as I didn't have time to broaden his education in that moment, I simply stayed with my argument that the dead man before us was most certainly Buug-lah. That Hawwy shouldn't be in such a hurry to base his opinions on the evidence of straining buttons or the sausagelike appearance of arms and legs trapped inside that uniform.

I attempted to tell him all of this between shallow breaths. Too shallow. The fetid air barely reached my lungs. My head was swimming and deep in the pit of my stomach, nausea roiled. I needed clean air or I was going to pass out. Besides, with Hawwy's limited language skills he couldn't, or wouldn't, understand a word I managed to say. So I addressed Skywalker, who was now crouched beside Hawwy and looking up at the sky.

“Could we please discuss this at a distance? I'm not feeling very well.”

Skywalker's puckered lips moved to the side of his face as he kept right on studying the sky. “No.”

“Why?” I shouted.

In a flat tone he answered, “Because it's going to rain.”

FIVE

Cold air moves down from the north with amazing speed, engulfing the vast prairie lying open and helpless. Overnight, snow as deep as a man is tall can shroud every mile of the plains. On the other hand, this same wallowing, near-treeless expanse is subject to blasts of warm air from the south. When the warm winds come, the snow melts, turning the prairie into a bog. If, however, there is no offering from the south, then the snow has been known to stay put for a span of days, sometimes weeks. When Indian people became tired of living with all that snow, they turned their faces to the south and prayed for the north wind's enemy, the south wind, to come out and fight.

The winds from the north and south have fought an ageless war, a war so old that during the days when my grandfather was a boy, he heard the ancient wise men of his youth talking about the north and the south winds battling it out over the prairie. The fighting can be so severe that it wakes up the Great Hind Leg, the swirling cloud known to whites as a tornado. To the Kiowa, it is known as Hind Leg of the Great Horse because when the first horse was found by my people, they didn't know what it was. Not recognizing its value, they threw it away. This angered the Creator because He had sent the horse as a gift. Having that gift shunned was an insult, so, from the hind leg of that horse, He made the tornado, and sent it to tear up the villages of His ungrateful children. That taught them a big lesson and soon after that, whenever they found a horse, they kept it.

When they discovered just how useful the animal was, they began to steal more, eventually learning how to breed them. But still the damage against the Creator's pride was not appeased and since those days, the hind leg of the first horse has continued to rampage the earth. Sometimes it isn't just the hind leg that appears. During one really bad storm I once saw all four legs running and great shafts of lightning spitting out from the huge black body. It was a thrilling sight, I watched that storm for as long as I could before having to run away.

Now, some young men never run away. To prove their courage they chased the storm, throwing lances at the hind leg. Older, wiser men, offered up shredded tobacco to the whirling cloud, apologized for the ignorance of their fathers, and for the arrogance of the young men too anxious to be called heroes for chasing the danger away from the people.

One young man I knew a long time ago, payed dearly for this arrogance. That was during the time three bands of us were in the Texas Panhandle. That's a bad place to be during a tornado. Too much sand. That young man didn't care about that, either. He had wanted more than anything, even more than his life, to be a hero and have great songs sung about his courage. With four other warriors who were also in a hurry to prove themselves, he mounted up, waved his lance around, and said, “From this day, Little Bluff himself will say my name with great respect.”

He was disappointed by the general lack of interest in his defiant pronouncement, for while he was declaring it, the entire camp was scurrying in all directions, more intent on finding shelter than standing around listening to a young man puffing himself up. The last words anyone heard him say were, “I'll show all of you.” Then he kicked his horse and rode out after the storm.

For a while, he and his friends were doing a fine job of chasing the leg away, but then, it turned. The young man was farther out in front, so while the other four were able to pull up, turn around and flee, the unfortunate man couldn't. That leg was on him before he could do anything. The others bore witness that that young man and his horse were sucked up inside that leg—a leg made black by all that terrible brown sand.

He was found a day later, his dead and broken body completely scoured. Everybody cried and carried on about him being dead, but as a doctor, I felt that his being killed was the best thing that could have happened. His being alive would have been too awful to contemplate, for he had no eyelids, ears, nose, or lips. It was as if his entire face had been rubbed off. There was a little bit of hair left on his head, but basically his skull was worn as smooth as a creek bedrock.

*   *   *

That young man is still talked about, but his courage is rarely mentioned. He is an example used to impress children that the prairie is a dangerous place—that being caught off guard, even for a moment, will kill or cripple. As I tell you about all this, it comes to mind that Skywalker was a good example of this, too. He'd been caught off guard, and the result was the fall from his bolting horse, leaving him with terrible headaches and the loss of two vital senses. Having survived this lesson, he took great care never to be caught off guard again.

So when Skywalker said, in that matter-of-fact tone of his, that rain was coming, I didn't doubt him for an instant. I didn't even bother to glance up at the sky. Instead I barked for Hawwy to help me dig in the softened earth around the body and sift that dirt through his fingers. He had no idea why he was doing it, he just jumped to respond to the urgency in my tone, busily digging and sifting the way I was doing.

And all we came away with was gritty dirt.

We couldn't bury the body because I wasn't finished with it.

Skywalker was covering it up with an expendable blanket just as fat drops of rain began to pelt the dry earth. The drops quickly became a deluge. Hears The Wolf yelled orders for us to move to safer ground, away from the few trees. Of course, this meant untying the soldiers. We were all prepared for trouble from either Little Jonas or Sergeant Cullen, but when lightning struck close by, that big black man and that mean white man were instantly too afraid to cause trouble.

Hears The Wolf let the horses go and they ran away like their tails were on fire. Throwing blankets over ourselves, we made our bodies just as flat as we could against the ground. The rains fell faster, pummeling us, winds tearing at our feeble protection, trying to take the blankets away. To prevent this, we rolled ourselves up in our blankets, the way some worms are able to roll themselves up before making the magical change to butterfly.

I can tell you this: It's very unnerving to be under only a blanket while lightning is striking all around and thunder is booming so loudly you can't even hear yourself scream. Mercifully, the storm lasted only about a half an hour, rain-laden clouds taking their own time wafting toward the encampments at Medicine Lodge. But for those of us caught out in it, the brief time seemed like a week, each lightning strike bringing with it the certainty of immediate death. When it was finally over, we sat up, threw the blankets off of our heads. Then we just looked at one another, duly surprised that we were all still alive.

*   *   *

Hawwy called Lieutenant Danny's condition “shock.” I've always called it Mind Going, for in times of great stress, the mind goes blank, and if it stays gone for a good length of time, the body shuts down and the victim dies. As the last thing we needed was one more dead Blue Jacket, we hastily made a fire, fueling it with whatever was handy, which after the storm wasn't very much. Grubbing around among the soaked scrub trees, The Cheyenne Robber found a few partially dry dead branches and a limited supply of as-good-as-dry buffalo chips, and Little Jonas helped him bring these things back to us. Billy concerned himself with searching through our soggy food bags that had been hurriedly removed along with the saddles from the horses.

William hovered over the young lieutenant, speaking to Hawwy in concerned whispers while Hawwy crouched before Lieutenant Danny, using his hands to rub the young man's arms and legs to keep the blood flowing in his extremities. I was trying to salvage what I could from my medical supply bag when I looked up and saw Sergeant Cullen sitting all by his petulant self, staring with menace at Sergeant Hicks who was tagging after Hears The Wolf and making every effort to be helpful. The thing that amazed me was that Sergeant Hicks was helping Hears The Wolf place all of the Blue Jackets' rifles and pistols in a blanket, and roll the blanket up. Then he helped carry the stash of guns over to what would be the Indian side of the make-do camp.

It wasn't a good camp, but as dusk was rapidly approaching, it was as good as it would ever get. The scant fire lasted only long enough to boil up a pot of coffee. It took the combined efforts of Hawwy and I to force hot coffee into Lieutenant Danny. William was still hovering, and he talked to me throughout the effort, asking the same thing over and over, his garbled words, sounding like, “He gawn di?” I found out later that what he actually asked was, “Is he going to die?”

Really, the language barrier during that time was an appalling nuisance, which decided me to just go ahead and learn the language. Over the course of the next years Hawwy patiently taught me—only for me to discover that he'd imparted his northern dialect, a thing vastly different from what is spoken throughout the Territory. That's the baffling thing about English, really, the too-many different ways to say the same word. It took me a long time to understand why I was being singled out by the Indian Agents whenever I dared to speak during a conference—why they kept at me about which school in New England I had attended. But I think the worst embarrassment came on a day I was trading in a store in Anadarko and a backwoodsman I had never seen before, leaning against a counter as he listened to me speaking to the store clerk, asked in a very loud voice, “You sum kinda book-learnin' Injun?”