RavenShadow (36 page)

The men of K Troop were more than ready. Their bodies were twisted like wire with tension, their nerves screaming. Fear and rage built in them like lightning in black clouds.

A young Indian named Black Coyote stood up now and jumped around holding his rifle with two hands above his head. Black Coyote was deaf. He yelled in Lakota, “This is
my
gun. I paid a lot of money. Nobody’s going to get this gun without paying for it. Nobody.” He repeated these words over and over, gyrating about like a crazy man.

Blue Crow and several others in the circle talked among themselves and then got up and went toward Black Coyote. He was a wild young man, a bad influence, and he hadn’t been able to hear any of the talk. They intended to calm him down and explain to him in sign language why men were giving up their guns.

Before the Indians got to Black Coyote, some soldiers slipped up behind the deaf man, grabbed him, and tried to wrest the rifle out of his hands. Black Coyote fought.

Just at this moment Yellow Bird grabbed a handful of dust and flung it in the air.

The rifle tilted, muzzle to the sky.

Somehow it went off.

The shot echoed through the valley of Wounded Knee Creek.

I saw knowledge on Blue Crow’s face. On the faces of the Horn Cloud sons. On the face of every man in the circle.

At point-blank range red eye looked into white eye, white into red.

The Indians hesitated. The soldiers hesitated.

The invitation to horror was recognized. It was accepted. It was welcomed.

One eternal moment ticked past.

Apocalypse came as the rage of Thunderstorm against Wind Storm.

A half dozen young Indians threw off their blankets and brought up their rifles.

The soldiers of K Troop fired a volley into the mass of Indians on the council ground. Then their lieutenant drew his revolver and screamed, “Fire! Fire on them!”

The men of Troop B, also hard against the Indian men in council, fired.

Indian men with and without dance shirts fell, or stood to shoot again.

Divine and demonic forces came screaming onto the field. In ancient enmity Wind Storm and Thunderstorm howled and raged. The cosmic energies crashed and boomed, and the merely human was destroyed. I could almost hear the mocking laugh of Iya.

Instantly dust, smoke, and din half-blinded and half-deafened everyone. Soldier and warrior shot it out at close quarters
through the murk and haze. When Indians missed, some of the shots ripped through the village. Women, children, old men, dogs, and horses burst into an uproar.

Wild shots from the soldiers ripped across the council ground and hit other soldiers.

Big Foot was propped up on one elbow. Immediately an officer and an enlisted man shot him in the upper chest, as though fulfilling an assignment. His daughter, who was standing by the sick man’s tent, dashed forward to her father. The same officer shot her between the shoulder blades.

The headmen sitting behind Big Foot took one of the first blasts from the Springfields. Bodies flew in wild directions, fell in agonized postures. Among those never to get up was Horn Cloud.

Captain Wallace ran to his station at the rear of K Troop. As he got there, a bullet knocked the top of his head off.

Colonel Forsyth ran to the top of the knoll, perhaps to get a better view, perhaps to be near the cannons.

With Indian and white so mixed up, hand to hand, the Hotchkiss guns could not fire.

I went to Blue Crow. He was kneeling, working his Winchester quickly and beautifully, shooting soldiers.

The strapping Indian who stalked Philip Wells now pulled a well-honed knife, raised it above his head with both hands, and drove it at the interpreter’s face. Wells fell to one knee and blocked the knife with his rifle. His eyes grew with horror—the sharp point missed his forehead but slashed downward and sliced his nose nearly off.

The Indian drove the knife downward again. On his back, Wells once more blocked it with his rifle. When the Indian pulled the blade back, Wells smashed him in the head with the muzzle.

While the Indian was stunned, Wells jumped up and shot
him in the side. A corporal ran up and finished the warrior with a shot in the back. Instantly the corporal fell to a shot from a soldier across the council ground.

Drenched in his own blood, mad with pain, in shock, Wells ran for the trader’s wagon. On the way he grabbed his nose, hanging by a thin bridge of skin, and tried to tear it off.

“My God, man,” cried an officer, “don’t do that! That can be saved!”

On the council ground, Wind Storm and Thunderstorm wrought pandemonium.

Seeing his father fall and Big Foot killed, Iron Hail charged the soldiers of B Troop. The swirl of smoke and dust attacked everyone’s eyes, ears, noses. Dewey could see little but the shiny brass buttons of the soldiers’ uniforms, and hurried toward those. A rifle went off next to his ear, deafening him. Iron Hail grabbed the rifle and twisted it away from the soldier. Then he thrust his knife into the man’s chest. The soldier clutched Iron Hail by the throat, and the Mniconjou drove his knife home, near the heart. The soldier crumpled. Iron Hail stabbed the man in the kidneys over and over, and over and over, until he stopped moving.

Seizing the soldier’s rifle, Iron Hail sprinted between the tipis toward the ravine. The village was a chaos of the screaming, the dying, and the dead. He was hit by a bullet in the arm, and as he leapt into the ravine, another struck him in the groin. Stunned, he looked back. Soldiers were rushing the ravine. He fired, reloaded, and fired several times.

The rifle fragmented in his hands. Realizing it had been hit by a bullet, he threw it away and hauled himself painfully to the bottom of the ravine.

On the council ground the magazines of those Indians left fighting were empty. Some red men dashed to the east, toward the creek. Troop G was a hundred yards off, firing. Most red men ran crazily toward the village. On the way they grappled
one-on-one with soldiers. When they could, they seized weapons and fled.

In the council area now sprawled more than twenty of their fellows, dead, wearing dance shirts or not, indiscriminantly. Ringing these bodies lay more than thirty dead and wounded soldiers.

O, those Winchester repeating rifles!

I saw Blue Crow, miraculously unhurt, bolt through the K Troop line, within reach of two soldiers, and sprint toward the village.
He is going to get Elk Medicine and run … to the ravine?

I wanted to cheer and vomit at the same time.

In the pandemonium on the council ground, the surrounding units did not shoot, the Hotchkiss crews did not fire, for fearing of hitting their comrades. They waited helpless, their fury mounting.

When the Indians fled in all directions, a dam holding back the guns of the other troops and Hotchkiss crews broke. Their fire raged down like lightning.

From the northwest end of the village the pony herd stampeded northwest, along a road. A group of women and children piled onto wagons and followed the ponies, right across the front of Troop E. Seeing that they were not combatants, the officers yelled for the men to hold their fire against the people, but to knock down the ponies.

The Hotchkiss guns took aim on the village. Each Hotchkiss could be fired fifty times a minute, and each shell flung shrapnel in every direction.

Blue Crow and other warriors dashed around the village, crying to their families to break for the ravine. Most Indians there were women, children, and old men, running frantically in every direction.

Elk Medicine trotted toward the ravine, herding the children with her hands and her voice. She kept looking back toward where Corn Woman lay….

Scurrying around the village, Blue Crow was stopped by a pile of rags, half-familiar, a tattered … body. Face down. Slowly now, gently, he turned the face to one side and looked at the profile of his wife, the mother of his children. He started to turn the body over, so he could see her fully one more time. He put his hands on her ribs. He drew them back in horror, and knew that body would not turn.

Elk Medicine pushed the children toward the ravine and sprinted back toward the village.
I cannot lose sister and husband both
.

Blue Crow jumped up screaming at the Hotchkiss crews. He flung wild shots at the batteries on the hill. He emptied his Winchester at them, and then hurled the most awful words he could think of.

Elk Medicine reached for her husband, screaming sense at him.

At that moment a Hotchkiss shell hit him square in the belly. It made a hole gaping wide enough for me to put my arm through.

My great-grandfather stood there for a long moment, and then slowly, stiffly, limb by limb, tottered to the ground.

Elk Medicine wailed her way to the ravine.

I felt like my skin was aflame.

I stood there in the village, bereft. Shells blew holes in the earth around me, and in my heart. They tossed human beings—what were once human beings—in the air and let them
clomp
to the ground. They tore the tipis to shreds. They knocked tripods and cook pots and medicine bags helter-skelter. They ripped flesh until bodies became odds and ends, scattered strangely, absurd remains of the games of evil gods.

Then the batteries turned their attention to clumps of people running away.

Having survived the hell on the council ground—somehow—Yellow Bird now got into a tipi on the edge of the silent village.
Troops K and B, still in their positions, stood nearby. The medicine man slit the canvas and, one by one, took potshots at soldiers.

Some saw where the fire was coming from. “I’ll get the son of a bitch out of there,” yelled one private of K Troop, and ran at the tipi waving a knife. Yellow Bird shot him in the stomach.

“My God, he has shot me. I am killed, I am killed.” The private staggered back toward his outfit and fell, dead.

The soldier’s comrades raked the tipi with rifle fire. From the hill two Hotchkiss shells made direct hits on the lodge.

Still Yellow Bird lived.
Their bullets will not penetrate you
. His sight searched out targets. His rage blazed out the barrel.

Outside I saw angry troopers push a bale of hay against the tipi on the medicine man’s blind side. They lit it. Soon flame crackled up the canvas to where the lodgepoles jutted out. Black smoke smothered the lodge. I watched for Yellow Bird to come bursting out, into a hail of lead. He did not come. He chose to stay inside.
The medicine of your dance shirt does not protect you against suffocation, or burning
.

I did not need my spirit sight to know what happened to Yellow Bird within.

Now, suddenly, the whirlwind seemed to slow. Up to that moment the clash had been immense, titanic, worthy of elemental Powers. But here came a small lull, a slacking. Most Indians alive had made it to the half-shelter of the ravine, though some were in the creek or had fled elsewhere. Occasional shots came from the ravine, but nothing forceful.

With what mental strength I had left, I hurled a message at the mind of the officers.
Pull your soldiers back, out of rifle range. Send an interpreter to talk to the Indians. You can end this horror
.

But Iya was rampant on this ground, and his malice is lava that boils, bubbles, and erupts prodigiously.

He delighted in the white people’s four centuries of fear and hatred of Indians. Perhaps it was he who taught them to use
“Indian fighter” as a term of honor. It was he who kept the acrid bitterness of the defeat at the Little Big Horn alive in the hearts of the officers here today. It was he who taught whites, from the beginning, to give their stories of Indians a dark and demonic face.

Iya needed to give no help to the rage of these Indian people. They had seen their relatives killed, their children shot, their homes blown to bits. Worst of all, they had seen their dream of a future, their beautiful picture of an ideal world returned, smashed to smithereens.

They were unspeakably sorrowful, unspeakably angry. One warrior said later that if he had eaten a soldier at this particular moment, it would not have satisfied his rage.

Therefore the evil god Wind Storm now ruled the killing ground: The batteries of artillery aimed their shells at the ravine.

Here huddled most of the survivors—warriors, old men, women, and children crouched in fear. The shells sent them scurrying.

Some ran along the ravine in both directions. Others bunched under an overhang, where the ravine made a sharp turn.

One big bunch burst out of the ravine and ran south, away from the fighting and toward the road to Pine Ridge. But this put them in front of the guns of C and D Troops. Stationed on the far side of the ravine, these soldiers had fallen back away from the shells, driving the Oglala scouts further from the action. When the officers saw the people run out of the ravine—Indian men, women, and children mixed up—they yelled, “Commence firing!”

One officer wrote later that the soldiers “fired rapidly, but it seemed only a few seconds till there was not a living thing before us; warriors, squaws, children, ponies, dogs—for they were all mixed together—went down before that unaimed fire. I believe over thirty bodies were found on our front.”

Meanwhile some of the scouts dropped into the ravine and started carrying surviving relatives to safety on the hilltops.

Wears Eagle despaired of finding Iron Hail, or anyone else in the family. Near the rim of the ravine she frantically dug a small hole in the earth. She intended to put Wet Feet in it.

Elk Medicine crouched beneath the north rim, and pulled the two remaining children to her. Her sister dead, her husband dead. Her eyes were vacant with death.

In a few minutes a Hotchkiss shell exploded on the floor of the ravine below them, and shrapnel ate the air in every direction.

The two children died in her arms. Elk Medicine felt a stabbing pain in the groin.

She held the children. She held them long past the time she knew they weren’t breathing.

She was far beyond thinking. Yet something within her, perhaps an instinct, perhaps the pulse of a person-to-be, reminded her.
Save the child within
.