Stone Song (16 page)

Curly and Buffalo Hump smiled, nodded yes at her, and looked at each other. They held each other’s eyes. Neither needed to put the lesson here into words:
We’ll take this spirit home, this sense of unity, all the people as one beating heart, its pulse the pulse of the drum, which is Earthbeat
.

A RING, A CIRCLE

Everyone had a grand time, the moon after the medicine lodge ceremony. First all the camps stayed together to hunt buffalo. The Lakota visitors found out that everyone called this Fat Meat Country for a reason. And the young Lakota showed that they were good guests—they hunted as fiercely as anyone and gave the meat to the families who had shown them hospitality.

When the big herds began to wander east, where the grass was deeper, the people hunted deer and antelope. The Sahiyela would have plenty to eat this year.

They might not have their ease, though. The agent had told those who went in to trade that the
wasicu
soldiers were determined to find the Sahiyela and fight. Horse soldiers, walking soldiers, wagon-gun soldiers, they were all coming.

“Why?” everyone wanted to know.

Incidents along the Holy Road, where the wagons traveled.

“But we were the ones who were wronged, not the
wasicu
,” the people complained.

The agent just shrugged. “The soldiers are going to look for you this summer,” he warned.

So they kept the wolves out, and sure enough, soldiers were coming from the Feather River to the south and the Shell River to the north. Everyone would be able to tell them where the medicine lodge had been, and the trail of pony drags would be easy to follow from there. It was just a matter of time before the soldiers blundered close.

The Sahiyela were all camped together, though—at their strongest both physically and spiritually. Surely the soldiers wouldn’t dare strike them now.

That was why Curly and Hump were glad when other young Lakota showed up to visit, Young Man-Whose-Enemies, Black Elk, Lone Bear, and He Dog. Curly was even half-glad to see the twins, No Water, and Pretty Fellow. If war came, the youth would feel better with Lakota at his side and not just strangers.

Everyone talked about what to do. The young men wanted to fight—men weren’t men if they didn’t stand up for their rights. The older men wanted to find a way to keep the peace. Nothing was decided, and everyone was buzzing about what would happen.

So they went hunting and waited and traded news and waited and gossiped and waited. The young men competed at fancy riding and trick shooting, or played the team sport of hitting the ball at a goal with a stick, or the kicking game. Young women gathered plants together, showed
each other what they had quilled and beaded over the winter, or traded secrets about what young man had an eye for what young woman.

Curly noticed that the young women of the Sahiyela were freer than those of the Lakota. They wore the hide belts between their legs to keep lovers away, naturally, but they were not so closely chaperoned, and they talked with the young men more. Sometimes a woman would stand in a man’s blanket with him for a long time, their faces close, their eyes deep into each other’s. Supposedly the talk was not personal—just what the band would do, where the buffalo were, how the weather was changing, whether the berries were ripening early or late—but who knew? Who knew how many of them slipped off for an afternoon together, as Curly and Black Buffalo Woman sometimes did?

The Sahiyela had a custom Curly had never heard of but liked. A young man and woman who wanted to marry exchanged rings. Traditionally, these were made of horn, sometimes of metal, not new rings but ones made precious by wearing. They might wear these rings for a long time before being allowed to marry. Sometimes they weren’t allowed to marry at all, or one of them had a change of heart. Then they sent the rings back.

Curly saw one young woman, Three Small Stones, throw a ring away. When she was helping her mother cook in front of the lodge one evening, wearing a man’s ring, Three Small Stones saw the man’s grandfather lead a string of horses into camp. She stood up straight, expectant. Curly saw her smile, but she and her mother both pretended to be totally absorbed in the cooking, acted like they didn’t see the horses coming.

The old man led the horses right past Three Small Stones and staked them in front of a neighboring lodge, where another eligible young woman lived.

Three Small Stones’ eyes went flat, her body rigid. She looked at her mother by the cooking tripod, but neither said anything. Suddenly the girl slipped the man’s ring off her finger, cocked her arm, and threw it into the willows—viciously, the way she would throw a hunting stick at a rabbit. Curly thought the young man was lucky she didn’t crack his head with the ring. Then Three Small Stones called raucously at her younger brother to get those
tipsila
, those prairie turnips, on over here, and in her voice Curly could hear how she would sound as a crabby old woman.

But Curly liked the ring-giving custom, and thought of Black Buffalo Woman.

Sometimes he fevered with the thought of her. Sometimes he dwelt on the details of their times together—the touching, the kissing, the passionate coupling, yes, and even more the sense of union of spirit. Sometimes he just imagined them sitting in a lodge together, just the two of them,
eating quietly, sharing the hours, each knowing the other’s thoughts without words, connected in their separateness as a man and woman are when their bodies are joined, in too deep a knowing for talk. For Curly all knowing was too deep for talk. Black Buffalo Woman was the same way, so they would be perfect together.

Perfect together after the years they had to wait. He found that hard to imagine. He had been here with the Sahiyela for eight moons, and the pain of missing Black Buffalo Woman was sharp. If he saw her every day, it would be worse. It was terrible during the half-moon he had stayed in the Oglala camp, before he left with Yellow Woman and her family. The evening before the trip, he had spoken only a few words to Black Buffalo Woman. As she was gathering sticks in the woods, he called softly. She came. They looked into each other’s eyes for a long moment. Finally he said, “I’m going to the Fat Meat Country to visit the Sahiyela.”

She blinked her eyes as a kind of nod. She’d surely heard the news already. She would know that, leaving this time of year, he would stay the winter. He wanted her to kiss him but knew she would not, not here where some other woman gathering sticks might see them. She looked at him soulfully.

He felt that she was wringing his heart in her hands.

She turned toward a downed tree and picked up more sticks.

Light Curly Hair thought that people who needed words to communicate were handicapped.

No, he had not run from her, he told himself, not really.

Another thought slapped him lightly, the way a man slaps a lump-raiser, a mosquito: No, no, he had
not
run from his responsibility to Rider, and to his vision.

Curly wore no rings—his vision forbade him ornamentation. So Blue Ear showed him how to carve one from the base of an elk antler. Curly shaped it to fit his smallest finger, polished it with fine white river sand, and brought it to a high gleam by rubbing it with back fat from a
pte
, a buffalo cow he himself had shot for Yellow Woman and her family. Yellow Woman gave the hoof bones to her small son, the one whose life Curly had saved.

He carved the top into a circle, like a hill with a flat top. He borrowed an awl from Yellow Woman, and in the circle he carved three simple lines, representing Hawk, who perched always in his heart, Hawk who would one day fly over his head as he went into battle.

He wished he could wear the ring. But he just put it away. His ring now, Black Buffalo Woman’s ring soon, and the sign of their oneness in spirit, a circle, a whole.

BATTLE

Curly stopped at the edge of the turquoise lake. He looked to the east, where the sun was just bubbling over the horizon. Its first light, not yet full-strength, played on the clear water, glimmering off the surface, flashing into his eyes. It was a dance, this sunlight reflecting off water, a bedazzling whirl of spirit.

Curly slowly and gently dipped his hands into the cool water, left and then right. He dipped them once more, together, held them high, and watched the water trickle home to the lake, catching the sun’s rays as it went, so transforming itself from liquid into light.

Miracle, this water. So said Hail and Dark.

Curly looked sideways at Buffalo Hump, also dipping his hands. Farther away, doing the same, stood the other young Lakota.

All around them several hundred Sahiyela fighting men were dismounting, coming to the bank of the small lake, dipping their hands, mounting again. From this upland they could see for a couple of sleeps in every direction, including the valley of the Mahkineohe, the Creek of Turkeys, where they would meet the soldiers today. Power was big in the Sahiyela warriors, and the water of this lake made it huge.

More sun stabbed through a cloud, and Curly saw the new light on his skin, and Hump’s.
Hokahe!
he said to himself.
It is a good day to die
.

Now the Sahiyela riders reorganized themselves into their warrior clubs. They had ridden here behind Hail and Dark, the two
wicasa wakan
who had foreseen power for today and who sang and danced and prayed it into this world. The fighters would leave here riding not behind their medicine leaders but behind their war leaders.

The dispute about whether to avoid the
wasicu
or fight them had been solved by Hail and Dark. The two
wicasa wakan
were young enough to be full of courage and seemingly too young to know power. These men wanted to fight, not run like cowards. They had discovered two kinds of medicine to make the Sahiyela invincible against the
wasicu
and gave it to the people in ceremonies.

Everyone understood then that fighting was the right course, for victory was guaranteed. The people would teach the soldiers a lesson.

Now the men were renewing the power Hail and Dark had given them.

The first medicine gave power to the Sahiyela weapons. The men had only poor firearms, some smooth-bore flintlocks and old-fashioned Allen six-shooters. These weapons were scarce in camp, and they were inaccurate anyway. Hail and Dark blessed the powder the fighters loaded their guns with. Now, said the seers, every shot would strike home.

The second medicine was even stronger—it would turn away the soldiers’
bullets. When the soldiers fired, their bullets would dribble out the ends of their muzzles and plunk to the ground, harmless. Or a Sahiyela need only lift a hand and the lead ball would bounce off like a pebble thrown by a boy. This medicine was the key. Instead of being overmatched, the warriors now were fighting an unarmed enemy.

The men had danced to these powers. They had sung the songs taught them by Hail and Dark. They had connected themselves to strengths larger and mightier than the merely physical. The last gesture the seers had required was that they dip their hands in this small turquoise lake.

Everything was in order. The Sahiyela had chosen the field of battle for their advantage, the broad valley of the Mahkineohe. Here they had plenty of room to maneuver. They were a day’s travel from camp, not so far they had worn out their ponies getting here, but far enough to protect the women and children. They could feel their own might rising in them.

Curly had studied Hail silently, for this man was Yellow Woman’s brother. Curly wanted to understand a young Sahiyela who took the way of the
wicasa wakan
, as his own father had, the path of spirit sight more than the path of war. That was not Curly’s way, but he wanted to understand it. Unfortunately, Hail said little except in public, and Curly found his face unreadable.

The Strange Man had another reason for wanting to understand. Hail was evidently a
wakinyan
dreamer—thus the name. He must have gone through a
heyoka
ceremony, but he was not one of the sacred clowns.

Curly was a
wakinyan
dreamer, too, but he didn’t let his mind wander in that direction, now by the lake or any other time. He stood up, mounted his traveling pony, checked the spare pony on lead, and followed the Sahiyela to meet the soldiers.

They waited in the sunpole trees at the east end of the valley. The soldiers would come at midday, said the Sahiyela wolves, or maybe not until midafternoon. Letting the horses graze, the Sahiyela lay in the shade, ate a little dried meat, and rested. They had painted themselves in camp this morning. Each man had long since invoked his personal medicine.

Curly felt queasy. He had seen beyond and learned of powers that would help him. He should have been wearing lightning on his face, as Rider did, and hail on his chest. He should have mounted the skin of a red-tailed hawk on top of his head and an eagle feather pointed downward in his hair behind. He had done none of this. He wondered whether, because he went naked into battle, he would die today. He looked at the hands he had dipped into the lake, uncertain. He felt Hawk tremble in his chest.

Suddenly men cried out. Everyone was looking at the bluffs at the west end of the big valley. The wolves were coming back at a gallop. From time
to time they would ride their horses in a circle, the sign meaning the horse soldiers were here. The walking soldiers and the wagon-gun soldiers would follow.

Quickly the Sahiyela formed into a long line and started forward. Then they separated into loose ranks across the width of the valley, the warrior societies together. Curly and his friends brought up the rear with the unproven Sahiyela youths. Finally the warriors stopped and waited for the soldiers. The hot wind made thousands of feathers flutter.

Curly’s mind was on the carbines the horse soldiers would be carrying. The Sahiyela bore only bows and arrows and those pitiful few firearms. He reminded himself of the medicine Hail and Dark had given them. Then he thought he should be in front, like Rider, galloping boldly toward the enemy fire, his fellow warriors trailing behind. He swallowed hard.

Buffalo Hump looked sideways at Curly. “
Hokahe!
” he barked.

From a swollen throat Curly answered, “It is a good day to die.”

Curly saw the horse soldiers canter forward across the flat valley floor. Two Sahiyela soldier societies rode off to the right and left in flanking movements. The soldiers rode out to force them back toward the center.

A bugle sounded, an unfamiliar call. Suddenly sun flashed off the soldiers, bright slashes of light.

The bugle sounded again, a different call, and familiar—the charge.

The big cavalry mounts came to a gallop.

The Sahiyela galloped straight at them.

Soon they were close enough to see individual soldiers. Onward charged both sides.

Suddenly Curly realized what was so strange. Over the roar of the hooves of hundreds of horses should have been another and different roar, a thunder—the sound of rifle fire.

No such sound.

Curly saw why. The horse soldiers were charging with their carbines put away and their swords raised.

The medicine of Hail and Dark protected against bullets, not blades.

All the Indian warriors seemed to make that observation at once. The men in front slowed, skittered about, turned. Others began to mill. Then the largest throng of fighting men the Sahiyela had ever put together bolted.

The powers said this was not a day to fight.

Warriors scattered in every direction.