The Veteran (32 page)

Craig was thrown down twenty feet to his left so that the fire did not block the view. They all stared at him for some time.

Sitting Bull gave an order which Craig did not understand. A brave unsheathed his knife and moved behind Craig. He waited for the death blow.

The knife sliced through the cords binding his wrists. For the first time in twenty-four hours he could bring his hands to the front of his body. He realized he could not even feel them.

The blood began to flow back, causing first a fiery tingle and then pain. He kept his face immobile.

Sitting Bull spoke again, this time to him. He did not understand, but replied in Cheyenne. There was a buzz of surprise.

One of the other chiefs. Two Moon of the Cheyenne, spoke.

“The Great Chief asks why the wasichu tied you to your horse and your hands behind you.”

“I had offended them,” said the scout.

“Was it a bad offence?”

For the rest of the interrogation Two Moon interpreted.

“The chief of the blue uniforms wanted to hang me. Tomorrow.”

“What had you done to them?”

Craig thought. Was it only the previous morning that Braddock had destroyed the lodge of Tall Elk? He started with that incident and finished when he was sentenced to hang. He noticed Two Moon nod at the reference to Tall Elk’s lodges. He already knew. At each sentence he paused while Two Moon translated into Sioux. When he was done there was a brief murmured conference. Two Moon called to one of his men.

“Ride back to our village. Bring Tall Elk and his daughter here.”

The brave went to his tethered pony, mounted and rode away. Sitting Bull’s questions resumed.

“Why did you come to make war against the Red Man?”

“They told me they had come because the Sioux were moving away from the reservations in the Dakotas. There was no talk of killing until Long Hair went crazy.”

There was another buzz of consultation.

“The Long Hair was here?” asked Two Moon.

For the first time Craig realized they had not even known whom they were fighting.

“He is on the hillside across the river. He is dead.”

The chiefs conferred again for a while, then there was silence. A council was a serious thing and there was no need for hurry. After half an hour Two Moon asked:

“Why do you wear the white eagle feather?”

Craig explained. Ten years ago when he was fourteen he had joined a bunch of Cheyenne youths and they all went hunting in the mountains. They all had bows and arrows, save Craig, who had been allowed to borrow Donaldson’s Sharps rifle. They had been surprised by an old grizzly, an evil-tempered veteran with hardly a tooth left in his head but the strength in his forepaws to kill a man with a single swipe. The bear had come out of a thicket with a mighty roar, and charged.

At this point one of the braves behind Two Moon asked to interrupt.

“I remember this story. It happened in the village of my cousin.”

Round the campfire there is nothing like a good story. He was invited to complete the tale and the Sioux craned to listen as Two Moon translated.

“The bear was like a mountain and he came fast. The Cheyenne boys scattered to the trees. But the small wasichu took careful aim and fired. The bullet passed under the bear’s muzzle and struck him in the chest. He rose to his back feet, tall as a pine, dying but still coming forward.

“The white boy ejected the spent cartridge and inserted another. Then he fired again. The second bullet went into the roaring mouth, through the roof and blew out the brains. The bear took one more pace and fell forward. The great head came down so close that saliva and blood splashed the boy’s knees. But he did not move.

“They sent a messenger to the village and braves came back with a travois to skin the monster and bring the hide to make a sleeping robe for my cousin’s father. Then they held a feast and gave the wasichu a new name. Kills-Bearwithno-Fear.

And the eagle feather of a man who hunts. So it was told in my village a hundred moons ago before we were moved to the reservations.”

The chiefs nodded. It was a good story. A party on ponies rode up. Behind was a travois. Two men Craig had never seen before entered the firelight. By their dressed and plaited hair they were Cheyenne.

One was Little Wolf, who told how he had been hunting east of the river when he saw plumes of smoke rising over the Rosebud. He investigated and found the slaughtered women and children. While he was there he heard the bluecoat soldiers coming back, so he trailed them all day and night until they came to the valley of the camp. But he was too late for the great fight.

The other man was Tall Elk. He had returned from hunting after the main column had passed. He was still grieving over his murdered womenfolk and children when his daughter came back. She was wounded but alive. Together with his other nine braves they had ridden through the night and the day to find the camp of the Cheyenne, arriving just before the battle, in which they had taken part with a will. He personally had sought death on Custer’s hill and had killed five wasichu soldiers but the Everywhere Spirit had not taken him.

The girl from the travois was the last to be heard. She was pale and in pain from the wound and the long ride from the Rosebud, but she spoke clearly.

She told of the massacre, and of the big man with the stripes on the arm. She did not understand his language but she understood what he wanted to do to her before she died. She told how the buckskin one had given her water, and eaten his meal, and set her on a pony and sent her back to her people.

The chiefs conferred. The judgement came from Sitting Bull but it was the verdict of them all. The wasichu might live, but he could not go back to his people. Either they would kill him, or he would tell them the position of the Sioux. He would be given into the care of Tall Elk, who could treat him as prisoner or as guest. In the spring he could go free or remain with the Cheyenne.

Around the fire there were grunts of approval from the braves. It was just. Craig rode back with Tall Elk to the teepee he had been given, and spent the night with two braves watching him. In the morning the great camp packed up to move. But scouts coming at dawn had brought news of even more bluecoats in the north, so they decided to go south towards the Bighorn Mountains and see if the wasichu came after them.

Having accepted him into his clan, Tall Elk was generous. Four uninjured cavalry horses were found and Craig took his pick. They were not much valued by the Plains Indians, who preferred their hardy ponies. This was because few horses could adapt to the harsh winters of the plains. They needed hay, which the Indians never gathered, and could rarely survive the winter on lichen, moss and willow bark like the ponies. Craig selected a tough-looking, rangy chestnut he thought might adapt and named her Rosebud after the place where he had met Whispering Wind.

A good saddle was easily found because the Indians never used them, and when his Sharps rifle and bowie knife were traced and identified, they were returned to him with some reluctance. From the saddlebags of his dead horse at the top of the slope he recovered his Sharps ammunition. There was nothing left to loot on the hillside. The Indians had taken all that interested them. They had no desire for the white man’s paper and white sheets fluttered in the long grass where they had been thrown. Among them were Captain William Cooke’s notes of the first interrogation.

The striking of the villages took all morning. The teepees came down, the utensils were packed, the women, children and baggage loaded onto the numerous travois and shortly after midday the departure began.

The dead were left behind, laid out in their teepees, painted for the next world, in their best robes, with the feathered bonnets of their rank. But in accordance with tradition all their household artefacts were scattered on the ground.

When Terry’s men, coming up the valley from the north, discovered this the next day they would think the Sioux and Cheyenne had departed in a hurry. Not so: scattering the effects of the dead was the custom. They would all be looted anyway.

Ever after the Plains Indians would protest that they only wanted to hunt, not fight, but Craig knew the army would recover from its loss and come looking for vengeance. Not for a while, but come they would. Sitting Bull’s grand council knew it too, and within a few days it was agreed the tribes should split up into smaller groups and scatter. This would make the job of the bluecoat soldiers harder and give the Indians a better chance of being able to winter in the wild and not be driven back to a half-starved winter in the Dakota reservations.

Craig rode with what was left of the clan of Tall Elk. Of the ten hunters who had lost their womenfolk by the Rosebud, two had died at the Little Bighorn and two were injured. One, with a slight gash in the side, chose to ride. The other, who had taken a Springfield bullet through the shoulder at close range, was on a travois. Tall Elk and the other five would find new women. To enable this to happen, they had joined ranks with two other extended families, making a clan of some sixty men, women and children.

When the group decision to split up came to them, they met in council to decide where they should go. Most were for heading on south into Wyoming, hiding in the Bighorn Mountains.

Craig was asked for his view.

“The bluecoats will come there,” he said.

With a stick he drew the line of the Bighorn River.

“They will look for you here in the south, and here in the east. But I know a place in the west. It is called the Pryor Range. I was raised there.”

He told them about the Pryors.

“The lower slopes teem with game. The forests are thick and their branches blur the smoke rising from cooking fires. The streams are full of fish and higher there are lakes with many fish also. The wasichu never come there.”

The clan agreed. On 1 July they peeled away from the main party of Cheyenne and, guided by Craig, headed northwest into south Montana, avoiding General Terry’s patrols, which were fanning out from the Bighorn but not that far west. In mid-July they reached the Pryors and it was still as Craig had said.

The teepees were shrouded by trees and invisible from half a mile away. From a nearby rock, today called Crown Butte, a watchman could see many miles, but no-one came. The hunters brought many deer and antelope from the forests and children fished fat trout from the streams.

Whispering Wind was young and healthy.

Her clean wound healed fast until she could run again, swift as a fawn. Sometimes he caught her eye as she brought food to the menfolk and always his heart hammered inside him. She gave no sign of what she felt, casting her glance downward when she caught him staring. He could not know that something in her belly seemed to melt and her ribcage wanted to burst when she took a glance from those dark blue eyes.

During the early autumn they just fell in love.

The women noticed. She would return from serving the men flushed, the front of her buckskin tunic rising and falling, and the older women would cackle with glee. She had no mother nor aunt left alive, so the squaws were from different families.

But they had sons among the twelve unmarried and therefore eligible braves. They wondered which one had set the beautiful girl afire. They teased her to let them know before he was stolen by another, but she told them they were talking nonsense.

In September the leaves fell and the camp moved higher to be screened by the conifers. The nights turned chill as October came. But the hunts were good and the ponies cropped the last grass before turning to moss, bark and lichen. Rosebud adapted like the ponies around her and Craig would go down to the prairie and return with a sack of fresh grass, sliced in tufts with his bowie knife.

If Whispering Wind had had a mother she might have intervened with Tall Elk, but there was no-one, so eventually she told her father herself. His rage was terrible to behold.

How could she think such a thing? The wasichu had destroyed all her family. This man would go back to his people and there was no place for her. Moreover, the warrior who had taken the bullet in the shoulder at the Little Bighorn was now almost recovered. The shattered bones had finally knit. Not straight, but whole again. He was Walking Owl and he was a fine and brave warrior. He was to be her betrothed. It would be announced the next day. That was final.

Tall Elk was perturbed. It could be the white man felt the same. He would have to be watched day and night from now on. He could not go back to his people; he knew where they camped. He would stay the winter but he would be watched.

And so it was.

Craig was suddenly moved to stay and sleep in a teepee with another family. There were three other single braves sharing the same lodge and they would stay alert if he tried to move during the night.

It was at the end of October that she came for him. He was lying awake, thinking of her, when a knife slowly and soundlessly slit one of the panels of the teepee. He rose silently and stepped through. She stood in the moonlight looking up at him.

They embraced for the first time and the blazing heat flowed back and forth.

She broke free, stepped back and beckoned. He followed where she led, through the trees to a spot out of sight of the camp. Rosebud was saddled up, a buffalo robe rolled behind the saddle. His rifle was in its long sheath by the shoulder. The saddlebags bulged with food and ammunition. A pinto pony was also tethered. He turned and they kissed and the cold night seemed to spin around him. She whispered in his ear, “Take me to your mountains, Ben Craig, and make me your woman.”

“Now and for ever. Whispering Wind.”

They mounted up and walked the horses quietly through the trees until they were clear, then rode down past the butte and towards the plain. At sunrise they were back in the foothills. At dawn a small party of Crow saw them in the distance and turned north towards Fort Ellis on the Bozeman Trail.

The Cheyenne came after them; they were six, moving fast, travelling light with their rifles slung behind their shoulders, hatchets in waistbands, trade blankets beneath them, and they had their orders. The betrothed of Walking Owl was to be brought back alive. The wasichu would die.