Authors: Janis Reams Hudson
Winter's Touch
The Arapaho Touch Series: Book One
Janis Reams Hudson
Table of Contents
Copyright
Diversion Books
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New York, NY 10016
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Copyright © 1999 by Janis Reams Hudson
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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First Diversion Books edition October 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62681-481-3
To Dean Sterling. The nugget was there, right where you said it was. Bright and shiny and gold. Thank you. Every day, in every way…
And to Ron, my hero, without whom I would have starved long before this book was finished. I love you.
The prophecy was old. So old that some said it was told to the First Pipe Keeper by Man-Above, Himself, and that the First Pipe Keeper entrusted it to the first man and woman.
Others argued that it was first told by the wind to an ancient holy man generation upon generation ago, long before the ones who call themselves Our People ever learned of the wide, treeless plains they would one day roam. Long before Our People ever saw a horse, ever encountered a white man.
The prophecy warned of a Plague of White Locusts. That one day Our People would become divided. Again and again they would divide, until their numbers paled in comparison to what they once had been. Game would grow scarce, and war would fill the land. Our People would be threatened with extinction.
There will come a Woman Whose Touch Can Heal, and the Man Who Walks By Her Side.
When Our People face great strife, the Woman shall heal a wound, and Man Who Walks By Her Side will show Our People the way to survive the Plague of White.
Take heed, the prophecy cautioned. The way will not be easy.
And now, the Plague of White Locusts is upon the land, and Our People, known to the whites as Arapaho, are few in number. Game is scarce, and war is upon the land. Our People are faced with extinction, if only they will realize it before it is too late.
As promised, there is a Woman Whose Touch Can heal, but her touch is as yet a secret, and she walks alone. There is no Man Who Walks By Her Side.
Unless…
The smell of burning cedar leaves, to keep the spirits of the dead at bay, wafted on the afternoon breeze. Wails of mourning echoed hauntingly through the small, protected valley in the Sierra Mojada. Winter Fawn’s throat tightened at the sound. One of the dead, now resting on a scaffold braced in the branches of a cottonwood along the creek, was her cousin’s friend, Long Nose.
Long Nose and two others had ridden out of camp three days ago to bring down a deer. They would all be leaving the valley soon to spend the coming summer with the rest of the tribe hunting the buffalo and camping along the banks of the Arkansas River. The deer was to have been roasted for a feast the night before they left their winter encampment.
Even as recently as two winters ago Our People would not have needed to leave their winter valley to bring down a large buck for the feast. The animals would have watered at the stream at dawn and sunset, there for the taking, yet taken only as needed. But every day more white people came to these foothills at the edge of the plains, crowding in, tearing up the land with their plows, dumping their waste in the streams. Every day the game became more scarce as the animals retreated higher up into the mountains or were slaughtered dozens at a time by the greedy white man. To find a large buck for this year’s feast, it had been necessary for the hunters to leave the valley.
Now there would be no feast, no deer. No Long Nose or Spotted Beaver or Walks with Limp.
If only the Cheyenne had not killed those soldiers so nearby. If only the Bluecoats could tell the difference between a Cheyenne and an Arapaho. If only the Bluecoats cared that there was a difference, that Our People, whom whites called Arapaho, had been staying away from whites, had been at peace with them for two summers now, soon three.
But they did not. Winter Fawn, as well as the rest of Our People, knew that to most white men, the Bluecoat Army in particular, an Indian was an Indian, and they should all be killed. For the deeds of the Cheyenne, the Bluecoats had yesterday killed three of Our People.
Now, while the elders of the Stoic Lodge urged caution and patience, the young warriors of the Staff Lodge, and the older Dogmen, the fiercest warriors of all, cried out for blood. A half dozen men from both groups had spoken all morning of riding out to punish the whites for killing three of Our People.
“Why do you frown so, granddaughter? Does the work displease you?”
“Of course not.” The work in hand was a new buckskin shirt for Winter Fawn’s brother, Hunter. When finished, the shirt would be given to Grandmother, who would give it to Grandfather, who would present it to Hunter. Since young men and young women, even brothers and sisters, were not permitted to speak to each other, or even be in each other’s company, this was the only practical way for him to receive the shirt.
Hunter would be told it was from his grandmother, but he would know the truth. He would understand that the shirt was a gift in honor of the anniversary of his birth. Their father had taught them the white man’s custom of what he called birthdays. Keeping to the custom was Winter Fawn’s way of feeling closer to her father. For he had also taught them another white man custom—sometimes fathers went away. Sometimes they left their children to be raised by grandparents so they could roam the mountains season upon season, alone.
Oh, their father came back to Our People now and then. He usually visited each spring and traveled with the band to meet with the rest of the tribe for the annual buffalo hunt and summer gathering.
But a visit once a year had never been enough for Winter Fawn’s heart. She loved her father deeply. After her mother’s death, during Winter Fawn’s twelfth winter, she had clung to her father as the only certainty in her world. He had been everything to her. Yet he had left.
Grandmother’s sister said that Red Beard had left to wander the mountains alone because he could not face life without Smiling Woman.
Winter Fawn knew in her mind that such was the truth, or at least part of it. Her father had seemed so lost after the storm took her mother’s life. Yet in her heart, Winter Fawn blamed herself for her father’s leaving. If only she had not—
“If the work does not displease you,” Grandmother said, drawing Winter Fawn from her painful thoughts, “then why do you look so troubled?”
Winter Fawn finished attaching the bead in the center of the flower on the shoulder of the shirt, then let the garment fall to her lap. “I am troubled about Crooked Oak and the others.”
A sly look came over Grandmother’s face. “Are you worried that Crooked Oak might be killed if they ride out to attack the whites?”
Winter Fawn’s frown deepened. “Not like you mean. Of course I am concerned that no more of Our People be killed.”
“And Crooked Oak in particular?”
“No, Grandmother. I have told you—”
“Yes, you have told me that you have no fond feelings for Crooked Oak. If your father had not left such foolish instructions—that we were not to accept a marriage offer for you without his permission—Crooked Oak would long since be your husband.”
Winter Fawn breathed a silent prayer of thanks that her father
had
left such instructions. The thought of being wife to Crooked Oak was not a pleasant one.
“It does not matter what you think, you know that.” Grandmother paused and looked at her. “Your uncle thinks highly of Crooked Oak. He is a strong and brave Dogman. A fierce warrior. A man to make his wife proud. You will marry the man chosen for you.”
“Yes, Grandmother. If it is my father’s wish.”
Grandmother made a sound of disgust. “And what kind of father is it who leaves his children?”
“Grandmother—”
“I know you do not like to hear bad talk about him, but a father who abandons his children is no father.”
“He is my father,” Winter Fawn said hotly. “I will hear no ill spoken of him.”
“Do not take that tone with me. I am your grandmother.”
“Yes, and I love you and honor you and respect you. But I am not a child to be scolded. I have passed my twentieth winter. I will hear no more ill talk of my father. When I spoke of my concern for Crooked Oak and the others, it was not their safety I meant. I am concerned about what will happen if they ride out and succeed in exacting their revenge against the whites.”
“Why should such a thing trouble you?”
“Our leaders have tried so hard to keep us out of the fighting. I fear that Crooked Oak will bring the Army down on us and we will all be slaughtered.”
“You are thinking of Sand Creek.”
“Yes.”
Grandmother lowered her gaze and turned back to the deer hide stretched on the frame beside her. Neither woman liked to think of the hundreds of Cheyenne, and a few Arapaho, who were killed by the Bluecoats at Sand Creek two summers past. Most were women, babies, and old men. Crooked Oak’s father had been among those slain at Sand Creek. Since then he and others had urged all-out war against all whites, while the leaders of Our People had pled for caution.
No matter which side a person took, what had happened at Sand Creek was too terrible to remember, to horrifying to forget.
“The council will consider tonight,” Grandmother reminded her, “whether or not to send warriors out.”
“There is talk,” Winter Fawn said quietly, “that Crooked Oak and a few others may ride the path to revenge regardless of what the elders decide.”
Grandmother made a low sound in her throat, but did not otherwise comment. She knew as well as Winter Fawn that the Dogmen wanted to fight, lived to fight. It was not unlikely that they would go their own way and seek revenge on their own. Not unlikely at all.
As the two women worked side by side in the late afternoon sun, the sounds of camp life penetrated the tension between them, dissipated it, pushed away the sad reminder of Sand Creek.
Nearby, children laughed, splashed in the stream beyond the last row of tepees, shrieked at the shock of icy water. Dogs barked and chased the children. Women called quietly to each other as they worked. Men laughed, talked. The smell of roasting rabbit drifted from nearby.
And faintly, on the breeze, lingered the wails of mourning, the smell of cedar smoke.
The sounds and smells of life, the sounds and scents of death. Weaving in and out among each other. Intermingled.
A low rumble sounded, tightening the muscles in Winter Fawn’s shoulders as if in fear of a blow. A moment later she identified the sound as hoofbeats and relaxed. Now that the council had broken up for a time, several of the men were racing their horses beyond the stream with the older boys. The pounding hooves, for an instant, had sounded like thunder. Thunder meant storms. Winter Fawn did not like storms.
Grandmother noticed Winter Fawn’s reaction, but made no comment. She, too, remembered that day during Winter Fawn’s twelfth summer when the bolt of lightning from the eye of the thunderbird struck the hilltop near their camp and killed Smiling Woman. Winter Fawn had lost her mother; Grandmother, her youngest daughter.