Bill Dugan (16 page)

Young Man Afraid, Hump, and the others circulated among the warriors, explaining what had to be done. Then, with a sound like thunder, the thousand warriors galloped toward the wagon boxes. Around and around they went. One horse fell under the relentless fire from the corral, then another, and a third. And still the fire continued. Crazy Horse did not know that there were several
wagon beds inside the corral with thousands of rounds of ammunition in them, positioned at key points on the perimeter of the makeshift fort. Only when a sixth horse went down and the fire continued unabated did he call off the circling warriors.

Dropping back well out of rifle range, they dismounted, thinking to approach on foot. But when this gambit was tried, the fire was like winter hail. The guns inside were not the old muzzle loaders. They were single-shot breech loaders, and could be fired almost as fast as arrows.

Attacking from only one side, the Sioux allowed the commander of the small stockade, Capt. J. N. Powell, to concentrate his men on one side. The Sioux in the rear ranks were unable to see over Crazy Horse and the others leading the assault, which reduced their effectiveness considerably. Most were unable to shoot their bows for fear of hitting the warriors in front of them, as had happened at Platte Bridge Station. And the wagon boxes were stopping those arrows which were fired.

Time after time, Crazy Horse led a charge, and time and again it was repulsed. He knew now that the soldiers were unlikely to run out of ammunition. Already, six warriors had been killed, as many as the bluecoats had lost, and still there was no chance to get any closer.

While he was deciding what to do next, Crazy Horse was summoned to speak to a scout, who told him that a hundred men had just left the fort and were coming on rapidly. A hundred men with such rifles, added to the nearly forty in the wagon boxes,
was a force too formidable to be dealt with. Bows and arrows were no match for the firepower of the troopers.

Signaling for a retreat, Crazy Horse waited in the rear, knowing that there had to be another way, if only he could find it.

B
LACK
B
UFFALO
W
OMAN
had her third child at the end of the summer. Crazy Horse had taken to spending most of his free time around the lodge she shared with No Water. It didn’t seem to matter to him what she was doing, it fascinated him no matter what. If she were scraping and tanning buffalo skins, he would squat nearby, not saying much, just drawing in the dirt with a twig, or watching the clouds, listening to the scrape of the skinning knife on the hide.

If she were pounding buffalo meat and herbs and berries together to make food stores for the coming winter, he watched her do that, too.

Her two older children played with Crazy Horse, and he seemed to enjoy the attention they lavished on him. No Water spent much of the time with a scowl on his face, but if he wanted Crazy Horse to leave, he never said so.

Sometimes Crazy Horse would go on one of his increasingly lengthy, and perpetually solitary hunts. No one knew when he would go, and once he left, no one was sure when he was coming back. White Deer and Worm worried about their older
son on these solitary hunts. They knew that he paid little attention to their worries, and they had long since given up nagging him about their concerns. But still they worried.

Worst of all for his parents was the gossip. The women, whether Black Buffalo Woman was within earshot or not, wondered whether the two of them were thinking about running off together. It had happened before, and they knew it would happen again. Some of the sharper tongues among them suggested that since Crazy Horse had become a shirt-wearer, Black Buffalo Woman was beginning to think that she had made a bad choice for her husband. The theory was that Red Cloud, thinking to consolidate his power, had pushed her in the direction of No Water, not realizing that the warriors would pass him over in order to make his rival a shirt-wearer.

That struck some of the women as too cynical, but they nevertheless harbored suspicions that something was about to happen. Blue Elk Woman, in particular, thought that her friends were missing the point. “They love each other,” she would say. “If anything happens, that will be why.”

“What could happen?” Fights the Clouds would argue. “Crazy Horse knows that she is married. He is a shirt-wearer. He won’t interfere.”

“Lone Eagle was married, and that didn’t stop his wife from running off with Three Bears.”

“That was different. Three Bears is a scoundrel. He doesn’t care about anyone but himself.”

“And Gray Calf.”

“And Gray Calf, yes.”

“But he didn’t care about Lone Eagle.”

“Neither did Gray Calf.” Blue Elk Woman laughed.

The others joined her, but there was an undercurrent of concern beneath the laughter. Lone Eagle was a brave warrior, but he was not crazy with jealousy like No Water. When his wife left him, he did what any upstanding Sioux warrior would do, he accepted the two horses Three Bears’s family offered and forgot about it. It was no insult, no affront to his dignity. Women should not have to live with men they don’t want to live with. They all knew that. And the custom made allowances for that fact.

“Besides,” Fights the Clouds continued, after the laughter had died down. “Crazy Horse is a shirt-wearer. He is not allowed to take things for himself, or to make trouble. That is against his vows. And he is an honorable man. He won’t cause trouble, no matter how much pain he is in.”

“I am not worried about Crazy Horse,” Blue Elk Woman said. “It is Black Buffalo Woman I am worried about. And No Water. You see how she teases Crazy Horse, flirts with him. It is shameful, and she doesn’t seem to care. And if she goes to Crazy Horse and says she wants to live with him, what do you think he can do? Can he close his lodge and send her away? I don’t think so.”

“And then No Water will lose control of himself. Already he walks around with his face darker than any rainstorm. It won’t take much more for him to get really angry—angry enough to do something foolish.”

“Crazy Horse will kill him, then.”

“Crazy Horse has to worry about his responsibility as a shirt-wearer. He also has to worry about No
Water’s brother, Black Twin, who is now a shirt-wearer himself.”

“It will work out,” Fights the Clouds said. “It always does.”

“I wish I could be so sure,” Blue Elk Woman said.

But Crazy Horse ignored it all. If he had any plans concerning Black Buffalo Woman, he was keeping them to himself. In late September, with the sky a thickening gray, he rode off on one of his solitary hunts. Little Hawk had volunteered to accompany him, but the bleak look on his brother’s face was enough to convince him that Crazy Horse wanted to be alone.

He mounted his horse after kissing White Deer goodbye and telling his father that he would be gone for a while. Once more, Worm was left behind to worry. Little Hawk tried to convince him that his brother would be all right. “He always comes back, doesn’t he?” he asked.

Worm nodded. “Yes. He always comes back. But one day he won’t.”

“That day is a long time off,” Little Hawk said. “You know his vision. You know that he cannot be killed by an enemy.” He walked across the village and stood watching his brother slowly shrink away on the horizon. As Crazy Horse climbed a long, gentle slope, then reached the top and headed across the top of the ridge, he looked almost like a shadow etched against the gray. Little Hawk wanted to turn to look behind, to see where the figure was who had come between the light and the gray sky. But he knew there was no one there.

Rolling easily down the far end of the ridge,
Crazy Horse rode without thinking. There were so many things he didn’t understand, so many sources of confusion in his life. And somehow they all seemed to be jumbled together, so that he couldn’t even separate out the pieces of the half-dozen puzzles. Nothing seemed to fit together with anything else. The bluecoats, Black Buffalo Woman, No Water, the Crows, puzzles, every one.

He rode all day, stopping only once for some dried buffalo meat and a little water, while he let his pony graze a little and slake its own thirst in a small, cold creek.

The trees were starting to lose their leaves now. Some were already just black sticks against the sky, while others were still full of red and orange massed like flames. They were beautiful, but so were the desolate, blackened trees in their own way.

When he camped for the night, he lay down and wrapped himself in a buffalo robe. He knew that it would be cold during the night. It was even possible that the creek beside which he camped would have a silvery skin of ice in the morning. The first snow was not that far off, and even now the air smelled as if it might snow during the night.

He built a small fire and sat watching the flames dance restlessly for an hour or so before the wood was exhausted and the flames slowly died down. He lay there watching the sky, wondering where the stars had gone. He could hear the crackle of the coals, and now and then sparks in a slender column would climb a few feet into the air where they’d hang for a few moments, as if trying to compensate for the missing stars, before winking out altogether.

Beside him, he had the buckskin sheath White Deer had made for him, covered with beadwork in red and blue. Fringed with strips of shredded buckskin, it was seldom out of his sight, especially on his lonely hunts. Inside it was the Springfield rifle Caspar Collins had given him.

He thought about the young lieutenant, how brave he had been in the last moments of his life. He remembered watching the battle at the Platte River bridge then, when he saw that it was Caspar at the head of the bluecoats, running into the open and waving his arms desperately, like a grouse trying to lead a coyote away from its chicks. But Collins never saw him.

And the Brule were too angry to stop and think. Collins was not well known to them in any case, but had they known, they would almost certainly have stopped their attack.

But that hadn’t happened, and now Caspar Collins was dead nearly two years. Crazy Horse had good memories of the young bluecoat, and although he would have prevented Caspar’s death if he could have done so, he was pleased that it had been a courageous one. And he thought that Caspar was pleased, too. They had talked much, and during these long, lonely hunts, Crazy Horse often recalled entire conversations the two had had.

And it made him understand something that long had puzzled him. He knew Frank Grouard, the old white scout, and liked him. He knew Peter Bordeaux, the half-breed trader. And he knew Caspar Collins, the bluecoat soldier. They were white men, and he liked them. They had liked him, too, and respected him. He understood now that it
was not white men whom he hated, but the white man, that abstract thing that represented greed and violence, contempt for the Sioux and hatred of all things Lakota. It was a small difference, but it was an important one.

He fell asleep almost reluctantly, more than once sitting bolt upright as he tried to ward off the sudden surge of weariness that seemed to sweep over him like dark water, threatening to drown him.

In the morning, he awoke to find the ground already dusted with snow, and as he looked up, he could see that it was going to be a heavy storm, maybe snowing all day long. He broke camp quickly, as he had a thousand times before, and mounted up with one eye on the heavens.

For a moment, he thought about turning back. He knew how suddenly the earth could be swallowed up in a blizzard on the plains. Even though it was early, not even winter yet, he could find himself trapped in a foot or more of snow. Crazy Horse nudged his pony along the edge of the creek, staying out of the water, but inside the straggling line of trees that marked the creek bottom as it zigzagged across the valley floor.

This hunt would not be a long one, he promised himself. He did not want to find himself cut off from the village, but he did not want to go back empty-handed. There were too many people who depended on him. The old ones, especially, needed the meat he would bring in. As always, he gave them the best cuts of meat, keeping only the tough, stringy haunches for himself. It was enough for him, and he thought it might even make him stronger. The old ones with few teeth needed the
tender cuts, and he was more than happy to see to it that they got what they needed.

And there was a new widow in the village now. Old Three Stones had died the week before, and his wife had no one to provide for her. He knew that Three Stones had been a great warrior in his day, although he had already been an old man by the time Crazy Horse had met him. But the old man had been kind to him, and loved to tell stories to all the children about the old days, the days before the bluecoats had come, when war was what it should be—a fair fight with mortal enemies. Three Stones liked to tell stories especially about the Pawnee, who he said were far worse than the Crows, crueler and more dangerous warriors.

It was at his knee that many of the young men, including Hump and Young Man Afraid, had heard the hero stories, and tales of the trickster. Three Stones knew them all, and more than once, the boys had spent all night in his lodge while the old man smoked his pipe and took requests for favorite tales. His own sons were both dead, killed in a great battle with the Pawnee.

It was partly out of a sense of duty, and partly to pay homage to his fond memories of the old man, that Crazy Horse wanted to find something before turning back, maybe a deer, if not a buffalo.

It was snowing harder now, and his vision was drastically impaired by the sheets of snow fluttering all around him. He followed the creek bed for more than a mile before finding a sign. The small depressions in the snow were already nearly filled in, and it wasn’t possible to tell whether they had been made by a deer or a small elk. But either one
would do, he thought, as he stared across the creek, where the animal had gone.

He followed the tracks, leaning forward over his pony’s neck in order to keep his eye on the shallow depressions in the snow. The trail wound uphill for nearly half a mile, then angled across a ridge. His pack horse was fighting him, tugging on the follow line, almost as if it sensed something that frightened it. But he kept pushing on. The snow was picking up, and on the face of the ridge, the snow all but obliterated the tracks. Breaking over the ridge, he started down the other side. Trees loomed up suddenly, the black shapes startling him when he caught a glimpse of them through the swirling storm.

When he reached the trees, he had some protection from the wind, and the thickly needled pines, as well as those trees still leaved, held off the snow, and the trail was much easier to follow. He could hear running water somewhere ahead, probably a creek at the bottom of the hill. If he were fortunate, the quarry, which he could now tell was a deer, would be huddled somewhere in the trees trying to keep away from the worst of the blizzard.

He could see the dark water now, and the tracks in the snow made straight for it. At the edge of the creek, the tracks moved laterally, following the watercourse rather than crossing it. Sensing that his prey was close, he squeezed the pony between his knees, urging it to move a little faster. He remembered hunting with Caspar, and how the lieutenant had done so poorly with the bow and arrow, but had laughed at himself. And how Caspar had practiced and practiced, until he could shoot
the bow well, not like Sioux, but well enough for a white man.

And there it was, a big doe, one of the biggest he had ever seen. The deer was in a cluster of small pines all but free of needles, deprived of sun by the taller pines around it. In places, he could even see the needled floor, barely dusted with snow. Without dismounting, he pulled the rifle Caspar Collins had given him and thumbed back the hammer on the single-shot breech loader.

He sighted carefully then realized that it would be better to shoot from a more stable platform, and he slipped from the pony’s back, his feet barely louder than the whisper of buckskin on horsehide. The doe looked up as he sighted in again. He squeezed the trigger and the doe went down while the echo of the gunshot rattled among the trees for a few moments before dying away.