Bill Dugan_War Chiefs 03 (12 page)

He was a boy again, chasing the buffalo for the first time. The pounding drums, the beating of his
blood, became the thunder of a thousand hooves. He could see the calf he had killed on his first hunt, watched as it turned, saw it look at him, and saw the sun reflected in the calf’s eye. This time it was the eye that grew large, and then the sun within it, and once more whiteness swallowed the world, leaving him in a blank, empty space where there was nothing but his pain to fill it.

He spun then like a top … or perhaps it was the world spinning around him. His feet, legs, and abdomen seemed to have disappeared, his body ending at the incisions in his chest. There was only the sun and the pain until, as if by a miracle, just when he thought he could stand it no longer, his feet touched the ground and he felt arms surround him. He breathed in and out, each deep inhalation sending stabs of pain though his chest and back. Slowly his vision returned. He was lowered to the sage leaves in the shade, and for a while he could rest, until it was time to be suspended once more. Closing his eyes, he felt a serenity wash over him. Away from the searing heat for a few moments, he was able to see clearly, to think clearly, to consider what he had seen in his visions. They were
wakan
and he would talk them over with Black Moon or Four Horns, with someone who would help him to understand what they meant.

Then it was time to resume. Once more he was suspended, and once more the sun became his universe. This time, the whiteness contained a point of color, far off across the universe, and he stared at it, watching it grow slowly larger, as if something
were moving slowly, deliberately toward him from the other side of the world.

He beckoned to it, crying out, begging it to approach him, but before it reached him, it winked out, like a closing eye, and the whiteness was total once more. He had a vision of a buffalo, the largest buffalo anyone had ever seen, and the animal spoke to him, calling him by his first name. “Jumping Badger,” it said. “Jumping Badger.”

He wanted to ask the buffalo questions, remembering the visitation of the medicine buffalo to his father. He wanted to know, he wanted to understand, he wanted to ask a thousand questions, but the buffalo simply repeated his name over and over again, then turned and walked into the sun, its great shadow swirling like water in a pool, surrounding it, then swallowing it up and shrinking away to the size of bead and then vanishing altogether.

Again the salt trickled into his wounds and the skewers tore at his flesh, and once more he was lowered to the ground for a rest.

When he was hauled into the air again, the music was faster, the drums beating louder, and he counted the drumbeats one by one, then two by two, then three by three as the rhythm changed, the drummers adding accents, grouping their beats in clusters. It seemed to him then that his heart echoed the drumming, skipping beats where there was silence, pounding harder where the drummers struck the skin covers of their instruments with extra force. Smoke seemed to well up out of the earth now, surrounding him in its foggy pall.

Where there had been nothing but the infinite expanse of white, as if he walked on the surface of the sun itself, tiny as a bug, alone, now there was a world of gray. Shapes appeared in the misty distance like shadows.

The fog rippled and swirled, tantalizing him as it seemed about to dissipate, revealing the things that moved in its deepest heart, then rushing toward him in great banks, like fog off the river in cold weather, taking the secrets away and leaving him empty, a great, yearning void in his mind, a place where he sensed something was missing, something
Wakantanka
wanted him to know, but would not tell him—something he had to discover for himself.

He tilted his head back, stretching until he thought his spine would snap like a brittle stick, and opened his mouth. He felt a great rush go out of him, thought that he had screamed, but he heard nothing.

Then the fog began to twist like a great funnel, swirling, turning darker and darker, until it became a tornado. Far off in the distance he heard an incessant roar that became a howl, then seemed to whistle. It came toward him, then backed off, as if it were alive, and uncertain of him. He could hear the drums only distantly now, the great roaring coming back like sudden thunder.

His lips were dry, his throat parched. He rubbed the tip of his tongue against the dry skin, tasting the salt caked on his chin. He watched the swirling darkness now and once more it was full of shadows, things that moved, that shimmered as if they
were made of water, changing shape likes trees on the horizon in summer heat. He reached out as if to touch them, but the movement of his arm sent knifelike pain through his chest and back, and he howled in agony as his arm fell limply to his side. He was spinning now, or thought he was, twirling like the dark apparitions before him, but no matter how fast he whirled, the shimmering black thing was always in front of him, as if the universe itself were spinning, and he with it.

For a moment it was silent. Even the drums in the lodge seemed to have quieted. Then a whisper, like wind far off, hissing as if through brittle leaves, and he heard a flute, the drums began again, the flute soaring above them, its solitary wail echoing in his ears as if he and it were in some dark cave full of swirling murk. The whisper grew louder again, like the howling of a tornado, it rose in pitch, coming closer and closer, but nothing he saw seemed to change. It was as if something he could not see was bearing down on him, faster and faster, coming closer, and he wanted to see, tried to force his eyes to show him this thing that would not be seen. And then a voice, deep and resonant, called him by name as the buffalo had. But this time he was called Sitting Bull. He felt the world trembling with the power of the great voice.

He cried out again, his own voice frail and tiny beside the deep thunder of the thing he could not see. Again and again he called out, until his throat grew raw, and finally the thunder spoke to him again,
“Wakantanka
will give you what you ask for.
Wakantanka
will grant your wish.”

He tried again to raise his arm, to reach out to the heart of the darkness that surrounded him, but he could not. He cried out again, but the thunder had gone. His own voice died away, tiny, feeble, like the sound of a pebble falling off a cliff. Silence surrounded him. He felt a fire in his chest as one of the skewers in his flesh tore free.

The added weight ripped the other skewer in his chest loose, and he felt a snap as his weight shifted and he tilted forward. The strain of his weight was too much for the skewers in his back and they ripped free too. As he fell, it seemed to him that he would never land, as if he were falling through a tunnel with no bottom, where there was no light. He was spinning faster and faster, his head and feet twirling like the seed of a maple tree spiraling in the wind. His world went black.

Missouri River Valley
1856

T
HE TRICKLE OF WHITES
into Indian territory that began in the 1840s was now threatening to become a flood. The Hunkpapas stayed as far to the north as they could, trying to limit their contact with the white settlers. Keeping to themselves, they wanted only to live as they had always lived. But that was becoming harder and harder to do.

The buffalo herds were thinning because the white hunters were slaughtering them for their skins, leaving the carcasses to rot in the sun. The Lakota depended on the herds, deriving most of their sustenance from the great beasts. The meat was their main source of food, the hides were used for making the walls of their tipis and for robes, the horns were used in ceremonial headdresses—even the bones found use.

More and more often, especially to the south, hunting parties would ride for days and days without
finding a herd. As often as not, they would ride into a valley only to find it covered with bones, picked clean by scavengers, the huge rib cages empty of everything but the weeds growing up through them.

Worse than finding the bones was stumbling on a recent kill, the meat rotting in the sun, filling a valley with its stink. The putrescent carcasses gleamed in the sun under a skin of writhing maggots. Buzzards hopped from carcass to carcass, their great wings fanning the air, ugly naked heads bobbing as they tore at the rotting meat with beak and talon. Interrupted, the huge birds would squawk and beat the air to chase off intruders.

Because they were the furthest north of the Lakota groups, the Hunkpapa were the most insulated from the white incursions. They heard about them from the Oglala, whose hunting grounds were directly in the path of the white settlers. But wiser heads among the Hunkpapas were concerned about other intruders. The United States Army had been building forts all across Lakota land. There had been a great council at one of the forts in 1851. Many of the Lakota chiefs had been present and some had even touched pen to treaty paper, but no Hunkpapa had signed. Still, to those chiefs who thought about it, the presence of the white soldiers could only mean trouble.

The white soldier chiefs and the commissioners had said the forts were necessary, because the army was there to protect the white settlers from the Indians, and the Indians from the white
settlers. But no one among the Lakota could remember a time in the five winters since the treaty paper was signed at Fort Laramie that the soldiers had punished a white man for anything. There were plenty of times when Indians had been punished for things they had not done. It seemed that the treaty worked only one way, and the Hunkpapas were glad they had not signed. Many among them were beginning to think that, whether they had signed or not, they had been compromised by the treaty.

News traveled slowly among the plains Indians. A band of hunters from the Brule would come across a band from the Miniconjou and they would exchange information. When the Miniconjou hunters encountered an Oglala war party, they would pass on what they had learned from the Brule, and learn something new from the Oglala. So word traveled, but slowly, like water seeping through sand. If the news was important, someone would ride from one village to another to pass along the information. It was only at the great summer gatherings for the sun dance that most of the Lakota were in one place. And even then, some bands did not make an appearance.

The council of the Hunkpapas, led by the chiefs Four Horns and Bear’s Rib, wanted nothing to do with the white men, settlers or soldiers. They wanted only to be left alone. But some of the Hunkpapas knew that was not to be, Sitting Bull among them. He hoped he was wrong. It was better to ignore the whites whenever possible, saving your worries for
the Crows and the Ankara and the Pawnee. The white men claimed they were only interested in a safe route to the great ocean to the west, and as long as they just passed through, it might be possible to get along peacefully.

Even that slim hope didn’t last long. It was only the year before that a white officer named Grattan had attacked a peaceful village and killed many people in an argument over an emaciated cow. Everyone knew that the cow was worthless, but that didn’t seem to matter to Grattan, and when a Brule chief named Conquering Bear had refused to surrender a Miniconjou warrior for the theft of the cow, Grattan had attacked the camp. He didn’t seem to understand that Conquering Bear had no authority to surrender a man who did not want to be surrendered. Not only was the warrior a member of a different band, but no Lakota chief had that kind of authority, even over warriors in his own band. Lakota warriors made up their own minds, went where they wanted to go and did what they wanted to do.

Grattan had paid a high price for his ignorance. He and his entire command of thirty men had been killed in the fight. Then the white men started to call it a massacre and sent more soldiers to punish the Lakota, who had done nothing more than defend themselves from an unprovoked attack. General Harney was sent to punish the Lakota for defending themselves, and this time it
was
a massacre, with more than a hundred peaceful Brule Lakota killed—most of them women and children.

To some of the Hunkpapas, all of that seemed a long way away, but Sitting Bull knew better. Just twenty-five years old, he had wisdom beyond his years. He understood that the white men were not going to go away, that if anything went away it would be the buffalo. For the time being, though, there didn’t seem to be anything that could be done about it. It was best to pursue the old ways, until
Wakantanka
showed the Lakota what to do. White Buffalo Woman had come to them once before; perhaps she would come again, this time bearing the key to a puzzle that most Lakota warriors dismissed as a petty annoyance.

But the problem was never very far from Sitting Bull’s mind. When he hunted, there was plenty of time to think, and even on the warpath, there were moments when he found himself thinking of the white man instead of the Crows. But life had to go on, and he did his best to concentrate on those things he could control.

In the fall of 1856, after the summer hunt, it was apparent that the Hunkpapa needed more horses, and there was only one place to get them—from the Crows. A war party of nearly a hundred warriors assembled and headed west, along the Yellowstone River, into the heart of Crow country.

For five days, they sent scouts out in every direction, hoping to spot a Crow village. And for five days, the scouts came back disappointed. The country was so vast that it sometimes took as much luck as skill to find the enemy. The Lakota could follow a trail as well as anyone on the
plains, but before you could follow it, you had to find it.

Like most of the plains tribes, the Crow established their villages in river bottoms, where there would be plenty of water for drinking, cooking, bathing, and the livestock. The Yellowstone wound through hills and mountains, like a snake in its death throes, and the Hunkpapas’ patience was wearing thin as they followed its riverbank. On the morning of the sixth day, the war party turned to a medicine man for counsel, and after communing with the spirits, he announced that they would find a Crow village within one day.