Stone Song (47 page)

TO THE VICTOR

The victory tasted delicious. The big villages moved off from the site of the battle and held big dances to celebrate. The men chanted, sang, and danced their deeds in the fight against Long Hair by the Greasy Grass. Crazy Horse noticed that they sounded like hero stories of old. Lakota warriors struck so many coups that many of them had not been witnessed.

Men made new songs about the fight. Some were mocking:

“
Long Hair, I had no guns
.

You brought me some
.

I thank you
.

You make me laugh!

“
Long Hair, I had no horses
.

You brought me some
.

I thank you
.

You make me laugh!
”

One of the songs Crazy Horse liked best pointed at the way the whites were always condemning people different from them:

“
A charger, he is coming
.

I made him come
.

When he came, I wiped him out
.

He didn’t like my ways
,

That’s why
.”

What he was happiest about was that the people had joined together and acted as one people, not a lot of quarreling bands and chiefs. Also, the Lakota had fought the new way, not individually but as a unit, not for honors and glory but to kill.

Other war leaders paid him a compliment. When they saw that Gall would chase the soldiers up the hill, the warriors following Crazy Horse rode away from the fight, around in back of Long Hair, and surprised him from the rear. They added that only Crazy Horse could have led the men in that roundabout attack.

People said the spirit of Sitting Bull’s vision had been realized. Others said that because of some mutilations and stripping of bodies, a terrible price would be exacted later.

Many Lakota wondered what the soldiers would do now. “Respect us,” some said, “and leave us alone.” “Get revenge for Long Hair,” others said, “by sending ten soldiers for every one they sent to the Greasy Grass.”

Crazy Horse did not participate in these arguments. He said in private that they would simply have to wait and see what the whites would do. There was nothing to be gained by guessing about it. He had another reason not to talk, though, to withdraw and be quiet and listen: Something was more and more insistent in his mind—the beat of the drum.

The soldiers made their choice: They withdrew from the entire country and waited until one full moon had passed and half of another, the Moon When All Things Ripen. Even then they marched all around and found hardly any Indians and had indifferent success when they did.

In the meantime Crazy Horse went to Paha Sapa against the miners. He thought the people mustn’t lose the Hills. But regardless of what the army did, more miners crawled over the hills every day, tearing up the earth looking for gold. He took groups of young warriors. They slipped through the canyons silently, used arrows instead of guns, and killed miner after miner.

They stole wagonloads of goods that were welcome in the camps.

When the young men dragged their feet, wanting to enjoy themselves, Crazy Horse went back to the Hills alone and killed more miners. He was quiet and effective. He felt more murderous than he had since the days when he avenged Little Hawk’s death.

It was He Dog who figured out what Crazy Horse was doing and upbraided him.

“And what do you do?” He Dog asked a little sharply, talking about the lone trips.

“Kill miners,” said Crazy Horse. It required no explanation.

He Dog sucked at his
canupa
and said nothing for a while. Then he spoke softly and intensely. “My friend, you have no right.” He looked Crazy Horse in the eye. “You have no right. You belong to everyone now.”

He let it sit. They both were thinking how Crazy Horse had belonged to everyone as a shirtman, pledged to think of all the people first, and how he had lost that status and those duties.

“Things are different now,” He Dog said. “The Big Bellies are agency chiefs. We have not made any new shirtmen for a long time. The people choose the leaders they want in the way they want.” He gazed at Crazy Horse directly. “They’ve chosen you. You are their hero. They follow you.”

Crazy Horse listened to the beat of the drum.

He Dog was quiet for a while. “This is a terrible time,” he said. “The hoop of the people is broken, some of us living the old way, some of us begging from the whites. To mend the hoop we need leadership. You cannot throw your life at the feet of some miner who happens to see you first.”

Crazy Horse stayed in camp. It was time for the fall hunt anyway, if anyone could find buffalo.

When the meat was in the packs—well, some meat—came the awful news. The Big Bellies had sold Paha Sapa. The Black Hills, whites called them, and the whites “owned” them now.

People listened to the messengers in the council lodge in a hubbub. They spoke out of turn and even interrupted each other. Men called “
Hunhunhe!
” in regret. Some women wailed.

“They can’t sell any land,” said someone. “The paper says three out of four of us have to sign.”

“The whites say it’s done,” answered the messengers.

“How many signed?”

“Thirty or forty.”

“Out of all the people?”

“Thirty or forty.”

Worm said, “They see how few of us are left.”

“Why did they sign?”

“They were drunk,” someone put in.

One messenger held up a hand. “Red Cloud refused to sign,” he said. “Spotted Tail refused to sign. Then the agents said no more food would be given to anyone until they signed.”

No more food at all. The children would starve to death.

The warriors looked at each other. No one said the obvious. If you took the white man’s word, his food, his clothing and blankets, then he would starve you whenever he wanted more.

At this revelation Crazy Horse, silent as usual, got up and left the council.

He walked out into the hills near camp. He sat and looked around and saw nothing. He was in a rage.

He tried to quiet enough inside to listen to Hawk, to sense Hawk’s mood.

Maybe she was still. At least he couldn’t feel her.

Besides, she was his guide in war.

Who would guide him when he won on the battlefield and lost everything to a piece of paper?

Crazy Horse watched them walking knee-deep through the soft snow, gliding through the flakes that drifted down, gray, misty shadows barely moving. Many took just enough steps to keep from freezing to death.
When they stopped, they looked thin and bare and quaking, like the leafless aspens they walked through.

Easing down, the snow made them lavender silhouettes against the pink dawn light. Yes, they had a kind of austere beauty. Sometimes he thought death was beautiful. Sometimes he felt its call, soft and alluring. Sometimes the call seemed to come from Hawk. Sometimes from the mother whose name he would never speak. Sometimes from the beat of the drum.

It was not time to listen to it, not yet.

He stood in the deep snow among the aspens and watched the Sahiyela village of Morning Star walk toward Crazy Horse’s camp on Hanging Woman Creek above the Buffalo Tongue River near the Shining Mountains. The village had been hit by Three Stars’ soldiers, and for three-quarters of an entire moon, a moon of death, they had walked through the terrible cold to seek succor from Crazy Horse.

He was afoot because he had given his mount to a young woman with children of about six and two winters. The woman could barely stand up on her frozen, bloodied feet.
Akicita
men would be here soon with plenty of ponies, but Crazy Horse wanted to ease the woman’s pain immediately. He would walk back to camp. Sometimes walking made his mind and spirit reflective, and he saw into things.

This time he could barely stand to see. The word was that eleven babies had frozen to death in their mothers’ arms. Clearly the soldiers had destroyed most of the village’s possessions—horses, lodges, food, clothing, blankets, everything. And left them to walk through the cold, dying.

This moon, which the whites called November, had been the coldest Winter Moon he could remember. The snow that began last night at dusk had warmed Mother Earth a little. Otherwise more children would probably have frozen to death in their mothers’ arms just last night.

Now his village’s camp was on Hanging Woman Creek. The name was from the Psatoka, who said that an older woman had hanged herself from the lodge poles here when her man took a second and younger wife. Still, the name seemed … fateful.

Sometimes he felt mesmerized by the beat of the drum.

He shook his head and forced himself to think not about his birth mother but the soldiers. They had done such things before to the Sahiyela, on Sand Creek, at the Washita, and just last winter at Two Moons’ camp, when He Dog was there. Such soldiers were incomprehensible to Crazy Horse. “Understand your enemy” was a first principle of war. He did not want to understand these enemies. But he did want to kill them.

Morning Star told the story in the council lodge, but so feebly it hardly made sense. The Sahiyela thought the soldiers had missed them. A youth captured by several Snakes had given the location of the village away before he realized the Snakes were scouting for the army. The pony soldiers struck at dawn. Morning Star’s young son had been killed in the first charge. The soldiers got straight into the village. The warriors had to hold them off from a nearby ridge while the women and children fled. Over thirty Sahiyela were killed. And the soldiers burned the entire village, everything the people owned.

Exactly what had happened didn’t matter, though the Sahiyela seemed not to be good at watching for soldiers in winter camp. What did matter was that here were nearly two hundred lodges, about thirteen hundred people, without shelter, without clothing, without blankets, without food.

Sitting next to Crazy Horse, He Dog assured the Sahiyela that their people would be fed and kept warm by their brothers the Lakota.

Crazy Horse held his short
canupa
up and asked the blessings of the powers upon this village. They were going to need blessings, he thought. To get enough food and enough to keep warm for all these people through the winter—now that was only a gray, misty hope.

In the next moon, the time of the shortest days of the year, Lakota men came into camp from Red Cloud Agency with an offer. To persuade these men to ask the free chiefs to bring their people in, Three Stars had made two promises: He would quit chasing the Indians in the winter, and they would get agencies here in their own country, not far off on the Muddy Water River, the Missouri.

“A white-man promise!” exclaimed Little Big Man.

Besides, the messengers had to admit that last moon Three Stars had confiscated all the ponies and guns at Red Cloud Agency, every one of them. It was humiliating. The army had sent the scouts of the Pani, their oldest enemies, to confiscate Lakota property. The Pani had marched right into lodges, thrown things around, taken every gun they could find, and even burned some lodges.

“Why?” asked Little Big Man sharply. “Why take the horses and guns?”

Three Stars said it was because the Oglala had moved away from the agency after they signed the paper selling the Black Hills. But Red Cloud’s people thought it was to keep the agency Indians from helping their free cousins.

Then Three Stars showed how angry he was at Red Cloud. The soldier chief set Spotted Tail as headman over the Oglala as well as the Sicangu.

The leaders looked at each other wide-eyed. Go in? And have every horse and every firearm taken by the soldiers? How would they live? What good would an agency in their own country be if they couldn’t move the village or hunt? They would be prisoners, dependent on handouts.

No, they said with bitter laughter, they wouldn’t go to Red Cloud Agency. There the air would be thick with the old troubles among the Oglala anyway. And the Oglala would be under a Sicangu chief.

But they were very hungry. Every day they ate horses, usually the American horses captured from the soldiers last summer. Though they’d run cattle off from Bear Coat’s new fort at the mouth of Buffalo Tongue River, that beef was butchered and gone.

No one mentioned it, but the extra Sahiyela mouths to feed were a heavy burden.

Crazy Horse struggled to keep his mind on helping the people. His spirit was off in the forest, alone, listening to the song of songs, the beat of the drum.

One morning thirteen lodges were gone, headed for Red Cloud Agency. The headmen had talked about this and agreed: All the people in this camp, 600 lodges of Oglala, Mniconjou, and Itazipicola, would stay until everyone decided what to do. They would not fragment themselves, not during this hard winter. No one liked to make such a decision—it went hard against the Lakota sense that each man owned his own life and directed it by his own insight into Power. But sometimes individuals had to govern themselves for the best for all.

So the
akicita
men followed the lodge trail in the snow and brought the deserters back. By instruction they unstrung their bows and whipped the men to shame them. They also took their weapons and broke their lodge poles.

The next day four lodges of people left with the messengers from Red Cloud. The chiefs let them go—the soldiers were holding the families of these people hostage at Fort Robinson until they came in.

So the headmen talked long and seriously among themselves. People were suffering. Something had to be done.

They decided to send messengers to Bear Coat, the whites’ General Miles. Four hundred lodges of Hunkpapa had gone in to Miles at the soldier house at the mouth of the Tongue River and were given plenty to eat. Maybe Bear Coat would give them food, let them keep their mounts and weapons and live in their own land.

The headmen went down to the fort, Crazy Horse, He Dog, Big Road, Lame Deer of the Mniconjou, and a score of others. They sat their ponies on a ridge and sent forward Drum-on-His-Back, the Oglala who
had learned to read. Seven other messengers rode with Drum-on-His-Back, under a white flag of truce, as General Miles had instructed.