The Powder River (15 page)

Chapter 5

Sings Wolf sat his horse and waited for Smith to decide. He was well mounted now—all three of them were, riding the dead scouts’ big American horses and their light McClellan saddles, with the rest of their gear, U.S. Army issue, packed on Hindy’s draft animals. They looked down on a baker’s dozen horses in a fenced pasture, and the ranch building beyond.

“The people need them,” Sings Wolf said simply, without emphasis.

Yes, but … Smith was wanted for kidnapping a white girl, maybe for killing her father, for killing three scouts of the U.S. Army, and stealing army horses and equipment. Fortunately, they could execute him only once.

And fat chance they would mistake his identity. Nothing more common around here than six-and-a-half-foot Indians who speak English like a Dartmouth graduate and are trained in medicine, is there, Doctor?

He wondered whether Elaine would suffer on his account. Would they persecute her somehow for being his wife? Would they mock her for being married to a murderer? Would they hold her to guarantee his surrender?

His wife seemed to him an infinity away. He thought of her in his bedroll at dawn and dusk, when he got a little nap. He hoped she healed rapidly. He hoped she would go to Fort Robinson and wait for him. He feared she would go home, and become a Massachusetts schoolmarm, and eventually make a respectable marriage. Whatever she decided, it was beyond his reach. He had moved into a world with its own gravitational pull, which he could not overcome.

So why didn’t he want to steal this ranchers horses? Why not, indeed?

Smith knew he would do it. It was right for Sings Wolf. Sings Wolf looked and sounded marvelously martial. He was full of his own virility. After six decades as a woman, he glowed manhood.

Smith chuckled. He said to himself, Maybe you can store up your virility. But wasn’t the whole idea to spend it? And have a good time spending it?

He nodded once at Sings Wolf. The old warrior told Hindy to wait for them in the ravine north of the ranch buildings, a couple of miles from here. They would come immediately after dark, which was only an hour away. The girl walked her big horse off. Ever since the rape, she’d been pliable and listless, acting half-dead. Smith was worried about her.

The old man sat down to paint his face like a veteran of a thousand raids.

As soon as she felt able, the third day after her surgery, Elaine dictated a telegram to her mother and sister:

I HAVE SURVIVED STOP RIGHT LEG AMPUTATED BELOW THE KNEE STOP LONG REHABILITATION MAY MEAN VISIT HOME STOP SAD BUT BEARING UP STOP YOUR LOVING DAUGHTER ELAINE

Sings Wolf gazed into the small fire. The dawn light made it nearly invisible. He was uneasy. Not tired, just uneasy.

Since he had claimed his manhood, Sings Wolf felt strong. His body was no longer seventy winters worn, but new. So he had been able to push the stolen horses hard all night with Vekifs and the white child, not sleeping at all. Sings Wolf thought this push unnecessary. They had made off with the horses at night and had seen and heard nothing of the white ranch people. He thought maybe the people were gone into town because of the Indian scare. Or else they hadn’t been watchful.

If the ranchers followed the horses’ trail, thought Sings Wolf, they had not started until the next morning, and so would be too far behind to catch up before the animals were part of the herd of three hundred Tsistsistas-Suhtaio. The people’s trail was fresh now—Sings Wolf, Vekifs, and Hindy would catch up with the people tomorrow.

And they would ride to a descant of evil. Sings Wolf was beginning to feel that evil now, no more visible than the wind but just as real. He felt it in the turning of hairs on his arms, in the small turbulence in his chest, in his oppressing sense of blight here, in his held-back despair.

He realized that his two companions did not notice it, not Hindy napping there across the fire, not Vekifs standing watch on the horses. To him it was remarkable that they could look about and see nothing but the usual arid, rolling plains of the country between the Platte and the Arkansas. They did not sense the hints here, and they would not hear the awful melody, thrummed loudly by all the living things, at the hill where the blood ran deep. Sings Wolf shrugged and stood up.

“Let’s go,” he said, not loudly.

Hindy sat up immediately, rubbing her eyes. A willing girl, that one—she will make a good woman of the Tsistsistas-Suhtaio, he thought. A little food, a little nap, and she is ready to ride all day.

Vekifs came to get his saddle. He picked up a saddle in each hand, his and Hindy’s, and headed back toward the rope corral. His strength was wonderful.

But if some of his blood was not white, he would feel what was here. He did not, so Sings Wolf would have to tell him. Last evening the sky had even sifted down a thin snow for a few minutes, the first sign of winter, and a sign that it was time to tell stories.

Sings Wolf gave it a moment’s thought. He had best tell his tale here, before they got to the hill where the whites had done most of the killing three years ago. There the spirits acted out the slaughter perpetually. And all the malignity, the darkness of human beings and of the universe—it was still there, a palpable evil. If the spirits heard Sings Wolf speak of the evil, they would be ill-disposed toward him and his companions.

But if Vekifs was to be truly Cheyenne, he must hear, feel, know, understand. So when Vekifs started to take down the rope corral, Sings Wolf stayed his hand.

“Grandson,” began Sings Wolf, “you do not know what happened a little below here, down the Sappa River.” Smith had gathered from the hints, the silences, the turns away from some conversational directions that the Human Beings didn’t want to talk about it. They avoided speaking the names of the dead, and they didn’t talk about what was too sad for tears. So people died here, doubtless lots of people. If Sings Wolf was about to ignore the taboo and tell him what happened, it was important.

Sings Wolf told it simply, without emphasis, without elaboration, without pause. Except for the quaver in his voice and the grief in his face, his telling might have seemed matter-of-fact.

Some soldiers and volunteers (those bastards again) chased a band of Human Beings in this direction from Fort Reno because Black Horse refused to go to jail. He broke away and fled with the Tsistsistas-Suhtaio. They fled rapidly to the north, back to Powder River country, just like now. Many people on this trip were at Sappa Creek, including Sings Wolf

Somehow the whites got the Cheyennes pinned down in a difficult place. The women had to dig holes for themselves and the children, and the men shot from rifle pits. But the Human Beings had only a few guns and not much ammunition, and they were finally overwhelmed. It was one of the few times the whites were willing to fight all the way, and the people couldn’t hold them off.

Some people escaped, slipping off to the rear. But lots of warriors were killed. Sings Wolf mentioned slaughtered warriors without using their names—the oldest son of Two Feathers, the brother of Blue Knife, the father of Singing Crane. It was too long a recitation. Smith knew many of the warriors and had fought with some of them.

When the warriors were dead, and the soldiers and volunteers came up, many women and children were still hiding in their pits.

Sings Wolf hesitated now, and went on with audible resolve. The whites clubbed the women and children, even the infants, with the butts of their guns. Sings Wolf listed the dead women and children without naming them. He did it evenly, but his eyes gave him away—he had left the present and was in the past, a past that was nearly unspeakable.

Then the whites burned the people’s belongings—tipi covers, poles, buffalo robes, everything. And they threw the bodies of the Indians on the fires, some still alive.

Sings Wolf looked Smith flush in the eyes. His wordless gaze said, Do you see? Do you understand? Then the old man untied the rope and let the horses out.

So. My grandfather has spoken the simple truth, and will say no more about it.

Sings Wolf handed Smith the reins of his mount. Smith was too affected to move yet.

Smith was thinking that to him, it was an evil inflicted on the people three years ago. To Sings Wolf it was more, much more. It was a continuing expression of the malign forces in the universe. As such, it was still happening. Sings Wolf gazed upon the present and the past simultaneously. As he rode into the scene today, what happened there would be happening again. It would always be happening, murder after murder, implacably.

And for Smith to put the event back to three years ago, to push it away, made no difference. He was stunned, dumbfounded.

Sings Wolf was mounted. He yelled at the horses and moved them down the trail. Smith had to get going.

The day after she sent her telegram, Elaine got a wire back:

BUCK UP STOP OF COURSE YOU SURVIVED STOP YOU ARE A CUMMINCS STOP YOU CAN DO ANYTHINC STOP WE LOVE YOU STOP MOTHER AND DORA

Dr. Richtarsch instructed Fran Wockerley to read it to Elaine as soon as she was alert, and to give her the hundred dollars that came with it. Elaine wasn’t alert enough until the next day.

Chapter 6

Smith, Sings Wolf, and Hindy caught up with the main band of Human Beings about noon and were received warmly by Lisette and Rain. The people went into camp early in the afternoon—they would rest a day or two to let their weak horses recuperate. Sings Wolf immediately gave the stolen horses away, a genuine boon.

The women quickly fixed Smith, Sings Wolf, and Hindy something to eat. They accepted Hindy into the family without question.

The news was good and not so good. Yes, the Tsistsistas-Suhtaio had whipped Colonel Lewis back at the forks of Punished Woman Creek. They would have whipped him worse, but some young warrior had gotten excited and shot too soon and spoiled the ambush. And they hadn’t been bothered by soldiers since that day.

But the people were low in spirit. Their horses were exhausted, and some died every day, or the people killed them for food. And the tribe had limped past the hill on the Sappa River where so many relatives died not long ago. Lisette said no more. Smith knew she implied that the badness of the place, the spirit of evil there, brought everyone low.

So Smith wandered through the camp and found out what was happening in the strangest of ways: Little Finger Nail was drawing in his canvas-covered account book.

Smith had come to like Finger Nail. The young warrior spoke seldom, seemed game for any sort of adventure, and smiled appealingly, the sweet smile of an easygoing, congenial youth. And he was beautiful. His face was striking in a way that was still boyish, his clothes hung on him becomingly, he moved gracefully, and somehow he just looked like a picture, a romantic version in soft contours of a plains warrior. He wore a bird in his hair, which he thought lent him his sweetness of voice. The way he’d tied the feathers onto his lance was somehow just right, the painting on his shield was handsome, the way he sat in his saddle dramatic. All the while with that boyish smile. Smith supposed that the eye of the artist shaped all his life.

Finger Nail was depicting yesterday’s coups. Some young men had gone after horses. When they saw the white rancher had his horses carefully guarded, they knew the word was out. Finger Nail had crept up on a corral, killed the guard with his knife, scalped him, and chased the horses out. Then he had ridden back against the pursuers and struck one with his war club, a fine coup indeed, facing rifles to strike a blow by hand.

The fresh scalp hanging from a cottonwood branch told the rest of the story. Auburn, the scalp was.

Finger Nail talked a little in his soft, youthful voice while he drew. The young men raided because the Human Beings needed horses—the people could not walk to Powder River and carry all their belongings on their backs. While the warriors raided, they took life and they took hair. “We remember,” he said simply.

Finger Nail looked up from his work when he said those words. His eyes were large and soft, pretty, but Smith knew that he was among the most daring of the young men. “We spoke among ourselves of killing nineteen whites here.” That was the number of Human Beings killed here three years ago. “We are not finished yet.”

Smith left him to his work and talked to others. Before long he understood: Little Wolf no longer had any control of his warriors. Morning Star sought no control. Everyone felt the same way. Stealing horses was necessary for reasons of practicality. Taking scalps was mandatory for reasons of the spirit. The policy of walking softly through the white-man country was dead. It brought no mercy from the white man anyway.

A hell for them, Smith thought. A hell of the past, a hell of the present.

A hell for us.

Smith was startled when Sings Wolf woke him out of a deep sleep around midnight. After days of hard pushing, Smith needed to sleep, and he was surprised that Sings Wolf didn’t. “I’m leading a pony raid,” said the old man, “and I would like you to go.”

Smith nodded, ready to listen. He knew how it was done. One man felt called to go on a pony raid. It was a weighty responsibility. That man made medicine and listened to what his medicine said—how it should be done, where, in what way it could succeed, and what might cause it to fail. Then he chose companions, and in choosing took responsibility for them. He was saying that his medicine promised success—that the party would get horses and everyone would come back alive. If his medicine failed, he would accept some responsibility for the dead man’s family.

The men chosen could accept or refuse. Acceptance indicated confidence in the leader’s medicine. Refusal simply indicated that their own medicine told them to stay home or do something else. Embracing the leader’s medicine meant embracing the way the raid was to be done.

Sings Wolf said he had heard of a big ranch with many horses to the northeast. They would steal the horses at dawn. The whites would respond slowly, but might follow. The raiders would return without shedding anyone’s blood, white man or red man. Nothing would be stolen but horses.

Smith listened to Sings Wolf’s revelations carefully. He needed to understand what to do. What he didn’t understand was why Sings Wolf was doing this. The old man seemed listless about it, unenthusiastic—he was a warrior now, but it seemed to mean nothing to him. After leading the one war charge, maybe Sings Wolf would have liked to become Calling Eagle again. Nevertheless, Smith would not have refused his grandfather.

Smith was glad when he saw Wooden Legs, a son of the old-man chief Little Wolf and a leader, join them. And Little Finger Nail, the painter and singer. He nodded at Raven, a man who’d spoken at councils for killing, but a longtime friend of Sings Wolf.

Then Smith saw Twist coming. He wanted to speak irately to his grandfather. He wanted to back out in anger. But he knew Sings Wolf had considered Smith’s feelings and had strong reasons for ignoring them. He couldn’t refuse to go.

Twist was smirking about the situation, damn him.

Why had Sings Wolf picked out Smith’s enemy? Why had Twist, known for his bloodthirstiness, accepted a raid that was to be bloodless?

Smith was awake now, and nettled. But it was not for him to challenge his grandfather’s medicine. He wished his eye wounds didn’t hurt, and itch.

Question marks, Nelly Burns had said—question marks around the brain. Got any questions about yourself, Smith?

It was no ordinary western-Kansas ranch house. No soddy, Smith saw in the predawn light, not even a log cabin. A house framed out of saw timber, and a big house. The saw timber the homesteaders usually had was the timber in their wagons. They trundled their wagons out from the nearest railway stop full of household goods, to the spot they claimed as home.

Daring imaginations, these homesteaders had, to eyeball a vacant, dried-up stretch of prairie and imagine it as what they meant by home, a place fenced and irrigated and full of fat cattle and hay and growing kids and a vegetable garden and even flowers in what they called a yard. Smith had to admire them, in a way.

When they got to their spot, some place like this on a creek or with a good spring, they unloaded the household goods and stripped the wagons for saw timber to build a house. This house was substantial—this rancher must have hauled more saw timber out from Ogallala. What looked like another home stood across the driveway. Plus half a dozen outbuildings—sheds, barns for stock and feed—all of saw timber. A man of big dreams, this rancher. Smith bet his kids had homesteaded the adjacent sections. That was the way the smart ones did it.

Well, after today, these folks would have to tend their cattle on foot. The Cheyenne nation was about to requisition their horses.

Smith finished his face paint—red forehead, broad band of verdigris on the nose—and walked down behind the ridge to get his mount. A big bunch of white-man horses was in one jingle pasture, just waiting to be requisitioned.

There behind the ridge, before they started the raid, Sings Wolf reminded them again that no one was to be killed.

Twist said softly, and with a bitter smile, “Remember the Sappa River!”

The warriors were taken aback at this rudeness, this defiance.

Sings Wolf looked at Twist somberly. “No blood will be shed,” repeated Sings Wolf, “either ours or theirs.” It was not an order, but a statement of the right way to do things, the medicine way. It was powerful.

Smith thought his grandfather’s medicine must be convincing. Smith had seen the foul mood (the foul spirit, the Tsistsistas-Suhtaio would say, meaning something different) descend on Sings Wolf as they came down the Sappa River. He had seen Sings Wolf congratulate the young men who brought white scalps into camp. He could see murder in Sings Wolf’s eyes even now. It was not policy that stayed his grandfather’s hand—it could only be medicine.

So Sings Wolf and Twist started down the hill on foot. It was their job to make sure the horses were unguarded, or to take care of the guards. If Sings Wolf’s medicine was good, the whites would not be watching their horses. Then the two would cut the pasture fence and yell and wave their blankets and stampede the horses into open country. Twist had a prized pair of wire cutters for the purpose. Stolen, Smith assumed, and probably from a dead man.

It was the job of the others to bring Sings Wolf and Twist their mounts and get the stolen horses running back toward camp, fast. Smith and Sings Wolf would guard the back trail, to make sure no one followed the stolen horses too closely. An occasional rifle shot would be plenty to put the fear of ambush into the hearts of any followers.

The plan came apart, in a roundabout way, because a teenage girl had to pee.

That dawn was the dawn of a fine Sunday morning in early October of 1878 in western Kansas. Western Kansas was then much too sparsely settled for most ranchers and farmers to be able to go to church. But they did like to use Sundays for get-togethers. In this case Eric Sunvold had decided to organize a stockman’s association, a group to register brands, cut down on mavericking and rustling, get some control of predators and Indians, and advance the interest of cattle raisers against sodbusters. So he had invited neighboring cattlemen for miles around to his home for a big get-together on Saturday night, some talk, a vote on officers on Sunday morning, dinner, and a lot of long wagon rides home on Sunday afternoon.

Eric Sunvold was the man to do the organizing—he was a natural leader, prosperous, ambitious, and he had the room to accommodate a half-dozen neighbors and their families, the women and younger kids sleeping in the house and the men and older kids in the wagons and barns. He expected to be elected president of the new association.

He was a middle-aged man with a thick, drooping mustache, a roll of hard belly, and a huge, leonine head. He had three surviving children, and was fiercely proud of all of them. Max had built his own house right there on the place, and his wife Kate had a start on a family. Jacob lived at home but would start to work at the bank in Ogallala next month, learning the business. Alene was a pretty, vivacious thing, just fifteen years old.

Eric Sunvold didn’t know that his daughter Alene, at the moment of dawn when Sunvold got out of bed, was out by the creek making the beast with two backs with Benjamin Halstead. Ben was just seventeen, and a nearby rancher’s only son. He and Alene had discovered this intensely pleasurable activity last summer, without the permission of their parents. Alene was bold at finding opportunities to repeat it—this dawn meeting was the third she’d found since Ben arrived with his folks yesterday noon.

Even though Alene was a romantic, when she completed that vigorous act she felt an unromantic need. She had to pee. Now. Ordinarily, she would have deemed this time and place fitting—she certainly had no secrets from her parents and brothers. But Ben was not family, not yet, and she felt shy. Besides, she’d better gather some eggs pretty quick and get into the kitchen to get breakfast started. So she wrapped the blankets she’d brought around her and headed toward the barnyard and the privy at a trot.

That’s when she saw Twist sneaking into the barn, and started screaming bloody murder.

Two days ago Twist had discovered coal oil. White people kept coal oil around their farms and ranches as a fuel. Twist had found some in a barn. Yellow Nose had shown him what it would do. Burn down the barn. And the house. And all the other outbuildings. The ranch people were already dead, so Twist and Yellow Nose took their time and made a thorough job of it. Ordinarily, it was hard to get a building started burning. You had to work at the fire steadily for a while. But with coal oil it was quick. And it looked so fine.

As they crept toward the jingle pasture, Twist told Sings Wolf he was going to create a little diversion with fire. Give the white folks something to think about. So much to think about they wouldn’t have time to worry about their horses.

“No,” Sings Wolf said simply.

Twist sneered at him, tossed the wire cutters onto the ground, and headed for the barn.

Sings Wolf berated himself for following Twist. He could have gone to the pasture alone, cut the fence, and turned the horses loose. He could have just gone back to his companions. He could have stuck to what he saw with his medicine foresight. But he didn’t, and he didn’t know why.

He wished he could get out from under the blackness that came on him this morning when he came to the Sappa River. Black memories, black thoughts. Bloody, murderous thoughts. Sings Wolf kept pushing them away, and they kept coming back, like something alien seeping into his mind, body, spirit. But it was not alien, he knew—it was the anger of a man at the killing of his relatives and friends here. It was natural, human. Yet he needed to set that anger aside.

He had seen this pony raid clearly, a glimpse of the future. In his foresight it was bloodless. It included no burning, either. But burning wasn’t killing, yet, was it?

The way he saw it had been simple. He saw small pictures of it happening—the approach, the stampede, the triumphant return to camp—in the commonplace way that he foresaw Lisette cooking dinner tonight, the way he remembered his
veho
son Mac, the way he imagined Smith saying good-bye to Elaine in Dodge City. It was clear and simple, as such glimpses usually were. It was medicine foresight.