The Warriors (44 page)

And it was more than a bow, Michael saw suddenly. It had a pointed iron head. The head pressed the side of young Ruffin’s neck. Wind fluttered the feathers decorating the bow lance.

Michael stood silent and stunned in the blowing buffalo grass, his frightened gaze taking in the dark cheeks, the nut-colored eyes, the hands gripping bows and shields, the animal-skin shirts with long twisted strands of hair knotted in the fringing. Scalp locks taken from their enemies—?

As he glanced from face to expressionless face, he found no friendliness. He shivered, all but certain several of the motionless horsemen were ready to reach for arrows in quivers slung over their backs. He knew that if he bolted to sound an alarm he’d be killed before he ran six steps.

And the nearest workers were half a mile away. Very faintly, he heard their shouts and splashing.

So,
he thought with a mixture of terror and sadness,
it seems I’ve found another enemy.

And another war.

S
OME THIRTY MILES SOUTHEAST
of the railhead on a simmering afternoon in the same month, a handsome, twenty-six-year-old Oglala Sioux and his white companion found what they had been seeking for the better part of a week.

The Sioux, whom the white man called Kola, knew the search was over when his friend came scrambling down the side of the ravine to the dry wash where Kola had been told to wait with the rickety wagon. Two mules were hitched to the wagon. The wiry buffalo pony that was their common property was tied to the tailgate.

From the expression on his friend’s face, Kola suspected the find was a good one. The young white man’s dark eyes sparkled when the sun touched them beneath the brim of his low-crowned plainsman’s hat. Like nearly everything else the partners owned, the hat had been stolen.

As always, the sight of the white man stirred a profound, almost religious feeling of affection within the Sioux. Only a few of the white’s quirks bothered Kola. One was altogether minor, and by now almost amusing.

Six months earlier, the white man had found the Sioux brave half dead, beaten in most uncharacteristic fashion by the husband of a woman named Sweet Summer. In his pain, the young Sioux had tried to thank his benefactor. Again and again he’d pointed alternately to the white man and then to himself while repeating the word
kola
to indicate each was now a special friend to the other. The Sioux had had a regular
kola
during his boyhood years—Lively Cub, who’d taken the name Brave Horse after counting his first coups.

Although the white man soon came to understand what
kola
meant in a general sense, he took a fancy to the word. He preferred it to the Sioux’s adult name, Clever Hunter.

“Kola, we hit some luck. There’s a small herd lying down with their cuds, right up yonder.” One of the white man’s grease-stained buckskin gauntlets lifted toward the rim of the wash.

“How many, Joseph?” Kola asked in the badly accented English he’d learned hanging around the fort.

“Eighteen, twenty—” Joseph brushed a pestiferous fly from the long fair hair hanging over the back of his collar-less flannel shirt. Suspenders held up his threadbare trousers. But his boots were sturdy.

“Couple of calves, too,” Joseph added. “We’ll let them go.”

Kola shared his friend’s happiness with a smile. Joseph was five or six years Kola’s junior, but seemed older. He was lean, strong and, most importantly, trustworthy. At least he had never proved himself otherwise during their half-year association.

If Joseph tended to be somewhat more reckless than a Sioux, that was a peculiarity of his white temperament. Kola did not question it too deeply. The saving of his life by Joseph had been a sending of the gods.
Wakan.
Holy. Therefore an event of great meaning for the future. Shortly after their meeting, a night vision had confirmed it.

Occasionally Kola was disturbed by the pitiless set of Joseph’s mouth when he fired one of their weapons. The Sioux killed to eat, and slew their enemies only when absolutely necessary. For honor, pleasure—and the preservation of tribal manpower—they preferred counting coup instead.

But Joseph was his
kola.
For that reason, and another even more compelling, the Sioux brave never spoke about disturbing aspects of his friend’s behavior. The reason was Kola’s certainty that Joseph was guided by his own inner voice.

Every Sioux heeded this most sacred and mysterious of all instructors. It told him where he must go, and how he must behave. It sometimes spoke when a man was awake, but more often it spoke through dreams.

Even the
winkte,
the target of so many warrior jests, did no more than follow the promptings of his inner voice when, as a boy, he chose to don women’s clothing and face paint for the rest of his life. Thus every
winkte
—and they were numerous—was revered as well as scorned. A
winkte
was often asked to name a newborn so the child would never suffer sickness, for instance. Almost without exception, the inner voice of a human being was
wakan.

So Kola believed that in all things, Joseph was only obeying the inner voice Kola would never hear, just as Joseph would never hear his. The belief made Kola forgiving of behavior he might otherwise have questioned.

The Sioux, a dark, supple young man wearing only a buffalo skin breechclout and moccasins with bull rawhide soles, glanced at the scorching sun which appeared to be sitting on the rim of the gully. The sun’s glare threw the outline of his large sharp nose across one side of his face and created tiny shadows beside the two puckered scars in the hard flesh above his nipples. At eighteen he had committed himself to the religious frenzy of the gazing-at-the-sun dance, stamping and reeling for hours around the sacred pole until his zeal gave him strength to mortify his own flesh. The wooden skewers inserted under his skin by the shaman had torn free and fallen, bloody at the ends of the braided ropes attached to the pole. The twin scars were testimony to his courage.

The sun was a fearful and sacred thing to the Indian: another tangible sign of the presence of
Wakan Tonka
—the Great Mystery, the driving force and spirit of life which was in every place, every person, and every occurrence, though in ways not always discernible. This afternoon, however, the sun had a more practical significance.

“The time is late, Joseph. The buffalo will move soon to the night bedding place.”

“Or find a larger herd.” Joseph nodded. Kola had taught him that, in August, when the rutting season began and the bulls and cows grew impatient to breed, the animals tended to gather and migrate together in huge numbers—a thousand, two thousand—which made hunting more difficult. “We’ll get them before they do,” the white man continued. “I’ve already picked out the cow leading them.”

Kola murmured a syllable to show the pleasure he took from his friend’s confidence. In the spring when they’d first traveled together, Joseph had been unable to distinguish a leader in a herd of massive bulls, smaller cows, and their calves. Out of gratitude, Kola had taught him much. Kola did not hate white men with the ferocity of some of his race. He’d been around forts too long as a youth. And he’d been cast out from his own tribal group because of the wrath and influence of Sweet Summer’s husband.

Joseph reached down to scratch his right leg just above the boot where he hid his skinning knife. “There are half a dozen bulls, the rest cows. Been through a grass fire not too long ago. Hides look burned on the hindquarters where they’ve shed. Two of the bulls and two of the cows must have had their eyes ruined when they stampeded through the fire.”

A scowl ridged Kola’s brow. “Four of them do not see?”

“Practically sure of it.”

The Sioux digested that. It made what they were about to do more difficult. The bison lacked good vision even when they hadn’t been injured. But they possessed sharp senses of smell and hearing to offset the lack. Blind buffalo—common on the prairie—were even more alert to alien scents and sounds.

“Is there a hiding place where the wind is right?”

“Some brush. I have it all laid out.”

Joseph spoke in a quiet, pleasant voice, slurring, and softening some of his words. Kola had encountered a few whites who talked the same way. Driving small herds of longhorn cattle, they had ridden up from the southern part of the land mass Joseph had frequently tried to describe for him, but whose immensity defied Kola’s imagination. He was also unable to form more than a rudimentary mental picture of the fantastic collections of structures Joseph called cities, that the white man assured Kola were plentiful beyond eastern rivers Kola had never seen.

A happy curve relieved the severity of Joseph’s mouth as he gestured to his companion. “Let’s unpack the guns.”

A strong
kola,
this stranger who had fed and cared for him until he could walk and function again. A
kola
who handled white men’s weapons well, although with a strange, almost possessive fondness.

Kola tied the reins of the mules and clambered into the rear of the wagon. He unwrapped the blanket and removed the three loaded rifles, along with a hide cartridge pouch. Kola noticed how perspiration appeared on Joseph’s upper lip and a smile brightened his eyes at the sight of the trio of powerful buffalo killers.

Conscious of the lateness of the hour, the two men still exercised caution in climbing from the ravine and working their way in a large semicircle to the brush from which Joseph would attempt to force the small herd into a stand. In fifteen minutes they were in place, both kneeling, the buffalo guns laid out side by side within easy reach of Joseph’s right hand.

The equipment for the hunt consisted of three single-shot pieces: a rather battered Laidley-Whitney .50 caliber, and two fine Ballard .45s, all three capable of accepting the 70-grain powder charge required to bring down a rampaging bull. Kola didn’t know where Joseph had gotten any of the buffalo killers. The white man was not talkative on the subject, except to say—usually with one of those mirthless smiles—that he wasn’t the original owner of any of the rifles. Kola, however, had shown him how to use them on their proper targets.

The small herd rested about sixty yards away. The immense bodies were half concealed by the windblown grass. Great jaws moved slowly as the animals chewed the regurgitated grasses they’d cropped during their morning graze. Kola noted the tawny hides of the two calves nestling next to their mothers.

Joseph wiped a gauntlet across his wet brow and pointed. With a nod, Kola acknowledged and endorsed Joseph’s selection of the presumed leader. Both the bulls and the cows had angry red hindquarters. Their winter protection—long, shaggy hair and thick, woollike undercoats—had been shed or rubbed away. On the flanks of the resting animals Kola could easily discern scorch marks and large sores. At close range he would have seen many more sores; the bare hides attracted swarms of biting insects during the summer months.

Joseph held out his right hand. Kola passed him the first of the Ballards, then laid out extra cartridges from the pouch. The success of a stand depended not only on the witlessness of the buffalo but upon the speed and accuracy with which the hunter singled out the successive leaders.

Slowly, Joseph raised the Ballard to his shoulder. There was no sound except the faint murmur of the wind blowing from the direction of the herd. Joseph’s hands lost color as he took a firmer grip and laid his cheek into sighting position.

All at once, in the ravine behind them, one of the mules brayed.

Not loudly. But the sound was enough to bring the cow leader to her feet.

The rest of the herd lumbered up. Kola watched Joseph’s mouth go white and his eyes flick angrily toward the disastrous noise. Then Kola heard another sound from the same direction. The tinkle of bit metal—? He was almost positive.

He had no time to think of who it might be. The herd was starting to move. Joseph fired.

The lead cow bellowed, struck exactly where Kola had taught Joseph to hit. Behind the last rib, the point at which a bullet or an arrow would pierce and destroy the air sacs white men called lungs. Kola had not needed to teach Joseph how to shoot. He was an unerring marksman.

The herd grew frantic as the cow teetered and collapsed on her forefeet, shoulders heaving. A blind bull swung toward the source of the shot, then went plunging past the dying leader. Even nineteen bison with two calves trailing set up a formidable rumble in the ground.

Joseph never took his eyes from the running herd. His tension was betrayed only by the sweat rivering down his cheeks and neck. He thrust the Ballard to the ground. Kola slapped the second one into his palm. In seconds, Joseph was ready to fire.

But he held his shot while Kola swiftly and expertly re-loaded the first rifle. Joseph was watching the fleeing herd. Letting them go far enough. Fifty yards. Seventy-five—

Suddenly a lumbering cow separated from the rest, veering north. The others followed. With the new leader identified, Joseph fired. A cry of pain, and she went down.

The buffalo kept running, widening the distance between themselves and the hunters. Soon the animals would be out of range of the Laidley-Whitney Joseph held ready. But the pattern repeated itself. A new cow charged to the front. Joseph dropped her with a thunderous roar of the gun.

They waited. The critical moment—

A blind bull slowed and lowered his shaggy head.

A calf straggled to a stop.

A cow dashed on, then turned back.

After another few seconds, the entire herd, baffled by the loss of three leaders in quick succession, came to a halt. It was the classic stand every hunter hoped for if his timing and his luck were good.

A smile curled Joseph’s mouth. He swabbed the filthy cuff of his shirt across his forehead. Then, with barely a sound, he climbed to his feet.

“It was well done, Joseph,” Kola whispered as he finished loading the Laidley-Whitney. There was genuine admiration in his voice.