Heart of the Sandhills (22 page)

But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again . . .

—Luke 6:35

“Now listen here, son—”

“Don’t call me that! I’m not your son and I don’t have to listen to you!” Aaron yelled at the top of his lungs, shoving Zephyr Picotte’s hand off his shoulder. He appealed to Elliot. “Make him listen, Uncle Elliot. Make him understand.”

“I do understand, Aaron,” Zephyr said. His voice was almost gentle.

“You don’t,” Aaron spat back. “You can’t. If you understood, you wouldn’t be standing here telling me we can’t go look for Two Stars. He’s not
like
other Indians. Why won’t you believe me?”

“It’s got nothing to do with Two Stars,” Picotte said. “I wouldn’t volunteer a hunting party to go look for the baby Jesus today, not with what just happened. It’s likely the warriors haven’t even gotten all their dead off the battlefield yet. And you’re running on nervous energy right now. By evening you’re probably going to collapse. And it’s not just you. A battle like we fought today takes it out of a man.” Picotte grunted and sat down. He kicked a chair in frustration and looked across the room at Elliot. “Maybe he’ll listen to you.”

There was quiet in the room while Elliot swept his hand through his long white hair, thinking. He had just come from the commander’s office where reports were being prepared on today’s fight. He had listened carefully, using all his military experience to try and gain a clear picture of what had happened. He had looked over the men’s shoulders when they drew diagrams and listened to at least a dozen different accounts of events. The only explanation for why any of the men inside that corral had survived seemed to be a miracle in the form of a Springfield rifle. That was the only thing he could figure, but nothing gave him any clear idea of what could have happened to Daniel. Someone thought they had seen the white horse headed off toward the woodcutters’ camp. Someone else had seen him take part in the small charge against the force firing the camp, but that force had retreated to inside the corral, and it was at that point in the morning all trace of Daniel Two Stars seemed to disappear.

“Tell me what happened again,” he said to Aaron. Then he waved toward an empty chair. “But first, sit down.”

“I’ve already told you everything I know,” Aaron said wearily, as he slid into a chair. After a moment, he repeated it all again. “I was mad because Daniel didn’t let me stay with the men at the corral. He sent me off to help guard the herd. I knew what he was doing. He knew they would probably try to run off some mules and ponies first, and he figured that would give me time to get away. He told me at the first sign of trouble I was to head for the fort. He made it sound like I’d be helping by going for reinforcements. But what he was really doing was trying to keep me out of the fight.” Aaron rubbed his forehead with his fingertips. He continued with a trembling voice. “They did stampede the herd first. Just like Daniel said. Only he didn’t stay put in the corral to fight. When he saw how many Indians there were—”

“How many?” Elliot asked. The reports he had heard ranged anywhere from two hundred to a thousand, depending on the individual soldier and his stomach for battle.

“I don’t know,” Aaron said. “I think most of the men think it was maybe two hundred.” He cleared his throat. “It seemed like more, but two hundred is probably about right. Anyway, when Daniel saw what was happening, he came and got me. Didn’t even take time to saddle his horse. Just climbed aboard bareback and streaked into the fight. I’d only fired my rifle a couple times when he road up alongside and hollered for me to come to the fort.” Aaron scraped his boots across the wood floor nervously and leaned back in his chair. He looked at his uncle dully. “But I didn’t. I pretended I was going, but I doubled back. When the Indians stopped to burn the woodcutters’ camp, that gave me a chance to get inside the corral. Then the fighting . . . I asked about Daniel, but there were too many things—”

“Nothin’ we could’a done anyway,” Picotte interjected. He scratched his beard, thinking. “Doesn’t make sense, him just disappearin’ that way.”

“What if he’s wounded, Uncle Elliot?” Aaron’s voice was edged with desperation. “We can’t just leave him out there.” He added, “Robert and Big Amos would go after him.”

“They would,” Elliot agreed. “But neither of them can. Big Amos has a bullet hole in his shoulder and Robert got creased here,” Elliot brushed his head above his ear. “Doctor’s worried about infection. Said he had a patient once where everything seemed fine, then a few days later the poor soul went into a coma and died. Autopsy showed a brain abscess. He wants to keep a close watch on Robert in the hospital.”

“So we don’t have our scouts and Zephyr won’t go,” Aaron put his head in his hands.

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t go,” Picotte said. “I just said I’m not heading out tonight. We’d be nothing more than fresh meat for those warriors tonight. Or wolves.”

“I’m not afraid of wolves,” Aaron blustered.

“Well you should be,” Picotte said. “A pack of a hundred wolves would bring that pony of yours down without giving you notice, boy.” He waved his hand at Aaron. “I know, I know, you’re not a boy. Quit actin’ like one and think like a man. Men don’t behave like emotional women when bad things happen.” He stood up. “We’ll ride out tomorrow when the men go to reconnoiter the battlefield. See what we can see.” He shrugged. “Who knows, maybe Daniel will come in himself before morning. He could just be layin’ low, waitin’ to make sure he can make it back to the fort before he comes out of hiding.” He made for the door, pausing on his way out of the room. “Don’t think on it anymore, Aaron. You’ll go around and around with it in your head and nothing good will come of it.”

“I should have come to the fort like he told me,” Aaron muttered. “We needed reinforcements. We really did.”

“Maybe that’s so. But the fact is, what you did or didn’t do probably didn’t make all that much difference with what happened. Maybe Two Stars would have stayed inside the corral if you weren’t so stubborn. Maybe he’d been the one shot in the head the minute the battle started. Maybe not. This isn’t battle practice, son. It’s the real thing. And when the real thing happened, Two Stars did what he had to do, and you fought like a man. You can hold your head up and no man has a right to tell you otherwise. So don’t you tell yourself some foolishness that’ll only weigh you down with guilt.” Picotte closed the door behind him.

“People make decisions in the heat of battle, Aaron,” Elliot said quietly. “Some of them are good, some are bad. In the end, a soldier does the best he can and learns to live with the results. We all have to do that, or we’d all end up crazy. Now get to bed. You won’t do Daniel one bit of good if you aren’t rested tomorrow.” Elliot got up and scooted his chair back beneath the table.

Aaron followed suit, pausing at the door. “What are we going to tell Ma, Uncle Elliot? What if we don’t find him?”

“She’s a strong woman,” Elliot said quickly, “with a strong faith. She’s been through hard things before. She’ll bear up.”

Aaron nodded. He headed off toward his bed in the bunkhouse shared with several other enlisted men. Elliot watched him go, thinking to himself that, while his hair had not gone white nearly overnight, Aaron Dane looked at least a decade older. He put his good hand out and leaned against the log wall for a minute, wishing he felt as confident as he had sounded when he predicted how well Genevieve might do in the face of Daniel’s death.
She’ll bear up.
Elliot thought about it.

The wolves were at it again, fighting over the scrapple in the slaughter yard. Elliot listened to their snarls for a few minutes, then, as he crossed the parade ground, he paused and looked up at the inky black sky, praying with all his might for a miracle so that he would not be forced to take news of Daniel’s death to Genevieve Two Stars.

So he was alive. Barely, he realized, but the searing pain meant at least alive. High above him the sky was blue. He was in some kind of deep ravine. He could feel the frame of a travois beneath him, hear the scraping of the frame as it moved along what must be the canyon floor. It wasn’t a smooth ride, and with every bump it took all his energy not to yelp like a wounded animal against the pain that coursed through his body.

He wondered why they hadn’t killed him. But consciousness didn’t last long enough for him to work that out, and he slipped away.

The next time he was conscious long enough to think, Daniel realized he was inside a tepee. The sun was shining and blue sky shone above through the smoke-hole at the top. He could hear dogs barking, children laughing. He could feel the softness of some kind of animal pelt beneath him. Not a buffalo robe, but something else. There was someone in the tepee with him, but when he tried to turn his head the pain was too great. Breathing hurt, too. He kept his eyes closed, trying to concentrate on each part of his body. Every time he was tempted to fall asleep, he fought it: He managed to stay awake long enough to take inventory. Breathing was all right as long as he didn’t try to take in too much air, but every breath still hurt. His arms seemed all right, too. And his left foot, since he could move it. But the right one didn’t respond at all. He couldn’t feel his toes. If he tried to move his foot the pain shot up his leg and into his back and nearly knocked him out. He took inventory twice, coming to the same conclusion each time. When he sensed he was thirsty, someone read his thoughts, and moisture dribbled into his mouth. He swallowed it greedily, but he didn’t have the energy to open his eyes or even grunt to let whoever was tending him know he was awake.

“He will die,” the old man said. He had been inside Two Moons’s tepee and assessed the damage. “Everything will mend but the leg. The black sickness will come into the skin and he will die.”

He woundeth, and his hands make whole. He shall deliver thee in six troubles: yea in seven there shall no evil touch thee.

—Job 5:18–19

Little by little, he was remembering. A war cry had lured him up into the pines above the battlefield. He had a flashing memory of what he’d heard about Fetterman and wondered if the war party they had seen was only a decoy. He had wondered if maybe a few thousand more warriors were waiting just over the hill to swarm down and annihilate the men inside the corral, and he had been determined to find out.

All he’d seen was a flash of war paint in the trees up ahead, and he’d charged after it. Once he’d realized there were no other warriors and it was just the two of them, he’d pulled up, meaning to go back and join the fight. He had been near the rim of a canyon, and as he wheeled the stallion around to head back, he shuddered involuntarily as he neared the edge of a particularly tall cliff. Nudging the stallion’s sides, he was heading away from the rim of the canyon when a war cry sounded from the hill above and a single warrior on a dun pony came charging at him out of the pines.

The surprise attack had caught him off guard and thrown him off balance. He fell off his horse and landed with a thud that both stunned him momentarily and gave the enemy the chance he needed to grab Daniel’s horse.

But the white stallion was not a horse to be ridden by just anyone. His master was lying in the dirt and when the strange rider tried to climb aboard, the stallion sidestepped. That was all the time Daniel had needed to leap back to his feet and attack the horse thief. He had been enraged—he should be in the battle, not grappling with some fool over a horse.

What happened next was still fuzzy, but he remembered a howl from a mountain lion and the white stallion rearing up and going over backwards. Somehow Daniel lost his balance and stepped backwards into nothing but blue sky, gray canyon walls . . . and falling. After that, he didn’t remember anything until he woke on the travois.

He was better, he realized. The pain had confused him at first. So had the dream of colors and that feeling of flying. He understood both now.

Brown eyes had been the next thing that confused him. If he was sick or hurt, Blue Eyes should be here. A woman was here, but not Blue Eyes. He understood that now, too, of course. He was in some Indian camp being tended by a stranger. He could see the worry in her eyes.

When he finally managed to push himself up onto his elbows and look himself over, he worried, too. He still couldn’t feel his leg, and he could see enough of it to know it was swollen and red.

He lay back on the skins, which he now realized were antelope, and inhaled deeply. Moving still hurt, but he could bear it.

The next time the woman was in the tent, he opened his eyes to let her know he was awake. “Where am I?” he said in Dakota.

Her gaze was not unkind, but it was clear she didn’t understand him.

It took so much effort to sign his question he could hardly keep his eyes open to watch her answer, which was no help at all, because she simply signed, “With me.”

She signed, “You are Dakota.”

He nodded.

“I am your enemy,” she signed, and then giggled and smiled. When he frowned, she added, “I am your friend.” She left and when she came back, she had filled a skin with water. She hung it near his head and handed him a tin cup before she left the tent.

He drank and went back to sleep.

The smell was bad inside the tent.
It couldn’t be me
, he thought,
the woman washed me.
She had even combed his hair with her small, gentle hands. He raised up on his elbows again. This time, he managed to sit up and what he saw made his midsection tighten with fear. His leg was worse. Sweat poured down his face from the effort to sit up.
Maybe the sickness from my leg is spreading inside me and causing me to smell of death
, he thought.

The little woman came in and saw him sitting up looking at his leg. She saw the sweat on his forehead and made him lie flat. She washed his face and offered him soup.

“I am going to die,” he signed.

She didn’t answer and looked away.

The next time he was awake and the little woman was beside him, he tried to make her understand that he wanted something from his saddlebags. Eventually she understood and brought him the little book with the pressed flowers tucked inside.

At the sight of it, the wounded man blinked tears away from his eyes. He opened the book, turning the pages. He seemed to be searching for something. Two Moons realized he must be able to read the white man’s words. Presently he took the gold ring off his hand, tucked it between two pages, and handed the book back to her.

“For my wife,” he signed.

Two Moons took the book from his trembling hands, and nodded. His wife was called Blue Eyes and men at the fort would know her. She put the book and the ring back in his bags and left the tent. She walked away from the camp toward the snowcapped peak in the distance, thinking,
He hasn’t begged for anything. He hasn’t complained or even seemed afraid.
In the days she had tended the wounded man, he had only seemed intent on getting better. He had accepted her care, but he was always somewhere else in his mind.
Waiting
, she thought.
Waiting to go somewhere
. And when he realized he might be going to the spirit world instead, all he did was mention his wife and lie down to wait like a warrior who went into battle singing, “It is a good day to die.”

The medicine man said the doctors at the fort would cut off the bad leg. He said he had seen soldiers hobbling around on one leg, an awful life—but it was life. If she could give this one man life, then maybe it would somehow make up for all the death in her past.

Two Moons looked up toward the white mountain peaks. The snows were coming. Nights were cold now. She might have already waited too long. The fort was many days away. The black sickness hadn’t started in the man’s leg yet, but it was coming. She knew because the skin on his leg was tight and shiny, and the liquid running from the wound had begun to stink. That must be how he knew he was going to die.

Well, he wasn’t going to die, not if she could help it. Even if he did, then at least he would be at the fort where someone might know how to get the words and the ring to his wife, wherever she was. Maybe she was one of the loafers around the fort. That could be it.

She, Two Moons, had nothing from her husband or her child, except the scars on her arms to remember them by. She remembered the beads High Hand wore around his neck. Her hand went to her chest and she wished she had those beads now.

Two Moons hurried back to the tent. In less than an hour she had struck it down around the wounded man. She signed that she was taking him to the fort, but she didn’t know if he understood. The fever was on him and he was suffering more. It was late in the day. She would travel all night. She had to.

The old women in the village gathered around, offering advice she didn’t want or need. Did they think she didn’t know she was being foolish? Did they think she didn’t know they would both likely die going out alone?

The children had grown to like her stories, so they helped her tie her bundles in place on the travois behind her ragged pony. But when it came to getting the wounded man on the travois, she didn’t know what to do. She didn’t want to hurt him any more. It hadn’t mattered before. But now she knew he was brave and he had a wife somewhere—a wife who cared to know that he was alive or dead.

Just when she was despairing of how she would load him, the medicine man arrived. He examined the wounded man’s leg and looked at her with the death message in his eyes.

“I am taking him to the fort. You said the doctor there would be able to help him. You said you had seen men who had lived, even when the black sickness was on them.”

The medicine man grunted. “You are crazy, Two Moons.”

She looked at him with sad, dark eyes, and said gently, “Is not all of life a kind of craziness?”

He squinted at her for a moment. “If you are a spirit woman come to test me, you will see that I have passed your test,” he said, and he helped her load the wounded man on the travois.

The men made their way along the old, well-worn trail, heads down, hearts discouraged. Visiting Lakota camps had not proven dangerous, after all. But it had been useless. No one knew anything about a white horse or a Dakota scout. The five of them had been wandering the hills for two weeks now. Unless they wanted to spend the winter with the Lakota, they’d better head back. It wouldn’t be long before a storm could blow down from the Big Horn Mountains and make travel almost impossible.

Elliot had gathered more information about the “hostiles” than he’d dreamed possible. Of course he hadn’t written any of it down. He didn’t want the mission to appear “official” in any way, for that might risk too much. But this foray up the Tongue River had taught him things he’d use for the rest of his life. He wondered if that was why this had all happened. If Daniel were dead, at least it would bear lasting fruit in Washington.

Aaron had paid attention and learned, too. He’d picked up a fair number of Lakota phrases by listening to Picotte. Growing up around the Dakota had taught him a lot about Indians in general, but he didn’t remember them before they had been “civilized” and taken onto the reservation. These Lakota had made it their duty to stay as far away from whites as possible. They were nothing like the Dakota Aaron had grown up with. If nothing else, he realized he had much yet to learn about Indians. And he’d been reminded of that sense of “a calling” Aunt Jane had told him about. The Indian Question was far from being answered, and Aaron had begun to think he could easily give his life to help find answers that could somehow preserve this proud, beautiful people. He wondered if that was why this had all happened. If Daniel were dead, at least it would bear lasting fruit in Aaron’s life and, through Aaron, on behalf of the Indians.

Edward Pope had learned he was neither the coward he thought he was, nor was he stupid. He could do a lot more besides cook, although he watched the Lakota campfires with inborn curiosity and decided feasting on dog wouldn’t kill a man. He surprised himself with what Picotte called “amazing powers of observation,” and discovered a knack for setting people at ease, more than once saying something in a meeting that lightened the mood when things were getting tense. The Lakota weren’t fooled. They knew Aaron and Willets and Leighton were army. But Edward Pope eased their suspicions and made them almost believe their story about being deserters and looking for one of their friends named Two Stars who was going to join them for the winter up on the Little Bighorn.

Captain John Willets soaked up Zephyr Picotte’s wisdom and experience. From Aaron and Elliot he learned what true friendship and love among men of God looked like. It didn’t take him long to realize both Aaron Dane and Elliot Leighton were the “Two Stars kind of Christian.” Picotte had made it clear he didn’t want any part of their religion, and to Willets’s surprise they both respected that and didn’t shove their beliefs at him. Still, there were times when he looked at Elliot or Aaron and would have sworn the men were praying silently. He watched them closely, wondering what would happen to their faith when they realized they weren’t going to find Daniel Two Stars.

He thought too much about Genevieve Two Stars, and he didn’t like it but he couldn’t seem to do much about it. She was there, behind every thought he had of Daniel, a shadow beside her husband, and more often than not the reason he kept looking. If he was going to have to tell her Daniel was gone, he wanted to be certain he’d done everything humanly possible to prevent it. She was going to need someone to watch out for her if Daniel was gone. He wondered if she would go back to New York. He knew she hadn’t really liked it there. But he couldn’t let himself think of her beyond making certain Genevieve Two Stars would be well cared for. It was, after all, his duty to his men to do what he could for their families.