Dunbar spent the next two days taking steps, many of them geared toward creating an impression of strength and stability. It might have seemed lunatic, one man trying to prepare for the onslaught of countless enemies, but the lieutenant possessed a certain strength of character that allowed for working hard when he had very little. It was a good trait and it helped make him a good soldier.
He went about his preparations as if he were just another man at the post. His first order of business was to cache the provisions. He sorted through the entire inventory separating only the most essential items. The rest he buried with great care in holes around the fort.
He stashed the tools, lamp oil, several kegs of nails. and other miscellaneous building materials in one of the old sleeping holes. Then he covered it with a piece of canvas tarp, spread several yards of dirt over the site, and after hours of meticulous landscaping, the cache looked like a natural part of the slope.
He carried two boxes of rifles and a half-dozen small barrels of gunpowder and shot onto the grassland. There he spaded up more than twenty pieces of prairie, each about a foot square, each with the sod and grass clinging to one another. At the same spot he dug a deep hole, roughly six by six, and buried the ordnance. By the end of the afternoon he had replaced the sections of sod and grass, tamping them down so carefully that not even the most practiced eye could have detected a disturbance. He marked the place with a bleached buffalo rib, which he drove into the ground at an angle a few yards in front of the secret spot.
In the supply house he found a pair of U.S. flags, and using two of the corral posts as poles, he flew them, one from the roof of the supply house, the other from the roof of his quarters.
The afternoon rides were pared down to short, circular patrols that he made around the fort, always keeping his post within sight.
Two Socks appeared as usual on the bluff, but Dunbar was too busy to pay him much attention.
He took to wearing a full uniform at all times, keeping his high-topped riding boots shining, his hat free of dust, and his face shaved. He went nowhere, not even to the stream, without a rifle, a pistol, and a beltful of ammunition.
After two days of fevered activity he felt he was as ready as he could get.
But Lieutenant Dunbar’s presence at Fort Sedgewick had not been reported.
Kicking Bird had kept The Man Who Shines Like Snow locked away in his thoughts. For two days the medicine man stayed to himself, deeply disturbed by what he had seen, struggling mightily for the meaning of what he first believed to be a nightmarish hallucination.
After much reflection, however, he admitted to himself that what he had seen was real.
In some ways this conclusion created more problems. The man was real. He had life. He was over there. Kicking Bird further concluded that The Man Who Shines Like Snow must be linked in some way to the fate of the band. Otherwise the Great Spirit would not have bothered to present the vision of him.
He had taken it upon himself to divine the meaning of this, but try as he might, he could not. The whole situation troubled him like nothing he had ever experienced.
His wives knew there was some kind of trouble as soon as he returned from the fateful ride to Fort Sedgewick. They could see a distinct change in the expression of his eyes. But outside of taking extra care with their husband, the women said nothing as they went about their work.
There was a handful of men who, like Kicking Bird, carried great influence in the band. None was more influential than Ten Bears. He was the most venerated, and at sixty years, his toughness, his wisdom, and the remarkably steady hand with which he guided the band were exceeded only by his uncanny ability to know which way the winds of fortune, no matter how small or large, were going to shift next.
Ten Bears could see at first glance that something had happened to Kicking Bird, whom he looked on as an important staff member. But he, too, said nothing. It was his custom, and it served him well, to wait and watch.
But by the end of the second day it seemed apparent to Ten Bears that something serious might have happened, and late in the afternoon he paid a casual visit to Kicking Bird’s home.
For twenty minutes they smoked the medicine man’s tobacco in silence before slipping into bits and pieces of chitchat concerning unimportant matters.
At just the right moment Ten Bears drove the conversation deeper with a general question. He asked how Kicking Bird felt, from a spiritual point of view, about prospects for the summer.
Without going into detail, the medicine man told him the signs were good. A priest who cares not to elaborate about his work was a dead giveaway to Ten Bears. He was certain something had been held back.
Then, with the skill of a master diplomat, Ten Bears asked about potentially negative signs.
The two men’s eyes met. Ten Bears had trapped him in the most gentle way.
“There is one,” said Kicking Bird.
As soon as he said that, Kicking Bird felt a sudden release, as though his hands had been unbound, and it all spilled out: the ride, the fort, the beautiful buckskin horse, and The Man Who Shines Like Snow.
When he finished, Ten Bears relit the pipe and puffed thoughtfully before laying it between them.
“Did he look like a god?” he asked.
“No. He looked like a man,” replied Kicking Bird. “He walked like a man, sounded like a man. His form was as a man’s. Even his sex was as a man’s.”
“I have never heard of a white man without clothes,” said Ten Bears, and his expression turned suspicious. “His skin actually reflected the sun?”
“It stung the eyes.”
The men fell into silence once again.
Ten Bears got to his feet.
“I will think about this now.”
Ten Bears shooed everyone out of his lodge and sat by himself for more than an hour, thinking about what Kicking Bird had told him.
It was hard thinking.
He had only seen white men on a few occasions, and like Kicking Bird, he could not fathom their behavior. Because of their reputed numbers they would have to be watched and somehow controlled, but until now, they had been nothing beyond a persistent nuisance to the mind.
Ten Bears never liked thinking about them.
How could any race be so mixed-up? he thought.
But he was drifting from the point, and inwardly Ten Bears chastised himself for his messy thinking. What did he really know about the white people? He knew next to nothing. . . . That, he had to admit.
