hair fly in the wind. Then she closed her eyes, began to rock quietly back and forth, and concentrated on the terrible thing that had happened in her life, concentrated on it to the exclusion of all else.
Not many minutes later, the words to a song took shape in her head. She opened her mouth and verses tumbled out, as sure and strong as something she had diligently rehearsed.
Her singing was high. Sometimes her voice cracked. But she sang with her whole heart, with a beauty far surpassing something sweet to the ear.
The first was a simple song, celebrating his virtues as a warrior and a husband. Toward the end of it, a couplet came to her. It went:
“He was a great man,
He was great to me.”
She paused before she sang these lines. Lifting her closed eyes to the sky, Stands With A Fist pulled her knife from its scabbard and deliberately sliced a two-inch cut on her forearm. She dropped her head and peeked at the cut. The blood was coming well. She resumed her singing, holding the knife fast in one hand.
She slashed herself several more times in the next hour. The incisions were shallow, but they produced a lot of blood, and this pleased Stands With A Fist. As her head grew lighter, her concentration grew stronger.
The singing was good. It told the whole story of their lives in a way that talking to someone wouldn’t. Without going into detail, she left out nothing.
At last, when she’d made up a beautiful verse imploring the Great Spirit to give him an honored place in the world beyond the sun, a sudden surge of emotion hit her. There was little she hadn’t covered. She was finishing, and that meant goodbye.
Tears flooded her eyes as she hiked up the doeskin dress to slash one of her thighs. She drew the blade across her leg hastily and gave a little gasp. The cut was very deep this time. She must have hit a major vein or artery, because when Stands With A Fist looked down, she could see the red gushing out with every beat of her heart.
She could try to stop the bleeding or she could go on singing.
Stands With A Fist chose the latter. She sat with her feet stretched out, letting her blood soak into the ground as she lifted her head high and wailed the words:
“It will be good to die.
It will be good to go with him.
I will be going after.”
Because the breeze was blowing into her face, she never heard the rider’s approach.
He’d noticed the slope from far out and decided that, since he’d seen nothing yet, it would be a good place to take a sighting. If he still couldn’t see anything when he got there, he might climb that old tree.
Lieutenant Dunbar was halfway up the rise when the wind brought a strange, sad sound to his ears. Going with caution, he cleared the slope’s crest and saw a person sitting a few feet down the hill, just in front of him. The person’s back was turned. He couldn’t say for sure whether it was a man or a woman. But it was definitely an Indian.
A singing Indian.
He was sitting still on Cisco’s back when the person turned to face him.
She couldn’t have said what it was, but Stands With A Fist suddenly knew there was something standing behind her, and she turned to see.
She only caught a glimpse of the face below the hat before a surprise gust of wind whipped the colored flag around the man’s head.
But the glimpse was enough. It told her he was a white soldier.
She didn’t jump or run. There was something spellbinding about the image of the solitary horse soldier. The great colored flag and the shining pony and the sun blinking off the ornaments on his clothes. And now the face again as the flag unfurled: a hard, young face with shining eyes. Stands With A Fist blinked several times, unsure if she was seeing a vision or a person. Nothing had moved but the flag.
Then the soldier shifted his seat on the horse. He was real. She rolled to her knees and started to draw away down the slope. She didn’t make a sound, nor did she rush. Stands With A Fist had woken from one nightmare to find herself in another, one that was real. She moved slowly because she was too horrified to run.
Dunbar was shocked when he saw her face. He didn’t say the words, not even in his head, but if he had, the lieutenant would have said something like, “What kind of woman is this?”
The sharp little face, the tangled cherry hair, and the intelligent eyes, wild enough to love or hate with equal intensity, had thrown him completely. It didn’t occur to him then that she might not be an Indian. Only one thing was on his mind at the moment.
He had never seen a woman who looked so original.
Before he could move or speak, she rolled to her knees, and he saw that she was covered with blood.
“Oh my God,” he gasped.
It wasn’t until she’d backed all the way down the slope that he raised his hand and called out softly.
“Wait.”
At the sound of the word, Stands With A Fist broke into a stumbling run. Lieutenant Dunbar trotted after her, pleading for her to stop. When he had closed to within a few yards, Stands With A Fist glanced back, lost her footing, and went down in the high grass.
When he got to her she was crawling, and every time he tried to reach down he had to pull away, as if afraid to touch a wounded animal. When he finally took her around the shoulders, she flipped onto her back and clawed out at his face.
“You’re hurt,” he said, batting away her hands. “You’re hurt.”
For a few seconds she fought hard, but the steam went out of her fast and he had her by the wrists in no time. With the last of her strength she bucked and kicked under him. And when she did, something bizarre happened.
In the delirium of her struggle an old English word, one she hadn’t spoken for many years, came to her. It slipped out of her mouth before she could stop it.
“Don’t,” she said.
It gave them both pause. Lieutenant Dunbar couldn’t believe he’d heard it, and Stands With A Fist couldn’t believe she’d said it.
She threw her head back and let her body sag against the ground. It was too much for her. She moaned a few Comanche words and passed out.
The woman in the grass continued to breathe. Most of her wounds were superficial, but the one on her thigh was dangerous. Blood was still seeping steadily from it, and the lieutenant kicked himself for having thrown away the red sash a mile or two back. It would have made a perfect tourniquet.
He’d been ready to throw away more. The longer he’d ridden and the less he’d seen, the more ridiculous his plan had seemed. He’d thrown the sash away as something useless, silly really, and was ready to fold up the flag (which also seemed silly) and return to Fort Sedgewick when he saw the rise and the solitary tree.
His belt was new and too stiff, so with the woman’s knife, he cut a strip out of the flag and tied it high on her thigh. The flow of blood diminished right away, but he still needed a compress. He stripped off his uniform, wriggled out of his long johns, and cut the underwear in half. Then he wadded up the top and pressed it against the deep
