in his head like buzzing bees. The boy’s mouth froze, and so did his eyes. He didn’t blink. He’d never seen one before, but he knew exactly what he was looking at.
It was a white man. A white soldier man with blood on his face.
And he had somebody. He had that strange one, that Stands With A Fist woman.
The white soldier’s horse started into a trot as he passed. They were headed straight for the village. It was too late to run ahead and raise the alarm. Smiles A Lot shrank back into the herd and started to work his way back to the center. He would get into trouble for this. What could he possibly do?
The boy couldn’t think clearly; everything was tumbling in his head, like seeds in a rattle. If he’d been a little steadier, he would have known from the look on his face that the white soldier could not be on a hostile mission. Nothing in his bearing said so. But the only words banging around in Smiles A Lot’s brain were “White soldier, white soldier.”
Suddenly he thought, Maybe there are more. Maybe there is an army of hair mouths out on the prairie. Maybe they’re close by.
Thinking only of atoning for his carelessness, Smiles A Lot pulled off the willow bridle he kept around his neck, slipped it onto the face of a strong-looking pony, and led it as quietly as he could out of the herd.
Then he jumped up and whipped the pony into a run, racing away in the opposite direction of the village, anxiously squinting at the horizon for any sign of white soldiers.
Lieutenant Dunbar’s adrenaline was running. That pony herd . . . At first he’d thought the prairie was moving. Never had he seen horses in such numbers. Six, maybe seven hundred of them. It was so awe-inspiring he’d been tempted to stop and watch. But of course he couldn’t.
There was a woman in his arms.
She’d held up fairly well. Her breathing was regular and she hadn’t bled much. She’d been very quiet, too, but tiny as she was, the woman was breaking his back. He’d carried her for more than an hour, and now that he was close, the lieutenant wanted more than ever to get there. His fate would be decided shortly, and that kept his adrenaline running, but more than anything, he thought of the monstrous ache between his shoulder blades. It was killing him.
The land up ahead was dropping away, and as he drew closer, he could see pieces of the stream cutting across the prairie, then the tips of something; and then, as he reached the brow of the slope, the encampment rose into view before his eyes, rising as the moon had done the night before.
Unconsciously, the lieutenant squeezed the reins. He had to stop now. He was gazing on a sight for all time.
There were fifty or sixty conical, hide-covered houses pitched along the stream. They looked warm and peaceful in the late afternoon sun, but the shadows they cast also made them look larger than life, like ancient, still-living monuments.
He could see people working around the houses. He could hear some of their voices as they walked along the tamped-down avenues between lodges. He heard laughter, and somehow that surprised him. There were more people up and down the stream. Some of them were in the water.
Lieutenant Dunbar sat on Cisco, holding the woman he had found, his senses crushed by the power of the ageless tableau spread out before him, spread out like the unraveling of a living canvas. A primal, completely untouched civilization.
And he was there.
It was beyond the reach of his imagination, and at the same time he knew that this was why he’d come, this was at the core of his urge to be posted on the frontier. This, without his knowing it before, was what he had yearned to see.
These fast-moving moments on the brow of the slope would never come again in his mortal life. For these fleeting moments he became part of something so large that he ceased to be a lieutenant or a man or even a body of working parts. For these moments he was a spirit, hovering in the timeless, empty space of the universe. For these precious few seconds he knew the feeling of eternity.
The woman coughed. She stirred against his chest and Dunbar tenderly patted the back of her head.
He made a short kissing sound with his lips, and Cisco started down the slope. They’d only gone a few feet when he saw a woman and two children come out of the breaks along the river.
And they saw him.
The woman screamed as she let go of the water she was hauling, scooped up her children, and broke for the village, crying, “White soldier white soldier,” at the top of her lungs. Scores of Indian dogs went off like firecrackers, women shrieked for their children, and stampeded around the lodges, neighing wildly. It was full-scale pandemonium.
The entire band thought it was under attack.
As he drew closer to the village Lieutenant Dunbar could see men running everywhere. Those who had gotten hold of weapons were going for their horses with a whooping that reminded him of game birds in a panic. The village in upheaval was just as otherworldly as the village in repose. It was like a great nest of hornet people into which a stick had been poked.
The men who had reached their horses were swarming into a force that would momentarily race out to meet him, perhaps to kill him. He had not expected to create such a stir, nor had he expected these people to be so primitive. But there was something else that weighed on him as he moved close to the village, something that blotted out all else For the first time in his life Lieutenant Dunbar knew what it felt like to be an invader. It was a feeling he didn’t like, and it had a lot to do with the action he took next. The last thing he wanted was to be regarded as an intruder, and when he reached the bare ground of a clearing at the mouth of the village, when he was close enough to see through the curtain of dust that had been raised by the clamor and into the eyes of the people inside, he squeezed the reins once more and came to a stop.
Then he dismounted, taking the woman into his arms, and walked a pace or two in front of his horse. There he stood still, his eyes closed holding the wounded girl like some strange traveler bearing a strange gift.
The lieutenant listened hard as the village, in stages that lasted only a few seconds each, grew oddly quiet. The dusty curtain began to settle, and Dunbar perceived with his ears that the mass of humanity that had raised such a fearful howling only moments before was now creeping toward him. In the eerie quiet he could hear the occasional clank of some item of gear, the rustling of footsteps, the snort of a horse as it pawed and jostled impatiently.
He opened his eyes to see that the whole band had gathered at the village entrance, warriors and young men in front, women and children behind them. It was a dream of wild people, clothed in skins and colored fabric, a whole separate race of humans watching him breathlessly not a hundred yards away.
The girl was heavy in his arms, and when Dunbar shifted his stance, a buzz rose and died in the crowd. But no one moved forward to meet him.
A group of older men, apparently men of importance, went into a huddle as their people stood by, whispering amongst themselves in guttural tones so foreign to the lieutenant’s ear that they hardly seemed to be talking.
He let his attention wander during this lull, and when he glanced on a knot of about ten horsemen, the lieutenant’s eyes fell on a familiar face. It was the same man, the warrior who had barked at him so ferociously on the day of the raid at Fort Sedgewick. Wind In His Hair was staring back with such intensity that Dunbar almost turned around to see if someone was standing at his back.
His arms were so leaden that he wasn’t sure if he could move them anymore, but with the warrior’s glare still fixed on him, Dunbar lifted the woman a little higher, as if to say, “Here . . . please take her.”
Thrown by this sudden, unexpected gesture, the warrior hesitated, his eyes darting about the crowd, obviously wondering if this silent exchange had been noticed by anyone else. When he looked back, the lieutenant’s eyes were still on his and the gesture had not been withdrawn.
With an inward sigh of relief Lieutenant Dunbar saw Wind In His Hair leap off the pony and start across the
