Long Winter Gone

on these small boxes we fondly called TV, early on I found myself bitten by the seductive lure of the West. Yet it was not until 1965, during my freshman year in college in Oklahoma, where I was studying to become a history teacher, that I was finally able to separate the history of the West from the Myth of the West. Over the intervening twenty-five years I have happily found the historic West every bit as fascinating as the mythic frontier.

You would be hard pressed to find a man happier than I—still teaching as I am thousands of readers outside the confines of the classroom about a magical epoch of expansion that roared rowdy and rambunctious across the plains and mountains of our Western frontier. A man is a success when he can put food on his family’s table doing what he loves most to do.

Over the years I’ve been cursed with the itchiest of feet, moving on frequently as did the rounders and roamers of this mountain West more than a hundred-odd years before me. In the last three years we have been nomads, moving from Colorado to Montana to Washington, and now to these windswept foothills of the Prescott valley. My wife, Rhonda, hopes we can stay put for awhile, here in Billings along the Yellowstone, under the sun hung in that Big Sky, while we raise our two children, son Noah and daughter Erinn.

There’ll be time enough to move on, time enough for me to see what’s over the next hill. Time enough still to follow the seductive lure of tomorrow and the next valley across the years to come …

The legend of George A. Custer continues in this novel filled with Indian lore—a fascinating and authoritative look at the frontier military at the time of Little Big Horn.

SEIZE THE SKY

by Terry C. Johnston

Volume 2 in the Son of the Plains Trilogy

Turn the page for the tale of George A. Custer and his son, Yellow Bird, as told by a master frontier storyteller, Terry C. Johnston. SEIZE THE SKY is available wherever Bantam Books are sold.

The Hillside

Clouds of black powder smudged the late-afternoon ridges like yesterday’s coal-oil smoke. Yellow dust stived up into the broiling air beneath the countless unshod pony hoofs and moccasined feet scurrying through the gray sage and stunted grasses beneath a relentless summer sun. There weren’t many of the big, weary, iron-shod army horses left on the hillside now. A few carcasses lay stiffening, their four-legs rigid and bloated. But most of the big, iron-shod horses had clattered down to water.

He cried out. Not wanting to go up that hill. Terrified of what he saw. More terrified of what he heard.

Wailing, screeching, and hideous cries assaulted the ears. So many keened in mourning. Still others cried out their songs of victory. Many more lips screeched bowel-puckering shouts of vengeance as they attended their deadly labors of conquest. The side of the hill ran dark with blood.

He dared not look, covered his eyes. But just as quickly his mother jerked his hand away from his dirty face. She wanted him to see, to remember.

The parched, sandy slope was littered with the stinking refuse of battle: Bodies pale and lifeless, scattered across the dusty sage and brown grasses. Their dark blood soaked into the eager, thirsty soil that stretched all the way up to those mule-spine ridges far to the east where the sun, now into its western quadrant, glared down like a cruel, unblinking eye.

He tripped, stumbling to his knees. He cried out as he was dragged to his feet again, as his spindly, copper- skinned legs bled. Quickly he cut off his own yelp. Long ago he had been taught that a boy of the People does not cry out in pain.

There were several women and men clustered around each of the pale bodies on this knoll. Mostly it was the women, hunched over their crude handiwork. These bodies were as white as fish bellies—except for bloodied, leathery faces, necks, and hands.

What hairy creatures these fish-bellied men are.

Some of these browned-hide faces were almost coppery enough to belong to the People. Had it not been for all the hair on their faces that made him shudder with the sharp memory of childhood nightmares—he would not have believed these bodies were what the neighbor tribes called the dreaded wasichus.

His mother halted near the crest of the hill. There she knelt and enclosed him within her arms. At first her teary eyes moved about before gazing at last into her son’s face. She instructed him to stay by her side. Fearfully his own dark-cherry eyes darted about the hillside and he understood why she admonished him not to wander. Here in this place existed a mad fury he had never seen in his few summers of life.

Women, children, old men—running about carrying knives and axes, stone mallets and tomahawks, lances and bows, pistol butts and rifle barrels … cutting, slashing, clubbing, tearing and gouging.

The little boy huddled against his mother. Fear formed a hard, hot knot in his belly.

She bent, putting her face right next to his so she would not have to speak so loudly. Instead, she began to sob again before any words could come out.

Another woman of their tribe came up beside the mother and son, kneeling in the blood-soaked soil. She was a good friend of his mother and her name was Bighead Woman. He called her aunt because he had no real blood relatives among the People. His aunt smiled down at him, brushing the tears from one of his dirty cheeks. When she looked into his wide, frightened, small-animal eyes, he saw in hers a sorrow he had never before seen on her face.

“Monaseetah,” the older woman whispered hoarsely, like a trickle of water running over a drought-parched creek-bed, “you must be quick about this now. I wish to leave and go with the others across the hills. To touch these pale men who came with such foolish hearts to strike our camps of women and children again. Always they come to strike the women and children first—”

Her words snapped off like dry kindling in mid-sentence as Monaseetah, the boy’s mother, lifted her face, a mask of utter sadness and despair. Bighead Woman understood that despair and hopelessness immediately.

“This, I did for you, Monaseetah.” Her gnarled, scarred hand pointed down at the three bodies crumpled on the ground nearby. “I watched so that none would touch his body. Many came here to mutilate him … as they do now with the others who rode against us when the sun was high in the sky. But, I told them your story. Most left without a word to find other bodies they could revenge themselves upon. Some said a small prayer for you before they turned to go. My heart shares how you must feel. Long ago I lost a man in battle—in a time of cold when the Winter Man’s breath blew white out of the northlands. My man was killed in a battle just like this with the pony soldiers. It was the time you lost your father. You will remember … must remember—that time those cowardly white warriors of winter followed their chief … this one!”

Bighead Woman gestured violently toward the naked corpse beside them in the dust. She waited for Monaseetah to speak.

“I thank you for your care this day, sister. I will stay here now. My son and I will stay to watch over the body until dark fills the sky. We will see that no harm comes to this man. You need wait no longer. Leave us now.”

The older woman reached into a small quilled pouch hung at her belt and removed a bone awl, its point hardened in fire and sharpened for punching holes in the thickest of bull hides. With that awl clasped in her right hand, Bighead Woman twisted the white soldier’s head to the side so that he slumped over one of his forearms. Monaseetah grabbed the woman’s hand to still it.

For a long moment they stared at one another, the older woman able to read what lay within the liquid depths of the young mother’s eyes.

“What I do now is not for you, my young friend,” Bighead Woman explained softly. “This I do for him. Hiestzi did not heed the words told him long ago during his days in those lands to the