Long Winter Gone

dropped the fingertip into a small pouch hung round her neck.

Why would she take part of this soldier’s body to keep when everywhere else on the hillside all the others hacked at the white bodies with pure, unfettered blood-lust?

He studied the soldier’s head and saw that it would truly make for a very poor scalp. The short, reddish- blonde bristles were thinning, the hairline receding. No wonder no one had torn this skimpy head of hair from the white man’s skull.

“Here, my son.” Monaseetah gave him an elk-horn ladle she had pulled from her wide belt. “Bring me water from the river. Take it. Go now.”

She nudged him down the hill toward the river that lay like a silver ribbon beneath the wide, white sky. At least it would be cool beside the water, he thought.

Dodging the huge bloating horses and gleaming soldier corpses, he went to the river and scooped water into the ladle. Mounted warriors screeched past him as they rode to the south. Shaking, the boy spilled half of the cool water on his lonely, frightening climb back up the long hillside. He slid to a halt beside his mother and choked back the sudden, foul taste of bile washing his throat.

It surprised him. For the first time this afternoon he wanted to vomit. He gulped and swallowed, fighting down the urge to rid himself of that breakfast eaten so long ago.

As his mother began to wash the white man’s head and face, the boy turned away.

She used a strip of dirty, stiffened, white cloth—one of the dead soldier’s stockings. If only these white men wore moccasins instead of the clumsy black boots that made their feet hot and sweaty. With moccasins the white men would not need to wear these silly stockings. He smiled and began to feel better for it.

This was his seventh summer. He was too old to act like a child, the boy decided.

Finally he turned back to his mother and knelt to help her with her chore. Monaseetah scrubbed the last of the black, grainy smudges from the edges of the bullet hole in the soldier’s left temple. Little blood had oozed from the wound.

Perhaps this pale man had already been dying from that messy bullet wound in his side. The boy had seen enough deer and elk, antelope and buffalo brought down with bullets. And he knew no man could live long after suffering a wound in the chest as terrible as this. This soldier had been dying and he was shot in the head to assure his death. Someone had wanted to make certain that this soldier was not taken alive. Someone had saved this pale-skinned soldier from the possibility of torture by issuing a bullet to the brain.

Strange. As the boy looked about the hillside, he could see that the warriors had taken no prisoners. As far as his young eyes could see along the ridges of shimmering heat and yellow dust and black smoke and red death— none of these pony soldiers had lived for longer than it took the sun to move from one lodgepole to the next.

The boy sat quietly and watched his mother at work. With care she washed the white man’s entire face, scrubbing the dirty sock dipped in river water over the bristling stubble of red gold sprouting on the burnished cheeks and strong chin. The lips were cracked, peeling, and bloody from days in the sun and from drinking alkali water.

The boy’s eyes wandered down the pony soldier’s frame until they froze on the wound in the man’s left side, just two of his little hands below the white man’s heart. An ugly, gaping wound; he imagined the exit wound had to be even bigger. Surely the warrior who had shot this pony soldier had been no more than one arrow flight away when he fired his gun—no more than fifteen of his own short, little-boy strides. A shot fired far enough away not to bring instant death—but close enough to insure that death would be come eventually.

He wondered: In his last moments had this soldier gazed down this slope, seeing all the lodges and wickiups where slept the young, unmarried warriors along the bank? Hadn’t the soldier seen the great village stretched for miles along the Greasy Grass? Or, had he seen, and refused to believe his own pale-blue eyes now staring in death at the summer sky of the same robins-egg hue? Had he plunged on down toward the villages and his own death?

How could his mother treat this soldier as she would a member of her family? They had no relatives. Monaseetah and her two sons were alone in this world. It had been twelve winters since Monaseetah’s mother was killed by pony soldiers far to the south along the Little Dried River. Eight winters now since Monaseetah’s father had suffered the same fate at the hand of other soldiers in a similar dawn attack. His thoughts and fears tumbled: Why had his mother told the old Minniconjou woman this white-bellied soldier was a relative?

The stench of dried blood and putrefying gore clung strong on the breeze. He rubbed his nose and fidgeted, wanting to be gone. His mother’s hand quieted his nervousness.

“I am finished at last, my son.” She pulled him round to her gently. “I want you to listen to my words with all your heart. Listen to me with your soul, son of my body.”

The boy nodded, wanting only to be gone from this hillside.

Monaseetah tossed aside the dirty stocking she had used to bathe the dead soldier. When he studied her eyes for some answer to his confusion, the boy discovered tears glistening her dark eyes, streaming down her coppery cheeks. He thought, She is the prettiest woman I have ever seen.

With a tiny, dirty finger he touched her cheek, wiping away a single tear. Without a word Monaseetah took his tiny hand, directing him to touch the white soldier’s hair.

“The red-gold of a winter’s sunrise,” his mother whispered as she touched the soldier’s hair.

Monaseetah guided his hand to stroke her own dark, silky hair falling unfettered in the hot breezes across her quaking shoulders.

“Black, my son. Sleek as the raven’s shiny wing when it snags the sun’s rays in high flight.”

She took the boy’s hand and brought it up to touch his own head. She held some of his own long hair before his eyes.

“Your hair is not like your mother’s.”

“I do not understand,” he said, quivering.

Again, Monaseetah took his hand to touch first the soldier’s thinning, close-cropped hair. Then her own long, loose hair. Finally his own. Looking at it perhaps for the first time in his young life, the boy found himself growing scared, with a cold creeping right down to his toes.

“I named you Yellow Bird because of the color of your hair, my son.”

He watched her choke back a sob that made his mother shudder. She swiped at her wet cheeks before he worked up courage to ask.

“You are my mother, aren’t you?”

“Yes.” She smiled through the haze. “I am your mother.”

Anxiously, Yellow Bird wrung his hands through his hair, not understanding, afraid to accept what his mother had told him. He did not like the feeling at all. He had been scared before, he remembered. Like last summer when his pony had been spooked by a rattler, bolting into the hills as he clung to its mane in desperation. Yet, right now he was more frightened than he had ever been.

Yellow Bird bolted to his feet. As quickly his mother snagged his wrist and yanked him down beside her. He fell to his knees, sprawling over the naked pony soldier.

He cried out as his face brushed the pony soldier’s cold, bristling cheek.

Fiercely he clamped his eyes to shut off the flow of hot tears. In a flood, he figured out what she wanted to tell him. But Yellow Bird knew his mother wanted him to say the words himself.

Desperately he hungered for escape. The hillside filled his nostrils with the stench of blood and bowels released in death, gore scattered across the gray-backed sage and yellow dirt and dry red-brown grasses in savage, sudden, welcome death. At once Yellow Bird could not breathe.

“No!” he shouted. It scared him to hear the unbridled fear in his own voice.

“Yes,” his mother cooed. She cradled his little hands within hers, holding him in this place of terror.

“No-o-o-o-o!” Yellow Bird whimpered like a wounded animal caught in a snare.

Again and again he whipped his head from side to side, whimpering his word of denial.

“It is so, my son.”

Suddenly he let his tense, cold muscles go, like a dam releasing. Yellow Bird stopped fighting his mother. Instead he collapsed against her, sobbing as he stared down at the soldier. Once again he took up some long strands of his own loose, unbraided hair, lifting it into the bright, truthful sunlight. There before his eyes it shimmered, each strand much lighter than the dark, coarse hair of any other Cheyenne he had ever known in his