: The Dull Knife Battle, 1876

feet.

“Put the long shirt over my head—hurry!”

The youth dropped the long, fire-smoked elk-hide shirt over the gray head, the four long legs of the animal almost brushing the floor of the shaman’s lodge. Besides that heavy shirt, Box Elder wore no more than a breechclout.

“My buffalo moccasins. Hurry—we must go!”

One at a time Medicine Bear shoved them on the old man’s bony, veiny feet, then rose to help Box Elder shuffle to the door and step out into the bitter cold.

“The sun is not at the top of the ridge?” the old one asked, unable to feel its warmth on his face as he emerged from the cold lodge.

“No—”

“Box Elder!”

He turned at the sound of the voice crying out his name. Already screams floated like shards of ice from the lower end of the camp. “Curly? Is it you?”

Then the warrior grabbed Box Elder’s thin arm. “It is I, old friend. Come—we must hurry into the hills with your Sacred Wheel Lance.”

“What of Coal Bear?” Box Elder asked, his voice high and filled with dread.

“He already has Esevone* wrapped in its bundle, and I see they are coming this way,” Curly explained.

“Box Elder!” he heard Coal Bear, the Keeper of the Sacred Hat, call out to him.

“You have Esevone?” the old man asked, wishing his eyes could see, for his ears were already telling him of many guns beginning to explode at the far end of the valley.

“It is on my wife’s back.”

“She is with you? And you have Nimhoyoh?”†

“I do, in my hands—here, feel it now, for we must go quickly!”

Box Elder reached for Coal Bear’s wrist, his fingers working down to the hand that held the round cherrywood stick about the length of a man’s arm. Suspended from the stick was a crude rectangle of buffalo rawhide, the edges of which were perforated, then braided with a long strand of rawhide. From the three sides of Nimhoyoh hung many long buffalo tails, tied to the rawhide shield like scalp locks.

“Hurry, old friend!” Coal Bear repeated.

Laying a hand on Coal Bear’s arm, Box Elder started to move off. “All of us go together. I will flee with you and Esevone! Give the Turner to Medicine Bear so that he might carry it above him on his pony to turn away the soldier bullets!”

Coal Bear gave the heavy object to the young apprentice. “And we must let the woman walk ahead of us,” Coal Bear turned to instruct the other two men with them. “She carries the Sacred Hat and we must not walk too close to her.”

The blind shaman nodded, saying, “I think we should walk a little to the right and behind her, my friend.”

Other warriors appeared like shards of black ice through that cold mist slinking among the lodges, mist that hugged the ground with its bitter, bone-chilling cold. Peeling off to the left and right in a tight crescent behind the woman, Coal Bear and Box Elder, those determined men, formed a protective guard as Coal Bear’s wife walked toward the hills as slowly as if she were merely carrying the sacred object to another camp.

While they moved along, Box Elder held his Sacred Wheel Lance over his head so that the whole group would have its protection from the soldier bullets. First in one hand, then in the other, back and forth he switched it as his thin, bony arms grew tired holding the long lance in the air so that its power could rain down upon them all … but he would not let any of the younger men carry it. Nor did he falter in this duty to his people.

The Sacred Wheel Lance would make them all invisible so the soldiers and their terrible Indian scouts would not see them fleeing with Esevone.

Cries of the dying and screams of the frightened, thunder of hoofbeats and hammer of footsteps, rushed past their little party like a spring torrent cascading from these very mountains, bullets snapping branches and slapping the frozen lodges—but none of it gave Box Elder’s group any concern.

All around them the People ran and the enemy raced.

It was as if Box Elder and the rest were not there.

The hard, icy, compacted snow whined beneath his winter moccasins made of the thick buffalo hide with the fur turned in as Young Two Moon plodded across its silvery surface beneath the last of the night’s starshine. Day was coming.

And with the dawn, so too would come the soldiers.

He believed it not in his mind, but knew it in his belly. With a certainty he had experienced few times in his young life.

Although he was a Kit Fox—and duty bound to obey and serve last Bull—Young Two Moon had seen the soldiers with his own eyes, even walked among them and joined the soldiers’ many Indian scouts at their fires as they spoke in the Shoshone* Pawnee, Ute† and Bannock, even Lakota and Cheyenne tongues! Such a force of pony soldiers and their many, many wolves were not out in this country, surely not out marching in this mind-numbing cold, on a lark.

But that’s just what it seemed to be: a lark for Last Bull and the rest of his Kit Fox Soldiers, who enjoyed themselves far too much bullying the entire camp so that no one could flee to the breastworks, escape to safety, prepare to defend the village.

But Young Two Moon was an honorable warrior. Sadly, reluctantly—he took his place with his warrior society and kept everyone in the camp dancing and singing.

By the time he wearily reached his family’s lodge at dawn, it seemed everyone had already gone to sleep, so exhausted were they from that night-long dance, around and around and around the drum when instead the young men should have had fighting on their minds. Not young women.

It was dark in the lodge. And cold here too. He let his eyes adjust to the dim light as he squatted near his parents’ bed at the back of the lodge. And struggled for a moment more before he knew he had to speak what he had been fighting all night.

“Father.”

He waited a moment.

“Father?”

“What do you want?” Beaver Claws grumbled with fatigue.

“I want my family to get up and dress. Now.”

The man rolled toward his son, pulling the buffalo robe back from his face. When he spoke, his words became frost in the gray light of dawn-coming. “You want us to get dressed? We just came here to sleep! Be quiet and go to bed.”

“Please, father. Get the family up and dressed and come with me,” Young Two Moon pleaded, then turned slightly, hearing the rustle of blankets, finding his father’s second wife rising to an elbow to listen at the side of the lodge.

“The soldiers?” the older man asked.

“Yes. It will be soon,” he replied, his voice thinned by urgency. “Please hurry! The day is nearly here! We must go to the far end of the canyon, climb into the rocks where you will be safe!”

“All right,” Beaver Claws answered in a louder voice, then patted the woman beside him on the rump as he sat up, the blankets and robes falling from his bare chest. “Everyone! Get up! Get dressed! This young warrior believes the soldiers are coming—and I choose to believe him … because he has seen the enemy with his own eyes!”

Black Hairy Dog was not used to such cold as this.

For generations beyond count his people had ranged the southern plains. But now that the white man had rounded up the many clans and forced them onto the reservation in the southern country,* he had fled north with the Sacred Arrows once his father, Stone Forehead, had died.

Now the powerful objects were Black Hairy Dog’s responsibility. On his aging shoulders rested so much of the fate of his people. He was one to trust the visions of the old ones much more than he trusted the preening talk of