calling out his name.
“Who will go with me?” he asked in a booming voice.
Immediately many hands shot into the air, their courage electrifying everyone within hearing.
“Bring your weapons and come with me!” Yellow Nose cried out, pointing the muzzle of his Winchester repeater at the knoll. “Some of my friends are in trouble and I must help them!”
By the time they were streaming across the rugged ground for that slope, Young Two Moon figured there must have been at least three-times-ten streaming out like a flight of geese from Yellow Nose, just as the rest of the long-necked flock veed from the point goose while they winged overhead in the first cold days before winter. Many of them wore bonnets and feathers, skins of wolf and badger and skunk—everyone shouting, raising his hoarse voice into the cold air to frighten the soldiers and give their hearts daring for this charge.
One, then two and three at a time … the guns began to fire around Young Two Moon and the rest. The five warriors on the hill looked over their shoulders and saw their friends coming. Three of them climbed to their knees, waving their rescuers on enthusiastically, whooping and pounding their chests with fists, others shaking their fists at the enemy scouts who yelped and howled in dismay when the five quickly retreated from the hilltop while their rescuers held the soldiers at bay.
At the base of the slope Yellow Nose whirled and pranced atop that pony, shouting at the enemy, calling out instructions to his warriors until it came time to run back to safety.
This time they had rescued the five. They had dared gamble with their lives for their friends.
And they had won.
*
* The Ute.
Chapter 35
Big Freezing Moon 1876
Nearly naked, she had been standing resolutely with the other women, most of them older than her fifteen summers, among the rocks they had piled up along the top of the ridge at the upper end of camp.
Above what was left of their village, now that the soldiers and their Indian scouts had begun to set fire to all that the People possessed in their lives.
After singing so long in that terrible cold—here where none of them found any protection from the winter wind—her voice was all but gone. Her throat so raw, it gave her great pain just to draw in each breath, one after the other, much less to sing with all her might.
But this was what she was called upon to do. And Buffalo Calf Woman would sing the strong-heart songs as long as it would take. Vowing she would sing as long as her younger brother kept singing.
At dawn’s first cry, that first gunshot, those first hoofbeats that had startled everyone at the upper end of camp, she and some of her friends had been talking in those moments after the drum had fallen silent and the dancers had dispersed, everyone going off to their beds. When the dancing had started the night before, Buffalo Calf Woman had been knotted to five others by her mother with lengths of rawhide so none of Last Bull’s Kit Fox warriors could snatch them away.
At dawn they were still tied one to the others.
So with the coming of the soldiers and their terrifying scouts when the six of them had attempted to flee in six different directions—all of them had spilled onto the trampled snow as the hoofbeats and the war songs and the whistles and the snarling bullets drew closer and closer.
From somewhere an old woman appeared with her long and worn butcher knife. She slashed it down on one rawhide strand, up through the next, on and on until all six girls were freed to scatter as the enemy reached the top of the ridge south of camp—firing their rifles into the lodges.
To the door of her family’s home Buffalo Calf Woman flew, finding the interior dark and empty, a kettle filled with water beside the coals of last night’s fire, dried meat laid out, ready for boiling their breakfast.
“Flying Man!” she had cried in panic, her heart in her throat as she’d turned away from that abandoned lodge, women and children dashing past her, screaming, screeching, keening, and crying.
“Flying Man!” she hollered with fleeting hope through that upper end of camp until it was too late and two warriors had to drag her from the village before she was captured or killed by the enemy’s scouts. There at the far edge of the village she had found her mother’s body seeping a slush of blackening crimson onto the torn snow.
Yet it was no time for tears.
“I must find Flying Man!” she had tried to explain to the warriors who pulled her from the body. She was seeking her younger brother—the boy who was born with a dark blanket pulled over his eyes for all time.
Had he gotten out of the village in time? Had her mother taken him just so far and no farther in their flight? With her mother killed—what had become of Flying Man?
Reluctantly climbing the western ridge with the others, digging with her torn and bloody fingers at the rocks they pulled from the frozen ground, piling them one by one atop the other to erect breastworks—she kept looking for Flying Man. Kept asking each new arrival if they had seen her brother.
He would be frightened. Blind to the danger—able only to hear the terror in that village put on the run.
“Buffalo Calf Woman!”
Only faintly at first she had heard the voice, looking here and there until she heard it call out again—a little stronger this time. Then she found him, struggling up the long slope of the ridge, an old bent woman clutching his arm. The ancient one’s back curved so far that she had to twist her head to the side to look at anything but the ground; nonetheless, the woman clung to the blind boy and helped his feet to see every step of their way together.
He sang out again, “Buffalo Calf Woman!”
“I am here, Flying Man!” she shrieked, pitching down the slope in a mad run, skidding to a stop on the icy snow, clutching him to her breast, her tears spilling as she next brought the old bent woman within her embrace.
“I was so scared after mother’s hand was ripped from mine and then she would not answer me,” Flying Man said quietly, tears from his unseeing eyes spilling on his cheeks. “But the old one here found me and told me I must be strong for her—to take her to safety with me.”
Buffalo Calf Woman put out her hand and touched the wrinkled cheek of the old one, skin like the bark of a long-dead cottonwood. “You … you both were very brave.”
“We must sing, young woman,” the old, toothless mouth said with a raspy croak, the watery eyes blinking in the severe cold.
“Yes,” Buffalo Calf Woman agreed as she took her brother on one arm, the old one grasping her other. “We will go now to the top where we will sing for our men.”
All morning the three of them had been there together. The young boy, who raised his sightless eyes upon that valley where his people were fighting for their very existence. The old woman so bent with age and troubles and her many winters that she had to turn her head to fling her voice down to the warriors below them on the valley floor.
And Buffalo Calf Woman—not knowing where her father and older brothers were in the fierce struggle below.
Yet knowing her mother’s spirit stood beside them now—her mother’s voice giving them all its magic to sing the strong-heart songs behind the tears.
This old fur trapper reminded Seamus of Bridger. Ol’ Gabe. Big Throat. Jim Bridger.
For any man’s purposes, Bill Rowland was indeed cut of the very same cloth. A simple frontiersman who, like Bridger, had married an Indian woman and taken up with her people.
Donegan turned in the saddle and glanced over his shoulder at the high ridge behind them. Up there, south of the village, Tom Cosgrove and his friend, Yancy Eckles, both were squaw men among the Shoshone on the Wind River. But this Rowland had to be a hell of a lot older than those two Confederates. Been out here on the plains
