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 the length of two of his little hands below the white man’s heart. An ugly, gaping hole; 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 soon in coming.
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 robin’s-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 another dawn attack. His thoughts and fears tumbled: Why had his mother told the old Miniconjou 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 terrible 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 in her dark eyes, streaming down her coppery cheeks. He thought,
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.
“You were named 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 him to tell her. 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!” 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. 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 few summers of life.
After what seemed like another lifetime, Yellow Bird brought his face away from his mother’s soft breast where his tears had soaked through her soft buckskin dress. Already the sun had begun to cast long shadows in its relentless march to the west.
“Yes, Yellow Bird,” Monaseetah said quietly. “This is your father.”
BOOK I
THE MARCH
CHAPTER 1
THE dawn air was filled with that heady, earthy fragrance of fresh dung dropped by a few of the hundreds upon hundreds of mules and horses crowding the parade ground.
Springtime brought with it at least one blessing to this land of tractless, far-reaching prairie: enough rain to hold down the thick yellow dust. But rain also brought mud and great, swampy puddles that collected across the swales and at the foot of every hillock. Those puddles in turn bred mosquitoes, winged tormentors soon to rise over this northland as they had for his last three springs here on the Missouri. Huge creatures swarming above these great grasslands in a dark cloak like the horde of locusts swarming above the Egypt of ancient pharoahs.
Still, it would take something far hardier than a plague of mosquitoes to drive him from this western frontier. Perhaps only a call to Washington City itself.
“Mr. Burkman.” He turned to his personal aide. “I see you scribbling in your little book again.”
