cracked with the sharp blasts of the white man’s Colt’s pistols.
Eerie, the young Shahiyena warrior thought as he watched, that humanlike screaming of the horse as its rider shot a bullet into its head, bringing that last of the big animals down in a resplendent spray of sand and blood. It fought to the last: biting, hurling phlegm and piss as it thrashed headlong into the grass, legs still fighting as a second bullet crashed into its brain.
The white man lunged behind his huge brown barricade, safe from the oncoming charge. Another rush came from the north bank, the white men frightened by the quirts slashing, slapping pony rumps as the horsemen tore past. There was more deafening sound now, thunderous and numbing to the young warrior as he grappled with how to reach the trio of white men huddled beneath the bank. To ride until he drew near … or do it all on foot.
Frightened voices filled the steamy air above the island. Though he could not understand it all, Bull did know some of the white man’s tongue: what he had learned from his mother—even more, what he had learned from the white man who had fathered him. Those words he believed he knew best: the profane, desperate prayers. The cries of men hit and bleeding, calling out for help.
It took no special talent to know the warriors had severely hurt and crippled the half-a-hundred in their first few charges, in less time than it took a man to light and smoke a small pipe bowl of tobacco. But they had failed to squash the enemy the way they had planned. It had not been the quick work they had whipped themselves into believing it would be.
For now it became nothing more than hot, gritty labor—the white men having plopped down behind the heaving carcasses of their dying horses, laying their hot-barreled many-shoots rifles over the still-quivering bodies of their dust-slaked, bloody, arrow-pocked barricades. Gray-black powder smoke drifted like a smudge against the blue sky above the sandbar. Below erupted clouds of spurting yellow dust as warrior bullets struck here and there, yet to find a target.
And in the midst of the sandy riverbed lay the naked bodies, most not moving any longer, picked off by the white men on the island, perhaps finished by the three under the bank in their burrow.
The hair on his arms tingled at the faint bugle call from upstream, brassy and clear on the cool air of that dawn. Likely it was one of the renegade turncoats who proudly carried his shiny medicine at all times—soldiers once themselves.
That one who called himself Kan-sas. Cly-bor was his white name. But the Dog Soldiers who had taken him in when he had deserted the pony soldiers called him Kansas. He carried his shiny gold horn on a leather cord over his shoulder. It was likely he who called with his horn for another charge now because many of the horsemen were milling upstream, as if waiting for someone to take control of them.
“Where is Roman Nose?” Bull wondered aloud, reining about and moving out upstream to see for himself. Porcupine would be with him, he knew. No matter what the other war chiefs might try, it remained for the Nose to bring order out of the chaos of those first few charges.
And now near the upstream end of the island, the bullets from Shahiyena snipers began to fall among the hastily dug rifle pits behind the carcasses. Some of the brown-skinned horsemen had abandoned their ponies, diving among the reeds and willow along both sides of the sandy riverbed. There they parted the brush and fired at anything that moved on the sandbar. Still, Bull considered as he gazed along the shallow, sandy riverbed, the white man had exacted his terrible damage on the horsemen. Across the sand and in the lapping river itself lay not only the wounded and dead warriors, but the dying, squealing war ponies as well.
The gall rising in his throat, his decision was made, and with a savage yank on his rein, Bull brought his own animal around abruptly.
Instead of forcing it down into the riverbed as the others had, he chose to race along the edge of the north bank. Then, surprising the trio who hid in their burrow, he cut sharply to the right, pushing his reluctant animal directly for the badger’s hole where the three white men waited.
One of them turned and broke as soon as the warrior was but twenty feet from the overhanging bank. The other two attempted to bring their rifles up to fire, but Bull was into and over them before they drew sight on him. Swinging his war club, screaming his death song, he knocked a rifle from the hands of one of the whites, hurling the man aside like white water sliding past a midstream boulder as his pony raced by.
Then Bull found himself in the shallow river again, alone this time. And on the shore he watched the many warriors rise from the willows and plum brush, holding aloft their rifles and weapons, cheering his brave, heroic ride as his pony sidestepped, fighting the grit and water, frightened of the bullets that hissed all about him now that he forced the animal into the teeth of the enemy guns.
Pounding his heels into its flanks, Bull abruptly nosed the pony straight for the sandbar, its small hooves clawing at the side of the island, vaulting over the breastworks of two horse carcasses and down into the midst of the improvised rifle pits where the enemy dived and lunged out of the path of the lone, crazed horseman.
He astonished himself as well as his cheering brothers as he reached that lone cottonwood at the far end of the island without a bullet having touched him. He had taunted
Then he heard the raucous cheers of the women and children and old men gathered on the next ridge. They had watched his daring ride and celebrated that small victory with High-Backed Bull.
As his wind-stung eyes cleared of the tears and dust, he scanned the slopes of the surrounding hills. On the crests of most had appeared spectators from the villages. Besides women and the little ones come to watch, came the old ones and the boys eager but too young to fight. The chiefs proved themselves wise once again—bringing their people here to watch the battle.
With an audience of his family and friends, not to mention the young women a young warrior hoped to court —all of them there to cheer him on from the nearby bluffs—what man would not redouble his efforts to make a grand show of rubbing out the half-a-hundred?
Then as Bull watched, the cheers and war cries came of a single purpose. Most of the spectators on top of those ridges were turning, as if watching the approach of something. Or someone.
And in his heart High-Backed Bull realized it could be but one whose arrival caused such a thunderous reception: Roman Nose.
In his heart Bull cried for his war chief. Knowing the end had come for this the greatest ever to lead the Dog Soldiers.
Though he knew his medicine was gone now the way of the shortgrass in spring, his power gone the way of puffball dust on a summer wind, the great Shahiyena war chief had come at last to lead his faithful, trusting warriors, lead them down on that sandbar and the half-a-hundred.
While his heart leapt with joy at the arrival of Roman Nose, High-Backed Bull’s heart also sank. The white man’s iron fork had sealed the terrible, unstoppable fate of this bloody morning.
Clearly Bull knew there remained no way to alter the course of the war chief’s destiny. With his charge into the teeth of the white man’s guns on that sandy island, Roman Nose was fated to die.
11
THERE HAD TO be at least a thousand warriors in the valley, counting the Dog Soldiers of Tall Bull and White Horse. Why, Roman Nose led at least half that number himself.
The fight should have been over sooner than it would take a man to eat his breakfast.
How was it that they hadn’t rubbed that sandbar clear of those half-a-hundred?
Why was it taking so long?
He glanced at the sun, found it halfway on its climb to zenith. A half day’s time lost and no scalps for any of them to brandish. That lay in his belly like the cold pig-meat the white man gave the reservation Indians imprisoned
