among the whites, he returned to his mother’s people, only to discover that they too distrusted him, if not shunned him outright. Sired by a white man, born of a Shahiyena mother, and wanting nothing more than acceptance—for too long Bull found a home among neither people.
But now, it seemed, not only had the fierce and renegade Dog Soldiers made a place for him at their talks, they truly desired his counsel.
Quite by accident Bull had discovered that the only way he could find acceptance among the Shahiyena was to turn his back completely, irrevocably, on his white father and the white world. Although there were enough reminders of the mixed blood flowing through his veins, what Bull nonetheless hated himself for was the white taint to that blood. More than anything he feared that it would one day prove a stain to his medicine, his power, would ultimately undo his life.
Try as he might through that solitary journey of his last winter, Bull’s time alone had done nothing more than allow him to brood on just how much he differed from the rest of these young warriors crowding the camp. Though he stood taller, though he might be bigger, of greater muscle, Bull wanted none of that. More than anything, he wanted to be dark-haired, black-eyed like them. He wanted most to have a father he could walk with through this camp of Hotamitanyo. A warrior father. A father he could be proud of. Not one of the enemy.
So he sat and cleaned his heavy pistol this last day before they would ride forth at dawn, drawing the cleaning cloth in and out of the barrel of the Walker Colt he had taken out of the dead, frozen hands of a soldier near the pine fort two winters before at the place where the Shahiyena and Lakota had slaughtered the hundred-in- the-hand. Others had claimed the muzzle-loading rifles. Bull had instead rushed in to claim one of the many-shoots pistols: a powerful, destructive weapon.
“You clean that gun so much, you will wear it out,” chided Porcupine as he settled to his haunches in the shade beside his friend.
“Yours could stand some cleaning too,” Bull said sourly, not looking up from his task.
Porcupine sighed as he leaned back against the buffalo-hide lodge. “This magic that sent you riding into the teeth of last winter, it did not help you find the father you seek. Why are you so sure you will find him now?”
He stayed his hands, the powder-streaked rag protruding from both ends of the pistol barrel. “Last winter I hoped to find word of him, or my mother. The time of cold is a season when the soldiers do not march, when the army does not need its scouts—its eyes and ears to guide the soldiers to the sleeping Indian camps.”
“You believed you would find this father of yours in a lodge where you, would also find your mother?”
He nodded, then said, “But I found neither one of them,” as he dragged the oiled rag from the barrel. “So now I have greater faith in the journey we will make this summer. If we kill enough white men, capture enough women, steal enough of their spotted buffalo and bum enough of their dirt lodges—the pony soldiers will come after us.”
Porcupine snorted. “That is one certainty no man will gamble against, Bull. The white man always swats back at that which troubles him.”
Bull nodded. “Yes. But even more important—I know I will find my father this summer. If we kill and steal and rape and kidnap enough—then we will leave a wide and bloody trail for the army to follow.”
“And you believe your father will lead the soldiers on that trail we will leave them to follow?”
With a smile Bull answered, “My father will not be able to deny the smell of Indians in his nostrils. He will lead the pony soldiers after us.”
“Then you will find your father at last,” Porcupine said.
“No,” he replied. “I will kill him.”
16
HIS OLD FRIENDS were going, one by one by one.
The end of the halcyon days of the fur trade had driven the first of them from this land. Some fled back east to what they could muster to live out their lives. Others like Meek and Newell pushed on to Oregon country. Shad tried that, and in the end came back to what he and Shell Woman knew best: living a nomadic life crossing the plains in the shadow of the cloud-scraping Rocky Mountains. A man did what a man must to provide for his Cheyenne wife and family. And for almost twenty years he had found work here and there, at times guiding for those long, snaking trains of emigrants bound for Oregon or California. Then too he had scouted for the dragoons in those pre-war days and built a reputation so that when the Army of the West came out here to stay. Shad Sweete had all the work a man needed.
Like Jim Bridger had done, like Kit Carson.
Times like these, riding out ahead of an army column, searching for some sign of a hostile village on the move, made Sweete draw in and think on all that he had done in those glory days in the West, brood on all that had been taken from him.
Of late there had been more and more taken from the old man.
The first real blow was Ol’ Gabe. Not until last winter did Shad hear that Bridger had give up and gone back east to Missouri, gone to live with a daughter back yonder, there somewhere. If it was so, that meant Jim had been gone from the plains almost a year now this summer. Going blind, some even claimed. Sawbones doctors didn’t rightly know how, but some ventured that too much high, bright sun made that happen to a man.
Ol’ Gabe going blind—after all the glory that them two eyes had seen?
“Wagh!” Shad had snorted the grappling roar of a grizzly boar. To think of the un-goddamned-fairness of it.
“Still, the army came to call on the legend,” Major Eugene Carr, commanding officer of the Fifth U.S. Cavalry, had informed Sweete before the whole shebang set out from Fort Lyon, marching south to drive the hostiles toward Custer’s Seventh Cavalry waiting east in the country of the Canadian River. “No less than General Philip H. Sheridan himself asked Bridger’s advice on waging a winter campaign against the Cheyenne and Kiowa riding out of Indian Territory to commit their depredations on the settlers in Kansas, Shad.”
“And what’d Ol’ Gabe tell that little pissant of an Irishman?” Sweete had asked.
“Word has it Bridger wanted an audience with Sheridan his own self, personally—to tell the general what a damned fool idea the winter campaign was.”
Shad had himself a good laugh at that, conjuring up that scene between the little banty-rooster of a general and that tall, rangy old trapper. “Had to come to Fort Hays his own self, did he? Just to tell Sheridan what the dad- blamed hell he was getting his soldiers into, I’ll bet.”
Later still that winter Shad had learned from army scout California Joe Milner that Joe had been at Hays to see it for himself when Bridger rode in from Missouri to have a palaver with Sheridan—been there to see the old eyes nearly gone a milky-white, to see how stooped Bridger had become with the crippling rheumatiz and joint aches, how all those years climbing cold mountains and wading through icy streams had made the man little more than a thinning caricature of the giant he used to be.
Joe said, “Gabe was most afraid of his claim to the fort.”
“Fort Bridger?”
Milner had nodded, balling a fist up and laying it alongside his own neck. “He weren’t the same man, Shad. Hardly could twist his head without causing hisself some pain from that knot of goiter eating away on his neck.”
“What’s this about the fort? Why, I helped him raise one of them buildings and a corral there myself. Ain’t his claim with the army settled yet?”
“That ten-year lease he said he give the army is up now, but he ain’t seen a dollar cross his hand in payment.”
“Government ain’t paid him for using that fort—all ten year worth?”
“No—and now even Sheridan hisself told Bridger the army’s went and declared his land what they call a military reservation.”
That bit of news had caused a cold knot to grow in Sweete’s belly. “So they took it all from him—same as the
