30
IT SEEMED THE wind had howled for days, the frozen icy snow driven against the crusty side of the buffalo- hide lodge, rattling like hailstones against a hollowed log.
It was February. The heart of winter on the central plains.
She was alone again.
Long before last winter young Pipe Woman had bundled up her few possessions and rode off with Porcupine and his band of Dog Soldiers, heading north into the land of Two Moon and the rest of the wild tribes. It was said Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapa and Crazy Horse’s Hunkpatilla Oglalla roamed that land up there. Shell Woman remembered that country from her childhood. With the fondness of those memories, she had allowed her daughter to go with the young Hotamitanyo warriors hurrying north to the last great hunting ground of the roaming bands.
After all, she had reasoned with herself, what else could she do? No one believed the thin one called Hook would be coming back. Gone more than four winters, with no word of where he was, when he would return. Pipe Woman was growing old waiting for a ghost to return. Reluctantly, with a real pain in the parting, Shell Woman let her daughter go, to roam the north country with the bands wandering in the footprints of the nomadic old ones.
She had not let her daughter see the tears. But that was more than a winter ago and long enough to get over it.
So now she was alone again.
Six sleeps ago Shell Woman had watched her husband ride off to find work, called to the place called Kan-sas by the army, to guide the Bear Coat General.
Outside her lodge the rattling, bare-bones wind was finally dying, like a living creature itself, slowing its raging howl into a keening whine. For a night it had lowed like a snuffling rodent outside the frozen lodge walls. And now the wind whimpered in its last gasps of the blizzard.
Miles: the American name her husband used when he spoke of the soldier chief. Her man had gone off to find work in a faraway place he said was called Kan-sas, where he said the army was preparing to crush the southern tribes. Kiowa. Comanche. And her own people too—the Shahiyena. All those who would not come back in to register themselves on the reservations staked out for them in Indian Territory. It was common knowledge that many bands had never ventured in to the reservations, had vowed they never would.
The army knew they were out there raiding, stealing, killing—kidnapping again. And the Bear Coat General was gathering his warriors to take up the war road against the southern tribes one last time. He needed scouts: eyes and ears and noses—wolves to track the scent of his enemy, the warrior bands.
Her man, the one her people had named Rising Fire, had held her body close against his through that last long winter night before riding off of a cold gray dawn that grew no brighter for Shell Woman.
For the most part he hadn’t left her side ever since that autumn day four winters ago when he returned to her camp in the shady copse of trees where she had raised her lodge. Already the cottonwood had begun changing, going to gold when the man named Sweete had come riding slowly into her camp where she waited, there near the soldier fort called Laramie. He had an extra pony with him: a gift for High-Backed Bull’s mother that he said came from Porcupine.
“Why does Porcupine send me a gift of this pony?” she had asked the big white man who stood over her, reaching to take her in his arms.
In his eyes Shell Woman had seen the answer.
Through the days of her grief that followed, time and again her husband repeated the story. Telling and retelling the details to give them permanence in the heart of Shell Woman. It was there in the heart of a mother that High-Backed Bull would live on.
It was the scars she touched now, running her callused fingertips slowly, gently over the long, stiffened worms of discolored flesh that laddered up the length of her arms the way the ancient rivers made a lattice across the great plains on their relentless march to the big water she had only heard stories of, but had never seen. In time her hair had grown after she hacked off the long braids in mourning the loss of one born of her womb. Now it hung nearly gray, streaked with the iron of more and more snow come every winter. So old now, she thought—and never would she see the children her son might have fathered.
Had he not hated his own blood. His own father.
Shell Woman lay back down; resting her head on an arm, and closed her eyes. Time enough to venture into the cold for more firewood. Enough left there by the door if she was frugal—for she ate so little anymore. And if she stayed wrapped in her buffalo robe, she would not need to keep a big fire burning day and night like those in other lodges. Only what was needed to drive most of the frost from the inside of the dewcloth.
Time enough to look outside at the world. She had seen many, many snows in her lifetime—remembering how it was to be a child and push aside the hide door flap after a blizzard, to gaze outside happily at the dazzlingly white world that’ stretched pristine and unbroken clear to the horizon in all directions. Overhead would dome the inside of that virginal blue bowl, so close and pure that she was sure this was how the world must have looked the day after the Everywhere Spirit had created all things.
A world not yet marred by the tracks of man nor disturbed by the passing of animals—it was so new it made her heart ache looking at it. Beneath that white blanket of winter’s might lay the renewal of life that throbbed in the endless flow of the seasons.
And now she chose to lie here instead of going out to look upon the new world. Shell Woman had seen it before. Instead, she would sleep and think about the renewal of the world another time.
Outside, the commotion of the loafer camp told her the others were moving about. Poking her head from beneath the robe, Shell Woman saw her breath in the murky darkness of her lodge. With the door flap closed and the smoke flaps laid one over the other, little light penetrated the thick, smoke-cured buffalo hides. From the texture of the sky above and quality of what light snaked in at the top fan of lodgepoles, she knew it must be late afternoon. That meant she had slept again for more than a day without waking.
A night and another day come and gone.
She heard voices of women and children, the yips of camp dogs, and occasionally the sound of young men. Burnt Thigh of Spotted Tail’s clan: these people who hugged close to the soldier fort at Laramie. They were Lakota words, and most she understood.
“Shell Woman.”
The scratch came at the antelope hide over the lodge entrance. After a moment they called out her name again. It was a voice she had not heard before. And it spoke to her in her own tongue: Shahiyena.
Though she did not allow herself to hope, she had to ask, anyway. “Rising Fire?”
“No, Shell Woman,” the man answered. “It is Porcupine.”
“Is Pipe Woman with you?”
“No. Your daughter did not come south with us.”
Her heart cracked, as did her voice when she replied, “Come … come in.”
The setting sun’s light seeped in through the east-facing lodge door as the warrior pulled back the stiffened antelope hide and stepped into the dark interior. She sat up, clutching the buffalo robe to her with a cold shudder.
“Porcupine,” she said, a smile adding its light to her face. “It is good to see you. The rest? They come with you?”
He wagged his head and came to sit at her left hand. “No. Not all. A few rode with me. To see family. Visit old friends.”
“The storm.”
“Yes,” he replied, and smiled. “The skies were very angry for many days, weren’t they? We waited them out at the forks of a stream a day’s ride west of here. Had to kill one of our ponies for food. But we kept warm, and out of the wind. And our bellies were full enough that we sang and told stories and made fun of one another.”
“Young men,” she said with a sigh.
“You are all right?” he asked, his eyes falling to the cold ash mound in the fire pit.
“I am well. Warm and fed.”
His eyes bounded over the dewcloth rope strung the circumference of the lodge, in search of what might hang from it. “Is the white man here?”
