Her eyes dropped from his as she answered. “Six … no, seven suns now. He went to …” Then Shell Woman decided not to say any more about her husband to the warrior. That they fought, she knew. That these two had clashed at the springs where Tall Bull’s village had been destroyed—that much was certain. But she had vowed not to let either of them put her between her people and her husband.
“Yes. I see,” Porcupine replied. “The army is thinking of marching again. It is no secret.”
“You have been fighting?”
“Not since last summer—far to the north on the Elk River.* The pony-soldier chief called Yellow Hair by the Shahiyena, he led his warriors along the river for a long time while the days grew hot.”
“Yellow Hair. The same who rode into Black Kettle’s camp on the Washita?”
“The same,” he answered. “My small numbers joined Crazy Horse, Gall, and others as we followed the pony soldiers and the ones they escorted. The Lakota grow very angry, for it appears the white man will bring the tracks for his smoking horse across those northern lands.”
“Will the Lakota stop the white man?”
“With the help of the Shahiyena, they will stop the white man for ail time.”
“You scared the soldiers off?”
“Yes—I think we drove them off, back to the east they fled.”
“For now, Porcupine,” she sighed. “The day is coming when—”
“Do not tell me, Shell Woman,” he interrupted. “I do not believe it will happen.”
She sensed the raw, open nerve she had dragged a fingernail across and sought to talk of something else. “Where do you go from here?”
“We will move east, then north once more. Back to the Paha Sapa, the black-timbered hills—where we can worship at Bear Butte, praying for strength before the coming of the shortgrass time.”
“Before the coming of another raiding season.”
“Yes.”
How well she knew this cycle of the seasons of war. “From time to time here at this Laramie fort, I see white men coming through, marching north to the black-timbered hills.”
“More soldiers?”
“No. These are not the army. Just white men with their horses and supplies and tools. What do you think they are looking for in that land north of here?”
He shrugged, rustling his one rattail warrior braid. “I do not know what they are looking for, Shell Woman. I only know what the white man will find if he trespasses in those sacred hills. For a long, long time that has been medicine ground to both the Lakota and the Shahiyena. A white man would be very foolish indeed to trespass on that sacred land. If they are stupid enough to come into our hunting and medicine grounds, they will find only death.”
“Perhaps you only fight the inevitable.” And as she said it, Shell Woman was sorry, watching the gray cloud cross the warrior’s face, his brow knitting in a deep furrow as he glared at the dead fire pit.
Then with even, thoughtful words, Porcupine asked, “Do you speak those words as a Shahiyena, a mother to a brave warrior? Or do you say that as the wife of a white man, one who first leads the pony soldiers to attack our villages and the next day buries the body of his son as only a Shahiyena father would do?”
With surprise she looked up, staring evenly at him. “You know what Rising Fire did to protect the body of his son?”
“I saw everything from the hills overlooking the ruin of Tall Bull’s camp, where your husband protected his son’s body from the Shaved-Heads who wanted a brave warrior’s scalp. I followed, to watch him bury Bull in the crevice of a great ledge that faces the rising sun.”
“Above the river that will always flow at his feet.”
“Yes. I am sure he told you that Bull is safe for all time to come.”
She nodded. “He told me. And brought me the pony you gave him as a gift for me.”
Porcupine tilted his head, eyes narrowing as he asked, “A pony I gave him for you?”
The first teasing tickle of confusion arose in her. “You did not have a pony brought to the mother of High- Backed Bull?”
He swallowed and straightened, his mouth a thin, grim line on his otherwise impassive face. “May I see this pony I sent you?”
“If you did not send the gift for my grieving, then why—”
“Will you show me this pony?” he interrupted.
“It has been many winters, Porcupine. The pony—”
“It lives?”
“Yes,” she answered finally.
“Take me to see it. Now,” he directed, standing in the deepening darkness of that cold, shadowy lodge.
Without saying another word. Shell Woman dragged up a blanket and wrapped it about herself, lashing at the waist with a wide belt studded with many brass tacks. The cold shocked her as she stepped from the lodge. How quickly the warmth left the earth when the sky cleared the day following a terrible storm. The snow lay trampled in most every direction she looked, except along the narrow trail leading down to the riverbank itself. Here only a few feet had troubled the surface of the deep, wind-driven snow. She listened to his deep, rhythmic breathing as he followed her into the bare cottonwoods, down to the small corral where some of the Brule kept their special breeding stock separated from the herds allowed to pasture in the river bottoms.
It was there she had built her own small pen for the three ponies: the young gelding that pulled everything she owned on her travois, the old mare she rode, and the present from Porcupine that autumn day long ago, when she learned she was no more the mother of a warrior son.
The three animals had fared the blizzard well enough. In the beginning hours of the storm, as the wind began to rise with the icy bite of snow in the air, Shell Woman took the ponies cottonwood branches and bark shavings to eat, not knowing how long the sky would remain tormented. Now she was relieved to find them still there, a bit cramped against one side of the pole corral for the tall snowdrift that iced over a good half of their pen.
“It is the gray one?” Porcupine asked.
“No,” and she pointed.
“The red one?”
Shell Woman nodded, watching him approach the pole corral and climb through onto the snow trampled by those unshod hooves. The old mare came up to nuzzle against the warrior. He stroked her long gray muzzle, then sidled around her. The gray gelding bobbed its head, eyes widening as the man approached, but stood its ground, scenting the warrior. He patted its neck, then ran a hand down the length of its spine, crossing behind it for the corner of the corral.
“Yes, I remember this pony,” he told her quietly as he approached the strawberry roan.
“It is a beautiful animal, Porcupine. I thank you for remembering the mother of High-Backed Bull in such a way. My son would be proud to own such a pony.”
At first the roan wanted to have nothing to do with the warrior, trotting first this way, then that, moving along the short corral fence walls. Finally Porcupine reached inside his woollen capote and took something out. Holding it aloft and speaking soothingly to the pony at the same time, he gradually moved closer and closer.
She could not tell what it was at first, until the warrior finally reached the pony, looped an arm over its short neck, and stroked its mane. Then she recognized what Porcupine held in his hand—the horse medicine. A small skin bundle, trimmed with red wool, two small hawk’s feathers strung from the drawstring at the top.
High-Backed Bull’s horse medicine.
Her hands gripped the top pole of the pen to keep from falling. “Where did you get my son’s horse bundle?”
“From his pony.”
“The pony his father killed at the entrance to Bull’s resting place?”
He nodded, still stroking under the jaw of the pony, then tied the bundle into the roan’s mane before walking back across the trampled snow to stand near her, on the inside of the corral.
“Shell Woman,” he began, laying a hand atop one of hers, “this pony was not mine to give.”
Already her eyes had filled with tears from the cruel slash of the wind as the light died behind the mountains far to the west and twilight failed in this cottonwood grove beside the river. But more than the sting of the wind,
