Winter Rain

order to move downstream toward the meadow. War ponies were given attention: a sprinkling of puffball dust was rubbed on an animal’s muzzle, or red mud from the creekbank was smeared around a pony’s nostrils to give it extra wind for the coming fight, bear grease streaked up and down each of the four long legs to give the pony speed for what would be required of it in the coming hours.

It was then that the war chief instructed them all to put their saddles and extra baggage in the trees. The branches hung heavy with all that they would not carry into battle. Up there, it was explained to Tall One, badgers and skunks and other scavengers could not drag off their belongings before the warriors returned, victorious in battle.

For but a moment Tall One and Antelope caught a glimpse of Isatai, always escorted by those who wished to be seen in the company of the powerful young shaman as he strutted through camp on foot, leading his pony. He did so completely naked except for a special pair of yellow-painted moccasins, his skin carefully covered with yellow earth-paint. His pony had been smeared a dull yellow as well. In his hair the medicine man stuffed sprigs of gray sage.

“I need nothing—no clothing to stop the white man’s bullets!” he harangued them. “My medicine will turn the bullets to water!”

When darkness came to court the short summer night, the gray-eyed war chief gave the order for the warriors to move out without mounting their ponies. They walked for a long time until reaching the edge of the valley where stood the white man’s earth lodges. Here they were told to sleep with the reins in their hands until it was time to attack.

Tall One did not sleep. How could he—come this greatest of all his days as a Kwahadi warrior! How could any man sleep?

When the command came to mount the attack, the tall war chief rode his gray horse before the hundreds, reminding these hot-blooded young men they must remain in a solid, unbroken line until he gave his order to charge.

“We walk slow at first,” he told them. “When the earth lodges come into view—then I will order the charge.”

In the murky, graying light of dawn-coming, Tall One barely made out the dark shadows of the four buildings where the tai-bos were sleeping. It was then the war chief had ordered the warriors spread for the coming charge. Quietly the hundreds shuffled to the right and left, forming an immense but compact phalanx. Hundreds of ponies grew restless. Warriors murmured their war songs. The air hummed with death- coming. Like the swinging of a club so heavy, it could not be slowed nor stopped.

His heart had pounded in his throat, threatening to choke Tall One as he waited those last moments until the war chief had finally screeched his call for the charge.

From the hundreds of throats erupted war cries that rumbled across the river valley, causing a thousand birds to take wing from the nearby trees. In that instant thousands of hooves hammered the dry, flaky earth as the entire line burst into ragged motion. The noise of the charge fell deafening on Tall One’s ears. Never before had he heard anything like this: the hammering of the hooves like a hailstorm on a buffalo-hide lodge; the keening voices like the crying of a deadly wind.

Around him several of the horsemen went down as their ponies stumbled across a prairie-dog town. Horses cried out with the pain of broken legs, riders screeching as the rest careened over them in the new light shredded with streamers of gray dust.

Still the hundreds rode down on the earth lodges, gathering speed as they brought terror and death for the tai-bos.

But they had failed. Isatai’s prophecies had simply not come true: the white men were not asleep in their beds; the bullets from their big buffalo-killing guns did not turn to water; the shaman’s medicine did not protect warriors from dying at the hands of the tai-bos who hid inside their earth lodges through that long morning as the sun rose across the meadow where the blood of brave horsemen and war ponies stained the thirsty ground.

To the voices of the many Tall One added his own, crying out in rage as the first charge was turned back. Crying out in frustration at the failure of the famous Comanche wheel that flew in a fury around the earth lodges, hoping to grind down the enemy as it had for so many raiding seasons. Around and around they had circled in a tight red noose of screaming warriors, while the white man knocked horsemen from the backs of their ponies, even spilling many of the animals into the dusty meadow.

“Isatai lied to us!” shouted Antelope as he reined up beside Tall One at the far edge of the meadow where more and more of the warriors milled about, confused, frightened, and ultimately sucking on their deepest rage. Leaving their ponies and the Comanche wheel behind, more and more warriors chose to sprint forward on foot and fight behind the tai-bos’ wagons and the tall stacks the hide hunters had made of their dried buffalo hides.

There was a moment when it seemed the gray-eyed war chief was the only one of them still mounted. Alone he charged one of the earth lodges. But his pony too was thrown, shot by the powerful medicine of those big buffalo guns. Their bravest—this war chief—made to crawl for his life, forced to seek cover behind a stack of buffalo hides, slaughtered by the white man.

As the sun climbed ever higher toward its summer zenith, the battle became a long-distance waiting game. Out in the meadow after they had killed all the tai-bos’ horses and mules, the warriors took to sniping at the windows and doors while Tall One listened to the white men yell to one another, back and forth from one earth lodge to another. Behind that wide stack of hides, the young warrior sat, listening to the sounds those strange words made in his ears, feeling the tug of something uncomfortable in his heart as more and more of the foreign tongue made all the more sense.

Over and over he wished it did not. Hoping he could shut out what became more and more familiar—shut out what he wished was not a language he remembered. His eyes smarting, Tall One had grown angry with himself for crying. So instead he made himself angry at the tai-bos for yelling loud enough that he could hear them use the words spoken by his father and mother, by his sister.

It had been so long since he had thought of her—remembering now the curve of her sunburned cheeks, the pretty nose beneath the shade of that bonnet brim as they worked up the weeds in the field.

Tall One gazed down at the soil where he knelt, the ground gone dry and thirsty. He scooped up a handful, allowing it to run through his fingers as the big bullets sang through the super-heated summer air of that meadow. And he remembered a time he had planted row upon row of seed in ground rich and dark, soil made fertile with the embrace of sun and the blessing of rain, where the old mules dragged the single-shovel plow behind them, turning the soil over in black, steamy curls where little Zeke would trundle behind, struggling beneath the huge shoulder bag filled with seed.

Zeke. He hadn’t remembered his brother’s name in … many seasons. And now these tai- bos had brought it all welling to the surface again. Try as he might to squeeze them out, their voices still echoed in his ears. Not the hide hunters’ shouts of encouragement to one another. No, what tormented Tall One then were the voices of those who had loved him, the voices of those he had loved.

Near the end of that terrible, bloody day, he had looked at the sun falling to the west, sensing in the old core of him that this time of the year was well past the season for planting. Instead of crops, here in this meadow all that had been sown was blood and terror and death. What else could the Kwahadi now reap but more blood and terror and death?

That morning as the sky had lightened in the east, the hundreds of horsemen had been filled with great heart to overrun this place of the tai-bo hide men. But now as that sun sank in despair, the hundreds had found the white hunters awake and not to be clubbed in their sleep, found the enemy’s big guns shooting far and accurately, discovered the white men tenaciously clinging to the shadows of their earth-walled burrows. Every bit of fight had seeped out of the warriors.

Like translucent milk oozing from the old sow’s teats as one of her piglets came loose, the fight had gone out of these hundreds. Like that milk gone bad, their sun-dance war medicine had gone sour in the mouths of the Kwahadi.

By sundown Lone Wolf rode away with the Kiowa. No man tried to stop them.

That next morning Tall One awoke in the gray stillness to see the Shahiyena of Medicine Water and Rock Forehead and the rest mounting up. They said they were going to ride north, raid settlements where there were no