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.
