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?”
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?”
