“For generations to come: as the old ones pass down their winter counts and battle stories,” Bull added. “A charge when the great Roman Nose knew he was destined to die. Still, he led his warriors into the face of those hot-mouthed white-man guns spitting fire into our ranks. It was a day to be proud of my Shahiyena blood—to watch a great man lead the rest, riding to your certain death.”
Roman Nose’s eyes found those of High-Backed Bull. “To be a man—this was enough in my life.”
“You die having carried our struggle with the white man onto the island itself when so many others turned away,” Bull said. “Watching you this day has given me the courage to take a vow on the blood of my war chief: to ride now into the white man’s world and face my own destiny.”
Roman Nose almost slipped away then, his lids fluttering, but he opened them slightly, his eyes glazing as he asked, “Your father?”
Bull nodded. “I vow to kill him.”
“This is dangerous medicine,” Porcupine warned. “Your blood is his blood.”
Weakly reaching out with his trembling fingers, Roman Nose sought Bull’s hand, took it, and squeezed as tightly as he could. “I faced the guns on that island because my medicine told me that it was here my end would come.”
“Our chief is right, Bull,” Porcupine agreed. “You have had no vision telling you to seek out and kill this white man.”
Like a duck shaking water from its back, he shrugged off any fear of offending his personal spirits. Bull’s eyes clearly showed he wanted no fraternal touch. “I need no vision to tell me,” he said softly, a distinct edge to his words. Then he tapped his heart with a finger. “What vision I need to complete my vow comes from here. Where I am told what I need to do.”
“If your heart is strong, then you must go,” Roman Nose said, his eyelids flickering with a spasm of pain.
“It is a fool’s errand,” Porcupine protested. “To go alone … why, he is only one man—when you can ride with us against many more—”
“Would Porcupine call my ride into the face of those guns a fool’s errand?” the war chief asked, his eyes gazing directly overhead into the deepening twilight.
Bull could see the eyes were nearly glazed in death-seeing. “Your spirit will ride with me, Roman Nose,” he said. “As I go to kill white men wherever I can find them—you will be by my side.”
“If you remain true to your heart, High-Backed Bull,” Roman Nose said with a noisy rasp as he struggled with a wave of great pain crossing his gray face, “then my spirit will forever ride with you.”
Bull watched the great war chief’s eyelids open widely, then slowly fall with his last, painful breath. The hand that held his own loosened, sagging. He rose from the body.
Going quickly to his pony Bull galloped off—unshod hooves spitting spirals of golden dust into the purple twilight—riding toward the deepening gloom of night.
Into the night he raced, north by east. Where High-Backed Bull knew he would one day find the man who had fathered him.
“The riders—these have your family?” Two Sleep asked, his words hushed among the rocks where they lay studying the overland trail that skirted this Red Desert Basin country east of the pass.
Together they had traveled west from Independence Rock, that great turtle’s hump rising solitary and magnificent from the tableland of the central plains, from Devil’s Gate, where the Sweetwater tumbled off the continent’s spine toward the North Platte, rushing ever onward to feed the great Missouri. Climbing through the treeless, sage-pocked arid desolation that would take them to the high pass through this unpeopled country, they had decided to pull off the trail, hunker back in the high rocks and have themselves a look in both directions. Less than two hours’ ride from where they now lay, every melting snowflake, every drop of rain that fell to kiss this high, dry land, would either flow east or to the Pacific. From here on out to the top of the pass it was country where a man had little choice but to expose himself against all that sky, against all that naked ground.
But here they lay in the shadows of the outcrop overhead, their stock tied below and behind the jagged bluff, grazing on summer’s last dry offering of grass. They had watched the half-dozen horsemen riding stirrup to stirrup, fanned out and coming on at an easy lope as if they were about their mission with a deadly zeal.
Not long after sunup and a cold breakfast of some hard-bread and what leavings of meat they’d fried the night before, the Shoshone warrior had spotted the first wisps of dust faintly smearing the horizon to the southwest. In this clear-aired country, that was too much sign to be just one man, even two. Even enough dust was raised to be a small war party.
