Only then would the Dog Soldiers retreat from the land stolen by the white settlers, leaving in their wake the dead and wounded, the slaughtered cattle and the charred ruins smudging the clean prairie sky. This would be a summer to drive the white man back to the east, where it was said he numbered like the blades of grass.
“I cannot believe this,” Tall Bull had declared haughtily when confronted with that frightening but questionable news by messengers from tribes who lived farther to the east. “Your words are only the scared talk of those who would rather run than fight the white man.”
“Neither do I believe it,” Bull had said. “As a child I grew up around the white man’s forts.” The war council grunted their approval of his statement. “I have never seen so many white men that they would even number the blades of grass where Tall Bull raised this lodge of his.”
He was proud of the smile those words had elicited from Tall Bull and White Horse both. And ever since, the Dog Soldier chiefs had seemed to desire the counsel of the young warrior of twenty-four summers, never failing to include Bull in those talks made to decide on which path the Hotamitanyo would take.
That recognition proved to be a pain-giving balm: soothing some of his self-loathing, taking his mind off his hatred of his own white blood. For too long had he wanted acceptance by his father’s race. When Bull did not find it among the whites, he returned to his mother’s people, only to discover that they too distrusted him, if not shunned him outright. Sired by a white man, born of a Shahiyena mother, and wanting nothing more than acceptance—for too long Bull found a home among neither people.
But now, it seemed, not only had the fierce and renegade Dog Soldiers made a place for him at their talks, they truly desired his counsel.
Quite by accident Bull had discovered that the only way he could find acceptance among the Shahiyena was to turn his back completely, irrevocably, on his white father and the white world. Although there were enough reminders of the mixed blood flowing through his veins, what Bull nonetheless hated himself for was the white taint to that blood. More than anything he feared that it would one day prove a stain to his medicine, his power, would ultimately undo his life.
Try as he might through that solitary journey of his last winter, Bull’s time alone had done nothing more than allow him to brood on just how much he differed from the rest of these young warriors crowding the camp. Though he stood taller, though he might be bigger, of greater muscle, Bull wanted none of that. More than anything, he wanted to be dark-haired, black-eyed like them. He wanted most to have a father he could walk with through this camp of Hotamitanyo. A warrior father. A father he could be proud of. Not one of the enemy.
So he sat and cleaned his heavy pistol this last day before they would ride forth at dawn, drawing the cleaning cloth in and out of the barrel of the Walker Colt he had taken out of the dead, frozen hands of a soldier near the pine fort two winters before at the place where the Shahiyena and Lakota had slaughtered the hundred-in-the-hand. Others had claimed the muzzle-loading rifles. Bull had instead rushed in to claim one of the many-shoots pistols: a powerful, destructive weapon.
“You clean that gun so much, you will wear it out,” chided Porcupine as he settled to his haunches in the shade beside his friend.
“Yours could stand some cleaning too,” Bull said sourly, not looking up from his task.
Porcupine sighed as he leaned back against the buffalo-hide lodge. “This magic that sent you riding into the teeth of last winter, it did not help you find the father you seek. Why are you so sure you will find him now?”
He stayed his hands, the powder-streaked rag protruding from both ends of the pistol barrel. “Last winter I hoped to find word of him, or my mother. The time of cold is a season when the soldiers do not march, when the army does not need its scouts—its eyes and ears to guide the soldiers to the sleeping Indian camps.”
“You believed you would find this father of yours in a lodge where you, would also find your mother?”
He nodded, then said, “But I found neither one of them,” as he dragged the oiled rag from the barrel. “So now I have greater faith in the journey we will make this summer. If we kill enough white men, capture enough women, steal enough of their spotted buffalo and bum enough of their dirt lodges—the pony soldiers will come after us.”
Porcupine snorted. “That is one certainty no man will gamble against, Bull. The white man always swats back at that which troubles him.”
Bull nodded. “Yes. But even more important—I know I will find my father this summer. If we kill and steal and rape and kidnap enough—then we will leave a wide and bloody trail for the army to follow.”
“And you believe your father will lead the soldiers on that trail we will leave them to follow?”
