Bull turned and looked across White Butte Creek, which ran through camp in a southeasterly direction. He found Tall Bull and Two Crows standing beside the chief’s lodge, peering into the distance without apparent alarm. They wanted the village to wait and rest here for two days before crossing the river and heading north to the rock formation where years before, at the foot of what the white man called Court House Rock, they had starved the Shaved-Heads they met there in battle.
This was no cause for excitement—perhaps. Nearby, others were saying there should be no alarm. After all, hunters were out in the countryside looking for buffalo. Others had gone in search of antelope. Surely no enemy could surprise this village of proven warriors.
“There! On the hills!”
Many were the ones now bursting from their lodges in curiosity. Even the children were pointing at the distant figures loping back and forth on far slopes: horsemen with long hair waving on the hot, dry wind, brandishing rifles aloft. A sign of greeting.
Visitors?
“Perhaps these are Pawnee Killer’s Lakotas,” someone suggested.
“Yes,” another agreed loudly. “So much shooting—they must have been successful in their hunt!”
Bull squinted into the bright light once more, attempting to make sense out of the throbbing forms on horseback coming out of the north.
Then his mouth went dry and his heart went cold. The first bullets whined into camp, striking meat racks, splintering lodgepoles, crying overhead in warning.
The Shaved-Heads had come—returned to savor the sweet taste of victory in their mouths!
As two wide phalanxes of dust-shrouded pony soldiers broke over the top of the hills, Bull whirled.
Porcupine was running toward him shouting,
Some of the Shahiyena already lay bleeding underfoot of the others who scattered in panic, sweeping up children, gathering an armload of possessions before fleeing in the wake of the white soldiers. Hearing the smack of lead against flesh like the slap of his hand against wet rawhide, Bull saw one woman’s lower jaw disappear in a blinding corona of crimson. She sank to the ground, gurgling for but a moment until her chest heaved no more.
Now they were surrounded on three sides, coming in from the east and west as well as the north, the hooves of their iron-shod horses hammering the baked, sere earth.
“There!” he shouted, pointing to the south, immediately joined by other young warriors who had also taken up their arms.
They yanked, pulled, prodded, dragged the old and young, growled at the rest to hurry them along. To the south! It was the only direction of escape left them.
In that frightening confusion a few ponies reared, and some went down screaming as bullets smacked into them. A few women struggled to control what animals were in camp. Because most horses were out grazing with the herd, those Shahiyena who fled the carnage did so on foot—clutching a young one beneath an arm, perhaps snatching up a weapon or a blanket before darting through the hellish smoke and dust, heading for places of safety and hiding in the sandy bluffs hard by the river.
The old shamans had spelled doom for the band! Trusting as they did to the blood congealing at the bottom of a badger carcass! Yet—in the end it was Tall Bull who had decided to believe the old medicine men.
Porcupine was already hollering for the warriors to follow him into the teeth of the charge, there to make a stand only as long as it would take to clear the camp. Then they would escape.
Until then, their weapons and their brown bodies were all that stood between the white pony soldiers and this camp of fleeing women, children, and old ones.
A streak of blond hair and a swirl of greasy, smoke-stained cloth swept past the young warrior. It meant one of the white women had escaped and was fleeing toward the soldiers.
Bull wanted to find Tall Bull—to see where he himself had run to escape this destruction he and the old ones had brought down on this warrior band. Angrily Bull rubbed the grit from his eyes and strained into the yellow dust that stung his mouth and nose. Then he found the war chief beside his lodge, the white woman suspended at the end of his brown arm by her blond hair. Her hands gripped his wrist, her face turned upward, imploring Tall Bull. Raised in his other hand was a silver-bladed tomahawk.
Her mouth opened, a huge black hole in her face, as the woman screamed inhumanly.
“Kill her!” Bull screamed at the chief through the din of rifle fire and war cries. “Kill the white woman!”
Without hesitation Tall Bull hurled the tomahawk downward into the woman’s face.
“Yes! Yes!” cried the young warrior as he watched the blood and gore splatter the war chief.
Her body convulsed, falling to the side, where it trembled for a moment. Then Tall Bull was gone.
