Cody choked a little, swallowing hard. His eyes seemed to brim as he forced a smile onto his lips and his own hand came up for a salute. “Well done yourself, old friend.”
Shad reined away abruptly, nudging his roan into a walk. “Watch your hair, Bill Cody. It’d look mighty fine on some buck’s coup-stick. Damn, but it’s awful pretty!”
Cody forced a quick laugh, watching the big plainsman’s back as Sweete moved away down the slope toward the wide silver band of river. “You … you watch your backtrail, Shad Sweete. By God, you watch your backtrail!”
So total a surprise, so terrible a disaster. So complete their loss of nearly everything—all of it burned by the soldiers, all that had not been looted by the Shaved-Heads before the lodges were put to the torch. Meat and flour, blankets and robes. Weapons and powder and the wealth they had collected from the white homesteads across many moons of raiding. All of it—gone in the time it took for the sun to cross half the sky above.
And those bodies mutilated by the Shaved-Heads and left for the predators that always came, drawn by the smell of blood on the winds. Porcupine and many of the other warriors had returned to that smoking camp when the soldiers withdrew. Come to bury their own: fathers and sons, brothers and uncles, friends.
The bodies were all there, most still recognizable despite the butchery of the Pawnee trackers—identified by a fragment of clothing or quillwork, some body paint or a particular weapon, perhaps a necklace or hair ornament.
After the soldiers had gone, Porcupine had looked and looked, unable to find the body of his young friend who had stayed behind in the grassy ravine as the war chief and others clawed their way up the far side and escaped before the soldiers overran them. Bull’s body was not among those at the ravine near the village, nor among those who had taken refuge with Tall Bull in another deep ravine south of camp where the war chief and the rest had died bravely rather than run. Tall Bull had even killed his favorite war pony there at the mouth of the ravine—to show the Shaved-Heads that he would go no farther, that he would attempt no escape.
Like Bull, a handful of the Dog Soldiers had stayed behind to cover the retreat of the women and children and old ones. To give their lives for their people.
Inside his breast, Porcupine’s heart felt chilled and prickly, hollow as a buffalo horn, black as the far side of night. Having hoped against hope, praying as he waited until he could return to the devastated camp, unable to mount a counterattack, Porcupine and some of the others had angrily watched the Shaved-Heads mutilate the dead Shahiyena scattered throughout the village. From a nearby hill he had seen the tall white man approach the grassy ravine where Bull fell, saw the tall one guard the fallen warrior’s body with his own life—fighting off the Shaved-Heads until soldiers arrived.
Porcupine sensed in his heart what his thoughts had tried to tell him a long time ago—that the one Bull hunted now in fact grieved a great loss.
The white man wrapped the body in a blanket, then bound it in a buffalo robe. He took from one of the lodges soon to be torched those special possessions with which to bury a warrior: weapons and parfleches, food and finery. Binding it all inside the buffalo robe with the body, lashing it tight with rawhide whangs he cut from the bottom of a seasoned lodge, he tied the body across the back of one of the handsomest of the captured Shahiyena ponies and moved slowly out of that camp as the destruction of Tall Bull’s village began.
He had followed the old gray-head toward the river and beyond, heading south by southwest toward the tall, chalky river bluffs in that wild, austere wilderness that had long been the hunting ground of the Shahiyena. Each time Porcupine had turned around to look behind him at the site of destruction, it had sickened him to watch another tall spiral of greasy black smoke rising in the distance beyond the hills, where once the camp of Tall Bull’s people had waited beside the spring.
Into the second day the old one had pushed on with the two extra ponies strung out behind him on picket ropes, riding below the river bluffs slowly, looking carefully before he finally stopped—having selected the right crevice below the shade of both juniper and cedar, there above the quiet murmur of the great river fed by distant mountain snows.
