In a struggle up the sharp, sandy slope, the old one had dragged the buffalo-hide bundle to its final resting place, taken one last look around, then placed the body of High-Backed Bull within the darkness of eternity. It took the rest of that second day and into the fading twilight for the old man to lumber up that slope with enough rocks gathered along the riverbank, enough to seal up the crevice forever and all time to come.
As the sun had sunk like a bloody benediction over those faraway mountains, Porcupine watched the white man bring the reluctant war pony up that loose and shifting slope, right to the base of the bluff, to the very foot of the rock-enclosed crevice where High-Backed Bull lay. There the old man raised his hand to the sky and began singing. Not the words of the white man’s prayer medicine—but the words of the Shahiyena air-spirits song.
The song over, its last notes falling away from the bluffs to echo across the river below, the old man pulled free his pistol, rubbing the neck of one of Bull’s favorite ponies.
That single shot reverberated for the longest time, carried back and forth along the river.
Just before dark the old gray-headed one finally rose and made his way down the slope, leaving behind the carcass of the war pony to guard the entrance to the rock cairn.
That rainy night icy hail lashed the white man’s cheerless camp as he softly sang over and over the traditional song that wished the departed one a safe and quick journey across the Star Road, into the far, far land of Seyan. With no drum, he beat a hand on the bottom of a much-used copper kettle.
When the hail was done with them, passing on to the east with its white fury, the white man stripped himself naked to the chilling night. At his deep fire pit the man lit some white sage and smudged his body in the sacred and healing smoke. All the while he mumbled prayers that Porcupine could not make sense of from his hiding place in the willows.
Prayers spoken not in the white man’s foreign tongue—but in the language of High-Backed Bull.
In the gray of sun-coming that next morning, Porcupine awoke cold and stiff in his rain-soaked blanket beside the river, blinking against the sleep-grit matting his eyes, rubbing them quickly before he peered through the willow to find the old one gone, disappeared some time in the night.
He wished the gray one a safe journey now that the white man rode all the more alone, rode without his son. Feeling sorry, Porcupine himself felt empty still, realizing the old one had journeyed far too many miles already without having the love of his son. The one born of his flesh, blood of his blood.
Yet Porcupine’s spirit sang as he rode below that river bluff one last time that glorious dawn, stopping to gaze above at the carcass of the war pony, at the vertical scar in the bluff, a dark slash filled with river stones of every size.
High-Backed Bull had gone where he had wanted to be.
And the one who had fathered him was now traveling a road to seek his own redemption.
For knowing them both, Porcupine felt stronger still as he moved away from the river. Resolved more now than before to help White Horse once again gather the Dog Soldiers and their families into a fighting force that High-Backed Bull would be proud of.
Porcupine sensed his own spirit renewed, knowing the struggle continued.
24
THE TRAIL HAD gone cold.
Two winters came and passed; each day they hoped against hope that some clue would turn up, some slip of a tongue, some word of Jubilee Usher’s Danites passing through the country. But, nothing.
Back that October of sixty-eight, Two Sleep had taken Jonah on west from the land of the red desert beside the Sandy, crossing Green River, then pushing on to Fort Bridger. Like the back of his leathery, walnut-colored hand, the Shoshone knew the lay of that land and the caliber of those men in army blue. Jonah stayed quiet for the most part, letting the Indian ask the questions needing answers.
But none of the soldiers stationed at Bridger could remember a big outfit of horsemen, wagons, and an ambulance coming through of recent. Anything on the order of that many armed men would have surely caused that undermanned garrison at the frontier outpost to stand right up and take notice, what with so few civilian travelers moving east or west out in this infernal country. As it was, for the most part the soldiers said things had gone quiet to the north: up where the Sioux and Cheyenne had appeared to settle down after wrenching the big treaty of 1868, and the abandonment of the forts along the Bozeman Road, from the white man’s army. With that summer of sixty-eight fading into history, the troops assigned the Montana Road had filed back down toward Laramie, for all time quitting the hunting ground granted the wild tribes.
