Reap the Whirlwind (34 page)

It was a good sign, this. The herd of buffalo in the valley—right here along the trail they were taking to attack the Lakota village of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. The Grandfather Above was giving these animals to the Crow as a blessing. Giving them also to the Shoshone and Lone Star’s soldiers too.

But Plenty Coups knew the buffalo were meant as a gift to his Crow.

He had joined this hunt with the half-breed called Grabber, the one who was the chief of Lone Star’s scouts. Plenty Coups figured the Grabber had to hate the Lakota as much as his own Raven People hated them.

The Crow war chief was not a young man, but neither was he old. He had an unremarkable face, though it encompassed a firm mouth and chin, a wide and noble brow above the commanding nose. Of average height, with the chest of a bull and the long arms of sinew and muscle, he had tested his body against his enemies and the animals of this land. Twenty-nine winters he had lived, fought, loved—and distinguished himself among his own people. The People of the Raven. The Apsaalooke.

They were, after all, every one of them his children. He
had been told just that many years before when he was but a child himself. The dream had come to him, on the wings of a spirit helper—to tell him he would have no children of his own blood and body; yet all Crows would be his family.

That sacred dream had pointed the way for the rest of Plenty Coups’s life. He had followed that footpath without faltering.

Plenty Coups was born in the summer at the place his people called “The Cliff That Has No Pass” on the Yellowstone. One of his grandmothers had married a Shoshone. So he considered it good fortune to be riding with Luishaw’s warriors against the Lakota, even if the old chief Washakie was not here to lead his tribesmen into battle.

It was natural, after all, to feel such strong kinship with the Snakes—for Shoshone blood flowed in Plenty Coups’s veins.

Earlier that spring the Limping Soldier
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had come to the Crow villages to talk to the chiefs about joining his army in its war against the Lakota. When the soldier chief asked for some wolves to scout for him, the Raven People sent thirty. They went with the soldier chief to his camp on the Yellowstone to await the arrival of The Other One
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and the Son of the Morning Star
^‡

It wasn’t long after those thirty scouts departed that Left Hand and the Grabber arrived at the Big Horn River, saying Lone Star wanted some scouts for his march on the Lakota. It was a good thing to help the soldiers, for the white man was strong and without number, like the stars in the sky in his own country. Besides, the Crow had struggled for generations against the Lakota, Shahiyena, and Arapaho anyway. To defeat these old enemies would be a great thing. Many warriors finally heeded the words of Old Crow and decided to follow Left Hand and the Grabber back to Lone Star’s camp.

Plenty Coups knew he would long remember his first sight of that soldier camp: row upon row upon row of tiny white tents nestled down in the tall green grass like white
snowberry blossoms, men in blue here and there and everywhere, more horses and mules and white-topped wagons than he had ever seen before, all corralled in the great vee formed by the forks of Goose Creek. Then they rode down the slope to the soldier camp while some of the white men came together marching in step and others mounted horses matched by the same color, all those big American horses seeming to dance to the music called from the tin horns and the drums.

To amuse and entertain the white men, the Crow chiefs called out to their warriors: the brown-skinned horsemen immediately put their ponies at a gallop, rushing forward to perform a mock charge on the soldiers, firing their guns and shouting.

It had been great fun. A time to make the heart of Plenty Coups swell and grow strong to see so many going against his old enemies, the Lakota.

Left Hand had told the Crow something important—that Lone Star had decided to march north even though he was still expecting an overdue message from Limping Soldier or The Other One up on the Elk River. Lone Star had been three days waiting here for word, but now he would press ahead with his own soldiers.

Lone Star asked Plenty Coups to go with the Grabber to scout the country ahead toward the Rosebud. The war chief was to pick nine others as well. The eleven slipped away from the great wagon camp earlier that morning than most of the soldiers still in their blankets and tents. Ten had painted themselves and donned wolf hides before they followed the Grabber quietly past the outlying soldier pickets and on up the first slope that looked down on the forks of Goose Creek.

Turning one last time to gaze back at that little camp in the gray of false-dawn, Plenty Coups had found his chest swelling in pride.

“Yes,” Plenty Coups said with great confidence to the Grabber, who rode near him, “we can whip the Lakota, all the Shahiyena, all the Arapaho in the world!”

Out there beyond the far edge of the soldier camp, in that cold predawn darkness, they first heard one, then another Lakota wolf call out. The Lakota did their best to
howl like the gaunt-legged predator, but a warrior knows the difference between the howl of a man and the howl of a wolf. No matter how good the imitation, for some reason a man’s call always makes an echo. Later as the wild rose light began to spread out of the east, and Plenty Coups’s warriors rode on toward the north, they spotted Lakota scouts from time to time on the crests of the hills.

Plenty Coups waved to the enemy, signaled them. His heart was buoyant—if not downright cocky and spoiling for this fight—simply because he was certain the Lakota were soon to suffer a grave defeat. It was nearing mid-morning when he first noticed the buzzards circling a patch of pale sky far ahead. Below that patch of sky Plenty Coups and his scouts discovered the carcasses of two big American horses, each with the U.S. symbol burned in the hide of the rear flank. Iron hooves further confirmed that these had been soldier horses.

“Where are the riders?” asked Fox Just Coming Over the Hill.

“They are with the Lakota now,” Humpy said tragically, wagging his head. In some ways many would see this short, deformed man as a pitiable creature—but Humpy was instead a brave and accomplished warrior.

“Better to die quick in battle, than die slow in a Lakota village,” Fox replied.

“It’s no wonder now,” Plenty Coups said to the others as they were leaping back atop their own ponies. “No wonder Lone Star has not received any message from the soldier chiefs on the Elk River.”

The Grabber only nodded and moved them out, not speaking a word nor making a sound save for the muted hoofbeats of his pony loping through the tall grass.

Later they came across some buffalo grazing on the slopes of the valley, black as sowbugs against the deep green of the new grass. Stopping his scouts to watch the herd for a moment, Plenty Coups saw some of the black forms racing down the slope. Immediately he knew why the beasts lumbered in their hurry—for this was not something buffalo would do, perhaps only in the season of the rut.

Hunters!

Those horsemen in among the herd could only be from the enemy’s village. From the way the distant riders wore their hair and painted their ponies, he knew they were not Lakota. These were Shahiyena hunters.

The other nine were yelling now, at the enemy in the distance and at the Grabber, working themselves up to go in pursuit of those hunter horsemen, racing their ponies back and forth along the slope to give them a second wind just about the time the Lakota saw the Crow on the far hillside. Both sides reined up in shouting distance, taunting the enemy, hurling insults back and forth as well as exposing their manhood—as if to say how they would desecrate the bodies of the enemy dead they would kill that day.

Even though the Shahiyena outnumbered the Crow scouts, they did not rush the Grabber and Plenty Coups’s warriors. He thought there must be a reason—

“The Shahiyena must surely know of the soldiers coming behind us,” the Grabber said, making sign talk with his hands.

As the Shahiyena turned their tails and slapped their bare rumps in a parting gesture to the Crow, Plenty Coups signed, “Let us go kill some buffalo. No hurry now, for we know the enemy goes north to the Rosebud.”

“Yes,” the Grabber signed. “It is good. We shall feast tonight. And fight our enemies tomorrow.”

Moon of Ripening Berries

H
e felt the blade slide between his ribs, the metal so cold it
actually seemed hot, as if the soldier behind him had held it in the fire only a heartbeat before lunging for him with the long weapon.

Crazy Horse jerked upright, blinking into the darkness of morning-coming. Heaving, to catch his breath. As cool as it was at this time of the day, he wasn’t surprised to find his naked skin damp, beads across his brow.

In the firepit the coals lay dead, the camp quiet beyond the hides stretched over the ring of lodgepoles that were his sanctuary. His woman lay sleeping still, her breathing heavy. He had not awakened her this time.

His own heart hammered beneath his ribs like a captive bird beating its wings against a cage now that the hot flush of fear surged through his veins. Filling his entire body with its terror.

This was the only fear Crazy Horse had ever known.

The awful nightmare had returned again. Here on the eve of the battle they would take into the lap of the soldiers marching out of the south against this great village camped on Sundance Creek.
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Not often did it return. Only at certain, mystically powerful times in his adult life would the same terrifying vision revisit him, come to haunt the Hunkpatila war chief. Now again that they had reached the season known as Wipazuka Waste Wi.

Yet what pained him much more than the soldier’s long rifle-knife sliding past his ribs to puncture his kidney was the fact that it was not other soldiers who held Crazy Horse as he was mortally wounded. What agonized him most about his recurring nightmare was that Oglalla warriors imprisoned his arms. His own friends helped to kill him.

Time and again he professed to his people that no gun had been made by the white man that could kill him.

“No bullet fired by these soldiers marching north from Goose Creek will kill me when I ride into this battle,” he repeated to his warriors, seeking to drive them into a fighting fury.

But there remained something he did not say to anyone, not his wife, nor his best friends: the only thing Crazy Horse had ever feared was his own people, dying like a trapped animal in their clutches.

When all he had ever wanted for his Oglalla was for them to be truly free.

With a corner of the shaggy, fire-fragrant buffalo robe, he swabbed some of the stale sweat from his body, then rose quietly, taking his war shirt and leggings with him as he ducked from the lodge. He dressed outside rather than chance awakening his wife, Black Shawl.

His war pony snorted, picking up the man’s scent even though he had picketed the animal on the far side of the lodge. Crazy Horse went immediately to the magnificent creature that seemed so much to be his namesake. The war chief stroked the pony’s muzzle, more to calm himself. Its coat would soon become a brilliant red when the high sun rose that day over this land. The pale slash it bore between its eyes as well as the two stockings on the gelding’s forelegs made the animal stand out in any company of horse-mounted warriors.

Turning, Crazy Horse went to a nearby copse of trees, letting his moccasins feel their way across the earth for what his eyes could not see in the starlit darkness. He knew
he had not slept long without looking overhead at the positions of the star patterns, simply because his eyes felt so gritty … then his toes felt the humped earth. Kneeling, he confirmed that he had found the mound of dirt thrown out of the burrow by a pocket gopher. Scooting on his knees, he found two more burrows nearby. Now he scooped earth from the mounds into both hands and returned to the pony.

Slowly he poured some of the loosened dirt along the spine of the pony as his spirit helper from the lake had taught him long ago. Then on each leg he rubbed the fresh earth in those zigzagging thunderbolts. And around each nostril to bring power to its lungs. Back to the rear flanks with what little he had left in each hand, spotting the hips with hailstones.

This completed, Crazy Horse dropped to his knees and felt for some drying grass. His fingers selected three stalks dry enough to suit him. Each of the short blades of grass he stuffed into his hair: one behind each ear, and the last in his own forelock. Rising again, he stroked the war pony’s muzzle once more.

Today they would ride south, together. Perhaps tomorrow to reach the soldiers. His medicine was strong, made all the more potent with the arrival of his cousin Black Elk, come from Red Cloud’s agency down on the White Rock.