Walking Wolf (15 page)

Later that evening, I saw what looked to be an owl rise from where she was sleeping, its muffled wings beating silently as it flew in the direction of her people's camp. A coincidence? If I had been raised White, and human to boot, perhaps I could believe that. But I have walked the thin line between the real and the unreal all my life, both as a Comanche brave and a shapeshifting were-beast, and I know better than to dismiss such things out of hand.

The very next day, as we entered the Hunkpapa camp, Sitting Bull strode from his tipi and warmly greeted his niece without anyone telling him we had arrived. I was able to understand most of what he said, as I'd spent the past couple of days learning as much of the Lakota tongue as possible. Once again my gift for languages had come in handy, allowing me to become fluent in a matter of weeks instead of months.

“Digging Woman! Little daughter! I saw you in a dream last night! It is good to know my vision was true.”

“It is good to see you as well, Uncle.”

“In my dream, you said you were bringing back powerful medicine to help us in our war against the Whites. Is this true?”

Digging Woman hopped off her horse and gestured to me, wrapped in blankets and curled up on the pony drag like an ailing grandmother. “Judge for yourself, Uncle.”

Sitting Bull frowned and moved to lift the blanket from my face. I was groggy from the herbs used to blunt the pain that stitched its way through my body like lightning. My nose elongated and became a snout, and I flashed my fangs in warning lest he touch me. Sitting Bull's eyes widened, and he stepped back from the pony drag, clearly shaken.

“You have captured Coyote!” he exclaimed.

Digging Woman shook her head. “He is not Coyote, but one beloved of him. He calls himself Walking Wolf.”

Sitting Bull nodded his head as he digested what she was telling him. “You have indeed done well, Digging Woman. Our medicine will be made strong against the Whites! I will see to it that the skinwalker is welcome here.”

That was my first meeting with Sitting Bull, and it would prove to be far from the last. True to his word, Sitting Bull had one of his sub-chiefs surrender his tipi, so I could recover from the grievous injuries dealt me by Grondeur. During that time, Digging Woman tended to me personally, but Sitting Bull was often a visitor to my tent as well. There was much on the chief's mind, and he often talked with me when he was troubled.

The Sitting Bull I knew was still relatively young, but he lacked the bloodthirsty brashness that marked so many of his fellow war chiefs. He was a thoughtful man, in his way. He reminded me of Medicine Dog, and I guess that was one reason I came to trust and respect him so quickly. When I looked into his eyes, I could tell he was a man who could see true.

Word soon got out that Sitting Bull was playing host to a skin-walker, and many of the rival chiefs came to pay him homage. I distinctly remember the day Red Cloud, chief of the Oglala Sioux, rode into camp. Red Cloud was feared far and wide, by Whites and Indians alike. Before the settlers found their way onto the Great Plains, Red Cloud's name struck fear into the Utes, Crows and Pawnees. A ruthless warrior, he was known as a man of pronounced cruelty. One story told how he pulled a drowning Ute out of the river by his hair, only to scalp the poor bastard once he got him to shore.

When he arrived at Sitting Bull's camp, his party rode in whooping and shrieking so that everyone would know they were fierce and mighty warriors. Red Cloud was, by this time, an older man—older than Sitting Bull by a decade or more. He dismounted, and Sitting Bull greeted him cordially. Red Cloud was a proud figure of a man, although he now limped from an imperfectly healed wound he'd received from a Pawnee arrow a few years back.

I was sitting in front of my tipi, wrapped in a buffalo robe and smoking my pipe. I had been amongst the Sioux the better part of a month and was close to being completely healed. My left ear had yet to grow back all the way—I wasn't exactly sure why it was being so stubborn, perhaps because my attacker had been a
vargr
—but the burn tissue had all but disappeared, except for a thick patch on my right shoulder the size of an eagle dollar. I watched as Sitting Bull and Red Cloud strode in my direction. I could tell by the look in his eyes that Red Cloud was displeased.

“You told me you had a skinwalker, Sitting Bull,” he protested. “How can this be a skinwalker when he is White?”

Sitting Bull simply smiled and said, “He is White on the outside, but hairy on the inside.”

I lay aside my pipe and stood up, shrugging off my buffalo robe, and looked Red Cloud square in the face. It was a hard thing to do, for he indeed had the eyes of a born killer. And, without speaking a word, I shifted into my true skin. Red Cloud's face showed no trace of fear or surprise, but I could see something change deep within those merciless eyes.

He nodded, more to himself than to show approval of me. “With such powerful medicine, we cannot lose against our enemies.”

He was wrong, of course. Horribly wrong. But at the time it seemed like the truth.

I spent the next thirteen years living as a member of Sitting Bull's tribe. They were good years, although far from idyllic. The U.S. government considered the Sioux hostile since they didn't hold with the Whites trying to build roads across their hunting grounds. Conflict was a constant part of Sioux life—as was death. But I had been raised amongst the Comanche, and the idea of being constantly at odds with those around you was far from unusual to me. Peace was good, but war was the way of things. This the Sioux and Comanche understood.

During those days amongst the Hunkpapa, I came to be regarded as a living good luck piece. Braves who wanted success on the warpath came to me so I could bless their shields and arrows. War chiefs who needed help in keeping control of their warriors came to me for support. Women heavy of child came to me, so I could breathe into their nostrils and impart the blessing of Coyote on their unborn son or daughter.

In time, I came to know all the great chiefs and warriors of the Sioux, not to mention the Cheyenne. They all came to my tipi, bringing gifts of ponies, food, buffalo robes and fine beadwork. Their names read like a Who's Who of the American Indian: Rain-in-the-Face, Gall, Black Kettle, Dull Knife, Spotted Tail, Crazy Horse. All of them brave men; all of them now long dead.

Soon I became quite wealthy, as the plains tribes judged such things, and I could take whatever woman I pleased to wife. So I picked Digging Woman. She might not have been a great beauty, but she was strong-minded, loyal and fearless.

And what about my fear of shapeshifting during intimate moments, you ask? Was ours a marriage in name only? Certainly not. During my recovery, Digging Woman spent many nights underneath the buffalo robes with me, chasing the illness from my bones by pressing her body against mine. When my fever finally broke, my body celebrated its escape from death and I soon found myself inside Digging Woman, but she was not frightened by my bestial appearance. For the first time in my life, I found myself actually making love to a woman.

As Sitting Bull's nephew-in-law, my status in the tribe became even greater. The only thing that would bring even stronger good luck to the Hunkpapa would be if a child were born of the union between skinwalker and Sioux. And in 1865, I was presented with a son. No man could have been prouder or happier than I was on the day my firstborn was presented to me, wrapped in the skin of a rabbit, squalling lustily and waving his tiny hands as if he would pull the clouds from the sky. His skin was covered with a light down, like that of a pup, and he yipped just like one when he was hungry. We named him Small Wolf.

As I held my son, I no longer wondered who or what I was. It did not matter if I was White or
vargr,
Sioux or Comanche. As of that moment, I knew that from that day forward I would always be Walking Wolf, no matter what I might call myself in the years to come.

The seasons passed and became years. The Whites eventually resolved their fight against themselves down south and began refocusing their time and energies on winning the Indian territories. The government insisted on building a road to Bozeman along the Powder River, but Red Cloud would have none of it. He constantly harassed the soldiers sent there to build the three guardian forts needed to secure Bozeman Trail until the Whites agreed to close it to emigrate traffic. But Red Cloud and the other chiefs had no way of knowing that the Whites had only agreed to do so because the Union Pacific Railroad was opening better routes to Montana farther west. Nor did Red Cloud and the other chiefs who had put their names on the Medicine Lodge Treaty know that a new Great White Father had been elected—one who publicly announced that the settlers headed westward were to be protected even if it meant the extermination of every Indian tribe.

Equally devastating was the effect the Union Pacific Railroad was having on the great buffalo herd that was the source of all life and social structure amongst the tribes that roamed the Great Plains. The train tracks had, effectively, divided the buffalo into two herds, the Northern and Southern. At first they refused to acknowledge the iron horses that cut through their ancestral grazing ground, often blocking the trains. It wasn't long, though, before the railroad hired hunters, equipped with long rifles that could shoot as far as a mile away, to make sure the tracks stayed clear. The buffalo hunters slaughtered the herds in numbers undreamed of by even the mightiest Indian hunter. And, in what seemed to be an act of genuine perversity, the carcasses were left to rot where they fell, with only a tongue or a hump taken to collect their bounty.

There was a madness on the land, and its name was Extinction.

In the spring of 1870, Red Cloud did what none had ever thought he would do. He rode to Fort Fetterman, Wyoming, named after a bluecoat he had killed four years before, and told the commandant that he wanted to go to Washington and talk to the Great White Father about the possibility of a treaty. It is hard to say whether Red Cloud's desire for peace came from a need to protect his people from certain extermination, or if he had simply grown weary of the warpath. I, myself, do not know for sure, and I was there.

Three years later an agency was created in northwestern Nebraska, just outside the boundary of the Great Sioux Reservation. There the White government built the Red Cloud Agency for the Oglalas, and the Spotted Tail Agency for the Brûlés, their ancestral enemies. Although the Whites viewed it as a victory, thing soon went sour. Violence and contracting frauds plagued the agencies from the very start, and the Sioux did not respond well to the Indian Bureau's high-handed attempts to “civilize” them by educating their children by stripping them of their language and culture.

Many of them resented—or simply did not comprehend—the Whites' desire to keep them away from the settlements and travel routes, while the Whites didn't understand that Indians off the reservation did not automatically mean hostility. Most of the time they were simply out hunting, visiting friends and family in neighboring tribes, or just wandering around the country, seeing the sights. Their refusal to stay in one spot was perceived as threatening. Although Red Cloud remained on the reservation, hundreds of Oglala braves flocked to Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, who refused to be corralled in such a manner.

Although Sitting Bull still held immense respect for Red Cloud, he considered him deluded. Reservation life was confining; the clothing and rations were often scanty and invariably of poor quality. The whiskey peddlers and other opportunists that were drawn to the agency were decidedly bad influences on the more impressionable young braves. As Sitting Bull once said at one of the tribal talks, “You are fools to make yourselves slaves to a piece of fat bacon, some hardtack, and a little sugar and coffee.”

As it was, many of the Sioux traveled back and forth between the agencies and the non-treaty camps, enjoying the old hunting life during the spring and returning for the hardtack and coffee during the winter. The Indian Bureau saw these “unfriendlies” as dangerous, as they were ungovernable and sometimes raided along the Platte.

Then, a year after Red Cloud went to the reservation, George “Yellow Hair” Custer led his soldiers into the Black Hills, part of the Great Sioux Reservation itself, and home to the Lakota. It was there they found gold. Naturally, miners swarmed into the territory and the government did nothing to stop them, except to make a lame attempt at offering to buy the land from the Sioux for a paltry sum.

It was at this time I had a vision.

I was asleep, but in my dream my eyes were open and I could see someone standing at the entrance of my tipi, watching me. When I looked harder, I saw the person watching me was none other than Medicine Dog. I was very glad to see my old teacher, but at the same time there was a strange feeling inside me.

“It is good to see you, Medicine Dog,” I said, getting to my feet. “But are you not dead?”

Medicine Dog nodded and smiled. “Almost ten years, as the White Man reckons time. Much has happened since I last saw you,” he commented, pointing at Digging Woman and Small Wolf, still sound asleep on either side of me. As I drew closer to him, I realized that not only had he regained his vision, he now had both eyes.

“Why have you chosen this time to visit me, old friend?”

“I would give you a vision, Walking Wolf.” Medicine Dog motioned for me to follow him as he held open the flap of my tipi. “One you would do well to heed.” Without another word, the old medicine man slipped out of the tent. Uncertain of what to do, I followed him—and stepped out of Montana into the choking dust and heat of the Texas Panhandle.

I was more disoriented than frightened by the chaos around me. I had walked into the middle of a Comanche war camp, the braves painted for battle and preparing to meet their enemy. As I looked around, I recognized several faces, including those of Quanah Parker and Coyote Shit. Everything seemed extremely real. I could smell the sweat of the braves, hear their war songs, even count the hairs on the tails of their pony—but no one seemed to be able to see either Medicine Dog or myself. Coyote Shit, who wore the buffalo headdress and sacred amulets of a medicine man, was busy evoking the blessings of the Great Spirit, but if he sensed our presence, he gave no sign.