Ashes of Heaven (The Plainsmen Series) Page 6

  In the past handful of days, Johnny himself hadn’t seen much game to speak of. It was a good thing the soldiers brought along their army food, in packs lashed to the backs of those dozen mules.

  Perhaps closer to the mountains, the village would find buffalo and the hunting would be good. That had to be where they were headed. West, right into the teeth of this wind coming off the slopes of those icy granite peaks.

  Every day or so he came across signs of their passing: a patch of bottomground where it was plain to see they had camped, the hundreds leaving the frozen snow trampled, pocked with small, round, black scars marking every fire pit. Trees were left gnawed by the ponies, unable to find anything to eat when they pawed down through the trampled crust to the blackened cinders of the scorched earth the warrior bands left behind last autumn. Besides the bark of the cottonwood and the slender branches of the alder and chokecherry, there was nothing for the starving ponies to eat.

  Johnny grew thirsty in the dry, wolfish wind, so he sucked on his tongue to stimulate some saliva. How this cold made him all the more thirsty than a hot summer day. The shocking cold sucked all the juices right out of a man. He tucked the loose, flyaway flap of the buffalo coat around his right chap and pressed it against the horse’s ribs to clamp it down against the strengthening wind.

  Big Leggings. That’s what Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapa called him. Johnny had been running for his life last summer when he bumped into them. General Miles said the white officials had a writ out for his arrest. With a little St. Louis education under his belt, Johnny knew what that writ meant. Murder meant hanging, especially when the victim was a white man killed by an agency half-breed.

  Able to speak both his mother’s Lakota and a good deal of the white man’s tongue, Johnny had spent three seasons as an interpreter for the agent at Standing Rock. Then he rubbed up against the wrong white man—a teamster, a wrangler, a trouble-maker from first jump, who beat who he wanted and abused any woman he coveted.

  Then came that cold day at the agency store. With eyes as dead as stones, the white man grabbed a young Lakota woman, dragging her to the door. Johnny was standing even before the woman’s grandmother flung herself shrieking onto the man. But Johnny wasn’t quick enough to stop the white man from beating the old woman aside. The half-breed had stepped beyond the point of retreat.

  Knives pulled, the two of them danced for a moment that passed in a blur. He stood back moments later, amazed at how much blood could pour out of a man, the floor beneath his opponent slick with dark puddles and a greasy coil of gut. He had killed a white man. No matter that he had gone to the defense of the helpless. No matter that the white man had pulled his big knife first.

  Johnny fled on a stolen horse tied outside the door. Racing west away from the agency, he eventually reached the Black Hills, where it wasn’t hard for a strapping youngster to find work sweeping up and hauling kegs in and out of a saloon. The watering hole provided a warm place to sleep too, there in the back, among the crates of supplies and whiskey, while the noisy miners shouted and shot at one another out front.

  Then the saloon owner showed him the stiffened parchment with Johnny’s likeness printed on it. The English words said he was wanted for murder. The handbills were going up all over town. If they got their hands on him, a miners’ court sure as hell would hang a half-breed like him. What with all the Indian troubles since spring.

  He slipped down the alley and stole another horse. A big one with a blaze face and two front stockings. Behind its saddle was tied a thick blanket roll, wrapped in an oiled slicker, along with two stuffed saddlebags. Plain to see that horse and rigging were ready for the trail. They raced off to the west, somewhere the white man wouldn’t dare to follow him: hostile country.

  That first night beside his fire Johnny unwrapped the bedroll and found the pair of well-oiled leather chaps inside. He was wearing them when he bumped into the Hunkpapa village. And when he studied the half-breed’s chaps, Sitting Bull himself anointed Bruguier with his Lakota name: Big Leggings.

  Bruguier migrated with the Hunkpapa last autumn when they crossed to the north side of the Elk River* and discovered that the supply trains moving between the soldier posts drove off the buffalo herds and ruined the hunting. At Sitting Bull’s direction, Johnny wrote English words on a scrap of paper and left it tied to a stick so the soldier wagons would find it.†

  When the soldier chief read the note, he ignored Sitting Bull’s demand to leave the Hunkpapa hunting ground. The Lakota attacked. In a day-long running battle against the wagon soldiers, Gall’s warriors accomplished little more than slowing the white man’s progress. After two days of fighting, the Bear Coat arrived from his fort to the west with enough soldiers to raise the siege. And while the wagons continued west over the hills toward the Buffalo Tongue River, the Bear Coat asked for a parley with the Lakota chiefs.

  In that middle ground between the two enemies, Big Leggings had settled himself between Sitting Bull and the Bear Coat, a soldier chief named Miles. Back and forth those two strong men argued. The Lakota demanded that the soldiers abandon their posts in that country so the villages could hunt as they always had. Then the soldiers demanded that the warrior bands give up their claim to that Elk River country and go in to the reservations where they would learn to be farmers.

  Johnny knew that attempting to turn a warrior into a sod-buster would work about as well as trying to tie a woman’s bustle on a boar hog. It wouldn’t make the hog any prettier, and in the end, someone was bound to get hurt.

  It was no surprise when that parley broke down and the Bear Coat’s soldiers started a running fight that drove the Lakota villages all the way to the north bank of the Elk River. But while most of the war chiefs escaped across the river, Sitting Bull and a few loyal followers slipped off to the east and eluded the Bear Coat. If they could just stay far away from the white man, the Hunkpapa mystic declared to his people, they could go on hunting as they always had.

  As a cold, drizzly autumn quickly froze with the coming of an early winter on those northern plains, more Lakota stragglers limped in from the other camps to join Sitting Bull in the badlands of the Missouri River. There they found buffalo, making much meat and dressing the hides to replace the lodges they lost when the Bear Coat attacked their village. And in that country north of Fort Peck, the Slotas showed up from the Land of the Grandmother, those half-breed Metis who had ammunition and guns and whiskey to trade.

  Still Sitting Bull did not seem content. He was beginning to realize that the Bear Coat was steadily chipping away at his grand alliance.

  “This land is no longer any good,” he explained to Johnny one cold night. “The soldiers are here to stay. As much as we might try to avoid them, the soldiers are not going away. I am looking to the north, Big Leggings. Perhaps there I will have peace.”

  If Sitting Bull took his people north to Canada, Johnny had a decision to make: a choice between casting his lot from here on out with the Hunkpapa in that foreign land, or trying to make a life for himself somewhere on the frontier, where he would always be looking over his shoulder, dreading that someone might see the wanted poster with his likeness and offer of reward on it.

  He licked his cracked, blistered lips again now, remembering the tastes he had acquired around the agency at Standing Rock—coffee and fresh bread, strong tobacco and whiskey.

  So when a contingent of soldiers came upriver to garrison the Fort Peck Agency, the Lakota bands who had once more gathered around Sitting Bull scattered to the four winds. But Johnny had stayed behind. With a blanket over his head, and that dark skin of his, he blended right in with the agency bands who camped near the agent’s stockade walls.

  But even in that village, he remained homesick. His heart yearned for the smells and sounds and sights of the agency, for the life he had come to know as a youngster on the Standing Rock. Just about the time he had decided he was going to stay on at Fort Peck rather than return to Sitting Bull’s village, the Bear Coat�
�s soldiers showed up from the south.

  Along with Miles was that long-haired scout named Kelly, who recognized Johnny despite the blanket pulled over his head. He was cornered. Instead of arresting Bruguier, Miles wanted to offer the half-breed a bargain. While the other soldiers advised against making a pact with Bruguier, the Bear Coat nonetheless explained how they could help one another.

  If Johnny Bruguier would turn his back on Sitting Bull and divulge where the warrior bands were camped, then Miles would do all he could to get the half-breed cleared of that killing back at Standing Rock. In the end, both of them had a shot at what they wanted most.

  Trouble was, until Miles had those Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse bands rounded up and put on their reservations, Johnny Bruguier wasn’t going to get what he wanted. Which meant that when the Bear Coat said he wanted to send one of the captives to parley with the Crazy Horse people, Johnny couldn’t rightly say no. It was go along, or chance having his neck stretched.

  Johnny was in too deep now. No matter how crazy the plan sounded, he had to go along.

  Now dabbing his horsehide mitten against his sore, cracked, and oozing lower lip, Bruguier turned slightly and glanced at the old woman. They were a strange pair, the two of them. Once more Johnny was putting his life in the hands of another, once more in the hands of an Indian.

  Maybe she had him fooled, he considered as her sad eyes met his stare. Maybe she had no intention of helping him extend the Bear Coat’s offer of peace to her people. Chances were good that she might only turn Johnny over to the camp’s warriors in retaliation for her capture.

  Still, something in those sad eyes reminded him of his mother. He smiled back at the old woman, praying he wasn’t wrong for putting his life in her hands.

  Praying that the old woman really did believe she had a shot at making peace for her people.

  Chapter 6

  Big Hoop-and-Stick Game Moon

  1877

  Old Wool Woman wasn’t exactly sure what moon it was. So much had happened since the fight at Belly Butte. Best she could figure, it was the latter days of the Big Hoop-and-Stick Game Moon. Not much chance that they had reached the early days of what her people called the Dusty Moon.

  Hard to know, really, the way the sky stayed cloudy, day and night. Hard to know how much of the old moon was left, or if the new moon had begun to swell again in the heavens. So cold, bleak, and endless were these days trudging back up the Buffalo Tongue River behind the half-breed who the Lakota of Buffalo Bull Sitting Down called “Big Leggings.” Her own Shahiyela simply called him “White.”

  Behind the two of them plodded six mules carrying supplies for their journey and gifts for her people. Around those mules rode the soldiers who were escorting her and Big Leggings into the traditional hunting grounds of the Northern People.

  “Old woman, you would tell me if you thought I was taking us in the wrong direction to find your people, wouldn’t you?” the half-breed had asked in Lakota at last night’s fire. “You would help me find them?” He always signed as he slowly spoke the tongue of the Hotohkesoneo-o, the Little Star People.*

  She knew enough of that Lakota tongue to understand this half-breed right from the first night when he had summoned her to the Bear Coat’s lodge where the three of them talked of taking gifts to her people, talked of surrender and peace—when she had spoken of the Sacred Medicine Hat Lodge as the object of their quest.

  “I would tell you,” she had answered him.

  “I am not wrong?”

  “No, the camp is still moving west.”

  His eyes seemed to soften in the flickering firelight. It was easy to see how she had reassured him. “They are in a hurry, old woman,” Big Leggings said.

  She had looked back down into the fire and thought a moment before she responded. “Those people are hungry. They do not have time to journey slow. There are too many bellies to feed.”

  Many times since her capture she had suffered stabbing pangs of guilt because she had so much to eat. Back when the Bear Coat’s soldiers first reached the fort with their captives, the wary guards had cooked every meal, then brought the Shahiyela women and children their portions. But it wasn’t long before the soldiers gave their prisoners weekly rations and allowed the women to cook their own meals. Old Wool Woman hadn’t seen so much food in … a long, long time.

  In those days before she was captured, just after the Red Fork fight when she lost her beloved Black White Man, when she left the Crazy Horse people and had gone to visit Tangle Hair’s village on the Pretty Fork,† she had trained herself to eat less and less so that she could give some of her food to the young ones. Many nights she went to bed with an aching belly, sucking on a short piece of chokecherry from which she had peeled the bark. That sliver of wood gave her mouth something to do as she drifted off to sleep, gave her tongue something to taste when she could give her belly very little to fill it.

  But now she had all she wanted of the soldier food: the salty meat and hard, dry crackers. Back at the army’s fort, she and the other prisoners had watched the soldiers open hard containers from which they poured strange foods onto their tin plates. Foods red, yellow, and green—all with new and pleasing tastes that Old Wool Woman quickly grew quite fond of.

  But nothing pleased her quite so much as a cup of scalding coffee, strong and flavorful, sweetened with heaps of the ve-ho-e’s sugar. Each night spent at the fire with these soldiers, she remembered how she once was called Sweet Taste Woman. In those long ago days when life itself was sweet. As a girl those tiny white grains had tickled her tongue, had become her greatest treat.

  Then came the beginning of this winter when Three Finger Kenzie’s soldiers attacked their village in the mountains, driving the Ohmeseheso into the sub-freezing dawn with little more than what they wore on their backs. The day she kissed Black White Man goodbye before he tore away from their lodge to fight off the attack, the day she lost her last son to the soldiers. The men of her family had given their lives in that battle.

  After that day, life would never again be as sweet for Sweet Taste Woman and the Shahiyela. With her scrap of greasy, fire-smudged blanket wrapped about her, she had joined the rest of the survivors who lumbered on frozen feet, day after day, in search of the Crazy Horse village. No more was this old, weary, frozen person known as Sweet Taste Woman.

  Now she was called Old Wool Woman.

  That greasy blanket was always at her side, wrapped tightly about her. Though the soldiers had given her a gray army blanket and a buffalo robe of her own, Old Wool Woman did not abandon the blanket that had sheltered her through all those days of freezing and hunger. She held it tightly against her as she rolled up beside the soldiers’ fire to sleep each night, thinking of Black White Man. And every morning she lashed it around her waist to provide an additional layer against this winter’s wolfish winds.

  There were times Old Wool Woman felt as if she were dreaming through much of the days on this journey with Big Leggings, her head tucked beneath a flap of her soldier blanket, the strong American horse rocking beneath her as it lunged forward with each step, breaking through the icy snow. From time to time the half-breed awoke her from her reverie, pointing to a patch of ground in some creekbottom where, it was clear to see, the village had stopped, made camp, and rested for the night.

  How reassuring it was whenever she and Big Leggings discovered such places, dismounting to walk across the ground where her people and the Crazy Horse Lakota had camped. Had it not been for the soldier food, she would have suffered the same terrible hunger her people had to be suffering now. Rarely did Big Leggings’s small party encounter any game throughout the short, cold days of this journey. Yet her belly rarely grew empty enough to complain.

  In this season of despair, Old Wool Woman hoped her people had found enough buffalo to end their tragic search.

  From the divide west of the Buffalo Tongue, Big Leggings led them down into the valley of the Roseberry River.* Along the wide path the villag
e had scratched across the snow, they encountered very few buffalo, nothing more than a handful of old bulls here and there. In the river valleys she reminded herself to look for the burial places—nooks and crevices back in the rocks where her people would have placed the bodies of those who died from the ceaseless cold, from the starvation. She was sure the very old, or the very young, could not defend themselves against the constant, endless snows. Old Wool Woman knew there would be mourning in the lodges of the Ohmeseheso. More mourning than any people deserved.

  Almost as if Ma-heo-o, the Everywhere Spirit, had abandoned his people.

  Perhaps the prophecy Buffalo Bull Sitting Down had angrily delivered after their fight with the soldiers on the Little Sheep River† had come to pass. In his fateful vision during the sun dance held the previous summer, the Lakota leader had been told that the warriors would be victorious, but that none of the victorious men and women were to take anything from the bodies. They were to remove nothing from the battlefield.

  But suddenly drunk with their victory, the Lakota and the Shahiyela had claimed soldier weapons, stripped the bodies, torn the saddles from the dead horses—revelling in their new wealth. So perhaps the Everywhere Spirit really was punishing them for disobeying Him.

  Maybe this was the reason the Ohmeseheso, once the single richest, most powerful tribe on the northern plains, was now the poorest—reduced to begging for help from the Little Star People, brought to the brink of begging the white man for peace.

  “Tomorrow,” Big Leggings said as he settled near her now beside the fire, “we will reach the valley of the Greasy Grass.”