Reap the Whirlwind Read Online Free

with the gore and reek with the spoils of battle. This was to be the summer of his dream.
    Everything happened just as it had been foretold, exactly as he had seen it in his troubled sleep: winter’s leaving on the heels of those messengers as the prairie became boggy with the melting snow. Then as suddenly as winter’s cold breath had disappeared, it returned—this time with avengeance in the Moon of Snow Blindness, colder than all but the oldest of old men could remember it had ever been. But by then his Hunkpatila were safely camped on a creek near the Little Powder. All of his people, except the lodges moving south with He Dog.
    If the soldiers did not catch them on the trail to the reservation, the killing winter might easily claim them all.
    Crazy Horse had worried. Not a quiet moment passed, not a day’s short path of the sun across the sky, when the war chief did not brood on those eleven lodges pushing through the great cold and the deep snow toward the White Rock Agency.
    Then a runner from a village camped close to the soldier forts appeared among them, saying that the soldiers were claiming they had destroyed the camp of Crazy Horse. The warriors and women, the children and old men around that messenger had laughed at his declaration. But the Horse had not laughed. True, his camp had not been destroyed.
    Yet that meant the soldiers had exacted a savage blow on some village. Crazy Horse prayed there would be survivors.
    All too suddenly that cold, leaden afternoon as the gun-barrel gray clouds hung so low a man could almost reach out and touch them, they heard a shout from one of the sentries posted on the hills overlooking their camp along the Little Powder.
    “People coming! People coming on foot from the south!”
    Young men and boys ran up the icy, crusty slopes among the snow-draped cedar and stunted pine to see for themselves.
    Crazy Horse did not need to look. He already knew.
    Turning to the women of his camp, he had ordered them to stir life back into their sleeping fires, to dig out all extra food and clothing, blankets and robes, to bring forth their bags of roots and herbs they would need for the fingers and noses, ears and toes, bitten savagely by the cold, for the wounds caused by soldier bullets.
    Only when preparations were under way had he climbed that hill himself and looked down into the nextvalley to see the broken line of survivors straggling through the deep, icy snow that cut their naked, unprotected legs. Tears had come to the eyes of Crazy Horse as he looked upon the Shahiyena of Two Moon and Old Bear, upon He Dog’s own Hunkpatila. Most struggled through the snowdrifts on foot. A few warriors rode in front, breaking trail, cutting through the deep snow with their heaving, struggling ponies. More warriors rode the mares and colts along the flanks of that sad, weary, frozen procession—young men bristling with their weapons, ever watchful as they brought their families back north to the protection of the Crazy Horse people.
    But try as he might, often wiping the tears from his eyes, the Horse could not see the one he sought most among those warriors. His heart feared the worst. Such cold it brought to his chest, like a lump of river ice beneath his ribs.
    With a wave of his arm, the war chief had ordered his young men to fetch up their own ponies, to ride through the hills toward the weak and old, the small and sick, to carry them into the village. He stood there as the Shahiyena moved past the great war chief in silence, most with shreds of frozen, threadbare blanket wrapped around their feet, stooped under the charred burden of what they had rescued from the blackened lodges burned by the soldiers of Three Stars.
    His eyes searched each of those passing slowly by, face by face by face. Looking for the one he sought.
    When he looked down on the tracks made by those who hobbled slowly past the place where he stood, there were far too many footprints spotted with blood from their brutal