The Powder River Read Online Free Page B

people who could barely walk, words about fighting the U.S. Army empty-handed. He couldn’t keep track of the words—they were making him crazy. He forced himself to study Elaine’s face, let himself wonder how she was taking it. She smiled a wan smile at him.
    Calling Eagle gestured with her quirt into the darkness.
    Coming out of the little canyon—Smith could not believe what he saw. He looked at the silhouettes of his grandmother and his mother. They could not be as stunned as Smith was. They must have known. The people were coming in twos, threes, and fours—afoot, carrying what little they could on their backs. They had left the horse herd. They straggled far down the canyon, mere shadows, barely moving.
    “They left all sixty lodges standing,” Calling Eagle said softly.
    Sixty lodges. My God, thought Smith. Suddenly he realized. Our marriage bed won’t even be crowded into a tipi—it will be in the open, on the hard ground. He looked across at Elaine. Her face was set and somber. She realized. On top of everything, no shelter from the wind and rain and cold.
    “Good Christ,” Smith said in despair.
    Elaine shook her head and pursed her lips against tears.
    “My grandson was once a warrior,” observed Calling Eagle. She smiled her mysterious smile at him, world-weary but at the same time full of love. His grandmother was the most intriguing person he had ever known, and the wisest. “Be a warrior once more.”
    Just then the sky erupted into flame. For a moment it lit the sky and the earth and the four directions brighter than lightning. The people quailed, and knelt or stooped in fear, until they realized it was not the light of shell bursts. Then they rose and looked at each other and at the radiant sky.
    “A falling star!” Smith hollered.
    Smith heard low cries from the people in the canyon below: “Ah-ho!”
    “Ah-ho!” echoed Little Wolf and Calling Eagle and Lisette in vigorous assent.
    Calling Eagle turned to Elaine and then to Smith with eyes that had seen the griefs of more than seventy winters, and smiled enigmatically again. “The powers,” she said in accented English, “send a sign for the helpless ones.”
    Smith heard in wonder. Hope flushed within him, and he squelched it.
    Little Wolf smiled at everyone. It occurred to Smith that he hadn’t seen the chief smile all summer. “We’re going home,” Little Wolf said. “I believe. We’re going home.”

Chapter 3
    Leading with the pipe and three good men, Morning Star went ahead. Then came the women and children and old people. Behind came the dog soldiers, in their proper place of rear guard to the people. A few were left at the village, to watch the soldiers’ sentries, make sure they did not catch on to the trick being played—and if they did, kill them quickly. Among these were Little Finger Nail and Little Wolf’s son Wooden Legs.
    When the sun rose, the people would scatter, and meet at the end of the day at the appointed place, where the young men might be ready with the horses. Scattered, they would not offer so fine a target for Captain Rendle-brock and his soldiers. Little Wolf said the officer from the white-man tribe called Germany, who always had whiskey on his breath, was too eager to shoot Indians. If Rendle-brock found the people, he would find only two or three or four together, unarmed, and those would say they were on the plain only to look for roots to eat. Even an officer of the white man’s army should understand the need to eat.
    Little Wolf walked among the old men and women and the children struggling along, and his heart felt heavy with responsibility for them. He had thought of giving himself as a hostage to the agent, a hostage to sit in jail and rot and die of despair like the others. But he was the appointed bearer of the medicine bundle—he put his hand on it now under his shirt—and must not show despair, no matter how tired and hopeless he felt.
    He fingered the scar beside his right eye, a