Cry of the Hawk Read Online Free Page B

would never forget how the warriors found some small kegs of the white man’s whiskey and got drunk. So drunk that a Cheyenne waving his pistol around accidentally shot an Arapaho warrior in the head, killing him to the raucous laughter of many others.
    Crazy Horse had escaped that place, moving upstream a mile before he halted among some willow and cottonwood and made himself a lonely camp for the night.
    For five more days the warriors ranged up and down the river, cutting off the supply routes and dragging down telegraph poles, using their ponies to pull the white man’s talking wire far across the prairie. More stations were burned, their employees killed. Cattle were driven off by the young men.
    By the time their week of raiding was complete, the villages were brimming with plunder. Nervous ponies were hitched to many wagons groaning under sacks of flour and cornmeal, rice and coffee. There were barrels of the white man’s pig meat and crates filled with sugar-coated citron fruits along with small tins of dark, sweet molasses. Shoes, clothing, boots, belts, and hats, besides the bolts of bright cloth the women argued over.
    And on the last day of raiding, a party of Shahiyena and a few Oglalla led by Crazy Horse had chanced across a party of nine men who had been members of Chivington’s Colorado volunteers and were on their way east when they were ambushed. Searching the valises belonging to the dead men, the warriors discovered two scalps. To one of the scalps still clung the peculiar shell that identified it as Little Wolf’s hair. The other scalp was identified by its light color as having been White Leaf’s.
    Both were warriors killed at Sand Creek.
    Yet what stirred the maddening hate within Crazy Horse even more were those other bits of hair and flesh the soldiers carried as souvenirs of the massacre at Little Dried River—easily recognizable as the genitals hacked from the bodies of Shahiyena women.
    After their second raid on Julesburg, the entire armada moved north, unhurried in crossing the South Platte, Lodgepole Creek, then the North Platte. Heading for the Niobrara, and away from the bluecoat soldiers at Fort Laramie.

2
    Early Spring, 1865
    I T HADN’T ALWAYS been this cold. Nor had it always taken so long for the morning sun to drive the chill from his marrow.
    But for a man with fifty-four winters behind him, come morning Shadrach Sweete moved a touch bit slower, shedding himself of the thick buffalo-hide sleeping robes, than he had when first he came to the mountains with General William H. Ashley back in 1825.
    A big bull-sized kid whose immense size belied his youth back then, Shad Sweete had parlayed that muscle into a spot among Ashley’s One Hundred. Across the next few years that quickly wore the green off his novice hide, Sweete trapped elbow to elbow in the mountain streams with the likes of Jim Bridger, Davey Jackson, mulattos Jim Beckwith and Edward Rose, Billy Sublette, Joe Meek, and all the rest who went on to have their names given to rivers, creeks, passes, and mountain peaks.
    Yet among them in those early years Shad Sweete had stood out, and stood out did he still. Six and one-half feet tall and nudging something shy of three hundred pounds, he was the sort who more readily blocked out the sun than moved with nothing more than the whisper of wind beneath his huge moccasins. Times were when he had been faced with riding a short-backed Indian pony, his buckskin-clad toes almost dragging the ground when he did.
    Shad glanced now over at the big Morgan mare he had purchased years ago off a Mormon emigrant along the Holy Road, up near Devil’s Gate. He had never been sorry for the handsome price paid, nor the years shared since.
    He stretched within his warm cocoon of buffalo robes and wool blankets, sensing the first far-off hint of coffee on the wind. Rubbing sleep from his gritty eyes, Shad sat up, his nose leading him now as it had across all the years past to find food or avoid