Page 78 of The Veteran

Craig thought. Was it only the previous morning that Braddock had destroyed the lodge of Tall Elk? He started with that incident and finished when he was sentenced to hang. He noticed Two Moon nod at the reference to Tall Elk’s lodges. He already knew. At each sentence he paused while Two Moon translated into Sioux. When he was done there was a brief murmured conference. Two Moon called to one of his men.

‘Ride back to our village. Bring Tall Elk and his daughter here.’

The brave went to his tethered pony, mounted and rode away. Sitting Bull’s questions resumed.

‘Why did you come to make war against the Red Man?’

‘They told me they had come because the Sioux were moving away from the reservations in the Dakotas. There was no talk of killing until Long Hair went crazy.’

There was another buzz of consultation. ‘The Long Hair was here?’ asked Two Moon. For the first time Craig realized they had not even known whom they were fighting.

‘He is on the hillside across the river. He is dead.’

The chiefs conferred again for a while, then there was silence. A council was a serious thing and there was no need for hurry. After half an hour Two Moon asked, ‘Why do you wear the white eagle feather?’

Craig explained. Ten years ago when he was fourteen he had joined a bunch of Cheyenne youths and they all went hunting in the mountai

ns. They all had bows and arrows, save Craig, who had been allowed to borrow Donaldson’s Sharps rifle. They had been surprised by an old grizzly, an evil-tempered veteran with hardly a tooth left in his head but the strength in his forepaws to kill a man with a single swipe. The bear had come out of a thicket with a mighty roar, and charged.

At this point one of the braves behind Two Moon asked to interrupt.

‘I remember this story. It happened in the village of my cousin.’

Round the campfire there is nothing like a good story. He was invited to complete the tale and the Sioux craned to listen as Two Moon translated.

‘The bear was like a mountain and he came fast. The Cheyenne boys scattered to the trees. But the small wasichu took careful aim and fired. The bullet passed under the bear’s muzzle and struck him in the chest. He rose to his back feet, tall as a pine, dying but still coming forward.

‘The white boy ejected the spent cartridge and inserted another. Then he fired again. The second bullet went into the roaring mouth, through the roof and blew out the brains. The bear took one more pace and fell forward. The great head came down so close that saliva and blood splashed the boy’s knees. But he did not move.

‘They sent a messenger to the village and braves came back with a travois to skin the monster and bring the hide to make a sleeping robe for my cousin’s father. Then they held a feast and gave the wasichu a new name. Kills-Bear-With-No-Fear. And the eagle feather of a man who hunts. So it was told in my village a hundred moons ago before we were moved to the reservations.’

The chiefs nodded. It was a good story. A party on ponies rode up. Behind was a travois. Two men Craig had never seen before entered the firelight. By their dressed and plaited hair they were Cheyenne.

One was Little Wolf, who told how he had been hunting east of the river when he saw plumes of smoke rising over the Rosebud. He investigated and found the slaughtered women and children. While he was there he heard the bluecoat soldiers coming back, so he trailed them all day and night until they came to the valley of the camp. But he was too late for the great fight.

The other man was Tall Elk. He had returned from hunting after the main column had passed. He was still grieving over his murdered womenfolk and children when his daughter came back. She was wounded but alive. Together with his other nine braves they had ridden through the night and the day to find the camp of the Cheyenne, arriving just before the battle, in which they had taken part with a will. He personally had sought death on Custer’s hill and had killed five wasichu soldiers but the Everywhere Spirit had not taken him.

The girl from the travois was the last to be heard. She was pale and in pain from the wound and the long ride from the Rosebud, but she spoke clearly.

She told of the massacre, and of the big man with the stripes on the arm. She did not understand his language but she understood what he wanted to do to her before she died. She told how the buckskin one had given her water, and eaten his meal, and set her on a pony and sent her back to her people.

The chiefs conferred. The judgement came from Sitting Bull but it was the verdict of them all. The wasichu might live, but he could not go back to his people. Either they would kill him, or he would tell them the position of the Sioux. He would be given into the care of Tall Elk, who could treat him as prisoner or as guest. In the spring he could go free or remain with the Cheyenne.

Around the fire there were grunts of approval from the braves. It was just. Craig rode back with Tall Elk to the teepee he had been given, and spent the night with two braves watching him. In the morning the great camp packed up to move. But scouts coming at dawn had brought news of even more bluecoats in the north, so they decided to go south towards the Bighorn Mountains and see if the wasichu came after them.

Having accepted him into his clan, Tall Elk was generous. Four uninjured cavalry horses were found and Craig took his pick. They were not much valued by the Plains Indians, who preferred their hardy ponies. This was because few horses could adapt to the harsh winters of the plains. They needed hay, which the Indians never gathered, and could rarely survive the winter on lichen, moss and willow bark like the ponies. Craig selected a tough-looking, rangy chestnut he thought might adapt and named her Rosebud after the place where he had met Whispering Wind.

A good saddle was easily found because the Indians never used them, and when his Sharps rifle and bowie knife were traced and identified, they were returned to him with some reluctance. From the saddlebags of his dead horse at the top of the slope he recovered his Sharps ammunition. There was nothing left to loot on the hillside. The Indians had taken all that interested them. They had no desire for the white man’s paper and white sheets fluttered in the long grass where they had been thrown. Among them were Captain William Cooke’s notes of the first interrogation.

The striking of the villages took all morning. The teepees came down, the utensils were packed, the women, children and baggage loaded onto the numerous travois and shortly after midday the departure began.

The dead were left behind, laid out in their teepees, painted for the next world, in their best robes, with the feathered bonnets of their rank. But in accordance with tradition all their household artefacts were scattered on the ground.

When Terry’s men, coming up the valley from the north, discovered this the next day they would think the Sioux and Cheyenne had departed in a hurry. Not so: scattering the effects of the dead was the custom. They would all be looted anyway.

Ever after the Plains Indians would protest that they only wanted to hunt, not fight, but Craig knew the army would recover from its loss and come looking for vengeance. Not for a while, but come they would. Sitting Bull’s grand council knew it too, and within a few days it was agreed the tribes should split up into smaller groups and scatter. This would make the job of the bluecoat soldiers harder and give the Indians a better chance of being able to winter in the wild and not be driven back to a half-starved winter in the Dakota reservations.

Craig rode with what was left of the clan of Tall Elk. Of the ten hunters who had lost their womenfolk by the Rosebud, two had died at the Little Bighorn and two were injured. One, with a slight gash in the side, chose to ride. The other, who had taken a Springfield bullet through the shoulder at close range, was on a travois. Tall Elk and the other five would find new women. To enable this to happen, they had joined ranks with two other extended families, making a clan of some sixty men, women and children.

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