Cry of the Hawk

The three eager warriors did just that. As soon as they could see that the first of the dancing lights was mounted on the front of the first smoking, belching iron monster, they reined their ponies about and headed back toward the ambush. But on came the growling monster, and behind it a second with its own dancing light spraying brightness over the graveled roadbed the white man had smoothed for the iron tracks of his noisy, wheezing wagons.

The train steadily gained on the three galloping warriors, no matter how fast they rode or whipped their war ponies. One brave rider loosened his best buffalo rawhide lariat and tried to guide his pony toward the smoking monster, where he could rope it to slow it down. But his pony would not get close enough, fighting the reins, resisting, its head jerking away from the steaming, spitting, hissing monster.

On the smoking wagon pressed into the low hills, passing the three riders on their weary ponies without slowing. And the second wagon as well. Both of the monsters disappearing into the night about the time Spotted Wolf’s warriors began firing at the first smoking wagon.

Sparks flew up from the great, spinning wheels, lighting the whole of morning itself. With a wheezing sigh the sparks went out as two white men riding atop the monster shouted to one another and fired back at the warriors along both sides of the track, others racing after the monster on horseback.

The smoking wagon was slowing, gradually slowing when it hit the bent rails and burned ties. The wheels spun and screeched, trying to grab for a hold on the tracks as it heeled over onto its side. White men hollered, jumped clear at the last moment. One by one the smaller wagons behind the smoking wagon came crashing up the tracks, not slowing.

One by one they crunched into the smoking wagon and keeled over, falling, tumbling, careening off the iron tracks, spilling on one side then the other of the roadbed.

A white man burst from the smoky haze of the wreckage, waving a bright light at the end of his arm.

“Get that one!” Spotted Wolf called out. “He warns the other wagon!”

The white man was running back down the track, swearing and hollering, when the young warriors rode him down and brought him to his knees. He clawed at the arrows sprouting from his back. His bright light fell into the gravel of the roadbed as he sank slowly to his face, still clawing. The young ones were upon him as he breathed his last.

Yet the damage was done.

The second smoking monster wheezed to a halt. Loud voices from that far wagon. A shrill whistle sounded, startling Turkey Leg’s warriors. Every one of them stopped what he was doing, crawling over the smoky wreckage, butchering the two white men from the wagons—every one watching the second monster as it screeched into motion—backward up the iron tracks.

Four or five white men hollered at one another. They had jumped off the second wagon and had started for the wreckage when they saw Spotted Wolf’s warriors. Now they were screaming wildly, sprinting for all they were worth toward the retreating second wagon as it backed into the coming of day.

That was where the white men belonged, Turkey Leg thought to himself proudly, watching some of the young warriors race across the nearby prairie with bolts of cloth pulled from the wreckage, bright colorful streamers fluttering from their ponies.

In the land to the east. Where the white man should have stayed in the first place.

Out here—this land belonged to the Lakota and Shahiyena. Coming out here only meant death to the white man.

He should have stayed in the east, where the sun came up each day.

35

September, 1867

THIS WAS THE only time of the day when the air cooled this late in the summer. Here when the moon finally sank from the sky.

He had waited for better than two weeks for this phase of the moon. When there wasn’t so much of the moon’s light to shine on this thickly wooded land—part of the Choctaw Nation down in the Territories … or were they now in the Creek Nation?

Riley Fordham didn’t know for sure. Certain only that it really didn’t matter right now as he swallowed down his heart that was choking him. Afraid of being caught as he stood and listened into the night. Hearing the June bugs scritching at one another, listening for the swoop of owls at their nightly hunting, the croak of frogs and other creatures up here in the darkness when few men walked the earth.

Only he and a dozen others guarding the perimeter of Jubilee Usher’s camp.

Fordham was one of the trusted ones. That’s the only way this was going to work. Boothog Wiser had put Riley in charge of a detail of camp guards. Every man of them knew they had to be extra careful now, this deep in Injun territory, what with the way they were stealing horses and borrowing squaws from the villages where the Choctaws and Creeks and Cherokees squatted, living out their miserable existences here where the white man had moved them from the east.