Cry of the Hawk

But the scout’s eyes told him he understood. Darkness oozed between the Pawnee’s fingers where he held his hand over the bullet hole in his hip. Jonah dragged him upright on one leg, the other dangling useless now. Behind them the whole of the scattered camp was ablaze with spurts of orange and yellow light. There really was no safe place, except at the center of it all, among the baggage and lodge skins.

Madness and terror brought in the new day—screaming horses and shouted curses, chanting songs and death wails from warrior throats on both sides. Bullets singing through the cold morning air. The flat putty-smack of lead and snake-hiss of iron-tipped arrow.

“Follow them!” one of the Pawnee shouted.

“Don’t let them ride away!”

“Finish these scalped-heads—now!” cried a voice from beyond.

As most of the young Cheyenne circled the camp, firing into the dark lumps of scouts and baggage, the Pawnee struggled to control their horses enough to mount and pursue the enemy. Jonah marveled at their courage. Outnumbered more than three to one, they coolly went about wresting the offensive from the Cheyenne when most men would be content finding a big place in which to make themselves small. In Jonah’s breast burned a pride for fighting alongside such brave men.

And in the next few moments he was not sure why he did what he did, but he remembered helping the wounded man behind a large bundle of lodge skins, then sprinting toward his horse and leaping atop it bareback, joining a handful of the rest who were charging out to break through the cordon of attackers.

The yelling grew faint in his ears as the animal carried him into the growing light of dawn, all rose and blood orange to the east, the ground a hammering thunder of noise—

—when suddenly the earth shook and came upon him, driving the breath from his lungs. Beneath his bloody cheek he heard the riders coming. Dragging his heavy head from the soil where it was warm and wet with his blood, he saw the young Cheyenne warriors bearing down on him. He did not stand a chance, he thought, his eyes rolling back in his head as he slipped away.

Two Pawnee horsemen fired their rifles again and again at the approaching Cheyenne. Then both leaned off the bare backs of their ponies and scooped the white man from the grassy sand at a full run.

Jonah started to come to, his eyes struggling to focus as his toes dragged the ground, bouncing off tufts of bunch-grass, suspended between two men and their heaving, sweat-slicked horses. He tried to look up at who carried him helpless as a newborn, hoping they were Pawnee. Then blacked out again from the pain in the side of his head.

Wondering if the Cheyenne warrior who had knocked him off his horse had been Shad’s half-breed son.

Blessed, merciful blackness …

Porcupine looked over the young warriors as they dismounted with him, back among Turkey Leg’s people.

Women and children surged forward, old ones too—each one looking for any who were missing among the war party gone to the hills beside Plum Creek where the Cheyenne had abandoned their belongings.

There were three missing. Three more carried in wounded. Women wailing anew—knowing the Pawnee would surely mutilate the bodies of their men left on the battlefield.

Porcupine looked at Turkey Leg, then walked on past the old man, leading his pony through the crowd.

“Porcupine!”

He turned, not really wanting to talk with the chief. Slowly, the warrior faced about.

“You tried, young one. Sometimes—that is all that counts.”

“I could not hold the rest long enough to see what the scalped-heads would take, what they would leave behind,” he said with bitterness. “They were too anxious to fight.”

“In some the blood of revenge runs so hot it knows no control.”

“We failed—and paid a mighty cost for it,” Porcupine sighed. “There is one among us who is without control, Turkey Leg. He rides without thought into the muzzles of the white man’s guns. He taunts the others because of it—and so brings danger to the rest of our war party because he is without fear—perhaps because he is crazy.”

“The half-breed? Son of the Cheyenne woman who married the tall white man?”

Porcupine nodded.

Turkey Leg gazed into the distance a moment. “I remember the man well—as if it were yesterday. More than twenty winters ago, he came among us and would have no other for his wife. Now his son pays for the transgressions of his father.” He looked up at Porcupine. “I fear that High-Backed Bull will one day die at the hands of the white man—perhaps his own father.”

“What I fear most is that he is so crazy, so hot for blood, that he will cause the deaths of many of our finest warriors.”

“If it is something that is to come to pass—it is not for us to change the will of the Grandfather Above.”

Porcupine sighed. It was so. Not for him to decide who was to live. Who was to die. The recent journey of the sun and moon had brought death to this camp, which meant many left without husbands, without fathers.