Cry of the Hawk

“I think not,” Young Man Afraid continued, his face taut as a hand drum at the white soldier’s rude interruption. “My father and his father, and his father before him all ate wild meat. It is not for me to change our way of life now. It was good for my ancestors. It is good for my children, and their children, and the children to come after them.”

“Times are changing,” Sanborn said. “We must all realize progress is coming to this new land.”

“I know nothing of this progress,” Young Man Afraid said. “All I know is the taste of buffalo in my mouth, the sweetness of cold water on my tongue, and the way the clouds touch the earth as I look far away at everything the Grandfather Above has placed here for his children. No! Listen and heed me—it will not be my generation that will give up to the greedy white man all that has been given us by the Grandfather Above!”

The discussions, debate, and heated exchanges droned on and on for most of three days in that tent on the outskirts of North Platte. In the end, the commissioners said they were calling an end to the inconclusive hearings, but were asking the bands to attend another treaty talk, scheduled for later that same month, near the end of the Falling Leaf Moon.

“There we can come to agreement on the terms of our new peace treaty,” explained General Terry as he disbanded the conference.

“You put too much hope in things changing between now and the next time we come together,” Turkey Leg said as the white men rose from their chairs behind the tables.

“I put a lot of hope in each of you tribal leaders doing what is best for your people,” General Harney said.

“That is for us to decide,” Pawnee Killer growled. “Not you white soldiers and peace-talkers.”

Fully a mile away, the young riders were gathering along the hilltops, watching Shad Sweete and the rest of his party approach along the meandering path of the creek bottom. From what the old mountain man could tell, the horsemen were mostly young boys, very likely carrying bows and quivers of arrows. No sign yet of older warriors brandishing rifles as they watched the small group of white men ride toward their village nestled among the cottonwoods and plum brush.

Sweete wondered … then caught himself hoping. It would be too great a gift, he figured, to find his half-breed son among those young men dippled along the hilltops, swirling away one by one on the off side of the knolls where the tall grass waved in the wind. Was he here? Shad wondered. Or was he still out with the Dog Soldiers of Tall Bull and White Horse, roaming and riding and raiding?

The old scout glanced at Jonah Hook riding beside him, finding the younger man most attentive to the distant spectacle, his eyes squinting into the bright autumn light this Indian summer day as the dried cottonwood leaves rattled in golden splendor, birds calling out in warning as the horsemen approached. Overhead a cloudless blue sky stretched everlasting to the far horizon in all directions. Sweete was adrift, as were these dark-skinned nomads he had come to visit, here on an inland sea of rolling, grass-covered surf.

More like paying homage, this visit was. To beg the attendance of the mighty Cheyenne of the central plains.

After the old mountain man had arranged the prisoner exchange at North Platte, General Phil Sheridan himself, that banty Irishman who commanded this part of the frontier, had personally asked Shad Sweete to lead this effort to assure that Turkey Leg and his headmen would come to Medicine Lodge Creek when the new moon had grown to half its full size. That’s when the white peace-talkers would once more assemble with the chiefs, to forge some kind of lasting agreement with the bands roaming Kansas and Nebraska—where the white man was pushing harder than ever, bringing his plow and raising sod houses and laying his iron rails.

Shad knew exactly how the bands felt. When the stench of human offal and waste in their camps grew too much to take, the bands simply took down their lodges and moved to a new campsite. Once more allowing the land and the wind and the rolling rhythm of the seasons to cleanse the breast of the mother of all things.

Such beauty, simplicity, he thought. So simple that its beauty continued to escape the white man. For only the white man squatted and never moved on. Continuing to live where he took a shit. A quarter century ago as a nomadic fur trapper, Shad had learned a better way. Man truly was not meant to live long in one place. Better that he took his shit, and moved on. Like the buffalo.

Dogs barking among the horses’ hooves announced the coming of the four white men—civilians all.