Cry of the Hawk

Down south, the Comanche and Kiowa and a few others were doing their best against a growing tide of white men: soldiers, settlers, those who laid the tracks for the great, smoking iron horses, the traders who brought bolts of cloth and the tinkling hawks-bells that made the Indian women lust for new things. They struggled on the southern plains, with hope still alive.

Up north Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapa were doing their best to stay away from the white man. Red Cloud’s Bad Face Oglalla were still reveling in their defeat of the soldiers last winter at the Battle of the Hundred in the Hand, far up on what the white man called the Bozeman Road. But Red Cloud had not succeeded in driving the soldiers from their three forts in the heart of that Lakota hunting ground.

So for now, it seemed, the soldiers had turned their attention to these central plains.

Not that far north along the Buffalo Shit River, what the white man called the Platte, others were laying more iron tracks. And down here south of the Republican, what the Cheyenne called their Plum River, another band of white men labored to lay more tracks toward the far western mountains, where the sun went to sleep at the end of each day.

Pawnee Killer was sure that the white man had focused his attention on this great buffalo ground as surely as a warrior would aim the iron-tipped point of his arrow at the heart of a young bull.

And now he was sure. The army had come. With five other chiefs, he had gone to talk with the three white men who scouted for the soldiers. Quickly he had grown angry and turned about, not content to talk further with the three. Instead, he would remain with his fighting men. When the soldiers came, they would stand and fight until the women and old ones, the ones too small to fight themselves, all had escaped.

Then the great warrior bands would disappear across the mapless prairie, like spring snow before the snow-eating chinook.

Hancock did nothing to inspire the trust of those fighting bands.

He sent Custer’s cavalry to surround the great village at sunset on 15 April. The lodges were still there, as were the racks groaning beneath drying strips of buffalo meat. Surrounding every lodge were staked the bloody hides being fleshed by the women. From a few smoke holes appeared wisps of smoke.

But except for a few dogs that had remained behind to enjoy an easy feast on the drying meat, the great village was empty.

“They’ve f-fled, General,” Custer stammered as he leapt to the ground beside Hancock’s luxuriously appointed army ambulance.

“By damn—tell me they haven’t!”

Shad Sweete edged up, hanging onto his reins. “They’re heading north and west, General.”

Hancock regarded the old scout a moment. “Where’s Hickok?”

“Him and some of the others stayed behind in the village.”

“They’re plundering it?”

“No, General. Stayed behind with some of the rest who found a little girl.”

“A white prisoner?”

Sweete shook his head. “Half-breed. She was left behind when the rest took off.”

“Savages used her pretty bad, General,” Custer broke in.

Hancock’s eyes narrowed as he brought the back of his hand to his mouth. “The disgusting—”

“You want her brought to our camp?” Sweete asked.

Custer turned to the scout, seeing that Hancock was not about to answer. “Have one of the surgeons see to her, Sweete. If not them, one of the hospital stewards.”

“Custer,” Hancock said as he settled back against the canvas campaign chair he had placed in the ambulance, “we’ll bloody well make these bastards pay one of these days.”

Jonah Hook wasn’t sure why he had stayed behind with the others when Shad had gone riding off with Custer to report to Hancock that the village was empty.

But now as the light was falling from the sky, he knew it had something to do with the little girl he had been the first to find among the empty, abandoned lodges. Something to do with thinking about his own daughter. Hattie would be twelve this spring, he thought. Not much older than this little thing.

He held the half-breed child in his arms, wishing it were Hattie he were rocking. As the light faded from the lodge, so did those scared eyes he hesitated to look into.

She had fought him like a frightened animal at first, until she gave up—perhaps her hope gone, perhaps all remaining strength. Then she had collapsed into his arms as he knelt atop a buffalo-robe bed, strewn with blankets not taken in the hasty retreat.

When the others had shown up, she had explained to Shad Sweete in her broken Cheyenne what the warriors had done after the women and old ones had abandoned her.

“When the others gone off, running with what they could carry,” Shad explained to Custer and the scouts who had gathered in that gloomy lodge, “a dozen or so of them young warriors rode back here to have their fun with her. She’s half-breed you know. And to them bucks—it makes her white.”

“You’re saying that while we were parleying with their chiefs,” Hickok growled, “some of those red bastards came back here?”