High up on a tree-covered ridge that gave way to a small open meadow still covered with about a half foot of snow, Little Wolf stole silently through the pine-scented forest. He moved with the fluid motions of one who had spent his formative years stalking game like that which he saw below him now. Although they snorted and sniffed the air cautiously, the three elk were unaware of the hunter now within a mere fifty yards of where they were grazing.
Staying downwind of his prey, Little Wolf made his way carefully around a fallen tree to a position where he had a clear field of fire. He paused a moment to admire the animals searching for the new spring grass beneath the snow. The older bull was a magnificent animal, almost regal in the way he pawed and scraped away the snow, lifting his head every now and again to look around, testing the wind. The cow and the younger bull pawed at the snow unconcerned. Rain Song would be pleased with the young bull. In moments like these, Little Wolf was always most in tune with the earth, and he felt a oneness with the elk and the mountains surrounding them. Thoughts of his childhood and his boyhood friend, Black Feather, filled his mind as he remembered the hunts they went on together. He shook his head sadly. Born a white child, he could no longer remember the faces of his white father and mother. It seemed impossible to him to even imagine he could feel the love and respect for them that he felt for Spotted Pony and Buffalo Woman, his adoptive Cheyenne parents.
He had not thought of his Indian parents for some time but they were always tucked away in the recesses of his mind. It was Spotted Pony who had given him the name Little Wolf, when he first came upon the child devouring the still warm liver of the grizzly he had killed. A boy of only ten killing a grizzly was unheard of—and big medicine. Spotted Pony had told him that he had taken the power of the bear and the people of his village had honored him, even at that young age.
That was many battles ago. Black Feather was dead, killed by a soldier’s bullet. Dead too were Morning Sky, Spotted Pony, and Buffalo Woman, and more recently his friend Squint Peterson.
He shook himself from his brief fit of melancholy. Why, he wondered, were such thoughts invading his mind? He reminded himself of the joy he knew when he was alone in the mountains or with the loving wife who waited for him back in his little valley. There had been many hard times, but life was good now, and he was thankful for that. He roused himself from his moment of reflection and got back to the business at hand. He was not close enough to the elk for a bow shot, so he laid it aside and pulled his rifle up to his shoulder. The younger bull was large for a spike and would provide plenty of meat for this trip. He raised his rifle and aimed at a spot behind the shoulder, about halfway down the chest, and squeezed the trigger. The bull dropped, shot through the lungs.
Little Wolf watched as the old bull and the cow loped off over the ridge and into the trees. Then he went back up the ridge to get his horses. They were tied no more than two hundred yards away but he wasted no time in retrieving them. Scavengers moved in fast on a fresh kill, and he didn’t want to give the eagles or crows or magpies a chance to descend on his meat.
The elk had simply collapsed when shot so it remained in a sitting position with all four legs folded up under it. Little Wolf pushed him over on his side in the snow. The bull was so big that it was a fair struggle to pull his back legs around to point them downhill. He worked quickly to part the skin of the beast’s belly. He started by cutting two slits in the hide just large enough to place his fingers. Then, inserting his skinning knife, blade up, he split the length of the bull’s belly, holding the hide away from the huge gut with his fingers until he had skinned one side. When the animal’s bowels pushed forward, he deftly cut around the sack and gutted it. After he had skinned up to the brisket, he reached inside the rib cage and cut out the organs as best he could. Finished, he crammed snow into the bull’s chest cavity to absorb the blood. Then he cleaned it out again and packed fresh snow inside. Though a young bull, the elk was far too large to carry, so he went about quartering the meat, cutting away the portions he wanted. While he worked, he thought about Rain Song and could not help but smile. She would scold him for the way he cut up the animal, wasting too much of the meat. Butchering a kill was women’s work and she was very confident of her skills. She was a tiny thing compared to him, but she would let him know in no uncertain terms that she was chief of the tipi.
When he had finished one side, he pulled the hide down once more to protect the meat and, with the help of his horse, turned the elk over on the other side and repeated the procedure.
It was late afternoon by the time he had his meat loaded on his packhorse and covered with the hide. He cleaned his hands in the snow and recited a Cheyenne prayer of thanks to the spirit of the elk for providing him with food. His hunting finished, he started down the mountain. It would be dark soon and he wanted to get farther down from the high country to make camp. The spring nights were still plenty cool so there was no concern for keeping his meat from going bad, even if he made it all the way down to the valley.
* * *
Little Wolf started back to his valley the next morning, after a breakfast of fresh elk, washed down with strong black coffee. It would take him most of the day to make the trek through the mountain passes and over the last high ridge that protected his valley. It was a fresh spring day and, though always alert, Little Wolf was in a carefree frame of mind as he followed the rushing stream through a cut in the pass. He was returning home earlier than he expected. That would please Rain Song. She did not like it when he was away for long periods.
The sun was already resting upon the mountaintops to the west when he climbed the last ridge between him and his little valley. Upon reaching the top, he was immediately aware of a thin gray spiral of smoke drifting lazily up from the valley below him. This caused immediate concern, and he prodded his pony for more speed as he made his way through the trees until he reached an open place from which he could observe his valley.
All the horrors of the past exploded in his brain, slamming against his prior sense of well-being with the impact of a gunshot. His blood seemed to freeze in his veins, and he shook his head violently, trying to shake from his eyes the vision that had caused his heart to stop. Far below, where his cabin had once stood, there was now a charred sore in the green of his valley. At once, he felt his muscles tense as his warrior’s instinct alerted his body for battle. The white men had found them!
He drove his pony down the ridge, oblivious to the steepness of the slope and the danger of stumbling. The Appaloosa responded to the challenge. He dropped the packhorse’s line and left him to follow on his own. It seemed to take forever, but he reached the bottom of the ridge in only a few minutes and was riding hard toward the still smoking embers of his home. As he rode, bent low over his horse’s neck, fleeting thoughts raced through his mind, thoughts that maybe all was not as it appeared. Maybe there had been an accident that started a fire. Maybe Rain Song and the others were all right and the worse that faced him was the need to rebuild. They were thoughts of desperation only, and the closer he got, the more he realized it. For everything was destroyed—the cabin, Sleeps Standing’s tipi, even the corral poles had been pulled down and thrown on the fire.
He reined the Appaloosa up hard and dismounted. Frantically, he looked around him for signs of life. There was no one there. He prayed that it meant all had escaped this vicious attack, for the signs told him this was white man’s work. As he searched the ground for tracks, he discovered the bloodstains in the grass. His heart sank—there had been a lot of blood. He stood up and scanned the ridges all around the valley, searching for answers from somewhere, momentarily at a loss, afraid to speculate on what had happened to his wife and his friends.
After a paralyzing moment of despair, he collected himself and forced his mind to work on the sign left for him to follow. Putting his grief aside, he began to cover the entire area, putting together a picture of what had taken place there. It was not pretty and, the more vivid it became, the more his anger grew. There had been twenty or more riders, all on shod horses. They had not only burned everything to the ground, it was plain that they had also ridden around and around the burning cabin, probably celebrating their raid. With that image burning in his brain, Little Wolf had not the faintest spark of remembrance that he was born a white man. He was Cheyenne pure and simple, and his war with the white man was rekindled into a raging inferno.
A movement in the southeastern corner of the valley caught Little Wolf’s eye, and he pulled his rifle from the buckskin sleeve on his saddle. Moving quickly to a position behind some smoldering fence rails, he waited and watched while a lone rider approached. A moment more and he recognized the slightly bent profile of Sore Hand. He stood up again and returned his rifle to its sling.
The news Sore Hand brought confirmed his fears. The old Nez Perce explained how he had survived the attack by the white citizens committee from the settlement. He was spared because he had chased the little mare. After Little Wolf reassured him that he felt no anger toward him, knowing there was nothing he could do to stop the massacre, Sore Hand described everything he had seen from behind the thicket across the stream.
“Rain Song!” Little Wolf demanded first.
Before he could fully ask the question he dreaded to have answered, Sore Hand interrupted. “She is not dead. They took her away, but I don’t know where they took her.”
Although still distressing, the news at least gave Little Wolf some sense of hope. If she lived, he would find her. “The others? I saw a lot of blood.”
“Dead,” Sore Hand said, his voice so soft it was barely audible. He went on to describe the massacre as he observed it from his position up the stream. He told of the murder of Sleeps Standing and the slaughter of the women. Two of the white men took all three scalps and rode circles around the burning cabin shouting and laughing, firing their pistols in the air. He did not know why Rain Song had been spared, only that they tied her hands and put her on a horse and took her with them. When they had gone, Sore Hand came back and wrapped the bodies in any odd pieces of hide he could find from the remains of the tipi. He took the corpses up on the south ridge and fashioned a rough burial platform for them.
There was nothing left of Little Wolf’s peaceful life in the secluded valley where he had come with Squint Peterson two years before. Their plan to raise horses and live apart from the squabbles between white men and red had seemed to hold promise for a while. Little Wolf had leaned toward living as a white man, though only slightly. And there had been a bond between himself and his natural brother, Tom Allred. Now Squint was dead and Tom was gone and Little Wolf was once more a Cheyenne renegade, whether by choice or not. His trail had been plainly marked for him. He had lived in the high mountains before, hunted by the white soldiers. It would be that way again, for he would not rest until he had found Rain Song. After that, the deaths of Sleeps Standing, Lark, and White Moon must be avenged.
“Do you know the men who did this?” Little Wolf asked.
Sore Hand nodded his head. “Yes, I know them. There were four who mutilated the bodies. I have seen them in the town. The sheriff was the leader. The others were the two who live in the shack below the fork of the river, and the little man the others call Pudd.”
“Pudd?” Little Wolf repeated it several times, watching Sore Hand’s face for a reaction. Sore Hand was not sure. Little Wolf thought for a moment before it dawned upon him. “Puddin?” he asked.
Sore Hand nodded his head vigorously up and down. “Pudd,” he repeated.
Little Wolf had heard both Squint Peterson and Tom comment on the town’s mayor. He had seen the man himself once when he rode into town to trade some pelts. He prodded Sore Hand to remember anything else about the posse of white men, but the old Nez Perce could not offer much more except to recall that the man wearing a badge seemed to be giving the others orders. So, Little Wolf thought, the mayor and the sheriff. He did not know the other two Sore Hand named, but to make sure the debt was paid, he vowed to himself to kill two white men for each of his friends who were murdered.
They spent but a short time among the ashes of what had been Squint Peterson’s dream before riding toward the south ridge. Sore Hand led him to the burial platforms he had constructed for Sleeps Standing, Lark, and White Moon. They paused there while Little Wolf said a final farewell to his longtime friend. Sore Hand apologized for the rudimentary structures he had built, but Little Wolf assured him that Sleeps Standing would understand. He stood there in silence for a while, thinking of the boy he had known so many years ago. He had hunted with him, played at making war with him when they were just children. When they had grown to manhood he had fought beside him, from the raids with the Sioux on the Bozeman, to the annihilation of Custer at Greasy Grass. He would be missed. He turned to Sore Hand. “Come.” They left the slope and started back into the mountains.
Little Wolf knew where he was going. There was a ravine close to a waterfall, high up in the rocks and pines. He had been there often while hunting. This would be where he would make his camp for now in case the white men from the settlement decided to come back with soldiers to look for him. The ravine was protected on three sides, and the entrance would be hard to find for someone who did not know of its existence.