“Scalp Cane was sent under,” said the Pawnee brave named Iron Knife. “Roan Bear’s legs have been broken. We will need to lash together a travois for both of them. I have removed the arrow from Short Buffalo’s face. But he will be unable to ride for several sleeps.”
Red Plume nodded. His face was drawn tight in profile as he turned to stare in the direction the Cheyenne had fled. Red Plume had led the charge and barely leaped aside in time to avoid being crushed in the slide. A huge, grape-colored bruise covered the side of his face where he had landed hard when he jumped.
“He has cut our number in half. And killed my best pony,” he said bitterly. “The best battle pony I have ever trained. Now it is maggot fodder under those boulders. I must ride Scalp Cane’s pony.”
Both warriors knew well what he meant: Riding the pony of a dead warrior was considered bad luck. Red Plume no longer took joy in this hunt. He had even lost interest in the prospect of wringing information from their most hated enemy, the Cheyenne. He only wanted to capture this red dog—to have the pleasure of staking him out spread-eagle in the blazing sun after slicing his eyelids off.
“Find his trail,” he told Gun Powder. “I swear this on my medicine bundle. For the Pawnee blood he has spilled, we will smear his blood on our faces!”
~*~
Even as Red Plume swore his oath, Touch the Sky was backtracking past the Pawnee at dangerously close range.
At first, after he started the slide, luck had been with the wounded, feverish Cheyenne: The well-trained gray had waited patiently just past the shoulder of the mountain.
But soon his luck ran out. The mountainside down which the sure-footed pony climbed had abruptly sheared off in a steep cliff. Unbroken rock wall plunged straight down to a jumbled mass of talus, rock fragments, far below.
He rode desperately to either side, but the cliff wrapped around this entire half of the mountain. There was no choice but to double back, dangerously close to the rockslide and the Pawnee.
He knew some had survived. Touch the Sky had heard them shouting to each other after the first thunderous din had abated.
Before he rode back over the shoulder, he dug four small but thick pieces of elk hide out of the chamois pannier tied to his horse. Rallying himself against the pain, he slid off the gray. It was a slow, painful process, but he tied all four pieces to the gray’s hooves with rawhide thongs.
Touch the Sky had first learned the trick from Arrow Keeper. Even though most Indians did not shoe their ponies, in the high country there was plenty of stone and flint. It could ring loudly when struck by a horse’s hoof.
He stole back down the mountain, leading his pony through an erosion gully that came within a stone’s throw of the Pawnee survivors. Luckily, they were busy tending to the injured. No doubt they assumed he was long gone.
He realized now that he could not possibly stay in the high country. The Pawnee had braved a Ute attack to follow him. They would never give up their search now that he had their blood on his hands. His best hope lay in getting as much head start as possible before his wound forced him to hole up.
His journey back down out of the mountains in the gathering darkness was tense but uneventful. Once he passed a spot where the Ute had set up racks to smoke fish. Every moment he expected to hear either the deep-chested kill cry of the Ute or the shrill and unnerving Pawnee shriek. But he finally reached the foothills and then the moonlit plain without being challenged.
His infected side was approaching its crisis stage. Again he drifted back and forth between waking and sleeping. Again he was forced to lash himself to his pony to keep from dropping off her.
At first the gray had been pointed east toward the Black Hills. But as Touch the Sky drifted into his feverish fancies, the pony was spooked by a coyote. She began to follow her own course toward the vast, empty northern country.
Touch the Sky rode, unaware of his direction or surroundings, until the weary gray faltered and simply refused to go further. By now, the sun long gone, fever chills wracked the Cheyenne’s exhausted body.
He slid off his pony and nearly fell, his legs were so weak. Touch the Sky was too exhausted to hobble his pony. He found a huge boulder that still retained the heat of the day. He sprawled against it, hugging the hard, warm surface.
Again that night, as he passed in and out of the fog of delirium, he experienced the strange medicine vision of earlier: a vision of a huge, winding snake swallowing a horse.
He awoke in the desolate time just after dawn, when all the colors of the plains still form a gray, unbroken mass. His wound was festering. It leaked a greenish-yellow discharge that stank sweetly of rot and death. But the deep, exhausted sleep had rested him.
Stiff and sore, he climbed down from the boulder. His pony grazed a patch of nearby grass. She nickered in greeting.
Touch the Sky stared back toward the mountains, watching close for movement on the horizon. But he saw no sign yet of the Pawnee.
He was badly disoriented and realized he had drifted far off course. This far north the country was unfamiliar. He could not recognize the landmarks which would lead him to Medicine Lake.
His hopes sinking even further, he took in the vast, strange landscape. When his name was still Matthew Hanchon, he had read Zebulon Pike s famous charge: The land west of the Mississippi River was “the Great American Desert,” arid and empty and useless. The mountain men’s explorations had proved Pike wrong—though vast, it was a land of riches. And the red man was in the way of those riches, according to the whites.
Still, Touch the Sky understood why the whites back East called this a desert—this was territory so desolate and huge that a rider without a remount was a dead man if his horse foundered.
But Touch the Sky had to cross it, to find his way to Medicine Lake. He had to elude the Pawnee in search, Arrow Keeper insisted, of a vision.
He knew that the vision Arrow Keeper meant was not the brief, horse-devouring-snake image of his dream. It would be a vast and epic vision, the old shaman insisted.
But even if he sought and obtained a vision, thought Touch the Sky, it could still be bad medicine. Arrow Keeper had explained this to him when Touch the Sky sought a vision before attacking the white whiskey traders. Now the old medicine man’s words crept into his thoughts like a whispered warning:
A medicine vision can be either a revelation or a curse. An enemy’s strong medicine may place a false vision over our eyes, and we may act upon it, aiding our enemies and destroying those whom we seek to help.
Even as he thought these things, his wound throbbed ominously. He whistled and the gray trotted obediently over to him.
Getting on his pony was a major effort which left tears of pain in his eyes. He wanted to rest for a few more hours.
But fear prodded him as he recalled the fate of those who had provoked Pawnee vengeance.
~*~
Touch the Sky rode until his shadow was long and distorted in the dying sun. Though he headed east, he had no idea how far south he needed to go nor when he needed to turn.
His supply of pemmican and dried fruit was gone. At one point, skirting a long spine of hills, he spotted a whitetail deer. He shot but missed, losing another arrow because he could not risk the time searching for it. He was dangerously low now, his quiver almost empty.
But he had a more immediate problem than even hunger: his wound. Now he was constantly feverish as his body tried to fight off the infection. By sunset he felt like one huge, exposed wound.
Now, with the instincts of a sick animal, he only wanted to hole up until the crisis was over. At this point either prospect—survival or death—was the same to him.
He stopped at a runoff stream which cut through a copse of trees. Touch the Sky turned the gray loose to drink. He was unable now to bend down so he could tether her. That night the exhausted, delirious Cheyenne crawled into a dense stand of spruce. Then he passed out on a deep mat of needles.
He didn’t wake up until the sun had almost completed her morning journey. He was clear-headed, famished, and realized he had survived his crisis.
The wound was still stiff and sore. But the discharge was almost gone, and the swelling was down. Touch the Sky carefully cleaned it and wrapped his side with soft bark to protect it.
Now he faced that other life-threatening crisis, the worm that gnawed slower but just as sure: starvation.
Game on the plains was scarce this far north. As for buffalo, the herds had been lessened, and driven further and further south each season, by mass slaughterings at the hands of white hiders. They would skin the carcass, pack the tasty tongue in brine, then simply leave the rest to rot by the thousands in the sun. Sometimes the carrion birds overhead were so thick they blocked out the sun.
For two sleeps Touch the Sky rode on. The land grew more bleak and less varied as he bore first east, then southeast, trying to spot a familiar mountain or other landmark.
He encountered enough water. But now the grass grew thinner and less nourishing, and he worried about graze for his hungry pony. For himself he managed to find and boil a few bitterroots. In the open vastness he robbed the caches of field mice for their stores of wild peas.
Never did he tarry long in one spot. He knew the Pawnee were tracking him like shadows stalk the sun. And unlike him, they had the advantage of their star charts for night travel.
By the third day after he’d survived his wound crisis, Touch the Sky was dizzy and weak with hunger. Occasional stands of forest yielded sweet acorns, a handful of green wild plums, a bit of honey. Once fortune was with him and a scrawny prairie chicken crossed his path. He killed it with his throwing ax and ate the tough, stringy meat with enjoyment, sorry it was only a few mouthfuls.
The fire to cook the bird was his first in several sleeps. Fear of the Pawnee restricted him to cold camps only. Always now, when he rested or slept, he kept his knife and bow at hand. Always he kept his back to a tree or rock, covering all approaches.
Eventually, when there was no sign he was being followed, Touch the Sky began to relax on that count. Had the lice-eaters supped full of him and the trouble he caused? Had they finally given up, assuming he must be dead?
Perhaps. But as he slogged ever onward, driving his reluctant, hungry pony, he couldn’t help wondering: What did it matter if he’d eluded his enemies? Wouldn’t it have been better to die fighting than to crawl to a slow, agonizing death on the open plains?
Better to die as a warrior than to die as he had so far lived: alone and belonging nowhere.