Blue Boy reined his horse up sharply. He sat motionless on top of a rise as he cupped his hand to his ear. Two shots. Coming from the east. Close.
Black Dog stopped his pony beside Blue Boy. He had pried the slug out of Black Dog’s shoulder, and it hung in a makeshift sling made out of Lorna’s petticoat. When he and Swallow had ridden back to camp without finding He Who Follows, Black Dog was up and insisting he come along on the hunt. “I heard it, too.” Black Dog sniffed the wind like a coyote. “I think it came from the east.”
Jimmy Swallow pulled up the rear. He walked his pony towards Blue Boy and Black Dog.
“You hear shots?” Blue Boy asked. “Or are Black Dog and me losing our minds?”
“I heard them,” Swallow answered and chin-pointed to the northeast. “They came from that way.”
“I do not think so,” Black Dog said. “The ones that I heard came from there.” He pointed. “Straight east.”
“I think they came from the east as well.” Blue Boy turned to Lorna riding in front of Swallow. “What direction do you say the shots came from?”
“The shots came from the northeast. Swallow is right.” Lorna looked into Blue Boy’s eyes. “Swallow is young. You two are . . . older. Perhaps both of you have been hit on the head once too often, and that cost you your hearing. All I know is the shots came from where Swallow said.”
Blue Boy digested what Lorna told him. Perhaps Jimmy Swallow’s young ears had heard better than his and Black Dog’s. “What else can you tell us about the shots?” Blue Boy asked.
Swallow puffed out his thin chest. “I know that one was a rifle and the other a pistol. And at least one was a wasicu.”
Blue Boy looked down at the young warrior. “And how did you come up with that wonderful conclusion?”
“Only a white man carries a short gun into this hostile place. He would not last long if his life depended on a pistol.”
Blue Boy thought of Swallow’s logic. Perhaps a chief could learn from the littlest of braves who followed him. “I think you are right, and He Who Follows just fired off a shot. We will start in the direction you heard them.”
Black Dog trotted his horse beside Blue Boy, and he nodded to Lorna. “She slows us down enough. If we go after He Who Follows, the Badlands may elude us after all. And perhaps the woman will seize her chance to escape.”
“Enough!” Blue Boy hunched over and stroked his horse’s withers as he spoke to Black Dog. “Whoever that man is, he has killed many of us. If we do not avenge the deaths of the others, their dishonor will rest on our heads.”
Black Dog sat tall on his pony, his arm in his sling, looking as if he cared little for the outcome of their conversation. “He Who Follows does so to free her.” He pointed to Lorna. “It is for that reason you want him dead. She has the white man in her heart. Killing him will never release her to you.”
Blue Boy looked at Lorna. Even after a hard week on the trail, she still carried her defiant look as she sat the pony in front of Swallow. “In time, she will come to love the life of being a war chief’s woman. In time she will grow to think only of me. Not of He Who Follows. Now go and eat. It may be the last meal you have for some time.”
Blue Boy sat his dun on a high hill overlooking a shallow valley leading northeast. His stomach growled, yet he ignored it. There were other things on his mind as he studied the terrain. They were close to the Badlands. How close, he was never sure, for they were unlike any other mountains. His people thought of them as mountains growing into Mother Earth. They did not rise up like the Shining Mountains of the Arapaho, or the majestic peaks of the Paha Sapa, the Black Hills. The Badlands offered stone fingers and granite and shale as the only warning to their harshness. Travelers rode into those mountains at their peril, and many did not return. The sunken mountains came upon unsuspecting travelers as suddenly as the frequent flash floods down her valleys. Perhaps Black Dog was right. Perhaps he should forget He Who Follows and ride into the safety of the Badlands with his woman.
He turned to watch the others seated around a fire roasting rabbits and a quail Swallow had killed. He wondered if he were doing the right thing as a leader of his band. What band he had left. But if he fled to the safety of the Great Wall now, his people would tell how he had pursued the white man. And had allowed him to live even after he had killed so many of Blue Boy’s warriors.
He left them and rode along the hillside. He had gone not a hundred yards when he topped a hill, and suddenly the Badlands loomed before him. He reined his horse to a stop as he sucked in a breath. He knew they had been close, yet he always reacted the same way when he saw them and the Wall that protected the Lakota. The Great Wall lay scooped out of the earth before him. Hundred-foot spires jutted up from the ground that seemed to be peppered with the white man’s popcorn: pea-size clumps of dried gumbo that would trip a horse up and kill its rider on the way down.
He recalled old men telling stories as they warmed their hands by the fire in the center of their winter lodge. They told of vast herds of tatanka being driven over the cliffs of the Great Wall to their deaths. Those buffalo had given their life so that the Lakota Oyate, the Seven Council Fires of the Lakota Nation, should live and flourish.
His thoughts drifted to the French trappers, and to the raid White Swan had led four summers ago, the man still dangerous in his old age. Those warriors relentlessly dogged the trappers as they picked their way down the long and treacherous, steeply winding, narrow trail. The Frenchmen had lost two of their party to falls from the trail, and two more from lack of water. White Swan’s Miniconjou had caught them halfway across the barren desert at the floor of the Badlands. “Les mauvaises terres à traverser,” they cried. “Bad lands to travel”—right before they met their deaths at the hands of White Swan’s Lakota.
Blue Boy knew from growing up around the white man that most could not endure a trip across that sunken desert. Wherever he looked, he saw the shimmering waves of mirages of false hopes, rivers and ponds that did not exist except in the mind’s eye. A land wicked enough to confuse even the best of men.
He continued to gaze across that familiar land and felt that special serenity found only in visions. Peace could come to him and Lorna. They could live the natural life of the Lakota. Only there followed a white man who tugged at the shirtsleeves of Blue Boy’s elusive peace. Black Dog was right, of course. His friend often displayed wisdom possessed by those much older than he. It was true that Lorna slowed them down and that he could not free her. He had taken her as a hunter takes a prize elk, something to display above the smoke hole of the lodge. And it was true that if they ran for the Wall now, they could evade He Who Follows.
Blue Boy sighed deeply and turned his horse around toward his camp. He knew what he must do.
Blue Boy rode east into the bright sun. He had said his morning prayers, thanking the four winds and Mother Earth and the sky. And he thanked Wakan Tanka that there were no clouds to mask the shadows of the white man’s tracks. He studied the ground, while the others walked behind him, not wanting to disturb sign left by He Who Follows.
At a fetid stream trickling from yesterday’s storm, the white man had dismounted. He had led his horse while he walked around. He had limped around the clearing on a foot he favored, even dragging his lame leg across the ground at times. Blue Boy said a silent prayer that the man would live long enough to feel Blue Boy’s blade enter his chest.
Blue Boy had watched Lorna out of the corner of his eye most of the morning as she rode with Jimmy Swallow. She seemed to know that they had turned back to hunt her man. She hadn’t even glanced Blue Boy’s way since they mounted up after their meal. During the night, she had hobbled their ponies with the strings she had taken from her boots. A vain attempt, she had admitted, meant to slow them down. And one that had cost them only as long as it took to slice the boot strings off the ponies’ legs.
Blue Boy turned his attention back to the white man’s tracks, when he stopped abruptly. He dismounted and squatted next to where a second track impressed itself over the tracks of He Who Follows. Black Dog rode up to where Blue Boy knelt. “Another begins to follow the woman’s man.”
“And riding hard.” Blue Boy motioned to tracks going in the direction of He Who Follows, as distinct as if he had put up little sign posts along the way. “At this rate, we will catch up to him within hours.”
“Unless this new hunter finds him first,” Black Dog said.
Blue Boy felt rage well up inside him. He hadn’t come this far, and taken his band away from the sanctuary of the Badlands, to be thwarted by someone out to kill the man. His man.