“Over here, brother,” Little Horse said. “Anthills. Let us clean our blankets.”
Touch the Sky slipped rawhide hobbles on his pony’s forelegs. Then the tall young Cheyenne brave removed the red Hudson’s Bay blanket from his mount. He and Little Horse were part of a hunting party searching for pronghorn antelope in the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains. Earlier, they had ridden through fields of bright blue columbine, through lush meadows of grass so high they were sometimes forced to kneel atop their ponies to see over it. Now they had stopped to water their mounts at a pond fed by a quiet runoff rill.
He joined Little Horse and a few other braves at a spot pockmarked with ant colonies. The Cheyennes spread their blankets out on the anthills. Within moments they were crawling with furious, ravenous ants. Immediately, the ant hordes devoured the lice and nits infesting the blankets. Then it was a simple matter to snap the ants off the now cleaned blankets.
Nearby, the brave named Wolf Who Hunts Smiling glanced toward Touch the Sky. His furtive, swift-as-minnow eyes taunted Touch the Sky as he called out to another buck:
“Cousin! Lice may be removed from a blanket. But I have heard a thing. I have heard that the stink of the Mah-ish-ta-schee-da can never be washed from their favorite dogs.”
Wolf Who Hunts Smiling had used the old Cheyenne name for white men: Yellow Eyes, because the first palefaces they had encountered were mountain men with jaundice. He spoke to his older cousin Black’ Elk, a fierce warrior with twenty-three winters behind him. Perhaps no Cheyenne looked more ferocious, for Black Elk had lost an ear to a Bluecoat saber, then sewn the detached flap of skin back on with buckskin thread. Now it lay against his skull like a wrinkled piece of cured leather.
“Whoever told you this thing,” Black Elk replied, his stare matching Touch the Sky’s, “spoke straight-arrow. The stink is on the whites so strong that Uncle Pte, the buffalo, flees south to the grassless plains.”
“Strange it is,” said a brave named Lone Bear, “that Cheyenne headmen would tolerate a stinking white man’s dog in the very bowels of our camp.” Lone Bear was the leader of the Bull Whips, the highly feared and despised military society to which Black Elk and Wolf Who Hunts Smiling also belonged.
“Not so strange,” Wolf Who Hunts Smiling said, his eyes still mocking Touch the Sky. “Only think. Arrow Keeper and the others have grown doting and soft-brained in their frosted years. They speak of ‘visions’ that no one else but an outsider has seen. Now, every time a certain dog for the white men pisses in our faces, the foolish elders call it spring rain!”
Little Horse, his jaw clenched tight in anger, was about to say something. Touch the Sky gripped his shorter friend by one stoutly muscled shoulder.
“Hold, brother. Do not rise to such familiar bait,” he said quietly. “They are only trying to goad me into a fight. Let it alone for now.”
Although the short white days of bitter cold were behind them, it was still early in the Moon When the Geese Return. At daybreak the grass on the Wyoming plains had been frosted. Some of the Cheyenne braves still wore their winter leggings of buffalo fur. Most of them had wrapped their braids in strips of red-painted buckskin. They also wore feathers with the ends oddly cropped off, the particular cut signifying their clan or military society.
Touch the Sky, however, wore an uncut feather, for he belonged to no clan or troop. Now he rose and returned to spread his blanket on his pony. He was tall and broad in the shoulders, even for a Cheyenne. A strong, hawk nose was set between keen black eyes and a mouth that formed a straight, determined slit under pressure.
As he threw the blanket over his pony, he admired the dappled gray mare’s powerful haunches and deep, muscle-corded chest. The pony was his by right of counting first coup on it during a raid on a Crow Indian camp. But his implacable enemy. Wolf Who Hunts Smiling, still swore he had counted coup first and was the rightful owner.
Touch the Sky knew this was only one more in a long series of supposed crimes against the tribe. It was also rumored that he was a spy for the Bluecoat pony soldiers; that his stink ruined the buffalo hunts; that he was trying to “put on the old moccasin” with Black Elk’s squaw, Honey Eater—the Cheyenne way of referring to an unmarried buck who wanted to rut on an experienced woman.
But Touch the Sky knew full well the greatest grievance Wolf Who Hunts Smiling held against him. The hotheaded young buck had bribed an old grandmother into claiming she’d had a “vision” about Touch the Sky—one which said he must undergo a terrible penance or the tribe was lost.
Consequently, Touch the Sky had “swung from the pole”—curved bone hooks were driven into his breasts and he was suspended from them for hours, fierce red waves of pain washing over him. But Arrow Keeper eventually exposed Wolf Who Hunts Smiling’s treachery. The Council of Forty had voted to strip the errant buck of his coup feathers—a devastating blow to this proud warrior.
Now, as Touch the Sky tightened the pony’s hair bridle, he sensed it stronger than ever: Wolf Who Hunts Smiling’s whole life was bent toward one purpose—destroying this archenemy who would come between him and eventual control of the Shaiyena nation. In this bloody purpose he was joined by Black Elk. Black Elk had heard the young girls in their sewing lodge, singing a tender song about the great and tragic love between Honey Eater and Touch the Sky. By now he was so blinded by jealousy that his warrior’s honor—once important to him—no longer mattered.
Little Horse moved up beside Touch the Sky.
“Take heart, Cheyenne,” he said. “Things go much better for you since the report from Shoots Left Handed. This removed much venom from your enemies’ sting.”
“I have ears for this,” Touch the Sky agreed. “But old Arrow Keeper is right. The foulest dogs will always return to their own vomit. Wolf Who Hunts Smiling and the rest have smelled the blood scent. Now they only wait for the first chance to pounce.”
The threat to Touch the Sky from within the tribe had recently become so dangerous that Arrow Keeper had taken secret action. He sent the tall youth and Little Horse far north to the Land of the Grandmother, called Canada by the hair faces. There, the lone Cheyenne band under Chief Shoots Left Handed had been driven far into the Bear Paw Mountains by Seth Carlson’s crack unit of Indian killers.
A battle against Gatling guns and artillery rockets was out of the question. So Touch the Sky had taken faith in Arrow Keeper’s wisdom, resorting instead to the shamanic arts. He had managed to invoke the rarely granted medicine of the Iron Shirt magic, which had the effect of turning enemy bullets to sand. Carlson’s unit had been routed without one drop of Cheyenne blood staining the earth.
When the rest at the Powder River camp learned of this, all anger and suspicion about his deserting the tribe again were momentarily forgotten. But he had learned by now that old sores could quickly be tom open again when—
Touch the Sky suddenly lost the thought. The gray had just lifted her head, ears pricked forward.
A heartbeat later, Little Horse, who had the sharpest ears in the tribe, said, “A rider approaches, buck, and his pony is shod with iron shoes!”
A single rider caused more curiosity than concern. The Cheyennes rose and stared as one while the horseman approached from the flat brown plains below. A white truce flag snapped in the breeze, tied to the muzzle of the rifle he wore at sling arms over his right shoulder.
“A hair face!” Wolf Who Hunts Smiling said with contempt.
His words fairly simmered with hatred, and the rest shared in his feeling. Even now, further east, the sacred Black Hills were swarming with Yellow Eyes searching for gold and silver. The Sioux, also enraged at this invasion of the sacred Paha Sapa, were killing them by the score. But the miners had encountered Indian boys carrying arrows tipped in pure gold; now they were like dogs in the hot moons, their eyes crazy-bright like the gold for which they lusted.
“This one must be lost,” Black Elk said. “Dreaming of the riches he will buy after he destroys the place of our High Holy Ones, he missed the Paha Sapa.”
“All the better,” Wolf Who Hunts Smiling said, pulling his Colt from the scabbard sewn to his pony blanket. “For surely he will not miss my bullet when it knocks him out from under his silly hat.”
Moments later a rifle bolt snicked home. All heads glanced toward Touch the Sky and Little Horse. Touch the Sky aimed his percussion-action Sharps at Wolf Who Hunts Smiling, Little Horse his four-barreled scattergun at Black Elk and Lone Bear. The braves standing nearby, knowing the scattergun’s shot pattern, quickly fell back.
“I am quick to grease any enemy’s bones with my war paint,” Touch the Sky said coldly. “But first I must know him for an enemy. According to our Cheyenne way, we fire at none who do not fire at us first.”
“You would defend those who run you,” Wolf Who Hunts Smiling said. “That is my new name for you. White Man Runs Him, the make-believe Cheyenne.”
“Call me what you will. As treaties with whites prove, words are cheap to coin. I am indifferent to your he-bear talk. But go on, Panther clan! Pull your rifle out and you will find my fettle!”
Wisely, no one tested Touch the Sky’s resolve. His enemies accused him of many things, but bluffing was not one of them.
Slowly the rider approached, exciting much speculation among the Indians. By now, they agreed, he had clearly spotted them. Yet he deliberately approached! Had be perhaps gone Wendigo, crazy by thunder? Many whites did go insane on the wide-open plains, unable to cope with the silence and the vastness and the unending boredom punctuated by moments of extreme terror. If crazy, they agreed, this one was safe. Crazy palefaces were strong bad medicine, to be strictly avoided.
Soon it was clear that he rode a beautiful horse, a big, seventeen-hand roan stallion. Its coat shone like a well-oiled gunstock in the bright sunlight.
It was the brave named River of Winds who first noticed it.
“Brothers!” he exclaimed. “This hair face uses a saddle and his horse is shod. But look closer. He wears no spurs. And he has bridled his horse Indian fashion with a headstall only, there is no iron in its mouth.”
This impressed the Cheyennes, who bitterly hated the white men for breaking the spirit of horses when they trained them. A Cheyenne would no more put spurs to a mount, or force iron into its mouth, than he would cut off his own trigger finger. Spirited ponies rode faster, jumped higher, showed more courage in battle.
Now they were truly curious. Their curiosity deepened when the rider, finally approaching the last line of hills before reaching them, halted his mount. He raised first his right hand, then his left, fingers extended. This was to show that he carried no hidden weapons.
Then he raised his right arm again and slowly turned his open hand from the back to the front—the universal Indian sign for peace.
The rider urged his mount closer. Touch the Sky saw a big-framed man in a floppy-brim plainsman’s hat. He wore buckskin trousers and shirt, elk skin moccasins instead of boots. He was young and sported a blond beard.
The rider advanced even closer, and Touch the Sky saw the collar-length tow hair under his hat, the cobalt-blue eyes. Familiar blue eyes.
“Brother,” Little Horse said at the same moment, “this is no stranger. It is the little soldier chief, Tom Riley! Only, he has traded his blue coat for hides.”
Indeed, at first glance, Touch the Sky was sure it was in fact Tom Riley. But this man was slightly younger than Tom, a little heavier. All whites looked alike to an Indian, but Touch the Sky had grown up among them.
In his excitement, Little Horse had spoken louder than he meant to. The others had overheard him. Now they stared at him and Touch the Sky.
“The occasion gives truth to my earlier claims,” Wolf Who Hunts Smiling said with triumph keen in his eyes. “See? This white knows these two make-believe Indians! Even here, their hair face friends seek out their dogs.”
“This man is a stranger to us,” Touch the Sky said coldly. “We know nothing about who he is or what he wants.”
Now the rider halted his mount well back from the Cheyennes. It was a .56 Spencer carbine with a bead sight that was slung over his shoulder.
“I speak in English,” he called out to them, “because I am searching for a Cheyenne brave who speaks my tongue. Is he among you? His name is Touch the Sky.” Hearing this stranger stumble over the Cheyenne pronunciation of his name, Touch the Sky felt hot blood creep up the back of his neck. As one, every member of the hunting party turned to stare accusingly at him.
“You heard your master calling you,” Wolf Who Hunts Smiling said. “Is your new name not White Man Runs Him? Best to answer quickly like a good dog!”