“Now comes Catch the Hawk’s band!” shouted the camp crier, racing up and down on his dappled gray pony between the lodges and tipis. “All hail our Shaiyena brothers!”
The tall youth named Touch the Sky joined the rest of those already gathered in a rousing cheer of welcome as the last of the ten far-flung Cheyenne bands rode into the temporary Tongue River Valley camp. Catch the Hawk’s tribe, whose summer camp was on the Rosebud, broke into an answering chorus of whoops, shouts, and songs. The warriors had donned their single-horned crow-feather bonnets in honor of the chief-renewal ceremony.
“This is always the way it is when the Cheyenne people come together as one,” explained Arrow Keeper proudly to Touch the Sky. The old medicine man’s weather-lined face was divided by a wide smile. “The Cheyenne people live in widely scattered camps. Only during the chief-renewal or the Sun Dance ceremonies of the warm moons do they erect their lodges in one camp.”
Touch the Sky watched, his keen black eyes wide with curiosity. He had a strong, hawk nose and wore his black hair in long, loose locks, except where it was cut short over his brow to keep his vision clear.
Already the newest arrivals were gathering by clans to set up their tipis. Besides the Cheyenne, the camp was swollen with visitors from other Plains tribes friendly to the Cheyenne: the Dakota, the Arapaho, the Cheyenne’s Teton Sioux cousins.
“My blood is Cheyenne like yours, Father,” said Touch the Sky, who had eighteen winters behind him. “But so much is new to me. I fear I will make mistakes during the ceremonies.”
Old Arrow Keeper nodded, pulling his red Hudson’s Bay blanket tighter around his gaunt figure. The shaman had served as acting chief since the death of Chief Yellow Bear. Now the Council of Forty, known simply as the Headmen, had appointed Gray Thunder of the Wolverine Clan as their new chief. The chief-renewal was an occasion of grand feasting and dancing, of much gift giving. The poor would profit handsomely, as it was an honored custom to give horses, robes, and other things of value to the needy.
“You will make some mistakes,” Arrow Keeper said. “Mighty oaks do not spring up overnight. There is much to learn. It takes many winters to develop the proper spirit, to learn the skills of a tribe shaman.
“Think back to the time when you left your white parents and rode into our country alone. You made many mistakes as a warrior in training also. But today even your worst enemies within the tribe admit you are one of our best fighters.”
These words heartened the youth. Arrow Keeper had recently announced that Touch the Sky was to be his shaman apprentice. With this decision, the elder had sent a clear message to Touch the Sky’s many enemies within the tribe. Despite the claims of Black Elk, Wolf Who Hunts Smiling, and others, who still accused Touch the Sky of being a spy for the Bluecoats, Arrow Keeper believed in him. Though he had been raised by whites, Arrow Keeper was convinced he was straight-arrow Shaiyena.
Further conversation was difficult now as the cheering and shouting and singing swelled like a gathering avalanche. The cleared space in the middle of the huge makeshift camp was nearly a mile across. The lodges now numbered between five and six hundred, each facing east. The circle itself was a symbolic tipi with the open door to the rising sun.
Soon Touch the Sky would assist Arrow Keeper in conducting the huge Sun Dance, a celebration of the warm moons and the hunts to come as well as the annual tribute to the all-important horses. For this important occasion the tall youth had donned his best beaded leggings and clout. Several eagle-tail feathers adorned his war bonnet, one for each time he had counted coup against an enemy. He wore an elk-tooth necklace, and his face and body were painted with red-bank war paint. He would paint and dress again for the actual dance.
Arrow Keeper touched the youths arm, then led him to his tipi. The shaman lifted the elkskin flap over the entrance. He stepped inside, then emerged again and handed something to Touch the Sky. The old man leaned close to his young friend’s ear so he could be heard above the din.
“Here is a mountain-lion skin. I used to wear this in the parades. It is blessed with strong magic for anyone who has the gift of visions, as you have. Now I give it to you, little brother.”
The tawny fur robe was soft and beautiful. When Touch the Sky tried to thank Arrow Keeper, the elder stopped him.
“We live on through the tribe. Boiled sassafras no longer comforts my old bones. Soon I must join Chief Yellow Bear in the Land of Ghosts. But the spirit of Arrow Keeper will live in Touch the Sky. Give this robe to your son, little brother, when your hair has turned to white frost like mine.”
Upon mentioning Yellow Bear, Arrow Keeper had automatically made the cut-off sign as one did when speaking of the dead. Now, exhausted by the long days of celebration, the old shaman stepped back into his tipi to rest and prepare for the Sun Dance.
His mind full of many tangled thoughts, Touch the Sky headed toward his own tipi to put away his new gift. He was skirting the huge buffalo-rope pony corral when suddenly he drew up short. A trio of Cheyenne bucks had crossed his path. He recognized them as Black Elk, Swift Canoe, and Wolf Who Hunts Smiling.
“Our new ‘shaman’ has acquired some finery,” said Black Elk, the oldest of the three.
He was a fierce young warrior with twenty two winters behind him. One ear had been severed by a Bluecoat saber, then later sewn back on with buffalo sinew. This lent him an especially fierce aspect.
“Perhaps,” added Black Elk, “he may use this skin as the bride-price for his own squaw instead of attempting to steal a bride from his betters.”
Despite his impassive face, these mocking words were bitter. Black Elk had recently performed the squaw-taking ceremony with Honey Eater, daughter of the great peace chief Yellow Bear. Touch the Sky knew that the jealous Black Elk suspected him of holding Honey Eater in his blanket—making love talk to her despite her marriage.
Touch the Sky waited a few heartbeats until the first flush of anger had passed. He had recently made a sojourn to sacred Medicine Lake in the Black Hills. There, a powerful medicine vision had convinced him that his place was with the Cheyenne. Now he was determined to do everything he possibly could to convince his enemies he was a loyal Cheyenne, not a double-tongued spy for the hairy faces.
“Black Elk is my war leader and the brave who taught me the arts of combat,” said Touch the Sky. “Thus, I freely admit he is my better. But never have I attempted to steal any brave’s squaw.”
These conciliatory words had little impact on Black Elk’s scowl. But Touch the Sky was gratified to note that Black Elk’s younger cousin, Wolf Who Hunts Smiling, seemed more subdued around him, less hateful and insulting than formerly.
They were still far from friends. But at least Wolf Who Hunts Smiling had revoked his long-standing threat to kill Touch the Sky. This was because Touch the Sky had bravely interceded during a Pawnee attack, saving the lives of Wolf Who Hunts Smiling and Swift Canoe. Now Wolf Who Hunts Smiling maintained a stone-eyed silence around him. But Touch the Sky knew the young warrior was intensely ambitious and he feared they must someday clash.
Swift Canoe, however, had not witnessed Touch the Sky’s bravery because he had lain in a creek bed wounded. And he still blamed Touch the Sky, wrongly, for causing the death of his twin brother, True Son. Unfortunately, Gray Thunder, the new peace chief, was a member of Swift Canoe’s Wolverine Clan. Like Swift Canoe, Gray Thunder was suspicious of Touch the Sky.
Now Swift Canoe spoke up. “Arrow Keeper would teach this spy all the sacred secrets of our tribe. He will let him handle the sacred Medicine Arrows—yet he has contaminated himself forever by shedding tribe blood!”
“The only blood I have ever shed,” said Touch the Sky, holding his face expressionless in the Indian way, “was spilled defending my life or protecting my tribe. I had nothing to do with the death of your brother.”
“You speak in a wolf bark, white man’s dog!”
Touch the Sky felt warm blood creeping into his face. Before he could reply, a familiar figure glided up close beside him.
“If it is three against one, brother,” said his friend Little Horse, “I am here to help even the fight.”
Little Horse was small, but quick and sure in his movements and built sturdy like a war pony. His steadfast loyalty to Touch the Sky had cost him friends in the tribe. But no one doubted his courage or ability in battle.
Copying the elders, Touch the Sky stepped back and folded his arms to show he was at peace. “There will be no fight, brother. This is a time of rejoicing. Come! Let us prepare for the Sun Dance.”
~*~
Several naked Cheyenne children were playing near the river bend when the Sioux Princess, its sail as flat as a collapsed tipi cover, inched its way into the turn.
Some of the children dropped their toy bows and willow-branch shields, fleeing back toward the huge makeshift camp. Others just stood staring, their mouths dropping open in surprise as the huge keelboat loomed closer.
The Sioux Princess flew a white truce flag. She was fifty five feet long, with shallow sides that sloped inward. These formed a pen for the horses and mules grouped tightly behind a plank cabin amidships. The boat was propelled upstream, depending on conditions, by its twenty two oars, by poles thrust against the bottom, by two long ropes called cordelles—or, when fate chose to smile on the overworked crew, by a square sail filled with favoring wind.
But today there was no favoring wind. The river was too narrow at this point for proper use of the oars, the bottom too uneven for easy poling. So the mostly Creole French crew, hired on in New Orleans, manned the cordelles from either bank. Laboriously, muscles straining, they tugged the heavily laden boat against the current.
Wes Munro, a thin, hard-knit, rawboned man with the butts of two British dueling pistols protruding from his sash, stood in the prow. His face was clean-shaven, his collar-length salt-and-pepper hair clean and evenly trimmed, his linsey clothing immaculate. But his eyes—as flat and hard as two chips of obsidian—belied his genteel appearance.
His hands were folded atop a one-pounder cannon. Spaced at regular intervals around the rest of the heavily armed boat were swivel-mounted flintlocks that fired eight-ounce balls.
“Heave into it, you frog bastards!” shouted a man behind Munro, calling out across the river to the crew on the banks straining over the cordelles. “You pack of spineless city squaws, heave!”
Hays Jackson lowered his voice and said to Munro, “Must be a big powwow. Christ, look how many red devils! This ain’t no reg’lar summer camp marked out on the map.”
Jackson was thickset, short, but built like a nail keg. His small eyes were set too close together. A nervous tic kept his left eye perpetually winking at whomever he spoke to.
Munro nodded as he waved to the children who still remained, curiously staring.
“Whatever’s going on, it’s no war council. We need replacements for those three men we lost in the Mandan raid. Time to announce our arrival.”
The one-pounder was always kept loaded with black powder. Munro removed a flint and steel from the possibles bag on his sash and sparked the touch hole. A moment later the cannon exploded, belching black smoke and smoldering wadding. Its cracking boom echoed out over the calm river.
With terrified screams, the remaining children dropped their toy weapons and raced up the bank toward the safety of their people.
Hays Jackson threw back his head and laughed. His few remaining teeth were stained brown from tobacco. “Lookit them little red devils scatter!”
Then he shouted out to the crew, “Snub the ropes to them cottonwoods, you raggedy-assed Pope worshippers!”
“Good thing they don’t palaver much English,” said Munro, “or they’d have opened your throat by now.”
“Them lubbers?” Jackson hawked up a wad of phlegm and spat it overboard. “They wouldn’t say boo to a goose, the white-livered cowards. You seen what a pack of wimmen they was when the Mandan hit us. Why, even that old codger we hired on at Bighorn Falls has got better oysters on him!”
At the booming roar of the cannon, the riotous camp had fallen silent. The Indians were more curious than afraid. Since the Fort Laramie accord seven winters ago, in the year the whites called 1851, keelboats had become a common sight in the Wyoming Territory. That crucial 1851 council had guaranteed the Cheyenne and Arapaho a broad tract of land that stretched from western Kansas to the toes of the Colorado Rockies. But it had also granted to the palefaces unrestricted transit rights across the territory.
Touch the Sky was among the first braves to reach the water. He noticed the two white men on deck, the drunken Creoles scattered along the banks, the horses and mules clustered in their shallow pen.
Then his eyes met those of a bearded old man standing amongst the animals. He was dressed in buckskin shirt and trousers with a slouch beaver hat.
A shock of recognition made Touch the Sky smile wide: It was his friend Old Knobby, the hostler from Bighorn Falls! Touch the Sky had been his friend back in the days when the Cheyenne youth was called Matthew Hanchon and lived among the whites.
“Knobby!” he called out, racing closer to the river.
Then he drew up short, confused and troubled.
Old Knobby had clearly recognized him. But now he made a quick, desperate gesture toward the other two white men, warning the youth with his eyes to stay quiet and pretend they were strangers to each other.
Then Old Knobby deliberately turned his back on his former friend, and Touch the Sky realized that trouble was in the wind.