Chapter Eleven
While the old ones remained hidden with the pony herd for much-needed rest, Touch-the-Clouds scouted down off the canyon’s west wall. The Minneconjou first rode north along the rim on his new favorite, a pony soldier’s white-footed horse that never tired under his weight. The tall fast runner had been gifted to him as a Greasy Grass war prize.
Touch-the-Clouds hoped exploring the picturesque river canyon for the first time would take the edge off his grief. He ranged in a far-reaching circle over the flat plain along the course of the rivers—the confluence of the Running Waters and the Snake. But before he crossed the rivers, Worm’s description of the ancient cottonwood revealed itself.
Where clear waters of the Snake doubled those of the Running Water, Touch-the-Clouds found Conquering Bear’s sepulcher tree. In full glory, the ancient displayed fall yellows on a wide bench above the riverbank. Still alone upon the alluvial plain, low-slung, broad-beamed, the cottonwood marked the trailhead. From Worm’s description of the sacred tree’s thick-fingered, widespread branches, he gauged how it held Conquering Bear’s blanket-wrapped body.
He recalled Worm’s words, “It marked the place where the death lodge and camp-surround stood for the ‘Last-Breath’ vigil; where the soul was bundled up and put into a ghost tipi. Here, Conquering Bear’s soul traveled the Tacanku (the Milky Way)—set free on the trail to the Spirit Lands.”
Riding closer, he approached the tree as holy ground. Approaching the sepulcher cottonwood, he felt compelled to touch its deep, rough-furrowed bark. Dismounting, hobbling the horse to graze, Touch-the-Clouds greeted the ancient tree like an old friend and walked in a sacred manner of respect, as for an elder.
“Thank you for seeing me this day to greet the morning,” he said reaching out to clean away dust, long-collected through years of blowing winds. He touched his lips to the rough bark, nibbling its taste. Without thinking, his great skinning knife leapt into his hand.
Spontaneously, he slit the length of his palm up to the thumb’s tip and squeezed his hand, working his fingers, smearing blood. Where tree bark had been wind-ripped away, he pressed his life’s essence with a handprint onto an exposed, bone-white bare spot.
On cue, peeking onto the scene, the sun targeted its first rays brightening the gnarled trunk’s new red mark.
Seeing its wet stickiness shine, Touch-the-Clouds bowed his head. With both hands, he steadied himself, leaning against Conquering Bear’s sepulcher tree. Tears coursed over high cheekbones down his wide face. Wetness gathered at his chin before he rubbed it away with his shoulder. He mourned two valiant hearts that’d stopped beating. He cut part of his hair, pressed the clump into the tree’s thick, inch-deep bark-rows. Supporting himself against the tree, wiping tears across an outstretched arm, he nestled his head into the crook of his arm and wept.
New emotions surged. Crushing, relentless guilt. Touch-the-Clouds felt he should have done more at the moment of Crazy Horse’s stabbing.
If only I’d stayed close, at his side . . .
His cousin’s fatal wounding could never be healed. Seeing it again—the thrust of the bayonet into Crazy Horse’s back, the reality of its aftermath far more powerful. The People fractured, moving down a bad road toward destruction . . . losing their way. Abandoned.
The Lakota had been struck a deathblow. In full circle back to Conquering Bear’s burial place had they ridden. It had only taken twenty-three winters to lose their way.
An avalanche of grief crushed him. His heart felt Crazy Horse’s death, the Oglala tribal rift, Spotted Tail’s betrayal, Red Cloud’s treachery, the threat to his family’s safety, and the loss of the Lakota way of life. His sense of self lost, he slumped to the ground. There with his back against the tree, he screamed out his rage and frustration.
“What is a warrior without freedom?”
Slamming great fists into the soft earth in rhythm with his words, looking upwards, anguish evolved to anger. He shook his bloodied fist skyward, “Grandfathers, listen to my prayer. Help me avenge Tashunka’s death!”
Tight-wrapping the self-inflicted wound with a strip of trade cloth to his hand’s cut, he braced himself against the tree to stand. Intent on composing himself, he walked the river’s edge, searching for calm. At a shallow ford, he jumped horseback and crossed the wide Running Water, its coolness lapped the animal’s belly, soaking his moccasins. In stealth, still angry, he explored the Running Water’s valley eastwards, downriver. The Wasicu pony followed an animal trail that led from the canyon meadow to a broad green valley. In dazed reverie, he took in the sight of the uninhabited land spread out before him.
Rooted in fertile soil, collected from eons of floodwaters’ ebb and flow, the lushness of green grasses waved in breezes coming off the river lowlands.
Rounding a great bend in the river, much to the warrior’s disgusted surprise, he discovered Wasicu farmers had trickled into lower reaches where the Running Water River ran between broad plains and rolling hills of sagebrush. Where once-great fields of prairie grasses thrived, now only barren swatches with burnt stumps dotted the landscape. At this place where the river valley floor leveled out, palefaces had turned out Mother Earth—cutting into her—to make white man’s plantings. Into vast pasturelands where buffalo once grazed in countless numbers, these earth-turners, along with a handful of paleface horse-raisers, had managed to spoil its sanctity with overgrazing.
Judging himself undetected in predawn’s shadow light, he rode close to see how palefaces lived in their mud-fashioned caves hollowed out of cutbanks—dirtier than even the Liar People—the Padani (Pawnee). The earthen holes looked lifeless, even though he guessed Wasicu slept inside. In garbage heaped outside the entry, Touch-the-Clouds’ eyes picked out bits of glass and metal that sparkled, reflecting the sun’s early rays.
Looking above the river’s cutbanks, where trees had been chopped, left as stumps and burned by grass fires, he saw hills covered with blackened sagebrush. Next to the squalor where the dirty whites existed, he spied pens of foul-smelling, round-bodied, snorting, hairless four-leggeds. Stench invaded his nostrils. An abomination to his senses—he squeezed his nose to avoid the stink.
To have lost Mother Earth’s lands to such people disgusted and angered him. He knew he would not return to this place, nor would any Lakota clans ever again.
The tall horse stopped with suddenness, throwing its rider forward. Surprised, Touch-the-Clouds clenched its mane. Long ears erect, head high, with an inborn eye of an eagle, the thoroughbred froze. Unseeing, yet with uncanny sensing, it heard them break cover from a hollow of sun-baked mud strewn with rattlesnake carcasses. From behind a hog pen, two steel-jawed canines rumbled themselves into frenzy.
Out of the corner of the warrior’s sight, a team of clumsy running shadows growled fury. The pit bulls’ ferocity came to his ears as a strange unworldly sound—primitive dogs, bred for blood sport, snarled an accustomed readiness for killing.
Touch-the-Cloud’s smug smile of derision darkened to grimness. Deftly slinging the rifle across his back, exchanging its leather strap in an instant for that of his bow case-quiver, he nocked the best of his buffalo-kill arrows.
With athletic agility, the thoroughbred pirouetted Touch-the-Clouds in a great swirling movement to avoid the teeth-slashing rush of canine predators, bred for evil.
Throughout his Minneconjou war years, Touch-the-Clouds had never seen the likes of these blocky-headed, heavy-boned dogs. Intuitively gauging them capable of extreme ferociousness, with deadly fascination he watched them make a sliding stumble to turn for another attack.
Advantaging their slowed momentum to change course, aiming at a massive chest, Touch-the-Clouds loosed an arrow.
Just as one of the fighting dogs began its headlong streak in a follow-up attack, the arrowhead nicked its lower jaw, on its flight to strike just above widely set forelegs. The shaft smashed deep into the body cavity, tumbling the dog. It rolled over itself; its rage momentarily thwarted.
Thinking the dog in its death throes, intent on retrieving the precious arrow, Touch-the-Clouds dismounted quickly. He moved to grasp the arrow, step on the body, and extract it with a fast pull.
Just as Touch-the-Clouds touched the long shaft, the pit bull’s eyes popped open, its lips curled in a vicious, gurgling, deep-throated snarl. Its great mouth widened into an enraged, furious flash of maddened teeth that spat blood. Bounding onto wide paws, a frothy tongue lapped red streams away in a great angry swirl, readying itself to press the attack. Eyes glaring, growling up blood from the marrow of its bred-purpose, the cur sent an unmistaken message.
A shiver coursed down the warrior’s back—chilled with adrenalin coursing up through the base of his neck, Touch-the-Clouds held the beast at bay pushing away with the arrow. His long muscled arm jammed the arrow-blade deeper into the attack dog as it lunged.
The weight from the leap of the second dog onto his back dropped the great warrior to his knees. The force brought his face to bump the bloody jowls of the one at his front. Its lethal bite instantaneously snapped at his nose. The dog’s putrid hot breath gagged him. Simultaneously, savage fierce jaws bit deep into the wood stock of the rifle at his back, holding fast.
Touch-the-Clouds struggled to stand, swayed by the weight of the dog on his back. At the same time, he kept the other mongrel at bay with steadfast grip on the arrow. He regained his feet, whirling to free himself from the pit bull on his back. Whipping his bow several times hard against the muzzle of the arrow-impaled fighter at his front, he twirled one, two, three times. Momentum cast the wild beast off his back.
Freed, Touch-the-Clouds pulled hard on his horse’s lead rope and ran to jump the wide-eyed gelding. With deep barking guttural sounds, the dogs pressed the attack. The moment the warrior struggled to mount, the kill-crazed pit bull aggressively tore at the horse’s legs.
Touch-the-Clouds managed to stay off the ground as his mount’s kicks sent him flying aloft. Jumping and bucking, the thoroughbred bounced him hard. Lying low on the horse’s back, he landed hard atop the tall horse. The warrior’s breath was knocked out of him. He concentrated to keep his hand’s grip on the bow. Trying to breathe, he grabbed both hands into the horse’s mane.
The thump of a well-placed hoof pounded the hapless, arrow-wounded brute, rolling the dog over the riverbank, down onto rocks at the water’s edge. Still, its mate, with daring attacks, chomped at the horse’s front leg, low, too low. Flying became its reward. The thoroughbred lashed out, kicking its powerful legs forward, one after the other in a vicious dance. The horse sent the smashed cur airborne to join its accomplice at the riverbank.
The thoroughbred regained its balance. In a great stomp of both front legs onto the ground, it flung Touch-the-Clouds far forward onto the back of its neck.
Awkwardly holding on, survival instincts gripping his bow, Touch-the-Clouds inadvertently slapped the weapon against the horse’s head—hard at its ear, drawing blood.
Betrayed, the thoroughbred bucked and crow-hopped to unseat its attacking rider. Only with tremendous strength possessed of few men did Touch-the-Clouds, gasping for air, pull hard on the lead, spinning the horse around, and regain control. Firmly seated on its back, the warrior kneed his mount, whipping the steed’s backside with quirt and bow to outrun the headstrong dogs in their persistent attack as they continued their charge back over the top of the riverbank.
Launched in a full-out run towards Running Water River—together as one, in three great bounding strides, man and horse became an aerial being. Nocking another arrow, Touch-the-Clouds dared look over his shoulder.
Uncannily, the inbred tenacity of the brutes gave chase. One slowed, all the while biting and chewing at the feathers of the protruding shaft at its chin. Running slightly behind its mate, the deep arrow wound was but a temporary nuisance.
The Minneconjou’s primary thoughts—escape. He needed to distance himself, avoid any additional sounds of the melee and get beyond the whites’ hearing.
Touch-the-Clouds guessed there would be little time before palefaces came looking. Approaching the river, he slowed, directing the horse to gallop parallel to the riverbank.
As the shorthaired, low-slung canines closed, the next arrow caught the second bulldog sideways through its brisket. Slicing through lungs, the deadly missile crunched deep in its opposite leg joint. Rolling over in a headlong tumble, the dog staggered on three legs, pitifully yelping to regain footing. With strength ebbing, the fighting breed’s tenaciousness still followed its blood-coughing companion in the kill-chase. Reluctant to give up another arrow, Touch-the-Clouds splashed his mount into the fast shallow current. The thoroughbred again stepped him easily across Running Water River.
Scampering up and over the far bank, the wolfishly smiling warrior leaned forward to put a calming hand on the horse’s head, smoothing out its mane. He wiped away the blood trickle near the laid-back ears of the great sorrel, still in distrust of its rider. Gazing back across the river, he saw where the deadly pair had collapsed just below the bank at the water’s edge. In the moment Touch-the-Clouds watched the whimpering pit bulls lick each other’s fatal wounds.
Underestimating its stamina, he realized the horse meant to keep running. Touch-the-Clouds, with uncharacteristic affection, patted his mount’s neck. In awe, he nodded recognition to his four-legged companion. With newfound admiration, he noticed the white-footed horse hadn’t even broken a sweat in their first race together with death. He felt, for the first time, respect never given any pony that carried his weight, especially on one that allowed the warrior to dangle his legs without injury. Touch-the-Clouds gave the animal its lead, encouraging it to run.
The thoroughbred, once known as Vic—an envious Kentucky blueblood conscripted in its purchase by the Boy General—had its long mane streaming backwards, lashing at the face of the racing Minneconjou. Bent low over its withers, he lived out his dream of fast riding.
Forgetting himself in the horse’s running, the tribal war chief savored a Lakota brave’s utmost pleasure.
Touch-the-Clouds leaned low. With a downward glance, he watched the sure-footed horse’s legs in great strides, saw the streaming rush of greenness, felt air roaring in his ears, and smelled the heady fragrance of dew-wet sage mixed with sweet grasses.
Still alive—free in the moment.
