The Powder River Read Online Free PDF Page B

about to walk up out of this little valley in a moment and stand for a while and listen for sounds from the rear, the sounds of pursuing soldiers. Twist was helping the dog soldiers guard the people from the rear as they moved. To his shame, he was not yet a dog soldier himself, and he had to do the job on foot. The cursed vehos had the people’s horses, and the people were scurrying away like crippled birds, earthbound when they should have been flying. Twist hated the white people for laying hands on his horses. He hated them for taking away the life of glory through the warpath, so that a brave young warrior like himself could not achieve honors, could not become a member of the dog soldiers.
    But Twist and the other young men exulted in this flight from the agency. Now they would have the warpath, and they could achieve coups, so the Cheyenne women would look at them the way women look at men, in awe and pride.
    He took another handful of water, rinsed his mouth, and spat it out. Foul water, warm, murky, and corrupted—not like the water in the Cheyennes’ home country, where clear, gleaming creeks gushed out of the Big Horn Mountains, or farther to the west, out of the Yellowstone Mountains. He had heard the tall white-man doctor say it was the bad water here making the people sick, giving them what the white soldiers called “the shits.” They smirked when they named it, and the people died.
    For their contempt Twist intended to make them fill their pants from fear. Then he would splatter their blood and excrement across the dust and sand.
    Sometimes Twist thought of spilling the white-man doctor’s blood, too. He was arrogant, that doctor. He held himself better than other Human Beings. It was true the doctor had the right to count coup—the older men said the doctor had been a fierce fighter when the men went against the soldiers at the Platte Bridge. But now the doctor had given his mind and spirit to the whites, and was more a veho than any of them. That was his father coming out, another veho , that one. Otherwise, how could the doctor have married a veho woman?
    Twist thought the doctor was no Cheyenne. He guessed the doctor and his veho woman were going to run off. When it looked like the soldiers were going to put a bunch of Indian blood on the ground, the way Twist judged it, the doctor and teacher would flee to the white-man troops, crying, “We’re white people, don’t shoot us! We’re college-educated, don’t shoot us!” When they did, Twist meant to see they did get shot. From behind.
    Rain lay down just for a minute, lay down on a dry rivulet a hip-span wide and two fingers deep, filled with soft sand. She wasn’t going to make a sound. She would let the tears run—she was tired, so tired—but she wasn’t going to make a sound. She was too Cheyenne to make a noise that might give her friends away to an enemy.
    Her companions, not far ahead, were completely defenseless. Led by two plucky women, Brave One and Enemy, they were all women and children, and they had fallen behind. None of them knew where the main group of the people was, only that they were ahead. Far ahead, and getting farther.
    If the soldiers heard them, the women and children couldn’t fight back and would get herded back to the agency, and their men would have to come back too, whipped.
    Rain sat up and spread her blanket. She would rest a few minutes. That would make her feel better, stronger, and then she could catch up.
    It came again, a moderate pull, longer this time. The tears ran, because Rain knew from listening to the older women what was coming, and she was alone to face her first time. If only she could catch up and get help.
    She had never borne a child before. She wondered calmly if it would kill her. She looked around. If the soldiers came, she would have no hiding place and no protection, not here. She saw nothing around her but low buffalo grass and undulations of dirt and sand, nothing big enough to shield