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Moon of Shedding Ponies Pehingnunipi Wi
At long, long last the winter moons had gone. The Moon of Terrible Cold. On its heels the Moon of Hard Times. So for now the surrounding hills no longer lay beneath a blanket of white. Warmed by the sun, kissed with the gentle rains of the season and nourished by a hard and long winter’s runoff, this great hunting land of his Hunkpatila was blooming once more.
In the high places just below the snowcapped peaks the Mother’s breast lay thick with tiny flowers of a hundred hues. Buds unfurled into a leafy green to drape every tree along the creeks and rivers with a rustling warmth that foretold of summer’s coming. The gently rolling, virgin slopes lay smothered in the fragrant blossoms of buffalo pea and sego lily, dragonhead and purple fleabane. It was truly a time of spiritual renewal for his people.
But Crazy Horse knew the soldiers would return. It was only a matter of time.
So for now the people traveled once more accompanied by the rhythmic circle of the seasons just as the Lakota had for generations without number. And for the present, Crazy Horse reminded the young warriors to keep their weapons in readiness. In these warming days they could watch their ponies grow sleek and fat on the new grass that stretched across the hills clear to the spring sky as far as the eye could see, then farther still.
The Hunkpatila had only to wait, Crazy Horse told them. The wasichu would be back.
Perhaps not this moon. More likely come Wipazuka Waste Wi, the Moon of Ripening Berries.
If Crazy Horse understood anything about the pony soldiers, it was that he shared in common one undeniable trait with the white warrior chiefs: neither they, nor he, would give up as long as there was strength left in muscle, a drop of blood left unspilled in this last great struggle between their peoples.
Those soldiers who had charged into the sleepy, unsuspecting Shahiyena camp of Two Moon would return one day soon. And as sure as he was of anything, Crazy Horse knew his people would be ready when that day dawned on this land of the Tongue and Rosebud and Greasy Grass. This time the Shahiyena and seven fires of the Lakota nation would be ready for the wasichu.
This time there would be no running. This time the warriors would do more than merely cover the retreat of their villages.
This time—Crazy Horse swore before the grand council fires—this time the red horsemen of the northern plains would exact a great reckoning, for once and for all days.
This he knew, for Crazy Horse had long ago accepted that he had been chosen. He was a mystic.
For three hard, hungry winters now, winters of empty bellies and snow blindness, winters of poor hunting and crying children, this slim warrior chief had experienced visions that presaged the coming summer’s great battles. Dreams that reminded him that the days of glory were not over. Dreams of bloody clashes with the white man, instilling the Hunkpatila war chief with hope for this approaching time of glory and honor.
It had been a long, long and treacherous path coming to this spring moon.
First the messengers had arrived from his old friend, Red Cloud.
“Come in,” the old Oglalla chief had asked the Hunkpatila people gathered around Crazy Horse last winter. “Come in to the agency and let your people eat. The soldiers will be coming for those who do not.”
At first he had just shaken his head, saddened that so great a war chief as Red Cloud, champion of the early days against the soldier forts, had now become an old woman cowed by his trips east to the land of the white man’s Grandfather. Red Cloud was no longer a warrior chief to the Oglalla. Now instead, the once-great leader was a tired old man content to suck on his kukuse, the white man’s pig meat, rather than feasting on buffalo and elk and the sweet antelope of these greening hills.
“The snow is too deep,” Crazy Horse had told the messengers. “And our ponies are too poor with this long and terrible cold.”
“There are others who are coming in,” Red Cloud’s messengers told the Hunkpatila. “They are fighting the snow rather than fighting the soldiers. Despite the cold, they are pushing their ponies south.”
The Horse had nodded, staring at the dancing flames in that lodge, listening to the feral howling of the wind outside like some gaunt-bellied, lank-legged wolf prowling the outskirts of his village.
And in the end Crazy Horse had told those messengers, “It matters not to me that others choose to take that trail south back to the white man’s agencies. As for the Hunkpatila, you tell Red Cloud—my old friend of the days when we fought the Battle of the Hundred in the Hand,* the days when we attacked soldiers hiding behind the barricades near the Pine Fort†—tell my tired old friend that this is still my country. Tell him that no one—not the white man, and not Red Cloud himself—will ever tell the Hunkpatila where to go and how to live.”
“The soldiers will come. Red Cloud wished only to warn you.”
“Tell Red Cloud I have been warned,” Crazy Horse replied. “The soldiers will know where to find me. I will not run this time. They will know where to find me.”
And the soldiers did come.
It wasn’t that Crazy Horse had ever doubted Red Cloud’s warning. Nor had he ever doubted that the white man’s army would march north into this last great hunting ground of the Lakota and Shahiyena. It surprised him only when the soldiers attacked a small village of those who were struggling against the great cold and deep, icy snow to force their way back to the agency at White Rock. Shameful, that attack was. To charge into a village of those who were attempting to return so that their children and old ones would be warmed by the soldiers’ thin gray blankets, so that the sick ones would have some of the moldy flour and the white man’s pig meat to put in their hungry bellies.
It still hurt Crazy Horse to think back on that parting from his old friend He Dog, who was taking his family and eleven lodges south to join Two Moon and Old Bear on their trail back to the White Rock Agency. Like a tearing of flesh from flesh after all that tragedy had visited upon the lodge of Crazy Horse in recent winters: friends slaughtered in war against the many enemies of the Lakota; a brother killed in battle; a daughter cut down in her youth by a white man’s disease that struck the weakest among them.
It was such an evil thing, this white man’s disease—slashing at a man when he had no way to fight back. Such a season of blackness it was become, a season of despair.
Even with his wife, Black Shawl, here with him ever since—he had been so alone. So very alone.
And then He Dog chose to leave.
Crazy Horse vowed he would find a way to strike back, to avenge himself on the enemies that had visited so much grief upon his lodge.
This he swore would be a summer of blood. He swore he would stand ankle deep in wasichu blood, cover himself with the gore and reek with the spoils of battle. This was to be the summer of his dream.
Everything happened just as it had been foretold, exactly as he had seen it in his troubled sleep: winter’s leaving on the heels of those messengers as the prairie became boggy with the melting snow. Then as suddenly as winter’s cold breath had disappeared, it returned—this time with a vengeance in the Moon of Snow Blindness, colder than all but the oldest of old men could remember it had ever been. But by then his Hunkpatila were safely camped on a creek near the Little Powder. All of his people, except the lodges moving south with He Dog.
If the soldiers did not catch them on the trail to the reservation, the killing winter might easily claim them all.
Crazy Horse had worried. Not a quiet moment passed, not a day’s short path of the sun across the sky, when the war chief did not brood on those eleven lodges pushing through the great cold and the deep snow toward the White Rock Agency.
Then a runner from a village camped close to the soldier forts appeared among them, saying that the soldiers were claiming they had destroyed the camp of Crazy Horse. The warriors and women, the children and old men around that messenger had laughed at his declaration. But the Horse had not laughed. True, his camp had not been destroyed.
Yet that meant the soldiers had exacted a savage blow on some village. Crazy Horse prayed there would be survivors.
All too suddenly that cold, leaden afternoon as the gun-barrel gray clouds hung so low a man could almost reach out and touch them, they heard a shout from one of the sentries posted on the hills overlooking their camp along the Little Powder.
“People coming! People coming on foot from the south!”
Young men and boys ran up the icy, crusty slopes among the snow-draped cedar and stunted pine to see for themselves.
Crazy Horse did not need to look. He already knew.
Turning to the women of his camp, he had ordered them to stir life back into their sleeping fires, to dig out all extra food and clothing, blankets and robes, to bring forth their bags of roots and herbs they would need for the fingers and noses, ears and toes, bitten savagely by the cold, for the wounds caused by soldier bullets.
