Beauty for Ashes (20 page)

A raised tomahawk caught the moonlight as it swung down.

Sam dodged and rolled.

He looked up and saw the dark figure raise the tomahawk again. Sam ducked inside its arc and rammed his head into the man's chest. As they went down, he tried to slash the man's back with his hair ornament knife, but couldn't tell if he got deer hide or human flesh.

Tangled arm and leg, the dark figure and Sam slashed at each other.

SLAM!

Someone else whammed into them. All three men rolled in the dust and darkness. Sam spilled away onto his back. His mind hollered,
Run!
The new man lifted a tomahawk.

Sam's arm was caught. He looked up into the tomahawk and swallowed his own scream before he died.

The blade swung down and crashed into the Lakota's skull.

“Let's go!”

It was a loud whisper—in the Crow language!

Sam followed the figure into the sagebrush. It paused and turned, and in the moonlight Sam saw Flat Dog's face. He motioned into the darkness, and Sam followed him at a run.

 

S
HOUTS SOUNDED BEHIND
them. Quickly the Lakotas would discover their dead comrades, and the escape.

They ran.

Suddenly there was Paladin, staked. Coy danced toward Sam.

Flat Dog jumped onto his mount. “Let's get out of here.”

Sam jumped onto Paladin. No saddle, and Paladin would be fine without a bridle.

“Let's slip off quietly,” Flat Dog said. “They can't track us in the dark.”

After a hundred yards Sam said, “I gotta get my rifle.”

“Forget it!”

Sam realized he didn't know where it was anyway.
The Celt is gone.
His one legacy from his father.

“I got Paladin for you, and Coy with him,” Flat Dog said, as though to say, “And that's enough.”

They came out onto the trail downstream of the village. “This trail, they won't be able to see any tracks. With luck they'll look for us the other direction,” Flat Dog said.

They walked the horses all night. Sam half froze. Even August nights are cold when you're stark naked.

When the sun came up, they concealed themselves in a willow thicket and slept.

Late in the afternoon they gathered juneberries and ate them. “I'll hunt tomorrow,” Flat Dog said. The only hunting weapon they had left was his bow.

“Where are we going?”

“We'll follow the mountains north. There's another pass up that way, and we'll cross to the Big Horn.”

They rode all night, and Sam froze again. Being naked had its disadvantages. He thought glumly that when they started riding during the day, he'd sunburned all over. Then he grinned at himself. All over except for the small strip where the ropes belted his belly, a funny sight.

Flat Dog killed a doe. They ate all they could that night and the next morning carried the hind quarters and left the rest. “Gotta get out of Head Cutter country,” said Flat Dog.

Sam pondered his situation. He'd lost everything he owned except his horse, dog, and hair-ornament knife. Rifle gone, knife gone, clothes gone. No more powder and lead, no more pemmican, no more coffee. No traps to get beaver with. No bow and arrows. Nothing to trade to the Indians.

He'd lost his friends.

Ghastly.

A clear, rotten thought clanged into his mind.
Instead of getting eight horses to win Meadowlark, I killed her brother.

He spent the rest of the day getting sunblistered and swimming in remorse.

That night and morning they gorged themselves on the hindquarters and ended up picking the last flesh off the bones. Amazing how much you could eat when you knew no more food was available. Coy looked back at the bones as they rode off. “Better to go hungry than get scalped,” Sam told him.

Up came a mental picture of Coy scalped. Sam started laughing and couldn't stop. Paladin turned her head and gave Sam a queer look. Flat Dog looked at Sam. He laughed the way a spring bubbles out of the ground, and he didn't know whether the water of his laughter was sweet or alkaline.

 

F
ROM THIS CAMP
they could see where the Big Horn River flowed, and where it cut through some mountains to the north. According to Flat Dog, the village now would be where the Stinking Water River flowed into the Big Horn. Later the big buffalo hunt, with several villages gathered together, would be held near the Pryors.

Sam was learning where the mountains lifted up and how the rivers ran, all a big picture in his mind. He wished he could write it all down, like Jedediah did, and make a map. Which was a damn funny thought for a man who didn't read or write, and didn't own even a scrap of paper.

But on this warm evening in August, in a pleasant camp on a nameless creek, that wasn't on his mind.

“I'm sorry I got Blue Medicine Horse killed.”

“Don't use his name,” said Flat Dog.

“I'm sorry.”

“You didn't do it. The one who isn't here, he made a mistake.”

Silence. As if that was enough.

“I feel terrible about it.”

This drew a flicker of sharpness in Flat Dog's eyes. “Warriors pay for their mistakes.”

Silence.

“I found all the signs,” Flat Dog went on. “I could tell a lot of what happened. The one who isn't here, it was his job to see anyone we were riding into. He didn't.”

“He was my friend.” Then Sam thought that Blue Horse was Flat Dog's brother, and felt ashamed of himself.

“I took care of him. Wrapped him in his blanket and put him in the fork of a tree. After one or two winters I'll go back and put his bones in a rocky crevice.”

Sam started to ask if Blue Horse was scalped, but he already knew the answer to that.

He tried to find something good about their situation. Well, on the trip home he would learn to ride bareback, since his saddle was gone. And he would train himself and Paladin always to turn with pressure of the knees instead of the reins.

He wished they had coffee. He wished they had food. He wished he didn't have to ride into the village tomorrow dead poor and stark naked.

Now that he thought of it, literally naked was too much of a problem. “Big favor,” said Sam.

Flat Dog looked up at him.

“I need a breechcloth. Don't see anything to use but your shirt.”

Flat Dog looked down at his chest. It was a perfectly good deerskin shirt but nothing special. He stripped it off. “You owe me a shirt.”

Sam started cutting a breechcloth from the tail of the shirt. The very sharp hair ornament knife worked well. “This is going to be one very short breechcloth,” he said.

“Cut two. We'll find someone to sew them together.”

Sam looked at the material. “I'll have enough for a couple of pairs of moccasins, too.” Barefoot could get painful.

He took off a sleeve and sliced part of it into a belt for the breechcloth, the rest into strips to braid into another rope.

“You owe me a shirt,” Flat Dog repeated, laughing a little.

“I owe you everything.”

M
ILES FROM THE
village, Sam felt his flesh redden. In his imagination he saw that, sunburned as he was, his skin would glow redder yet when they entered the village. Red Roan would watch him and smile. Gray Hawk and Needle, seeing they had lost a son, would turn their backs on Sam and refuse to look at him. Meadowlark would run into her lodge and weep.

He lived in this moment of humiliation all afternoon, running it over and over through his mind. He told himself that the real moment only had to be lived once, but he couldn't help rolling it through his mind again and again.

They spotted the village across an open plain, on the south bank of the Stinking Water. The moment was coming. Sam steeled himself.

Then, for some reason, no more than two hundred yards away, Flat Dog had said, “We have to go up on that hill.”

When they got there, Flat Dog's words surprised him again. “You have to sit here.” Sam dismounted and plopped his breechclothed bottom down. Coy joined him and looked up at Sam anxiously.

The hillock overlooked the camp. Flat Dog dismounted, walked the few steps to the crest, and waved his blanket in a big circle. “I have to get the people's attention,” he said.

This seemed odd—the sentries surely had told the camp that a small party was coming in.

“Now they know someone has been killed,” he said.

He waved his blanket toward the Big Horn Mountains. “That tells them what direction we're coming from,” he said.

He flung one end of the blanket to the ground at his side, once. “Now they know we've lost one.”

One? Six men rode out of this camp, and two were returning. Beckwourth was just gone somewhere else. Third Wing, Gideon, and Blue Medicine Horse were dead. Dead.

Flat Dog walked over and sat down by Sam. “Since they've seen me,” he said sadly, “they know which one.”

Sam pondered what that meant.

In a few minutes Red Roan and two other young Kit Foxes showed up. Coy stood up, bristled, and growled. Sam calmed him down.

The three sat and asked questions of Flat Dog, disregarding Sam. Flat Dog answered very factually and very fully. It seemed to Sam that he recounted every little thing they did after they left rendezvous to steal horses from the Head Cutters. The session seemed to last for hours.

Sam noticed nothing in particular that reflected on him except one story. Flat Dog told how Blue Medicine Horse had worried that no one in the party had medicine to go to war. At that point Sam told about his daydreams. Blue Horse and Flat Dog thought maybe that was how white men got their medicine and decided to go against the Head Cutters the next morning.

Not one of the interviewers looked directly at Sam, but he had never felt more thoroughly condemned.

At last Red Roan and others rose and walked down the hill to camp.

“We stay here,” Flat Dog.

That evening the wives of Kit Foxes brought them food and water. For some reason they weren't allowed to touch the cups that held the water. The women put water to their mouths like they were small children. No longer having a hat, Sam had to ask them to bring a small bowl for Coy to drink out of.

One woman brought a buffalo robe. Without looking at Sam, she dropped it on the ground and said, “For Joins with Buffalo,” and walked away.

When they were alone, Sam went to Paladin, then turned and looked at Flat Dog expectantly. Flat Dog shook his head no. “We stay here,” he said, “until the village finishes mourning.”

He sat on a silvered cedar log and took an arrow from his quiver. He gazed off toward the Big Horns for a minute or two. Then, suddenly, Flat Dog stabbed himself in the left shoulder with the arrow point. Then he stabbed himself about a dozen times on the left arm, each cut making a trickle of blood.

He began to weep. At first he cried softly, moaning a little. The moans grew in volume. They grew in intensity. They swooped up and down. They squeezed soft and bellowed loud.

As he moaned, he changed hands and stabbed himself on the right arm. Over and over, seemingly without counting, he inflicted small wounds on himself.

His moaning grew extravagant. It was as though he was trying to gauge the depth and breadth of his grief for his lost brother. He pitched on an ocean of sorrow, rode a swell of fierce pain upward and dropped down into a trough of anguish. Then the next pain lifted him high into the bleak vista of his heartache.

With the arrow he wounded himself about half a dozen times on each cheek.

At last he sat rigid, frozen by the prospect of a loss as wide and deep as any ocean.

Sam heard the drums beating in the village, and the voices joined together in a great song of woe. Now what he had seen in two winters of living with the Crow people came home to him. He had seen men and women with wounds like those Flat Dog just scarified himself with. Men and women with joints missing from a finger, where they had expressed violently their sorrow, and their anger at their loss. Women who lost a close relative chopped their hair almost to the roots, and mourned until it grew to its original length. Families gave away most of their belongings, and grieved formally for two moons, or sometimes an entire year.

When a relative was killed by an enemy, Sam remembered, the family mourned until a member of the offending tribe was killed in vengeance. It hit him hard—until a member of the offending tribe was killed in vengeance.

Flat Dog emerged from his seeming trance and once more began to give voice to his sorrow. Long into the night rose the beat of the drums and the village songs of mourning. Long into the night rose Flat Dog's wail.

The next day Sam realized that they were in a kind of exile. All day they sat on top of that little hill, and then another day and another. Sam lost track after three. Every day they sat on the hilltop, all day. Flat Dog sat looking mournful, or far away. Sam waited. Or thought about his dead friends. Mostly waited.

Coy looked at them peculiarly, and jumped onto his food and water gratefully when it came.

It was the second night that Sam began to grieve. He started with a kind of madness. He began to moan along with Flat Dog—he didn't know why, just had the impulse to make a kind of duet. Flat Dog sang high and loud, Sam soft and low.

Tears came.

True, hot tears.

Thoughts of Blue Medicine Horse swam through his head. How hard he worked, so exactly, to learn English. How he opened his heart to Sam because of that rabid coyote. How he helped Sam train Paladin, and helped save Sam's life during the buffalo hunt. How he counseled Sam wisely on how to behave in a way acceptable to the Crows. This man's duty was to protect his family, but he brought the stranger into their circle of acquaintance, tragically.

Most of all, Sam couldn't help thinking of Blue Medicine Horse as the man who risked his life to help Sam get eight horses to win Meadowlark's hand. And lost his life.

Sam's mourning lifted him high into anguish, low into despair.

He thought of the brother who could not help to assure the safety of his younger brothers and sisters. Who could no longer help feed his family. Who would be unavailable to defend the tribe against enemies. Who would never delight a young woman with his love. Who would never add to the life of the tribe through his issue.

A human being lost.

A new wave lifted Sam, and he knew how far his sorrows reached beyond the death of Blue Horse. He had lost Gideon, his first real friend in the mountains. He'd failed to protect Third Wing, the Pawnee who saved his life out of pure generosity.

He lifted his lament to the night sky.

The memory of his father, Lew Morgan, washed over him, tumbled him head over heels in a flash flood of sadness. It had no words, only pictures of his father's kind face, or his compact body doing work, lifting a deer onto his shoulder, carrying a ham in each hand, walking behind the mule and forcing the plow blade into the soft, spring earth.

He wailed and wailed.

Worse, Sam himself had become a killer. He had killed the Pawnee sentry Two Stones. He had slain Pock-Marked, his Lakota captor. Altogether he had walked the halls of the drama of life and death as one who sheds blood. He recognized, with the heaviest of hearts, that he walked the earth with bloody hands.

In this fullness of recognition, he knew that the earth was, forever, the cradle of birth. It was equally, and also forever, the cold arms of death. He knew himself as the bearer of both life and death, and knew that he bore in his blood his own death.

He wailed long into the night.