She was still there, trembling, sick, numbed, and witless, when a man rode into view and sat on his horse forty yards away, looking at her. In the first instant he knew that a war party had passed him on its way down the river.
He had a clear view of the seven prone persons, all of whom seemed to be dead, and of the woman, with blood all over her and with a bloody axe in her hands. He had seen men kill men. He himself had slain and scalped eight Indians since he left St. Louis and headed west. In the world where he now lived the killing of the weak by the strong was the first law of life, all the way from the tiniest gnats and spiders up to the wolf, the elk bull, the grizzly. No day passed in which he did not see creatures killing other creatures. No day passed in which enemies did not look at him and covet his flesh. This was not a country for persons dedicated to the prevention of cruelty by the living on the living.
Sam was not a man who could be easily moved by death and loss but he was moved by the scene before him. It was not the dead warriors; he cared nothing about them. Possibly it was not the sons and the daughter. It must have been the way a mother stood, looking round her and back and forth; the way she bent a little forward and peered at a son, and slowly turned to look at the daughter; the way she knelt and searched the dead faces and bright bloody skulls of the sons, who only a little while ago had thick mops of brown hair; or the way she knelt and looked at her daughter, with the deep tomahawk cleft in the upper face and forehead. So absorbed was she by the grim facts that had desolated her life and soul, so darkened and blotted out was her conscious mind, so depressed was her pulse and her breathing, that she had almost no sense of being left alone in the world, God only knew where.
Sam had at least a faint notion of it all. He supposed that this woman had killed four Blackfeet braves with nothing but an axe, who now was completely helpless before her enemies. Would she kneel there all day and all night, before her dead children? Was she praying? She had dropped the axe and now crawled back and forth, back and forth, between the children. Twenty minutes after Sam came in view she was kneeling by the girl and she seemed to be trying to clothe her; she stripped a thin shawl from her shoulders and laid it over the girl’s flanks. In one moment she glanced at the cottonwood tree where her husband had fallen forward. In that moment she understood what they had done to him, but she would understand that only in fleeting moments of insight, and only for a week or two. There would be a few brief flashes in the gathering darkness, when she would know that nothing was left to her but the dead, an old wagon, some bedding, a few utensils, an axe, a rifle ....
Turning from her daughter, she saw the big man on the horse. She leapt to her feet, recovered the axe, and began to run. Because he was in the path down which she had come she made a wide detour across river bottom, running with what the man thought was astonishing speed. A few moments later she came down the path toward him, a rifle in her hand, and he felt a vivid flash of horripilation, the bristling of body hair called gooseflesh. The expression on his face changed. Good God, did she intend to shoot him? "Woman, you’d better stop there!” he shouted to her, but she would not have stopped for droves of tigers or rivers of fire. She came on, but at twenty paces from him did stop, abruptly, and with both hands tried to raise the rifle and aim at him. He thought she was shaking too hard to put the sight on a target but he hung his rifle from the saddle’s pommel, threw a leg over, and slipped to the earth, both hands high above his head. He advanced toward her and all the while she was trying to aim the gun at him. Failing in that, she threatened him with it.
"Woman," he said sternly, "I’m your friend. It looks like you need one." When she gave no sign of friendliness he again advanced, slowly, trying to look into her eyes; and when twenty feet from her he unbuckled his revolvers and let them fall. He put his arms out wide, his fingers spread. "I’m Sam Minard, New York State. Like I said, you need a friend. We have graves to dig. You have a shovel?"
Holding her rifle with both hands, its muzzle pointed at him, she did not speak. She had so much redman’s blood on her face that he couldn’t tell what kind of face it was, except that it looked strong, like his mother’s. She had blood over one upper eyelid, and when she blinked the red spot flashed in the high sun. Sam was looking at her with wonder and admiration; he would never have believed that a woman with no weapon but an axe could kill four warriors, without herself being touched.
For two or three minutes he looked at her and waited. Knowing that her will had faltered and that he was no longer in danger, he buckled the guns round his waist and went back to his horses. Leading the stud and with the packhorse trailing, he went up the trail to the woman’s camp, observing along the way the spots where her husband or children had uprooted firewood. He wanted to ask what in hell they were doing away up here in Crow and Blackfeet land, and where they thought they were going, but he doubted that he would ever get a word out of her. She was wary, like a wild thing; she was lost in blood and horror. What would she do when her dead were buried? Would she let him take her north to the Missouri, to wait for a river boat, or far south to the trail?
He found a shovel in the camp, and thinking one spot as good as another, he was about to dig when she came running toward him, gesturing, like a mute. He followed her and she climbed to a tableland that was high enough to overlook the river and its bottoms, both north and south. She took the shovel from him and marked off three spots. Then, convulsed, it seemed to Sam, by frustration or anguish, she fell to her knees and with a stick made a small rectangle, and close to it another, twice as wide. He understood that she wanted her two sons in one grave. He had seen no tears in her eyes, no sign of the hysterical grief that he associated with women. Now that he was used to her bloody face he saw that it was rugged, with strong jawbones and chin and a line forehead. He thought her eyes were gray but could not tell, for they were alive with eerie apparitions of light. She had strong hands.
Up here, he thought, was no place for graves, where the soil was meager and the wild winds of wintertime would sweep across in forty-below-zero cold. Still, the soil was drier and rich in lime. So he began to dig, and after a few minutes his face was moist with sweat. She brought blankets from the camp. When the graves were dug he took a blanket and with his ride across his left arm went to the scene of the massacre, followed by the woman, who had put her rifle away somewhere. Sam spread the blanket at the dead girl’s side and gently laid her on it, the mother intently watching him all the while. He folded the blanket over her nakedness and at the same moment drew the shawl away. He then handed his rifle to the woman, and with the girl cradled in his two arms he carried her to the grave. So much blood had gushed from her horrible wound and down over her face that he could not tell what she had looked like, but he could tell that she had a full womanly form and he liked to think of her as one who had been superlatively lovely. He knelt and very gently lowered her three feet, to the bottom. In the next instant the mother was across the grave from him, kneeling, and though he could hear no words and see no movements in her lips he thought she was praying; and bowing his head, he prayed with her. Surely the Almighty was listening now. She still knelt, while he placed shovels of earth on the blanket, till the tomb was filled. The two lads he buried with the same gentleness as the daughter, laying them on a blanket side by side and covering them with elkskins that he took from his pack. Again, as before, he knelt across from her and prayed.