“My father sees the wisdom in my words, does he?”
Whistler put a hand on his son’s shoulder. “Perhaps. I will trust that you will be there to save my life if an enemy warrior is about to take my scalp.”
Swelling his chest like a prairie cock, Strikes-in-Camp said, “I will watch over both of you who are too old to make war—my father and the white man who has married my sister.”
Moving on around the circle, Whistler stopped behind Bass and Pretty On Top to say, “He-Who-Is-No-Longer-Here was never the sort to boast pridefully. Though he had many war honors, he rarely spoke of them before others.”
Bass added, “He made no big show of all that he had done, never prancing up and down like some young colts out to prove how strong they are.”
“As I said, white man—I will even save your life since you are married to my sister.”
“No wonder you don’t understand what your father is trying to teach you,” Scratch uttered with regret. “Your uncle was so much more a man than you will ever be.”
“But he was the one who taught me many things!” the young man snapped.
Whistler shook his head and said, “So why didn’t you learn to be more like my brother?”
“Because I am going to be a man in my own right,” Strikes-in-Camp spouted.
Bass watched Whistler turn and move into the darkness, heading for the nearby fire where another group sat out the long winter night. Looking back at Strikes-in-Camp, he said, “You have shamed your father with your selfish disrespect.”
“My family has shamed itself, white man,” he snarled. “My sister shames herself by fornicating with you. My mother and father shame themselves because they accept the white man who shamed their daughter into their lodge.”
“Your sister and I are married.”
“By the white man way?”
“No, not in the white man’s church,” Bass reluctantly admitted the truth. “We have promised our hearts to one another—”
“You white men are like rabbits in heat,” the warrior sneered. “You will say anything to our women to get your manhood under their dresses—”
Scratch found himself bolting to his feet before he realized it, but two sets of hands appeared out of the darkness to stay him. Struggling to free himself, he turned first to the right, finding Turns Plenty holding his arm. On the other side stood Whistler.
“He is not angry at you,” Whistler explained. “He is more angry at himself.”
“The white man is a coward,” Strikes-in-Camp said. “That day in our village, two winters ago, he could have fought us like an honorable man. Instead, he let us tie him up, him and his friend.”
“You will also remember how my brother came to free the two white men,” Whistler protested as he let go of Bass’s arm. He stepped over to stand before his son. “Already the white man and I have talked,” he told the young man. “There will be a ceremony for your sister when we return from this war trail to avenge the killing of He-Who-Is-Not-Here.”
“Ceremony?”
“She will marry the white man in the way of our people,” Whistler declared.
Bass swallowed hard, choking on the surprise of it.
“No matter,” the young warrior growled. “Too late to make my sister anything better than a whore who lays with white men—”
Scratch was lunging across the snow when he was jerked backward by Turns Plenty’s hold on his right arm. But as he shrugged that arm in a second attempt to free himself, he watched Whistler’s arm dart into the fire’s dim light, slashing out. His hand struck Strikes-in-Camp’s cheek with a pop as loud as an old cottonwood booming in the cold of a February night.
“Don’t ever do that again, old man,” the son snarled, laying his hand against his bruised cheek.
“Or what?” Whistler asked. “Perhaps it is you who should heed a warning. Maybe you should look over your shoulder more often when you are in enemy country. A man who so openly shames his family is surely the sort of man who has no friends to protect his back.”
That early morning when they crossed the frozen Missouri in the darkness, Bass discovered the tight knot in his belly along with the unshakable remembrance of that old shaman who had walked among the half-a-hundred warriors at dawn on that morning they had started north on this war trail so long ago.
Then, as now, it was snowing fitfully: not with huge, ash-curl flakes, but with those tiny, icy spears of cold pain as the wind whipped the glassy slivers sidelong across the ground. Slowly the old man moved between the rows of ponies and warriors quietly mumbling his songs as he shook an old rattle made of a buffalo bull’s scrotum. In his other hand he held a bull’s penis, stretched to its full length by inserting a narrow wand of willow. Both were his potent symbols of the bull’s power—the largest creature known to these people. The provocative maleness of those two objects, their utter masculinity plainly exhibiting that strength shown by the bull in his battles to assure his right to the cows, would now transfer their spiritual power to those men who were plunging into Blackfoot country.
So many more had wanted to come along, some who had all but begged Whistler to be included in the war party. Those he hadn’t selected for this dangerous journey had to stand back with the others in a wide cordon pressing in on either side of the five-times-ten who were the objects of a raucous send-off: cheering men, keening women, those boisterous children and yapping dogs darting in and out between the legs of the restive ponies.
Arapooesh’s successor, Yellow Belly, had parted the joyous, singsong crowd to stand before Whistler and the white trapper, holding aloft Rotten Belly’s sacred battle shield. No longer did it hang on the man-high tripod of peeled poles that stood outside the chief’s lodge. Instead, it had been passed down by the dying Arapooesh as a symbol of his office, as a token of the transfer of his power.
For a few minutes the noise had grown deafening as Yellow Belly held the shield aloft, hand drums beating and wing-bone whistles blown with shrill delight. Then as the chief lowered the shield, a hush fell over the crowd.
“Before you ride against our enemies,” Yellow Belly said, “each of you must touch the shield, touch the power of He-Who-Has-Died.”
First Whistler, then Bass, gently laid their hands on that round hoop covered by stiffened rawhide. Nearly the entire circle was covered with a pale-red earth paint; at the center stood a human figure with oversized ears and a single eagle feather, representing the moon who had come to the great chief in a vision and described the construction of this powerful shield and its medicine.
“Is it true,” Bass now asked Whistler as they pushed up the trail scuffed in the new snow by their forward scouts, come to that deadly land north of the Missouri, “true what your people say about the shield of He-Who-Is-Not-Here?”
“Its power to tell us the outcome of an event yet to happen?”
“Yes—I was told about the raid your brother wanted to lead against the Cheyenne in the south.”
Whistler stared into the cold mist ahead, then explained, “In the middle of camp he stacked a pile of buffalo chips, almost as high as his head. On the top he placed his shield and told us that he would let it roll to the bottom. If it landed with its painting against the ground, he would not lead the war party.”
“But years ago He-Who-Has-Died told me that his shield rolled down that stack of buffalo chips and landed with the paintings facing the sky.”
“Yes, and my brother led us to a great victory over the Cheyenne far to the south.” Then the warrior sighed and adjusted the heavy buffalo robe he had wrapped around the lower half of his body while they rode on horseback. “That shield was powerful enough to foretell its owner’s death.”