“Is not likely to reach anywhere,
“You are saying.
“Horses
“I am coming after.”
Enapay reached into the leather pouch at his waist and daubed his fingers with vermilion paint He painted a crescent on his mouth so that it appeared a grinning red wound curling upward to his cheekbones. He painted his hands and his feet red. From a rawhide case he took a single feather and fastened it at the back of his head, standing upright, for he had earned it by killing an enemy without himself having been harmed. Below that single erect feather he fastened two others horizontally, to signify that he had counted coup on two fallen enemies in the same battle. The others were fastening feathers now and applying paint. Otaktay was putting on a decorated war shirt. Howahkan, expecting they would be attacking the Pawnee on the morrow, had searched all that day for earth a mole had worked up, and he mixed that now with blue paint and a powdered herb, and rubbed the war medicine on his body and on that of his horse. He offered some of the medicine to the others, and they all accepted, rubbing it on their chests and their limbs, Teetonkah mixing his with vermilion paint, which he daubed in a wide band across his forehead and across his horse’s chest.
Otaktay complained that they had done and were still doing everything wrong-starting with Howahkan praying for horses while doing the pipe, and again just now when he’d sung “Horses I am coming after,” though he had been told repeatedly there were only mules. And now each was painting his horse and face in colors and designs different one from the other when surely they had been on war parties where a medicine man was in attendance and the horses and faces had been painted uniformly. On such a party recently, a man named Wambleeskah had made medicine, and had painted Otaktay’s horse and those of the others with white clay lightning flashes from the mouth over the chest and down the front legs and on the hind legs as well. He had then painted a blue band across the forehead of each horse and had painted blue spots on their flanks. There had been six braves in the party, and he had painted each of their faces blue and had then painted white lines across their foreheads and trailing down their cheeks.
Otaktay insisted that those in this party at least mount their horses facing east and then walk them single file in a circle before riding out against the wagon. Teetonkah told him he was an old woman. Howahkan, his face blue and smelling of earth and medicine, laughed — but only because he was nervous.
It was close to seven-thirty now. The night air was cool. The afternoon haze had burned off before suppertime, and there were stars and a moon, lazy cloud traces occasionally crossing its face to cast drifting shadows on the ground. The fire blazed not thirty feet from where the wagon stood. The mules were picketed between the wagon and the fire. Everyone in the family was still awake, but a guard had been posted nonetheless — Bobbo on the side of the wagon exposed to the prairie. Marauding wolves ventured closer and closer to the fire, drawn by the scent of the slain buffalo, eager to get at the carcass. In the darkness, they howled their intention, circling restlessly. Annabel didn’t think they’d come clear into camp, but she wasn’t sure.
“Can I take a shot at them, Pa?” Bobbo yelled.
“No, leave them be,” Hadley yelled back.
“Raise the dead, way they’re yammering,” Bobbo said.
Standing just this side of the wagon, between it and the fire, Minerva was brushing her hair, counting the strokes.
“Drive a man crazy with that countin out loud,” Hadley said.
“Thirty-three-thirty-four, thirty-five...”
“You’ve had too much to drink, Min.”
“Thirty-six, hush, thirty-seven...”
The wolves were still howling.
“Let me take a shot at them, Pa,” Bobbo called.
“Leave em be, son,” Hadley said.
Bonnie Sue had already crawled under her blanket. “Does anyone in this family have any notion of sleeping tonight?” she asked.
Annabel giggled. She’d taken off her bodice and skirt, and was walking barefooted in her petticoat, toward the dark side of the wagon. “Whyn’t you let him shoot one of the critters?” she said. “Otherwise, they’ll be at it all night long.”
“Ain’t there nobody planning to sleep tonight?” Bonnie Sue asked.
Annabel giggled again.
“Forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine,” Minerva said.
A little distance from the fire and the wagon both, not so far from either so that the wolves would get her, Annabel lifted her petticoat and let down her drawers and was preparing to pee when she heard what sounded like a whistle or a pipe, one of them wooden pipes the mountain people back home were all the time whittling. She peered into the darkness and could see nothing. It occured to her that not a moment before she’d seen the moving shadows of the wolves, had even been able to make out their eyes gleaming in the darkness. She couldn’t see nary a wolf now, nor did she hear them howling anymore.
“Bobbo?” she called.
“Yeah, Sis?”
“You hear something just—”
Somebody grabbed her from behind. She screamed, and urine ran down the inside of her leg and then stopped abruptly. He pulled her over by the hair, flat on her back, her underdrawers bunched around her ankles. She saw him only upside down. His face was painted with a grinning red mouth, feathers were in his hair. He had a tomahawk in his hand. She screamed again, and tried to scramble away, but he pinned her to the ground and straddled her as he would a pony, and then put the tomahawk down and reached for something at his belt.
She grabbed for the tomahawk at once.
Her fingers closed on the leather-encased haft and she swung the thing like the simple hatchet it was. His hand was coming up from his belt; there were leather thongs in it. He dropped the thongs and tried to protect his face, the fingers of his hand widespread. The sharp flint edge of the tomahawk cut through two fingers and struck him clean between the eyebrows, splitting open his forehead. Blood spurted out of him like a fountain. Annabel screamed and let go the hatchet.
She was still screaming when she came around the wagon tongue, pulling up her underdrawers. There were three more of them, one of them painted blood red like the one she’d just split open, another blue, the last a color seemed brown or black. Her father lay on the ground just near the back of the wagon, blood pouring from the side of his head. Bonnie Sue was on the bottom of an Indian straddling her same as she’d just been, only this one was wearing a beaded shirt. Bonnie Sue kicked and punched at him, but he had his forearm pressed hard against her throat and she was choking. Annabel ran to the fire, pulled a flaming stick from it, and ran back to where the Indian was on top of Bonnie Sue. He had a knife in his hand, he’d pulled a knife from his belt, Jesus, he was going to kill her!
She pushed the burning stick at his naked arm where the shirt ended, and the Indian let out a yell and jumped off Bonnie Sue. Annabel threw away the stick and started running. She could hear horses out there someplace; there’d be more Indians on them in a minute. The one she’d just poked with the stick grabbed her arm, swung her around, and punched her full in the face. She heard something snap inside her nose, and fell to her knees in pain, her hands covering her face. Blood was pouring from her nose. Where was the Indian, where’d he...? She turned, saw him running back to where he’d dropped his knife. He picked up the knife. It was a metal knife, the firelight glittered on its edge, he was coming back to where she sat with her petticoat tented over her knees.
Almost without looking at her, he stuck the knife in her and pulled it out again.
She felt only pain like she’d been burned, and then saw blood spreading into the white petticoat, and clutched for the wound. Blood welled up between her fingers. He pulled her hair away from her face, and brought the knife to her forehead. She thought: Please, no, and tried to scream but could not find the strength, and could not raise her hand to stop him. He slit the flesh across her forehead, just below the hairline, and was beginning to peel back her scalp when Bobbo shot him in the back. Feathers and beads exploded between his shoulder blades. He fell forward onto Annabel, his hand releasing the knife, the blade still caught between the scalp he’d been lifting and the skull beneath it.