As Slays in the Night shoved aside the frozen door flap and hurled himself outside, Scratch rolled up onto one knee and started for the door.
“I am right behind you, Popo!” Flea cried as he lunged onto his feet and followed his father into the gray before dawn’s arrival.
All around them in that instant, men were bursting from their lodges to join those few who were already scuffling across the snow, gathering at the middle of the lodge crescent. Loud voices were raised: a few of the clan chiefs shouting orders to their men, others demanding answers for the unanswerable, fragments of songs and sacred chants just beginning as a few took up the reins to their favored war ponies staked securely at a lodge door … and through it all came the high-pitched wailing of the women and the screams of children from the far side of camp.
In that direction, gunfire became steady, hot. Hoofbeats, male voices louder still, and coming their way.
“The enemy has entered the camp!” Pretty On Top called out from behind the lodges.
Suddenly the young chief appeared in view through the frozen, misty air, gauzy and stinging to the skin with sharp and invisible ice crystals. The old friend caught Bass’s eye, waved him on.
Grabbing the white man’s elbow, Slays in the Night said, “That one, he is a brave man. He wants us to go with him into the fight.”
“These are the men who took your wife, your horses,” Scratch explained hurriedly with a rasp. “They have been brought here to your hand, my friend.”
“Yi-eeee!” Slays called out in a shrill voice as he bolted into a run beside the white man.
“Nothing lives long but the rocks and sky!” Titus reminded him as they lumbered across the snow behind others on their way to stem this challenge to their camp. “If this is our day to look at last upon the face of the First Maker … then let it be known that we died protecting everything dear to us!”
By the time they had covered not more than thirty yards, Bass and Slays in the Night rushed up to a line of warriors, most of whom were kneeling against some lodges, firing their weapons against a crescent of unseen, shadowy gunmen. All a man could tell of his enemy was the flicker of some movement, the orange and yellow muzzle flashes of their firearms. Balls whined overhead, slammed through the stiffened, frozen lodge hides, splintered poles. Inside a few of the lodges, tiny voices cried out in terror.
“Some of our people are trapped!” one of the Crow bellowed.
“Cut them out!” Titus roared as he started forward off his cold, stiff knees. “Cut them out of their traps!”
Flat Mouth was there ahead of him, just as a ball whined past his cheek. Wrenching his long and well-worn skinning knife from its scabbard, Titus plunged it into the back of the rock-hard, frost-stiffened buffalo hide of the lodge and attempted to drag the blade in a downward motion. The knife would not budge. Quickly propping his rifle against the lodge, he gripped the knife in both hands and put his weight behind it, managing to slice a five-foot-long laceration in the back of the lodge cover. Even before he could get his knife yanked away from the bottom of the opening, the first child appeared, all legs and arms, terror-filled eyes and screeching throat. Six of them squirted through the opening before he realized Slays was calling to him in the noisy tumult.
Whirling on his heel as a warrior raked a slice open in a neighboring lodge, Scratch found Slays in the Night with Turns Back and Flea—all three of them pointing behind them … back to the side of camp where their lodge stood.
“The enemy!” Turns Back cried in frustration, shaking his smoothbore.
Flea’s breath streamed out of his mouth like a white streamer, “Father! The enemy has made us fools! They have circled around the camp and are attacking our rear!”
“Come, you fighters!” Slays shouted, standing in the open and making a grand target of himself. “Come, my Crow friends! Kill them all!”
A long, long time their peoples had themselves been enemies—but in this dim light, on this ground, Turns Back and Slays in the Night stood fighting a common foe, side by side.
“Go!” Bass shouted at the trio and started toward them across the trampled snow. “Go to the lodge! I am coming!”
The Blackfoot had arranged a fine diversion for their attack on the Crow village: staging their feint on the north side of camp where part of the herd was grazing in a windswept meadow, while most of their attackers plunged in among the lodges on the south part of the village—where Magpie and Waits waited with the children.
When they were no more than ten long strides from the small, smoke-blackened lodge, horsemen swirled out of the mist ahead of them. Evil faces, eyes glaring with hatred. Faces smeared with dabs and streaks of color. Feathers fluttering from fur caps and the hoods to their blanket coats. Bass heard the thung-thung-thung of bows as he raced on, his cold, aching knees protesting. First two, then more than a dozen riderless horses suddenly careened into view, forcing the four men to leap aside in both directions. Right behind the horses came the first of the Blackfoot raiders—some of them leaning off to swing a stone club or taking quick aim with their short, elkhorn bows, others attempting to aim and pull off a shot with their firearms—
That’s when Titus recognized their cries.
His eyes went directly to the lodge, finding that opening like a black oval in the frost-coated buffalo hides where Waits and Magpie had their faces, watching the battle, waiting for a chance to leap into the open.
“Don’t!” Bass cried as he ducked out of the way of a warrior’s wild swinging of a war club.
The round, stream-washed rock grazed the top of his right shoulder, pitching the white man onto his side in the snow, knocking over a warrior’s medicine tripod erected in front of the man’s lodge. As he rolled onto his hip, he saw Waits already stepping out of the lodge door with Crane positioned under her arm. Magpie was right behind, clutching her babe in her arms.
“Don’t come out!” he screamed at them, his voice high and shrill. “Don’t—”
Waits was already running across the icy rime, hand in hand with little Crane. Her pockmarked face was gray with terror as her moccasins repeatedly slipped on the trampled ground. But still she heaved and stumbled toward her husband. Slowly, slowly lumbering into the open.
“Go back!” he cried, standing to wave at her with that arm. How the shoulder hurt! “Please! Go back inside!”
Behind Waits and Magpie more horsemen appeared out of the frozen mist. Grayish-black forms suddenly squirting between the lodges, weapons leveled, mouths O’ed up in some war cry as their eyes narrowed on a selected target.
Once more he hollered, “Get back inside—”
—as the muzzle of a short smoothbore spit a dirty yellow flame just behind Waits-by-the-Water.
“No-o-o-o-o-o!” he shrieked at the instant Magpie tripped and spilled to the side, almost under a horse’s slashing hooves.
But it was not his daughter, or the grandson he had held for the first time last night, that was the enemy’s target.
Instead, the ball’s impact slammed his wife’s body forward, her back arching reflexively as her fingers flew free of Crane’s tiny hand and the little girl stumbled, tangled up in her mother’s flailing legs as Waits-by-the-Water desperately attempted to maintain her footing.
But there was no ground beneath her moccasins. She was already in the air, sailing awkwardly until she spilled onto the dirty, hoof-hammered snow. The side of her head skidded across the trampled crust as he brought up the rifle at his hip instinctively. There had to be more than ten of them. No matter. He wanted only the one in the red capote, the one who jumped his horse over the woman’s body and bore down on the white man with a frightening cry.