Chapter 2

“Don’t see no cattle.”

“I’ll buy when next month’s calf crop’s on the ground.”

“After all the troubles, you got money for that?” As if to reinforce his point about the recent hostilities, his gaze wandered to the stone house looming over him. “Bit grander’n what stood here before the cavalry burned you out. I hear the family at Teacher’s Mead come and rebuilt it while you was hiding out on the reservation.”

The comment about “hiding out,” nearly swamped my self-discipline, but I held my tongue. The part about the house was true. My whole family had come to rebuild the farm buildings out of rock quarried near Teacher’s Mead. Unlike wood, rock doesn’t burn. Landreth’s next words brought me alert.

“You ever heard tell of a Injun called Medicine Hair?”

His mention of the name was a surprise. Not many white men knew of it. No use putting this off. I’d have to face it sooner or later. “Some call me that.”

“I figgered. ‘Cause of that yella hair mixed in with the black, I reckon. Looks like big medicine to the heathens, don’t it?”

All my life, stray strands of my ma’s yellow hair had mingled with Pa’s black, marking me as different. With a conscious effort, I moved my mind from the hate-filled man in front of me to the sharp, dry smell of fallow fields riding a western breeze. The aroma brought a longing for spring and the rich odor of freshly turned earth. I could almost imagine tender new shoots rising like new-born infants from the earth.

“I hear you bossed one of them bands at Wounded Knee.” Landreth’s tone hovered between a question and an avowed fact.

“Then you heard wrong.”

“That so? You know a place called Rivers Bend?”

My stomach rolled. Landreth was better informed than I thought. And if he knew these things, so did the army. “That’s where I lived on the Pine Ridge Reservation for five years. And yes, I was head man there.”

He allowed an uneasy silence to grow before saying something strange. “You know the war’s over and done with, don’t you?”

The intensity of his voice gave me pause. “Yes, Sheriff, I recognize that.”

“How ‘bout you?” He stared at Bird.

My friend shot a puzzled glance my direction before answering. “The war’s done.”

It seemed for a moment Landreth was going to pursue the subject, but he back walked the white and turned away. “I’ll check with the military about this buck here. You’ll be hearing from me again if I don’t like what I hear.”

Winter Bird was on the nettle as the sheriff and his men thundered across the wooden bridge. I was a little disturbed, as well. Landreth hadn’t made the seven-mile trip from Yanube City just to check up on me. Likely, he’d heard there was another Indian on the place and wanted to make sure he hadn’t been given bad information about Matthew’s death. He didn’t need five men at his back to determine that; they were just to impress me that his interest wasn’t benign. The man’s hate ran deep, making me wonder at the cause of it. Lots of white folks didn’t like Indians, but Landreth’s loathing had a special edge to it.

But what was that baffling question about the war being done? And the comment about a gelding? Had he somehow learned of the man-love Matthew and I had shared? I slapped the porch railing and walked down the steps.

What did I care, anyway? This wasn’t living. Simply existing. Waiting. My heart waited to cease beating. My mind waited to awaken or perhaps go totally dark. My limbs waited to reclaim everyday skills. The whole of me seemed suspended as I drifted through each day somehow accomplishing mundane tasks.

It had been thus ever since the terrible, bloody slaughter at Wounded Knee and the battle at Drexel Mission where the better part of me, the bigger, stronger part of me, was slain some four moons past.

Matthew Brandt—nay, Shambling Bear, since he died a warrior and not a farmer—fell along with hundreds of others to the murderous fire of the Seventh Cavalry but refused to die until we reached the supposed sanctuary of Drexel Mission. Why was I not struck as I stood alongside him when a bullet tore into his chest? Why hadn’t I been taken instead of him?

After the Army’s indiscriminate slaughter of our people at Wounded Knee and the battle at Drexel, Winter Bird and I had fought our way through a three-day blizzard to bring Matthew home. My shock at discovering Pa and the family had traveled fifty miles from Teacher’s Mead to rebuild the farm almost undid me. I’d last cast eyes on nothing but charred ruins after the army fired the place in late ‘85 and drove us west to meet Bear’s destiny in a desolate gully on the Pine Ridge Reservation.