Thirty-two-year-old mixed blood John Strobaw, known to the Sioux as Medicine Hair, returns to his Turtle Crick Farm after a six-year exile on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Grief-stricken at the loss of his mate and lover Matthew Brand, known as Shambling Bear, at the Battle of Wounded Knee, he struggles to become a farmer again while fighting an internal battle to let go of the past and face his future. Will that future be with his best friend Winter Bird or with Pretty Face, an outrageous flirt who hasn’t yet decided who he is?<br><br>But before he can come to grips with this, John faces several battles. Will his former friends and neighbors accept him now the Indian War has come to an end? Can John forgive those same friends and neighbors after the murderous ambush of the Sioux by the 7th Cavalry at Wounded Knee? Or survive the hostility of an Indian-hating sheriff named Charles Landreth and protect himself against the mindless fear and loathing for Two Spirits, men who love men?

Wastelakapi…Beloved

Fleet Runner, a man not yet in his mid-twenties, would have been handsome had it not been for a nose too large for his face. The feature gave him a hawkish look, yet to speak to him was to encounter a pleasant, likable individual. I soon discerned he was na?ve in the way he dealt with the outside world. He readily admitted he was the individual hired by a “white grandfather with glasses on his eyes” to make a mark on a paper. He had been returning home from a visit to a woman of his acquaintance who lived in Fort Ramson when a big man on horseback stopped him on the south bank of Turtle Crick downstream from the farm.


Chapter 52