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Breathing harshly, his side aching, Night Horse fell to his knees.
He held his face in his hands and cried again.
He had cheated death today, but he now wondered if he was really so fortunate to still be breathing.
He was now a man without a people. As such, was he not, in a sense, dead, himself?
He had lost the right to live among people, either white or Crow. He would now live the life of a lost man who belonged nowhere, a man whose pride was gone.
In his heart he had longed to gain celebrity as a Custer scout, yet that would never be. He was now alone—totally, totally alone.
He could never return to his home, to his mother, or his brother, because when he left to ally himself with Custer, he was told by his Crow people never to return.
Even then, he had been dead to them.
Dispirited, filled with remorse and a deep, gnawing regret and shame, Night Horse rose to his feet and walked onward, his steps listless, his heart heavy.
Feeling empty inside, plagued by recurring visions of the battlefield, he walked awhile, and then he made himself remember that he had been a proud warrior before he had become a scout for the white eyes. His ahte, his father, had instilled within him much courage.
He reached deep inside himself now for what remained of that courage.
He had been taught the art of survival, as well, by his ahte, and Night Horse vowed he would survive even this . . . the worst day of his life.
He would make a new life for himself, even if he must live it alone.
The first thing he must do was steal a horse, and then find a place where he could be hidden from any who might realize he had not died and come looking for him.
He smiled as he thought of the perfect place where he could be safe, where he could make a world for himself as he learned to live alone.
It was a place that he and his brother Brave Wolf had found when he was a young brave trying to pretend he was a great, valiant warrior.
Yes, Night Horse would go there. He was a survivor, a man who had just cheated death.
Now he must find a way to tolerate his empty life, and he would, for this place where he would make his new life was a place of beauty where he would live among animals, and where eagles made their nests and taught their children how to soar among the clouds.
But even those things, which had always before filled his heart with joy, would not keep him from remembering, over and over again, what he had experienced today.
It was sheetsha-sheetsha, bad, bad!
Chapter Two
The American Indian once
grew as naturally as the wild
sunflowers; he belongs just
as the buffalo belonged.
—Luther Standing Bear,
Oglala Sioux Chief
Three months later—Montana
The fire burned soft and low in the tepee. Shadows thrown by the flames leapt on the inside buffalo-hide walls of the lodge, where there were no painted designs, for this was the home of an elderly widow.
The tepee that she had shared with her chieftain husband had been taken down, hide by hide, pole by pole, and removed from the village, for it was not good to live in a tepee where someone had died . . . not even a powerful chief.
