Free Cries from the Earth by Terry C. Johnston Page A

or are they going to accompany me to look for their new homes on the reservation?”

Chapter 5
    Season of Hillal
1877
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    BY TELEGRAPH
    CHEYENNE.
    Indian and Deadwood News.
    CHEYENNE, May 19.—General Crook with Major Randall and Lieutenant Schuyler leave here in the morning for the agencies, where the final grand council will be held, which must be simply a formality, as the disarmament of the Indians renders their consent to any proposition easily obtained. A small band of Cheyennes arrived at Red Cloud Wednesday, bringing in some two hundred horses. The Indians are convinced that the government is acting in good faith, and are evincing a like fidelity to the terms of the surrender.
    Joseph stretched out his arm and tapped his younger brother on the shoulder. The moment Ollokot turned to look, Joseph laid a finger against his lips, then pointed that same finger at the brush more than an arrow-flight away at the edge of the ravine.
    Ollokot nodded and started away cautiously, creeping wide across the side of the grassy hill. Joseph remained still, watching his brother, then moving only his eyes to watch the brush below them, and listened. He smiled, feeling confident that they would bring even more meat into camp before the sun set beyond the valley.
    One by one, the days had been growing longer, allowing the brothers to leave their wives and lodges earlier every morning, to return from the high slopes later every evening. Today’s would be their last hunt together in these hills blanketed with huckle and gooseberries the women usually harvested in the heat of the Wa-wa-mai-khal, 1 hills the two had roamed as boys.
    That melancholy thought stabbed him again in a place well-protected by his breastbone. Joseph swallowed at the sharp pain of loss and watched his brother continue across the breast of the hill above him as they both slowly worked their way in on the deer that had taken cover in that copse of timber. Just the way it had been when they were boys, back when they carried toy bows and tiny knife-sharpened stick arrows, hoping to kill a ground squirrel or a vole with their mighty weapons. Because their father, an important chief, did not often have time to train his youngest son, it was Joseph who had taken his brother under his wing and helped the younger one along. So many hunts, so many trips through these hills, had they shared over countless seasons.
    They were truly more than brothers of blood. Joseph and Ollokot were friends. And that made them brothers of the heart.
    But now, things would never be the same again. These hills near the lake at the edge of the Camas Prairie, 2 just like the hills in the Wallowa where they both were born, would never again be theirs to hunt. Monteith and Cut-Off Arm had convinced the chiefs that any further resistance, any more stubborn attempts at delay, were nothing less than futile.
    The day after Toohoolhoolzote had been locked behind the iron bars inside the white man’s log house, Cut-Off Arm had taken the Nee-Me-Poo leaders on a day-long ride across Monteith’s reservation so each of them could select the sites where their bands would make their new homes, there to live out the rest of their existence the way the Christian bands were living out theirs attempting to be white men.
    â€œThis is the land of your father,” Old Joseph had instructed his eldest son in those moments before the old man died six winters ago.
    Tuekakas was his Nee-Me-Poo name, meaning “Old Grizzly.” When so many thousands of white people began to flood in upon a few hundred of his people, contrary to the guarantees of the white peace-talkers, Old Joseph tore up his copy of an early treaty he had signed and even burned the Bible he had kept in his lodge for more than thirty years, ever since his Christian baptism.
    Nearing his final breath, he clutched the hands of both sons weakly and made them promise, “You must never sell, you must never give away,