Free Bill Dugan by Crazy Horse Page B

women among them.
    Harney’s men moved among the fallen. Women had their dresses yanked over their heads. If they were living they were raped and if dead, their pubic hair was cut out as if it were a scalp. The remaining Sioux who managed to escape ran for Fort Laramie, believing it was their only chance to survive.
    Curly saw the smoke from miles away. He and Hump and Little Hawk lashed their ponies, fearing the worst as they sprinted for the village. As they drew closer, they could see the ruined lodges, some still blazing, others already reduced to ashes.
    Dismounting on the edge of the silent, abandoned camp, they walked gingerly among the dead. One by one they checked the bodies, hoping to find survivors. The mutilated women lay everywhere. Curly choked back a sob, trying to control his rage. He thought of the young woman he had killed, and was glad that he had been unable to scalp her. Seeing the women of his own tribe brutalized this way convinced him that he had been right. Women and children should not be victims of the war.
    Hump was calling for him to mount up, when Curly heard a sound from the far side of a tipi that lay on its side, the skin walls scorched but not burned through.
    Stepping around the upended lodge, he saw a woman, a baby in her arms, lying on her side, curled into a ball. The baby was whimpering. He moved closer and knelt beside her, only to realize it was not the baby but the woman who cried so pitifully. He lifted the baby from her arms and saw that it was dead.
    Trying to comfort her, he shouted for Little Hawk to make a travois. When it was ready, he wrapped the woman in a buffalo robe. Leaving Hump and Little Hawk, he rode out onto the prairie. Over and over, he asked her name, but she could only stare at him, strange, childlike sobs wracking her slender body.
    That night, she was able to speak. She said her name was Yellow Woman. She was a Cheyenne, the niece of Ice, a great shaman, and had been visiting with the Brule.
    “I’ll take you home,” Curly told her. She looked at him as if she did not believe him or worse, as if she did not care. She just sat across the fire from him, her eyes black as the sky overhead, swallowing the firelight as it danced between them.
    Once more, he said, “I’ll take you home.”
    And he knew she didn’t care.

Chapter 8
July 1857
    T HE NEXT TWO YEARS were hard ones. Curly wandered from place to place, sometimes with Hump, sometimes with Young Man Afraid, sometimes with both and sometimes with neither. Sioux and Cheyenne alike made him welcome, but something gnawed at him. It was as if he had swallowed a small, vicious beast that chewed on his insides, not to get out, but simply for the pleasure of tormenting him.
    On his long rides across the plains, he said little, even to his
kola.
Hump respected the silence and did not press him. Both young men knew that things were changing in ways they could not see and could not understand even if they could see. The Sioux way of life was being bombarded from all sides. Soldier chiefs like Harney attacked them, some of the Sioux had given up, their spirits broken, and hung around the forts until the yearly white man gifts were distributed, then wandered off, their heads down, their hearts numb.
    Curly envied them that numbness. He felt too many things, and wanted to feel none of them. Better, he sometimes thought, to feel nothing at allthan to feel the empty ache in his belly. It was like the ache he felt when he watched Black Buffalo Woman carry water to her mother’s lodge, or when he would catch her staring at him as she sat in front of the lodge doing beadwork that everyone said was the best they had ever seen. She looked at him, and he looked back. And it seemed that that was all that would ever happen between them.
    Yellow Woman’s uncle Ice understood these things. He was a wise man, like Curly’s father, a shaman who saw with more eyes than other men. He could see things they could not see, and knew