Free Sing Down the Moon by Scott O’Dell Page A

harvest.
    There was much talk after that about the Long Knives who lived in the gray-walled fort in the midst of our fields. Hardly a day went by that some new story did not spread from hut to hut about them. The wheat flour would run out before winter came. The flour was cursed and if we went on eating it we would all die. The Long Knives wanted us to die and so we would, in some way or another.
    One story came to use from three different men, who had been in a place fifteen days' journey to the north. Each man brought the same story, so it was surely true. The place was called Sand Creek and it was near a town which was in the mountains. They said that a village of Cheyennes and Arapahos were asleep in their lodges. There was a white preacher and he rode out from the town with some men and when they came to the sleeping village he gave an order: "Kill and scalp all Indians, big and little," he shouted, "since nits make lice."
    Without warning, every Indian was killed. After
ward scalps were taken and shown to the people in the town.
    This story was told many times and everyone feared that the same thing would happen to us. The Long Knives would steal out from their fort and kill us all while we slept. Yet our men did nothing. They sat and shook their heads, but made no plans to defend themselves or their families should the Long Knives come. Even Tall Boy did nothing but talk about the soldiers and how they wanted to see us die.
    One day I asked him, "What are you going to do if the Long Knives fall upon us in the night? Will you cover your head and wait to be slain?"
    He looked at me and bit his lip. "The gods will tell us what to do," he said. "Now they punish us. When the time comes they will speak and we will hear them."
    My father talked this way, too, and many of the other men at Bosque Redondo when summer was ending.

20
    B EFORE SNOW CAME, when the first north wind blew, my mother and I and my sister started to work, strengthening our hut.
    Tall Boy's father knew one of the Long Knives. I think that he gave the soldier a valuable belt of silver and turquoise. Whatever it was, the white man gave him a speckled horse, too old for the soldiers to ride any longer that they were going to kill. We borrowed this horse and went across the river and cut willow poles, which we used to buttress the thick walls and the sagging roof.
    Tall Boy, besides getting the horse for us to use, helped put the poles in place and heap up the earth against them. This pleased my mother. She began to say a word to him now and then and even smiled a little when he was around.
    Therefore I was not surprised that Tall Boy's father came over one evening after we finished working on the hut and talked to my father. Then the next day Tall Boy's two uncles came over and talked. The talks went on every day until the new moon and then they made a good marriage bargain, though my mother did not get the old speckled horse, which she wanted.
    Relatives came to the wedding. There were so many that all of them could not get inside the hut. Tall Boy went in first, then my father and me. Tall Boy and I sat on a blanket in front of a basket of corn gruel and a jar of water with a ladle. My father crouched nearby. Relatives filed in and sat on both sides of us. Then my father made a cross with white corn pollen over the gruel and a circle around the cross.
    First I dipped water with the ladle and poured it over Tall Boy's hands and he did the same to me. Then he dipped a finger into the basket toward the east and ate a pinch of the gruel and I ate a pinch also. We ate pinches from all the different directions. Then the wedding was over and everyone came forward and began to feast.
    The elders, as they feasted, gave me advice about being married. One aunt told me not to scold. My unmarried aunt told me to be patient. Two others told me the same thing. My cousin told me to be polite to everyone, even to strangers. There was advice until the relatives left at