Free Ashes of Heaven by Terry C. Johnston

believe she had a shot at making peace for her people.

Chapter 6
    Big Hoop-and-Stick Game Moon
1877
    Old Wool Woman wasn’t exactly sure what moon it was. So much had happened since the fight at Belly Butte. Best she could figure, it was the latter days of the Big Hoop-and-Stick Game Moon. Not much chance that they had reached the early days of what her people called the Dusty Moon.
    Hard to know, really, the way the sky stayed cloudy, day and night. Hard to know how much of the old moon was left, or if the new moon had begun to swell again in the heavens. So cold, bleak, and endless were these days trudging back up the Buffalo Tongue River behind the half-breed who the Lakota of Buffalo Bull Sitting Down called “Big Leggings.” Her own Shahiyela simply called him “White.”
    Behind the two of them plodded six mules carrying supplies for their journey and gifts for her people. Around those mules rode the soldiers who were escorting her and Big Leggings into the traditional hunting grounds of the Northern People.
    â€œOld woman, you would tell me if you thought I was taking us in the wrong direction to find your people, wouldn’t you?” the half-breed had asked in Lakota at last night’s fire. “You would help me find them?” He always signed as he slowly spoke the tongue of the Hotohkesoneo-o, the Little Star People. *
    She knew enough of that Lakota tongue to understand this half-breed right from the first night when he had summoned her to the Bear Coat’s lodge where the three of them talked of taking gifts to her people, talked of surrender and peace—when she had spoken of the Sacred Medicine Hat Lodge as the object of their quest.
    â€œI would tell you,” she had answered him.
    â€œI am not wrong?”
    â€œNo, the camp is still moving west.”
    His eyes seemed to soften in the flickering firelight. It was easy to see how she had reassured him. “They are in a hurry, old woman,” Big Leggings said.
    She had looked back down into the fire and thought a moment before she responded. “Those people are hungry. They do not have time to journey slow. There are too many bellies to feed.”
    Many times since her capture she had suffered stabbing pangs of guilt because she had so much to eat. Back when the Bear Coat’s soldiers first reached the fort with their captives, the wary guards had cooked every meal, then brought the Shahiyela women and children their portions. But it wasn’t long before the soldiers gave their prisoners weekly rations and allowed the women to cook their own meals. Old Wool Woman hadn’t seen so much food in … a long, long time.
    In those days before she was captured, just after the Red Fork fight when she lost her beloved Black White Man, when she left the Crazy Horse people and had gone to visit Tangle Hair’s village on the Pretty Fork, † she had trained herself to eat less and less so that she could give some of her food to the young ones. Many nights she went to bed with an aching belly, sucking on a short piece of chokecherry from which she had peeled the bark. That sliver of wood gave her mouth something to do as she drifted off to sleep, gave her tongue something to taste when she could give her belly very little to fill it.
    But now she had all she wanted of the soldier food: the salty meat and hard, dry crackers. Back at the army’s fort, she and the other prisoners had watched the soldiers open hard containers from which they poured strange foods onto their tin plates. Foods red, yellow, and green—all with new and pleasing tastes that Old Wool Woman quickly grew quite fond of.
    But nothing pleased her quite so much as a cup of scalding coffee, strong and flavorful, sweetened with heaps of the ve-ho-e ’s sugar. Each night spent at the fire with these soldiers, she remembered how she once was called Sweet Taste Woman. In those long ago days when life itself was sweet. As a