Free Ashes of Heaven by Terry C. Johnston Page A

girl those tiny white grains had tickled her tongue, had become her greatest treat.
    Then came the beginning of this winter when Three Finger Kenzie’s soldiers attacked their village in the mountains, driving the Ohmeseheso into the sub-freezing dawn with little more than what they wore on their backs. The day she kissed Black White Man goodbye before he tore away from their lodge to fight off the attack, the day she lost her last son to the soldiers. The men of her family had given their lives in that battle.
    After that day, life would never again be as sweet for Sweet Taste Woman and the Shahiyela. With her scrap of greasy, fire-smudged blanket wrapped about her, she had joined the rest of the survivors who lumbered on frozen feet, day after day, in search of the Crazy Horse village. No more was this old, weary, frozen person known as Sweet Taste Woman.
    Now she was called Old Wool Woman.
    That greasy blanket was always at her side, wrapped tightly about her. Though the soldiers had given her a gray army blanket and a buffalo robe of her own, Old Wool Woman did not abandon the blanket that had sheltered her through all those days of freezing and hunger. She held it tightly against her as she rolled up beside the soldiers’ fire to sleep each night, thinking of Black White Man. And every morning she lashed it around her waist to provide an additional layer against this winter’s wolfish winds.
    There were times Old Wool Woman felt as if she were dreaming through much of the days on this journey with Big Leggings, her head tucked beneath a flap of her soldier blanket, the strong American horse rocking beneath her as it lunged forward with each step, breaking through the icy snow. From time to time the half-breed awoke her from her reverie, pointing to a patch of ground in some creekbottom where, it was clear to see, the village had stopped, made camp, and rested for the night.
    How reassuring it was whenever she and Big Leggings discovered such places, dismounting to walk across the ground where her people and the Crazy Horse Lakota had camped. Had it not been for the soldier food, she would have suffered the same terrible hunger her people had to be suffering now. Rarely did Big Leggings’s small party encounter any game throughout the short, cold days of this journey. Yet her belly rarely grew empty enough to complain.
    In this season of despair, Old Wool Woman hoped her people had found enough buffalo to end their tragic search.
    From the divide west of the Buffalo Tongue, Big Leggings led them down into the valley of the Roseberry River. * Along the wide path the village had scratched across the snow, they encountered very few buffalo, nothing more than a handful of old bulls here and there. In the river valleys she reminded herself to look for the burial places—nooks and crevices back in the rocks where her people would have placed the bodies of those who died from the ceaseless cold, from the starvation. She was sure the very old, or the very young, could not defend themselves against the constant, endless snows. Old Wool Woman knew there would be mourning in the lodges of the Ohmeseheso. More mourning than any people deserved.
    Almost as if Ma-heo-o, the Everywhere Spirit, had abandoned his people.
    Perhaps the prophecy Buffalo Bull Sitting Down had angrily delivered after their fight with the soldiers on the Little Sheep River † had come to pass. In his fateful vision during the sun dance held the previous summer, the Lakota leader had been told that the warriors would be victorious, but that none of the victorious men and women were to take anything from the bodies. They were to remove nothing from the battlefield.
    But suddenly drunk with their victory, the Lakota and the Shahiyela had claimed soldier weapons, stripped the bodies, torn the saddles from the dead horses—revelling in their new wealth. So perhaps the Everywhere Spirit really was punishing them for disobeying Him.
    Maybe