Free Thunder Rolling in the Mountains by Scott O’Dell Page A

Deer Woman, but she was not there. I looked into the gully. Young Joseph crouched at the bottom. Beside him knelt a women who was great with child.
    I motioned for them to climb out. "Here," I said. "Ride for Sitting Bull. Now!"
    Young Joseph pushed the woman on the horse and climbed up behind her. I slapped the pony and it bolted off.
    I saw many people grabbing horses and riding away. A woman rode by on a gray horse. A Cheyenne rode up, hoofs pounding, and grabbed her bridle. He fired his pistol. The bullet struck her in the back and she fell to the ground.
    Caught in a rain of bullets, horses screamed and died. I looked around for another pony, but the horses had gone. I was trapped.
    I leaped into the gully. Bullets passed over my
head. I could not look out. I hoped that Bending Willow and Deer Woman were safe.
    I heard war cries and gunfire above me. The war whoops of our warriors mingled with the shouts of the white soldiers. Then the fighting moved away.
    A warrior rolled over the edge and into the gully beside me. He landed heavily in the dirt. It was Swan Necklace. Blood covered his left arm. He had a gun in each hand.
    "Keep them loaded," he said. He tossed me one of the guns and a pouch of bullets. "We have pushed the Blue Coats out of our camp. Now we will fight to the death."
    All that day we fought pinned in the gully. The Blue Coats fired at us from behind rocks. Some shot from behind their dead horses. We were too busy to talk but our eyes spoke for us.
    When the shadows fell, the firing died away. Now and again a lone rifle barked. Without the sun the air grew even colder. Some of us were wrapped in robes, but like Swan Necklace, our warriors were stripped for battle. They fought without leggings. They had no shirts and most had no moccasins. Wearing only breechcloths, they shivered in the cold.
    Snow fell silently over the land. In the gathering darkness I peered over the edge of the gully and saw bodies strewn across the plain. Children cried with cold and fear and pain.
    People began to crawl across the ground, keeping flat so the soldiers would not see them. Warriors came in from the rocks and hollows. They brought news. The news was not good.
    Many were dead. Three of our dead were women, and the rest were warriors. Some of our greatest warriors would fight no more. Brave Ollokot, my uncle, was dead. He had fought from behind a rock, where he had killed many Blue Coats. But when he rose to fire his rifle, he was struck in the forehead. Too-hul-hul-sote was dead. His body lay on the field in front of the Blue Coats, where we could not retrieve it. Lone Bird was dead. Lean Elk was dead. These last two deaths were bitter, because the bullets that killed them did not come from the Blue Coats but from our own warriors who mistook them for Cheyenne scouts.
    We buried our dead, those we could reach. As we did at Big Hole, we dug shallow graves in the sides of the gullies. There was no time for a proper burial. We shoved them into the holes and covered them with earth.
    We had plenty of buffalo chips but did not start fires. The light would give the Blue Coats an easy target. We shared cold buffalo and cakes of camas root. I did not eat, nor did most of the other women. We gave the food to the children first, then to the warriors.
    We had gone all day without water. Two by two,
we crawled to the stream. We tied buffalo horn cups to rawhide and let them down into the water. When it was my turn I gulped the icy water. It was sweeter than honey to my dry throat.
    No one slept that night. With camas hooks and knives we dug deep trenches to shelter our people. Above the trenches, on the low bluffs, we dug shallow rifle pits for the warriors. We used pans to throw the dirt out of the holes we dug. As I dug with my camas hook I wondered if we would ever be safe.

Eighteen
    M ORNING CAME but the sun hid its face. The cold wind was thick with falling snow. Between our camp and the soldiers the snow was so deep that I