Moon of Bitter Cold by Frederick J. Chiaventone

Author:Frederick J. Chiaventone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

7

Canwepekasna wi

(Moon When The Wind Shakes Off The Leaves)

October 1866

Red Cloud watched impassively as the warriors slipped silently down the frost-rimed slopes below him. It had taken months of hard work and clever language to get to this point and now he would see just how well his words had worked. Lakota, Arapaho, Cheyenne were all represented here today, and he was anxious to see if he had been able to smooth relations sufficiently to let all of the parties involved cooperate without the petty squabbling and sniping that had become the usual custom among so many of these people. It had been a difficult process. Red Cloud knew that he was not a popular man among the tribes. He had accumulated a number of enemies even among his own people. Which made this moment even more appealing than it might otherwise have been. It seemed that he had always had to do everything better than everyone else.

He had seen but eight winters when his father had died of the wasichus’ bad whiskey and he was left, in many ways, to fend for himself. Certainly there had been several older men who took an interest in the boy’s early years but none of them was his father and the fact that his father had died of drinking rather than in battle or even from an accident in hunting cast a pall over him. He was the child who stood just outside the ring of light thrown by the oceta1 listening in the darkness. Watching the other boys grow to manhood in a different society, a different world than was allowed to him. He had always felt separate and apart from the others and had always felt that he had to prove himself in every endeavor. So it was that he had grown up always going after the largest, meanest bull buffalo. He sought out the rogue bear in her den. In combat he dashed ahead of the others and when he killed a man he did it completely. He would go into a frenzy of slaughter and utterly destroy and dismember whatever enemy he came up against. Some of the older warriors had begun to look at him strangely. He had overheard some of them talking about him one night after a very successful raid against the Crow. Red Cloud had singled out his foe, a brave man with a fierce reputation, caught him unaware as he crossed a stream and brought him down with relative ease. But afterward he had leaped onto the Crow’s body in the shallows and hacked it to pieces with his tomahawk. The stream ran red with the man’s blood. It pooled in the shallows and then drifted into the current where it was sucked whirling downstream in a pink ribbon. The older warriors thought that the Crow, although well slain, was deserving of more respect than the young Red Cloud afforded him.

Red Cloud had been incensed by these comments and soon afterward had taken to hanging around the white man’s Fort Laramie.

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