When the group decision to split up came to them, they met in council to decide where they should go. Most were for heading on south into Wyoming, hiding in the Bighorn Mountains. Craig was asked for his view.
‘The bluecoats will come there,’ he said. With a stick he drew the line of the Bighorn River. ‘They will look for you here in the south, and here in the east. But I know a place in the west. It is called the Pryor Range. I was raised there.’
He told them about the Pryors.
‘The lower slopes teem with game. The forests are thick and their branches blur the smoke rising from cooking fires. The streams are full of fish and higher there are lakes with many fish also. The wasichu never come there.’
The clan agreed. On 1 July they peeled away from the main party of Cheyenne and, guided by Craig, headed north-west into south Montana, avoiding General Terry’s patrols, which were fanning out from the Bighorn but not that far west. In mid-July they reached the Pryors and it was still as Craig had said.
The teepees were shrouded by trees and invisible from half a mile away. From a nearby rock, today called Crown Butte, a watchman could see many miles, but no-one came. The hunters brought many deer and antelope from the forests and children fished fat trout from the streams.
Whispering Wind was young and healthy.
Her clean wound healed fast until she could run again, swift as a fawn. Sometimes he caught her eye as she brought food to the menfolk and always his heart hammered inside him. She gave no sign of what she felt, casting her glance downward when s
he caught him staring. He could not know that something in her belly seemed to melt and her ribcage wanted to burst when she took a glance from those dark blue eyes.
During the early autumn they just fell in love.
The women noticed. She would return from serving the men flushed, the front of her buckskin tunic rising and falling, and the older women would cackle with glee. She had no mother nor aunt left alive, so the squaws were from different families. But they had sons among the twelve unmarried and therefore eligible braves. They wondered which one had set the beautiful girl afire. They teased her to let them know before he was stolen by another, but she told them they were talking nonsense.
In September the leaves fell and the camp moved higher to be screened by the conifers. The nights turned chill as October came. But the hunts were good and the ponies cropped the last grass before turning to moss, bark and lichen. Rosebud adapted like the ponies around her and Craig would go down to the prairie and return with a sack of fresh grass, sliced in tufts with his bowie knife.
If Whispering Wind had had a mother she might have intervened with Tall Elk, but there was no-one, so eventually she told her father herself. His rage was terrible to behold.
How could she think such a thing? The wasichu had destroyed all her family. This man would go back to his people and there was no place for her. Moreover, the warrior who had taken the bullet in the shoulder at the Little Bighorn was now almost recovered. The shattered bones had finally knit. Not straight, but whole again. He was Walking Owl and he was a fine and brave warrior. He was to be her betrothed. It would be announced the next day. That was final.
Tall Elk was perturbed. It could be the white man felt the same. He would have to be watched day and night from now on. He could not go back to his people; he knew where they camped. He would stay the winter but he would be watched. And so it was.
Craig was suddenly moved to stay and sleep in a teepee with another family. There were three other single braves sharing the same lodge and they would stay alert if he tried to move during the night.
It was at the end of October that she came for him. He was lying awake, thinking of her, when a knife slowly and soundlessly slit one of the panels of the teepee. He rose silently and stepped through. She stood in the moonlight looking up at him. They embraced for the first time and the blazing heat flowed back and forth.
She broke free, stepped back and beckoned. He followed where she led, through the trees to a spot out of sight of the camp. Rosebud was saddled up, a buffalo robe rolled behind the saddle. His rifle was in its long sheath by the shoulder. The saddlebags bulged with food and ammunition. A pinto pony was also tethered. He turned and they kissed and the cold night seemed to spin around him. She whispered in his ear, ‘Take me to your mountains, Ben Craig, and make me your woman.’
‘Now and for ever, Whispering Wind.’
They mounted up and walked the horses quietly through the trees until they were clear, then rode down past the butte and towards the plain. At sunrise they were back in the foothills. At dawn a small party of Crow saw them in the distance and turned north towards Fort Ellis on the Bozeman Trail.
The Cheyenne came after them; they were six, moving fast, travelling light with their rifles slung behind their shoulders, hatchets in waistbands, trade blankets beneath them, and they had their orders. The betrothed of Walking Owl was to be brought back alive. The wasichu would die.
The Crow party rode north and they rode hard. One of them had been with the army in the summer and knew that the bluecoats had posted a big reward for the white renegade, enough to buy a man many horses and trade goods.
They never made the Bozeman Trail. Twenty miles south of the Yellowstone they ran into a small patrol of cavalrymen, ten in all, commanded by a lieutenant. The former scout explained what they had seen, using mainly sign language, but the lieutenant understood. He turned the patrol south for the mountains, with the Crow acting as guides, seeking to cut the trail.
That summer the news of the massacre of Custer and his men had swept America like a blast of cold air. Far to the east the high and mighty of the nation had gathered at Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, to celebrate the first centenary of independence on July the Fourth, 1876. The news from the western frontier seemed unbelievable. An immediate inquiry was ordered.
After the battle the soldiers of General Terry had scoured the fatal hillside, seeking an explanation of the disaster. The Sioux and the Cheyenne were twenty-four hours gone and Terry was in no mood to pursue them. Reno’s survivors had been relieved but they knew nothing beyond what they had seen as Custer and his men rode out of sight behind the hills.
On the hillside every scrap of evidence was gathered and stored, even as the decomposing bodies were hastily buried. Among those things collected were the sheets of paper stuck in the long grass. Among these were the notes taken by Captain Cooke.
None of those who had stood behind Custer when he interrogated Ben Craig was left alive, but the clerkish notes by the adjutant said enough. The army needed a reason for the disaster. Now they had one: the savages had been forewarned and were fully prepared. The unwitting Custer had ridden into a massive ambush. More, the army had a scapegoat. Incompetence could not be accepted; treachery could. A reward of $1,000 was posted for the taking of the scout, dead or alive.
The trail went cold, until a party of Crow saw the fugitive, with an Indian girl behind him, riding out of the Pryor Mountains in the last days of October.
The lieutenant’s horses had rested, fed and watered through the night. They were fresh and he rode them hard to the south. His career was at stake.
Just after the sun rose Craig and Whispering Wind reached the Pryor Gap, a defile of lowland between the main range and the single peak of West Pryor. They crossed the defile, cantered through the foothills of West Pryor and emerged into the badlands, rough country of grassy ridges and gullies that went west for fifty miles.