Bitterroot (Billy Bob Holland 3)

The woods were dark, the larch trees shaggy with moss. An animal, perhaps the cougar that had been getting into the pet bowls, growled somewhere on the other side of the river. Lucas shifted his weight and stared into the darkness, one knee crimping into the pine needles on the ground, his young face and long-sleeved cream-colored shirt painted with the light from the fire. I looked at the innocence in his face and his refusal to show fear, and felt again my old inadequacy as his father.

But before I could speak, he said, "You believe in hell, Billy Bob?"

"I can't rightly say."

"Sue Lynn thinks she's going there."

"What has she done that's so terrible?"

"She has this nightmare all the time. It might make sense to you, but I sure cain't cipher it out."

The WORLD of Sue Lynn Big Medicine's sleep seemed more a collective record of her people than a dream. There was no historical date on the scene nor many particular names associated with it, but the season was summer and the hills above the river were treeless and golden in the heat, the water down in the river basin milky green, tepid to the touch, the surface flecked with cottonwood bloom.

The column of soldiers came out of the south, the razored blue peaks of distant mountains at their backs. They wore gray hats that were damp and wilted in the heat and blue blouses and trousers with yellow stripes on the legs, and the pommels of their saddles were strung with wooden canteens that clunked against the leather. The soldiers' blouses were sun-faded and stiff with salt, puffed in the hot wind, and their trousers so dark with sweat against their saddles that the soldiers looked as if they had fouled themselves.

The Crow scouts rode at the head of the column with an officer who was dressed differently from the rest. His boots were polished and flared at the knees, his trousers skintight, his yellow hair longer than a woman's, his hat festooned with bird plumes. The sun danced on the nickel plate of his English Bulldog revolvers. An ethereal light seemed to glow in his face, and he breathed the wind as though the chaff and dust in it were simply the embellishments on a grand day in history that was of his own manufacture.

The Crow horses pitched their heads, the nostrils dilating, the eyes protruding like walnuts, then they whirled in circles, fighting against the bit as though snakes lay in the golden grass that grew up the slope of the hill. The cottonwoods on the river were empty of birds, the buffalo briefly visible on the horizon, then gone. Magpies clattered in an arroyo, pulling shreds of meat from the exposed ribs of an elk that had already been butchered and skinned with stone knives.

The wind changed and a familiar odor struck the noses of the Crow scouts, a dense mixture of woodsmoke, horses hobbled among shade trees, animal hides curing over fires piled with willow branches and wet leaves, and churned mud flats that were now green and slick with feces in the sun.

The Crow were the first to reach the crest of the hill. What they saw in the valley below them turned them to stone.

The wickiups along the river and up the arroyos numbered in the thousands. These were all Sioux and Northern Cheyenne, the enemies of the Crow, but for just a moment the scouts wished the Crow were part of the assemblage, too, because surely the red people now had enough numbers to drive the white men back across the mountains to a place in the East where all the white man's diseases and his greed and his treachery came from.

The officer who was different from all the others joined them, his face impassive, his profile motionless against the hard blue background of the sky. His hair hung in ringlets on his shoulders, and he wiped the dampness off his throat with a kerchief and raised himself slightly in the stirrups, the leather creaking under him, in order to form a better view of the valley.

The Crow waited, not speaking, their faces as flat and empty of emotion as potter's clay. They had long ago learned not to speak to the officer unless he addressed them first. His anger was of a quiet kind that burned just below the skin, but his capacity for cruelty was legendary. The kitchen tent had been converted to a workshop where the officer indulged his hobby of stuffing the animals and birds he shot while his men ate cold rations. A soldier who stole a dried apple from a supply wagon was shaved bald and not allowed to mount his horse for one hundred miles. Three deserters were forced to kneel, then were shot to death at point-blank range.

Another officer, this one young, the exposed skin of his chest emblazoned with a V-shaped patch of sunburn, rode forward from the column, posting in the saddle.

"Sir?" he said, sweat running through his eyebrows.

But the officer who was different, whom the Indians called the Son of the Morning Star, did not answer.

"Sir?" the younger officer repeated.

"What?"

"What are your orders, sir?"

The Son of the Morning Star pulled off his fringed gloves and rubbed the tips of his fingers against the heel of his right hand, as though enjoying the feel of the oil in his skin.

"Why, young man, I'm very glad you asked that. I think I'm going to take an elk's tooth off a squaw's dress today," he said.

The younger officer let the focus go out of his eyes to hide his recognition of the senior officer's implication.

Big Medicine, the spokesman for the Crow scouts, glanced at his friends, then backed his horse away from the crest until he was abreast of the Son of the Morning Star.

"We go down there?" Big Medicine asked. "They're ours for the taking, my painted friend," the Son of the Morning Star said.

"We go down there, in that valley, we sing death song first," he said.

"Then you are cowards and you do not belong on this hill. Be gone from my sight," the Son of the Morning Star replied.

But the three Crow did not move. The Son of the Morning Star was scribbling in a book filled with blank pages. He tore a page with a single line on it from the book and handed it to a messenger. "Can you read what that says?" he asked. "Yes, sir. 'Hurry-bring packs,'" the messenger replied.

"Take these cowards back with you. They dishonor sacred ground," the Son of the Morning Star said.