Digging Woman was a wise woman, schooled in the knowledge of roots, herbs, grasses, and the phases of the moon. There was no such thing amongst the Comanche, unless you counted the Grandmothers who attended the women when it was their time to give birth. And, to judge by her dress and manner, Digging Woman had attained a great deal of stature within the tribe at an early age. Although the Sioux could be as dismissive of their women folk as the Comanche, the strength and truth of Digging Woman’s visions and her skill as a healer had won her great respect from the various Lakota tribes.

  She explained to me that she was born of a family famous for its medicine. Many great and powerful shamans had been born of her clan. In fact, her uncle was none other than Tatanka Yotanka, better known as Sitting Bull, the most revered of the Hunkpapa medicine men.

  The night before we reached her tribe’s camp, she informed me she would send a dream to her uncle, to tell him of their arrival. Later that evening, I saw what looked to be an owl rise from where she was sleeping, its muffled wings beating silently as it flew in the direction of her people. A coincidence? If I was a hundred percent White, and human to boot, perhaps I could believe that. But I have walked the thin line between the real and the unreal all my life, both as a Comanche brave and a shapeshifting werebeast, and I know better than to dismiss such things out of hand.

  In any case, the very next day as we pulled into the Hunkpapas’ camp, Sitting Bull strode from his tipi and warmly greeted his niece without anyone telling him we had arrived. I was able to understand most of what he said, as I’d spent the past couple of days learning as much of the Lakota tongue as possible. Once again my gift for languages had come in handy, allowing me to become fluent in a matter of weeks instead of months.

  “Digging Woman! Little daughter! I saw you in a dream last night! It is good to know my vision was true.”

  “It is good to see you as well, uncle.”

  “In my dream, you said you were bringing back powerful medicine to help us in our war against the Whites. Is this true?”

  Digging Woman hopped off her horse and gestured to me, wrapped in blankets and curled up on the pony drag like an ailing grandmother.

  “Judge for yourself, uncle.”

  Sitting Bull frowned and moved to lift the blanket from my face. Groggy from the herbs used in blunting the pain that stitched its way through my body like lightning, I felt my nose elongate, become a snout, and I flashed my fangs in warning, lest he touch me. Sitting Bull’s eyes widened and he stepped back from the pony drag, clearly shaken.

  “Coyote!”

  “Not Coyote. But one beloved of him. He calls himself Walking Wolf.”

  Sitting Bull nodded his head as he digested what she was telling him. “You have indeed done well, Digging Woman. Our medicine will indeed be made strong against the Whites! I will see to it that the skinwalker is made welcome.”

  That was my first meeting with Sitting Bull, and it would prove to be far from the last. True to his word, Sitting Bull had one of his subordinates surrender his tipi, where I spent the next month recovering from the grievous injuries dealt me by Poilu.

  During most of that time Digging Woman tended to me personally, but Sitting Bull was often a visitor to my tent as well. There was much on the chief’s mind, and he often talked with me when he was troubled. The Sitting Bull I knew then was still a young man, but he lacked the bloodthirsty brashness that marked so many of his fellow war chiefs. He was a thoughtful man, in his way. He reminded me of Medicine Dog, and I guess that was one reason I came to trust and respect him so quickly. When I looked into his eyes, I could tell he was a man who could see true.

  Word soon got out that Sitting Bull was playing host to a skinwalker and many of the rival Sioux chiefs came to pay him homage. I distinctly remember the day Red Cloud, chief of the Oglala Sioux, rode into camp. Red Cloud was feared far and wide, by Whites and Indians alike. Before the Whites found their way onto the Great Plains, Red Cloud’s name struck fear into the Utes, Crows, and Pawnees. A ruthless warrior, he was known as a man of pronounced cruelty, even by Indian standards. One story told how he pulled a drowning Ute out of the river by his hair, only to scalp the poor bastard once he got him to shore.

  When he arrived at Sitting Bull’s camp his party rode in whooping and shrieking, so everyone would know they were fierce and mighty warriors. Red Cloud was, by this time, an older man—older than Sitting Bull by a decade or more. He dismounted and Sitting Bull greeted him cordially. Red Cloud was a proud figure of a man, although he now limped from an imperfectly healed wound he’d received from a Pawnee arrow a few years back.

  I was sitting in front of my tipi, wrapped in a buffalo robe and smoking my pipe. I had been amongst the Sioux the better part of a month and was close to being completely healed. My left ear had yet to grow back completely—I wasn’t exactly sure why it was being so stubborn, perhaps because my attacker had been a vargr—but the burn tissue had all but disappeared, except for a thick patch on my right shoulder the size of an eagle dollar. I watched as Sitting Bull and Red Cloud strode in my direction. I could tell by the look in his eyes that Red Cloud was dismayed to see I wore the skin of a White.

  “You told me you had a skinwalker, Sitting Bull,” he protested. “How can this be a skinwalker when he is White?”

  Sitting Bull simply smiled and said, “He is White on the outside, but hairy on the inside.”

  I lay aside my pipe and stood up, shrugging off my buffalo robe, and looked Red Cloud square in the face. It was a hard thing to do, for he indeed had the hard eyes of a born killer. And, without speaking a word, I shifted into my true-skin. Red Cloud’s face showed no trace of fear or surprise, but I could see something change deep within those merciless eyes.

  He nodded, more to himself than to show approval of me. “With such powerful medicine, we can not lose against our enemies.”

  He was wrong, of course. Horribly wrong. But at the time it seemed like the truth.

  I spent thirteen years living as a member of Sitting Bull’s tribe. They were good years, although far from idyllic. The Sioux were considered hostiles, since they didn’t hold with the White government trying to build roads across their hunting grounds. Conflict was a constant part of Sioux life—as was death. But I had been raised amongst the Comanche, and the idea of being constantly at odds with those around you was far from unusual. Peace was good, but war was the way of things. This the Sioux and Comanche understood.

  During those days amongst the Hunkpapa, I came to be regarded as a living good luck piece. Braves who wanted success on the war path came to me so I could bless their shields and arrows. War chiefs who needed help in keeping control of their braves came to me for support. Women heavy of child came to me, so I could breathe into their nostrils and impart the blessing of Coyote on their unborn.

  In time I came to know all the great chiefs and warriors of the Sioux, not to mention the Cheyenne. They all came to my tipi, bringing gifts of ponies, food, buffalo robes, and fine beadwork. Their names read like a Who’s Who of the American Indian; Rain-in-the-Face, Gall, Scarlet Point, Lean Bear, Black Kettle, Little Robe, Blue Horse, Dull Knife, Pawnee Killer, Little Thunder, Spotted Tail, Crazy Horse… All of them brave men. All of them now dead.

  Soon I became quite wealthy, as the plains tribes judged such things, and I could take whatever woman I pleased to wife. So I picked Digging Woman. She might not have been a great beauty, but she was strong-minded, loyal, and fearless.

  And what about my fear of shapeshifting during intimate moments, you ask? Was ours a marriage in name only? Certainly not. During my recovery, Digging Woman spent many nights underneath the buffalo robes with me, chasing the illness from my bones by pressing her body against mine. When my fever finally broke, my body celebrated its escape from death and I soon found myself atop Digging Woman, but she was not frightened by my bestial appearance and far from unwilling. For the first time in my twenty years of life, I found myself actually making love to a woman.

  As Sitting Bull’s nephew-in-law, my status in the tribe became even greater. The only thing that would bring even stronger good luck to the Hunkpapa would be if a child was born of the union between skinwalker and Sioux. And in 1868, I was presented with a son. No man could have been prouder or happier than I was on the day my firstborn was presented to me, wrapped in the skin of a rabbit, squalling lustily and waving his tiny hands as if he would pull the clouds from the sky. His skin was covered with a light down, like that of a pup, and he yipped just like one when he was hungry. We named him Small Wolf.

  As I held my son, I no longer wondered who or what I was. It did not matter if I was White or vargr, or even Sioux as opposed to Comanche. As of that moment I was one-hundred percent Indian. And I knew that from that day forward I would always be Walking Wolf, no matter what I might call myself in the years to come.

  The seasons passed. Became years. The Whites eventually resolved their fight against themselves down South, and began refocusing their time and energies on winning the Indian territories. The government insisted on building a road to Bozeman along the Powder River, but Red Cloud would have none of it. He had threatened to fight all Whites who tried to use the Bozeman Trail, and constantly harassed the soldiers sent there to build the three guardian forts needed to secure the road.

  Then, in December of 1866, just as the gray clouds hovering over the Bighorn Valley warned of coming snows, High-Back-Bone of the Miniconjous and Red Cloud conferred on how best to destroy the Whites stationed at Fort Phil Kearney, along the banks of Little Piney Creek. They came to me for my blessings, and I gave it to them, although I secretly feared their efforts would prove futile.

  Red Cloud and High-Back-Bone marshalled their men and sent a small decoy party out to attack a wood train hauling timber to the post. A second decoy party, lead by Crazy Horse, rode boldly toward the front of the fort. Naturally, the commanding officer sent out his soldiers—eighty of them, to be exact, lead by a Captain William J. Fetterman. Crazy Horses’s men fell back and Fetterman followed, over the high ridge to the north and down the other side, where close to two thousand Sioux and Cheyenne braves burst from hiding places along the slope. The startled, overconfident soldiers found themselves engulfed by a sea of arrows. None survived.

  In what the Whites would call the Fetterman Massacre, the Plains Indians had succeeded in landing a solid blow against the Whites. With Colonel Carrington and his remaining soldiers trapped inside their fort by the fierce winter weather, and the troops at Forts Reno and C.F. Smith equally incapacitated, Red Cloud and his companions had proven themselves to be more than ignorant savages, nipping at the heels of their betters.

  To my private amazement, the government agreed to abandon the Bozeman Trail, confine military operations to defense of the existing Platte Road, and set aside eighty thousand square miles of the Missouri and Yellowstone river basins for exclusive occupancy by the Indians.

  Now full of confidence, during the summer of ‘67 Red Cloud’s war party attacked some wood-cutters near Fort Kearney, who barricaded themselves behind wagon boxes. As the soldiers were armed with the new breech-loading rifles, the war party was eventually driven off. However, the outcome at the Wagon Box Fight did not leave the Sioux feeling defeated. After all, they had denied the Bozeman Trail to all emigrant travel, trapped the soldiers in their forts, forced army supply trains to fight their way through, and had stolen enormous numbers of horses from the bluecoats.

  When the government sent messengers into the hostile camps with an invitation of peace talks in Laramie, Red Cloud dismissed them out of hand. He was too busy preparing for the fall buffalo hunt to waste his time on such foolishness. As far as Red Cloud was concerned, he had won his war. But he had no way of knowing that the Whites had agreed to surrender the Bozeman Trail only because the Union Pacific Railroad was opening better routes to the Montana mines farther west.

  The summer of 1868 was another good season for Red Cloud—he told the government’s runners that he would not attend the Peace Commission’s talks until Forts Phil Kearney and C.F. Smith were abandoned. And, at the end of July, he saw his demands carried out, as the soldiers marched out of Fort C.F. Smith, the northernmost post along the Bighorn River. Flushed with victory, he rode down from the mountains and set fire to the abandoned encampment. A few days later he was able to do the same to the much-hated Fort Kearney, after its garrison left.

  However, he still refused to attend the peace talks at Laramie. When I asked him about it, he said he would think about it after he had put in the winter’s meat for the tribe. But by the time he finally got around to signing the Medicine Lodge treaty, as it was called, it had become a worthless piece of paper. Red Cloud had no way of knowing this, of course. The workings of White government was beyond him—he had no way of knowing that a new president had been elected. A president who had seen to it that the Peace Commission was permanently adjourned and had publicly announced that the settlers and emigrants headed westward were to be protected even if it meant the extermination of every Indian tribe. Like I said, there was no way he or any of the other chiefs who had put their names on the peace treaty could have known that.

  But they would soon find out.

  Black Kettle was a Cheyenne chief, much respected by his fellows, although he had lost control over some of his younger warriors in the last few years. Black Kettle was old and tired of fighting. He wanted peace with the Whites, and had been instrumental in talking many of the chiefs into signing the Medicine Lodge Treaty.

  Angered when the bluecoats refused them rifles promised in the treaty, some of Black Kettle’s more hotheaded young braves went on a raid into Kansas, killing settlers and stealing their horses. Their war party left a trail across the snowy prairies that pointed to Black Kettle’s winter camp as starkly as a finger. On November 27, 1868, just as dawn broke, the blare of a military band woke the unsuspecting Cheyenne and brought them, sleepy-eyed, from their tipis. A bluecoat with golden hair ordered his men to open fire with their carbines. Black Kettle grabbed his wife and jumped onto a pony tethered outside his lodge and galloped for safety across the Washita River. A bullet struck Black Kettle in the back, while another struck his wife. They fell, dead, into the icy water of the Washita. The Indian Wars had begun.

  Over the next few years the White government’s Peace Policy proved itself to be just words on paper. The tide of emigrants and settlers heading ever westward kept increasing. There was no end of the White Man and his covered wagons. The Sioux were not the only tribe to find their treaties violated—the Kiowa, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Comanche, and Apache all ended up lied to. Horses, blankets, guns and ammunition that had been promised them by the White Man’s treaties in exchange for allowing trails to be build across their lands never materialized.

  Equally disturbing was the effect the Union Pacific Railroad was having on the great buffalo herd that was the source of all life and social structure amongst the tribes that roamed the Great Plains. The railroad had, effectively, divided the buffalo into two herds, the northern and southern. At first the buffalo refused to acknowledge the iron horses that cut through their ancestral grazing ground, often blocking the tracks. Soon the railroad hired hunters, equipped with long rifles that could shoot as far as a mile away, to make sure the way was kept clear.

  The Whites slaughtered the great buffalo in numbers undreamed of by even the mightiest Indian hunter. And, in what seemed to be genuine perversity on their part, the White hunters usually left the carcasses to rot where they fell, taking only a tongue or a hump in order to collect their bounty.

  There was a madness on the land, and its name was Extinction.

  In the spring of 1870, Red Cloud did what none had ever thought he would do. He rode to Fort Fetterman, Wyoming, named after the bluecoat he had helped kill four years before, and told the commandant that he wanted to go to Washington and talk to the Great Father about the Fort Laramie Treaty and the possibility of going to a reservation. It is hard to say whether Red Cloud’s desire for peace came from a need to protect his people from certain extermination or if he had simply grown weary of the war path. I do not know for sure, and I was there. In any case, Red Cloud never took up arms against the Whites for the rest of his life. Still, he was far from a whipped dog. He had many complaints against the government, and he voiced them quite eloquently. The coldblooded killer had, over the years, developed into a skilled statesman.

  Red Cloud intended to trade and draw his treaty rations and annuities at or near Fort Laramie, although the government was equally determined to get the Sioux off the Platte and onto the reservation. Red Cloud gave in little by little, walking a narrow line between the White government and his own people. Any concessions not widely supported by the Sioux weakened his leadership—which rested, largely, on his ability to manipulate the Whites. Finally, in 1873, a compromise was reached. An agency would be created in northwestern Nebraska, just outside the boundary of the Great Sioux Reservation. The government built the Red Cloud Agency for the Oglalas and the Spotted Tail Agency for the Brules, their ancestral enemies.

  Although the Whites saw this as a victory, it soon began to turn sour. Violence still proved a problem, contracting frauds plagued the agency from the very beginning, and the Sioux did not respond well to the Indian Bureau’s high-handed attempts to “civilize” them by educating their children in the White Man’s ways while stripping them of their language and culture.

  Many of the Indians resented—or simply did not comprehend—the Whites’ desire to keep them away from the settlements and travel routes. Indians off the reservation did not automatically mean hostility. They might be out hunting, or visiting friends and family in neighboring tribes, or just wandering around the country, seeing the sights. However, the Whites felt greatly threatened by the Indians’ refusal to stay in one spot. The Indian Peace was as illusory as the treaties they had signed. Although Red Cloud stood fast, remaining on the reservation, hundreds of Oglala braves flocked to Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse.

 

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