Cries from the Earth (18 page)

Good that his child should be born free, in these final days before their freedom would be no more.

Catching his breath, he watched Ollokot's wife,
Wetatonmi,
and Joseph's own nearly grown daughter,
Hophop Onmi,
whom he had named Sound of Running Feet because of how the tiny one had loved to run about with wild abandon as soon as she had learned to remain stable on two feet. With those two women and their three travois ponies walked
Welweyas,
the half-man, half-woman of the Wallowa who for nearly all his life had preferred to wear the traditional dress of a woman.

Farther back down the trail came the men with the nine other horses laden with beef: Joseph's old friend, Half Moon, and his young nephew, Three Eagles; also the warrior whom missionaries had once given the Christian name of John Wilson before he abandoned the white man's faith for good, returning to the reservation and the Dreamer religion. Behind them all rode Ollokot, bringing up the rear protectively.

Joseph smiled in the gray light of day-coming. He did not have to see Ollokot's face to know for sure who it was at the end of the procession. It would be his brother. They made an able pair, these two, he realized again. He himself always stepped to the fore, to be the first into whatever his people confronted. And Ollokot—his loyal, steadfast brother—always saw to it that the rear was protected, that no stragglers were left behind in the march, that … that no one could attack those at the end of the column without suffering his wrath.

They really were two of a kind, he decided as he put his pony into motion, starting into the canyon of the Split Rock. Both of them knew that should they be required to offer their lives up for their people, each of these brothers would willingly give that ultimate, and most sacred, sacrifice for the Wallowa band.

When they reached the camp, Joseph decided he would let the others continue on to Ollokot's lodge with the travois and those quarters of butchered beef. But he himself would peel off and hurry for the squat separation lodge a
Nee-Me-Poo
woman would erect away from the rest of the village when she was nearing her time to deliver.

Closer and closer he felt himself drawing to her now at this hour when she might need him most. Close enough that the faint smell of woodsmoke tickled his nostrils. Some of the bands must already be up and rekindling breakfast fires.

But when he studied the eastern sky ahead Joseph realized it was far too early for the camp to be rising for the day. There was no reason to make an early march; there was nowhere for them to go for this one last day of freedom. Strange that he should smell woodsmoke this early. But perhaps it was only the remnants of last night's lingering fires rising from the lodges, fanned to a fury while the people sang and danced, courted and coupled, before the
Nee-Me-Poo
fell upon their robes for that next-to-last night of freedom.

Each time Joseph thought about it—and he could really think of little else except the child's coming—Joseph sensed an immense pain in his heart. So he did his best to push aside the utter sadness of these last steps toward the reservation, these last steps away from all that their life had been … thinking of the child that was coming to them. Be it a boy or be it a girl, this infant would not live the freedom its parents knew, but it would certainly know love—

“Thunder Traveling!”

Suddenly he was aware of the horseman riding out of the brush ahead, bursting into view on the trail taking them to
Tepahlewam.
It had to be one of his people, to call him by his given name rather than the
Shahapto,
or white, Christian name first given to his father. Like most of the Wallowa, Joseph had renounced the white man's religion when it failed to protect his people from the greed of those pale-skinned Shadows who first brought the
Book of Heaven
to the
Nee-Me-Poo,
along with plows to cut up the ground and their shovels to scratch for gold.

“Two Moons!” Joseph cried with no little joy. It was good to see this long-time friend, an older warrior and respected counselor. “You are up and about early! Going off to hunt here as the sun has barely begun its journey across the—”

“I came looking for you,” Two Moons interrupted stonily.

“M-me?” he stammered a moment, instantly afraid. “It isn't … trouble for Cold Storm?”

“No,” the older warrior said. “Your wife is in no trouble—”

“Has she delivered our child?”

“No, not that I know of.”

Nonetheless, something in his belly gave him warning. “Then why do you come looking for me here before the rising sun has even entered the canyon?”

“To bring you back from the river,” Two Moons declared. “Our people need you.”

“For what purpose?”

“The camp is breaking up this morning, going back to their homes—”

“Going back?” Shaking his head in confusion, Joseph said, “We don't have to leave
Tepahlewam
until tomorrow—”

“They are fleeing. Last night they began to take down their lodges and bring in their horses—”

“Fleeing?”

“Some are going back to their homes,” Two Moons explained. “But others say they are planning to go higher and higher still into the mountains where the soldiers won't find them.”

He heard the women coming up behind him with those three laden travois, the poles scraping the canyon trail as his belly twisted with alarm. “
Sua-pies
? What of the soldiers?”

Two Moons let the tragic tale pour out, from the beginning of the taunts suffered by Shore Crossing to the return of the three killers with the horses and rifles of those white men they had murdered. “As soon as they reached our camp yesterday afternoon, nearly everyone cheered what the three young men had done to cover themselves in blood to start this war.”

“How many Shadows did these foolish ones kill?”

“Five, I think.”

“It—it doesn't have to be war,” Joseph ruminated, his mind racing on what to do as Ollokot and the others came up to them.

Two Moons protested, “It's too late—”

“No, surely it's not too late. We can go to Monteith, have him send a runner to bring Cut-Off Arm here before the soldiers come looking to punish any of us.”

“When the murderers returned, a few in the camp began to grieve because of what we knew would happen,” Two Moons explained. “But most of the people went into celebration. Toohoolhoolzote and Sun Necklace organized a war party that rode off to seek out more of the white men who have wronged our people—”

“How many went with them?”

“Two-times-ten, no more than that.”

His heart sank. Quietly he asked, “And what of old White Bird, and Looking Glass? Did they call for revenge and the blood of white men too?”

Shaking his head, the older warrior replied, “No. They did their best to stop things—but sadly most of the young men came from White Bird's band, the rest from Toohoolhoolzote's.”

Overwhelmed with despair, Joseph reached out and grabbed a handful of Two Moons's shirt. “Did … did any of our people join this war party?”

“Only one, Geese Three Times Lighting on the Water.”

Releasing his friend's shirt, Joseph only realized how angry he had become when that anger started to subside, the fire slowly being replaced by an undeniably hollow ache for what he now sensed was irrevocable, by a despair for what was now utterly inevitable.

“Perhaps as you say, we can still make some sort of peace,” Two Moons advised gravely, the look on his face betraying his words of hope.

“We must pray it will be so.” Joseph wanted to join in that hope with all his heart, but of all the Shadows he had known, there wasn't one he could turn to now. Not one he felt he could trust.

So Joseph rested his hand on the shorter man's shoulder and told Two Moons, “But even if we talk to Cut-Off Arm and make some sort of peace with him, because of what these three fools have done—because of what Sun Necklace's war party is on their way to do now—the white men will certainly take away everything we were going to have on the reservation. Now the soldiers will greedily strip us of what little would have been left us for our new life among the Treaty bands, just as the soldiers always do to those they defeat.”

When he heard Ollokot sigh deeply, Joseph turned to gaze sadly at his brother.

“This time, Joseph … it is for our people to fight,” Ollokot said. “Fight … or die.”

*   *   *

“Mamma, I see Papa coming down the road.”

The instant her four-year-old daughter, Emmy, raised the call, Isabella Benedict stepped out from behind the wet clothing she was hanging across the yard on a line strung between the house and the store and gazed down the path that led in from the White Bird Road.

“Looks like he didn't find none of them cows,” she replied grumpily and pulled another wet shirt from the basket.

A fiery redhead of Irish ancestry, Isabella had married Canadian-born Samuel Benedict back in '63 when she was no more than fifteen. Four children later, she hadn't seen her thirtieth birthday. But she hadn't lost a drop of her spit and vinegar.

By gum, if he won't expect me to go looking for them cows now me own self,
she thought as she lapped the damp shirt over the line and dug in her apron pocket for a clothespin. Then she stopped and stared again at her husband as he approached. Something was wrong, terribly wrong, with the way he was sitting that horse. Not riding it high and handsome, but clutching the horse like he was about to fall off. Now she saw that wasn't his horse.

“Isa—”

When Sam's voice choked off the way it did, she knew something was terrible wrong. And started walking, reminding herself to walk.

“Isa—Isabella!”

Then she was running, her long dress whipped between her lean legs like a damask table runner, her old ankle boots scuffing across the grassy yard to meet him.

“Mamma?”

“Stay with the little'un!” Isabella snapped at her daughter without stopping or turning, and kept running for Sam.

She was at his side the moment the strange horse came to a halt beneath the big tree that shaded the yard stretching between their wayside inn and the short path down to the mouth of White Bird Creek at the Salmon. He smiled weakly at her as he held out an arm. That's when she saw: nearly the entire back of his left leg was soaked with blood.

“Oh, Sam—what the hell you gone and done to yourself?” she asked as she dove in under his arm, throwing one of her own around his waist to pull him off the horse.

“Injuns,” he growled as he dragged his right leg down and struck the ground on his left, grunting in pain.

“Injuns?”

“Sh-shot me,” he groaned as the hottest pain seemed to pass. “Get me to the tree … there.”

She did as he ordered. “Who, Sam?” And she knelt with him, letting him lean all his weight on her as they came down quickly onto the grass.

Benedict lay back against the tree trunk, gasping, his eyes half-closed. “Three of them little pricks.”

Then she noticed his other leg, just as bloody if not worse. “Goddamn, they shot you more'n once!” she shrieked.

“I don't 'member no more'n one bullet,” he gasped and opened his eyes. “Don't know how they got me in both legs, for they didn't get the horse.”

“That ain't our horse, Sam.”

He wheezed, “I know. Think it's Elfers's. The bastards took mine. Later on, this'un come up to me all by itself.”

“Who? Who shot you, Sam?”

“One of 'em was in that bunch I run off two summers back,” he said, squeezing her hand till it turned white. “I know he was.”

“I'm gonna get some bandages; then we're gonna take you into the house where they can work on you—”

“No,” he interrupted. “Get over here, Emmy.”

The girl trotted over, her baby sister propped on her slim hip. “Papa—you're hurt.”

“You gotta go for help, Emmy.”

“Me, Papa?”

“Want you to take my horse and go fetch Hurdy Gurdy.”

“Mr. Brown? You want me get him to help you?”

Isabella stood and took the baby girl from her daughter's arms. “Go do what your father tells you now. Get Mr. Brown and tell him come quick.”

*   *   *

At that very moment some ninety miles north as the buzzard would fly, General Oliver Otis Howard was stepping onto the dock at Lewiston, accompanied by U.S. Indian Inspector Erwin C. Watkins. This was still a woolly frontier town, no matter how kind the description: a Snake River settlement growing hand-over-fist by the week, already sporting a grist-and a sawmill, a local newspaper, and quite a number of enterprising merchants making hay off the gold miners.

Two weeks earlier they had departed military headquarters in Portland for a tour of army posts and reservations in Howard's Department of the Columbia. Over the past year the general had grown increasingly irritated that he had to deal with as many as fourteen Indian agents in his region, each one of them wanting a little something different, perhaps a little something more from Howard's soldiers than the general was able to provide them.

“It is not scriptural to obey so many masters,” he was fond of grousing about those carping and conniving civil servants who plagued his department.

But now the general had the large-boned Watkins along, and Watkins clearly outranked those mealy-mouthed, frustrating agents. Besides that, Howard simply liked Watkins as a man. A Civil War veteran like himself, the inspector was a hale-fellow filled with Christian wholesomeness as well as unbounded courage.

So with tomorrow, the fifteenth of June, being the deadline he had given the Nez Perce to be on the reservation, Howard had decided it would be prudent of him to return to this area in the event there was the slightest trouble with the Non-Treaty bands not living up to what they had agreed to do.