He reined in before he had gone too far, because there wasn’t any point in going anywhere. The troopers had split into smaller groups, some driving off horses and others bearing down on The People running here and there like rabbits.

Not fifty yards in front of us was a most formidable knot of Indians. I still couldn’t tell one tribe from another, but they did not look happy and relaxed.

“Our brother the Cheyenne,” Hawk said in a conversational tone right in my ear. “So much for friends and trading partners. See if I ever trade them another horse.”

The scouts bore down on us, screaming and yelping. I put my hands over my ears again. I wanted to close my eyes, but I was too fascinated by those scouts, stripped down to their war paint and making ready to kill us. I felt as if I were standing outside myself, watching the whole thing.

Hawk dug his heels into his horse’s flanks and started toward the Indians. My first impulse was to implore him to go the other way, but he didn’t really have a choice of directions. He wailed his death chant – high-pitched and spooky and right in my ear – as we rode forward. The goosebumps marched up and down my spine in continuous ranks.

I caught the spirit of the thing then. We obviously weren’t going to get out of this one, so I saw no sense in hanging back or moping. I knew “Battle Cry of Freedom,” was a rousing Civil War song, so I started to sing. “Yes, we’ll rally ‘round the flag boys, rally once again…” I felt better and better, the closer I rode to death, “…shouting the battle cry of freedom,” at the top of my lungs. There were some things I wished I could have done before I died – mainly make love to the warrior on whose lap I sat – but there you are. Onward.

We were near enough to pick out individual faces, but I knew this wasn’t the time for me to tell Hawk that I still thought they just looked like Indians to me.

I finished the chorus, and was trying to remember The Apostle’s Creed when someone rode in front of us, hunched low over a fast-moving horse. Blue Mountain Woman. She dashed past us, then pulled her horse to a halt so fast that it nearly sat down. She leaped from her horse and stood there, her arms open wide, waiting for the Cheyenne scouts.

On quiet walks around our ranch in the spring, I have watched mother birds drag a wing to across my path to entice me away from a nest of fledglings. My husband assured me that other momma critters do that, too. I always walk carefully on prairie grass, careful not to disturb the young ones, as I remember Blue Mountain Woman with perfect clarity. And I thank her.