The wind picked up as the sun began to make its descent. I cannot tell you with what relief we watched the sun go down. We sat there another hour, saying nothing. Below us in the Nimiipuu camp we heard the howling and screams of women mourning their dead. The sound tugged at my heart and I wanted to join in, but I didn’t know the words.

Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the look on Blue Mountain Woman’s face as the Cheyenne wrench off her scalp. Then her expression gradually blended into Poker Joe, disintegrating before my eyes. These images still bother my dreams, upon occasion. Duncan shakes me gently awake. We usually lie there in each other’s arms, remembering.

When the moon was still biding its time, Hawk reached for my hand. With no words spoken between us, we slipped out of the rifle pit and stumbled and slid down the slope to the remnants of Joseph’s camp.

The camp was a veritable ant hill. Everyone who was old enough or not too young burrowed with tools or hands into the side of the cutbanks. Babies sobbed, but softly, little ones with no energy, either, a fatal loss in the young. The wounded groaned, and women lamented as they dug into the hillsides. Small fires illuminated but little, and gave off even less warmth.

This might make you chuckle, or at least appreciate irony, that delicious dry humor of Indians and people who have earned their cynicism. Later on, after the surrender, those insufferable, shoulder-strapped grads of West Point, America’s premier engineering school, had much to say about the impressive breastworks and rifle pits that The People threw up on such short notice. I heard someone, maybe General Howard himself, called them engineering marvels. Hawk would have enjoyed that. They were the result of mothers digging to save their babies, using tin cans, their fingers, and tin cups.

Not letting go of my hand, Hawk and I wandered among the survivors. Some of the women called to him. When he finished speaking to them, Blue Mountain Woman’s friends mourned her, too.

We found his kinsman Joseph sitting quietly with his blanket pulled up around his face. He rocked back and forth and in that high falsetto sang a nameless tune the prickled the back of my neck. I had seen Joseph toss his young daughter onto a horse and point her toward Canada. Who did he mourn?

Hawk bent over Joseph. “Ollokot?” he asked. Joseph nodded, then looked up at him, his eyes red and swollen.