The unspoken fear: we knew how little ammunition remained. Once it was gone, we were done for. Everyone knew it; no one said it out loud. God help me, but my bigger fear was that someone might find out that I had thought to call myself Bright Star. Even I had had enough of the shelling of those bright metal stars overhead.

We were so hungry. Someone broke open a box of bacon purloined at Cow Island and passed around the raw, salty slices. The children ate most of it, because most of us lied and said we were not hungry, not really. Then the little things found a flour sack and scooped out handfuls and ate it, too, licking it off their arms and clothing until I wanted to cry.

No one had the heart to comment upon a silent gathering of war leaders in Chief Joseph’s coulee encampment. No one raised a voice in that circle. We knew we could not last much longer.

Somehow, I slept through most of that afternoon, curled up in a corner of our tunnel, my legs drawn up close to my stomach in an attempt to get warm. I missed out on the day’s adventure by sleeping through it. Chief Joseph was chosen to parlay with the commanding officer, someone called Bear Coat. You would know him as Nelson Appleton Miles, who commanded the Fifth Infantry, and who had ridden from the Tongue River Cantonment with his command. As it turned out, Bear Paw Mountains, plus plenty of self-aggrandizement, burnished his career and eventually led to his promotion to Commanding General of the Army in 1895. Bear Coat retired last year in 1903.

The stars certainly did align in his favor after Bear Paw Mountains, but I cannot recommend his behavior there. After the parlay, he decided to detain Joseph overnight, trussed up like a bug in a rug, apparently, an unwilling guest of the U.S. Army.

This act naturally caused great consternation in our camp, and more weeping of women and then children, too, who cried because their mothers cried. I huddled in my little Eden in the tunnel and kept quiet, doing my best to be overlooked.

Some of the sharpshooters came down from the rifle pits as soon as it was dark. I watched for Hawk, but he was not among them. I tried to ladle calm acceptance on top of anxiety, but it didn’t sit well there. I reckoned he had figured out that Bright Star was a hoax, too, an imagined vision of a hungry white girl. He was an intelligent man. Flowering shells from a Hotchkiss gun would remind such a man of Bright Star.