He didn’t kiss me. I didn’t expect him to. We touched faces, his feverish and dirty, and mine merely dirty. After a long and wonderful moment, I helped him to his feet and he returned to the firing pit.

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-three

Two twelve-pound Napoleons and a Hotchkiss revolving cannon treated us to reveille after the sun rose, collapsing our tunnel. I tried to scream, but my mouth filled with dirt when I opened it. I gagged instead. All I wanted to do was get out of that place. And go precisely where? Hmm? the more rational side of my brain inquired.

I couldn’t leave. Mothers and children all around me dug frantically, not for the tunnel’s mouth, but to find the ones buried when the cannon roared. We dug like demons in the mud, but as we scraped and shoveled at the mound of earth, the screams and scrabbling from within grew fainter and then stopped. A little girl and her grandmother were dead when Joseph and one of his kinsmen lifted their limp bodies from the debris.

We continued our frantic digging and pulled out three other women, blessedly alive. The guns lobbed more shells our way, and we knew we were done. We spent most of the day crouched in the tunnels, hungry and wretched beyond belief. I grew up some more that day, when I became fully aware that my plight was miniscule because I had no children to worry about. As I watched a young mother trying to nurse her baby out of empty breasts and fighting back tears, it was as if some cosmic hand slapped the side of my head. I grew up.

I vowed that if I got out of this alive, I would make sure the soldiers knew that the Nimiipuu had not made war on me. I would tell them, and gladly, that The People had kept me alive by not abandoning me in a wilderness where I could not survive alone. I would tell all this to their soldier Bear Coat.

I waited and waited for Hawk to come down that night, but he did not. I jumped up every time anyone came into our tunnel. I wanted to look at his wound again and rebandage it. I wanted to tell him thank you for everything, and that even though I was probably not worth more than half a chicken, that was enough for me.

I sat there on the damp tunnel floor, hugging my knees to my chest, trying to stay out of everyone’s way. I didn’t belong there, but neither did they. Canada and Omaha were so far away that they might as well have been suburbs of Vienna.