He stared at me when I addressed him in English, stopping momentarily. I’m not certain what he would have done, because he never had the chance to take another step. The expression in his eyes fixed and hardened. He grabbed his throat and fell face down in the dust, an arrow in the back of his neck. He flopped a moment like a trout on a bank then lay still.

I gawked at him in horror, but Catherine never missed a beat, returning with another verse of “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing,” with a martial beat this time, if anything. I turned around to thank whoever had polished off the Bluecoat scout and there was Hawk, fitting another arrow against his bowstring.

“Liz, will you get the hell out of here?” he yelled.

I refused to let go of Catherine. “I can’t leave her here! Help me!”

He leaped down, pried me from his grandmother and almost threw me on my horse. “She’s singing her death chant. Leave her alone!”

“It’s a church hymn!” I shouted back.

He grabbed my leg and gave me a shake. “Maybe that’s her death chant, Elizabeth Ann,” he said. “Go now.”

He slapped my horse and Fair One leapt to his bidding, but not before I hollered, “Don’t forget to take out the arrow, you old miser!”

Thank God the horse had sense superior to mine. I leaned forward, sobbed into her mane, hung on and let her carry me away from the dead scout, an angry Nimiipuu, and an old woman who liked hymns and was ready to die.

I was mortified, aghast, saddened, angry at myself, sorry for a kind old lady, and worried for the man who only wanted me to find safety, and who knew better than most the high cost of dealing with the white man. The whole matter was sad beyond belief and embarrassing. If the earth could have swallowed me, I’d have been glad to go.

That was my experience with the Canyon Creek fight. Colonel Sam Sturgis commanded the Seventh Cavalry, having succeeded to regimental leadership after last year’s death of Colonel George Custer, and Sturgis’s own son, among many others. The ranks were now filled with troopers called “Custer Avengers,” soldiers only too happy to vent their rage on any Indians, even those who had nothing to do with the deaths of five companies of cavalry on the Greasy Grass about a year ago.