Heartsong Read Free

violently into darkness.

    â€œ M onsieur? Monsieur?”
    Charging Elk opened his eyes.
    â€œVotre petit dejeuner, monsieur .”
    A young woman put a square tray on his lap. He glanced down and he saw a bowl of white mush, a piece of hard morning bread, and a glass of orange juice. The woman put a soft cloth over his chest, sat down on a stool beside the bed, then dipped a spoon into the mush. When she brought it toward his face, he moved his hand up to block it. She said something in a tone of voice that suggested she was used to this kind of behavior. Charging Elk kept his hand up but he looked at her pale hand and peculiar ice-green eyes and recognized her, in spite of her mask, as the first woman who had fed him soup. Now she held the spoon about six inches from his hand. He reached for the spoon and took it gently from her hand. He looked at the mush, smelled it, then took a taste. It tasted likenothing. It was neither sweet nor spicy. But it slid down his throat and warmed his belly. He had another spoonful and nodded to the woman. “Café,” he said.
    â€œNon, non, monsieur,” she said in an excited voice. She said something else, then she rubbed her own belly and shook her finger.
    â€œCafé,” he said again.
    She said something, then stopped. After a moment, she stood and hurried toward the end of the room where the yellow light had been the night before. Charging Elk watched her. Then he dipped the heavy iron spoon into the mush and ate. He ate half the mush and drank his orange juice. He left the hard bread—he had seen it before, a small slice curved on top and flat on the bottom, like the sign for sunrise—to dunk into his pejuta sapa , black medicine.
    He thought of sunrise in another place. A place of long views, of pale dust and short grass, of few people and no buildings. He had seen that sunrise over the rolling simple plains, he had been a part of it and it had been a part of him. Many times he had seen it and he had been with his people.
    Charging Elk suddenly moaned as he remembered the ikce wicasa , the natural humans, as his people called themselves. He remembered his mother and father, his brother and sister. He remembered the villages, the encampments, one place, then another. Women picking berries, men coming back with meat, the dogs and horses, the sudden laughter or tears of children, the quiet ease of lying in the sunny lodge with the skins rolled up to catch a breeze. He had been a child then too and he had spent his days riding his horse, playing games, shooting arrows at gophers, eating the sarvisberry soup that his mother made.
    He remembered the big fight with the longknives on the Greasy Grass, the naked white bodies the women counted coup on with their butcher knives and axes. He and two of his friends, Liver and Strikes Plenty, had fought over a soldier’s agate ring. They had cutoff his finger to get it. But one of the older boys, Yellow Hand, had taken it away from them.
    Charging Elk lay back on the pillow and closed his eyes. He had been proud to be an Oglala then and he thought they would never surrender. The young boys talked about Crazy Horse and how he would lead them far away from the longknives. They would grow up to be hunters and to make war on their enemies. They would kill off the soldiers when they got old enough. Meanwhile the people spent the summer and fall moving from place to place, at first high up in the Bighorns and the Wolfs, then when the weather changed and the snows capped the peaks they moved back onto the plains. Sometimes they would camp for six or seven sleeps, sometimes only one or two. The scouts kept track of the longknives and they were never far away. But the game was plentiful during those warm times and the people didn’t suffer. Wakan Tanka, the Great Mystery, rode with them. The Oglalas seemed almost exhilarated, as though they knew this was to be their last time together as a free people and they were