Strongheart Read Free

single-action model made especially for the army in this year, 1873, and this one had been made to special order for his stepfather’s friend Chris Colt, who was a nephew of the inventor Colonel Samuel Colt.
    On his left hip was the long, beaded porcupine-quilled and fringed leather sheath holding the large Bowie knife with the elk antler handle and brass inlays. It had been left to him by his father.
    He wore long cowboy boots with large-roweled Mexican spurs, with two little bell-shaped pieces of steel that hung down from the hubs on the outside of each and clinked on the spur rowels as they spun while he walked.
    Because he had always been trained to keep his weapons clean and his knife sharp, Joshua pulled the large knife from its sheath and examined the blade. As usual, it was scalpel-sharp.
    Lila Wiya Waste handed him a cup of hot coffee from a large pot he had given her months earlier. He sipped the steaming brew and thought about his childhood quest to learn about his biological father and search for blood relatives.
    His biological father, Siostukala, “Claw Marks,” had disappeared when Joshua was young and had been a total mystery to him for many years. His mother would not tell him anything about the man, and Joshua quit asking, because tears would well up in her eyes every time his name was mentioned. Joshua figured he must have caused her very painful memories.
    Whenever family friends went off to trade with the Sioux, he traveled with them, seizing every opportunity to locate his father. Finally, at sixteen, he met his half brother, who grew up with Siostukala . His thirteen-year-old half brother, named Cate Waste, meaning “Cheerful,” told him that his father had died a year earlier.
    Joshua was very sad that his father had died, but he was also excited to meet a brother and several cousins. His half brother had since grown to manhood and proven himself in battle several times. At eighteen, Cate Waste’s name was changed to his manhood name, Akayake Mato, meaning “Rides the Bear.”
    Joshua recalled the story of their shared legacy.
    Claw Marks was one of the few men in the village along the banks of what was called the Greasy Grass. In three years, many Lakota, and their brothers the Cheyenne and Arapaho, would fight there against Long Hair Custer. They would call the mighty victory the Battle of the Greasy Grass, while the wasicun would always refer to it as the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and some would call it Custer’s Last Stand.
    In the small circle of lodges, Claw Marks had been recovering from a stab wound to the thigh suffered when he vanquished two Crows in a hand-to-hand fight with knives and war clubs on the banks of the Hehaka Wakpa, which meant “Elk River” but was called the Yellowstone River by the wasicun. Most of the men had left the tribal circle and gone out on a great hunt when a vast herd of buffalo was spotted a half day south.
    A large band of Crows approached the circle of lodges and the warning went up.
    Claw Marks, a war chief, had been hobbled and was walking with a makeshift crutch, but this day he tossed the crutch aside. With two older warrior volunteers, he faced the charging band, after sending the young warriors and children, including Cate Waste, down the banks of the Little Bighorn to what the warrior called the Badger Coulee. From there the remnants of the tribe could escape up the coulee, covering their tracks as they went.
    He and the two gray-haired warriors knew they would die. Although he was wounded, he was younger and stronger than the other two men, so he knew it fell to him to keep the Crows at bay as long as possible, to cover the retreat of the family circle. They sang their death songs while firing shots and arrows at the charging Crows. He looked up at a pair of red-tailed hawks swirling high overhead in the cloudless, endless Montana sky, and he smiled to the warriors, saying in Lakota, “This is a good day