The year passed until the snow fell no longer and Big Hair said the medicine chiefs had called it “The Falling Stars Winter” and had painted the sign on the sacred robes. The new grass changed from yellow to a green velvet, while the long hair blew off the horses’ hides in bunches and their shrunken flanks filled up with fat. As Nature awoke from the chill and began to circulate the Indians responded to its feel. They stalked among the pony herds, saying to each other: “By the middle of the moon of the new Elk Horns, these big dogs will carry us to war. There the enemy will know that the Chis-chis-chash did not die in the snow. There will be blood in our path this grass.”
Red Arrow and the Bat prayed often together to the Good God for fortune in war, as they sat in the lodge running their eyes along their arrows, picking those which were straightest, and singing:
“This arrow is straight
This arrow is straight
It will kill us a man
It will kill us a man—”
and the Bat boasted to his chum: “When I come to the enemy, I shall go nearer than any other Red Lodge man. I shall have more scalps to dance and no bullet or arrow can stop the Bat when he strikes his pony with the whip.” Red Arrow believed this as much as the boaster did, for men must believe they will do these things before they do them. “Red Arrow, we will not go with a big war-party. We will go with Iron Horn’s band of twenty warriors. Then next winter at the warriors’ feasts when we tell what we did, we will count for something. Red Arrow, we will see for the first time the great war-medicine.”
The boys of the camp herded the ponies where the grass was strongest, and the warriors watched them grow. It was the policy of the tribe to hang together in a mass, against the coming of the enemy, for the better protection of the women and the little ones, but no chiefs or councils were strong enough to stop the yearning of the young Cheyennes for military glory. All self-esteem, all applause, all power and greatness, came only down that fearful road—the war trail. Despite the pleadings of tribal policy Iron Horn, a noted war- and mystery-man, secretly organized his twenty men for glorious death or splendid triumph. Their orders went forth in whispers. “By the full of the moon at the place where the Drowned Buffalo water tumbled over the rocks one day’s pony-travel to the west.”
Not even Seet-se-be-a knew why the Bat was not sitting back against his willow-mat in the gray morning when she got up to make the kettle boil, but she had a woman’s instinct which made her raise the flap to look out. The two war-ponies were gone. Glancing again behind the robes of his bed she saw, too, that the oiled rifle was missing. Quickly she ran to the lodge of Red Arrow’s father, wailing, “My man has gone, my man has gone—his fast ponies are gone—his gun is gone,” and all the dogs barked and ran about in the shadows while Red Arrow’s mother appeared in the hole in the tepee, also wailing, “My boy has gone, my boy has gone,” and the village woke up in a tumult. Everyone understood. The dogs barked, the women wailed, the children cried, the magpies fluttered overhead while the wolves answered back in piercing yells from the plains beyond.
Big Hair sat up and filled his pipe. He placed his medicine-bag on the pole before him and blew smoke to the four sides of the earth and to the top of the lodge saying: “Make my boy strong. Make his heart brave, O Good Gods—take his pony over the dog-holes—make him see the enemy first!” Again he blew the smoke to the deities and continued to pray thus for an hour until the sun-lit camp was quiet and the chiefs sat under a giant cotton-wood, devising new plans to keep the young men at home.
Meanwhile from many points the destined warriors loped over the rolling landscape to the rendezvous. Tirelessly all day long they rose and fell as the ponies ate up the distance to the Drowned Buffalo, stopping only at the creeks to water the horses. By twos and threes they met, galloping together—speaking not. The moon rose big and red over their backs, the wolves stopped howling and scurried to one side—the ceaseless thud of the falling hoofs continued monotonously, broken only by the crack of a lash across a horse’s flank.
At midnight the faithful twenty men were still seated in a row around Iron Horn while the horses, too tired to eat, hung their heads. The old chief dismissed his war-party saying: “To-morrow we will make the mystery—we will find out whether the Good Gods will go with us to war or let us go alone.”
Sunrise found the ponies feeding quietly, having recovered themselves, while the robed aspirants sat in a circle; the grass having been removed from the enclosed space and leveled down.