Savage Courage (2 page)

This was a day no warrior could save, no matter how hard he tried, or how many pony soldiers could be killed by arrows before the enemy swept through the village with their deadly firearms.

Shouting, “
Tiras
, do not fire!
Tiras
, do not fire!”, the Silent Stream Band of Apache ran in many directions, sometimes colliding with each other and
falling clumsily to the ground, then getting up and running again in a desperate attempt to find one last moment of life.

It was a dizzying scene; no one seemed to have any sense of direction or plan of where to go, or what to do to save their beloved families.

The horses carrying the soldiers were already galloping into the outskirts of the village.

The soldiers ignored the pleading. They ignored the looks of terror on the Apache people’s faces.

Gunfire began exploding from the
pindah-lickoyee’s
firearms, followed by screams of terror, and then pain.

A soldier began giving orders to those under his command. “Spare no one!” he shouted. “Kill small and big, women and children! Let no warrior come out of this alive!”

A little boy ran from a tepee, crying. A soldier saw him and stopped and took aim. He sent a bullet flying from his rifle, but missed the child.

Another soldier who saw this drew a tight rein and dismounted. He fell to a knee, set his rifle on his other knee, aimed, and knocked the boy over with one lethal shot.

Five-year-old Shoshana was with her mother, Fawn, fleeing the soldiers, as gunfire spattered all around them. She screamed as she saw her people’s tepees being set afire with flaming torches.

She clung desperately to her mother’s hand as
they ran onward toward the nearby ravine where they might be able to hide in the bushes that stood at the edge of the water.

Shoshana’s heart raced as she heard a horse approaching from behind her and her mother. She looked wild-eyed over her shoulder as a soldier on a black steed took aim and fired.

She screamed when her mother’s body lurched, then released Shoshana’s hand and fell to the ground, quiet.

“
Todah
, no!
Ina
, mother!
Ina
!” Shoshana cried in her Apache tongue when she saw blood on the back of her mother’s doeskin dress, turning what was only moments ago a beautiful white color to red.

Shoshana fell to her knees beside her mother.

“
Ina
! Please awaken!” Shoshana sobbed as she began shaking her mother’s lifeless body. “Mother, I am so afraid. Do . . . not . . . leave me!”

But no matter what she said or did, her mother continued to lie there, her body quiet, her eyes closed.

Terror ate away at Shoshana’s heart, for what she saw today on her mother’s face was the same look she had seen on the day of her father’s death, when an enemy renegade burst out of bushes and killed her father, only to be killed himself moments later by her father’s best friend.

Now Shoshana had no one! Both her parents were dead.

Filled with despair, and a deep, gnawing need to survive this terrible day, Shoshana scurried to her feet.

Her eyes filled with the pain of loss, yet with sudden determination, she defied the whites who had brought death to her beloved Silent Stream Band of Apache as she ran onward toward the ravine. She still hoped to find shelter there.

But when she heard a horse quickly approaching from behind her and then felt an arm grabbing her up from the ground, she knew just how wrong it had been to hope for what would never be.

She gazed frantically over her shoulder and saw that the one who had grabbed her was a soldier with long hair the color of fire, and eyes the color of the sky.

She strugged to fight him off, kicking and biting him, but no matter how hard she tried, the pony soldier held her on his lap, an arm like steel around her tiny waist holding her in place against him. There was a sudden strange sort of kindness in his sky-blue eyes.

She realized that no matter how hard she tried, the soldier was taking her as his hostage as he rode away with her, leaving the fighting behind them, as well as the screams of terror and the leaping fires that were consuming the lodges.

And then Shoshana became aware of something else: the total silence behind her at the village. She
feared the
pindah-lickoyee
pony soldiers had done as they had been ordered to do. Except for herself, the pony soldiers had spared none of her people!

“
To-dah
, no,” she sobbed. “
To-dah
!”

She then hung her head in abject sorrow as she whispered to herself, “I . . . alone . . . am . . . alive.”

Yet inside her heart, she felt dead.

I will not let thee go.
Have we not chid the changeful moon?

—Robert Bridges

A few days later . . .

“It was a good day for a mock hunt, was it not, Little Bear?” Storm said proudly from his brown pony. He was ten winters of age and of the Chiricahua tribe of Apache, of the Piñaleno River Band.

He looked over at Little Bear, who rode at his side on his own pony, as others followed behind them. He noticed quickly that Little Bear did not even seem to have heard what Storm had said to him.

Wondering what had caught his friend’s attention, Storm followed the path of Little Bear’s eyes.

He grew cold at heart when he saw smoke in the distance. There was no doubt where it came from. It rose from their village which sat alongside the Piñaleno River.

And it was far too much smoke to be accounted for by the cooking fires of the village.

It was billowing and black, turning the sky dark where it had only moments ago been such a peaceful blue.

“My father . . . my mother . . . my sister . . . our people!” Storm gasped as he sank his heels deep into the flanks of his pony. “
Nuest-chee-shee
, come! We must go and see what we can do to stop the fires and help our people!”

“We are only small braves,” Little Bear whined as he came up closer to Storm on his spotted pony. “We will be riding into danger!”

“Do not cry and whine like a scared puppy,” Storm said scornfully. “
Huka
, I am not afraid! We must help! We must fight if any enemies are left at our village!”

“With our tiny bows and arrows?” Little Bear whined again. “We only have what is needed for a mock hunt, not for true killing. And . . . look at us, Storm. We are but a few!”

“Little Bear, we are but a few, but we are the future of our Piñaleno River Band!” Storm shouted. “Behave like a warrior instead of a mere brave! Be ready for whatever we find at our village! It takes
courage, Little Bear. It takes savage courage to be what only moments ago we were not. If our people were ambushed and are no longer of this earth, it will be up to us to carry on the traditions we have been taught.”

Then a thought came to Storm that made his heart skip several beats. His sister Dancing Willow had left at the same time that Storm and his friends had left. She, who was thirty winters of age, a spinster, and a Seer, had gone out into the hills to dig roots.

Dancing Willow had promised to teach the younger girls which roots to dig today. If they had returned to the village before the attack, then she, too, would be dead.

And what of his
Ina
, his mother? And . . . his . . . chieftain
ahte
, his father?

He feared his father would not have survived such an ambush, for he would have been one of the first the enemy, whether renegades or pony soldiers, would target!

To kill a powerful chief would be something to brag about.

Storm raised his eyes heavenward. “Please,
Maheo
, Great Spirit, do not let what I am thinking be true,” he shouted. “Please!”

He rode harder until he entered the thick smoke. Then he slowed his horse down to a slow lope, feeling sick to his stomach at the sights that greeted him. Death was everywhere.

“
To-dah
, no!” he cried.

Tears sprang to his eyes as he dismounted and began running from person to person, checking to see if any of his fallen people might still be alive.

It was obvious that they had been shot where they stood, unable even to defend themselves.

And then Storm found his mother.

He gagged when he fell beside her on his knees and saw that whoever had shot his white-skinned mother had also taken her golden hair, her scalp!

“
Ina
, mother,” he sobbed. “How could they do this to you? How? And . . . why?”

He hung his head and said a silent prayer over her, then broke away from her and turned to where his father lay only a few feet off.

Chief Two Stones, a cousin to Geronimo, was severely wounded, yet clinging to life, and had somehow been spared the terrible fate of being scalped.

When Storm fell to his knees beside his father and lifted his head onto his lap, he tried not to cry. He wanted to be a man in his father’s eyes, at least while he was still alive to see him.

Storm knew what his future held for him and he had to prove to his dying father that he was worthy of the title of chief, for he was next in line after his father to lead his people.

“My son,
pindah-lickoyee
, white-eye soldiers, came and killed. I . . . witnessed . . . your mother’s death. I could do nothing to help her. My son, you must flee
to higher ground now, while you can,” Chief Two Stones said in a voice scarcely audible to Storm. “Take the other young braves with you
ah-han-day
, afar. Lead them to safety high up in the Piñaleno Mountains.”

Chief Two Stones reached a quivering hand to one of Storm’s and clutched it desperately. “My son, remember to teach as I have taught you, that we Apache hold it a high virtue to speak the truth, always, and never to steal from our own tribesmen,” he said thickly. “Teach the children that the Apache warrior adheres more strictly to his code of honor than the white man does to his!”

“
Ahte
, I will teach what has been taught me,” Storm said, hearing just how weak his father’s voice was becoming, and admiring Chief Two Stones for not thinking of death, but instead of the future of the children and what they should know in order to survive as Apache.

“Son, you have proven yourself time and again to be worthy of the title of chief,” Chief Two Stones said, squeezing Storm’s hand. “It is now that I hand over the chieftainship to you. Go and make a new life, a stronghold, where no
pindah-lickoyee
can ever find you. But before you go to the mountains, find your sister Dancing Willow and the girls who are with her. Take them into hiding. Keep them safe and well.”

“I will find them. And I will be a great leader,”
Storm said. He swallowed hard. “I promise you that,
Ahte.
”

“I know you will,” Chief Two Stones said, slowly taking his hand away from Storm’s. He rested his hand over his heart. “My breath will soon be gone from me forever, but I have enough left to tell you that the man who shot and killed your beloved mother, and then shot your father, was himself shot in the leg. With the last of my strength, I sent an arrow from my bow. It lodged in the evil white man’s leg as he rode away.”

“I shall find him one day and make him pay,” Storm said softly. “I promise that I shall take revenge!”

“Storm, I know this man’s name,” Chief Two Stones said breathlessly. “In the middle of the massacre, just before he attacked your mother, I heard the man addressed as Colonel Whaley.”

He grabbed Storm’s hand once again. “Remember that name always, my son,” he said, his voice now barely a whisper. “Perhaps in the future you will hear of a pony soldier whose name is Whaley. If so, you will know he is the man who tore all of your people’s lives apart!”

Two Stones again released Storm’s hand. He sighed deeply, closed his eyes, then gazed up at Storm again. “Leave now,” he said. “But before you leave, please join one of your mother’s hands with mine. I will die much more happily if I am reunited in this way with my wife.”

Tears streaming from Storm’s eyes, he rose and took his mother’s cold hand and gently placed it in his father’s. He saw how his father’s fingers wrapped around his mother’s hand.

“Thank you, my son,” Chief Two Stones said as he gazed over at his wife, whose face was still visible to him through the blood. “Although I first knew your mother as my white captive, I fell in love with her, and she with me. We had a good, happy life, and she bore me a son of that love. That son is you, Storm. You always made us so proud.”

“I have always loved you both so much,” Storm said, swallowing hard. His older sister, a full-blood Apache, was from another time when his father had been married to one of his own people. She had died while giving birth to a second child . . . a child who did not survive either.

Although a half-breed because of his white mother, Storm had all of the appearance and mannerisms of an Apache warrior.

“Son, your heart is Apache,” Two Stones said, coughing blood as he spoke. “Lead! Be safe! Keep what remains of our band safe!”

Storm glanced over at his mother again. He could hardly stand to think of the pain she had suffered before dying, as her lovely golden hair was removed. But at least she was at peace now, and soon his father would be joining her in the stars!

“My son, why do you hesitate to leave?” Two Stones asked. “Why?”

“
Ahte
, I just cannot leave you here like this while you still have breath in your lungs,” Storm blurted out. “Mother is dead. But . . . you . . . are still among the living!”

“Storm—”

“No,
Ahte
, I must follow my heart,” Storm said, quickly rising to his feet. “And it tells me to take you with me. But before we leave, it is my decision to remain here long enough to bury the dead.”

“My son—”

“
Ahte
, it is the only way, or I would never get a night’s rest for thinking about our people lying like this for—”

“Do what you must,” Two Stones said, closing his eyes. “I understand.”

“Even
Ina
,” Storm said. “I must separate you two in order to bury her.”