Chapter 47

We left him upon the mountain under the wide sky, but we did not leave him as he had fallen, although he might have wished it to be.  We did not know how the Umatilla would have buried him, and Short Bull was unconscious and unable to tell us. The day had not many hours to go, and our way was hard. Short Bull lay upon his travois, and we must take him to a place beside a stream where his wound could be treated and where he could rest, this young Indian who was our friend.

So we buried Uruwishi as a Plains Indian might be buried, and if all was not perfect, at least it was done with respectful hands.  We cut four poles in the forest below the rim, and we stood them up in the ground and set them solidly there; then we built a platform of boughs and on it we placed the body of Uruwishi, his rifle beside him, with his ammunition belt and his medicine bag, and we covered him with his blanket and weighted the edges with stones.

He had brought his best clothes, knowing his time was near, and it was not until we stripped him to dress him in his best that we found the bullet wound, low down on his left side. He had bled much, but he had stopped the wound with moss and said nothing.

We could have let him lie where he fell, as men who die in battle are sometimes left, but our respect was too great, so we lifted him up, covered him over, and then Stacy, who had lived among Indians, sang a song of the dead warriors.  When he had done we rode away, but once, before I went over the rim of the mountain and out of sight, I looked back.

The frame was stark against the sky, and I thought I saw the old man’s hair blow in the wind, and I turned away, feeling I had left behind another father, one I had known a brief time only where the streams ran cold and clear and the stars stood bright in the sky.

Tonight he would ride the Milky Way, which the Greek call the Chief’s Road, and I would go back to our town and after a while back to Ninon and the life that lay before me.