When writing a When Heroes Fought story from only a single source, I will fictionalize it without changing any facts, and without including all of the facts. I do this largely to preserve the value of the sourcebook. The following tale is adapted from Crow Killer, The Saga of Liver-Eating Johnson, by Raymond W. Thorp and Robert Bunker, Chapter 27, Last Trail.

Fictionalized tales such as Medicine-Book Man will be found on the Fiction Page. Historical narratives, such The Black Foot, will be found on the Ancient Combat Page. The entire series can be accessed through clicking on the When Heroes Fought tag.

Among his people such a man would never live alone, but surrounded by family and warriors that wished the favor of a blessing, or advice in the form of a tale told. The Whites were different. The aged warrior built a lodge for himself overlooking the river like a chief would build for his band. He had a string of horses penned in behind the stake fence barrier with a swinging section for easy access. The cabin could house a family, but the man had lived the autumn alone, and now came winter.

As the clouds of the coming night scudded across the high rolling bluffs the warrior consider the old white chief as the strange being retired into his lodge. The smoke from the stone smoke-hole in the roof belched thicker. The old one was settling in for the night, but not yet for the winter, which was a scant two days off. These whites that live alone like this, they were from the Southern Mountains, the enemy of Sioux, Crow, Pierced Nose, and Blackfeet. The many goods this man had acquired, and had hauled into his cabin from the backs of two of his four good horses, had been acquired in this lonely way, by camping apart from his kind through the long mountain winters, trapping animals easily baited and thick with fur. This old white chief had yet to set out his winter traps.

The warrior considered this, fingered his knife with prideful anticipation, and crept back down the bluff toward the stand of cattail and willow that he had used to observe the white chief’s medicine ritual on the previous two mornings. The old hunter had once been powerful, as indicated by his composure. But the young warrior, noting the ease with which he was spied on, and the singular attention the old white chief paid to his medicine rituals, decided the time was right. Winter was just down river in the gathering gloom. The enemy elder would consult his totemic device one last time, and then set off to lay his winter’s traps, alert for danger, eyes on the land. The last opportunity to cleanly take this well-armed man—who most certainly possessed the unerring aim for which his kind were rightly famous with their buffalo-killing rifles—would be at dawn, as he beseeched the Sunrise Spirit.

He shivered beneath his wolf-skin jacket and draped elk robe as the sky grayed, the last sun of a dying year not yet risen above the far bluffs to his left. His well-trained pony was curled up between two willows a spear cast to his rear, at the back edge of the willow stand where the cattails were thickest. He heard the heavy snicker of the horse beyond the bluff, but not the soft tread of its hooves. After this day he would have two well-trained horses.

The old white rider emerged from the last shadows of night to sit his horse on the bluff that overlooked the Mother River. The man’s gray hair fell to his waist, which was still subtle, as the warrior had witnessed him bounding in and out of the saddle like a young man. His saddle was of fine Crow craftsmanship. A buffalo rifle was sheathed in a white doe-skin case attached to the saddle. Long knife, steel tomahawk, and pistol hung from his belt. His buckskins were finely made, and an otter-hide shawl draped his shoulders against the coming snow, clearly apparent to the warrior’s nose.

The old white chief, whose name he could not know, but might somehow discover through inquiry, had magnificent white face hair. The locks of the upper lip and chin were neatly sheared and combed. Based on the length and color of the man’s head and face hair this Whiteman was so old—had lived the unshaven life of his enigmatic kind for so long—that he might have been among the first to come to this land in the time of the warrior’s grandfather. He would have to ask of this when he returned with his prizes.

The old white chief then reached beneath his otter-hide shawl and pulled forth his black medicine-book, the curious item of power that the crazy unarmed whites who sometimes came to visit would speak to. The book was a bound mass of finest inner hides with secret markings within. The man, who had not looked around to assure that he was not being hunted, opened the book and began to speak to it. The warrior breathed easily, and then exhaled, as he squeezed the trigger of his rifle. When the rifle spoke the old man’s hands reached to the sky—one with the book still held in it—and he pitched forward over his horse’s neck to lay still and dead beneath the deep gray sky.

The warrior raced forward knife in hand, rifle slung across his back, to determine for certain that the white was dead. He had taken the man in the ribs, just behind the elbow of the left arm, as the man raised his medicine book to speak with it. The heavy bullet had smashed through two ribs, splintering them to ruin, burst the heart, and tore through booth lungs, destroying two more ribs as it exited the other side of the man’s broad chest.

The otter-skin shawl was intact.

The buckskin vest was ruined, but would be taken as a war prize, to prove he was no skulking thief in the night, but a hunter of men who killed beneath the living sky.

The prize horse with rifle and saddle was standing resignedly by its slain master, considering its new master.

The scalp of the old white chief would be his first! He would now know the path to manhood that was no longer open to most of his tribe. He might be the last of his people to become a man in the old way. Times were dying. He gathered the undressed hair of the man—who despite his many years had not begun to have his hair die on top like other whites—pulled the bunched arm-length hair into a twisted knot, carved a circle in the scalp at the crown of the head, and pulled with one quick motion, at last—just a day before his 22nd winter—savoring the sucking ‘pop’ sound of a scalp being torn from an enemy head.

The warrior sheathed his knife, jogged down to the willow and cattail stand where his pony was waiting patiently, and then led his faithful companion back to his kill. Only then did he tie the scalp to his mount’s bridle, stroking the beast as it shied from the smell of death—or was it the smell of the Whiteman?

He surveyed the ground before gathering the white man’s things and loading them upon the saddle of his new horse, larger than his own pony. After stripping the old white chief he considered the black medicine-book where it lay, and decided it was best left alone. The color was an unlucky one, and the medicine derived from speaking with it had done nothing but curse this enemy and make him easy to kill—too easy it seemed, for one who had obviously lived for so many lifetimes alone.

As he finished packing away the white man’s things, a chill struck him, a chill that ran up his spine. He turned and looked at the naked old man, even whiter now in the light of the risen but hidden sun, obscured behind the piling clouds.

Was the man cursed by his book?

Had the curse already transferred itself to his killer, or did it lay dormant in that black skin totem?

His hand brushed his fine wolf-hide jacket and set him at ease. The wolf was his totem. The wolves would gather for their feast at sundown. A pack roamed just beyond the Mother River. He would leave his fallen enemy for his totem, the wolf. Still, a spirit of uneasiness lingered about his first warrior kill, unlike the giddiness he had felt on taking this wolf in his youth.

He bounded into the modest saddle crafted by his grandfather, grabbed the reigns of his new prize horse with its great Crow saddle, and headed off for the lodge of Medicine-Book Man, as he would live in his memories—a great chief of his solitary kind.

To be concluded in The Hooped Scalp.