By the time the last sun of the dying year had reached its high point, he had eaten all of Medicine-Book Man’s biscuits, loaded his many fine things upon the lone white chief’s four horses, and stood before the new cabin made by old worn hands. Snow had fallen thickly all through the morning. The wolves were already getting at the man’s body over on the sunrise hill.

It was time to leave.

This was the victory ride, the ride that would make his manhood remarkable in this fading time with so few opportunities to make war. Perhaps, he might be the last, the last warrior of his kind to make war. Surely, with these many good things, and with the scalp as evidence as to his means of taking them, he would earn a chief’s favor, and be well able to purchase a chief’s daughter. Perhaps, one day, he would be a chief.

He rode homeward, idly stroking the old white chief’s long scalp lock as he rocked easily in the soft saddle.

The snow had stopped falling. But, long before sundown, the biting wind of winter raged across the largely treeless land. The slight rolling hills did little to slow its bitter progress. It would be nice to arrive home as soon as possible. However, the thought of being caught out in the killing wind with four additional horses to care for, drove him to make camp in the lee of a bluff on the riverbank, a place sheltered by a single bent willow, but where a nice cache of driftwood lay sundried beneath the fresh snow.

He crouched before the fire in a semi-trance, eventually falling off to sleep on his heels. He was just inside his people’s territory and they currently had no enemies. This sorry fact had made the finding of Medicine-Book Man an unexpected good fortune; a rare opportunity to act as a warrior of old, not as the squabbling warrior the whites wanted to trade with.

His father and uncles had told him of the old times when warriors would celebrate a victory with a roasted kill. One night on the way back from war, they would pause to celebrate their deeds, and eat only of that which was taken, or could be had by luck and arrow on the homecoming trail. That was before the smallpox wiped out so many of the ‘People-who-cook-with-hot-stones’. There were once too many tepees to count. Now, the great villages—which tended to stay by the Whiteman’s forts—were always fewer than a hundred tepees.

He might very well be the last war-blooded Assiniboine warrior.

After eating the last of the white man’s biscuits and his own remaining pemmican he continued down river toward home—then it hit him. He should go first to the principle village—perhaps begin negotiating for a wife there, perhaps return home a married man!

He changed course toward the principal village.

As the day wore on the graying clouds crowded upon one another, bank-upon-bank, as if rolling in to smother him beneath their weight. That might have been a fanciful interpretation of the coming storm. The peril he felt for he and his animals if caught out in the open was deadly true. As he advanced on the river to knock a hole in the ice for his horses a flock of loons honked and rose from the cattails. He raised his Whiteman-killing gun and took one on the wing.

After retrieving his kill he decided to water his horses and scout for a camp.

It had taken sometime, after he knocked a hole in the river ice, for all five horses to drink their fill. There was a small stream up ahead that he knew offered shelter at its mouth. Just above where the stream cut into the river it had—during time of storm—eroded a place beneath a grassy bluff. He found it easily enough. The overhang offered shelter from falling snow and rain as well as from the howling north wind, which whipped past the bluff out over the river to freeze it solid each year before winter truly fell. There was a single tree and some sparse grass and moss for the horses to feed on.

Before night fell he had built a roaring driftwood fire beneath the lone tree that sheltered the opening to his refuge. He had made a second smaller fire, about ten feet off among the flat rocks, that he raked into a bed of hot coals so he might be able to make the white-man’s food. The horses were not hobbled. They would stay near the fire, near its warmth, near the light that kept wolves at bay. He filled Medicine-Book Man’s coffee pot with water from the stream, which had not totally frozen sunken in its sheltered bank, and set it upon the coals as he pulverized some of his recently acquired coffee beans. He spitted the water bird and placed it over the coals to roast slowly. He would have a feast!

Now, with darkness enveloping his world of fire, he began preparing the Whiteman’s delicacy—biscuits. He squatted before the roaring fire as his goose roasted and his coffee brewed over the coals of the minor fire. He looked into the licking flames as his doughy hands kneaded the wetted flour in the black iron biscuit pan before him.

A soft, but deep, voice sounded besides him. It was the Whiteman’s tongue as spoken by the lonely chiefs who had little intercourse with their own kind, and used poorly formed words. “Kin I git invited fer supper?”

He looked up into the eyes of an elder giant, a huge brawny version of Medicine-Book Man, who stood relaxed, thumbs hooked in the belt that supported his heavy pistol, a rosewood handled-long knife with many notches carved into the fine wood, and an ancestral stone tomahawk of the Crow Nation.

His rifle was leaning against the tree, two paces way, closer to the white man’s reach than his own.

His tomahawk was three paces away where he had used it to prepare his coffee.

He looked at his hands, sticky with dough, as he considered the knife at his belt.

The man said, in a questioning tone, without a note of menace, “Kin’ uv in a fix, red ոigger?”

The big old white warrior glanced at his sticky hands and gestured toward the stream, “Jist step down ter ther crick an’ wash yer han’s”

The white might be big, might have caught him unawares, but he was a proud Warrior and would not be toyed with!

He snapped the dough from his hands with one quick motion as he sprang to his feet and drew his knife. Somehow this big old man was quicker than he, and seized the wrist of his knife hand in both of his big paws before the blade even cleared the sheath. He struggled for a moment and then felt his stomach flip inside as the popping sound and searing pain of his wrist bones snapping in that unbreakable grip assaulted his senses.

He reached across with his left hand to grab the white’s own knife, only to be struck a heavy blow by one of the big hands across the back of his neck. He pitched forward stunned, face first into the roaring fire, without even a chance to sing his death song.

The flames would not claim him. The white man kicked him across the belly with such force with his big moccasined foot that he was elevated over the fire and out across the ground, over toward the raked coals. He spun and crouched, meaning to spring for his tomahawk with his unbroken arm. But the white man was upon him, having leaped through the fire even as he flew through the air. As he sprang for his tomahawk the white man slashed him across the face with a flaming firebrand.

Staggered and blinded, his strong arm broken and flopping at the wrist, he sought only to reach out for his enemy to crab the mass of face hair. A terrific crack sounded in the back of his head around the base of the jaw.

He looked up into the glowing night—illuminated by a fire he had built with his own hands—to see the giant standing over him. He felt unconnected to his arms and limbs. He could not feel himself breathe. Blood flooded into the back of his throat. He was powerless to swallow, open his mouth, or even blink his eyes. The giant elder white loomed menacingly, fingering the broad long knife as it flashed in the firelight. As the giant bent he felt his hair tug and something popped in his neck. The cut around his scalp-lock burn—

The three warriors found him where he lay frozen in the lee of a streamside bluff, scalped, but without a weapon’s mark upon him. His knife arm and neck were cleanly broken. Strangely enough his liver had been removed. They brought his body back to the elders of Joseph’s band. These young warriors wished to know what manner of death this had been, and also if there was any rite that need be performed for the spirit of a warrior who has had his liver taken. Also, was there vengeance to be exacted for this queer death?

The elders conferred in Chief Joseph’s tepee as the young men waited respectfully outside with the body. The eldest emerged to inform them. “Wolf-jacket must have done something to bring up a curse from the mountains. There was once a giant white named ‘Killer of Crows’ and also ‘Liver Eater’. He is thought to be long dead—or an elder by now. He ate of Sioux and Blackfeet livers as well. Let this ghost alone and bear Wolf-jacket to his father. He died a warrior, battling another people’s curse.”