The Crow were the first to reach the crest of the hill. What they saw in the valley below them turned them to stone.

The wickiups along the river and up the arroyos numbered in the thousands. These were all Sioux and Northern Cheyenne, the enemies of the Crow, but for just a moment the scouts wished the Crow were part of the assemblage, too, because surely the red people now had enough numbers to drive the white men back across the mountains to a place in the East where all the white man's diseases and his greed and his treachery came from.

The officer who was different from all the others joined them, his face impassive, his profile motionless against the hard blue background of the sky. His hair hung in ringlets on his shoulders, and he wiped the dampness off his throat with a kerchief and raised himself slightly in the stirrups, the leather creaking under him, in order to form a better view of the valley.

The Crow waited, not speaking, their faces as flat and empty of emotion as potter's clay. They had long ago learned not to speak to the officer unless he addressed them first. His anger was of a quiet kind that burned just below the skin, but his capacity for cruelty was legendary. The kitchen tent had been converted to a workshop where the officer indulged his hobby of stuffing the animals and birds he shot while his men ate cold rations. A soldier who stole a dried apple from a supply wagon was shaved bald and not allowed to mount his horse for one hundred miles. Three deserters were forced to kneel, then were shot to death at point-blank range.

Another officer, this one young, the exposed skin of his chest emblazoned with a V-shaped patch of sunburn, rode forward from the column, posting in the saddle.

"Sir?" he said, sweat running through his eyebrows.

But the officer who was different, whom the Indians called the Son of the Morning Star, did not answer.

"Sir?" the younger officer repeated.

"What?"

"What are your orders, sir?"

The Son of the Morning Star pulled off his fringed gloves and rubbed the tips of his fingers against the heel of his right hand, as though enjoying the feel of the oil in his skin.

"Why, young man, I'm very glad you asked that. I think I'm going to take an elk's tooth off a squaw's dress today," he said.

The younger officer let the focus go out of his eyes to hide his recognition of the senior officer's implication.

Big Medicine, the spokesman for the Crow scouts, glanced at his friends, then backed his horse away from the crest until he was abreast of the Son of the Morning Star.

"We go down there?" Big Medicine asked. "They're ours for the taking, my painted friend," the Son of the Morning Star said.

"We go down there, in that valley, we sing death song first," he said.

"Then you are cowards and you do not belong on this hill. Be gone from my sight," the Son of the Morning Star replied.

But the three Crow did not move. The Son of the Morning Star was scribbling in a book filled with blank pages. He tore a page with a single line on it from the book and handed it to a messenger. "Can you read what that says?" he asked. "Yes, sir. 'Hurry-bring packs,'" the messenger replied.

"Take these cowards back with you. They dishonor sacred ground," the Son of the Morning Star said.

The Crow scouts looked at one another again, then rode their horses in file past the senior officer, their eyes straight ahead, the coup feathers in their hair stiffening and flattening in the wind.

But Big Medicine reined his horse and turned it in a circle and pulled a heavy, cap-and-ball Army-issue revolver from a holster strapped across his chest. He clenched the revolver by the barrel and flung it spinning down the hill.

"The Shyelas hate Son of the Morning Star for all the women and children and old ones he killed on the Washita. You will take no button off a squaw's clothes today. Instead your spirit will travel the Ghost Trail without ears to listen or sight to see," he said.

If the senior officer heard, he gave no sign. His posture in the saddle was regal, his thoughts already deep in the battle that was about to take place. The Crow disappeared down the slope, through the golden fields of yellow grass, out of history, while the long column of sweat-soaked soldiers rode past them toward the senior officer and the crest of the hill and the panorama of sky and cottonwoods on a lazy green river and thousands of deerhide wickiups that teemed with families who never thought they would be attacked by a military force as small as the one now flowing over the hill's crest.

But the next events in Sue Lynn Big Medicine's dream broke with history and reason. Even though she was a Crow, she was inside the encampment of Sioux and Northern Cheyenne and saw the attack through their eyes rather than through her people's.

The soldiers rode down the valley with a recklessness that the Indians could not believe, firing pistols and rifles from their saddles into the wickiups, splitting their column down the middle to encircle the Indians as though they were about to round up livestock. She heard toppling rounds whirring past her head and saw the stitched deerhide on the wickiup she had just exited pop and snap on the lodge poles that supported it.

She raced back inside and saw her ten-year-old brother sitting on a buffalo robe, holding the flat of his palm against his mouth. He removed his hand and stared at it and at the circle of blood in the center of it, then looked at her and grinned and put his fingers to the small hole in his chest. She sank to both knees in front of him, while bullets from the soldiers' guns tore through the wickiup, and held both his hands in hers and watched the focus go out of his eyes and the pallor of death invade his cheeks.

When she rose to her feet the streaks of blood on her hands felt as hot as burns. She wiped the blood on her face and hair and went outside into the swirl of dust from the soldiers' horses and the running of people from the wickiups. Up the slope she saw the officer the Indians called the Son of the Morning Star. Many of his men were down now, running for the hilltop behind them, their horses gut-shot and writhing in the grass, but the Son of the Morning Star was still mounted and only yards from the edge of the village, the bit sawed back in his horse's mouth, while he fired one ball after another from his revolvers.

But his courage or his devotion to killing Indians or his grandiose belief in himself, whatever quality or vice had allowed him to remain unscathed in years of warfare, suddenly had no application in the maelstrom he had ridden into. His men, mostly German and Irish immigrants from the slums of the East, many who had never heard a shot fired in anger, were now forming a ragged perimeter on the hilltop, their noncommissioned officers screaming orders at men whose hands shook so badly they could hardly throw the breech on their rifles.

The Son of the Morning Star rode after his men, firing back over his horse's rump to cover their retreat, his heels slashing into his horse's ribs, his face filled with rage, as though history were betraying him. Then the Indians surged out of the encampment, with arrows and bows and coup sticks and Spencer and Henry repeaters and steel hatchets and stone axes and bundles of fire they dragged on ropes behind their horses.

The squaws ferreted out the wounded who tried to hide in the cattails along the river and mutilated them with knives. The wind was blowing out of the south, and the fires climbed up the hill where the surviving soldiers were kneeling in the grass and shooting down the slope. Many of the soldiers had carried whiskey in their canteens and now had no water. The dust and smoke swirled over them, and down the hill they heard the screams of their friends inside the burning grass, saw blackened shapes trying to rise like crippled birds from the flames. Some of the soldiers on the hill inverted their pistols and discharged them into their mouths.