At times the girl was sulky because she was denied the rank of warrior,
shut out from the war-path secret, the hidden matters known only to
fighting men. This secret was that the warriors shared all knowledge in
common as to the frailties of women who erred, but Pine Leaf was barred
out.
There is no space here for a tithe of her battles, while that great
vengeance for her brother piled up the tale of scalps. In one
victorious action, charging at Jim’s side, she was struck by a bullet
which broke her left arm. With the wounded arm nursed in her bosom she
grew desperate, and three warriors fell to her ax before she fainted
from loss of blood.
Before she was well recovered from this wound, she was afield again,
despite Jim’s pleading and in defiance of his orders, and in an
invasion of the Cheyenne country, was shot through the body.
“Well,” she said afterward, as she lay at the point of death, “I’m
sorry that I did not listen to my chief, but I gained two trophies.”
The very rescue of her had cost the lives of four warriors.
While she lay through many months of pain, tended by Jim’s head wife,
her bosom friend, and by Black Panther, Jim’s little son, the chief was
away fighting the great campaigns, which made him famous through all
the Indian tribes. Medicine Calf was his title now, and his rank, head
chief, for he was one of two sovereigns of equal standing, who reigned
over the two tribes of the Crow nation.
While Pine Leaf sat in the lodge, her heart was crying, but at last
she was able to ride again to war. So came a disastrous expedition,
in which Medicine Calf and Pine Leaf, with fifty Crow warriors and an
American gentleman named Hunter, their guest, were caught in a pit on
a hillside, hemmed round by several hundred Blackfeet. They had to cut
their way through the enemy’s force, and when Hunter fell, the chief
stayed behind to die with him. Half the Crows were slain, and still the
Blackfeet pressed hardly upon them. Medicine Calf was at the rear when
Pine Leaf joined him. “Why do you wait to be killed?” she asked. “If
you wish to die, let us return together. I will die with you.”
They escaped, most of them wounded who survived, and almost dying of
cold and hunger before they came to the distant village of their tribe.
Jim’s next adventure was a horse-stealing raid into Canada, when he was
absent fourteen months, and the Crows mourned Medicine Calf for dead.
On his triumphant return, mounted on a piebald charger the chief had
presented to her, Pine Leaf rode with him once more in his campaigns.
During one of these raids, being afoot, she pursued and caught a young
Blackfoot warrior, then made him her prisoner. He became her slave, her
brother by tribal law, and rose to eminence as her private warrior.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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