A Cold Day in Hell: The Dull Knife Battle, 1876

And ever since the last days of summer Johnny had been running from the whites. They wanted to hang him for murder.

In the crisp chill of autumn Bruguier stirred the fire before him at the center of the huge lodge he shared with Sitting Bull’s family. The old man and everyone else still slept this morning, exhausted from yesterday’s crossing of the Elk River.*

But Johnny could not sleep. It had been like this nearly every night since he’d fled the Standing Rock Agency,† Each time he closed his eyes the nightmares returned to haunt him. He awoke in a sweat. Afraid to close his eyes, afraid of those awful dreams, he instead sat up and tended the fire through much of the night, thinking. Brooding on all manner of things. Mostly on the white men who would hang him. And hating his mother for hooking up with a drunken white trader at the agency more than two decades ago.

Life had been tough for a half-breed at Standing Rock. So many times while he was growing up had he felt pushed outside the Hunkpapa band. At the same time the whites closed their arms and cloaked their hearts to him. He damned his mother for choosing to bed down with a white man, damned her for ever giving birth to him. Damned himself especially now, for the way things had turned out at Standing Rock.

Because of his two bloods, Johnny was brought up knowing both languages. His mother knew some English, more than enough to cuss like the agency employees and the white teamsters who came and went. Likewise, his French-Canadian father knew enough Lakota to sweet-talk the agency Sioux out of most everything they owned, in trade for a handful of blue glass beads or a tin cup of whiskey, which the man had buried among his stores of treasures.

Able to speak both tongues, but feeling at home in neither world, Bruguier had reluctantly attempted to make a home for himself there at Standing Rock for the last few winters. He was one of the agent’s three interpreters—at least that had been his life until he’d rubbed up against the wrong white man.

The one with the eyes so cold, he figured the man was already one of the “walking dead.” No emotion had shown in those icy eyes, until a young woman had walked into the trader’s store one late December afternoon. On such winter days most of the agency employees sat by the iron stove, whittling, telling stories, sharpening knives, drinking if they had pay coming on account.

This morning Johnny could feel the sweet tang of winter coming again to the high plains. The sharp teeth of winter were closing in upon them. His fire felt especially good this morning before the sun rose, as he remembered last winter. Remembered the woman. And the one with the walking dead eyes.

To the white men it would have been nothing more than an argument over a woman. Those things happened in that world. Among the Lakota, it had been a matter of the young woman’s honor. How the white man had shamed her and defiled her when she’d nervously walked into the trader’s store with her grandmother that cold winter afternoon almost a year gone now. No one else was going to tell the white man to take his hand off the woman’s arm. No one else was going to tell the man he should not have cuffed the old woman aside when she’d cried out, trying to remove the white man’s claws from her granddaughter’s arm.

No one, that is, except Johnny Bruguier.

As he looked back now, he thought how things had a way of sweeping him up and carrying him along before he knew it. Like a spring torrent of winter runoff rushing between two narrow creekbanks. He had his own knife at work on a piece of ash, carving a new stem for an uncle’s pipe. How the old men loved to spend much time with their pipes and telling stories this season of the year. When the bad words and the loud talk started, Johnny already had his knife out. When the white man pulled his knife, everything hurried by in a blur.

He remembered the girl being flung aside, landing in a heap atop her old grandmother. He remembered the size of that white man’s knife as he lunged for Johnny. And the last thing Bruguier was ever able to recall was the look in those walking dead eyes as the two men grappled. Those eyes no longer seeming dead at all, but lit with a bright, cold fire—such hate Johnny had never before seen.

Nor had he ever thought he would see so much blood pour out of a man. Something inside Bruguier had told him to put out the fire in those eyes, but Johnny did not know how he’d accomplished that, for he could remember nothing more until he was standing over the white man thrashing on the floor, bleeding from a dozen or more serious wounds, the floor beneath him slicking with dark puddles of blood and a greasy coil of gut. Too much blood, he had told himself. Too much for any man to lose and still live.