June 25th 1876, 3:14 p.m. Sitting Bull is sitting and smoking with friends in the shade of his lodge. None of them knows yet that soldiers are approaching the village. They don't know that about 7 hours before two boys have found a pack of hard bread a few miles away. The boys, more interested in what was inside the box than who had lost it, were busy trying to pry it open when suddenly soldiers came galloping along. Different versions are being told about who these boys were. One version says that they belonged to Little Wolf's Cheyenne group which was on its way to the Little Bighorn Camp. Another version says they were Lakota boys and that one of them was Sitting Bull's ten years old nephew Deeds who was shot dead by the troopers. So, if the second version is true, Sitting Bull smokes the pipe with his friends, blissfully ignorant that the soldiers have just killed his nephew and are about to kill many more Lakota now. Suddenly there is a strange unrest in the village which quickly swells to noise, screams of alarm. "Soldiers are attacking!" For a few moments there is incredulity. Who would be so foolish to attack such a powerful, large village? Surely some nervous woman's nerves must have played a trick on her! But the noise gets louder. More and more people are running, up north, away from the southern end of the village! Women are frantically calling the names of their children, and children are crying for their mothers. The men exchange serious glances and jump up. This is for real! 3:15 p.m. Twenty-three year old warrior One Bull, among the first fighting men ready to repel the assault, reports with his uncle Sitting Bull. Armed with a muzzle-loading musket, his chances against the troopers with their breech-loading carbines aren't the best. Sitting Bull gives him his own weapons instead - a stone club and his personal war shield with the black bird on blue ground. Will this turn out to be a blessing or a curse? One Bull rides out south with Sitting Bull's instructions. 3:16 p.m. Meanwhile Pizi (called Gall by the Whites) is running through the chaos into the direction of the firing and screaming, frantically searching for his family. As he reaches the edge of the village, a horrific scene greets him which no Lakota has had to witness in the past thirteen years and which most of the people only know from eery campfire stories: The horizon is swarming with blue riders, bullets are flying about like angry bees, plunging into the lodges and the ground like hailstones, and, strewn into the dry grass, lie the twisted bodies of boys, girls and women, all of them very dead. Pizi is a seasoned warrior, he has seen dead people before, yet as he looks closer, his horror becomes boundless. There lies his first wife and there his second wife, there his child, there another of his children and over there a third one... Those who have ever experienced what if feels like to be hit out of the blue by the totally unexpected death of a loved-one will know about the sudden, pitch-black abyss of the sheer dreadfully impossible that suddenly devours you, lets something vitally important inside you collapse immediately and then make your knees go soft and and your body inexorably sink to the ground. Imagine that happening to you five-fold at once... Pizi's own words - as they have been recorded by white people - are short and matter-of-factly and reflect what a tough guy he was, not folding in boundless despair but soon after turning his grief into deadly anger: "It made my heart bad. After that I killed all my enemies with the hatchet." Meanwhile, One Bull is on a mission. Sitting Bull has instructed him to try to parley with the soldiers. He tries just that - but it doesn't take long to realize that his entreaties are futile as only bullets are coming back. The paralels to previous massacres are eery. Sand Creek 1864, where Southern Cheyenne Peace Chief White Antelope ran out towards the troops and shouting to them to stop in clearly discernable English - only to be shot down and mutilated... Washita 1868, where the rest of the same village was annihilated by Custer's troops. But this is neither Sand Creek nor Washita. One Bull isn't White Antelope. He is turning about at this very moment to act upon the second part of Sitting Bull's instruction: "If they won't talk - go and fight!". One Bull, armed with a stone club and Sitting Bull's shield won't die today, he will kill three soldiers in this battle and live a long life well into the atomic age. Pizi will grab a hatchet, do everything to prevent further carnage and then direct the counter attack. This is the high water mark of the 7th cavalry's deadly attack. No more women and children will die today. Now it will be the soldiers who will get a taste of their own medicine... __________ Poser Pro 2014 - Vue Xstream 2014