The one person she didn’t think about was Gunner Pedersen.
Then she fell back into a sleep with arms—arms that enfolded her, kept her still and warm, pinning her down against her will.
JANUARY 13, 1888, 12:15 A.M.
SIGNAL OFFICE
WAR DEPARTMENT
SAINT PAUL
Indications for 24 hours commencing at 7 A.M. today.
FOR SAINT PAUL AND MINNEAPOLIS: snow, colder with a cold wave, fresh northerly winds.
FOR MINNESOTA: colder with a cold wave, snow followed in northern part by fair weather, fresh northerly winds.
FOR DAKOTA: local snows, colder with a cold wave, fresh northerly winds becoming variable.
CHAPTER 20
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THE SUN ROSE THAT MORNING as ever, peeking over the eastern horizon, taking its sweet time, painting the black sky purple, then pink, then with tendrils of faded blue that began to erase the night. It continued to rise, until a dome of the most brilliant blue encircled a prairie that was sparkling with new snow, the crystals catching and reflecting back up their blinding bursts of brilliance.
A hawk, one that had found shelter in a nest built in the top of a newly planted oak next to a little creek, emerged, shaking its wings lazily before taking to the sky, working to catch a current. The air was so still he had to climb higher than usual, but then he found it; he circled widely, flapping his wings slowly as he patrolled his patch of prairie, searching for something to eat.
As he soared high above, the blinding white of the landscape below seemed unbroken, a great undulating blanket of snow as far as the eye could see, except for a few far-flung houses and barns. Fences were completely obscured, so that it all seemed one parcel, one infinite landscape of shimmering diamonds.
But the hawk knew the landscape; there were vast areas of it he avoided due to a scarcity of prey. Land that was overhunted—that land was the Great Sioux Reservation, bordered by the rugged Black Hills on the west, the Missouri River on the east. There, even scrawny squirrels and half-dead rabbits were precious. The smudges there were tepees, made out of fading buffalo hide, clustered together in groups, the groups too close to those from other tribes, but forced, due to the government, to live together. Misery hung over this landscape like a cloud, even on the sunniest day.
So he kept to the south, swooping closer to the ground, and finally the peaceful-seeming landscape gave up some secrets. A fence post here, a clump of bushes there, an upturned wagon, haystacks.
As his eyes adjusted, however, other secrets were discovered. What seemed like a line of small haystacks were, upon closer inspection as the hawk zeroed in, cows. Unmoving cows, statues; some on their sides, others standing, all frozen where they were.
The hawk turned, uninterested, to investigate more dark shapes emerging from the blinding white; horses, their legs collapsed under them, eyes closed forever.
Now the hawk swooped back up, circling ever wider, before zeroing in on the ground again, intent for food.
But nothing moved. Not a rabbit, not a gopher. Not a smaller bird, unaware.
A small smudge over there—the bird cruised down to see, hopeful, hungry. But he was disappointed; the smudge did not move. For it was an arm, sticking out of the snow, attached to a body buried beneath.
Another odd blot of lifelessness, another, another—the bird took it all in from his aerial vantage point. A yellow hat atop a grey head, eyes frozen shut. A hand, poking out of a drift; a child’s hand, so small, so white, a deathly white, paler than the snow. A wagon wheel, a pale blue dress fluttering out of its spokes, and inside that dress, a lifeless female body.
Clothing fluttered, moving, tricking the hawk time and again into thinking it had found its breakfast. Clothing blown off bodies that were now naked to the elements, like the one over there, only a few heartbreaking steps away from a barn.