Fort

Wanica knew the Northern Raiders operated like pack animals with no stomach for sticking around once they lost their own Chief. And sure enough they fled into the grasslands north, never to return to the river ford at the foot of the Island in the Sky claimed by the People.

A bison gets thirsty eating grass all day out on the Great Plains and Squaw River was a reliable source of water. A herd came near to the source at the Island in the Sky where the stream was still fairly narrow. When the herd was taking drink Wanica struck with the Golden Gift, taking just one of them according to the needs of the Kuwapi People. It was done in such a stealthy way the rest of the herd barely noticed. In this way the Kuwapi were able to sustain themselves without ranging far afield to hunt.

Later the People saw the first wagon trains of white skin settlers use the ford at the river. The white skins used their fire sticks to drop some of the animals merely to clear the way and they did not even take the animals for food. Fair enough, Wanica thought, there is plenty for all. But by the second year the herds had grown noticeably thinner, and many of the People remembered the fire sticks.

The year after that no large game animals were seen at all. The People had to scratch a living from small game, or from the scrawny solitary black-tail deer they sometimes chanced upon. A few of of the hunters murmured openly, recalling with glowing fondness the time of Chief Bad Heart Bull, perhaps forgetting that even during that lost "Golden Age" it was still Wanica who led the hunts.

The army of the Whites set up an outpost six land miles (and twelve river miles) eastward of the Island in the Sky they called Fort Price. Captain John Smalley commanded a company of mounted rifles detached north from the 6th Calvalry Regiment, and despite his bitter hatred for the dead-end post he had been assigned, snack in the middle of the biggest zone of nothing in the American West, Smalley maintained good relations with Chief Wanica and the Kuwapi. For one reason, they all somehow spoke passable English, and the son of the Chief and his wife actually spoke it better than most Whites. He considered the People to be relatively peaceful.

But contacts were necessarily limited because the People are so poor they have almost nothing to trade. "This fort ain't exactly a charity outfit," he was often heard to say. Ten Kuwapi women lived at the fort and the less busy the soldiers were the more busy the women were.

One day eight whiteskins came mounted on horses, cracking whips, two on Point, two on Flank, and two on Drag, with a cook with his own wagon in the rear and a man riding way out front picking the best path for five hundred animals bulkier than any game animal save the bison.