Death on the Grand GIVEN THE KIND OF early life I had had, I was generally a real light sleeper, but on this morning, maybe having a premonition that what- and whenever anything happened concerning Sitting Bull, I wouldn’t be able to stop it, I was not woke up by what must of been the considerable noise outside of arriving horses and dismounting men, and was not brought fully awake even by the pounding at the cabin door and then somebody yelling, “Tatanka Iyotanka!” in a voice full of bad feeling, though I heard it as the trailing off of an unpleasant dream, from which I’d open my eyes to the crowded but real homey room full of people on good terms with one another and whose combined body-heats warmed the place against the outside cold, for it had snowed some lately and ice had begun to form on the Grand, and anyway whoever was yelling was Indian, using the Bull’s Lakota name, so it wasn’t the U.S. Army attacking like they done when I lived in Black Kettle’s village on the Washita and the Seventh Cavalry rode down on us.
