A well-written story, Bill, as I’ve come to expect when I visit your port. Not one of my favorites, but skillfully done!
an over-hanging branch
issued just two weeks prior (suggestion: earlier)
long-johns doesn’t need the hyphen
fore-warning doesn’t need the hyphen
as black as a wild animal’s
The rest of this section is brutal, but vividly told. I will admit that I was a bit skeptical about some of the facts (namely, that members of what appeared to be different tribes would share sign language), but I have learned some things, reading this. http://nativeamericanrhymes.com/plains/overview.ht...
You’ve got a potentially sympathetic character in Thunder Bow, but he doesn’t act on his own stated beliefs to stop Night Bear - he merely turns away. And I could almost feel for Night Bear; I understand his need for revenge, but his pragmatic fiddling with the stolen boots before killing the man seems to indicate that he enjoys being cruel. I don’t much like either of them.
They had rodeidden hard throughout the day
…Fort “holding area,” stolen two horses and some weapons, then made good their escape.
Parallelism: They had broken, had stolen, had made… I don’t think you need the quotation marks around “holding area.”
You like hyphens, don’t you, Bill? I think they’re not needed here: damn-it, nurse-maids, double-back, and … well, you search for ‘em. You’ll find ‘em.
Rained dripped heavily from the buckskins
Black Bear then spoke in Comanche (don’t you mean Night Bear?)
His hands shaking, the young soldier relied on his countless drilling. On his what??
Not the ending I’d expected or half-hoped for… The words tragic and senseless come to mind. And I suppose, if you’re trying to make the point that there are no real heros or villains on either side of the conflict, just men of peace, men who rightly thirst for revenge, men who follow duty, and scared boys who haven’t begun to grow a beard who get caught up in war, then you’ve made it well.
As always, I was caught up in your writing style, and you held my attention throughout. Your descriptive passages are vivid - neither overblown nor understated; your dialogue is credible.
And yet, I’m left feeling vaguely dissatisfied and more than a little sad. There were no characters here that I loved or hated passionately enough to care much, one way or the other, what happened to them (except maybe the one at the beginning that you dispatched so violently). Or maybe Pup. But there’s a mother for you… I suppose, what I’m mourning at the end, is the fact that this story highlights the way we humans always manage to turn misunderstandings into conflict, and conflict into senseless war, and how little there is to be “won” in that. I think that’s what you intended and achieved by making the young and almost innocent the real victims.
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