So I had to check out this book, or at least an excerpt. Our hero, by the way, is Matt, and he sees a Sioux holy man dancing among the warriors his men have surrounded and are holding at gunpoint.
Matt clenched his jaw. Exactly what they didn't need. The Lakota had been docile enough yesterday when Matt's company had rounded them up near Porcupine Butte. Big Foot had been compliant. But this holy man... he was stirring up defiance.
For some reason, the Sioux don't react with the docility and compliance that Matt would like. Instead, chaos and gunfire break out. Fleeing women and children get caught up in it.
In fact, most of the Lakota were fleeing now, no longer an active threat.
Yet bullets continued to fly. Mortar shells continued to explode. Indians continued to die.
Protect your men. Complete your objective. Ignore the rest.
Matt clenched his jaw and hardened his heart. Focus on what's within your control.
And be sure to clench your jaw. That wins awards!
Matt then goes down into a ravine and confronts an old woman trying to protect five children, one of whom is a boy who takes a pot shot at him. Matt shoots the boy in the shoulder, twists the gun out of his hand, and notices artillery being positioned to fire down into the ravine.
He turned back to the old woman. "Come." He gestured urgently and pointed at the mountain gun. "We must leave. Now."
She ignored him. Well, that wasn't precisely true. She ignored his order, not him.
No woman should ignore an order from a man, amiright?
Him, she impaled with a look of hatred as she herded the other children back toward the camp. Into the line of fire. As if she'd rather die with her people than follow a white man to safety.
1. Does she even understand him when he speaks to her in English?
2. Even if she understood him, how is she supposed to know he's a wonderful, morally upright person who wants to save her? It's not as though white men have a stellar record of treating indigenous women and children well.
3. Also, notice the word used to describe how the Indian woman treats the children? She doesn't guide them back to the camp. She herds them. Herding, what's done to animals.
"Wait!" Matt grabbed for the boy, desperate to save at least one, but the kid scrambled rashly after his kin, only to be hit full in the chest by a bullet.
The boy here is the one Matt shot, so he's understandably not keen on being near a man who just shot him. Like most children, he'd prefer to be with people he knows. But this is described as "rash". So if the child hadn't been reckless and foolhardy, he wouldn't have been killed. Maybe Matt could have, I don't know, sent him to a nice residential school instead.
The chapter ends with Matt being conveniently knocked out as the cannon fires, so when he wakes up, all he sees is the aftermath of the massacre, which he says isn't justice. And that's where the chapter ends, with "maybe hundreds" of Sioux dead, Our Hero morally awakened, and myself determined never to touch another of this author's books.
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