She Found a Lakota Warrior Dying in the Snow—Three Days Later, His Tribe Surrounded Her Cabin

Chapter 4

The first thing she learned about him was that he was a man who did not cry out easily.

Through the long hours of that first day, as she stripped him of his frozen clothes and wrapped him in blankets, as she chafed his hands and feet and forced warm broth between his cracked lips, he made almost no sound. A groan, once, when she moved him too quickly. A muttered word in a language she did not understand. But no screams. No pleas.

It was only when she found the arrow that she understood why.

She had been trying to ease his position, to make him more comfortable, when her hand brushed against something hard. She pushed aside the buffalo hide tunic—stiff with ice, frozen blood darkening the leather—and found the broken shaft.

The arrow had entered just below his ribs on the right side. The shaft had snapped off, leaving the head and a few inches embedded deep. The wound was swollen, an angry purple-red, the surrounding flesh hot even through the chill of his skin.

Elara’s breath caught. This was not the storm. This was not an accident.

Someone had shot him.

She sat back on her heels, her mind reeling. Rival warriors. White men. The possibilities were all grim, and none of them led to a safe conclusion for the woman who now held his life in her hands.

Her knowledge of medicine was rudimentary—learned from her mother, supplemented by the hard necessities of frontier life. She could set a broken bone. She could stitch a cut. She could brew willow bark tea for fever and yarrow poultices for infection.

But an arrowhead, lodged against vital organs, was beyond her experience.

To leave it in meant infection. Death.

To remove it meant bleeding. Possibly death.

She sat in the firelight, watching the warrior’s chest rise and fall, and she made her choice.