Eric Maas’s Reviews > Days Without End > Status Update

7. Indians too go to ground; Caleb Booth the lucky man; Mrs. Lavinia Grady-Neale, Major’s bride; new trace of Caught-His-Horse-First.

I had in my days of being a girl considered the phrase ‘feminine mystery’ because I had been obliged to try to turn my hand to it. Here was the sockdolager of goddamned feminine mystery.

There goes Caleb Booth, the lucky man. A lucky man is a man you want fighting near you and he gives the needful sense that the world is a thing of mysteries and wonders. That it’s bigger than you, bigger than all the shot and blood you seen. That God might be in it somehow looking out for you.

6. Peace with the Oglala Indians. And broken peace, ending with the massacre of twenty fellow men. Lieutenant handled with the same disrespect Indians victims were given by white men (cutting off access to heaven by cutting off heads)

Joking, all that Irish do, but somewhere behind it the dark wolves staring, the hunger wolves under the hunger moons.

5. Indian victuals, ice storm & frostbite

The wind was all icy blades and might have shaved the beards and whiskers of the men but that they had already froze to metal.

Gangrene got in and that’s a dancing partner no trooper chooses.

Ever since leaving the Daggsville saloon it’s been all violence and hardship for the troops. Like an inventory or encyclopedia. I long for an individual level of narrative

4. Flood, and starting away from Indians

It’s a dark thing when the world sets no value on you or your kin, and Death comes stalking in, in his bloody boots. (p.42)