The Veteran

by Frederick Forsyth

  The pinto pony was neither piebald nor skew-bald as most Indian mounts. It was a pale fawn, known as a golden buckskin. Craig had heard of that pony.

  The man on it was naked but for a breechcloth around his waist and moccasins on his feet. He was dressed like a simple brave but had the authority of a chief. There was no shield on his left forearm, implying that he disdained personal protection, but from the left hand dangled a stone war club. Therefore, Sioux.

  The war club was a fearsome weapon. Eighteen inches of haft, ending in a fork. Into the fork was rammed a smooth stone the size of a large goose egg. This was tied with hide thongs which would have been soaking wet when applied as lashings. Drying in the sun, they would shrink and tighten, so that the stone never fell. A blow from such a club would smash arms, shoulders or ribs, and crush the human skull like a walnut. It could only be used at close quarters, thus bringing much honour.

  When he spoke again it was in the Oglala Sioux tongue, which being closest to Cheyenne the scout could understand.

  ‘Why did you tie the wasichu like this?’

  ‘We did not, Great Chief. We found him thus tied, by his own people.’

  The dark gaze fell on the thongs still tied to each of Craig’s ankles. The Sioux noticed, but said nothing. Sat, lost in thought. His chest and shoulders were covered with painted circles to represent hailstones and from his hairline a single black lightning bolt ran to his bullet-scarred chin. He wore no other ornamentation but Craig knew him by repute. He was looking at the legendary Crazy Horse, undisputed chief of the Oglala Sioux these past twelve years, since the age of twenty-six, a man revered for his fearlessness, mysticism and self-denial.

  An evening breeze came off the river below. It ruffled the chief’s hair, the long grass and the feather behind the scout’s head, which came to rest on one buckskin shoulder. Crazy Horse noted this too. It was a sign of honour given by the Cheyenne.

  ‘He lives,’ ordered the war leader. ‘Take him to Chief Sitting Bull for judgement.’

  The warriors were disappointed to lose the chance of so much loot, but they obeyed. Craig was hauled to his feet and hustled down the hill to the river. As he went the half-mile he saw the aftermath of the massacre.

  Across the slope the 210 men of the five companies, minus scouts and deserters, were strewn in the strange postures of death. The Indians were stripping them of everything in the search for trophies, then carrying out the ritual mutilations, different according to each tribe. The Cheyenne slashed legs so the dead man could not pursue them, the Sioux battered skulls and faces to pulp with stone clubs. Others severed arms, legs and heads.

  Fifty yards down the hill the scout saw the body of George Armstrong Custer, naked but for his cotton ankle socks, marble white under the sun. He remained unmutilated save for the punctured eardrums and would be found that way by Terry’s men.

  Everything was being taken from pockets and saddlebags: rifles and pistols of course, with the copious supply of ammunition still remaining; tobacco pouches, steel-case watches, wallets with family photos, anything that could constitute a trophy. Then came the caps, boots and uniforms. The hillside swarmed with braves and squaws.

  At the riverbank there was a cluster of ponies. Craig was hoisted onto one and he and his four escorts splashed through the Little Bighorn to the western bank. As they rode through the Cheyenne village the women came out to scream abuse at the one surviving wasichu, but they fell silent when they saw the eagle feather. Was this a friend or a traitor?

  The group trotted down through the camps of the Sans Arcs and the Minneconjou until they reached the village of the Hunkpapa. The camp was in uproar.

  These braves had not faced Custer on the hill; they had met and driven back Major Reno, whose remnants were even then across the river, besieged on their hilltop, joined by Benteen and the mule train, wondering why Custer did not ride back down the hills to relieve them.

  Blackfoot, Minneconjou and Hunkpapa warriors rode hither and thither waving their trophies taken from Reno’s dead, and here and there Craig saw a blond or ginger scalp being waved aloft. Surrounded by screaming squaws, they came to the lodge of the great medicine man and judge, Sitting Bull.

  His Oglala escorts explained the orders of Crazy Horse, handed him over and rode back to seek their trophies on the slope. Craig was roughly thrown into a teepee and two old squaws were instructed to watch over him with knives in their hands.

  It was long after dark when he was sent for. A dozen braves came for him and dragged him out. Campfires had been lit and by their light the still-painted warriors were a fearsome sight. But the mood had calmed, even though a mile away, beyond the cottonwood stand and across the river, out of sight, occasional shots in the dark indicated that the Sioux were still crawling up the hill to Reno’s defensive circle on the bluff.

  In the entire battle, at both ends of the huge camp, the Sioux had taken thirty-one casualties. Although 1,800 warriors had been involved and their enemies had been virtually wiped out, they felt the loss. Up and down the camps widows were keening over husbands and sons and preparing them for the Great Journey.

  At the centre of the Hunkpapa village was one fire larger than the rest, and around it were a dozen chiefs, supreme among them Sitting Bull. He was then just forty but he looked older, his mahogany face even darker in the firelight and deeply lined. Like Crazy Horse, he was revered for once having had a great vision of the future of his people and of the buffalo of the plains. It had been a bleak vision: he had seen them all wiped out by the white man, and he was known to hate the wasichu. Craig was thrown down twenty feet to his left so that the fire did not block the view. They all stared at him for some time. Sitting Bull gave an order which Craig did not understand. A brave unsheathed his knife and moved behind Craig. He waited for the death blow.

  The knife sliced through the cords binding his wrists. For the first time in twenty-four hours he could bring his hands to the front of his body. He realized he could not even feel them. The blood began to flow back, causing first a fiery tingle and then pain. He kept his face immobile.

  Sitting Bull spoke again, this time to him. He did not understand, but replied in Cheyenne. There was a buzz of surprise. One of the other chiefs, Two Moon of the Cheyenne, spoke.

  ‘The Great Chief asks why the wasichu tied you to your horse and your hands behind you.’

  ‘I had offended them,’ said the scout.

  ‘Was it a bad offence?’ For the rest of the interrogation Two Moon interpreted.

  ‘The chief of the blue uniforms wanted to hang me. Tomorrow.’

  ‘What had you done to them?’

  Craig thought. Was it only the previous morning that Braddock had destroyed the lodge of Tall Elk? He started with that incident and finished when he was sentenced to hang. He noticed Two Moon nod at the reference to Tall Elk’s lodges. He already knew. At each sentence he paused while Two Moon translated into Sioux. When he was done there was a brief murmured conference. Two Moon called to one of his men.

  ‘Ride back to our village. Bring Tall Elk and his daughter here.’

  The brave went to his tethered pony, mounted and rode away. Sitting Bull’s questions resumed.

  ‘Why did you come to make war against the Red Man?’

  ‘They told me they had come because the Sioux were moving away from the reservations in the Dakotas. There was no talk of killing until Long Hair went crazy.’

  There was another buzz of consultation. ‘The Long Hair was here?’ asked Two Moon. For the first time Craig realized they had not even known whom they were fighting.

  ‘He is on the hillside across the river. He is dead.’

  The chiefs conferred again for a while, then there was silence. A council was a serious thing and there was no need for hurry. After half an hour Two Moon asked, ‘Why do you wear the white eagle feather?’

  Craig explained. Ten years ago when he was fourteen he had joined a bunch of Cheyenne youths and they all went hunting in the mountai
ns. They all had bows and arrows, save Craig, who had been allowed to borrow Donaldson’s Sharps rifle. They had been surprised by an old grizzly, an evil-tempered veteran with hardly a tooth left in his head but the strength in his forepaws to kill a man with a single swipe. The bear had come out of a thicket with a mighty roar, and charged.

  At this point one of the braves behind Two Moon asked to interrupt.

  ‘I remember this story. It happened in the village of my cousin.’

  Round the campfire there is nothing like a good story. He was invited to complete the tale and the Sioux craned to listen as Two Moon translated.

  ‘The bear was like a mountain and he came fast. The Cheyenne boys scattered to the trees. But the small wasichu took careful aim and fired. The bullet passed under the bear’s muzzle and struck him in the chest. He rose to his back feet, tall as a pine, dying but still coming forward.

  ‘The white boy ejected the spent cartridge and inserted another. Then he fired again. The second bullet went into the roaring mouth, through the roof and blew out the brains. The bear took one more pace and fell forward. The great head came down so close that saliva and blood splashed the boy’s knees. But he did not move.

  ‘They sent a messenger to the village and braves came back with a travois to skin the monster and bring the hide to make a sleeping robe for my cousin’s father. Then they held a feast and gave the wasichu a new name. Kills-Bear-With-No-Fear. And the eagle feather of a man who hunts. So it was told in my village a hundred moons ago before we were moved to the reservations.’

  The chiefs nodded. It was a good story. A party on ponies rode up. Behind was a travois. Two men Craig had never seen before entered the firelight. By their dressed and plaited hair they were Cheyenne.

  One was Little Wolf, who told how he had been hunting east of the river when he saw plumes of smoke rising over the Rosebud. He investigated and found the slaughtered women and children. While he was there he heard the bluecoat soldiers coming back, so he trailed them all day and night until they came to the valley of the camp. But he was too late for the great fight.

  The other man was Tall Elk. He had returned from hunting after the main column had passed. He was still grieving over his murdered womenfolk and children when his daughter came back. She was wounded but alive. Together with his other nine braves they had ridden through the night and the day to find the camp of the Cheyenne, arriving just before the battle, in which they had taken part with a will. He personally had sought death on Custer’s hill and had killed five wasichu soldiers but the Everywhere Spirit had not taken him.

  The girl from the travois was the last to be heard. She was pale and in pain from the wound and the long ride from the Rosebud, but she spoke clearly.

  She told of the massacre, and of the big man with the stripes on the arm. She did not understand his language but she understood what he wanted to do to her before she died. She told how the buckskin one had given her water, and eaten his meal, and set her on a pony and sent her back to her people.

  The chiefs conferred. The judgement came from Sitting Bull but it was the verdict of them all. The wasichu might live, but he could not go back to his people. Either they would kill him, or he would tell them the position of the Sioux. He would be given into the care of Tall Elk, who could treat him as prisoner or as guest. In the spring he could go free or remain with the Cheyenne.

  Around the fire there were grunts of approval from the braves. It was just. Craig rode back with Tall Elk to the teepee he had been given, and spent the night with two braves watching him. In the morning the great camp packed up to move. But scouts coming at dawn had brought news of even more bluecoats in the north, so they decided to go south towards the Bighorn Mountains and see if the wasichu came after them.

  Having accepted him into his clan, Tall Elk was generous. Four uninjured cavalry horses were found and Craig took his pick. They were not much valued by the Plains Indians, who preferred their hardy ponies. This was because few horses could adapt to the harsh winters of the plains. They needed hay, which the Indians never gathered, and could rarely survive the winter on lichen, moss and willow bark like the ponies. Craig selected a tough-looking, rangy chestnut he thought might adapt and named her Rosebud after the place where he had met Whispering Wind.

  A good saddle was easily found because the Indians never used them, and when his Sharps rifle and bowie knife were traced and identified, they were returned to him with some reluctance. From the saddlebags of his dead horse at the top of the slope he recovered his Sharps ammunition. There was nothing left to loot on the hillside. The Indians had taken all that interested them. They had no desire for the white man’s paper and white sheets fluttered in the long grass where they had been thrown. Among them were Captain William Cooke’s notes of the first interrogation.

  The striking of the villages took all morning. The teepees came down, the utensils were packed, the women, children and baggage loaded onto the numerous travois and shortly after midday the departure began.

  The dead were left behind, laid out in their teepees, painted for the next world, in their best robes, with the feathered bonnets of their rank. But in accordance with tradition all their household artefacts were scattered on the ground.

  When Terry’s men, coming up the valley from the north, discovered this the next day they would think the Sioux and Cheyenne had departed in a hurry. Not so: scattering the effects of the dead was the custom. They would all be looted anyway.

  Ever after the Plains Indians would protest that they only wanted to hunt, not fight, but Craig knew the army would recover from its loss and come looking for vengeance. Not for a while, but come they would. Sitting Bull’s grand council knew it too, and within a few days it was agreed the tribes should split up into smaller groups and scatter. This would make the job of the bluecoat soldiers harder and give the Indians a better chance of being able to winter in the wild and not be driven back to a half-starved winter in the Dakota reservations.

  Craig rode with what was left of the clan of Tall Elk. Of the ten hunters who had lost their womenfolk by the Rosebud, two had died at the Little Bighorn and two were injured. One, with a slight gash in the side, chose to ride. The other, who had taken a Springfield bullet through the shoulder at close range, was on a travois. Tall Elk and the other five would find new women. To enable this to happen, they had joined ranks with two other extended families, making a clan of some sixty men, women and children.

  When the group decision to split up came to them, they met in council to decide where they should go. Most were for heading on south into Wyoming, hiding in the Bighorn Mountains. Craig was asked for his view.

  ‘The bluecoats will come there,’ he said. With a stick he drew the line of the Bighorn River. ‘They will look for you here in the south, and here in the east. But I know a place in the west. It is called the Pryor Range. I was raised there.’

  He told them about the Pryors.

  ‘The lower slopes teem with game. The forests are thick and their branches blur the smoke rising from cooking fires. The streams are full of fish and higher there are lakes with many fish also. The wasichu never come there.’

  The clan agreed. On 1 July they peeled away from the main party of Cheyenne and, guided by Craig, headed north-west into south Montana, avoiding General Terry’s patrols, which were fanning out from the Bighorn but not that far west. In mid-July they reached the Pryors and it was still as Craig had said.

  The teepees were shrouded by trees and invisible from half a mile away. From a nearby rock, today called Crown Butte, a watchman could see many miles, but no-one came. The hunters brought many deer and antelope from the forests and children fished fat trout from the streams.

  Whispering Wind was young and healthy.

  Her clean wound healed fast until she could run again, swift as a fawn. Sometimes he caught her eye as she brought food to the menfolk and always his heart hammered inside him. She gave no sign of what she felt, casting her glance downward when s
he caught him staring. He could not know that something in her belly seemed to melt and her ribcage wanted to burst when she took a glance from those dark blue eyes.

  During the early autumn they just fell in love.

  The women noticed. She would return from serving the men flushed, the front of her buckskin tunic rising and falling, and the older women would cackle with glee. She had no mother nor aunt left alive, so the squaws were from different families. But they had sons among the twelve unmarried and therefore eligible braves. They wondered which one had set the beautiful girl afire. They teased her to let them know before he was stolen by another, but she told them they were talking nonsense.

  In September the leaves fell and the camp moved higher to be screened by the conifers. The nights turned chill as October came. But the hunts were good and the ponies cropped the last grass before turning to moss, bark and lichen. Rosebud adapted like the ponies around her and Craig would go down to the prairie and return with a sack of fresh grass, sliced in tufts with his bowie knife.

  If Whispering Wind had had a mother she might have intervened with Tall Elk, but there was no-one, so eventually she told her father herself. His rage was terrible to behold.

  How could she think such a thing? The wasichu had destroyed all her family. This man would go back to his people and there was no place for her. Moreover, the warrior who had taken the bullet in the shoulder at the Little Bighorn was now almost recovered. The shattered bones had finally knit. Not straight, but whole again. He was Walking Owl and he was a fine and brave warrior. He was to be her betrothed. It would be announced the next day. That was final.

  Tall Elk was perturbed. It could be the white man felt the same. He would have to be watched day and night from now on. He could not go back to his people; he knew where they camped. He would stay the winter but he would be watched. And so it was.

  Craig was suddenly moved to stay and sleep in a teepee with another family. There were three other single braves sharing the same lodge and they would stay alert if he tried to move during the night.