Medicine Creek

by Charles G. West

  “No!” Wounded Bear shouted and stepped between the two. He knew the savage Hump would not hesitate to kill the young man, and Wounded Bear needed every man he had. With anger blazing in his eyes, he turned to his nephew. “Why do you come here, making war on your own people? Have you no honor? Have the soldiers made you their camp dog, as they did Yellow Hand?”

  Hump ignored his chastising. “Where is the woman? She belongs to me.” A movement beyond the campfire caught his eye and he turned in time to see a woman disappear into the darkness, running toward the horses grazing close by. Without hesitation, he leaped on his horse and charged after her.

  Rain Song ran for her life. Her only chance was to reach the horses and escape in the dark. Ignoring the sharp pain that stabbed her side with each step she took, she strained as hard as her body would permit. Almost immediately, she heard the thunder of hooves bearing down upon her, louder and louder until they seemed to be almost on top of her. The closest horse in the grazing herd was still a long twenty yards away. She felt the impact of Hump’s horse as he slammed into her. Like a boulder, the solid blow from the horse’s chest sent her rolling head over heels in the knee-high grass. Before she could recover her senses, Hump dismounted and was on top of her.

  “You are my woman,” he hissed and laid his whip upon her bare legs a dozen times, leaving bloody welts each time it kissed her flesh. Subdued, and too hurt and frightened to fight back, she tried to cover her head with her arms and submitted to the beating.

  When he had exhausted some of his anger, he reached down and grabbed a handful of her dress and pulled her up on her feet. He pulled a length of rawhide rope from his saddle pack and bound her hands together. Then he threw her up on his horse as easily as lifting a sack of flour, and led the animal back through the silent gathering of people. The thought of putting a bullet into the brutish scout entered the minds of more than one of the braves there, but none dared. Hump was feared as much as Yellow Hand had been. Of the handful of men there, only old Wounded Bear dared to speak out against him.

  “Why don’t you leave her alone? The woman does not want to go with you.” Hump turned to face him, an angry scowl on his face. Wounded Bear was not intimidated. “She already has a husband. Leave her with us and go back to your soldier friends.”

  The muscles in Hump’s arm tensed. He thought about giving Wounded Bear a taste of his whip, but he restrained himself. “This is none of your affair,” he said, his voice threatening. “She is a Cheyenne, a slave. She belongs to me. I will kill any man who stands in my way.” His rifle in one hand, he pulled himself up behind Rain Song and kicked his horse hard, disappearing into the night.

  Wounded Bear was truly sorry to see the Cheyenne woman carried off by this savage bully. Had he been younger, he might have defied Hump, but he didn’t blame the young men in his band for not resisting. After all, Rain Song was a captured Cheyenne. Maybe Hump did have some justification in his claim of ownership. Anyway, it was over and done. The brute had what he wanted. Wounded Bear had more important things to occupy his mind at the moment. Blue Otter was right—it was imperative that they make better time on the trail tomorrow.

  * * *

  Brice had his men in the saddle before sunup. There was a great deal of grumbling among the troopers, but Brice intended to overtake the runaways before they had an opportunity to cross the mountains into the Flathead Valley. He drove the men hard, keeping them in the saddle all day, stopping only at dark to rest the horses. The trail was easy enough to follow so they were able to make forty miles that day. When camp was made that night on the west fork of the river, he sent Charlie Rain Cloud on ahead to scout the next morning’s trail for a few miles. When Charlie returned, he reported that he had seen cookfires in the bluffs, no more than four or five miles ahead.

  “We caught ’em,” Sergeant Baskin announced, upon hearing Charlie’s report. “I didn’t figure we’d need twenty days’ rations to catch up with this bunch.”

  “We haven’t got ’em back to the reservation yet,” Brice responded. “What does the trail look like up ahead, Charlie?”

  The scout shrugged his shoulders. “Not bad. They follow river pretty close.”

  Already knowing what his lieutenant was considering, Baskin said, “There’s gonna be a moon tonight, almost a full moon.”

  Brice nodded. “Looks like a perfect evening for a night march. Sergeant, let the men have fires tonight but keep ’em small. After the horses are rested for a few hours, we’ll move up to within a mile or two of their camp and hit ’em in the morning.”

  * * *

  A light mist rose from the river and Quill shivered in the chilly morning air that settled in the narrow valley. She tapped her fingers impatiently while she waited for the water bag to fill. Looking back at the camp, she realized that she was the first to rise. This pleased her. She liked to be awake and cooking Blue Otter’s breakfast before the other women crawled out from their warm blankets. Blue Otter would brag about his hardworking wife.

  Her water bag filled, she climbed up the steep bank and started toward her cookfire, which was already blazing with the limbs she placed on the coals only minutes before. She paused to listen. A soft thundering sound came to her from across the river. The horses are running, she thought, someone is stealing the horses! She ran to the edge of the bluff and looked beyond to the grassy meadow. The horses were not running—they were still there where the men had left them to graze the night before. As she looked at them, first one and then another, they pitched their heads up and whinnied, aware of the presence of strange horses.

  Quill dropped her water bag and screamed out in alarm, for she realized then what the thundering hoofs were. At almost the same moment she screamed, the first shots rang out. As she ran to alert the others, she saw the first line of cavalry plunging across the river, their horses struggling to climb the steep bank.

  Brice, at the head of his charging troopers, had given the order to shoot for effect only. His intention was to surprise the Indians and demoralize them with a sudden show of force, without killing anyone if possible. His job was to bring them back to the reservation, and his plan might have been successful but for the unforeseen steepness of the river banks. As his horse struggled and pawed to gain the top of the bank, he saw other horses sliding backward and falling on both sides of him, dumping their riders into the chilly water. The troopers behind, seeing their comrades tumbling, thought their horses were brought down by rifle fire from the Indian camp. Consequently, they returned fire, no longer shooting into the air but aiming at the fleeing figures now running to the safety of the bluffs behind them.

  Brice, fighting hard to keep his horse from sliding into the water, managed to gain the far bank along with a handful of his men. He was forced to lose valuable time and waste the element of surprise while he waited for the rest of the column to ford the river. During that period of perhaps ten minutes, not one shot was fired by the Indian camp as they ran for cover. By the time at least half of Brice’s patrol had regrouped, the Nez Perces were safely positioned in the gullies and cuts in the bluffs, and were now returning fire.

  Sergeant Baskin pulled up beside Brice. He was soaked to the skin from a dunking in the river. “You want to charge and run ’em out of there?” The sergeant had let his anger override his common sense.

  “Shit no,” Brice responded, “I don’t need to lose half the men charging those bluffs.” It was bad enough that his original plan had been bungled. Now he was in a skirmish.

  Baskin was still hot. He would rather have been shot than take a bath and he was eager to make someone pay for it. “Well, what the hell do you aim to do?” When Brice cocked his head around and locked a cold eye on him, he added, “Sir.”

  “We don’t have much choice.” Standing up in the stirrups, he yelled, “Dismount! Send the horses back out of range along the riverbank.” He then had Baskin set up a perimeter fronting the gullies to keep the renegades pinned down in the bluffs. As the handlers col
lected the mounts and led them out of the line of fire, the rest of the men scurried about, finding cover anywhere they could, some scratching out hasty rifle pits in the sand. Brice deployed eight of his troopers between the hostiles and their horses.

  From early morning until just before noon, the troopers kept a steady rain of gunfire on the Indian positions. Brice figured the renegades could not repel them if he ordered a charge, but he knew he would take casualties if he did. And he still wanted to avoid killing any Indians if he could. He counted on the half dozen or so rifles among the Indians running out of ammunition before long, forcing them to finally surrender. So Brice kept them pinned down and waited for the inevitable.

  In the gullies, things were not going well for Wounded Bear’s band. The old chief had caught a bullet in his side during the flight into the bluffs. One of the younger men had been killed trying to get to the pony herd, leaving only five of them to defend their families. Although the wound pained him badly, Wounded Bear fired his rifle until the old Henry jammed with dirt in the magazine and he was forced to lie back and let the others shoot what little ammunition they had left.

  It soon became apparent that they could hold out no longer. The sun was almost in the middle of the sky and pretty soon the soldiers would realize there had been no shots fired at them for some time. Wounded Bear counciled his young warriors to save a few bullets to use only if the soldiers charged. “We are finished. We have women and children to think about. I think we must surrender.”

  Blue Otter alone protested the decision. “I will not go back to the reservation. I will die first!”

  Wounded Bear understood his son-in-law’s anguish, but he had concern for his daughters and his grandson. “It is not for me to say what another man must do. If I were younger, I might feel as you do. But how will you escape? We are cut off from our horses. The soldiers will surely kill you if you try to run.”

  Blue Otter had been looking for an escape route from the moment he pulled his family into the deep gully. He discovered a likely exit from the trap they found themselves in when he spotted another gully, separated from the one they were in by no more than three feet of clay bank. The second gully ran perpendicular to theirs and led down to the river. While he fired his rifle at the soldiers, Blue Otter told his son to pick away at the dirt between the two gullies with his knife.

  Everything fell silent. The soldiers had stopped firing. They sensed an order was soon to come to attack the Indians’ position, since there had been no return fire from the Nez Perces for fully a half hour. Blue Otter knew there was no time left. “I speak for only myself and my family. We can crawl through this hole and follow the gully down to the river. If others want to come, I welcome them, but I and my family will certainly go.”

  “How will you get to your horses? The soldiers will kill you.”

  “We will go on foot. I would sooner walk to Canada than go back to that reservation of slow death.”

  None among the others chose to slip out of the trap with Blue Otter. He waited as long as he thought prudent before gathering what belongings he had been able to salvage when the soldiers attacked. Wounded Bear embraced his daughters and grandson and then bid them a solemn farewell. Tears streamed down his daughters’ faces as they dutifully followed Blue Otter through the opening fashioned by his son. Wounded Bear watched them until they could no longer be seen from his place at the head of the chasm. Then he crawled back to the lower end of the gully to watch the soldiers’ position. There was no indication that the troops had seen Blue Otter escape.

  Back near the banks of the river, Brice signaled for Sergeant Baskin. When Baskin made his way over to the lieutenant’s position, he dropped down on a knee, still keeping a wary eye on the bluffs. Brice looked at his watch. “It’s been over thirty minutes now with nothing from those gullies. I think we’ve waited long enough. Let’s go get ’em outta there.”

  “Wait!” Baskin blurted and Brice turned back toward the bluffs to find a white cloth waving on a rifle barrel protruding from one of the gullies. “Looks like this little picnic is over.”

  Once the Indian ponies were rounded up, and the wounded and dead were loaded on travois, the troop started back to Lapwai with four good hours of daylight left. Wounded Bear, mortally injured, had made his last attempt to regain the life of freedom he had been born into. The wound in his side eventually became infected and he was to die within two weeks of his return to the reservation. Back in a willow thicket by the river, Blue Otter, his wife, her sister, and his son hid until the column was out of sight. They then crossed the river and started making their way toward the mountains on foot.

  13

  “What the hell?” Tobin roared and pulled back hard on the reins. What he saw didn’t make sense. Little Wolf had run north just as Tobin figured he would, following the valley, heading toward Canada. Now, for no apparent reason, the white Cheyenne had turned back dead west, following an old hunting trail that led up into the mountains. This caused Tobin some measure of irritation. He thought he had figured out his man, knew what he was thinking, and he had him heading straight for Canada as fast as he could get there.

  “Hell,” he blurted, “he’s heading into Kutenai territory” Tobin didn’t like it when his prey didn’t run true to form. He paused to think it over for a few minutes while he scrutinized the trail plainly left by the four horses. Maybe he’s just trying to throw me off, he considered. Then another thought struck his mind. “Maybe this ol’ boy has still got a taste for blood and he’s thinking about taking a few more scalps from his good friends in Medicine Creek before he leaves the country. Maybe Little Wolf was more bloodthirsty than he had figured him to be. The longer Tobin followed the trail up through the spruce and pines, the more the idea appealed to him. He felt he was back inside Little Wolf’s head again. “That musta been one purty little Injun gal,” he said.

  Although Tobin never hesitated to follow a hunch, he still kept a sharp eye to make sure Little Wolf was not intent on doubling back and heading north again. As slick as this renegade was, Tobin did not discount the possibility that the Cheyenne was waiting to ambush him.

  The trail was steep in places as it climbed higher into the trees, sometimes blocked by fallen timber, deadfalls that necessitated a detour. But the tracks always came back to the trail. Hours passed with no long departure from the trail leading to the west.

  It was almost sunset when the tracks split off from the trail and led off through a thick forest of lodgepole pines, with trees so close together that Tobin marveled how a man could lead four horses through it. Uh-oh, he thought and smiled to himself. He’s trying to lose me now. Though there were still a couple of hours of daylight left, it would soon be black as night in the pines. So Tobin decided it best to make camp where he was and wait for daylight to follow Little Wolfs trail. The Cheyenne was slick—it wouldn’t do to give him any advantage.

  Morning came. Tobin knew he was losing ground by having to wait for the sun to filter a little light through the tall pines, but he had little choice. Even when he decided it was as light as it was likely to get, the floor of the forest was still cloaked in a dark veil. Tobin was not discouraged. He was confident that no man was his equal when it came to tracking. At times he found it necessary to dismount and proceed cautiously on foot as he searched for disturbed patches in the deep floor of pine needles.

  After hours of dogged tracking, he emerged from the trees on a downslope. Out in the open, the trail led down through a grassy bottom to a small stream where it appeared the Cheyenne had stopped to let his horses feed on the knee-high grass. The water ran deep and swift, and there was beaver sign everywhere among the clumps of willow. Tobin gnawed on a piece of buffalo jerky while his horse drank from the stream. He studied the trail leading off up the stream, paralleling the coursing water. Tobin glanced ahead, toward the mountain where the stream originated, thinking, After holding to the west for more than a day, he’s turned back north. Again Tobin smiled. This is where he fig
ures to throw me off. Wants me to think he’s heading for Canada after all.

  The trail was easy to follow until the stream narrowed as it carved its way through broad areas of shale and rock, approaching the treeline. The buckskin began to labor as the incline became more severe, but Tobin pushed him onward. “If that damn renegade can drive four horses up here, you better damn shore make it,” he scolded.

  “Here it is,” he stated at the place he expected to find, where the trail he had been following vanished. Now we’ll see who’s the best, he thought as he dismounted and began a careful examination of the rocky ground. He covered the area, working in a wide circle until he found what he was looking for. It was barely noticeable, a handful of disturbed gravel and a small hoofmark on a rock. “East,” he noted softly, and he paused to look off in that direction, a path that would lead back to the valley of the Flathead. “You son of a bitch, I know you! You ain’t going back to that valley.”

  Leading the buckskin, he worked slowly along the rocky ledge until he found the sign he knew had to be there: two clear prints in a patch of bear grass. I don’t care how damn good you be, four horses is gonna leave sign somewhere, he thought to himself. He stood up and looked around him, satisfied that he was always a step ahead of the man he followed. “Yessir, Mr. Little Wolf, you’re about as slick as any I’ve chased. But you ain’t got no notion of heading north like them tracks say.”

  Farther up, he found more sign that led through the trees until he reached another outcropping of rock where the trail disappeared again. Undeterred, he turned west once more, knowing where his man was going. You got careless now, he thought. You ain’t figuring on nobody staying on your trail this long. It was as he figured. Little Wolf, thinking he had surely thrown Tobin off his track, had not been as careful when he led his horses out toward the west again. It was then that Tobin was certain Little Wolf was intent on returning to raid the citizens of Medicine Creek.