Shortgrass Song

by Mike Blakely

  Buster pulled Caleb by the arm as he sprinted toward the draw upstream. Glancing back, he saw one Cheyenne warrior riding across the creek. The thicket was just fifty yards ahead, yet he didn’t know if he would reach it in time. His slick boots slipped on the slope of the creek bank, and branches whipped him as he raced. He stumbled into the draw just as the brave crossed the creek toward it.

  Caleb tried to lie down in the bushes, but Buster dragged him deeper into the cover by the collar. The boy gasped for air but seemed unable to draw any. Finally, Buster dropped him between the trunks of two big trees and picked up a stick.

  The gunshots had stopped firing at the cabin, and Caleb wondered if the Indians had killed or captured Pete. The sound of his own heaving slackened, and he could hear the rush of the creek, the whistle of a chinook in the treetops. Then he recognized the clop of hooves. The Indians were sneaking into the woods to get him. He was afraid of what Snake Woman would do to him if the Cheyenne took him back to the Comanche. He thanked God Buster was with him.

  A warm foul smell hung in the still air of the underbrush. Caleb couldn’t take a breath without it filling his nostrils. It made him wrinkle his nose. It was the thick odor of primitive death. Something was rotting.

  Buster had his stick poised over his shoulder and was watching for movements of the two braves when he felt Caleb pulling on his sleeve. He brushed the boy’s hand away and concentrated on the enemy, one coming from the mouth of the draw and another from somewhere above. The tugging came again at his sleeve, and he scowled down at the boy.

  But Caleb wasn’t looking up at him. Instead, the boy’s eyes were fixed on something in the shadows just up the draw. Buster followed his line of sight. There, hammered into the ground at the base of a tree, was the wolf-getter, its trigger baited with rotten meat swarming with flies.

  He put the stick on the ground and pulled Caleb across a small clearing to the wolf gun. He heard a Cheyenne horse kick a stone behind him. Carefully, he eased the hammer of the pistol down. The warriors were corning nearer; he could hear branches raking across the buffalo-hide shields they carried. He yanked the wolf-getter from the ground and pulled the rotting meat from the hook, flies singing war songs around him. He bent the hook to get it out of the way of the muzzle.

  Moccasins hit the ground, and Buster knew the brave coming from the mouth of the draw had dismounted. Pulling Caleb between him and the tree, he cocked the wolf gun and turned back to the little clearing he had crossed. In seconds the warrior materialized, dappled with tree-strained sunlight, a shield in one hand and a revolver in the other. The wolf-getter spoke, its forty-five slug catching the dog soldier in the chest and knocking him back.

  Buster sprinted across the clearing for the brave’s weapon but saw the wounded warrior trying to muster the strength to raise his pistol. The spike on the wolf-getter was Buster’s only weapon. He pounced on the brave and drove it into his chest, then took the pistol away and motioned for Caleb to run to him.

  Caleb didn’t care to run toward the bloody Indian, but he followed Buster’s orders. He had taken no more than three steps when he sensed a presence behind him. It was as if his own echo followed in his footsteps. Buster’s eyes grew wide and the captured revolver swung up. “Get down!” he yelled.

  But Caleb was too afraid to drop. He glanced over his shoulder and saw the dog soldier reaching for him. Caleb’s foot caught on something and he fell. The pistol fired, and the warrior collapsed beside him. Caleb scrambled back to his feet and buried his face in Buster’s chest.

  “You’re all right, boy,” Buster said. He listened. “We better go see how everybody else made out.”

  They caught the two Indian ponies in the draw, both of them wearing fine ranch saddles probably stolen on another recent raid. They heard horses coming, and when they ventured out of the thicket, they saw Ab and Javier riding toward them, calling their names.

  Pete was riding behind Javier. “Caleb!” he cried.

  Matthew was along the tree line, stooping over one of his dead Indians. Buster and Caleb rode the Cheyenne horses toward Matthew to meet the other men. When they got close, they found Matthew with the brave’s hair in one hand and a knife in the other.

  “How do you do it?” he asked his father. “How do you scalp ’em?”

  “I know how,” Javier said, sliding down from his Mexican saddle. “One time there was a bounty on Indians in New Mexico, and we scalped them to keep a count of how many…”

  “What in Hades do you think you’re doing?!” Ab said. “Matthew, get your hands off of those lousy plaits. We don’t scalp. It isn’t Christian.”

  Matthew let the dead man’s hair fall in the dirt. “But, the Pikes Peakers scalped Texans at Glorietta Pass.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Those freighters here last fall.”

  “That’s a lie. Even scalping Texans isn’t Christian, and they’re the scalpingest bunch of heathens the devil ever created. Buster, get Caleb off of that wild Indian pony before it kills him. How many Indians did you get?”

  Caleb slid off of the captured horse.

  “We got two,” Buster said. “Caleb found the wolfgetter, and I got one of ’em with that. They’re both back in that thicket.”

  “Who got this one?” Ab asked.

  “And that other one back there?” Javier added. “It wasn’t me. I missed every one I shot at.”

  “I killed three,” Matthew said, drawing himself up like a decorated hero. “Got one on the roof and two along the creek.”

  Ab stared. “You?”

  Matthew nodded and brandished the repeater.

  “It’s a good thing you had the Henry,” Javier said. “They would have killed you if you had to stop to reload. You can load that Henry on Sunday and fire it all week.”

  Ab shook his head. “Thank the Lord your mama’s not here to see you boys turn killer. That would break her heart. Let’s drag the bodies together and burn them.”

  “I can’t scalp mine?”

  “No!”

  As the slain braves burned under a great heap of timber, Ab and Javier took stock of the damages. “How many horses did they get?” Ab asked.

  “Just two,” Javier said.

  “Well, Buster got two of theirs and we killed five of them on top of that. I guess we got the better of them. Which two horses did they get? Any good ones?”

  “Not really,” Javier said. “They got the black with the stocking feet and the one with the blue eyes.”

  “Blue Eyes?” Caleb said. “They got Blue Eyes?”

  Javier squatted and rubbed his hand through Caleb’s hair. “Sí, muchacho. They got your little pony. I tried to shoot the one who did it, but you know I can shoot nothing but wolves with that wolf gun Buster made for us.” He shook Caleb and laughed, but the boy didn’t laugh in return. “Well, maybe you can have one of the horses we got from those two that Buster killed.”

  “No,” Ab said. “We’ll get him a gentle horse when he gets big enough to ride. I don’t want him riding those wild Indian ponies.”

  “But, you said,” Caleb protested. “You said when I get big as Pete I can ride along with him and Matthew. I’m big as he was when you said it.”

  “Hush, boy,” Ab snapped. “I said when you get big as Pete. Are you big as Pete now? No, you’re not, are you? You’d better thank God you’re alive and stop complain-tag.”

  Caleb opened his mouth, but no words would come to him. He would never be as big as Pete. Pete was older and kept ahead of him. He would never chase Holcomb cattle. He wasn’t going to be a rancher. He was going to be a farmer’s helper for the rest of his days, and plod in the dust wake of oxen while his brothers lost their hats in the wind.

  He turned away from his father with tears in his eyes and looked over the bald hill at the mountains, wavering strangely through the heat and smoke of the cremation fire. Someday he was going all the way over the hill, he told himself. Someday he would go up into that high country. He would
find a place where people rode horses and played music all day. A place where he could do whatever he wanted.

  Sometimes he glimpsed a hint of something on that hill, heard a stray echo from some distant canyon—a vagrant chinook moaning over a lonely crag. It would sigh the soft sounds of his name like an Indian chant. Someday he would answer that call.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Long Fingers lay on his buffalo robe and stared up at the light of dawn streaming weakly through the smoke hole of his tepee. The warmth of his wife felt good beside him, but he had little else to comfort him. He had slept very little, and even in his fleeting dreams he had thought only of his people’s precarious existence on the earth. A death song kept breaking the circle of his thoughts:

  Nothing lives long except the earth and the mountains.

  Long Fingers and a few other chiefs the Indian agents regarded as “reliables” had brought their bands to Fort Wise to seek peace. Even Kicking Dog had come, swayed by a majority of his dog soldiers, who were weary of fighting with blue coats and settlers. The Indians had turned over their weapons, received rations, and had been promised protection.

  But the rations dried up all too soon. Starving, the Indians were given their weapons and told to disperse and hunt. The commander at Fort Wise ensured them that they were under army protection and would not be attacked by white settlers seeking revenge for recent depredations.

  When they left Fort Wise, Long Fingers’s band fell back to Sand Creek with White Antelope and Black Kettle of the Cheyenne. Most of the young braves were scouring the plains for game. Winter was coming, and there was not enough food. At least they were hunting instead of raiding, Long Fingers thought. At least now his people were under the protection of the white soldiers and not pitted against them.

  Yet, out on the plains, not more than a mile from Long Fingers’s Sand Creek camp, Horace Gribble was belching the fetor of whiskey up from his stomach and trying to clear his head for battle. He shouldn’t have drunk so much on the long night march, but the Gribbles had always had a taste for whiskey.

  His brothers, Hank and Bill, were in their graves, and Horace wanted vengeance. After striking Holcomb’s Ranch, Kicking Dog had ridden north and found much greater success at the Gribble Ranch. Horace had been away in Denver. He had returned to find his home burned and the bodies of his brothers stripped and mutilated. When Colonel Chivington started recruiting men for hundred-day enlistments in the Third Cavalry, Horace signed on. Sand Creek was to be his first battle.

  Dawn gave enough light for him to see all the way down the skirmish line Chivington had ordered the men to form. Most of the seven hundred mounted men belonged to the Hundred Dazers, as the Third was called, but two battalions of the old First Regiment of Colorado Volunteers were present, too.

  Chivington trotted before the line, his baritone striking the clarion call to arms as if spouting from the pulpit. He badly needed a victory today. The fame he had won at Glorietta Pass, that which had elevated him to Commander of the Military District of Colorado, had already faded in the rash of Indian troubles.

  “It is honorable in the eyes of the Lord to exterminate these heathen reds,” he was saying. “Think of the farms they have left smoldering in their wake upon your prairies. You, soldier, strip that coat off. You’ll get hot enough.…”

  As the colonel harangued his volunteers, his scout loped up from the creek bed to report. “Did you ever whop the wild pigeons down from the roosts back east, colonel?” Cheyenne Dutch asked.

  “Pigeons? No. What about the Indians?”

  “Don’t feel slighted for the sport. You’ll get a taste of it this mornin’.”

  “A taste of what, man? Report sensibly.”

  “A taste of whoppin’ down the pigeons. Killin’ them Indians won’t take no more trouble.”

  “How many lodges?”

  “Three hundred, I’ll wager.”

  “Who are the chiefs?”

  “Cheyenne for the most part. White Antelope, Black Kettle, War Bonnet, Little Robe, and Standing-in-the-Water. I saw one band of Arapaho, too. Long Fingers’s.”

  “Which one is he?”

  “Talks American.”

  “Oh, yes.” The big reverend soldier sneered with hatred. “How many warriors do you estimate?”

  Dutch scratched his whiskered neck as he made his tabulations. “Maybe a buck in every lodge. Them squaws and boys’ll fight, too, though.”

  The colonel nodded and told Dutch to choose his place in the line. “The Indians will fight to the death,” he shouted at his men. “Take no prisoners!”

  “Colonel,” one of the soldiers said, “what about their women and children? Will we give them time to clear out?”

  Chivington turned his huge dapple gray to face the questioner. “As an officer of the United States Army, I cannot order you to fire upon women and children. But I will offer an observation: Nits make lice. Damn any man in sympathy with the Indians.…”

  * * *

  Chivington’s four howitzers found their places on the sand hills overlooking the creek, and the skirmish line moved forward. “What do you think the colonel meant about nits?” the man next to Horace asked. “Does he want us to kill the younguns or not?”

  “Hell if I know. Don’t reckon I’ll shoot any unless they’re shootin’ at me.”

  “You’ll wait one shot too late if you let them shoot at you first. Here, you want a drink of this?”

  “Oh, Lordy, put it away,” Horace said. He saw the bed of Sand Creek dropping off in front of him. The sooty pinnacles of the hide lodges emerged, standing among a few old cottonwood trees along the watercourse. “Wait a minute,” he said. “On second thought, let me have just one gurgle.” He took the bottle from his companion and turned it up on his parched lips.

  * * *

  Long Fingers came back from his musings of peace at the terrified shout of a squaw. He threw the buffalo robe off, startling his wife, and shoved his feet into his moccasins. From the flap of his lodge he saw the howitzers against the morning sky. Families stumbled from their lodges, waking in terror to the sights of the white man’s war. A company of cavalrymen was galloping to get between the camp and the horse herd.

  Kicking Dog came from his tepee with his weapons already in hand. “Now what have you brought us, old fool?” he said to Long Fingers.

  “Wait,” the chief replied. “They do not mean to fight us. Maybe it is an escort. They have come to take us to another place.”

  An officer shouted, and the main body of the force appeared over the sandy slope of the creek bank. Kicking Dog shouted for all the warriors to arm themselves and prepare to cover a retreat of the women and children up the creek bed.

  “Wait,” Long Fingers ordered. “They mistake us. Black Kettle, raise the American flag and tie a white flag under it.”

  The Cheyenne chief tied the flags to the end of a lodge pole and raised it overhead; a throng of women and children gathered at the foot of the staff for protection. But just as the banners reached a zenith, the howitzers spoke. Grapeshot ripped through the hide tents. The shrieks of women and children split the air, and Indians fled in every direction. Chivington’s voice thundered. Soldiers cheered, and two thousand hooves drummed down the creek bank.

  White Antelope ran at the cavalry charge, holding his hands high overhead. He yelled in English: “Stop! Stop!” His band of Cheyenne followed him, trying to surrender before the senseless battle could begin.

  Horace saw White Antelope running unarmed at the Hundred Dazers, but when the old chief saw the soldiers would not obey, he lowered his arms, folded them over his chest, and met the onslaught as if it consisted of nothing more than a fair breeze.

  The first pistols cracked, and White Antelope rolled under the trampling hooves of the cavalry. The whiskey drinker riding next to Horace spurred his horse in front of Horace’s Kentucky stud and jumped off as he passed over the body of White Antelope.

  “Damn you!” Horace said, whirling the stud aro
und. “Don’t cut my charge!” He had his Remington revolver drawn and pointed skyward, his thumb on the hammer.

  The whiskey drinker didn’t look up but drew his knife, and cut the leather leggings from the dead chief’s hips. He cut the thong of the breechcloth and tossed it aside. He took the testicles of the corpse in his hand.

  “My Lord,” Horace said. “What in God’s name do you mean to do?” Screams and gunfire cut through the dust in the creek bed.

  “I’ll take and fix me a tobacco pouch,” he shouted above the racket, grinning up at Horace. He put his blade under the grisly trophy.

  Horace spurred his stud away from the scene of mutilation. He would remember the soldier’s face and report his atrocity after the battle. But for now he had to catch the warriors fleeing up the sand hills and along the creek bed. Somebody was going to pay for what had happened to Hank and Bill.

  Squads of soldiers swarmed everywhere in pursuit, setting up a cross fire that proved more dangerous to themselves than anything the Indians had organized. The artillerymen hadn’t stopped blasting, even though their own men were now in the line of fire.

  Horace galloped among the tepees and the bushes, heading up the broad, sandy creek bed. Ahead, the warriors seemed to be making an attempt at fighting back, and he wanted to join the battle. His horse dodged bloody bodies as he weaved his way among the deserted tents.

  Before he could reach the battle up the creek bed, he ran upon six soldiers preparing to set a tepee on fire. “Hey, soldier, give us a hand,” one of them said. “They’re in this one thick as fleas.”

  “They’re fixin’ to flush,” another shouted.

  Horace turned his horse and cocked his pistol, waiting for the braves to bolt from the lodge. The burning buffalo hide sizzled like grease, and smoke billowed from the lodge as the soldiers lined up and prepared to fire. The flap of the tepee flew aside, and a little girl tripped out. Strands of black hair covered her face. She held a stick with a dirty white handkerchief tied to it. Horace pointed his gun back to the sky and heaved a sigh of relief. “Just kids,” he said.