A Cold Day in Hell

by Terry C. Johnston

  Right through the narrowing neck of the canyon where the riders could race four abreast now and on into the widening valley where the lieutenants shouted and Cosgrove bellowed—leading their Shoshone to the left, their ponies scratching for a hold on the red-rocked side of the slope they began to ascend, one horse at a time, climbing, climbing to reach that high ground where they could seize a commanding field of fire over the village.

  Now the Pawnee were beginning to cross to the far side of the creek to the south of the canyon. Slowed, their ponies cautious, as they slipped and fought for footing again on the ice-rimed banks, most of the animals hurtling into the water—legs flailing in the air as they came down into the shockingly cold creek—rising with a struggle to leap across the stream with their riders and vault to the far side, sprays like cock’s combs roostering into the gray light of that bloody dawn, the first crimson light of day smeared recklessly on the tops of the high red bluffs above them all. The Pawnee screeched and cried out, exhorting one another, brandishing their carbines, many of them clamping the reins in their teeth as they splashed one another in that mad race to be the first in among the lodges … to be the first in to claim the finest of those Cheyenne ponies.

  Among them one lone Pawnee shaman blew on a wooden pipe, its high-pitched notes rising with a waver above the hammer of hooves and the grunts of the horses, the cracking of ice and the snapping of bare willow limbs against legs and saddles and muscled pony flanks. A sound not unlike the wet, steamy whistle of the boats in Boston Towne’s harbor, these notes the man blew as they raced along—a strange, eerie war song that lifted the guard hairs on the back of the Irishman’s neck. Made that huge scar across the great width of his back tingle once more with alarm.

  He had been swept up in half a hundred charges during the Civil War, riding stirrup to stirrup with brave men only heartbeats away from death, their bodies shredded by grapeshot and canister erupting in their midst. Seamus had been wounded before—hit not by shrapnel from Johnny Reb cannons, but hit instead by bone from the comrade riding to the left or right as their gallant troop set out behind the colors and banners and battle streamers for the enemy lines.

  But nothing had ever stirred in him the feeling of being so carried away, of being so ultimately helpless against the powerful thrust of this moment in time, the way this charge reached down inside him and yanked him up by the balls. His heart rose to his throat, raw as it was—then he realized he was screaming at the top of his lungs with the rest of the copper-skinned scouts.

  It surprised him when the first shots cracked the cold, brittle blue air of that valley morning yet to be touched by the faintest intrusion of the winter sun.

  “Bet that’s one of them sonsabitches shooting off his gun at a herder boy!” Grouard growled beside him. “Get ’em some Cheyenne ponies!”

  “Don’t make me no never-mind, Frank,” Seamus said. “The bleeming ball’s been opened, which means you and me are up for the first dance!”

  Maybe it was one of the Cheyenne in the village who heard the first thunder of the hooves, Donegan thought as the big bay surged beneath him, all muscle and foaming fear … perhaps a warrior snatching up his weapon and bursting into that frozen morning, standing naked to confront that trio of Sioux scouts.

  No matter now: the whole bloody village was brought to life with battle cries and thunderous echoes from each side of the canyon—up ahead children screaming and women crying out, the old wailing as they stumbled into the gray light of that terrible morn.

  This dawning of a cold day in hell.

  Warriors sweeping up weapons and cartridge belts, quivers and bows, hurriedly tying their war medicine at their loose hair or dropping the cords of pendants around their necks. Taking time for little else—this sudden attack did not allow them the leisure to paint, time to dress, the luxury of fleeing with blankets and robes. Instead these warrior would thrust their naked, shivering bodies between the first of the soldier scouts and their families. Protecting, defending. Laying down their lives.

  And then Seamus realized what it was that was dragging its razorlike claws across the inside or his belly: he suddenly sensed how it must be to protect those you love, to defend your home, to stand and face the assault at all costs. Somewhere inside he sensed as he had never before sensed just how these Cheyenne warriors would fight this day—from lodge to lodge, rock to rock, yard by yard … and it scared Seamus down to the marrow of him.

  Now Gordon’s soldiers were pressing hot upon the scouts’ tails, Mauck’s battalion coming hard behind them: a mad cacophony of men bellowing orders on the run above the deafening tumult of sound laid back upon sound within the re-repeating echoes quaking within that canyon—not a single mount slowing as the soldiers fanned out, sweeping into a broad front behind Donegan and those savage mercenaries Mackenzie brought there to destroy the Cheyenne.

  As if they had suddenly emerged from the narrowing maw of a cannon, immediately before them lay the narrow plain—the enemy village no more than three quarters of a mile ahead. Behind him troopers whooped and hollered. Indian scouts cried out anew with their medicine songs. And every heel hammered unmercifully into the ribs and flanks and bellies of their heaving mounts.

  Somewhere far behind him and to his right, where Mackenzie’s headquarters group would be, a lone bugle stuttered out the notes of the charge. Again and again it echoed back on itself from the terrible blood-tinged red walls.

  As if any of these men had to be told, Donegan mulled to himself as he clamped tight and low to his animal. As if any of them had to be told they were to hurl themselves into the goddamned thick of it.

  Ahead in that dusky darkness of a night graying into morn Seamus made out the first faraway muzzle flashes. The sharp cracks of carbines stuttered a heartbeat later. Then the big drum suddenly throbbed again, this time not with the steady, rhythmic beat that had signaled last night’s revelry. Now it was beaten frantically, a call of alarm hammered out upon its taut surface, warning and awakening even the heaviest of dark-skinned sleepers.

  At that moment Seamus watched the North brothers turn their battalion off the narrow terrace that ran along the mountain to their left and plunge their mounts down into the boggy creek bottom to make a recrossing. For what godforsaken reason, he could not figure out. While the Pawnee ponies jammed up in the the miry ground, slowed to all but a stop as they struggled up to their bellies in the muddy swamp, Seamus and the other scouts rumbled past.

  Then in the growing clamor of gunfire and wailing women, Seamus turned—suddenly hearing the eerie croon of that Pawnee’s sacred flute again in the noisy cacophony of gunfire and screaming voices, surprised to find the first of the North scouts freed from the boggy ground, all of them laid out along their ponies’ necks, racing with total abandon once more toward the heart of the village, which for the most part lay along the south bank of the creek as it flowed to the east out of the canyon.

  A few gunshots rattled behind him—among the Pawnee.

  They must have run onto a herder out alone back there, Seamus thought as his horse swept across the grass slickened with icy frost toward the first of the deserted lodges erected in the starkly beautiful amphitheater, the walls rising above them five hundred feet in places, a thousand feet in others. In numberless icy brooks and freshets, waters tumbled down into a maze of shallow ravines, each one slashing the valley floor in its race to feed its waters to the Red Fork, each crevice thereby marked with the telltale path of willow and box elder.

  As the lodges loomed closer, his nose came alive.

  Woodsmoke and green hides laid out for fleshing, roasting meat and animal fat to be mixed for pemmican with last autumn’s cherries, the odor of fresh dung and the scent of unmitigated fear. Donegan had smelled all these before—as far back as the summer of sixty-nine and the destruction of Tall Bull’s village at Summit Springs.*

  On to the Comanche and Kiowa and Cheyenne camps huddled at the bottom of Palo Duro Canyon, which rose majestically above the smok
e-blackened lodges in just the way this valley rose above these lodges he and the rest of the scouts found themselves among of a sudden.

  In the middistance the flashes of the enemy guns became a steady, pulsing light as the Cheyenne warriors fired, retreated to another lodge, turned and fired once more as they sought to stem the overwhelming tide … then hoped for nothing more than to protect the retreat of their families.

  To his right Seamus could see that down the northern edge of the elongated valley ran a low plateau for something on the order of a mile. Ahead beyond the village the canyon itself disintegrated into a series of upvaults and deep ravines, flat-topped hills and snakelike gulleys where he could barely make out the black flit of bodies against the growing light of that cold day. Swarming into every recess in that rocky red sandstone maze—the Cheyenne were making good their escape among those rugged slopes that tumbled one upon another into the high white mountainsides just now touched with the rose of the sun’s rising this cold, cold day.

  It reminded Seamus of the color of blood daubed, spilled, smeared upon the snow.

  The way the warriors had fled to the steep sides of the canyon, there likely to take cover and train their fire down upon the village, Donegan realized Mackenzie’s dawn attack already had the makings of one damned cold day in hell.

  * Black Sun, Vol. 4, The Plainsmen Series.

  Chapter 26

  Big Freezing Moon 1876

  He could not see if it was light yet, for he had been many, many winters without the power of sight. But behind his eyes where the sun never shined, Box Elder nonetheless knew. In his mind he could see what was about to happen as clearly as he had seen with his eyes as a young man.

  In his dream he heard the thunder of the hooves before he heard it with his ears. Beneath him he felt them coming.

  And he sat up.

  “Bring me the Sacred Wheel Lance!” he cried, his voice thin and reedy with so much singing and praying among the rocks in the hills last night as the celebration had gone on at Last Bull’s big fire.

  Now his throat was sore, and it hurt so to use it.

  His young nephew, the son of a son of a friend who wanted the boy to apprentice to the great shaman of the Ohmeseheso, quickly snatched up the ten-foot-long lance at the end of which hung the round rawhide-braided wheel that was Box Elder’s special medicine—given him by the earth spirits so many, many summers ago when he had first begun to use his powerful gifts.

  One of those gifts he had used time and again was the power to see what was to happen in some time yet to come.

  He had seen the soldiers and their friendly Indians coming.

  And now they were here!

  Young Medicine Bear helped the frail old man throw back his blankets and the heavy robes and get to his feet.

  “Put the long shirt over my head—hurry!”

  The youth dropped the long, fire-smoked elk-hide shirt over the gray head, the four long legs of the animal almost brushing the floor of the shaman’s lodge. Besides that heavy shirt, Box Elder wore no more than a breechclout.

  “My buffalo moccasins. Hurry—we must go!”

  One at a time Medicine Bear shoved them on the old man’s bony, veiny feet, then rose to help Box Elder shuffle to the door and step out into the bitter cold.

  “The sun is not at the top of the ridge?” the old one asked, unable to feel its warmth on his face as he emerged from the cold lodge.

  “No—”

  “Box Elder!”

  He turned at the sound of the voice crying out his name. Already screams floated like shards of ice from the lower end of the camp. “Curly? Is it you?”

  Then the warrior grabbed Box Elder’s thin arm. “It is I, old friend. Come—we must hurry into the hills with your Sacred Wheel Lance.”

  “What of Coal Bear?” Box Elder asked, his voice high and filled with dread.

  “He already has Esevone* wrapped in its bundle, and I see they are coming this way,” Curly explained.

  “Box Elder!” he heard Coal Bear, the Keeper of the Sacred Hat, call out to him.

  “You have Esevone?” the old man asked, wishing his eyes could see, for his ears were already telling him of many guns beginning to explode at the far end of the valley.

  “It is on my wife’s back.”

  “She is with you? And you have Nimhoyoh?”†

  “I do, in my hands—here, feel it now, for we must go quickly!”

  Box Elder reached for Coal Bear’s wrist, his fingers working down to the hand that held the round cherrywood stick about the length of a man’s arm. Suspended from the stick was a crude rectangle of buffalo rawhide, the edges of which were perforated, then braided with a long strand of rawhide. From the three sides of Nimhoyoh hung many long buffalo tails, tied to the rawhide shield like scalp locks.

  “Hurry, old friend!” Coal Bear repeated.

  Laying a hand on Coal Bear’s arm, Box Elder started to move off. “All of us go together. I will flee with you and Esevone! Give the Turner to Medicine Bear so that he might carry it above him on his pony to turn away the soldier bullets!”

  Coal Bear gave the heavy object to the young apprentice. “And we must let the woman walk ahead of us,” Coal Bear turned to instruct the other two men with them. “She carries the Sacred Hat and we must not walk too close to her.”

  The blind shaman nodded, saying, “I think we should walk a little to the right and behind her, my friend.”

  Other warriors appeared like shards of black ice through that cold mist slinking among the lodges, mist that hugged the ground with its bitter, bone-chilling cold. Peeling off to the left and right in a tight crescent behind the woman, Coal Bear and Box Elder, those determined men, formed a protective guard as Coal Bear’s wife walked toward the hills as slowly as if she were merely carrying the sacred object to another camp.

  While they moved along, Box Elder held his Sacred Wheel Lance over his head so that the whole group would have its protection from the soldier bullets. First in one hand, then in the other, back and forth he switched it as his thin, bony arms grew tired holding the long lance in the air so that its power could rain down upon them all … but he would not let any of the younger men carry it. Nor did he falter in this duty to his people.

  The Sacred Wheel Lance would make them all invisible so the soldiers and their terrible Indian scouts would not see them fleeing with Esevone.

  Cries of the dying and screams of the frightened, thunder of hoofbeats and hammer of footsteps, rushed past their little party like a spring torrent cascading from these very mountains, bullets snapping branches and slapping the frozen lodges—but none of it gave Box Elder’s group any concern.

  All around them the People ran and the enemy raced.

  It was as if Box Elder and the rest were not there.

  The hard, icy, compacted snow whined beneath his winter moccasins made of the thick buffalo hide with the fur turned in as Young Two Moon plodded across its silvery surface beneath the last of the night’s starshine. Day was coming.

  And with the dawn, so too would come the soldiers.

  He believed it not in his mind, but knew it in his belly. With a certainty he had experienced few times in his young life.

  Although he was a Kit Fox—and duty bound to obey and serve last Bull—Young Two Moon had seen the soldiers with his own eyes, even walked among them and joined the soldiers’ many Indian scouts at their fires as they spoke in the Shoshone* Pawnee, Ute† and Bannock, even Lakota and Cheyenne tongues! Such a force of pony soldiers and their many, many wolves were not out in this country, surely not out marching in this mind-numbing cold, on a lark.

  But that’s just what it seemed to be: a lark for Last Bull and the rest of his Kit Fox Soldiers, who enjoyed themselves far too much bullying the entire camp so that no one could flee to the breastworks, escape to safety, prepare to defend the village.

  But Young Two Moon was an honorable warrior. Sadly, reluctantly—he took his place with his warrior society and ke
pt everyone in the camp dancing and singing.

  By the time he wearily reached his family’s lodge at dawn, it seemed everyone had already gone to sleep, so exhausted were they from that night-long dance, around and around and around the drum when instead the young men should have had fighting on their minds. Not young women.

  It was dark in the lodge. And cold here too. He let his eyes adjust to the dim light as he squatted near his parents’ bed at the back of the lodge. And struggled for a moment more before he knew he had to speak what he had been fighting all night.

  “Father.”

  He waited a moment.

  “Father?”

  “What do you want?” Beaver Claws grumbled with fatigue.

  “I want my family to get up and dress. Now.”

  The man rolled toward his son, pulling the buffalo robe back from his face. When he spoke, his words became frost in the gray light of dawn-coming. “You want us to get dressed? We just came here to sleep! Be quiet and go to bed.”

  “Please, father. Get the family up and dressed and come with me,” Young Two Moon pleaded, then turned slightly, hearing the rustle of blankets, finding his father’s second wife rising to an elbow to listen at the side of the lodge.

  “The soldiers?” the older man asked.

  “Yes. It will be soon,” he replied, his voice thinned by urgency. “Please hurry! The day is nearly here! We must go to the far end of the canyon, climb into the rocks where you will be safe!”