“All right,” Beaver Claws answered in a louder voice, then patted the woman beside him on the rump as he sat up, the blankets and robes falling from his bare chest. “Everyone! Get up! Get dressed! This young warrior believes the soldiers are coming—and I choose to believe him … because he has seen the enemy with his own eyes!”
Black Hairy Dog was not used to such cold as this.
For generations beyond count his people had ranged the southern plains. But now that the white man had rounded up the many clans and forced them onto the reservation in the southern country,* he had fled north with the Sacred Arrows once his father, Stone Forehead, had died.
Now the powerful objects were Black Hairy Dog’s responsibility. On his aging shoulders rested so much of the fate of his people. He was one to trust the visions of the old ones much more than he trusted the preening talk of the war chiefs.
There had been much strutting last night as the People gathered around the great, roaring skunk and danced shoulder to shoulder, sliding their feet a step at a time, the throbbing circle moving right to left, following the path of the sun.
Last Bull’s brash young men, drunk with their sudden power, swayed in the dance, singing out to boast of their war coups over the Shoshone. One of them held aloft the withered hand and arm of an enemy woman. Another cavorted about with a bag filled with the right hands of twelve Shoshone babies. Another, called High Wolf, proudly displayed his necklace of dried fingers. Flitting overhead in the fire’s light wagged some thirty fresh scalps tied at the ends of the long poles as the Kit Fox warriors and their wives sashayed in and out of the grand circle.
When the People warmed to the celebration, the older trophies came out. A warrior swirled into their midst wearing the fringed buckskin jacket he had taken from the body of the man he had killed in the terrible fighting at the north end of the hill above the Greasy Grass River. Another proudly sported the black hat emblazoned with the chevrons of a cavalry sergeant. Instead of a heavy blanket, another warrior pranced about in his soldier-blue caped mackintosh.
All around them voices sang and whooped until they were hoarse. And danced until their legs could barely move in those moments just before sunrise when the drum fell silent and the loudmouthed Kit Fox Soldiers told everyone to be off to bed.
“No soldiers are coming! Do not believe the Elk Scrapers—they are frightened old women! No soldiers are coming!”
So Black Hairy Dog laid his weary bones down in his robes and tried to sleep, but could not. Unable to shake the feeling deep in his marrow that for days had convinced him the village must be moved … time and again he remembered how nearly forty winters before a warrior society among his southern people had beaten the Keeper of the Medicine Arrows with their bows for publicly opposing them.
Again it was the power of the Arrows’ intangible medicine pitted against the might of angry and prideful young men.
He pulled his clothes back on, then clutched a robe around his shoulders as he went to the nearby brush where he had tied his ponies to keep them close. Knowing in his heart that the soldiers were coming. The soldiers always came.
Black Hairy Dog began to drive the ponies up the southeastern slope of the canyon, away from the village, when he heard the first yell break the cold, misty silence on the floor of the canyon.
Then heard that first shot.
And from that far end of the village he heard that first Cheyenne cry out as a woman spilled onto the bloody snow trampled beneath the onslaught.
“The soldiers are here!” Black Hairy Dog screamed, turning in the deep snow, tripping and falling—then picking himself back up to stumble down toward the village. “Hurry! Hurry! The soldiers are here!”
Damned funny, Seamus thought as the horse lurched beneath him, then fell back into its ground-eating stride.
For the life of him he couldn’t figure out why the first of the Cheyenne warriors appearing out of the cold mist were firing at the heights south of the village. They weren’t acting as if they realized the soldiers and their scouts were all but upon them. Instead, the warriors fired and dodged, dropped to one knee and fired, aiming at the Shoshone that Cosgrove and Schuyler had raced to the high ground. Up there Seamus could see the Snake dismounting, horses being led back from the edge of the cliff where the scouts plopped onto their bellies and began to pour some harassing fire down among the Cheyenne lodges.
Not far away, on Donegan’s right, he watched some of the Sioux and Cheyenne scouts peel off for the village, leaving Mackenzie and his headquarters group suddenly exposed. A moment later a Cheyenne warrior leaped to his feet atop the low plateau on the north edge of the valley, leveling a rifle at the soldier chief.
Seamus no more got his mouth open to shout a warning than the colonel’s orderlies all fired their pistols into the warrior. He was pitched back, spinning about, rifle tumbling out of his grasp as he disappeared into the brush, Mackenzie and his orderlies thundering on past.
To Donegan’s left Frank and Luther North led their Pawnee among the first lodges, which were pitched at the end of the camp near the mouth of a dry creek clogged with leafless underbrush and stunted alder. From their left, near the opening of that ravine, a blanketed form sprang up directly in front of Lute North, who whirled his carbine down at the target and fired at almost the same instant that Frank pulled the trigger on his carbine. The shock of both bullets at that range catapulted the Cheyenne warrior off his feet, back into the brush as the horsemen raced on by.
Behind them the Pawnee yelped their approval and praise for making that first kill, “Ki-de-de-de! Ki-de-de-de!”
Singing out, the coatless battalion pushed on for the village, hoping for plunder, ready to fight hand to hand for enemy scalps as they plunged through the camp, intending to meet Mackenzie’s soldiers on the far side and thereby seal off all chance for the Cheyenne to escape. But the delay caused by their recrossing the creek to join Mackenzie minutes before now doomed the colonel’s plan of attack to frustration, if not ultimately to failure.
Already Donegan could make out the dark forms of the Cheyenne spilling from the west end of village far ahead, making for the high ground like coveys of quail flushed from the protective undergrowth.
“Dammit,” he muttered, realizing that with the Cheyennes’ flight, this was bound to turn into a long struggle of it. The warriors would quit fighting only if Mackenzie’s men were able to capture the women and children.
As Seamus reined up at the downstream fringe of the lodge circle, he turned the bay around, then wheeled the horse around again, searching out a target for the long-barreled .45-caliber Colt’s revolver. North of him across the flat ground he saw Mackenzie and those outfits at the head of the charge slow—
A bullet hissed by.
Then a second snarled past his left ear, splitting it painfully.
“God-damn!” he bellowed between clenched teeth. As many times as he had been seriously wounded, still, nothing he had experienced had ever hurt with so much raw-edged torment as that wound to his ear as the cold breeze made every nerve come alive in the ragged laceration.
Jamming his pistol back into its holster over his left hip, Seamus tore off his gloves and yanked at the knot in the greasy bandanna tied at his neck. Ripping off his hat, Donegan quickly whirled the bandanna around several times to make a long bandage he quickly lashed around his head. When it was tied, he pulled on his hat and again hauled out the pistol just as his horse snorted and sidestepped.
Losing his balance with the animal’s sudden move, Donegan spotted the approaching warrior from the corner of his eye as he was pitched from the saddle into the snow.
The lone Cheyenne skidded to a stop, kicking up a slow-rising rooster tail of fine snow with his feet as he brought a repeating carbine to his bare shoulder.
Rolling onto his belly as he landed with a cascade of snow, Seamus stretched out his arm, turned on his side, and squeezed the trigger. Sensing the jolt of the pistol in his paw, he continued his tumble side
ways while drawing the hammer back with his thumb a second time.
He felt a bullet whine past him. Too damn close.
Rolling up onto his knees, Seamus brought the pistol’s front blade to that spot where his instinct told him Indian had been … and pulled the trigger again. He watched the slug slam into the warrior’s chest, knocking the Cheyenne off his feet. Spilling backward into the half foot of trampled snow, he skidded on his back a few feet before coming to a stop, arms and legs crooked and unmoving.
The amphitheater around Seamus thundered with the deafening rattle of hooves, shouts of men close at hand, and distant screams of the women bursting out of the far end of the village.
He dragged his legs under him and rose to his feet, dusted some of the snow off his front with that seven-and-a-half-inch pistol barrel, then turned at the hammer of hoofbeats bearing down upon him.
Past him on both sides burst more of the Sioux and Cheyenne scouts, led by Three Bears, streaming into the heart of the village.
Turning, Donegan whistled to the bay, then swept his hat out of snow, shoving it down so hard on the bandanna and flesh wound that it made him wince. Snagging the saddle horn in both gloved hands with the pistol between them, he vaulted atop the horse without using the stirrup and slammed the small rowels of his spurs into the animal’s muscular flanks, it bolted off, straining to catch the scouts plunging into the mass of hide-and-canvas lodges.
Ahead of him the Sioux and Cheyenne advance was slowing, some men dismounting in a noisy, shouting whirl as the fighting became hotter. Less than a hundred yards away Cheyenne warriors were retreating one lodge at a time, fighting hard even in the face of the enemy horsemen.
Off to Donegan’s left the pony ridden by the Sioux chief Three Bears reared, wheeled, and shuddered, becoming unmanageable in the midst of all those singing bullets and shrill voices, wing-bone whistles and lead slapping into the frozen lodge covers. After a great leap while it bowed its back, the pony suddenly tore from side to side crazily, then bolted straight for a cluster of lodges where the rifle fire from a knot of Cheyenne was the hottest.
Almost as fast as the pony bolted away, another Sioux named Feathers on the Head recognized the trouble Three Bears faced. Slamming his quirt down on his own pony’s flanks, he bent low along the withers to avoid the enemy’s bullets. He was all of thirty feet behind Three Bears when the war chief’s horse wheeled to the left, leaped down the creekbank and up the far side, into the other part of the village still firmly held by the Cheyenne—only to halt suddenly in a spray of snow, go stiff-legged, and keel over, spilling its rider against a drying rack loaded with meat, and into the side of a canvas lodge.
Feathers on the Head was across the embankment and among the enemy lodges before a dazed Three Bears even had his legs under him. The horseman held out a foot and extending a hand as he wheeled his pony about, putting himself and his animal between the Cheyenne and his war chief, grunting as he pulled Three Bears up behind him.
It was a pretty, pretty show, Seamus decided, watching the two of them spin about in the next heartbeat, all four of their legs kicking the pony into a gallop to speed them out of that devil’s den of whining lead.
Something warned him, something so airy and ethereal—yet with enough substance that he thought he recognized it as Sam’s voice in his ear, crying out. Seamus jerked around, certain he would find her there, the voice had been that real. Instead, at seventy yards he saw them coming, ten, perhaps a dozen of them: bare-breasted warriors yelling as they raced toward him.
In that next breath Donegan realized he was alone.
With the whine of a bullet passing by his cheek, the Irishman collapsed along the neck of the bay and slapped the long end of the reins down its front shoulder, feeling it explode into motion beneath him. The animal leaped back out of the brush, across the icy stream, where it slipped twice before clawing its way up the cutbank to the north side of the Red Fork, hooves cutting into the crusty snow as lead followed man and horse across the flat toward Mackenzie and his bunch now that the other companies were just emerging along the north side of the canyon.
The cold, icy fingers of frozen mist were only then beginning to lift from the willow-clogged bottom ground.
Why everyone believed Hades was hot, Seamus figured he would never understand. As far as he was concerned, this morning had all the makings of hell itself.
* The Sacred Buffalo Hat.
† The Sacred Turner.
* Sosone-eo-o.
† Mo-ohtavaha-taneo, “Black People.”
* Darlington Agency for the Southern Cheyenne, Indian Territory.
Chapter 27
Big Freezing Moon 1876
The power of Maahotse must protect the People!
As he raced back to his Sacred Arrow Lodge from the hillside, raising the alarm, Black Hairy Dog found his woman already taking the Maahotse bundle from its tripod where the Arrows hung at that singular place of honor in the lodge. When he burst into the lodge, his woman turned toward him with a start, carefully cradling the Arrows in their kit-fox quiver. Around it she had wrapped a layer of thick buffalo rawhide.
“I will follow you,” she said to her husband as she laid the bundle across his arms.
“Together we will protect them,” he said as her fingers brushed the back of his hand lovingly. “Just as these Arrows have protected our people far back into the time beyond memory.”
Outside the lodge a group of men and boys had already gathered by the time Black Hairy Dog ducked through the door into the swirling, freezing mist that clung about their ankles. Most wore a shirt, or a vest of wool or buffalo hide, yet none wore leggings. On every face was the grim mask of determination. They had come there to protect the second of those two sacred objects of the Ohmeseheso.
“We must go to the hills,” the Arrow Priest told them, slowly stepping into the small gathering without another word, parting them like a boulder thrown down in the middle of a narrow creek, the group closing in behind Black Hairy Dog’s woman.
He knew he must take the Sacred Arrows to a hill overlooking the upper end of the village, leading that small procession of those who would protect him and the Maahotse as the terrible clamor grew at the far end of the village: gunshots, hoofbeats, the cries of enemy Indians, and the shrill blasts of the soldier horns.
Only then, from the Heights overlooking the battle, could Black Hairy Dog rain the terrible unseen power of the Arrows down upon the enemy … and those Tse-Tsehese scouts who had come to help the soldiers against their own people.
“Dammit!” Ranald S. Mackenzie hollered, shrill as could be above the tumult as he slowed the orderlies and aides around him.
From what he could now see off to his left front, the Pawnee hadn’t got into the village quick enough to shut the back door on the damned Cheyenne. They were streaming out of the far end of the lodges, fanning across that flat ground taking them toward the deep gulch and the rocky slopes at the western end of the valley.
That had been the whole purpose of sending those damned North brothers in at the head of the charge with their Pawnee! That, and making sure he didn’t get his soldiers snared in a trap.
With the way the first of his troops had failed to form up into position during their charge, he had ordered the Norths to recross to the north side of the stream. In that way Ranald felt he had those additional horsemen close by—
Suddenly the air around him erupted with pistol fire. He spun in the saddle at the crack. Nearly every one of his orderlies had their revolvers barking, smoke curling up from the muzzles of the long-barrels, smoke whipped away on the brutally cold breeze. He spun to the other side in the saddle—spotting the Cheyenne warrior who had popped up nearly under their horses’ bellies as they had passed by. The near naked body flopped back into the thick brush, quivered a moment, then lay still.
Now we’re in the thick of it.
To the right his eyes quickly bounced over the slopes above him along that low plateau stretching a
mile or so against the north side of the valley.
They could be anywhere in those rocks and brush. They’ll fight us like that—one at a time from behind a tree, a clump of willow, down at the edge of a ravine. Dammit, it’s going to be a dirty job to clean them out and mop this thing up now that the whole goddamned village is scattering.
“Smith!”
He watched the young orderly nudge his horse closer.
“Yessir, General?”
“Get back there as fast as you can ride.” Mackenzie spat his words out with Gatling-gun speed. “Tell those company commanders to hurry their outfits through that neck and get across the creek! Got that?”
“Yessir!”
“Wait, Smith—I want those troops here and into the fight faster than on the double! Can you get that across to them!”
“Yessir!”
“Dismissed—now go!”
Smith hunched forward as his legs pummeled the ribs of his mount, all the while savagely sawing the reins of his horse to the side—nearly twisting the animal back on itself before it bolted away like the spring in a child’s jack-in-the-box toy when the lid came flying back.
“General!” hollered Edward Wilson.
Mackenzie turned again, expecting to find another sniper along the hillside, but instead found some of his orderlies pointing in the same direction Private Wilson indicated.
“Bastards are making for that herd, aren’t they?” the colonel growled.
Damn! For starters they hadn’t sealed off the village, so now they would have to make a long and messy fight of it. And now it looked as if those damned Pawnee had got themselves bogged down in the village with those scouts from the Red Cloud Agency—which meant none of them were rounding up the enemy’s herds.
Which just might mean some of the Cheyenne would be free to scurry after the herds themselves and drive them off before Mackenzie’s force could capture them.
If the Cheyenne got those ponies into that broken ground at the far end of the valley, there was little his men could do to get them back, short of suicide. He had to keep those warriors—maybe two dozen or more from what he could count through his field glasses before the eyepieces fogged up against his face—had to keep every last one of them from reaching that big herd grazing up toward the bench to the west.
A Cold Day in Hell Page 31