“Is our lieutenant here?” one of the pair asked.
The doctor said nothing, only pointing before he continued with knotting the cloth on the struggling soldier beneath him.
However, one of the stewards helping that physician asked, “You in the lieutenant’s troop?”
“We are.”
The steward shook his head. “He’s dead.”
“D-dead? We didn’t know.”
Now the doctor looked up. “Didn’t know he was dead? I thought you said you were in his troop.”
“We are … w-were,” the soldier answered. “Got separated when the red-bellies pitched into us.”
“He was killed and a bunch more wounded” the steward explained. “How come you didn’t know they was all taken off the battlefield? You didn’t run, did you?”
The two young soldiers looked at one another; then the first tried to explain. “No. We ain’t no cowards. Got separated from the rest and had to hide when things got hot.”
“Hide?” asked the doctor.
“All day,” he replied. “Been waiting for it to get full dark afore we could come in. Up in them rocks we didn’t know how bad it got for any of the rest of the boys. But we did know the lieutenant and the sergeant got hit afore we took cover up the side of that ravine.”
Donegan wagged his head—remembering the fear he had swallowed down time and time again as a young soldier faced with those moments before making a charge, those terrifying heartbeats as the fighting, the scuffling, the cannonade began all around them. Perhaps the difference between a private and a sergeant had always been that the private was supposed to be scared. And in this army the sergeant was never allowed the luxury of fear.
“Irish … Irishman.”
Seamus turned at the sound of the soft, croaking call. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dim light. The voice called again, “Over here.”
He started toward the sound, in a few steps reaching the feet of McKinney’s sergeant.
“Forsyth?”
“Yes.”
“It is you,” Seamus said as he squatted beside the wounded soldier and nodded to the young private who sat at the sergeant’s head, holding a wool blanket over them both as the flakes came down.
Forsyth said, “Started to snow again, dammit.”
For a moment he laid his wool glove on the sergeant’s arm. “You’re warm enough?”
“I’ll be fine on that account. Others worse off.”
“I seen they brought you in with the rest,” Donegan said.
“Was pretty well et up with the pain by then,” Forsyth replied. “Then the doc give me some laudanum and he went to work.”
The young soldier added, “Damn bullets flying over our heads all day—scaring the bejaysus outta every last one of these sawbone meat cutters, they have.”
“How’s it been for your cawpril over there?”
Forsyth turned slightly to glance at the big soldier who had stationed himself beside the blanket shroud laid out at the edge of the field hospital, both the corporal and the dead man slowly collecting ribbons of white as the snow began to fall more insistently. “He’s been quiet. Been there all day for what I know. Ain’t never left the cap’n’s side.”
“Good for him,” Seamus said.
“Yes,” agreed the young soldier as he shifted the blanket bower above him and Forsyth, “good for him. The lieutenant never had him a chance. The doc said he counted four bullets in him—any one of ’em s’posed to kill him right off.”
“F-four bullets you say?” Forsyth asked.
“One gone through his chest. ’Nother one gone through his lower arm and ended up in his belly. Third one done the worst: shattered his backbone. And the last one hit him in the head—stayed right there in his brains ’thout coming out.”
“Damn!” the sergeant whispered. “I’m sure thirsty, soldier.”
“Yes, sir. Here,” and he handed over a canteen.
Forsyth took himself a drink, then held it up for Donegan. “You thirsty, Irishman? Sure you are: ary a fighting man gets thirsty after doing his duty, don’t you think?”
He took the canteen, hesitating because he was not really all that thirsty—when the sweetish fragrance of the corn mash whiskey drifted up to his nostrils. Seamus sniffed at the canteen.
“Gloree be, Sergeant Forsyth!” he exclaimed with quiet wonder, then tilted the canteen up slightly to let a little wash across the end of his tongue. “That tastes good enough for me to stay here and kill my thirst with you, it does, it does. But—a man in your state needs your thirst killer much more’n I do.”
“You’re sure you don’t want none, are you?”
“Aye. I’m sure, and thankful too we had men like you on that line today.” Donegan watched the sergeant’s eyes soften. Wondering if it were the laudanum, or the whiskey, or maybe it was enduring all that pain that made them go soft and doelike right then.
“You won’t drink any more of my whiskey,” Forsyth said, “then you’ll have to give me your hand before you go.” They shook quickly. “Man like you, Irishman—you had no business coming on that charge with us. No reason on God’s green earth to be at the edge of that ravine.”
“I had every reason in the world,” Donegan replied. “But the two most important reasons are waiting for me back at Laramie.”
“Then see that you get yourself back to them whole,” the sergeant ordered as he sagged a bit, jamming the cork back in the top of his canteen, his eyelids drooping. “You don’t mind—think maybe I’ll grab me a bit of shut-eye now.”
“I’ll look you up tomorrow,” Donegan declared, patting the sergeant’s arm before he got to his feet and moved away into the firelit snowy night.
As he walked back toward the creek, his mind snagged on how McKinney had clutched at Dr. LaGarde, speaking of his mother so far, far away with his dying breath.
Natural that Donegan’s thoughts turned to his own mother now in heaven, still watching over her firstborn son come so far, far away to distant Amerikay.
Throughout the waning of the light that afternoon, Morning Star’s people had scrounged through the snow to gather wood to kindle the fires one of the old men started with the flint-and-steel fire-striker he had carried from his lodge at the upper end of camp that morning. These were not big fires like the ones the soldiers below fed with all that the Ohmeseheso had once owned. Instead these were small by comparison as the wind came up along the ridgetops and the snow began to fall around them.
It weighed down his heart to think that some of his people would not last this cold, cold night despite the small fires where the strong ones rubbed the hands and feet, legs and arms of those who were too small or too sick or too old to warm themselves. Not only had he lost family and friends to the soldier bullets this day, but with the coming night, Morning Star realized he would lose a few more to the winter giant.
As a Council Chief, it was his station in life to worry about such things—to concern himself more with the fate of his people than with his own family, his own fortune. So it saddened Morning Star that he thought again of Old Crow, a longtime friend who had elected to stay at the White River Agency* last summer when Morning Star and the others had decided to return to the north country. Especially after the soldiers had turned them back in the skirmish* with the soldiers near the Mini Pusa,† men like Old Crow had elected to stay behind.
So why was it, Morning Star asked, that Old Crow and other old friends of his then decided to join the soldiers in tracking down their own tribesmen? To side with the ve-ho-e in making war on their old friends, their own families?
How could the world have got so crazy that a man would turn his back on his own and join with the enemy?
Throughout the morning’s battle several warriors came to Morning Star reporting that they had seen Old Crow and others—some relatives of the squaw man Rowland—all from the White River Agency, among the Tse-Tsehese scouts fighting on the side of the soldiers. This was so hard to beli
eve!
But that afternoon Morning Star saw for himself.
A solitary horseman rode out from the enemy’s side of the valley and approached the bluffs where the warriors continued to put up a strong fight and Black Hairy Dog was working his medicine with the Sacred Arrows. As the lone rider drew closer to the rocky hillside, Morning Star recognized his friend, despite the white man’s heavy blue coat and the canvas britches.
“Old Crow!”
“It is me!” the soldier scout cried out.
“You best not come closer!”
The rider reined up. “I am here to tell you something.”
A warrior in the rocks near Morning Star angrily hurled his voice at the horseman. “Tell us nothing but that you are coming to fight beside us against the soldiers.”
“I must fight against you,” Old Crow sadly admitted from the back of his skittish pony.
“Then perhaps we should kill you as we will kill the soldiers!”
Other warriors in the rocks shouted in derision too, but no one fired a shot at Old Crow. Killing one of their own would be so hard a thing to do.
Morning Star’s voice rose above the others. “You have come here for a reason, my friend. Tell us.”
The horseman patted the pockets of the dark wool coat he wore. “Although I am forced to fight against you—I am leaving a lot of ammunition for your guns on this hillside.”
They watched him ease out of the saddle, lead his pony to a rocky outcrop, then quickly empty his pockets. Then the Council Chief leaped back into the saddle, tightened his grip on the reins, and called out in parting.
“The old days are gone, Morning Star! We are watching the sun set on the old ways. Do not let the soldiers kill any more of your relatives. Bring them to the agency where we can live out the rest of our days together in peace, smoking the white man’s tobacco.”
Jamming the heels of his winter moccasins into the flanks of that pony, Old Crow reined about in a cascade of snow and bolted away, turning his back broad and inviting to the warriors among the rocks.
But no man fired his weapon at Old Crow. It simply would not be an honorable thing to raise a weapon against one’s own people.
Even if that man no longer acted like one of the Ohmeseheso, but acted instead more like a white man … the hated ve-ho-e who brought destruction wherever his boot left a track.
* Red Cloud Agency, Nebraska.
* “Warbonnet Creek—17 July 1876.
† The South Fork of the Cheyenne River.
Chapter 38
Big Freezing Moon 1876
Every throb of that drum was like a tiny stab at his heart—making pain for him in each of his six wounds. Little Wolf knew the Snake Indians would beat it right on through the bitterly cold night.
But for the tiny fires they had kindled here and there in the breastworks and among the rocky crags that shadowed the valley, it was very dark. The stars had been blotted out not long after the sun had turned the clouds a deep reddish purple. And then it began to snow.
The clouds hovered just over their heads, shrouding the tops of the mountains, as the chiefs and headmen of the People gathered in council to discuss what course they should take.
There wasn’t much arguing—for their choice seemed clear. While there were those who spoke on behalf of the wounded, the sick, the old, and the little ones, who whimpered with the intense cold and their empty bellies, still no one chose to surrender to the soldiers in the valley. There was but one course to take, and that was for them to start away from the valley that very night, abandoning the camp where everything they owned had been destroyed.
How proud Little Wolf was that his people were still fierce and as full of fight as ever despite their devastating loss.
“I will remain behind, even if no others stay with me,” Young Two Moon volunteered. “Tonight I will sneak down close to the village under the cloak of darkness and wait for the soldiers to leave tomorrow when I can go down to what piles of rubble and ash are left—to see what I can find for us to use.”
“This is good,” Little Wolf replied. “And we need others to follow the soldiers’ trail as they leave the valley. To see where they are going now that we journey north.”
“We must travel through the mountains for a long distance,” advised Walking Whirlwind. “If we go onto the plains too quickly, the soldiers will find us there and we will never reach the Crazy Horse people.”
Just as Old Bear’s small band of Tse-Tsehese had done last winter following the fight on the Powder River in the Sore-Eye Moon, they would again seek out the Hunkpatila Oglalla band of Crazy Horse, said to be camped for the winter along the Tongue River.
Besides that drumming and the triumphant singing of the Shoshone scouts in the valley below, all around the chiefs women were keening softly, crying out with shrill and angry voices, mourning the dead, singing over the wounded as the old shamans shook their rattles, blew their prayers into each bloody, frozen bullet hole with four long puffs of air.
Brave, heroic men like Yellow Nose suffered in silence for the most part, asking only for sips of melted snow as they lay curled close to the small fires.
For all the pain they had caused his people, Little Wolf still would gladly take Old Crow’s gift of soldier bullets—those boxes of the shiny cartridges left behind in the rocks below Morning Star and the others. Yes, Little Wolf was never so proud he did not use the white man’s bullets to defend his people.
He wondered now how Old Crow slept, wondering if he slept at all—having turned against the Ohmeseheso even though he too was one of the Council of Forty-four. Perhaps the power of the Maahotse would indeed kill all those who had turned their backs on their own people.
For a long time that afternoon Black Hairy Dog had prayed over the Sacred Arrows he pulled from their fox-skin quiver. Many warriors and women eventually gathered around the priest, all joining in to stamp their feet and sing the songs that would put a curse on every one of those who fought on the side of the white man against their own people.
Then, slowly, with much respect, the Sacred Arrow Priest lifted the Arrows one by one from the white-sage bed he had made for them to overlook the valley, replacing them in the quiver. Then just past twilight Little Wolf sadly watched Black Hairy Dog place the Maahotse on his wife’s back, and together with an escort of some eighteen families they began their retreat to the south. Big Horse, White Buffalo, Young Turkey Leg, and others were, after all, Southern People like Black Hairy Dog.
“We will stay east of the mountains as we go south,” they told Little Wolf and the rest at their last council just before departing. “When we reach the foot of Hammer Mountain* we can then turn our faces south by east back to our agency.† Only then will I be sure the Maahotse are safe.”
Esevone was safe as well. Some time ago Coal Bear and his woman had fled up the mountain with the Medicine Hat as men like Box Elder, with his Sacred Wheel Lance; Long Jaw, with his bullet-riddled red blanket cloak; and Medicine Bear, with the magic of the Turner, first used their powers to cloak the old couple with invisibility, then diverted the enemy’s bullets. By sundown there were many who had poked their fingers through the countless holes shot in Long Jaw’s cape, whispering in amazement that not one ve-ho-e bullet had penetrated his body.
Truly, the Everywhere Spirit had watched over His people this day. But they still faced the winter, and the wilderness, and the search for the Hunkpatila of Crazy Horse.
Little Wolf winced with the pain in his six wounds as he turned to look up the slope into the darkness at the faint points of red light glowing here and there. Beside one of those fires rested the Hat Bundle. With its power secure, the People just might survive the coming ordeal.
But at a terrible cost.
Then he shuddered to think how many were sure to die in the coming ordeal.
During his short nap in the midst of the long-range battle yesterday afternoon, William Earl Smith’s leg had gone to sleep and a deep cold had seeped into th
e muscles. As the night wore on, the leg continued to hurt all the more, making any attempt he made at sleep fitful and sporadic. Between the leg and the cries of the wounded in the nearby field hospital, Smith didn’t figure he had slept for more than an hour at a time all night long.
Each time he awoke, he came to with a start, slowly realizing where he was, listening to the groans of those in pain and the voices of those men on picket duty, or what soldiers were unable to sleep. And each time he came awake, the private always found Mackenzie pacing back and forth. At first he figured the colonel was attending to one matter or another, but Smith soon came to realize Mackenzie had instead slipped into some kind of deep depression.
William Earl liked the man, and it bothered him to find Mackenzie so sorely troubled. It even shook the young private to the core to have seen the colonel openly cry when he learned Lieutenant McKinney had been killed at the ravine.
The following morning Smith scribbled in his journal:
I don’t believe he slept at all that nite. His mind must of been troubled about some thing. I don’t know what, for he is the bravest man I ever saw. He don’t seem to think any more about bullets flying than I would about snowballs.
By dawn all of the killed and wounded soldiers had been brought in and accounted for, since it was generally believed the Cheyenne would resume the battle as soon as there was enough light for them to see their targets. Instead, the hilltops and rocky ridges were eerily silent as night bled into that Sunday, the twenty-sixth of November.
“It’s just as well,” Mackenzie murmured over his breakfast of black coffee as the sky grayed. “Last night in officers’ conference I decided that even the infantry would pay too high a cost trying to dislodge the warriors from the rocks in these mountains. Sadly, I now realize we’ve already paid too high a price for this victory.”
For a time Smith figured his commander might be morose simply because of losing so many casualties to the enemy, while at the same time during that officers’ meeting last night Mackenzie could personally verify no more than twenty-five warriors killed from the many reports. To justify so many dead soldiers, he should have clearly killed many, many more Cheyenne.
A Cold Day in Hell Page 44