“For the love of God, Mo-nah-se-tah, mount my horse!” commanded Custer as he leaned over, stretching his arm out to his wife.
She stepped forward, her lips pulled tightly back in a bestial sneer. She growled deeply at the confused general, who was frozen in horror at what he was seeing.
“I am the spirit that deceives fools!” She began laughing and as her peals of cold, rude laughter froze his blood, he saw her become diaphanous and vanish.
His officers had seen their commanding officer speaking to the woman in the water, and were stunned at the incident. As the volume of fire from the Indian village intensified, they implored him to come to his senses. From behind a rock on the opposite side of the river, a brave named White Cow Bull took aim with his Henry at a figure wearing a buckskin jacket and wide brimmed hat…
Custer was hit low in the left side of the chest, the bullet narrowly missing the heart but passing through one lung and entering into the other. The energy imparted from the large, slow moving .44 caliber 300 grain lead slug unseated the commander from his mount, and he fell into the river. Instantly the attack faltered, and uncertainty flooded the ranks as they saw their commander helped back onto his saddle, where he slumped in a heap. The guidon bearer was shot off his mount, as was the next man who attempted to recover the standard. As Custer was escorted to the rear, toward the highest hill, a skirmisher’s line was rapidly formed, with every fourth man taking four horses, as the balance of the cavalry fought on foot against a rapidly growing tidal wave of howling warriors that began to wash over them.
Custer’s entourage rushed him up the steep slope leading to the ridge as he leaned forward, arms around the neck of Vic, his mount, as he tried to breathe and maintain consciousness.
“Mo-nah-se-tah!” he gurgled over and over.
Realization came to him in a flood as he saw that his future was at an end. He knew he was dying and knew that all of his descendants would be from his Cheyenne wife, Mo-nah-se-tah.
“Oh please forgive me, God!” he prayed, “Give me one more chance!”
Guilt washed over him for having spurned his infant son, who was now an outcast among every tribe and nation that he traveled to with his mother. Vic seemed to know intuitively where to go as the small nucleus of command headed up the slope of the ridge.
“I think not of Libbie in my last minutes, but of Mo-nah-se-tah!”
The ridge was about a half a mile in length, and punctuated with several knolls. It offered a sweeping panorama of the Montana Territory in all directions. To the west was a vast ocean of prairie, to the east was a labyrinth of gulches covered with buffalo grass, wild plum trees, and sagebrush. The command elements for the most part were with this group, and they took their crippled leader to the north end-the highest knoll. Quickly they began setting up skirmishers, but before they could consolidate the circumference of the knoll, they were taken under fire by Gall, a Hunkpapa Lakota Chief standing well over six feet tall and weighing nearly 300 pounds, whose hordes had attained the summit of the knoll.
If things couldn’t get any worse, the trailing companies had been heavily engaged on three sides as they tried to reach the command element. Ultimately, they were engulfed and established impromptu defenses on the southern knoll and a dip on the reverse slope several hundred yards back, where they were in effect islands in a seething red sea. Of these three islands, the one on the south end was the strongest, desperately defended by Custer’s brother-in-law, 1st Lt James Calhoun.
Some of the troopers in Company E whose horses had been shot out from under them made a mad dash for a deep gulch, seeking cover; they were overtaken by Cheyenne, led by Lame White Man, who grabbed Associated Press Reporter Mark Kellogg by the back of the collar. Lame White Man jerked Kellogg back and halted his retreat toward the sanctuary of the deep ravine.
Furious hand to hand fighting ensued-the soldiers shooting their .45s into washboard etched stomachs and meat loafed chests before using the big Colts as clubs.
Kellogg, a slightly built man of 45 years with thinning grey hair over a high forehead, moved adroitly to the side as Lame White Man slashed at his head, taking off his right ear. His spectacles were perched atop a Pinocchio nose and were smeared with sweat; they rested askew minus the supporting ear. His shallow face was offset by a thick set of sideburns, blood and sweat flew in droplets from them as he ducked and weaved while trying to dodge the murderous slashes of Lame White Man’s Bowie knife.
“Listen!” shouted Kellogg at his attacker, “you don’t have to do this!”
“Pig!” retorted the obsessed Cheyenne chief, who was making jabs and slashing movements with the knife as he advanced on the reporter in increments, “I mean to gut you like a pig!”
Kellogg locked eyes with the big Cheyenne, who wielded the Bowie knife with murderous skill. Even in this desperate situation, Kellogg noted with a reporter’s attention to detail that the opponent he faced wore a thin, pronounced moustache, meticulously manicured. Lame White Man drove the big knife into Kellogg’s pigeon chest with sledgehammer force, impaling it into Kellogg’s shorthand notebook.
“Bastard!” growled Lame White Man like a wolf, as he tried to extract the large fighting knife, designed by the controversial duelist and frontiersman, Jim Bowie.
Lame White Man had pronounced Caucasoid features; his head was dolichocephalic and reflected the features of his captive white mother very strongly. The soft hazel irises could not belie the bestial fury that raged out of control inside them.
Kellogg’s fear was overridden with passion to live as he fumbled for, found, and wielded his needle sharp pencil like a stiletto. Grasping the pencil with his right hand, he drove it full force into the left eye of Lame White Man, who turned his head violently aside, breaking off the pencil in his eye socket.
“Aaaaargh!” shouted Lame White Man, “My eye!”
Kellogg was frozen in horror as he watched the Cheyenne war chief try to extract the writing instrument from the sclera; the pencil had embedded into the orbit of the skull, penetrating the maniac’s brain. The half blinded aboriginal bellowed like a blinded Cyclops.
“You little shit!” screamed the enraged Cheyenne, “I’m going to rip your throat out with my bare hands!”
The big chief withdrew his hands from his ruined eye and advanced on Kellogg with hellish intent, ham like hands opening and closing. Kellogg’s gaze was fixed on the remaining eye of the older Cheyenne warrior, an eye that beamed antipathy from its dilated pupil. The greased hair was parted in the middle and dangled in the form of two large braids on either side, these swung back and forth as he shook his head in rage and pain.
Kellogg pulled Lame White Man’s Bowie knife from his shirt; the note pad was still imbedded on the murderous blade tip. The tip of the knife had punctured an inch through the ledger, leaving a deep puncture in the string reporter’s bony chest. Quickly, violently, Kellogg swung the heavy knife down on Lame White Man’s head.
“Haaaaaaaa!!!” screamed Kellogg as he swung the oversized fighting knife in an arcing motion.
The knife struck with the effect of a meat cleaver, splitting Lame White Man’s head down to the high set cheek bones, the blade had cleaved cleanly between the two hemispheres of the brain. The paper notebook pad had dislodged itself from the tip of the knife when the blade rent through the cranial bone, its leaves of paper catching and flying in the gusty wind. The square set jaw of the gigantic Cheyenne opened in a deafening scream as he locked his hands around Kellogg’s skinny neck and began to throttle him.
“Die! Funny little man!” growled Lame White Man as his thumbs dug into and worked their way into the trachea of Mark Kellogg, who tried ineffectually to break the grip of the maddened chief.
The 250 pound dynamo of raw strength hurled himself onto the ectomorphic form of the desperate string reporter, slamming him onto the hard, dry ground. The veins in Kellogg’s neck distended into large vessels the size of rope as Kellogg struggled to break the grip, twisting his head fr
om side to side as he did so, the back of his head was gouged by small sharp rocks with the twisting motion.
“Let go!” gasped Kellogg who saw the visage of his antagonist blur as he lost consciousness.
Nearly all of the dismounted soldiers were dead, the few survivors were being shot in the deep coulee. A warrior rushed to help the chief, but took a stray bullet and crumpled to the ground. Lame White Man released the broken, distended neck of the newspaper reporter, and leaning forward, bit deeply into the pronounced Adam’s apple of the deceased Kellogg. The Bowie knife that was still wedged in his skull impeded his efforts; the wooden handle that was fastened onto the tang with brass studs retarded his progress. Standing up, he looked at his fellow braves, and spat out the Adam’s apple. He took two steps while wiping the gore from his mouth with the back of a forearm corded with steel cable muscle. Then he collapsed as he tried to remove the overbuilt blade, the handle of which he grasped with both hands as hundreds of fine threads of blood sprayed several feet into the air from all around the deeply imbedded blade.
Six hundred yards northward on the ridge was another island, where the terrain dipped. This was defended by the men of Company I, and commanded by the hard drinking Irishman Captain Myles Keogh. Keogh had a reputation as a lady’s man and a stern officer, he carried a cane with a wolf’s head made of silver. Often he would cane his men for minor infractions during in ranks inspections, and he was despised by them. They despised him because he was a Catholic, an Irishman, an officer, and a bully.
The high, shrill sounds of war flutes drifted through the cacophony of noise, as the screams of wounded horses mingled with the war whoops of charging Sioux and Cheyenne.
“Hold your bloody positions!” screamed the big captain in his Irish brogue. The hulking Irishman saw clearly that Calhoun’s position was being overwhelmed; Calhoun was waddling like a porcupine with dozens of arrows protruding from him as he fired his Colt point blank into the screaming mouth of a Cro-Magnon like warrior.
“We’re gonna havta make a run for the high knoll! Over there where Custer is!” screamed Keogh as he looked back over his shoulder to the knoll at the end of the ridge where Custer’s guidons were snapping smartly in the wind.
There were several thousand natives armed with a mismatched assortment of lances, flint lock pistols, muzzle loading rifles and repeaters crawling through the tall buffalo grass toward them, these men were between Keogh and Custer’s hill. Slapping his horse Comanche on the rear with his cane, he sent the big gelding into the grasses and ordered his men to follow the horse, while he remained covering the rear.
“Follow my horse! Every man for himself! Get after it while I cover you!” shouted the Irishman at the top of his lungs.
The remnants of his company broke and ran for the distant promontory as Keogh resumed firing with two Colt revolvers. He saw waves of Indian bowmen further down the slope; they were loosing shafts in an upward trajectory as they walked, not taking aim, and not seeking cover. The effect of the plunging fire could not be overstated as the arrows plunged into soldiers who had taken cover behind fallen horses.
At this moment Crazy Horse, the orchestrator of General Crook's defeat at the Battle of Rosebud Creek, entered the fray. With an entourage of several hundred warriors he crashed into the fleeing soldiers, who began dropping their rifles, while others began shooting themselves in the head with their revolvers. One soldier, a grizzled Civil War veteran, took aim a Keogh’s leg with his revolver and blew the captain’s knee off.
“To the devil with you, you damned Mick!” he shouted at the officer.
Wheeling about like a dervish, he shot twice into a clump of a dozen advancing braves, knocking two of them back. In seconds five of them were on him, but he’d saved the last bullet for himself. Cursing and spitting tobacco juice at being denied a captive, they turned their fury on Keogh, who stuck the muzzle of his revolver in his mouth and blew the top of his head off before they could stop him.
“Take my bulldogs, Tom!” Gasped the dying general. “I’m giving you the command! Try to save what you can!” Thomas Custer surveyed the situation with horror.
“There is nothing left to save, Audie! You’ve got your derringer, use it!” The Custer elements never had time to form up as a whole, as had Reno’s. Instead it had to stop and fight as it was overtaken, the already tiny unit being subdivided into three smaller entities. The sound of gunfire was deafening, and Thomas Custer never heard the shot that his brother put through the side of his head.
The bloodshot onyx eyes of Rain In The Face saw the lone officer standing among the clumps of dead horses and soldiers whose rifles would not fire. Bloodshot eyes which beheld the object of a grudge, and the eyes narrowed into slits as the brain behind them fomented a way to skirt around and behind the figure. The figure’s eyes locked with his own and recognition was there, amplifying the horror of the standing soldier’s predicament.
The handsome features of the brave were distorted by a fierce grimace of hate, hate of having endured the most humiliating of any insult a Sioux warrior could suffer. The greased hair was parted in the middle and woven tightly into two braids which descended below the swell of the pectorals. The braids were held intact with rawhide and colored cloth. The high forehead was atop an aquiline face reminiscent of a Trojan; a Sioux Hector, only the epicanthic folds above his eyes differentiated his regal visage from that of the Mediterranean races. A double bandolier of ammunition for his Winchester crisscrossed the heavy slabs of pectoral muscles which played with each arm movement. A gun belt with its holstered .44 Remington revolver was slung at an angle on his narrow loins. He wore a loin cloth of heavy red fabric over a set of elk skin leather breeches. Rather than moccasins, he wore sandals in the Mexican fashion.
Rain In The Face had murdered the fort’s dentist in cold blood, and had drunkenly boasted of the deed at an Indian gathering outside the fort’s main sultry store. Word had gotten back to Thomas Custer, who arrested the brave and had him shackled in irons with a white ne’er do well for about a year, pending a death sentence. Through the winter with nothing but a single blanket and with snow blowing through the log spacings, Rain In The Face had survived on hatred. Chaining a Sioux warrior to a white man and locking him in a shack was the worst insult that could be given a Sioux, and Rain In The Face vowed revenge.
Suddenly everything went white, with stars flying in all directions as Tom fell forward face first onto the ground. An Indian coup stick was rising and falling, rising and falling.
Rain In The Face smashed the sternum with the large rock and took his boning knife-a wicked bone handled instrument with a four inch blade, and cut through the broken bones of the younger Custer’s chest, cut through and reached into the chest cavity, grabbing the yet beating heart with his right hand while severing the great vessels and arteries with the knife held in his left hand.
Kneeling on both knees over the lifeless body, Rain In The Face held the beating heart up high over his forehead and toward the sun. Then he began to rip and tear at the tough fibrous cardiac muscle with his strong tobacco stained teeth. The beaten armbands of copper pressed into the skin as the bulging biceps strained against them. Holding a quivering shred of the tough muscle in his mouth, he spat it full into the flattened remains of Thomas’s face. The heart continued to expand and contract as he bit into the right atrium, causing blood to spurt across his eyes, temporarily blinding him.
The smell and coppery taste of the hot blood overcame the Hunkpapa’s self-control and he began ripping and tearing at the throbbing double pump, shredding it with his strong teeth and swallowing chunks of it without chewing. He held the ravished heart to his mouth with both hands as he rended the muscle, and a deep growl issued from the blood masked mouth. Swallowing the quivering hunks of raw heart muscle whole, he paused for breath. He could feel the separate vestiges of the heart moving in his stomach, as though it had a power of its own, and he renewed his rending of the heart remnants. He was growling and slaveri
ng like a rabid wolf as he tore at the flesh. Suddenly, without warning, he felt a sudden energy-a vitality borne of the warrior’s heart he had just eaten. Rain In The Face stood up, and roared like a mountain lion, causing the warriors nearest him to step back in terror.
Chapter Twenty ~ Duel of the Titans!
“Wake up! Wake up Mrs. Custer!” spoke the Indian maid servant in a commanding tone.
“Get up! You have to eat and get dressed. Big fighting in creek today for Poquerhienee.”
It was with difficulty that Libbie roused from the deep slumber, early as it was. Not yet four thirty in the morning.
“Get up! Get up! Elizabeth Custer!”
Then she felt the covers pulled suddenly from her, and the icy night air of the open windowed bedroom startled her awake.
∞
The throng of spectators had gathered along either side of the creek bank and were for the most part members of the various tribes of Cree who supplied scouts and assisted with work details of Fort Abraham Lincoln. Entire sides of antelope roasted over glowing coals of cooking fires while hot coffee brewed and Indian men passed bottled whiskey from mouth to mouth. Naked children frolicked in the water as their mothers commingled with each other spreading the family’s gossip. Everyone was oblivious to the struggle playing out a thousand miles away as they sang, talked, played and anticipated the coming contest between the two young contenders for the chance to suckle the breasts of the vivacious Poquerhienee.
“Must the children always run about naked?” complained the uncomfortable Margaret, turning her head from Libbie and seeing the elderly sachem of the reservation.
He was relieving himself on the side of a large cottonwood tree twenty feet away. He spat tobacco juice and smiled at her as he shook the droplets of urine from his uncircumcised member.
Metal Storm: Weird Custer A Novel Page 11