by Peter Bowen
They was looking to cut Nez Perce sign, and would before long wheel north by northwest. They wouldn’t be asked to fight, just to steal the pony herd and keep the Nez Perces nervous and stirred up.
I figured on just waiting for Miles to show up.
If I rode downriver it would be only to ride upriver again. As soon as the band of Crows was out of sight (I trust everybody, see), I swum my horse and the mules over to the north bank and spread my clothes out on the bushes to dry.
The Nez Perces was probably trying to join Sitting Bull up in Canada—I guessed that they hadn’t heard or didn’t believe that old medicine man was driving Cheyennes and Gros Ventres back across the border. There was about sixteen Mounties between Ottawa and Lake Louise, and Sitting Bull was quite happy with that arrangement and didn’t want to make his new friends nervous, or at least no jumpier than they already was. Sitting Bull was a deep man. I have felt sorry for him, for he saw more than he wanted to.
I remember that day as the last good one of the year. The sun was warm, and the last of the bees was taking advantage of it to make a final round of the wild primroses. The white man’s flies, the Indians called the honeybees. If an Indian saw a white man’s fly then he knew it wouldn’t be long until he was crowded out. Not for nothing that the Mormons use that bee as their symbol.
It was so relaxed and quiet, just the popple leaves rattling—the bright crimson aspens which, some say, shake forever because they were the wood used to make the cross upon which the Romans nailed Jesus. Utter rot, that. I have never seen an aspen more than six or eight inches in diameter. I fell asleep in the sun on a buffalo robe. The dark hair gathered the heat.
My horse woke me, whinnying at the approaching cavalry’s mounts. I dressed and walked up a deadfall till I was ten feet or so above the ground. Pretty quick I could make out the guidons and pennants of the Fifth Cavalry, pickets and flankers riding their horses shoulder deep through the yellow buffalo grass.
I waved my hat—I wear a big Monarch of the Plains Stetson, white underneath, the way it comes out of the box, and smoked brownish-gray on top. One of the flankers caught my signal and raised his yellow-gauntleted hand in greeting.
If you have never heard a horse troop, it is a stirring thing. First a thick sound far off, like a porridge of thunder too many miles away to hear, but you can feel it. Then the thunder breaks into hoofbeats, and the jingle of tack appears, and finally you hear a distinct one-two beat, for the horses are all leading with their left sides.
The cottonwood log I was standing on began to vibrate like a drum. The troopers came into full view, their horses kicking up dust and chaff, and if you put your ear to the ground you could hear the Fifth up in Canada. Sitting Bull was hearing it, I was sure of that.
All of them hours at horse drill was showing. The troopers swept the gullies and then converged on a big meadow. Sentries dismounted on the tops of hills and began to glass the country. One rider came straight for me—a Captain name of Mitchell. He was as weathered as an old stump, though he couldn’t have been more than thirty. He’d spent four years chasing the Apaches, and that will age a man faster than anything I know.
Mitchell stopped his big bay horse about ten feet from me and slid off him smooth as a stream of water.
“Mr. Kelly, sir,” he said, extending his hand, “the Colonel’s compliments and mine own.” Mitchell rarely spoke, and he had a twinkle in his eye all of the time, as though he had a joke of his own devise that included everyone he met.
“You’ve heard the news, of course,” I said. “Joseph’s three days ahead.”
“We’ll ride on a three horse to a trooper remount if need be.”
“I saw your allies go by eight hours ago,” I said. “I think if Miles wants to catch Joseph, you’d best head northwest now.”
“The Far West isn’t far behind,” Mitchell said. “We can leave at first light. Do you have any suggestions as to placement of sentries?” He had a soft trace of Tidewater Virginia in his speech.
I mentioned a couple of spots. Mitchell remounted and rode off. The troopers were felling trees and dragging them off to form breastworks. These were good soldiers, no mistake.
By the time the troopers had finished with their corral, I could hear the thump of the Far West’s engines. Grant Marsh was at the wheel, he who had picked up the wounded from the Reno-Benteen fight on the bluffs west of where Custer had got his, and set a record for speed to Fort Buford. I had once seen Marsh throw a tinhorn gambler, holding him by the throat and crotch, into the paddle wheel. There were no charges filed.
Marsh had to pick his way carefully through the channel—there was a lot of big cottonwoods which had been uprooted and then buried up to their tops in the mud and sand, leaving the rootball to flail like a giant’s club just below the surface. They were called sawyers and were the most fearsome hazard on the river. Later there would be big steamboats with winches—they called them Uncle Sam’s Toothpullers—to haul out the sawyers, but for now it was just Grant Marsh’s uncanny reading of the water keeping the boat safe.
The steamboat anchored in a good-sized eddy, and the crew poured down the gangplank and began to cut wood for the boilers—the soldiers had sawed quite a bit. They would cut twice what the boat could hold, and hope that the Indians wouldn’t set fire to the stacked wood.
A hostler—couldn’t have been fourteen, the age at which I joined the Union Army—came for my animals. He saluted me and said, “With the Colonel’s compliments, sir, and he would like to see you right away.”
I stomped up the gangplank, hearing the hollow thump of my bootheels on sawboards—an unfamiliar sound. I crouched and had my pistol in hand in an instant. The sentry at the gangport looked at me quizzically.
“Out here you learn to listen for sounds what shouldn’t ought to be if you want to keep your hair,” I says, half embarrassed, or at least enough to make an excuse for my behavior.
“Jaysus, Kelly,” Baldwin’s big voice boomed. “Are you ready for the asylum yet?”
The first time I met Baldwin I was playing the fool, and I volunteered to take a message through the country to Fort Fetterman. I was acting like a halfwit—for the practice, you know—and when Baldwin asked me what I would do if captured, I said I would act the madman, since the Indians are superstitious about madmen and never harm one. I got to enjoying it, and Baldwin ever after would remind me of our first meeting.
Frank was the second in command, and as good a soldier and man as any. We got drunk one night in St. Louis and with that peculiar intensity that whiskey gives, he had fixed me with his Black Irish eye and said, “Jaysus, Kelly, it’s not heroes I want to be commanding, it’s run-of-the-mill cowards with their backs to the wall. I never met a hero who had a hat size bigger than five and one-eighth.”
“Hello, Frank,” I says, “and good evening to you.”
“You’re just in time for the wrestling match, me against him,” says Baldwin. “Now wouldn’t the papers have fun with this?”
Christ in pantaloons, I thinks. It ain’t enough he has to send his troopers out to get their heads blown off, they get to spend their free time playing football and doing rope pulls and three-legged races and tossing horseshoes. Miles was strange, no doubt.
“Wrestling match,” I says. “How perfectly grateful I am to have such an entertainment. Might I wager on the outcome?”
“Of course.”
“Well, I’ll take Miles. Or I could bribe you to break his goddamned neck.”
Baldwin laughed and jerked a thumb toward the rear of the boat, where Miles had his office. He also carried a Turkey carpet with him on campaign and a folding India-rubber bathtub.
“The commandin’ officer and me are wrestling for the privilege of the double bed atop the wheelhouse, so the victor can freeze his ass off in the midnight air. Well, my mother used to say, ‘What’s the use in being Irish if you can’t be thick?’”
There was a wrestling ring set up on the stern deck, and even a cou
ple of junior officers with buckets and towels trying to look like managers. Miles was preening his muscles—they was about half flab now, but he must have been strong when he was younger. Miles had a cast eye, one just a bit off center. It was unnerving to have him stare at you. I thought he must have got most of his promotions that way. The most memorable in a field of bad candidates.
“Ho, Luther,” says Miles, all jolly, “another of your calling cards, eh? I think this one is even bigger than the first one you sent!”
He extended his hand and we shook paws, and when he let go to turn and flex his muscles some more I looked at the sheen on my palm and realized that he had oiled himself.
It was a fair match, as to size. Baldwin could have easily been the victor, but he was, of course, too smart for that. Rank was hard to come by these days—there were men serving out here as captains who had been generals in the Civil War. There weren’t any great slaughters to clear the field of an oversupply of eligible candidates. The Indians had never heard of frontal assaults, which leads to rapid promotions.
I left them straining and grunting and wandered off to the riverside rail. Someone offered me a flask, which I refused. The water was low and pretty clear. I watched the river go by and listened with half an ear to the grunts and thuds. A fingernail moon came up and the river began to steam as the night air cooled.
A bullboat was passing us by. I almost sounded the alarm, and then a voice came straggling over the river, over its low roaring sounds of stones and sand and trees and carcasses rasping toward the Gulf of Mexico.
“Nezzz Percies crossed at Cow Island four days ago,” a reed-thin voice wafted across the foggy river.
“We know,” I hollered. “Where you from, where you headed?”
The bullboat was spinning, I got only one word out of the sentence that followed. It was enough.
“................cholera.......”
I shuddered.
Hands were clapping behind me, so the match must be over. I walked back to the crowd on the afterdeck. Backs were being slapped and money was changing hands.
Baldwin had won. It gave me a puzzlement, and then I remembered that as crazy and devious as Miles was, he knew better than to surround himself with arse-crawling sycophants. There is nothing so discouraging as written requests for written instructions in the middle of a battle. Miles was a lot more afraid of Howard stealing his newspaper headlines than he was of the Nez Perces, but he was smart enough to know he needed men of judgment. Besides, he could always screw his subordinates out of their fair share of the glory later.
Miles beckoned to me, and I walked over to where he was toweling himself off.
“How far behind do you reckon we are?” he says.
“If you force every ounce out of your men and horses, maybe a day and a half, maybe two,” I says. “They are pretty well encumbered with everything they own that’s portable and they’ve got their children and old folks, too.”
“We leave at first light!” Miles shouted. “One hundred rounds per man, one remount, one hundred and fifty rounds on the pack mules. Bacon and hardtack only.”
“I suggest you leave now and find out exactly where they are, Kelly,” he smiled. “After all, that’s what Uncle Sam pays you for.”
Like I said, he wasn’t all that dumb.
4
I SETTLED MY PONY into his ground-eating lope, and we drifted up the trail under the faint starlight. He was a damn good horse, and once he got which direction he was supposed to go in, I could sleep in the saddle, he was so surefooted.
We come to Cow Island just at dawn. I glassed the Island and both sides of the ford from a hiding post in a clump of chokeberry bushes. There wasn’t any activity, and I hadn’t expected any. There on the north bank was a sight I goggled at for a full minute. A boiler, gleaming with brass and German silver, smack in the middle of an Indian uprising. It had been block-and-tackled up the bank from a sunken wreck. The great muddy swath where there had been roller logs was as visible as a cut on your face.
I could see the Nez Perces’ trail, too, winding up the draw and out onto the high tablelands to the north. So they was gone, like I thought. Even the rearguard would be at least two days’ travel ahead. I rode cautiously up to where they had made camp. It had rained here and the ashes from the cooking fires touched sharply in the nose. I knew that they had come up through the Judith Basin, and I looked for the red grass seeds in the horse turds—the seeds are from a grass which grows there and not much of any place else. They were there. The Nez Perces’ trail was two hundred feet wide, overlaid with the prints of the Crow ponies.
I started up the trail, and then I saw some cache turves stacked to one side of the trail. The Crows had opened the caches, which had been dug by the Nez Perces.
You know what was in them? Gold pans. Hundreds of gold pans, many kegs of nails in another, kitchen crockery in another, all piled up by the salvage crew who run off when the Nez Perces came.
It was a real head scratcher. Here’s this bunch of folks, who have already run some seventeen hundred miles, soldiers behind them, and God knows what coming in from their flanks, having fought several pitched battles, and within a hundred and fifty miles of safety, they spend a day caching goods they don’t need and can’t possibly use. An Indian got about as much use for a nail as I do for a bustle. It was as though they knew that they weren’t to make it, and dallied so it wouldn’t be worse than it was.
All of the time that I had been poking about I had been scanning the ridges. A scout, if he is any good, looks like a feeding chicken—peck down and stare up. Peck and look, peck and look—about four pecks and three looks into my routine I saw a rider dash between two huge rocks two miles away. I hightailed it to a good spot and rein-hobbled my horse and saw to it that my gun had one in the chamber and a full deck in the magazine.
Pretty soon he come trotting down the trail, waving like a Mick politician on St. Paddy’s Day, all smiles and hoots. He came right for me, because if he’d been in my boots, that’s where he would be.
“Pip, pip, old man,” Buffalo Horn hooted. “Jolly good, don’tcher know. Pass the port. Pass the girl. Oh, what rotters are we. Sun never sets.”
“I think I am going to kill you,” I snarls.
“Tut, tut, old man, port out and starboard home. By god that’s the biggest bloody moose I’ve seen since last I dined at Crowell’s. D’you have the time or at least a paper? Pip, pip, old fellow, we shall never make it at these rates. The niggers start at Calais. Beastly hot, ain’t it?”
Buffalo Horn had spent a portion of this season guiding dudes from the Sceptered Isle and he was quite bonkers (to use a term) and homicidal, too. Texas Jack Omohundro had recruited him—down under that copper skin and the outlandish garments beat the heart of a greedy, avaricious little bastard.
I stood up and whistled for my horse. Buffalo Horn sat on his mount and grinned like a shit-eating dog. He was a Bannock, from across the Rockies. He wore the Bannock hat, a circular arrangement of otter fur with buffalo horn tips for decoration.
“Good meat,” says Buffalo Horn, holding up a mesh bag full of tins.
We ate anchovies, liver paté, canned tomatoes and peaches, and had evaporated milk for our coffee.
5
BUFFALO HORN AND ME took off after a few hours sleep, following the Nez Perces’ trail. It went as straight as the country would allow—north. We come upon a grave that they had made. A small one. A child must have died. I couldn’t help but think that this was a rotten war, and then I couldn’t think of a good war. I had nothing against the Nez Perces.
At dawn we found the tracks of Miles’s Crow scouts. They had cut across and were up ahead, harassing the fleeing Nez Perces. They had strict orders not to engage the Nez Perces, which orders would probably hold about the same amount of time your orders do when you tell your dog to stay the hell off the couch. As long as Miles’s eye was on ’em he could expect to be obeyed.
We had come maybe forty miles b
y noon. We stopped to let our ponies water and cool themselves and chew a bit of the sweet buffalo grass. The wind quartered for a moment, and we smelled the sweet fishy smell of death. There were three bodies beside the trail, tumbled off into a little wash. They were Crows, and each of them had been killed by a shot to the head. Most Horse Indians can’t shoot for sour owlshit—it’s the boom that matters—while most Corn Indians are pretty good with a rifle. But the Corn Indians don’t fight much, and the Horse Indians do. I suppose the Corn Indians are good shots because they have to trim back the gopher population.
“Wal,” I says, pointing to the three bloated corpses in the bed of the wash, “looks like them Nez Perces can shoot, anyway.”
Buffalo Horn laughed. We both heard the horses at the same moment and were both behind the same log an eyeblink later. We was scanning the ground and ready to toss off a shot at the first topknot to show itself.
Someone halloed. The party clattered up the wash bed, the horseshoes clanging on the stones.
“Shit,” I said. It was the word come first to mind. There was this young soldier, and behind him the man I hated most in all of the world. You know someone who does something that you do and twists it and makes it a vile thing? Something that you do that you love?
Red Mike was about the vilest critter I had ever met, and Miles, the bastard, had sent him along after me. Clever fellow, our Colonel. Send two men who hate each other’s guts to do the same job and they will likely bust ass to prove each other a worse case. And if one should come back with some tale of woe befallen the other, there is always the entertainment of a good court martial and hanging.
I smiled nice and thought, by god, I am going to figure out a way to kill you, you bastard.
“Howdy, Kelly,” says Red Mike, grinning and showing his big gapped teeth. “What a sartain pleasure to work with you once again.”
Mike was such a gentleman he preferred to scalp squaws’ lower pelts, if you gather what I mean. It’s hard to think of company that would find that polite conversation, but there you are.