by Andy Conway
He looked down at his fist clutching the blanket to his waist. It was crimson with blood gushing out of his belly like water from a mountain spring.
He said something.
I didn’t understand.
Then he pushed himself up and walked away over the ridge, down the hill to the river. Perhaps he wanted to die in his tipi, or see his loved ones before the spirits took him. He walked off down the hill in his blue shirt and I saw him no more.
For the first time, I was scared.
This was death.
This was what it would be to die on this day. I didn’t want to die.
I glanced back and saw that the large group of soldiers on the left wing were rushing up to the hill where Sitting Bull had delivered his prayers to the spirits last night.
And the thought of Custer made me angry again.
I took up my rifle and prepared to run into the smoke and kill as many soldiers as I could before they reached the hill and joined Long Hair.
The smoke cleared, as if the spirits had answered my prayer, only to see the soldiers well out of range of my bullets. They were running on foot, chasing their comrades on horses who galloped to the hilltop.
But the men on foot couldn’t outrun the bullets and arrows of the braves who chased them, nor the braves on horses who ran them down. I watched from the ridge and saw them chased through the dips and gorges that rippled up towards the high hill they hoped would be their salvation. In moments they were lying dead in the grass and swarmed on by warriors who hacked them into bloody lumps.
Only a few escaped to the hill ahead.
I knew that Custer was up there, watching his right wing wiped out by the thousands of braves that now swirled around him like a flood that was rising, inch by inch, and would soon engulf him, and drown him.
A hungry man’s meal
I ROLLED BACK OFF THE ridge to the steep rise swarming with Indians who were still pouring out of the village.
The soldiers on the hill were shooting their horses and lying behind them. It was the only cover they could have. The odd gunshot echoed over from the other side of the ridge where Crazy Horse and his braves were attacking, but there was a strange moment of calm now as both sides prepared for the end.
Long Hair was surrounded.
Some of them fired down on the Indians below. Men rushed here and there on that hill, setting up their defence, distributing ammunition.
We reverted to the same tactic we’d applied at the start of the battle.
Thousands of us creeping through the tall grass.
I ducked behind a sage bush and scooted towards the hill, doubled over. The end was nigh and I wanted to be there for it. I wanted to kill Custer for myself if only I could make it to the hill before he was wiped out.
A sudden commotion erupted from the hill and I ducked. A group of grey horses bolted free. They seemed to be riderless but I wondered if the soldiers were hanging off the side of their mounts, as the braves would ride when they would shoot from under the horse’s neck.
A few braves shot at them, suspecting the same, but it was clear there were no riders. Fearing the loss of such a prize, many braves down the hill rushed to capture the horses. Long Hair was creating a diversion, hoping the braves would be so greedy for horses they would fail to see him escape.
I ran forward, tall now, praying no soldier would notice and shoot me. A bullet whizzed past me and I fell face down in the dirt. A Cheyenne brave lying in the grass barked at me but I ignored him, only trained my rifle on the hill and fired off a round.
With a great cry, a group of soldiers ran down the hill. They were charging us!
The braves down there shrank back, wary of this sudden rush. Every soldier was coated in white dust, as if they had painted themselves for this charge. It looked like they might storm all the way down to the river and into the camp.
An arrow pierced one of the men and we all heard his scream. Their magic was dispelled. The braves down there swarmed over them and slaughtered them where they stood.
But some of the blueshirts changed course, like a panicked group of buffalo that peel off from the main herd and quickly realize they are alone. They ran in a line twenty feet below and I could not resist kneeling up and shooting down at them, even though I made myself an easy target to those on the hill.
One of them fell from my bullet and I whooped with delight. The others hurtled for the deep ravine that led down to the river.
But it was hopeless.
There were Indians all around them, as many as the blades of grass. It was only a miracle that so many ran so far before they were gunned down.
We heard their screams echo up from the ravine, and imagined its walls painted with their blood.
An overwhelming urge to run down there and count coup on the man I had shot possessed me, but I looked up the hill to see the last of the soldiers clustered around its peak.
The diversion of the horses and the men had been for nothing, if they had even been diversions and not simply blind panic.
For there was no escape now.
If I ran to count coup on the soldier I’d shot, I would miss the assault on the hill.
There were no more than a hundred left.
I stood up and screamed.
“I have a hundred enemies in this hand! Who wants them?”
Shots peppered the sagebrush all around me and I kissed the dirt. It was as if Little Star had taken over my body for a moment. I cursed him and heard him laughing at me.
Suddenly, a rain of arrows made the sky black, pouring down on the hill’s summit where Sitting Bull had prayed last night, and one by one the blueshirts fell and their gunfire grew weaker.
We seemed to know, as one, when it was right to attack. When just enough were left alive so their bullets could not kill us all.
And the blueshirts must have known it too.
An ear-splitting cry went up all around, and we swarmed up the hill.
I ran with the rest, quicker because we were running across the rise, not up it.
Their guns fired and almost hid them in clouds of smoke, but if any Indians fell from their bullets, it was not enough to save them.
We ran into that thunder.
The guns crackled like a roaring fire, and the smoke and gunpowder so acrid in the air I choked on it.
It was over so quickly.
Like the ants swarming all over the beehive in my vision, we swarmed on Long Hair and there was no space to even kill a soldier.
I ran at one.
He kneeled, screamed, “Mein Gott!” to the sky.
I pulled the trigger from my hip.
Half his face flew off and I smashed the rifle butt into the explosion of blood, bone and brain and watched him crumple to the dirt.
In a flash I’d taken out my knife and scalped him, my hands all red, screaming to the sky.
And it was that moment I saw him — Long Hair, Custer, Son of the Morning Star — sitting up, slumped over, looking around him as if he’d just woken and didn’t know where he was. A part of him was already in the Spirit Land for he looked only half in this world. His eyes saw mine and he blinked, puzzled, and there was a moment when I wondered if he saw me at all.
Then he was lost in the scrum of braves, like a thousand dogs in a fight.
Before I’d finished screaming, I realized the only guns firing were our own and the men were shouting out the truth.
“Every soldier on the hill is dead!”
Farewell to the squawman
LOOKING OUT FROM THE hill, I could see young men chasing horses over the prairie. Some of the horses wandered, limping, and no one chased them. That great tide of fleeing women, children and the elderly had come closer and closer to the battle and were now picking their way through the dead, collecting those warriors who’d fallen, and plundering those soldiers who lay dead.
Women clubbed soldiers to finish them off, and they stripped off their clothes. All over the surrounding bluffs the stark white
bodies of the soldiers stood out against the grass, obscene and pale in the blazing sun.
Sitting Bull had warned us not to plunder the dead, but everywhere they were doing it. And some were hacking the bodies to bits, cutting off their heads.
I could smell death and breathed its rank, fetid stench.
It had made me sick to my stomach when I’d seen them mutilate the Crow horse thief, but now I felt nothing. The death of Little Star had killed something inside me. It had killed all pity for these men who’d come to destroy us. His death had changed me, made me stronger.
I picked through the pockets of the German soldier I’d killed. There were coins and some green dollar bills. “Running Away Money,” a voice whispered in my ear. I looked around, but Little Star wasn’t there. Was he talking to me even though he was dead?
I secreted the money in my pouch and flicked through the notebook, cooing like a white man finding gold in a riverbed. A few pages covered in German scrawl, but most of the notebook was pristine white sheets, blank with the promise of fresh thoughts. I tucked it away in the pouch with the pencil and the money and moved on up the hill.
Many of the braves had left and were drifting south across the bluffs to where they thought more soldiers were stationed. The call had flown round but I did not heed it. I wanted to find Long Hair, to see that he truly was dead, to know that he would chase me no more.
Women and old men picked over the dead, finishing off any soldiers still breathing, ripping off their boots and stabbing arrows between their toes to make sure. Others collected rifles and ammunition, or tended to the Indian wounded or cried over the braves who’d fallen.
Smoke swirled all around, as if the hill had been set on fire, and I came across a cluster of people bent over a body.
I saw it was Long Hair before I saw who was standing around him. Those bright blue eyes now staring with incomprehension at the unforgiving sky. He was stripped naked and seemed so puny, like a fallen birch tree, and they were arguing over him.
The brave who was kneeling over him stood up suddenly and I saw it was White Cow Bull, whom I hadn’t seen since the soldiers had tried to ford the river.
His knife was in his hand. Had he shot Custer from his horse earlier and now come to scalp him?
Two women were shouting at him and he shrank from them, his face flushing ochre.
It was Monahsetah, the Cheyenne princess Custer had captured and raped. She stood over Custer’s body now, her aunt, Mahwissa, at her side. And there was the son, Yellow Tail.
“Leave him alone!” Mahwissa shouted. “He is our relative!”
White Cow Bull skulked away. This man who’d faced down the troops crossing the river hours before. Caught in the act of mutilating the father of her son, he ran away from Monahsetah for the first time since he’d set eyes on her.
The two women gazed down at Long Hair’s white body and neither said anything for a while. Monahsetah stared with a strange kind of grief, tears rolling down her face. But they were not tears of sorrow, I thought, only of hate and rage.
The old woman delved into her pouch, pulled out her sewing awl and rammed it in Custer’s ear.
“So Long Hair will hear better in the Spirit Land,” she said, with grim certainty.
She pierced his other ear and stood back as if to admire her work, then she tugged the boy’s arm and led him away, leaving the Cheyenne princess with the dead father of her child.
Monahsetah stood staring for a while, as if she had turned to stone, and I looked away to see the braves drifting south to move on the soldiers over there, thinking they must be the soldiers that had first attacked the village.
The soldier who’d killed Little Star would be among them.
Anger flared in me again and I knew I wasn’t done with killing.
I heard movement behind me and turned to see Monahsetah snatch up an arrow from the ground and crouch over Long Hair’s naked body.
She rammed the arrow into him with a squelch of dead flesh.
One thing was clear: when Long Hair got to the Spirit Land he might have all his limbs, but he wouldn’t be raping any more women.
The last stand
I STAGGERED DOWN THE hill, skirting around dead bodies and the Indians who were arguing over their spoils. I trudged as fast as my weary legs could carry me down to the coulee where I’d left my pony. I laughed as I remembered Surrounded gifting it to me, with the rifle that I now carried, for a bag full of bees that would make him invincible in battle. Was he still alive? I wondered.
I cackled as I found the pony, chewing sagebrush as if this was a normal summer’s evening on the plains.
I was still laughing as I mounted him and kicked him to ride back up the rise. I had become a mad woman. Up through the smoking, bloody grass littered with white bodies. I veered south over the bluffs till I could no longer see the battlefield behind me and the air felt cleaner, even though it was thick with dust kicked up by the thousands of braves who’d galloped ahead of me.
When I caught them up, I found a band of Hunkpapa braves. I needed people around me whose language I could understand. For almost the entirety of the Custer battle I’d fought alongside the Cheyenne. Knowing what was being called out along the lines of warriors might save my life, so it was with a strong sense of tiyata that I greeted them.
They saw my man’s shirt and breeches, and my face covered in blood, and nodded their approval.
“You are a warrior, like us!”
“I killed four blueshirts today!”
“I’ve counted coup on seven!”
I ticked off the men I’d killed on my blood red fingers. “I killed five.”
They howled and slapped me on the back.
“She is a true brave!”
“She killed more than you!”
“I will kill more, then! I’ll kill Long Hair when I find him!”
They didn’t know. They thought we had simply killed half of the soldiers who’d come to attack us and now it was time to kill the rest. They had no idea a battle that would live on in history was already over. Custer’s Last Stand, like the book in my vision had told me, was over.
“He’s already dead,” I said, and wished I hadn’t as the words left my lips.
They laughed.
“The end of Long Hair will be a greater battle than that!”
“He must be with this great force of soldiers ahead of us!”
I nodded, swallowing the words that formed in my throat, that I’d seen him with my own eyes. It would serve no purpose. Would they give up the fight with the soldiers ahead if they knew that Long Hair was already dead? Would they fight harder if they thought he was still alive?
We were far enough away from the village now that no one worried there might be another force close by to capture the women and children.
The sudden surprise appearance of Custer’s forces on the ridge had scared everyone, but they were not going to make that mistake again. Lookouts had been posted and could see for miles around.
No, these soldiers on the hill to the south were alone and were the only soldiers for miles around. I knew they were the ones who’d attacked the village from the south this morning. I looked over to the west, where the sun was sinking behind the hills, casting their shadows across the benchland. I could see the dark scar of the timber that skirted the river, the village hidden behind it. I traced the gorges that led from the river up to the hill ahead and imagined how the soldiers who’d first shot on the village had run to this point. Hundreds of braves had crossed the river further up and decided to leave them there, whipped and licking their wounds. They must have arced back northwards to attack Custer’s forces: the Lakota braves I’d seen attacking from the south as I’d fought my way up from Greasy Grass Ridge.
The braves talked about the forces that were on the hill. We held a ridge that overlooked them but their hill commanded the low and open terrain all around. Nevertheless, braves were pouring in, taking up position to attack.
It
would not be so easy as the previous two parts of the battle, where the blueshirts had been routed with such ease. I crept up to the ridge and peered over to see for myself.
I was looking down on a great hill that would take a man an hour to walk around it. In the centre, it dipped into a bowl, where horses and pack mules were corralled. Hundreds of soldiers lined the ridges of the hill, digging into trenches.
It was a fortress.
Doubt plagued my mind. I was alone in knowing that the Last Stand was already over and my visions had not talked of another battle that had continued after the death of Custer.
But Little Star’s killer was down there among them and that was enough for me.
The shooting began.
We fired on them till the entire hill was hidden in smoke. It was like the thunder beings roaring as one.
Braves on all sides got on their horses and charged, only to fall back when the soldiers fired on them.
How could anyone on that hill be still alive after that?
I fired till my rifle was empty.
A brave took my place on the ridge and I reluctantly retreated to watch with hundreds of others. The surrounding hills were black with Indians, as if this were a show put on for our entertainment. I wondered what they must feel down there, seeing so many of us waiting to take the place of any Indian they managed to kill.
The sun sank and the firing grew more sporadic. Braves began to drift back to the camp.
A chief shouted orders. “Go back to camp! Go eat and sleep! We will keep the soldiers awake all night!”
There were plenty of braves to keep the soldiers occupied. It was pointless to stay.
“You! Go! Come back with bullets!”
I turned to go, cursing my empty rifle.
Perhaps I could run go back to the hill where Custer lay. Might there be some bullets left? No. The battlefield had been picked clean. Surely every single bullet had already made its way to here?
The thought of returning to that stinking hill covered in dead bodies made me feel disheartened. I drifted back to my pony and rode down Medicine Tail Coulee.