Climb the Wind: A Journey Into Another Past

by Pamela Sargent

  The shot caught him in the chest. He swayed in his saddle, reaching for his gun when another bullet caught him in the arm. The horse under him kept moving and then the ground was rushing up to meet him.

  “Jesus,” he heard himself say, “I’m a God damned fool.” He was lying on his back. A large shadowy shape loomed over him. Charley was about to say that he already knew he was done for when another shot struck him.

  “Shit,” Jane said under her breath.

  From near the top of the hillside, under the pines, she had a good view of the flatter land below and the campfires of an Indian war party. The fires flickered on the darkened plain like oversized stars. She guessed that there might be as many as three hundred warriors, possibly more.

  “And that’s just one group,” Isaiah said next to her. They had veered east, leaving the trail of another band of Indians, only to discover that there were even more of them in their path. “Looks like they mean to come at the Seventh from two sides.”

  Jane leaned against her horse. “Isaiah,’’ she said softly, “I just damn well don’t know what all to do now.”

  “If Custer found out they’s coming,” Isaiah said, “he’ll already be moving against them.”

  “He wouldn’t know unless he sent out more scouts.”

  “Maybe that’s just what he did. Wouldn’t have moved far without sending scouts out, even after smoking a peace pipe.”

  Jane shook her head. Isaiah sounded like he might be looking for reasons not to rejoin the Seventh. Well, she couldn’t blame him for that. At this point, it looked as though the redskins would probably get there first. She wondered what would give them a better chance at staying alive—riding to the Seventh in time to fight at the side of the men, or getting as far away from this territory as possible. Fort Laramie had to be at least five days away; Bismarck and Fort Lincoln were farther away than that. A hard ride toward Laramie through the dry badlands would likely kill the horses.

  Isaiah said, “Calamity, maybe you oughta think about riding out of here as far and as fast as you can go.” He was thinking the same thing, then. “Nobody’d think any the worse of you, being a woman and all.”

  “Hell, being female never kept me from doing anything before. Ain’t going to be what tells me what to do now. Our horses couldn’t take a hard ride out of here anyway.” She was silent for a while. “What are you going to do, Isaiah? Try to find the Seventh?”

  “Damn right.”

  “You’re a good man.”

  He turned his head. She could not see his face. “You saw what happened to White Man Runs Him,” he said. “That’s what they’d do to me if I get caught. Don’t have nothing to lose by going to fight with Custer.”

  “We’ll split up,” she said. “That way, we’ll each of us have a better chance of getting through.” It came to her that Custer might have divided his forces. “You keep heading east around those redskins, and I’ll go the other way.” The Indians would be on the move at dawn, and she and Isaiah would lose time trying to avoid them. There was a good chance that one of them, maybe both of them, would find their way blocked by another band of redskins. Their horses were already tired, and they probably would not reach the Seventh in time to do any good. None of that would stop her from trying.

  Jane led her horse on foot, keeping under the cover of trees. The fires were going out; the Indians would be riding out soon. She crept down a hillside and kept going until another hill hid the hostiles from her, then pulled herself into the saddle.

  They had to be close to the Seventh, she and Isaiah. She could get to the valley where they had been camped before dark, and from there she could easily follow them to wherever they were now. Custer’s men could not have gone far, not in the time since she and Isaiah had left them. The Indians might stop to sing their war songs and put on war paint and make medicine, and that would give her more time.

  The weather was growing cooler; the wind rose and then died. Jane’s eyelids felt gritty. Isaiah and she had been riding for most of the night, stopping only once to rest and water their horses, before they saw those hundreds of Indians. She might not sleep for a while. She urged her horse on, trying not to think about sleep.

  It was almost noon when she came to more tracks. They showed a small band of Indians moving south. She followed them down to a small creek and saw, on the other side, the pale bloated body of a white man lying on his stomach.

  They had stripped the dead man of his clothing. Jane crossed the stream and dismounted next to the corpse. They had scalped him, but the body was largely unmarked. Maybe they had not had time to torture him. She turned the body over and looked into the twisted face of Luther North.

  He had been shot twice, once in the chest, once in the head. Jane let go of him and straightened. Several paces away, she saw two more bodies lying in the grass, also stripped. For a moment, she thought they might be the bodies of Indians, but they couldn’t be Sioux or Cheyenne. Those redskins would not have stripped one of their own and left him here; they would have taken the body with them. So they had to be scouts, ones who had ridden out here with Luther North.

  So Custer had sent out more scouts. She wondered if Iron Pants already knew that hundreds of Indians were massing against him. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t find out anything from Luther now. Her heart thumped against her chest. She looked down at Luther North’s body and was suddenly terrified.

  The Indians were gathering below the Mountain Goat, on the other side of the river. Caleb Tornor could make out their feathered war bonnets; a lot of the redskins were wearing the headpieces, while others had feathers in their hair. The men near him were still digging earthworks and getting ready to hold their position.

  Bloody Knife, one of the Arikara scouts, had ridden out in the night. He had returned with the news that hundreds of Sioux and Cheyenne would be near the Mountain Goat by dawn. The Seventh had quickly dug in for the battle, setting up barriers with wagons and digging defensive trenches. They held the higher ground, Caleb thought; they still had the advantage. If they killed enough Indians, the other redskins would retreat.

  The sun was high, noon already past, and the Indians still had not attacked. Maybe they realized that trying to fight with the Seventh holding the high ground would be a costly battle, and a lot more costly for the redskins than for Custer. They would try to rush the cavalry eventually and draw some men off into an ambush. That was the way Indians fought. They could lose a lot of braves that way.

  Caleb and Captain Yates’s F Company were dug in below Tom Custer and C Company. One of the men near Caleb, an Irish trooper named O’Hara, leaned forward, cupping a hand over his eyes.

  “What the hell is that, now?” O’Hara asked.

  Caleb saw where the man was looking. Near one group of Indians stood what looked like a small platform; on this platform sat several colorful cylindrical objects. Narrowing his eyes, Caleb noticed then that the platform was made up of several poles, much like the pony drags the Sioux used to transport their tepees and goods from one campsite to another. The cylinders were painted with bright colorful designs; two men in loose blue jackets squatted near the platform. Unlike the other redskins, they each had one long black braid hanging down their backs. The two, unlike the bare-chested men around them, were also not stripped down to their leggings and breechcloths. They were smaller than the redskins, too. They didn’t, he realized, actually look much like Indians.

  “Damn,” an officer behind Caleb muttered, “wish we’d brought a fucking Gatling gun.”

  More Indians were riding in from the west, along the opposite side of the creek below the slope. Caleb saw dust clouds in the north, marking more riders. There might be at least as many as two thousand braves massed against them, maybe a lot more. He had never expected to see so many Indians in one place.

  The Indians chanted. Caleb could barely hear them over the rising wind. “Hoka hey,” they were singing, “hoka hey.” It was their usual chant before going into battle. “Hoka he
y—it is a good day to die.”

  Suddenly the chanting stopped. Caleb kept expecting them to cross the creek and ride toward the mountain, to charge up the hill and attack as they usually did. Instead, they waited, mounted on their horses, gazing at the hill in silence.

  “I don’t like it,” a man behind him whispered.

  Caleb did not like it much himself. It almost looked as though the Indians were grouped in a kind of defensive formation, although he had to be imagining that. Were they planning to sit there and wait the Seventh out? Indians wouldn’t be that patient. Anyway, they would run out of food before Custer’s men ran out of water. They could not have brought much food with them, and would have to hunt for more to feed so many men.

  Suddenly the wind died. At that moment, a chief in a war bonnet lifted his arm and pointed at the platform with his war club.

  One of the blue-jacketed men jumped up and leaped onto the platform. A bright light flared from one of the painted cylinders that the Indians had brought with them. The cylinder shot toward the sky, shooting off sparks, and then separated into three missiles.

  Caleb, still clutching his Springfield and too stunned to move, watched the three rockets silently arch toward the mountainside, then drop toward the Seventh. One exploded, sending a shower of black debris toward the regimental flag. He heard the clap of the explosion just as the second missile struck near a wagon, sending up a geyser of dirt and grass. Caleb could not see where the third one had landed, and then the sound of the blast nearly deafened him.

  He threw himself to the ground. Somebody shouted, and another blast tore at the air, a sound he had not heard since the War Between the States, and he realized that one of the ammunition wagons had been hit. Several men were screaming.

  A lucky hit, he thought, and bad luck for the Seventh. His hands were still locked around his rifle; he waited for someone to shout an order, not knowing what to do. The Indians still waited below, and then another cylinder rose from the platform and arched toward the slope.

  Lemuel sat on his horse, to the rear of the fighters, far out of range of the Seventh, too far from the action even for the Lakota and their allies to have him within range of their weapons. He was far enough away from the battle for Custer’s men to be tiny, indistinct shapes in blue or buckskin crawling on the mountainside. He watched as a third rocket shot toward the sky and then fell toward Custer’s forces.

  The sound of the explosion reached him a few moments later. Glorious Spirit and Victorious Spirit had done well with their arrow-rockets, their Eagles Hunting for Martens and their Flaming Flowers. The sight of the missiles had probably been enough to throw Custer’s men off guard, but seeing an ammunition wagon explode had shown Lemuel how this battle was likely to go.

  Touch-the-Clouds would have to kill them all. He had said it himself, that they would all have to die for coming into these lands. Anything less would be a defeat, and would only bring more Blue Coats into the Black Hills later on to avenge the Seventh. At least a few of the men with Custer would have found traces of yellow metal by now; they would have to be blind not to see the evidence that there was gold here. Lemuel sat on his horse watching the battle, sick at heart.

  A company of troopers was massing on the slope. He guessed that they were preparing to attack the Indians. They had to be wondering why the Sioux and Cheyenne were not fighting in their usual fashion, why they had not tried to rush the hillside to win glory and count coup or to draw men away from the slope.

  They would fight by using the ways that Touch-the-Clouds had seen in his visions and had heard about from Rubalev. He had sent other chiefs among the men to repeat what he had told them before, what he had been telling them ever since having his earliest visions. Trap the Blue Coats, let them waste themselves and their bullets in attacks, use the rocket-arrows against them—there would be chances enough later for counting coup on the bodies of the enemy.

  The front row of troopers coming toward the Lakota warriors stopped, then raised their rifles. Other Blue Coats were behind them, holding their horses. Before they could fire, the Lakota nearest them brought up their rifles in one swift movement and fired. Lemuel watched as several cavalrymen fell; others fired and were brought down by answering shots from Lakota Winchesters.

  Another rocket-arrow shot toward the sky, then fell toward the Blue Coats, sending up a spout of earth near a flagpole. Lemuel gazed at the red, white, and blue flag hanging from the pole and remembered when he had fought for that flag. Another company of the cavalry was preparing to attack the Lakota below. Lemuel supposed that they would try for the platform holding the rocket-arrows, but the Lakota would fiercely defend both the weapons and their designers.

  Soaring Eagle rode toward him. The older Lakota man was prepared to fight if necessary, but Lemuel very much doubted that he would have to ride into battle. The men on the mountainside could not have known what they would be facing. He reminded himself that they had deliberately violated the treaty by coming here, that they had brought this punishment upon themselves, but could not stop thinking about Custer and about McIntosh, the Mohawk officer. McIntosh would be up there now, preparing to fight with his men. Maybe he was among those getting ready to attack the rocket-arrow platform.

  “It is a good day to die,” Soaring Eagle said in Lakota as he reined in his horse.

  Soldiers rode down the hillside toward the platform, firing from the saddle. More soldiers followed them, covering them with their rifles. Another rocket-arrow shot out from the platform, but this one was traveling in a straight line toward the attackers. Victorious Spirit and Glorious Spirit had released the Buffaloes Running Together, one of the rocket-arrows that moved close to the ground and was packed with what the Chinese brothers called their Thunderclaps. Lemuel’s mouth grew dry as an explosion brought down a few of the charging men and horses.

  “It is a good day to die,” Soaring Eagle said again.

  Lemuel looked away and then bowed his head.

  If, Caleb thought, they could hold the redskins off until night—His thoughts did not go much further ahead than that. The Indians would not fight after dark. It might be possible to slip away under cover of night. He was thinking of deserting. Probably most of the men were considering that, ready to take their chances fleeing through Indian territory. He wondered if it was too late to surrender.

  Behind a wagon near him, Captain Williams, one of the medical officers, was tending to the wounded. Five men lay there, and two of them looked like they wouldn’t be around much longer. Williams had given them some of the whiskey, which would probably do them as much good as the doctor’s epsom salts or quinine. Caleb suddenly longed for a swig of whiskey himself.

  Still the Indians waited on their horses, remaining out of range. Maybe they could wait there until the Seventh had exhausted its rations and water. They were not shooting off their rockets now. He wondered how they had come upon such weapons, along with the Winchesters and Colts and ammunition they seemed to have in such abundance.

  Caleb heard a shriek to his right. More of the men were suddenly charging down the hill on foot, firing away with their rifles. From the way they ran, in all directions, he could tell that no one had ordered the charge. Some of the Sioux opened fire, and he watched them fall, one by one. The last man to fall almost made it as far as the creek.

  He heard another shriek, and then voices calling in words he did not know. The voices were calling from farther up the hillside. Shots rang out from behind him. “They’re behind us!” somebody shouted, but Caleb had already figured that out. He turned his head to look back and glimpsed a movement near one rocky precipice.

  Somehow some Indians had sneaked up behind them and were now shooting at them from higher ground. Caleb spun around, loaded his rifle again, and took aim. A man near him pitched forward before Caleb could hear the shot that had struck his brother-in-arms.

  Caleb fired, and an Indian tumbled from a rock.

  Some of Custer’s men were deserting, trying t
o escape. That was how it looked to Lemuel as five blue-coated cavalrymen galloped away on gray horses. Maybe those men had some other strategy in mind, but he doubted it.

  A band of Cheyenne galloped after the five men. One of the Cheyenne warriors suddenly fell from his horse; a soldier firing from behind a wagon had wounded him, perhaps killed him. Other Indians had fallen, and Lemuel wondered how many more Touch-the-Clouds was prepared to lose. The Cheyenne were closing in on the fleeing cavalrymen when another Indian was shot from his mount.

  The Cheyenne quickly surrounded the men trying to get away. Two of the Blue Coats swung rifles at the Indians, almost knocking one from his horse. I knew what the Lakota and their allies would have to do when I rode here, Lemuel thought; I knew what might happen when I was riding to Touch-the-Clouds with Katia. He covered his eyes for a moment, unable to watch the fighting.

  When he looked up again, another arrow-rocket was arching toward Custer’s men. It fell toward a wagon, lighting its canvas covering. The flames danced, and then the wagon exploded, sending a geyser of rocks and dirt into the air and curtains of earth over some of the men near the wagon. Glorious Spirit and Victorious Spirit had been lucky once again in their aim.

  The Lakota who had crept up behind the Blue Coats were still firing down upon their enemies. Soldiers were scattered over the slope like broken toys; Lemuel guessed that over a hundred were dead or wounded, perhaps more.

  “Hie!” a woman’s voice shouted behind Lemuel. “It is a good day to die!”

  He turned in his saddle. Walking Blanket Woman, one of the women from the camp of Touch-the-Clouds, sat on a roan horse. She held a war club and wore an ammunition belt around her waist. The war club had belonged to her brother, but someone, perhaps a man who had known her brother or her father, must have given her the Colt and the rifle she also carried. Walking Blanket Woman had not come to the battle alone. Next to her, on a black horse, was the Cheyenne woman Young Spring Grass.