Climb the Wind: A Journey Into Another Past

by Pamela Sargent

  “Why are you here?” Lemuel asked in Lakota.

  “I have come to fight,” Walking Blanket Woman replied.

  Young Spring Grass said in Lakota, “I have come to see the father of my son die.”

  Lemuel restrained a shudder. These two women frightened him as much as almost any man. Walking Blanket Woman had lost her father and brother, and did not yet have a husband; there was no fighting man alive in her family. The men allowed her to ride into battle because of that.

  Young Spring Grass was another matter. She was here because of her son, a light-haired boy called Yellow Bird. Young Spring Grass had once lived with General Custer, the man her people called the Son of the Morning Star, and then had been abandoned by him. Perhaps she had loved him; perhaps she had gone away with him after the death of her family at Black Kettle’s camp along the Washita because she had no choice. But Lemuel saw, as he gazed at her implacable copper-colored face and onyx eyes, that she now had only hatred for Custer, the father of her son.

  He thought of Katia, who in her own way was as out of place among these people as were these two warrior women without men. Katia was still the wife who had given Touch-the-Clouds no son. Whatever medicine she possessed, and there were still rumors that Touch-the-Clouds trusted in her visions, had not been powerful enough to give her any children. Katia probably could have come to the battle with Walking Blanket Woman and Young Spring Grass and no one, not even her husband, would have stopped her. Such bravery might have earned her a bit of respect. He felt relieved that she was not here.

  “It is a good day to die,” Walking Blanket Woman called out, and then she kicked the sides of her horse with her heels and rode away. Young Spring Grass let out a cry and galloped after her.

  Caleb saw where Custer stood. He was up by the flagpole, firing at the Indians above them on the slope. A bloodstain covered the left buckskin sleeve of his jacket.

  Raise the white flag, Caleb thought; it was time to surrender. If you stay, the man Rowland had said, you will never leave the Black Hills. Caleb wondered if that meant that the redskins would accept a surrender and make prisoners of them, or if this was to be a fight to the death. It did not matter; Custer would never surrender anyway.

  On the hillside below, wounded men lay dying. Soon the Indians would try to take the slope and kill the rest of them. “Look there!” a soldier near Caleb shouted, pointing to the east.

  A man galloped toward them along the riverbank, whooping and shouting as he fired his Colt wildly at the Indians. Caleb did not know who he was at first, until his Stetson fell from his head and revealed his wooly hair and dark brown face. Isaiah Dorman, Caleb thought; the nigger scout would get himself killed that way.

  “Hoka hey!” Dorman shouted. “Hoka hey!” He kept firing his gun; miraculously, the Indians shooting back at him kept missing him.

  “Damn black fool!” a man near Caleb said, his voice tinged with respect. Dorman had to have seen signs of how many Indians had gathered here during his ride, and yet he had come back to fight with the Seventh. He was a damned fool, Caleb thought, admiring the scout in spite of himself.

  A Sioux galloped straight toward Dorman. “Hoka hey!” the black man shouted, waving his gun. The Indian closed in on him. Dorman swung his gun at the Sioux brave’s head, and Caleb realized that the scout’s Colt had no more bullets. The Indian swung his club, catching Dorman in the chest.

  The Negro swayed in his saddle, then fell. The Indian jumped from his horse as other Indians rushed in to strike at Dorman and count coup.

  “Shit,’’ Caleb muttered, and then heard a shriek behind him. An Indian was standing on top of an open wagon just up the hill. He aimed his rifle at Caleb and fired, hitting him in the chest.

  “Shit,” Caleb said again. He was lying on the ground, staring up at the sky. An Indian stood over him. “Damn it all to hell.” The Indian brought down his club on Caleb’s head.

  The sun was setting. Lemuel felt grateful for that. Soon darkness would hide the carnage of the day.

  He had seen Custer fall. The general had leaped on a horse and begun to ride down the hill, surrounded by other men on horseback. Lemuel supposed that Custer had decided to die fighting hand to hand, since he would have seen that escape was impossible. Custer had been struck by an arrow, then by a rifle shot. He had looked oddly graceful as he toppled from his horse.

  The other Blue Coats had lost heart after that. One group had waved a piece of white cloth, perhaps in an attempt to surrender, but had been cut down. When the Lakota stormed the hill, Lemuel had seen a few men raise their revolvers to their own heads. Perhaps they had feared torture at the hands of the Lakota, although there had been no reason to fear it. Touch-the-Clouds and his allies were too intent on killing the Blue Coats as quickly and cleanly as possible to bother with torturing them.

  Touch-the-Clouds, Lemuel thought, had inspired his men to be more efficient.

  Walking Blanket Woman rode along the creek, waving her rifle and rallying the men. Young Spring Grass was just behind her, shaking a scalp in one hand. Maybe one of the warriors had given it to her; maybe she had taken the scalp herself.

  Lemuel could watch no longer. He tightened his legs around the barrel of his horse and rode up the hill.

  Jane reached the top of the hill by late afternoon, in time to see that the Seventh had already lost their battle. Trees dotting the hillside gave her cover as she dismounted and crept forward, leading her horse by the reins. She had watered the animal that morning and fed it the last of her oats, forcing herself not to think any further ahead than the next hour. Now the thought she had been avoiding came upon her so suddenly that she was unable to push it from herself.

  She had known as soon as she saw the trails of the Sioux, and how fast they seemed to be traveling, that it was useless to ride to the Seventh. Nothing that she could do would change the outcome of any battle; to warn Custer’s men, even if she could reach them before the Indians did, would accomplish nothing. The size of the Indian force had told her that the battle would be hard fought; the blue-coated and buckskin-covered bodies lying on the mountain slope to the east of the hill, and the sporadic gunfire of the few defenders who were still alive, showed her that the battle was nearly over. The Indians were already moving over the slope to count coup and take scalps.

  She might have tried to get out of Sioux territory, but the ride would have killed her horse and her both. Better to die here, to at least go through the motions of trying to warn Custer’s men. No one could say that she had deserted, that she had acted like some lily-livered woman in the end. No one, she thought grimly, was likely to remember her at all.

  She wondered what had happened to Isaiah. He would not have turned yellow and made a run for it; she was sure of that. Anyway, dying in the fight would have been better than being captured by the Sioux.

  Her vision blurred. She let go of the horse’s reins and sat down. “Damn it all,’’ she muttered, then began to cry. Her horse nickered at her side. Someone would find her here. She did not care.

  A rider was below the trees, moving in her direction. The rider wore an old blue soldier’s coat. As the horse he rode made its way up the hillside, Jane reached for her pistol. The man could not be one of the Seventh; he would not have been able to ride here out in the open without being shot. He might be an Indian who had taken his coat from a dead man’s body; she could not tell. His hair was too short for a Sioux’s, but that might not mean anything.

  She took aim, then let her arm fall. Shooting him would likely bring a pack of redskins galloping over here to see what was going on. Maybe it made more sense to shoot herself.

  Jane got to her feet, not troubling to conceal herself. The man had seen her. He was reaching for his Colt when her forefinger tightened on the trigger of her gun. In that instant, she knew that she had him, that her bullet would hit him right between the eyes.

  “I’m not a Lakota,” he called out. Hearing him talk in American startled her, nearly maki
ng her flinch. She kept her Colt trained on him. “My name’s Lemuel Rowland.”

  He could be a renegade, she thought. The stranger held out his hands, apparently seeing that he could not draw his gun before she shot him. “I don’t want to shoot,” he went on. “I’ve seen enough killing for one day.” He paused. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

  She was silent.

  “You won’t gain anything by shooting me,” he said.

  That was true enough. Already a few of the Indians had ridden toward this hill; she glimpsed them through the trees.

  “You’re right about that,” she said, lowering her right arm. “Just do me a favor, stranger. Shoot me right here—don’t leave me to those redskins. I saw some of their handiwork, riding here.”

  He frowned. “Why, you’re hardly more than a boy.”

  She had forgotten to keep her voice low. If she didn’t mumble, or remember to lower her pitch, her voice often gave her away. “Hell,” she said, “I ain’t no boy, mister—I’m Calamity Jane Cannary, and I might as well tell you that so as there’s somebody to remember my name. Now go ahead and shoot.”

  He still had not reached for his gun.

  “Go on,” she said, “don’t drag it out. I’d do it myself, but I don’t know how the good Lord would take to that. I always heard He didn’t much cotten to folks who died by their own hand, and I got enough sins on my conscience already.”

  The man did not move. At last she dropped her gun. “Hell,” she said, steadying herself, “that ought to convince you.”

  “I don’t know if I can shoot an unarmed woman.”

  “Mister, those redskins won’t exactly treat me like a lady.” Her legs shook under her. She sank to the ground once more. “They’re all dead, aren’t they—Custer and his men, all of them, they’re all dead, the redskins killed them.”

  “I think so. Yes. They were warned. They could have left the Black Hills and nothing would have happened.”

  Tears trickled down her face. Damn it, she thought, despising her own weakness. Here she was, facing death like one of those soft silly women she had always scorned.

  The stranger had his gun trained on her now. “It’ll be dark soon,” he said. “I’ll wait here with you.”

  Jane tried to understand what he was saying. “You think I can ride out of here?” she asked, startled at how quickly she grasped at that futile hope. Maybe she wasn’t so ready to die after all.

  “No. You can’t ride out of here, but I think I can keep you alive.”

  More tears flowed; she could not stop herself from crying.

  “Damn it all,’’ she whispered. “Keep me alive—what the hell for?”

  “You can’t leave. You won’t be able to leave for a long time, and if you tried, I don’t want to think of what would happen to you. But I’m pretty sure I can keep them from killing you.”

  Jane forced herself to look up at him. “I ain’t going to be no squaw,” she said. “If that’s the deal, you might as well put a bullet in me now.”

  “You won’t be a squaw. I don’t think any of the men would force that on you. Hell, just about every Lakota woman I’ve seen is a far sight prettier than you are.”

  She made a choked sound. The man had almost made her laugh, even in the midst of this horror. “I won’t argue that with you, mister.”

  “Anyway, we might need you to identify some of the bodies,” Lemuel Rowland said. “Touch-the-Clouds will want to know that Custer is dead.”

  Jane covered her face. Custer dead, the rest of them dead—Isaiah was probably dead, too. She was the only one left alive to mourn them—Calamity Jane Cannary, lone survivor of Custer’s Seventh after the Battle of the Black Hills.

  TWELVE

  Katia and White Cow Sees followed the tracks of their husband and his men to the Mountain Goat a day after they were told of his victory over Long Hair and the Blue Coats. They brought little with them, so did not have to walk with horses pulling pony drags. Red Deer, an uncle of Touch-the-Clouds, rode with them; the rest of the people in their husband’s camp would follow them soon to the site of the battle.

  White Cow Sees had her youngest child tied to her back; another of her sons, on a roan pony, trotted ahead of them. Red Deer was one of the oldest of the men, too old to fight. He spoke of past battles as they rode, of raids against other red men to steal horses or to avenge a slight, of wars fought before there was peace with the Crow and with the Arikara and the other peoples near these hunting and grazing grounds. Katia listened, thinking of the three scouts who had deserted the invading Blue Coats to join the Lakota, and of how merciless Touch-the-Clouds had been in his treatment of them.

  “I would have welcomed you if you had come to me many moons ago,’’ Touch-the-Clouds had said to the Crow called White Man Runs Him and his two comrades, Hairy Moccasin and Goes Ahead. “I would have trusted you if you had come into this land by yourselves, instead of with the Blue Coats. But if you run away from them now in order to join me, how can I trust you? How do I know that you haven’t come to me out of fear of what will happen? How do I know that you won’t desert me in times to come?”

  Perhaps, Katia thought, her husband was right about the three men, but others had changed sides and he had made his peace with them. He might have granted the three scouts a quicker death.

  They rounded a bend along the creek bed. Ahead, a few of the young warriors were watering their horses; one of them wore a soldier’s hat and another a blue jacket. The Mountain Goat lay to the east. Even at this distance, Katia saw that bodies of the dead still covered the slopes. Other women were already there, taking what they could from the corpses.

  One of the warriors by the creek shook his war club at Katia and White Cow Sees. The wind carried the chants of the young men’s kill songs to them. “Let go of your guns, Long Hair. You brought us more weapons and we thank you, for you have need of them no more. You make us dance with joy.” The son of Touch-the-Clouds smiled at his mother, put back his head, and laughed.

  Katia reined in her horse and rested her hands on the high pommel of her woman’s saddle. “These are the wives of Touch-the-Clouds,” Red Deer said to the men as White Cow Sees halted near him, “and they have brought his two youngest sons along with them.”

  “He will be pleased to see them,” one of the men replied.

  “Then our husband will have to come here to visit with us and to see his sons,” White Cow Sees said, “because this is as far as I go.” She gazed toward the mountain. “My husband’s victory makes me happy, but I would rather not rest too close to where it was fought.”

  Katia gazed gratefully at the other woman. Maybe White Cow Sees did not want to be near the carnage, the stink of the bodies, or perhaps she had seen into Katia’s thoughts.

  It had been right, Katia thought, to try to live among her own people, and certainly better than being a largely useless companion to Grisha Rubalev. She might have failed to give Touch-the-Clouds children, but he had learned something of the Wasichu ways from her. There had been few happy moments for her in the Wasichu world, and the Lakota had given her little more happiness, but living among them had hardened her and made her stronger than the weak woman she had once been, living in the white world. The triumph of the Lakota over the Blue Coats who had come into the Black Hills was right and just, but the sight of tortured men and bloated, rotting bodies tempered any joy she might have taken in the victory.

  I still don’t belong among them, she thought. Now she thought of herself as Katia Rubalev almost all of the time, and no longer as Graceful Swan, the wife of Touch-the-Clouds.

  Lemuel watched as Rubalev danced. “He rode alone,” Rubalev sang in Lakota, “and I found him. We have kept our promise to Long Hair Custer, for he will not leave Paha Sapa.” He shook the scalp as he sang.

  Jane Cannary had recognized the long reddish-brown hair of the scalp. “Charley Reynolds,” she had told Lemuel. “Nobody else had hair like that. It has to be Charley. I guess they must
have sent him out after Isaiah and I rode out after White Man Runs Him.”

  Rubalev had said that the scalp’s owner was riding south, presumably aiming for Fort Fetterman or Fort Laramie, and that he could have been riding there only to report on the plans of the Lakota to attack. For the time being, it was necessary to keep any word about the fate of Custer and his men from spreading, so that scout had to die.

  Lemuel understood that necessity. Once the fate of the Seventh was known, many would want to avenge the dead soldiers, and the Lakota were not yet ready to face that kind of battle. Lemuel could grant all of that, and still find himself repulsed by the joy with which Rubalev was displaying his trophy.

  Already some of the stronger men, and several of the women, were digging graves so that the dead soldiers could be buried. Horses would be ridden over the graves in an effort to hide any traces of them. Old men on horseback and women with pony drags would ride back along the route the Seventh had taken, concealing marks of their trail. Custer’s superiors would have to know, when he did not return, that he had met with misadventure; they would be certain that he and his men had been attacked. They would have to guess at his fate sooner or later, but meanwhile it was better to have as much mystery surrounding Custer’s fate as possible. To have him and his men vanish so completely would terrify the Wasichu. Terror, Touch-the-Clouds was learning, could be a useful weapon.

  “Poor Charley,” Calamity Jane muttered. “Maybe I shouldn’t be saying ‘poor Charley.’ Maybe he’s better off dead than I am alive.” She took a sip from her flask of whiskey. Lemuel had found some liquor among the dead, and she had asked for some, and he had not had the heart to deny her its solace.