Night Birds, The

by Maltman, Thomas

  “What’s that?”

  “Be quiet, so’s I can sleep.”

  “Oh,” Noles said. He tapped out the ashes of his pipe, muttering under his breath, and still muttering climbed into his bedroll. Caleb’s thoughts turned to the broken fingernail they’d found by Matthew’s too-shallow grave. Grant’s men had found a woman in the tallgrass, a survivor after all this time. Krieger, was her name, or something like it. Half-dead, she slept now in the bed of one of the Conestoga wagons. I should have stayed longer out there. They can’t all be dead like Matthew. All those countless others. I wish I had the sight back. He tried to find it within him, to get some sense of his sister and brothers out there in the broad darkness. Straining, he thought he heard something beyond the wind in the grass. He pictured Kate, her dress worn to rags, crawling on bloodied hands toward him, a curse on her lips that he had left her behind.

  All the night birds had gone quiet. Noles had rolled over in his sleep, snoring like a wounded moose, his breath rancid. Caleb jabbed a hard finger into the man’s ribs and forced him to roll back. He burrowed into his blankets, trying to find what he had been thinking about, his mind too restless for sleep.

  Wanikiya had left to fight with the rest. It was important he stay near the other braves. He knew that Cut-Nose and others, like Running Rattler, had spoken of killing all the captives if things went poorly in battle, that if they must die they would take as many whites as they could along with them. He knew that Little Paul and the Upper Sioux were trying to offer a safe haven in their side of the camp, hoping to rescue as many whites as they could. Wanikiya feared that before all the fighting was done the Dakota would turn against one another. Another civil war , Hazel thought, when he told her. Men in this age find such simple reasons to kill one another. Even the Tetons, when they heard of this uprising, had fled further out on the prairies, not wanting any part of the destruction. And so it was important that he stay close to the Medewakanton and Wahpekutes who trusted him because of his brother, Tatanyandowan. If they planned something, he would hear of it first. Wanikiya went forth to the battles and loaded his gun. But he would not kill.

  He had fled that dream of the tree-dweller.

  Caleb woke before first light in the early gray of morning, the hiccup of a single shot startling him from the dregs of his dream. He reached for his rifle, tucked near his blanket, and tried to stretch a kink of out of his neck. He had little time to dwell on his discomfort.

  Noles, caught out by the perimeter of the sentries relieving his bladder, was running back through the tallgrass with his pants still around his ankles. He tripped and went down while still fifty yards away. The single rifle shot called down a rain of gunfire. A raveling cloud of blue smoke erupted from the treeline Noles had pointed out the night before. Where had Noles gone? He’d disappeared in the grass. Two sentries raced back toward camp, screaming about Indians as they came. One of them sat down in the grass a second later, as if pausing to catch his breath, his mouth falling open in surprise while a scarlet blot spread out on his white shirt. His boyish face contorted; his hands touched the dark spot and then he fell forward into the grass.

  Caleb quickly forgot the fallen sentry as the first gunshots were followed by war whoops and shrieks from the coulees and ravines and woods. The air boiled with lead. Horses, hobbled to wagons, screamed and fell, blood frothing from their mouths. The lead shredded white-topped wagons and dropped men where they stood around the ashes of their night fires, tin cups of steaming coffee held in their hands.

  “Down,” an officer screamed. “Take cover!” Caleb pressed his face against the dew-wet grass until he heard a rustling directly in front of him. He cocked back the hammer and prepared to shoot. The short grass parted to reveal Noles, breathing hoarsely, as he spidered his way back into camp, his breeches left behind on the prairie. Noles rolled to a spot beside Caleb and fumbled for his own rifle. Bullets thunked into the crate of wine and scattered wood splinters around them. “Hellfire and damnation!” he crowed. “Must be the entire Sioux nation come for us.” He checked the priming of his rifle, climbed onto his knees, and squeezed off a shot. Smoke and the familiar, acrid stench of gunpowder roiled the air. “What are ye waiting for?” Noles called to him. “If we don’t shoot back we’ll soon be overrun.”

  Caleb shook free from his paralysis and crouched beside him. He sighted down the rifle and picked out one spot of grass moving in the gray light, the dark grass-entwined headband of an Indian just peeking above the crest. The head vanished seconds after the shot, but Caleb had no idea if he’d hit him. Noles took cover to reload.

  Behind them chaos reigned in the camp. Captain Grant, his shirttails untucked, was shouting hoarsely for the men to assemble in a line. Spittle was flung from his mouth with each shout of “Here,” and “To me!” while he waved his saber. A group of men responded, but when Caleb tried to rise he was pulled down by Noles. The men never had a chance to form their line. They were priming their rifles one moment and cut down the next, five falling like saplings before an ax, and Grant, still shouting, still untouched by gunfire, was left waving his saber at nothingness.

  “Stay down,” Noles hissed in Caleb’s ear. “I mean to hold ye to yer promise of a wedding.” A bullet shattered the spoke of a wagon beside them and Caleb was blinded by a hail of splinters, live hot spikes of oak burrowing into his cheekbones and forehead. Noles, caught by the same explosion twisted around with a hoarse cry. Caleb couldn’t see for the blood that streamed over his eyes as he clawed at the hot splinters burrowing into his face, pulling each out along with patches of skin. He was stumbling, crawling through the melee, hands still clutched to his smoothbore musket, when he felt Noles pull him down again. Caleb cleared his eyes to see Noles beside him, beard scarlet, spitting blood and teeth and wood fragments into the prairie grass. The ricocheting bullet had ripped a fresh gash in one of his wounded cheeks. The Welshman shook his fist at the howling mass on the outskirts of the camp, shouting “Sons o’ bitches!” and then scrambling, half-dragged Caleb to better cover.

  All around camp the soldiers scurried to find a decent position from which to return fire. The most terrible sound was the horses screaming as the bullets and buckshot ripped into their hides and shattered bones. Officers hurried men into groups behind horse carcasses. Other men went from wagon to wagon, overturning them with a clatter, to provide protective cover. The air was thick with blue gunpowder smoke. Men who had passed a sleepless night in horror, remembering the dead they had encountered face-down in ditches and sloughs, now scrambled to avoid a similar fate. The surrounding Indians were firing a withering barrage of buckshot and heavy trader’s balls from their double-barrels.

  Noles hauled Caleb through this carnage until they found cover behind a screaming horse, an immense percheron whose intestines spilled in greasy coils on the grass before it. Caleb affixed the bayonet to his rifle in case they were overrun, pausing every few seconds to wipe blood from his eyes. Once the bayonet was affixed he ran the heaving horse straight through the neck, throwing his full shoulder into the strike. The blade pierced the horse’s throat. Man and horse were impaled together. The horse shrieked and then gave its death rattle. Caleb yanked the blade out quickly, wiped another sheet of blood from his eyes, and crouched beside Noles. More bullets thunked into the heavy horseflesh, but could not reach the men in their hiding place.

  Noles shook his head, stuffing wads of cotton stripped from his shirt into either side of his mouth, soupy with blood. Splinters bristled from his face like a hedgehog, but when Caleb tried to pull them out, Noles screamed, “Leave them!” and shoved him away. His skinny, hairy legs were tucked under him and his eyes bugged out as he grimaced and stuffed the cloth into his cheek. The initial barrage had diminished and become more scattershot; the men were in a better position to cut down any Indian who left cover to attack. Somehow they had reached a stalemate.

  “How long do you think we have?” Caleb asked.

  Noles shook his head and poin
ted at the rags stuffed into his wounds. His cheeks were inflamed and swelling. Caleb tore another strip from his own shirt and tied it around the bleeding gash in his forehead. He laughed then, in spite of his terror. Noles looked so piteous without his pants, the recent wound finally silencing his monologues. Noles turned a questioning stare on his new friend. Probably thinks I’ve lost my marbles , Caleb thought. Oh friend, that happened long before now. The cloth around Caleb’s forehead soaked up enough of the blood that he could see clearly. He raised himself above the horse from time to time to fire at fluid shapes moving in the treeline a hundred yards away.

  The sun rose and through the dust the carnage was apparent all around them. Wagons splintered. Every horse, and there must have been near ninety, dead or barely breathing. The men raising tiny clouds of dust as they scraped up thick prairie roots and tried to dig trenches using tin plates. The wagon that held Justina Krieger was the only one that had not been overturned; its white-topped canvas fluttered in shredded bits from the hoops and the siding was marred with bullet holes and gashes. She must be dead inside there , Caleb thought, her life leaking out from a hundred wounds.

  Captain Grant, moving from entrenched group to group, his saber clattering in its sheath, ducked over by Caleb and Noles.

  “Jesus!” he said, shaking his head at Noles. “This man needs a doctor.”

  “Mmph!” said Noles through his bloody teeth.

  Caleb coughed out dust. “Do you think they’ve heard us at the fort, sir? How long before we can expect reinforcements?”

  Grant shrugged. He had a long, aristocratic nose and a high, needling voice. “We’ll be here the afternoon at least. Unfortunately, the wagon that holds our supplies is outside our circle. It’d be suicide to go to it now. And there’s more bad news,” he added, calling for a man at a near barricade—an overturned wagon—to bring them fresh ammunition. “We brought along .62 caliber bullets for .58 caliber rifles. You’ll have to whittle them down. Make every shot count.”

  “Mmph!” Noles said again, glowering darkly at the man. Through the bloody gauze Caleb heard him cursing, You shit-for-brains.

  “Yes, sir,” Caleb said, speaking quickly. “Used to it by now.”

  “And there’s another thing,” Grant continued. “We have only one canteen of water and one head of cabbage. It will be around shortly. Each man gets a leaf of cabbage and one swallow. No more than that.”

  “Mmpher!” Noles said, preparing to raise his rifle.

  Grant put his hand atop Noles’s greasy black head. “God give you strength. And remember, make every shot count!” He was already ducking and running to the next group of men, his saber clattering behind him in the dust.

  Noles made the sound in his throat again.

  “I know,” said Caleb. “But it would be a waste of a bullet with so many Indians coming to kill us.”

  His head felt light and he wondered faintly if one of those splinters had gone straight into his brain. Last night he hadn’t cared whether he lived or died. Now—beside this grotesque, wounded figure, this strange friend whose life had become bound with his—he no longer felt afraid. He would fight until the end.

  Noles gave Caleb his extra swig, since the water would have done the gauze in his mouth little good, but Caleb refused it. There were men dying not far away, gut-shot, and crying for water. Leave it to them. A sheen of dust and blood and sweat covered everything. Through the passing clouds of acrid gunpowder, Caleb lifted himself up on the haunches of the dead horse and shot at the Indians trying to establish sniper positions from higher ground. Noles whittled the bullets and crammed in fresh powder and rags with the ramrod, trading rifles with Caleb after each shot.

  Morning turned to afternoon and the sun climbed to its apex and turned a harsh light on the camp. It was too hot to think, too hot even to fight. The Indians seem to have lost interest, retreating, Caleb imagined, to their own well-fortified positions to drink spring water and eat red meat dripping from sticks and ladles full of stew. The saliva pooled at the back of his throat just thinking of it.

  The day turned brilliant with white heat. The huge horse they crouched behind swelled with fly larvae and gases as the afternoon passed. Across the camp horse carcasses bloated in the September sunshine, empty cavities inflating and filling like balloons. The heat grew so intense, the carcasses so swollen, that some cracked open, the dead lungs breaking the rib cage with an audible noise, and filled the air with fetid, boiling gases. Men retched in the trenches they had dug and held useless handkerchiefs over their mouths and noses to try and stifle the smell.

  Occasionally this suffering was broken by moments of terror as Indians from different positions—the southern ravine, the western woods near Caleb and Noles—launched a yipping attack and charged toward the camp. They turned away again while still out of range, but not before the men had fired a few useless shots to stop the charge. Immediately, the Indians would spring up in the grass, taunting, and calling them women and children in their own tongue.

  “Fill it with a double load of powder,” Caleb said, watching one brave caper near the edge of the woods. Noles did as he asked. Each time Caleb leaned on the horse they huddled behind he forced heated air from its nostrils, the horse continuing to breathe in death. The Indian pounded his chest and then whirled around. Caleb watched him from the end of his barrel, his blood leaking down again, freckling the edge of the rifle. He squeezed off a shot and the double load of powder actually kicked him off his knees and spilled him over backward.

  Noles made an appreciative sound in his throat. Caleb climbed back up and looked over at the distant woods. The Indian he had shot at was gone. It was difficult to tell whether his aim had been true, but at least no more of them approached close enough to taunt.

  Afternoon climbed into evening and the men heard cannonfire in the distant ravines. A few began to shout encouragement, knowing this was their reinforcements, but as the hours passed the sounds came no closer.

  They lay in a miasma, a dense odorous film of foul-smelling dust. Caleb’s throat was raw and thick. Noles napped beside him, his cheek inflamed and festering. The man had dabbed his wounds in gunpowder to stave off infection, but it seemed to do little good. Caleb had an image of the two of them bloating like the horses until their ribcages opened with a crack and spilled out their innards. Such a fate had happened over and over again across the prairies, for those that they had buried had lain in their own filth, in intense heat and showers of rain, in vortexes of bluebottle flies. It filled his heart with hatred to think of it. Each passing second was a torment. Caleb’s skin was peeling and sun- burned beneath his wounds and coating of dust. His tongue, like some great slug, grew until he wheezed for breath. Hatred filled him. He wanted every Indian dead. If I live past this moment, Lord , he vowed, I will live to see my suffering paid for in full.

  Before dark the Indians sent one white-flag draped brave asking them to surrender the half-breeds, promising that they “were as many as leaves on trees” and that they would finish their work the next morning. The men had amused themselves by calling back hopeless insults at the brave, even shot out his horse from beneath him when he tried to retreat.

  Then darkness fell, releasing them from the burning eye of the sun. The wounded continued to cry for water in parched voices. Caleb’s uneasy mind slouched toward sleep and backed away again with each renewed scream. His brain felt heavy and drugged. Noles was feverish beside him, his forehead blazing like a forge. Water. The man is dying for a glass of water. If Caleb had a single container to store it in he would have left the protective circle and run the gauntlet of the guns to bring him water, but he had nothing. He stayed where he was, drifting between alertness and his own fevered dreams of a wounded woman crawling toward him in the grass.

  Caleb could see it in their faces when they came. The reinforcements arrived in the morning, a full thirty-one hours after the battle was joined. The men gagged and held camphor-laced handkerchiefs close to their mouths. Cal
eb lay where he was, beside the decaying horse and his dead comrade. He’d woken earlier and called to his friend, but Noles had quit breathing sometime in the dark. Caleb was given a swig of water and helped to his feet, but he promptly collapsed again. “Leave me!” he cried, but the hands would not. They pulled him to his feet.

  One of Caleb’s eyes was webbed shut with dried blood. He looked on the scene, the dead, Noles among them, being dragged into the same trenches where they had sheltered earlier, the officers on horseback riding through the camp, the horrified soldiers, sunstruck and delirious, eyes void of color and feeling. There was no hoarse shouting of men glad to be alive. Thirteen dead out of a hundred and seventy. Oh it could have been far worse. And have you heard? That woman they rescued, she lived too! The wagon shot full of holes, even the cup of water she held pierced. But she’s alive and well. It’s a providence amidst such suffering. Caleb kept walking until he could kneel in the grass to vomit, spilling out the water he’d just been given, his chest dry and cracking. Then he wept for Noles. And he wept to be alive. And when he was done he heard the guns being fired off, a salute in their honor. He tried to recall the song Noles had sung at his stepbrother Matthew’s grave. Something about leaves. Something about not changing the mind of God.