Trumpet on the Land

by Terry C. Johnston

  If Frank Grouard could do that, there was something uncanny about the man. Maybe something even unholy.

  And that made Seamus Donegan shiver as he put his own horse in motion, following the half-breed into the deepening darkness of that summer night.

  He had grown up Catholic, learned his catechism early at his mother’s knee, then later beneath the thick leather strop of a series of stern priests who ruled the village school with an iron Celtic hand. Growing up Catholic in Ireland had come to mean that he too was superstitious. There were the legends of the first nomadic Celts and the mystical druids and, of course, tales of the Little People. Damn right, Seamus grew up every bit as superstitious as these savage heathens he’d been fighting for a full bloody decade come this very summer.

  Ten years ago. There at the Crazy Woman Crossing it had been—when he watched that first warrior racing in atop his pony, all painted up, hair and a cock’s comb of feathers all a’spray in the wind, the look on that dark, contorted face like no other he had seen since … why, since he saw the etching in the ancient book one of the old Irishmen in the village had shown all the interested young lads. It was the face of a banshee, the like of those what came to wail out of the dark places in the forests, to frighten off but lure at the same time—banshees that would suck the very life from a man’s body if ever they got their hands on you.

  Donegan swallowed hard, remembering that very first warrior he had dropped with the Henry repeater. In the dust and sage and sunlight there on the top of a bluff near the Crazy Woman Crossing. For so long he hadn’t believed it had been an Indian at all. No. By the Blessed Virgin—in his sights Seamus had beheld an unholy banshee galloping right out from the bowels of the earth when he pulled the Henry’s trigger.

  So was he a Christian? he asked himself now this night. And eventually, as darkness shrouded them while he followed Frank Grouard into the rugged badlands east of the Greasy Grass, in the footsteps of a doomed command riding to its death—Seamus admitted he was not a Christian. Instead, he was what his mother and the priests had made of him: a Catholic. And an Irish Catholic at that.

  He had been ever since he had known enough to cross himself and mutter the prayers of his childhood catechism whenever evil lurked just out of reach, as it did throughout that dark ride north into the unknown.

  Within an hour the breeze came up and thin veils of clouds wafted in from the west. A few drops fell, big ones the size of tobacco wads. Cold they were. But a few heavy drops were all the sky had in it while the temperature plunged, chilling Donegan as he followed the half-breed. Overhead the moon rose to midsky behind the graying pall of pewter-tinted clouds scurrying east. As if even they knew better than to tarry above this ground forever touched by death’s foul hand.

  Then, as they were beginning to climb the dark foreground of a slope that appeared as if it would take them out of a wide saddle toward the top of a long ridge, Grouard’s horse suddenly snorted, jerking its head to the left as if to avoid bumping into something that had loomed right out of the darkness.

  Seamus had his hand on the butt of a pistol, half out of its holster, when he demanded in a hush, “What is it?”

  “Don’t know,” Grouard growled, fighting the blackcoated animal until it settled and came to a rest. “Never knowed this horse to act this way. To get scared at anything.”

  “You see what it shied at?”

  “No,” he replied, dropping from the saddle. Standing on the ground, he handed the reins to Donegan. “But I’m fixing to find out.”

  As Seamus watched, the half-breed crouched forward, bent nearly on all fours. Grouard had barely gone ten feet when he jerked to an abrupt halt. In the darkness it appeared the scout inched sideways, his arms out, feeling something with both hands.

  Swallowing, he quickly glanced around him at the darkness seeming to swell around him. Donegan asked nervously, “What’d you find?”

  “Shit!” Grouard squealed, and fell backward on his rump.

  “What the hell is it?” Seamus demanded, his raspy voice louder now as he forced the question from a throat constricted in fear. Maybe the gruff edge he could bring to his words would scare away the ancient demons haunting him ever since the fall of darkness.

  “It’s a goddamned body.”

  “A body?” Donegan asked, dropping immediately to the ground. His own horse caught the scent of the corpse, yanking at the reins. “Man?”

  “Yeah.”

  He joined the half-breed as Grouard knelt a second time over the dark shape. In what murky light the rind of moon and starlight could strain through the oilcloth covering of clouds, Seamus finally made out the unmistakable human form beneath them. Pale. Naked. White as the dust itself.

  “His arms—” Grouard said.

  “I see. They been cut off.”

  “When I put my hand out first time, I found his head.”

  “Ain’t much left of it, is there?”

  “No,” the half-breed replied. “Scalped, and they smashed his face in.”

  “War club does a pretty job of that, don’t it?” Donegan asked grimly. “A white man?”

  “My bet’d be this fella was a soldier.”

  “Yeah. One of them what made the trail we been following.” Seamus stood stiffly, feeling the pull in his legs after going so long in the saddle. Up and down the length of his thighs he rubbed with his palms in the way of a horseman gone afoot after hours of crossing rough country, working those leg and rump muscles in partnership with the animal below him.

  Grouard stood slowly as well.

  “Let’s go,” Donegan said hollowly, holding out Grouard’s rein.

  The half-breed’s only answer was to take up the leather strap and fling himself into the saddle without using the stirrup from the off-hand side. With a sudden jerk he yanked the animal’s head about to the north and set off once more into the darkness, straight up the long slope at the end of that narrow ridge running parallel with the river.

  Twenty feet from the crest of the ridge Grouard’s horse shied again, snorting, wheeling, once more fighting the bit. Frank brought it under control as Donegan came up, both scouts peering down at a second body, white as paste among the dust beneath that cloudy moonlight.

  “We get up on top there,” Frank whispered, “we likely won’t run onto any more of ’em.”

  As much death as he had seen—men torn limb from limb by canister and grapeshot during the war, men wounded not by bullets but struck by the flying pieces of bone from other bodies torn apart by concussion shot, as well as the finest in mutilation handiwork practiced by the native inhabitants of the high plains—Seamus nevertheless found his heart beginning to hammer more loudly with its every beat thundering in his ears. All too soon he began to realize that what they had stumbled across wasn’t a battlefield.

  It was a slaughterhouse.

  And when the cool breeze of the prairie night shifted to come out of the north, again carrying the promise of moisture on it as that breeze scurried beneath the thin clouds, Donegan caught the first whiff of decay. Mortifying flesh left to molder and rot, exposed to sun and time, left to bloat beneath the flight and crawl of countless insects already about their devilish work.

  This … this was like Gettysburg.

  “Frank, you smell that?”

  “Yes,” Grouard said, struggling to keep his mount pointed to the north, moving a bit west as he kicked the animal’s coal-black flanks to leap up the last few yards to the very spine of that ridge.

  As the two scouts reached the crest, those thin, ghostly clouds parted like the opening of a veil, casting a sudden, eerie light on the silvery ribbon of river below them.

  “The Greasy Grass.”

  “Yeah,” Seamus replied. “The Little Bighorn.”

  And as the clouds scudded back from the quarter rind of moon even more, the jumble of ridge and coulee, the cut and slash of ravines that fingered up from the east bank of the river, all revealed themselves to the horsemen. Exposing the dark c
lumps of four-legged beasts left moidering against the pale hue of ground and trampled grass. Among those huge carcasses lay the stark, ghostly white of crumpled human forms. Unstirred at this interruption to their sleep, never again to move. Left here beneath this hallowed sky to await another day of searing heat, and more bloating, and perhaps the coming of all the more predators to finish the work of life’s great eternal circle.

  Dust to bloody goddamned dust, Seamus thought, coughing with the sour taste at the back of his tongue as his nose came alive each time the breeze stiffened in his face. Just like rotting meat.

  For as far as Seamus could see in the silvery light of what star and moonshine had been allowed through the wispy, inky shreds of clouds speeding over their heads, the four-legged carcasses dotted both sides of the long ridge. And clustered here and there, everywhere for as far as he could see to the north, lay those pale, fish-bellied bodies. Much more than a hundred of them. More than two hundred ghosts.

  “W-white men,” Donegan muttered.

  “They’re soldiers,” Grouard said. “Were soldiers.”

  “Blessed Virgin Mither of Christ,” the Irishman whispered, crossing himself suddenly. His skin crawled. His eyes darted here, then there. Knowing he could never fight something he could not see. “I got to get out of here.”

  “I’m with you,” the half-breed agreed, heeling his horse north along the hogback ridge.

  Side by side they walked their horses, casting their eyes at times down to the bright sheen of that river ribboned below them, clear to the far bank, where the thick stands of tall cottonwoods revealed abandoned wickiup frames among a few pale cones—lodges for some reason left behind in the great village’s departure.

  Off to the left a coyote yipped in warning, snarled in anger, then snapped its jaws angrily at the riders and their horses before it tucked its tail and led a half-dozen others in loping long-legged down toward a deep ravine, where Donegan could hear the distant throat-gurgle, that distinctive canine growl of animals contesting one another over spoils. Some of the soldiers must have tried making it to the river.

  And now the beasts were already working over the dead of this army.

  For what seemed like hours they plodded their way north along the top of that ridge above the Greasy Grass, the oppressive, sickeningly sweetish stench of mortifying flesh mingled with the aroma of burned grass that was carried up from the valley floor and benchland west of the river by the breezes. This seemed to be a land laid to waste. Nothing left alive except the predators, both four-legged and hard-shelled, at work on the bloated, gassy flesh. Nothing else alive, except for two intruders who had stumbled onto this ridge where the two hundred would tomorrow again lie beneath a blistering canopy of high-plains summer heat.

  Yet by the time Grouard and Donegan reached the northern end of the ridge where more than forty, perhaps as many as fifty, bodies lay bunched a few yards down the western slope, Seamus realized that even though their ride along that hogback had seemed to take endless hours, it had taken less than a dozen minutes as their horses nosed their way through the stiff-legged carcasses and fish-bellied corpses. Both horses had fought their bits, bobbing their heads in disgust at the smell of decay every step of that journey through this killing ground.

  This had to be the same bunch that caught Crook’s army flat-footed on the Rosebud, Seamus thought. Had to be. The big village was camped on the Rosebud—that much they knew. Between then and now they crossed over the mountains. Which meant that the same bunch that came close to wiping out Crook a week later wiped out these soldiers.

  Injins what had me and the Snake scout surrounded and all but dead … finished the job on these … these men.

  For longer than he dared remember, his mouth had been painfully dry. With this slaughterhouse of death around him, it was becoming harder and harder still to concentrate on how he breathed—having to remind himself to inhale through his mouth and not through his nose. Feeling the rotting stench like a crawling, wriggling, living thing on the back of his tongue instead of smelling it.

  What made that big man shudder in abject fear there in the dark, there in the utter silence of that unmarked graveyard, was that these had been the Indians he had fought on the Rosebud, come face-to-face with, the warriors who almost killed him.

  A few feet ahead Grouard halted his mount down the slope from the northernmost end of that long ridge of death. He patted the animal’s sleek black neck and said, “We better cross and see where the village is headed.”

  Seamus swallowed, shuddering unconsciously as he remembered standing over that soldier’s fallen body when Royall began his retreat near the Rosebud, swinging his empty Henry against the onrushing red horde for what seemed like an eternity spent in hell.

  Then he forced himself to say, “We both know where they’re headed, Frank. There’s no mistaking it.”

  “S’pose you’re right,” Grouard replied. “Moving south.”

  Donegan peered off into the eerie blackness at the dark humps of the hills that lost themselves as they thrust up against the cast-iron underbelly of the night sky. “Moving south … and heading straight for Crook’s army.”

  It wasn’t until that first graying of dawn shortly after moonset that Donegan and Grouard got themselves a good look at the immense trail heading toward the Bighorn Mountains. Less than an hour later they both caught the aroma of wood smoke on the wind.

  “You said you know this country pretty good, Frank?”

  Grouard nodded. “Lakota come to this ground to hunt last few years, yes.”

  “Where you figure they’re going to be camped?”

  “Maybe on up there, I suppose. Yes. On Pass Creek. Maybe down to the mouth of Twin Creek on what some call the Big Flat.”

  Donegan sighed, troubled. “Then if you know that much about the ground between us and them, you’re gonna keep us as far away from them h’athens as you can— right?”

  “Wrong, Irishman.”

  “Wrong?” he squeaked, his throat constricting, remembering that slaughterhouse along the bluff above the Little Bighorn.

  “We gotta get close enough to figure out for sure what they’re gonna do, where they’re headed for certain. Crook’ll wanna know.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Crook’ll wanna know. Blessed Mither of God, Grouard. I come along thinking this was going to be an Injin scout. Not a God-blame-ed Injin fight!”

  “No fighting to do if you stick with me, Irishman.”

  “I’ll remember you said that,” Seamus growled. Then he eventually smiled. “And if there’s fighting to do—by God, I’ll make you eat your words, you half-breed son of a bitch.”

  Grouard grinned as he led off. Seamus could do nothing more than shake his head, and follow.

  Now there were Indians between them and Crook’s camp at Goose Creek. Enough Indians to slaughter more than two hundred pony soldiers back there on that ridge above the Greasy Grass.

  More than enough to take care of two army scouts.

  Chapter 8

  27-28 June 1876

  “You can’t be serious about going over there to talk with that old man!” Seamus squealed, his throat cords constricting in surprise.

  Grouard nodded, not even looking at the Irishman. Instead he continued to peer through the thick brush at the ancient Indian, who at that moment was driving some ponies from the fringe of a crowded lodge circle down to Twin Creek for water that early morning. “This is the first Lakota camp we come on. Maybe I can find out where they’re heading—something.”

  “You’re crazier’n I ever thought, Grouard.”

  “I figure that’s got to be a compliment, coming from you, Irishman.” He grinned. “Just make yourself small here till I get back.”

  “I’m gonna make myself real small, you half-witted son of a bitch. Damned small—what with you walking into the biggest goddamned Injin camp ever there was.”

  “Ain’t walking in there,” Grouard whispered back raspily. “Just gonna go dust off my Lakota s
ome with that ol’ man.”

  Unlashing his bedroll behind his saddle, Grouard pulled his old red blanket from its gum poncho and draped it over his head and shoulders, holding it together with one hand, while beneath the blanket he concealed the pistol he slipped from its holster. Through the thick brush and out onto a flat, it wasn’t long before the half-breed caught up to the ponies that shied at first with the intruder’s appearance, then settled and moseyed on toward the creekbank behind the lead horse.

  Donegan couldn’t make out either of the voices as Grouard hailed the old man, but he did hear a dog howl, then others bark, somewhere in that nearest Indian camp. After bumping into those four-legged predators on that battle ridge last night, just the sound of those Sioux canines was enough to raise the hair on the back of his neck, to make him shudder as he sat there in that thick brush drenched by the cold gray light of dawn in this valley of the Greasy Grass.

  Seamus had turned, warily watching for any signs of movement off to his right in the direction of the first camp circle, when he heard the old Indian’s frightened squawk. By the time Donegan jerked around to look, Grouard’s blanket was off his head and shoulders, gathered in a clump under one arm as he sprinted back toward Donegan, yelling. The half-breed’s voice was drowned out by the old man’s continued warning cry as the Indian herder fled in the opposite direction from Grouard—down the creekbank and across the water toward the village.

  “Get the goddamned horses!”

  By the time he finally made out what Grouard was yelling, Donegan was up and moving himself. “You bet I’ll get the bleeming horses!”

  Yanking the animals out of the brush toward Grouard just as Frank came huffing up, Seamus vaulted onto the horse’s back using only the saddle’s big horn. The halfbreed flung the red blanket at Donegan as he swept up the reins to the big black he rode.