Long Winter Gone: Son of the Plains - Volume 1 (10 page)

Custer himself awoke refreshed from a long nap about the time a ghostly light climbed out of the dense river mist. Nearby the scouts murmured among themselves. A few Osages began chanting their own eerie melodies as the bright light emerged from the thick fog bank, ascending into the lamp-black sky.

“It’s the Morning Star, sir,” Moylan whispered at Custer’s side.

It loomed close. Huge, and shimmering with life.

“A good omen for our victory, Lieutenant.”

Nothing short of powerful medicine to the Osages, this appearance of the celestial light above the river, here on the precipice of battle. As the brilliant globe climbed above the southwestern horizon, it seemed to ascend more slowly, its light radiating prismatically from color to color. An imperial stillness settled over this wilderness in these last moments before dawn, causing something deep within Custer’s being to assure him this star was destined to shine on this valley, his command—on he alone.

Custer smiled, certain to the core of the outcome of the impending fight. The heavens had ordained the star to shine upon him.

He vowed to do nothing to disappoint the gods of Olympus with the coming light of a new day.

Stiff with cold, the Cheyenne sentry who stationed himself atop the knoll south of camp had no appreciation for the celestial light glowing above him in the river mist. Half Bear settled in the snow.

Not much longer before he could return to a warm lodge where his woman would build up the fire, put some breakfast meat on to boil. His stomach churned, angry with him, a hunger enough to keep a sentry awake.

Yet he decided he could nap a bit before the sky paled in morning-coming.

Half Bear slumped over. By the time he had curled his legs up beneath the heavy robe, his breath had begun to warm his frozen face. His breathing grew more regular. Before he realized it he was no longer merely napping. Half Bear slept.

Down he plunged, deep and sound, unable to yank himself back out of that warm, liquid pit. In the midst of its welcome darkness he was sure the ear he laid against the ground caught the warning of iron-shod hooves scraping across the frozen breast of the Mother of Them All.

Half Bear’s eyes refused to open. He heard horses circling to the backside of the knoll where he slept on. Horses clattering up from the river. Creeping south of the village behind him. That unmistakable jangle of pony soldier saddle gear! Still he tried to convince himself it was only a dream.

Hah! That pony soldiers would come in the cold of a winter dawn made bright beneath the Morning Star—this could only be a dream!

Curled deep within his robe, Half Bear dozed … warm enough to dream on.

With the growing light, Custer sent Lieutenant Cooke’s detail far to the left, deploying his men among the tall oaks along the steep northern bank of the Washita. A quarter-hour later, Custer led his four companies down the gradual slope that sank away to the river. There he halted the troopers in a dense copse of trees shading the north lip of the Washita as it circled the sleeping village in a lazy loop of icy water.

To his left, astride a broad-backed gray, sat the regimental color guard, his guidon dancing stiffly in the fog. Staying near Custer and refusing to wander far from that colorful cavalry standard sat the twelve Osage trackers. In a mad charge against Indians, they had decided, there could be no safer place for them.

Like warm milk from a cracked bowl, the gray light of a new day eventually began to leak out of the east.

The twenty-seventh of November. One day after Thanksgiving. That thin band of growing light caused Custer to send Moylan to carry word among the four companies shivering behind him.

Troopers shed their warm buffalo coats. They dropped their haversacks holding rations of hardtack and coffee. One soldier from each company was assigned to stay behind to guard the coats and haversacks. All eyes focused on the coming light of dawn.

“Moylan, bring the band up. I want them to play at the moment of attack.”

Officers pulled pistols from mule-eared holsters, reins gripped anxiously in the other hand. Hundreds of troopers sat shivering in the brutal cold, not knowing what awaited them in that sleeping village on the other side of the frozen Washita.

Across the river a dog began to bark, its call soon taken up by another.

Murky light spread behind the hills like alkaline water strained through a dirty pair of trooper’s stockings.

A few more minutes. A few more anxious heartbeats, and he would lead them splashing across the Washita, victory assured before that new sun ever rose above these ancient hills. Wrapped securely in winter’s cloak of deep hibernation, the Washita valley slept on.

Little Rock stirred and listened again. Now he was certain. The dog he heard wasn’t snarling at another in camp.

He sat up, straining at the thick blanket of silence laid over the sleeping camp. In his dark lodge he quickly pulled
on his clothing and wrenched up his old muzzle loader, checking the priming in the pan.

For a heartbeat the old Indian gazed down at his young daughter, peacefully cocooned in childlike slumber. Wisps of last night’s fire hung like skinny ghosts refusing to depart, suspended beneath the dark smoke hole. Up in the narrow opening he could make out a growing light in the sky, knowing dawn would come to the valley in little more time than it took a man to eat his morning meal.

Slipping quietly through the doorway, he stood. Listening to all the air told him. Again the two dogs barked from the far side of camp where the sun rose each morning. Something told him they didn’t bark at each other. Perhaps at something across the river—some predator roaming through the horse herd.

He moved east, through the cadaverous lodges and around those hard, frozen droppings left behind by more than ten times ten ponies three young Kiowas had driven through the Cheyenne camp late yesterday afternoon.

It did not matter. He had not truly been asleep anyway. Little Rock never was able to fall back to sleep each night after his daughter awakened him with her nightmare screaming.

In minutes he found himself down at the sharp slope of the bank. The river lapped quietly beneath a thin scum of ice within the webby red willow nodding in the breeze above the slow-moving water.

Again the dogs barked … moving to his left now. He crept back along the bank toward camp. Perhaps the dogs tormented a hungry wolf, wandering about with an empty winter-belly, hoping to drag down a poor, weary, winter-old mare.

With his breath freezing his cheeks, he stepped from the cover of some overhanging oaks. The dogs lurched back and forth in the shallow icy water, barking at the anonymous north bank.

Little Rock’s eyes crawled across that short span of the cold river collared in fog. His old eyes strained to penetrate the swirling gray mist. Still the dogs yipped and howled, barked and splashed, snarling at the far side of the stream. The fog slowly danced and cavorted … lifting momentarily.

He could not be sure.

Little Rock crept down the bank. Cracking through the ice at water’s edge, he found his footing shaky on the slippery rocks. Three more greasy steps brought him out to the river’s main flow. The stinging mist lifted fully for the first time. Only then did the dark trees on the steep northern bank relinquish their frightening secret.

Pony soldiers!

“Aieeee!”
That frantic sound clutched his throat as surely as the icy current clawed at his spindly legs. Tugging, making it hard for him to turn and sprint out of the river. Struggling against the Washita’s icy flow, he raised his rifle in the air and slipped an old finger against the trigger.

Make it to the bank now! If I cannot … must fire a warning shot.

The fog that momentarily swirled off the river to expose the cavalry to Little Rock had at the same time revealed the old Indian to the troopers.

Major Joel Elliott’s mind seared with the dilemma dropped in his lap. He wasn’t sure if he should stop the old man. But the Indian had a rifle held up in his hand. No
mistaking that. And no mistaking that the old man had seen Elliott’s men waiting like a long ribbon of black ghosts picketed among the icy trees.

With a damning frustration Elliott understood he would be alerting both the camp and the rest of the regiment to his predicament if he fired at the old man. Yet that was exactly what it appeared the old man himself was about to do.

Only one way to get the jump on that goddamned village.….

“Sergeant Major Kennedy!” he barked.

“Yessir!”

“Kill that Indian!”

Without dropping his reins, the veteran trooper answered by throwing his carbine to his right shoulder, pressing his cheek along the frozen stock. The deep rumble of the Spencer tore through the low-hanging mist. Kennedy rarely missed.

The bullet caught Little Rock squarely between the shoulder blades. With both arms flung wide, his old muzzle loader went tumbling across the frozen mud at the river’s edge. A gaping hole blown in his chest where his heart once beat, he stumbled two more slippery steps. Then took one last lunge as his wet, gut-slimy moccasins fought to hold the rocky bottom. It no longer mattered. He could walk no more.

As the old man crumbled into the skiffs of snow at the water’s edge, the village disappeared from view behind the gentle slope leading to the water. Little Rock pitched face down into the frozen crust lapping at the edge of the icy Washita.

An old man robbed of time to sing his death song.

S
ITTING
a quarter-mile away, Custer recognized the roar of an army carbine. No throaty boom of an Indian muzzle loader. What he heard had been the report of a Spencer.

Custer knew his troops had been discovered. Better to plunge ahead now that the whole camp had been alerted. His troop commanders would be anxious and confused. It set his gall to boiling having his hand forced.

Whirling on his bugler and the regimental band behind him, he waved his arm. “Sound the advance!”

As Custer had planned, young John Murphy, the bugler, began first, blowing the charge that would send the regiment dashing into the village. As those initial stirring notes of the charge faded over the river, the band struck up the first strains of the rollicking, stirring drinking tune “GarryOwen.”

Custer burst from the trees. On Dandy’s heels galloped his four companies. Left behind, the regimental trumpeters broke off raggedly in discordant notes as moisture from
their warm breath froze in the brass instruments. The fighting men plunged ahead.

The battle of Washita was on.

Downstream from the main command, past the high slope where Cooke’s sharpshooters stood, Elliott’s cavalry had to struggle down the same steep embankment that Custer’s companies plunged over. A slope high and steep enough to preclude an immediate charge. Instead, Elliott’s grumbling troopers had to lead their horses down the vertical bank by leaping the animals off the lip of the slope into the icy unknown of the river below. Once the first soldiers made the water and were able to spur their staggering horses toward the village, wave after wave of troopers dived into the Washita. That very delay in the charge allowed the Cheyenne a precious few seconds of breath to sort out the nightmare of the attack: time only to draw a blanket about their naked shoulders, a heartbeat allowing some of the women and children to run while the men covered their escape.

Myers’s troops were practically in the village before they fell under the eyes of an old woman out gathering some deadfall for her breakfast fire. Busy scouring through the snow and ice that coated everything, she wheeled to hear the horses an instant before the black forms loomed from the blood-thick mist. With hundreds of hooves they thundered on over her. One young trooper aimed his carbine at the solitary, blanket-wrapped figure. A lead bullet tore through the center of the old woman’s chest.

Calls Twice at the Moon was dead as she hit the snow, her frail body sliding backward before she was trampled beneath iron-shod hooves. The back of her blanket a patch
of bright crimson across the dirty snow beside her scattered bundle of tiny sticks.

With the soldier’s charge, the warriors, their women and children, and with the old ones, of many winters, all came clawing out of their sleep-warm robes and blankets like so many grass beetles scattering in panic from beneath an overturned buffalo chip. Scurrying in all directions. No direction at all. Warriors shouted, directing the old and weaker ones as each fighting man searched for some route of escape.

There was nowhere to run.

In those first few seconds pure bedlam whirled around the charging, slashing soldiers. Thompson, Elliott, and Myers reached the shrieking camp within seconds. Custer’s four companies galloped up from the Washita as the lieutenant colonel himself pressed on into the heart of the hostile village with Captain Louis M. Hamilton at his side.

What few Cheyenne camped in the center of the village were more fortunate then those who had pitched their lodges near the horns of the camp circle. They alone had a few precious seconds to decide what to do, where to go. That is, until Elliott pulled in on the east side of camp, plugging the last escape route south of the river. Custer’s crude noose tightened around the village, strangling those who had escaped slaughter in the initial charge.

Everywhere the Cheyenne turned, rifles spit yellow fire, and long, slashing knives sang a wheezing death song through the frozen air. No chance for the warriors to stem the blue tide and turn the avalanche already burying their sleepy village.

Women and children and old ones died in the mud alongside their fighting men.

Like a deafening thunder, the roar of thousands of rounds from the Springfield swallowed the keening cries of the dead and dying. Curses of frightened soldiers mingled with the war whoops and valiant death chants sung by young warriors standing their ground, ready to die.

“There!” Custer pointed, showing Captain Louis Hamilton three warriors disappearing behind a lodge.