Wolf Mountain Moon (18 page)

Across the last few weeks Sitting Bull had been trading with the Red River Slota for what he needed even more than blankets and food—rifles and bullets, along with more than twenty mules to carry the fifty heavy boxes of ammunition his warriors would use to fight the soldiers to a decisive conclusion come spring.

So with those mules and those bullets and guns, with his people and their few meager belongings, Sitting Bull had headed away from Fort Peck, crossing the frozen river and plunging into the breaks south of the
Minisose,
back toward the Redwater River country. Day by day they would have to march south and east, climbing toward the divide that would eventually drop them into the valley of the Elk River. From there it would be a few short sleeps until they found Crazy Horse somewhere on the Powder, perhaps on the Tongue.

Then, with the ammunition and weapons the Hunkpapa had traded from the northern
metis,
the reunited Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull bands would be ready for that final war ágainst the
wasicu
soldiers come the spring, when the new grass filled the bellies of their fattened horses and brought the buffalo herds back once again.

Chapter 10
7-8 December 1876

“G
et up, soldier! Stand up, damn you!”

Hearing that curse from one of the old files behind him, Frank Baldwin stiffly turned his horse about and moved back down the line of soldiers painfully trudging into the howling gale. For these few moments, at least, he would have the hurling snow at his back.

There out of the darkening mist as the last layer of daylight seeped from the western horizon, Baldwin spotted the group. Two older soldiers hunched over a third, pulling the man to his feet with a struggle.

“Lemme … lemme be,” he pleaded, flinging his arms about like a stocking doll.

“Naw, I ain't gonna lea'f you, faith,” one of the men explained, his voice softer now as he attempted to cradle the reluctant soldier beneath his arm.

“Not me neither,” the other said, sweeping a long arm around the third man's waist, and with a mighty heave raised the soldier nearly off the ground between them. “Couldn't live with myself knowing I left you out here.”

“Don't! Don't take me,” the rag doll pleaded. “Lemme sleep.”

“No sleeping—Baldwin's orders, faith,” the old graybeard
said, scooping up the young soldier's rifle out of the drifting snow, then stepping up to shove his shoulder under the failing infantryman.

Baldwin said, “If he falls again, give him the point of your bayonets.”

Both of the older men jerked up in surprise to find the lieutenant all but upon them as they stumbled to a halt there on the trail so many feet were carving out of the snow.

“Beggin' pardon, sir,” one of the two chattered, fighting to keep his misshapen kepi on in the stiff wind as he peered up from beneath the rumpled brim at the lieutenant on horseback, “I cain't bring my own self to jab a fellow Fifther with me bayonet. I save such a punishment for them blooming red-bellies.”

“Jab 'im, soldier,” Baldwin ordered. “If that's the only way to keep the man moving—give 'im your bayonet. Is that understood?”

Both men swallowed, glanced at each other and the soldier between them, then nodded.

“Understood, sir.”

Baldwin started to turn, hearing more growling and yelps from back up the line of march, but instead turned round to the trio once more. “Listen, men—I don't cotton to using the bayonets either. But you must understand. If you don't keep every last one of us moving till we reach Fort Peck, then some might just lay down and die right here. How do you men want it?”

“Sir—beggin' pardon?”

“You want half the men in your company falling out to die along this road? Or will you use your bayonets as I've ordered you to do?”

“W-we'll bring 'em all in with us, sir,” the old graybeard replied. “Trust in that, Lieutenant. Trust in that.”

“I will,” Baldwin said. “Because I know what you're made of, soldier.”

Then the lieutenant turned away and urged his weary horse to plod back up the line of stumbling, wobbly men hunching over to shove their way into the stiff, changeable wind that was blowing an icy mix of wet snow and dry crystal right into their faces. Not a moment passed that Frank did not watch a man collapse to a knee, perhaps to both. By and large
most men waited a few seconds to rest, catch their breath as others trudged, stumbled, fell around them on the trail, then pull themselves slowly up, hand over hand on their rifles until they stood on wobbly pins once more. Again they would lean into the wind, forcing their legs to follow somehow.

All round them voices begged to be left behind so they could just sleep. Others pleaded to die right then and there—since it was clear they were all going to die anyway before Baldwin's lonely battalion made it back to the safety of Fort Peck.

Yet there were more voices, stronger voices, deeper and more confident voices from those who shouted down the naysayers, who suffered this same unthinkable torture but fought back by grumbling and grousing and cursing up a blue streak in the raw, unrelenting face of that Montana blizzard. The sort of man who might often complain himself about lack of sleep or the poor rations of sidebelly and old crackers not fit for a man in prison, the sort of man who would grumble about putting in fatigue duty back at the Tongue River Cantonment, or curse his superiors when he had to dig a new latrine or corduroy a bank for the wagons or chop down trees to somehow construct just one more bridge across one more nameless goddamned creek.

But it was just that sort of double-riveted soldier who rose to the need and pulled lesser men out of the snow now as the wolfish wind howled, pulled others not quite as strong out of the frozen snowdrifts that might otherwise be their graves. The sort of man who pushed and yanked and even poked with his bayonet to be sure that every other soldier in front of him kept moving.

Just to keep all of them moving together into the teeth of that brutal storm. One crippling step at a time.

The sort of man who was bound and determined that every last one of them would make it back to Fort Peck alive. All. Without the loss of a single man.

At the head of the march the men in charge of the pack train had their own problems with the balky mules. Baldwin had put them up there for a purpose: to break trail through the deepening snow and near-insurmountable drifts. With the snow and that cursed wind blowing head-on against them, the men were far past numb. And with numbness begins the
creeping fatigue, the irrepressible drowsiness that convinces a man he needs only to sit down, curl up, and rest awhile—then he'll be fit enough to march on, invigorated and refreshed.

Frank wondered if his own brain were growing cold, and slow, and just might not be as sharp as he needed it to be to get these hundred-plus men back to safety. If he failed them, they might well all die.

“Get that man up!” the lieutenant bellowed, the ice cracking on his cheeks and beard, sprinkling the front of his dark wool coat with moonlit glitter. “Get him moving—jab 'im if you have to!”

This new bunch of soldiers looked up at Baldwin; then one of them pulled his bayonet from its scabbard and prodded their fellow with the sharp tip. The soldier down and floundering in a snowdrift tried again and again to shove the long knife aside whenever it jabbed him.

“Awright!” he hollered, grabbing on to the muzzle of another man's long Springfield, raising himself painfully with his own rifle as a crutch. “I'm standing, Lieutenant! I'm standing, by God!”

“Standing isn't good enough—I need you to march, soldier!” Baldwin shouted, his words hurried on by the rising wail of the wind. “March! Fast or slow … I don't care. Just stay on your feet and keep moving!”

It had been that way since dark. How many hours ago now?

Just before they had set off into the raging blizzard, as the last of the men were stuffing themselves with their rations, Baldwin had gone from company to company, ordering each commander to choose the eight or ten who were strongest of body and will to walk at the rear of each outfit with the officers, all of them with their bayonets fixed.

Their situation grew all the more desperate as the night wore on. Sometime well past midnight and after miles of grueling march—Frank could not get his turnip watch freed, for his pockets had frozen shut—he ordered those hearty soldiers assigned the pack string to lash all the unused rope to the sawbucks and string the lines out to the rear. Then the call was made up and down the column of wobbly, weaving, near-dead men.

“Every one of you who believes you can't possibly go on
under your own steam—grab hold of the rope,” Baldwin instructed each group within the sound of his voice as he yelled against the keening wind. “And hold on for your life.”

He knew the next few miles and hours might well be their lives.

There were times when he had to coax what he thought would be the last bit of strength out of his horse, prodding it to the front of the column repeatedly, where he would give his order to those soldiers with the mules who were following a half-dead Vic Smith.

“By damn, boys! It's a sad, sad sight back there. This walking isn't near enough. For fifteen minutes we've got to trot these beasts!”

“T-trot 'em, Lieutenant?”

“Trot 'em, soldier,” Baldwin snapped. “At a walk is no longer good enough. The men are fading on me—I must get their blood moving! Keep these dumb brutes moving at a trot. Now!”

With stiff salutes the first half-dozen soldiers turned back to their duty, whipping the balky, braying animals until first one, then another, and finally the rest of the snow-crusted beasts lumbered into a rolling trot, yanking on the ropes that pulled the hapless, frozen, blizzard-beaten soldiers along through the snowdrifts being broken by those hooves.

On and on Frank went, in and out of the saddle himself, up and down the line, many times pulling his flagging horse behind him just so he could stir up his own circulation by walking, so he could show them that he wasn't above busting through the icy, crusty snow himself. Baldwin wasn't sure just when it happened, so numb was his mind, so splintered was his judgment—but he stood among a half-dozen men, lending a hand to their struggle to hoist one half-dead man atop Baldwin's horse when—

“Listen, sir!”

Frank turned dumbly, blinking, his face so cold, his eyelids barely moved in the swirl of snow.

“I don't hear anything, goddammit!” one of the others grunted, holding up his share of the soldier's weight as they shoved the unconscious man across the lieutenant's saddle like a wet sack of oats.

A nearby voice cried, “That's all of it!”

“Exactly!”

“The wind …,” Baldwin whimpered with exhaustion, so tired he didn't even have the strength to cry with relief. “It's stopped.”

Another man yelped with glee. “The gol-danged storm's gone and blowed over us!”

All around them men began to lumber to a halt, slowly able to stand straighter now that they did not have to hunch over against the gale-force winds, able to open their eyes fully and peer out beneath the frost-crusted eyelashes. Slowly each one came to understand, causing some to pound one another clumsily on the backs, croaking their cheers and congratulations with cracking voices.

Then near the front of the march the men started demanding quiet, silence … like a flow, the call rippled back along the column as every one went dumb, listening.

There, every now and then beneath the rustle and shove of the dying wind, they heard a gunshot. Distant. So far away the gunshots were almost muffled.

“That's gotta be the fort!” one cried out.

The rest celebrated all over again. To be within hearing distance of Fort Peck.

Baldwin didn't have the heart to tell them it might well be nothing more than the ice thickening in the river, no more than the cottonwoods popping in the brutal, soul-numbing cold.