Wolf Mountain Moon (3 page)

W
hile Seamus Donegan pushes north by west away from Crook and Mackenzie's camp on the Belle Fourche River, you and I are going to have to step back in time a few weeks so that we can catch up with all that's been happening in the Yellowstone country, where Miles's Fifth Infantry are scrambling about trying to find out where Sitting Bull scampered off to after the fight at Cedar Creek.

To write with continuity the final half of
A Cold Day in Hell
our previous volume, I was faced with a dilemma. I could chop up the action in the Mackenzie / Fourth Cavalry / Morning Star story line by yanking the reader back and forth from the Bighorn country to the northern plains patrolled by the Fifth Infantry … or I could charge straight ahead with one story line instead of dealing with two simultaneously. I chose this second option.

Since this present novel deals with the tale of Nelson A. Miles's efforts in the rugged country north of the Yellowstone, we are free now to drop back a few weeks in time before the conclusion of
A Cold Day in Hell
so that we might learn how the colonel's men were faring in their hunt for Sitting Bull's Hunkpapa at the same moment Crook and Mackenzie were crushing the last of Northern Cheyenne resistance.

This means that after we get Seamus riding off to the north into Crazy Horse country, we're going to leave him for a few days as we leap on north to catch up with all the action we've missed while we've been busy with the Fourth Cavalry and their Battle of the Red Fork.

And because we are going back on the calendar, we won't be starting out right away with the newspaper headlines as we normally do. Once we bring all our characters closer to mid-December, when the Irishman reaches the Tongue River Cantonment, those news reports will continue.

At the beginning of some chapters and some scenes you're going to read the very same news stories devoured by the officers' wives and those civilians employed at army posts or those living in adjacent frontier settlements, taken from the front page of the daily newspapers just as Samantha Donegan herself would read them—newspapers that arrived as much as a week or more late, due to the wilderness distances to be traveled by freight carriers.

Copied verbatim from the headlines and graphic accounts of the day, these reports and stories were the only news available for those people who had a most personal interest in the frontier army's last great campaign—those families who had tearfully watched a loved one march off to war that winter of the Great Sioux War of 1876.

My hope is that you will be struck with the immediacy of each day's front page as you finish reading that day's news—just as Samantha Donegan would have read the sometimes reassuring, ofttimes terrifying, news from her relative safety at Fort Laramie. But unlike her and the rest of those left behind at the posts and frontier settlements, you will be thrust back into the footsteps of those cold, frightened infantrymen and the harried villages of hungry people the army is searching for here in the maw of that most terrible winter.

An army knowing it is now only a matter of time until they succeed in what was begun many months before in the trampled, bloody snow along the Powder River.

The Lakota and Cheyenne realizing at last that their culture, an ancient way of life, is taking its last breath.

To be no more.

PROLOGUE
Mid-December 1876

H
e watched the three of them until they dropped out of sight beyond that last far rise to the south.

Then he watched that snowy sliver of empty ground a little while longer, just to be sure those three horsemen might not reappear there where the icy gray blanket of earth pressed against the lowering slate-gray sky. Hoping the riders might … but knowing they wouldn't.

Seamus Donegan took a deep breath—so deep, the sub-freezing air shocked his chest. Then he gently nudged the roan to the left and pointed their noses north.

To the Yellowstone.

Right through the heart of the country where the Cheyenne survivors of Mackenzie's attack on Morning Star's village were fleeing. Dead center through the land where Crazy Horse was said to be wintering.

As if it had been lying in wait for those three Indian scouts to sign talk their hurried farewells in the bitter cold—as if it had been patient only long enough until he could turn his face back to the north—the wind came up, leaping out of hiding suddenly that midday. The Irishman glanced back over his shoulder at the southern rim of that monochrome sky, unable to make out where the sun was hanging in its low
travels. Nothing but a slate of clouds for as far as the eye could see. Gray above, and gray-white below.

He glanced one last time at the top of that ridge where he'd last seen the faraway figures of Three Bears and the other two scouts, knowing they were long gone now. Only a foolish man would tarry in these parts. This was enemy country if ever there was one. Here between Sitting Bull's Yellowstone and Crazy Horse's Powder. No matter that Three Bears and his scouts were all three Lakota: truth was, they had just led the soldiers north against the winter roamers.

Already the great hoop was cracking. Agency Indian against free Indian. Good Injun against hostile.

Tugging the wide wool scarf farther up his raw cheeks and nose, Seamus dabbed at the tears pooling in his eyes. It was a wind strong enough that the roan beneath him kept quartering around, bitter enough to make Donegan tuck his own head down to the side, turtling it as far as he could within the big upturned flap of the collar on his wool mackinaw. Thank the merciful saints for the wolf-hide cap Richard Closter had handed him that morning before Donegan had ridden away in the dark behind those three sullen, silent Indian scouts. With a scrap of old wool scarf from last winter's campaign to the Powder with Crook and Reynolds just long enough to pull over the top of his head and down over his ears, Donegan clamped it in place with the wolf-hide cap he tied beneath his chin with a pair of thongs.

Around his neck twisted and tossed the drawstring on his wide-brimmed prairie hat, which the wind tugged this way and that, shoving and fluttering with each gust. The wool muffler and wolf hide were both much better for this weather and this wind, he thought as he raised a horsehide gauntlet mitten and snugged the furry cap down to the bridge of his nose. Then he blinked more tears away as he steered the horse off the ridge, down another ravine that come next spring would be a creek. For now the bare willow and alder stood out like skeletal claws against the deep, drifted snow pocked in those places hidden back from the short-season's southerly sunlight.

In the dim glow of their tiny fire that first night away from the army column, he and the sullen Three Bears had talked with their hands about the task that lay before
them—what would eventually face the lone white man once the four of them had reached the mouth of the Little Powder and the White River Agency Sioux would turn back.

Tell me if I am a fool to go on down the Powder.

For a long time the old warrior stared into the low flames and glowing bed of crimson coals, his face shining like polished copper.
We believe the Crazy Horse people are upstream.
And he had pointed south.

So it would be safe enough for me to follow the Powder down to the Elk River?
^*

With a wag of his head Three Bears finally looked up into Donegan's face.
The chances are good the Hunkpatila have already started downstream … moving north to reach Sitting Bull, Gall, and the fighting Hunkpapa.

Seamus pointed.
To the north?

Three Bears nodded.

Then I should not go down the Powder.

It is not wise.

At that fire of theirs in the shadow of Inyan Kara
^†
the Lakota instructed him to cross the Powder after they had parted company, to ascend the divide that would lead him over to Mizpah Creek, take him beyond that to Pumpkin Creek and eventually to the Tongue itself.

For three and a half days they pushed their ponies through the cold and the snow from dawn till dusk. But the White River Agency scouts would not travel after sundown. Nor could Seamus get them started before light. Which meant the four of them sat out the long winter nights around a tiny fire built back against the overhang of some washed-out bluff, or far up from the mouth of a deep ravine so the glow of the low flames would not reflect their reddish hue so readily against the low clouds and snowy landscape.