Wolf Mountain Moon (42 page)

A
s cold, weary, and miserable as the soldiers were, to Luther Kelly it seemed as if General Miles wasn't all that anxious to order them onto their feet in the predawn darkness. The continued subzero temperatures and half rations, along with the bone-chilling rain and hail that had soaked them to the skin in the past days, continued to wear away at every man's wick.

Luther wondered just how long this chase could go on—with Crazy Horse and his chiefs withdrawing the village farther and farther up the Tongue, making sure his scouts who kept a constant eye on the column's movements did not engage the soldiers … maintaining only enough contact to keep luring, taunting, seducing Miles and his officers farther and farther into the river canyons.

Maybe it was just as that tall Irishman had said: the enemy village will drop back, little by little, until Crazy Horse finds the ground where he will make his stand against a half-fed, half-froze, beat-down, ragtag bunch of soldiers too damned far from their supply base.

Later than usual, it was just past seven-thirty
A.M
. when Miles sent out his scouts and ordered his men into formation to begin their day's march through five more inches of new snow.

Twisting and turning, the river continued its relentless attempt to make things as hard as it could on the foot soldiers and their wagons. Hugging first one side of the valley, then the other, the Tongue confounded and tested the most tolerant man's patience. It took more than five hours to cover the first two and a half miles that snowy, blustery day—most of the time eaten up with the three crossings the men were forced to perform in that short distance.

With what had clearly become a growing sense of frustration, Miles ordered Kelly's men to probe ahead while he rested his column there at midday … now better than 115 miles from their Tongue River cantonment.

“Find me something—anything—that will tell me what the hell the enemy is doing besides retreating!” Miles growled with exasperation as he twisted the long leather reins in his leather mittens. “See if you can find out how far away they
are … I've got to know if the hostiles are in striking distance.”

“We'll push on ahead a few miles, General,” Luther replied sympathetically. “See what the sign holds for us.”

He led his scouts away from that cottonwood grove where the last of the wagons were coming to a noisy halt, mules braying and oxen grunting after that last cold crossing to the east side of the river. There in a loop of wide, sloping bottomland the soldiers were in the process of falling out right where they were in the snow, collapsing against trees and deadfall while a few began to scrape together some kindling, snapping twigs and branches off the leafless trees.

Several hundred yards to the south stood a long treeless ridge, at the middle of which rose a pointed, cone-shaped butte.

His small band of civilians and Indians rode through the gray, cold midday light in silence. From time to time across the next two miles Kelly signaled a halt at some high point of ground where the rest hunkered out of the biting wind to listen while Luther patiently scoured the country ahead with his field glasses.

The country all about them was awash with winter's brush, painted with a blur in a limited palette of colors. Beneath the monochrome gray of the low, ice-laden clouds, the monotonous white of the new snow was marred only by an occasional streak of ocher along the slopes of striated buttes, dotted by huge clumps of sage and those stands of fragrant cedar growing here and there in pockets where roots could be sent down deep.

He let out a sigh and pushed the focus wheel with a bare right finger. With the rising of the cold wind his hand was starting to tremble a little, so Kelly held the field glasses with only the left hand still encased in its wool mitten stuffed down inside the horsehide gauntlet. He was looking mostly off to the southwest, peering all the way to the distant foothills of the Wolf Mountains. He and many of the others expected they would find the Crazy Horse camps in that direction, figuring the hostiles were leading the army farther and farther up the Tongue, eventually around the southern end of the Wolf Mountains and on to the Bighorns in an endless, draining chase.

That is, if Miles didn't run out of rations and grain for his animals before then … if Crazy Horse hadn't forced the issue. A long chase it would be if the Sioux didn't choose to stand and fight—

As he was slowly scanning the far countryside from west to east, a beetlelike movement caught his attention, and he quickly moved his field of focus back to the southeast. There against the snow, inching along a hillside, black forms. Half a dozen?

Yes, at least six. Some were shorter—children, he decided. But at least some were adults. And those grown-ups would have answers to Kelly's questions.

Still, why were they on foot? Without ponies … perhaps they were part of the bunch who escaped Mackenzie's attack.

“Look at this, Seamus,” he said, handing the field glasses across to the Irishman. “There, halfway down the slope. Better than a mile off, I'd say. Sight down from the saddle.”

“Don't see what—”

“In the saddle,” he repeated. “Look for some movement, about halfway down from that rocky outcrop that looks like a—”

“I see 'em,” Donegan exclaimed in a gush. “But what the bleeming hell are they doing on foot?”

“Injuns?” asked George Johnson, flicking a grin at James Parker and John Johnston, who sat their horses on either side of him.

Kelly took the field glasses back from Donegan. “Yes—Injuns.” Then he took one last look at the distant figures, just to be certain. “Fellas—that isn't a hunting party we've spotted.”

Seamus nodded. “I'm sure as sun the general will want to talk with what Injins they are. Maybe they can tell us where we can find Crazy Horse.”

In the background Tom Leforge was whispering from the side of his mouth, translating for his two Crow trackers, Half Yellow Face and Old Bear.

Kelly grinned. “Exactly what I'm hoping they'll be able to tell us, fellas.” He got to his feet, immediately shoved sideways a step by the cold wind. Stuffing the glasses back into a saddlebag,
he said, “Let's go round up some prisoners for General Miles.”

With her head bent into the strong wind blowing at their faces, Old Wool Woman struggled on, breaking a path for the younger ones who followed her through the drifting snow—especially the two children. Each time the wind drew in its breath and she dared look up, the distant wisps of smoke she saw on the far side of the ridge in the valley of the Tongue promised that their struggle would soon be over.

It had been a tough journey on foot from the Pretty Fork
^*
country near
Noaha-vosey,
^†
where they had gone for a short visit among Tangle Hair's band of Dog Soldiers. Big Horse, a scout for Little Wolf, had come to visit friends and relations too. But, like Old Wool Woman, they all quickly came to miss their families and friends among Morning Star's people now traveling with the Crazy Horse village somewhere in the valley of the Tongue. Another widow, Twin Woman, as well as Old Wool Woman's own daughter, Fingers Woman, and her niece, Crooked Nose Woman, all decided to ask Big Horse if they could return with him when he started on his way back to their people.

Including Twin Woman's son and daughter, Red Hat and Crane Woman, along with an adolescent boy named Black Horse, the group set off overland on foot, what ponies they had each dragging a travois carrying their tiny lodge and other baggage. They did not have all that much after Three Finger Kenzie's soldiers had destroyed everything and driven them into the wilderness.

Following a grueling struggle, the little party finally reached the headwaters at the east fork of Suicide Creek. From there they trudged through the icy, crusty snow until they reached the divide and looked down on the valley of the Tongue. Far away, where they had expected they would find the village, they saw no lodges. But there was smoke rising from the distant trees, farther down the Tongue.

“I do not believe our people would move their camp such a short distance downriver,” Big Horse warned from atop his
pony. “It could be soldiers come looking for camps in the snow again.” For a moment his eyes gazed at the boy, Black Horse. “Go on down this creek—but be careful, and watchful. I will go see whose smoke that is in the distance and return for you.”

Old Wool Woman and young Black Horse watched the warrior move off into the wind and snow that swirled along the ground. In moments he was gone among the cold fog and clumps of cedar.

Sighing, she set off again at the head of the march, breaking snow for the rest of those who followed. The boy waited for the rest to pass, then protectively took up the rear of their march. Although this was her fifty-fourth winter, Old Wool Woman was nonetheless as strong as Fingers Woman and even Twin Woman, the widow of Lame White Man, who had been killed in the fight beside the Little Sheep River.
^*

Both of them were still young enough to be strong in body, but their will had never been tested the way Old Wool Woman had been tested in her life.

She remembered the taste of this wind—like laying her tongue on a piece of the
ve-ho-e'
s steel when the temperature plummeted. So sharp the metallic taste. So cold, it was hard to pull her tongue from the barrel of a pistol or the blade of the knife. So cold and so hard that her tongue kept the taste of that steel on it for a long time afterward. It had been that way when Black White Man had first come to live with the
Ohmeseheso
—when she and he were both children.

Many, many winters ago.

Almost as cold then as it was this day. So long ago that it was a time of few
ve-ho-e,
very few. What white men there were came to trap the flat-tails in the streams, or trade furs from the wandering bands of the northern plains. It was a time before those light-eyed creatures from the east pushed hard against the land and the herds and the migrating bands.

She was called Sweet Taste Woman back then. When the men came back from trading buffalo robes and fine furs to the
ve-ho-e,
often they brought small pouches of the white grains that were so sweet on her tongue, they made her mouth tickle, made Sweet Taste Woman giggle. She was so young then, less
than eight winters—now remembering how on one journey the warriors had brought back not just iron kettles and bolts of cloth, not just powder and lead and sugar … but in front of one of the war chiefs sat a strange creature. The whole village came out to gawk and whisper, some daring to inch close enough to touch the creature once the war chief dropped to the ground with the little dark person still wriggling in his arms.

How wide and filled with fear were the child's eyes back then as he looked around at all the
Ohmeseheso
who crowded about him. Finally one old man licked a finger and rubbed it hard across the creature's cheek. But the child's black paint would not wipe off!

“We stole him,” the war chief announced. “I saw him at the log lodges where we went to trade. There was a grown-tall person with skin as black as this. But I wanted this little one for my adopted son.”

He was thin and gangly, with strange pink palms and pink on the soles of his bare feet, but he learned quickly how to speak the People's tongue, quickly adopting the People's ways. And before long he went on his first pony raid. Then off for scalps against the
Ooetaneo-o.
^*

Moons and seasons and winters passed, and soon this boy they had been calling Little Black White Man was called only Black White Man.

He had come of age, and grown all the more handsome to the eyes and heart of Sweet Taste Woman. She had hoped the look in her eyes would tell him how much she wished him to come to her parents' lodge with his blanket after dark that late spring night she would always remember.

Spring ran into summer, and still he did not show … then finally one night she sat there beside the fire with her father and mother, with her younger sisters and brothers—and they all heard the flute. She remembered now as they struggled through gusts of cold breath from Winter Man's nostrils how she had closed her eyes and prayed that it would be Black White Man who was playing the flute for her outside their lodge door.

Sweet Taste Woman's father barely lifted the door flap and
peeked out. Then he quietly let the door flap back down and went back to looking at the fire without saying a word. Only the crackle of the flames along the dry-split cottonwood in that quiet lodge … and the sound of that flute.

Finally her father looked at Sweet Taste Woman and spoke.

“I think there is a young man outside our door, playing his song for you. He is a good man and will make a fine husband for you. Go see if he truly wants to make you his wife.”

For a moment she wanted to cry out, to ask who it was before she went out and made a fool of herself before the wrong young man. Instead she bit her lip and felt the tremble grow inside her until she could not move.

“Go ahead,” she remembered her father saying gruffly, though his eyes twinkled with merriment. “He is a brave young man. I do not think he is a very rich young man with many fine ponies to bring us, but I am certain that one is brave enough to stand and play his flute all night long if you do not go out now to be with him, Sweet Taste Woman. Yes, I think he is bull-headed enough to stay until he gets what he wants. Go see to him so he will stop playing, because you know how I don't like to have my sleep disturbed. Go, daughter.”

Sweet Taste Woman turned quickly now as she heard one of the young girls whimper behind her on the side of the hill where there was little shelter from the harsh wind. She motioned the child, Crane Woman, to her side, where Old Wool Woman put the girl beneath her arm, wrapping her there beneath the edge of her old blanket—so they could share their warmth. In that way they walked on, seeking the Crazy Horse camp where their relatives were staying this winter after the terrible battle with Three Finger's soldiers in the Red Fork Canyon.