Wolf Mountain Moon (48 page)

At dark the others had retreated back to their village. When the night had turned black, several of his friends had
said they would stay behind and join him when he crawled close to the soldier camp. They understood that Wooden Leg had to know for sure. Every warrior has relations. Every man has a family he will defend unto death.

What joy it brought his cold, small heart to hear his sister's voice call back to him from the night!

By the time Wooden Leg and his loyal friends were racing back toward the village, they heard the sounds of many hooves on the hard, winter-frozen ground. They stopped, listened, hearing the faint snort of many horses in the dark, hearing the muted murmur of many mouths. Then he and the others rode to a low hill to look down on the valley.

Coming along both the west bank and the east side of the river rode a great cavalcade: the strength of the
Ohmeseheso
people whom Three Stars Crook could not destroy when he attacked Old Bear's camp on the Powder, the people Three Fingers Kenzie could not destroy when he attacked Morning Star's camp in the Red Fork Valley. The finest warriors, old and young, rode knee to knee with those Lakota who had joined Crazy Horse in vowing never to give up to the white government men, never to go in to the agencies. How it made Wooden Leg's heart leap to see so many marching through the cold and the dark, like a throbbing of the land itself: men and horses going to battle across the blue-lit snow.

“Nitaa-shema!
Let's go!” he urged those friends around him, so eager was he to start this fight. So much wrong done by the soldiers against the
Tse-Tsehese
was about to be made right.

How it made a young warrior's spirit sing! Come morning, it would be a good, good day to die protecting his People!

The Bear Coat and his soldiers must be taught a lesson this time, he thought as he urged his pony down the slope toward the great procession of warriors bundled in blankets and capotes and buffalo robes against the terrible cold. The
ve-ho-e
soldiers were like bothersome, nagging magpies swooping, diving, chattering after a sore-backed horse, landing now and then to poke their beaks into the skin ulcers and angry places where the horse's hide weeped and oozed. Usually a man could take some of the tarry oil he collected from the black springs to keep the nettlesome magpies off the horse long enough for the terrible sores to heal.

But this time there was no tarry oil. This time the village itself was the sore-backed horse: women and children, helpless. And the soldiers would continue diving and swooping and squawking until they were driven away, once and for all time.

There was no tarry oil to protect the village … but there were all these warriors, these men who would put their bodies between the soldiers and the lives of their loved ones.

For all that they held dear! For this land where the bones of their people were buried!

Hoka hey!
Come dawn it would be a great day to die!

Chapter 29
8 January 1877

T
he gray, cheerless sky was just beginning to pale when the soldiers were ordered to roll out of their blankets. The sun was not yet up. As they greeted a temperature of fourteen degrees, most had to shake fresh snow off their bedrolls. Several new inches lay atop what had been in the valley the afternoon of the seventh. Off to the west the sky appeared all the more forbidding. Dark, snow-laden clouds obscured all but the foothills of the distant mountains.

Worse yet, it was still snowing in the valley of the Tongue.

In the predawn darkness men lumbered slowly among the cottonwood trees along that sweeping horseshoe of the river, going about their toilet while others built up the fires on the ground scraped clear of snow and started breakfast preparations: chopping at the frozen salt pork, cracking open wooden crates of hardtack crackers the men would soak in the spewing grease or dunk in their coffee until soft enough to chew.

Stepping away from the fire for a moment, Seamus looked over at the front flap of the surgeon's tent, finding the old woman seated there, right where she had been last night when he had closed his eyes. Her lined, cherrywood face gazed here and there impassively at all the activity among the soldiers. For a moment their eyes met—but in hers there shone no
light of friendly recognition. He walked over, holding out a steaming cup, which she readily took from him and drank.

Once he had poured himself another cup, Donegan trudged to the nearby south side of camp. As the night reluctantly gave way to a snowy dawn, he peered beyond at the terrain surrounding them. To the north and east stood a series of low hills covered with cedar and stunted pine, which blended into red-tinged bluffs and ridges rising farther still.

More striking still, some four hundred yards southwest of him lay another long ridge, at the middle of which stood an abrupt, rounded knob covered with shale and talus. At the northern foot of that ridge ran a deep, snow-drifted coulee stretching all the way to the Tongue River itself.
^*

In the dim, graying light Donegan could make out what he thought might be the hint of movement along the top of the low knoll where last night Miles had ordered a detachment of his men to erect breastworks and hold that flat-topped piece of strategic ground. The wind was blowing hard enough, cruel enough, that Seamus could see how it tormented those soldiers who had to stand up there, exposed and out in the open on picket duty.

Some three hundred yards farther southeast from the knoll arose the most prominent feature of the entire landscape: the volcanic-shaped cone decked out in its stark red-earth and snow colors thrust up against the pale horizon.
^†

Beyond the butte the ridgeline meandered all the way into the eastern bluffs and hills, standing at least three hundred feet high, dotted with cedar and oakbrush and sage, the entire landscape buried in some eight to twelve inches of snow as dawn presumed to awaken this frozen land.

“Would you care to go with us, Mr. Donegan?”

Seamus turned, finding Miles and Kelly, along with a handful of the colonel's headquarters staff.

“Where are you off to?”

“There,” and Miles pointed with a two-foot shaft of peeled cottonwood he had been carrying since arriving yesterday. “I want to be up there to those breastworks by the time it grows light enough to see.”

“Yeah—I'll come along, General.”

They trudged through the deep snow on foot, through the last of the bivouac tents and breakfast fires, on past a dozen or more mules pawing at the snow for their own morning meal, on up the long slope to the top of the flat-topped knoll. Stopping there, Miles stuffed the peeled staff under his armpit and put out his hand. Lieutenant Baird, his adjutant, pulled the field glasses from a scratched and weathered leather campaign case.

Along the gray horizon to the southeast a man could gaze into the distance, following the path of the Tongue as it flowed out of a stretch of broken country, around the far end of the Wolf Mountains from its birthplace in the Bighorns. At the eastern edge of the earth the snowy sky was quickly becoming all the brighter with the first hint of the sun's rising behind those low, ominous snow clouds. A cold, icy mist clung eerily to everything in the valley just below them. Most of the time the wind caused the flakes to swirl, collecting, then dispersing among the old cottonwood that lined the river.

“Great Jupiter!” Miles exclaimed quietly as he peered into the distance.

“What is it?” Frank Baldwin asked.

“They're coming this way,” the colonel explained. “Here, Kelly—take a look for yourself.”

Kelly stepped up and peered through the field glasses at the scene below them to the southwest. Then he handed the glasses to Donegan. “Have yourself a look.”

From what he could estimate, Seamus figured there had to be more than six hundred horsemen quickly approaching from up the valley, advancing on both sides of the river toward the soldier bivouac. Quickly again he tried to calculate their numbers—just to goad himself with the odds. Then Donegan remembered. Only once before had he ever seen such a disciplined formation of Indian horsemen: when Roman Nose had led his Northern Cheyenne and Pawnee Killer's Sioux down on the twenty-eight men still able to fire their rifles from that nameless sandbar on the high plains of Colorado.
^*

As Donegan handed the glasses back to the colonel, Miles asked them both, “How many you make of it?”

Kelly shrugged. “Six hundred, maybe more.”

“I'd say that's about right,” Seamus agreed.

“And that's only the ones we can see,” Miles reminded them. “No telling how many we can't count because of the fog behind them.” The colonel waved his peeled wand in the air. “No telling how many are already somewhere in these hills.”

“They easily have us two to one, General,” Kelly said quietly. “Maybe worse than that.”

For the next half hour the warriors pushed their ponies up from the river valley, on up the slopes of that ridgeline south of the soldier bivouac, emerging like black insects from the cottony, swirling fog that nestled among the trees and brush along the river. In addition to those horsemen gathering in clusters along the hills immediately across the river, the western end of the heights bristled with horsemen who gathered to look down at the soldiers on the flat-topped knob.

They began to call out to the soldiers in Lakota.

“You know any of that tongue?” Seamus asked Kelly.

Luther nodded, stepping out to the edge of the knoll with Miles and Donegan. “Listen.”

They did listen for a few moments more; then Kelly turned to the others and said, “From what I can make of it—they're telling us that we're not going to eat any more fat meat.”

“Fat meat?” Miles said, wagging his head in confusion. “I don't get it.”

“Bacon,” Donegan declared. “They mean bacon, General. Don't you see? What they're trying to tell us white men is that we've eaten our last breakfast.”

Miles turned to Seamus, asking, “Eaten our last breakfast, have we?”

“That's their strongest call to battle, General,” Kelly explained. “Those bucks are saying your men won't live to have another meal.”

“You know their tongue,” Donegan said to Kelly, “so why don't you go ahead and tell that bunch what we think of them as warriors?”

A smile crept across Kelly's mouth there in the early light
as the snow whipped around them in a whirling fury. “Not a thing to lose if I do.”

Seamus watched the chief of scouts take a step away from them to unbutton the bottom of his heavy buffalo-hide coat. Then Kelly grabbed his crotch and gyrated his hips forward, calling out in Lakota.

“I will have many breakfasts, for I am strong,” he hollered across the snowy heights. “But you will cower before me because you are women! None of you are men like me—for you are all women!”

They watched how that taunting challenge struck the warriors gathered on the heights to their left and across the river—angering the Sioux and Cheyenne beyond reason, working them into a fighting lather. It was just then seven
A.M.
as a few of the warriors began their first slow advance from the ridgeline down toward the open bowl where the soldier camp lay.

“I think you done just what you wanted to do,” Seamus told Kelly. “Looks like they're ready to fight, General.”