Wolf Mountain Moon (62 page)

When he finally turned, the colonel told his staff, “Inform the company commanders that we are doing an about-face.”

Baldwin argued with his characteristic enthusiasm, “But, General—they can't be that far ahead of us!”

Wagging his head with resignation, Miles replied, “That may well be, Lieutenant. But I don't think we're going to catch them again this time out. Not
this
outfit. We're already in trouble with our rations and grain for the stock.”

“We'll march back to bivouac?” asked James Casey.

“Yes,” and Miles nodded.

“Let me volunteer to pursue them with a battalion,” Baldwin offered. “I can follow their trail and catch Crazy Horse unawares just like I caught Sitting—”

“No, Lieutenant,” Miles interrupted as Baldwin was warming up to his appeal. “From the looks of things the hostiles are trying to make their way to the Bighorns.”

“I can follow them even there,” Baldwin pleaded. “You just give me the men and some animals—”

“And your men would eat what, Lieutenant?” Miles paused a moment to let that sink in for all of them gathered around him. “I don't have enough in the wagons for this outfit to have full rations on our march back to the Yellowstone, much less to supply a battalion that might be in the field for God knows how many days. And the weather, Mr. Baldwin … this goddamned weather! No man can say with any certainty just what the sky is going to do to us next in this country! No, Lieutenant—let's all just say we've done our damage, and that we're going home.”

Kelly stepped up with his reins in hand. “As chief of scouts, I agree with the general,” he told the officers. “The Crazy Horse people are done for. It's just a matter of time—no more than weeks at the most—before he has no choice but to take his people in to the reservation.”

The colonel nodded with that support. “Yes, I think Crazy Horse is finished, Kelly. If he doesn't turn his village around and come in to surrender very soon, I'm certain a lot of his people are going to die from a cruel recipe of hunger and bitter cold.”

In the icy bottomland of the Tongue River, Miles ordered his six companies to turn about and march north to their bivouac.

The weary, hungry foot soldiers reached their wagon camp near dusk.

*  *  *

A crusty layer of new snow greeted the soldiers on the morning of the tenth as they rolled out to another day promising more subfreezing temperatures, in addition to a long march north and repeated crossings of the Tongue River.

In the last few predawn hours no groans were heard from the surgeons' tent. Seamus figured Dr. Tilton had finally put enough laudanum down Private Bernard McCann to put the poor soldier completely out. For the last two nights McCann had clearly been in tremendous pain from the bullet wound that had smashed through his upper right femur, the heaviest bone in the body.

Merciful God, if you plan on taking the man, make it quick, Seamus had asked through the long hours of the past two nights when he could not sleep for listening to the soldier's pain. Let him go in peace, I pray you.

“We're eating with the general this morning,” Kelly announced as he came up out of the cold dawn to the sheltered place where Donegan had hunkered out of the wind between a couple of fallen cottonwood.

As Seamus finished wrapping his blankets inside the thick, waterproof canvas ducking of his bedroll, he asked, “What's on the menu?”

“Same as yesterday. Same as the day before,” Kelly replied. “Same as we had the day before that.”

Standing, Seamus rubbed his stomach with one hand in mock delight. “You sure know how to get a man's appetite up, don't you?”

Then the grin washed from Kelly's face. “You're still serious about this morning, are you? Still set on leaving us to ride south?”

With a nod Seamus said, “I'll light out after breakfast with Miles. Go see for myself how the country looks southeast from here.”

“Injun sign?”

Donegan got to his feet and tossed the bedroll atop his saddle and blanket, lying there at the bottom of the tree where the two rifles stood ready. He wagged his head in resignation, then sighed, “This army's flushed 'em … again. No telling where they're scattering now.”

Miles turned at the sound of their approach, along with most of those staff officers and a few of the scouts who had
bedded down at a nearby fire. The colonel stepped away from his headquarters group, once again looking massive in his buffalo coat and dark, bushy beard.

“So, Kelly—have you convinced Mr. Donegan here to stay on with us?”

“I don't think there was ever a chance of that, General,” Kelly replied, shrugging in apology.

“You could have a dangerous ride ahead of you,” Miles said, holding his hand out to welcome Donegan to the fire.

Seamus shook the colonel's hand. “Not the first one of those I've had.”

Miles let go of Donegan's hand and leaned back. “I get the feeling this won't be the last.” Then the colonel turned to step between Kelly and Donegan, pounding a hand on each shoulder, nudging them toward the fire. “Bring these men some coffee, will you, Bailey? And let's get some meat cooking. Mr. Donegan is going to need something to stick to his ribs, something to last out this first day.”

Donegan asked, “How will you fare on what you've got for rations, General?”

“We'll make it back,” he answered stoically. “These men are made of the finest stuff…. There's no better soldiers on the plains.”

Accepting a cup of coffee from Hobart Bailey, Seamus responded, “I've had the signal honor to fight alongside them, General.”

“It's been an honor having you along for the march, Mr. Donegan. Perhaps you can join us again.”

Blowing the steam off the coffee's surface, Seamus took a scalding sip, then said, “I'd like to tell you that hell itself would have to freeze over before I ever rode north to fight Injins with you in the winter … but twice now I've already seen how certain things can change my plans.”

“I mean to go back to the cantonment, straightaway. And while the men and stock recoup their strength, I'm planning to attempt some diplomacy with the warrior bands,” Miles explained as the slabs of pork were speared out of the blackened cast-iron skillets and flung onto the tiny oval tin halves of a soldier's mess kit. “By now I must surely have convinced the hostile chiefs that they must surrender—or I will dog them
until their villages are totally destroyed, until their people are completely destitute.”

“Diplomacy, General?” Kelly inquired around a mouthful of bacon. “You're going to send emissaries of peace out to those warrior villages?”

Miles nodded, chewing a piece of meat, his eyes flicking at the swarthy half-breed. “Bruguier here is the man I'll depend on to do it. With Sitting Bull roaming to the north of the Yellowstone, and Crazy Horse still at large here in the south, it stands to reason that I'm the one and only man who can bring either one—or maybe even both—to talk about surrendering and going into their agencies.”

“Bruguier will no doubt have his hands full,” Donegan said. Then he turned to the half-breed to ask, “You sure about this? Sure you can expect to find anything besides the end of a scalping knife waiting for you in those Lakota camps?”

“What are you asking him?” Miles demanded.

“Just that I'd be real surprised, General … surprised if Johnny Bruguier found himself welcome in those enemy villages after he came over to the army.”

Johnny Bruguier looked at Miles impassively, as if he expected the colonel to do his talking for him.

Miles said, “I'll send one or two of the captives with Johnny when he goes, Mr. Donegan. They can tell their own people how my heart is right when I offer them good terms of surrender.”

Shrugging, Bruguier added, “I gotta try, Donegan. Soon there's no more buffalo. And always the army keeps coming—until there will be no more warriors to feed the women and children anyway. I gotta try.”

He held out his hand to the half-breed, a begrudging grin crossing his cold face. “All right, Bruguier. I wish you all the luck in the world.” Then the Irishman turned back to the colonel. “I imagine if anyone can talk the Crazy Horse and Lone Wolf people in … I expect it will be one of their own people, General. You're smart to send some of them along with Johnny to talk surrender to the chiefs.”

“I only pray my strategy works,” Miles replied. “One way or the other—surrender or annihilation—this winter has been the beginning of the end for these people.”

“And if your peace strategy doesn't work?” Kelly asked.

Miles turned to his chief of scouts. “Then the Fifth Infantry will be on the march again by spring.”

That first night after the battle, Wooden Leg joined the small group of warriors who slipped back after nightfall and crept up through the snow to get close to the soldier camp. They did not need to stalk quietly through the snow flurries—the
ve-ho-e
had started big fires, and the white men were talking loud, laughing too, not at all worried about making noise.

Perhaps … one man or two might slip in among the shadows and the loud clamor, take out his knife, and cut the prisoners free.

But they found a tight ring of camp guards surrounding Bear Coat's men, so Crazy Horse's warriors could not get as close to the soldiers as they had planned, much less slip in to free the captives, as they had hoped. In utter frustration one of the Lakota fired his rifle at a tall shadow that crossed one of the roaring fires. That began a scary time of it for the warriors out beyond the last rings of dancing firelight. Soldiers fired back into the night. Warriors answered in kind as the big
ve-ho-e
fires were snuffed out one by one, frightened men kicking snow and dumping water onto the flames.

“Sister! Can you hear me?” Wooden Leg called out several times before she answered him.

In the midst of the yelling white men and the sporadic, infrequent gunfire, Crooked Nose Woman hollered back, “We are all right, Wooden Leg! Go back and tell our people we are all right. The soldiers are taking us to their home on the Elk River. We have food and are warm. Do not worry about us. We will be all right.”

“Know that we will come for you there!”

“Do not throw your lives away on account of us,” Crooked Nose Woman answered. “The soldiers have treated us kindly. Look to yourselves now. Protect those in the village.”

“I will see you again soon!” Wooden Leg promised.

“That is my prayer too!” Crooked Nose Woman shouted. “Until I am back among my people. When this war is over and there is peace once again … be safe, Wooden Leg!”

Then he heard another
Tse-Tsehese
voice. It sounded old. Perhaps it was Old Wool Woman's. She was singing a news
song—the way a camp crier would sing to tell others in the village of some important event.

One by one the
Ohmeseheso
warriors told the Lakota what Old Wool Woman was singing, and eventually the Indian guns fell silent. With a cracking voice she continued to sing her calming song as the warriors slipped back, back away from the outer ring of firelight.

Wooden Leg lay there on the mushy snow in the dark, listening to the soldiers whisper in their camp, hearing the heavy, icy rain tumble through the skeletal branches of the aged cottonwoods over his head, thinking on Old Wool Woman's words.

How many of the People were left alive and free? After a winter, a spring, then a long summer and autumn, and now another winter of fighting the soldiers—how many? With very few lodges and ponies, very few weapons and sacred objects left them, the
Tse-Tsehese
truly had little. But now Wooden Leg was forced to consider just how few of them there were.

Once a rich people, the most powerful warriors on the
northern plains … now reduced to living in shabby rock-and-branch shelters, women and children running in fear of the soldiers because with so many battles, there were no longer enough warriors to protect them. No longer enough warriors to turn back all the soldiers.

They kept coming. And coming. And coming.

It seemed the
ve-ho-e
were like the stars. There were too many to count. Whenever Wooden Leg looked up at a summer sky, he was sure the stars covered everything from one edge of the earth to the other. From one distant point of the four winds to the other.

Although the clouds hid everything above this night, Wooden Leg began to weep with realization in that freezing drizzle of a rain.

Soon the white man would cover everything in the same way the stars covered the sky.

Chapter 38
Tioheynuka Wi
1877