A Cold Day in Hell (41 page)

He had been swept up in half a hundred charges during the Civil War, riding stirrup to stirrup with brave men only heartbeats away from death, their bodies shredded by grapeshot and canister erupting in their midst. Seamus had been wounded before—hit not by shrapnel from Johnny Reb cannons, but hit instead by bone from the comrade riding to the left or right as their gallant troop set out behind the colors and banners and battle streamers for the enemy lines.

But nothing had ever stirred in him the feeling of being so carried away, of being so ultimately helpless against the powerful thrust of this moment in time, the way this charge reached down inside him and yanked him up by the balls. His heart rose to his throat, raw as it was—then he realized he was screaming at the top of his lungs with the rest of the copper-skinned scouts.

It surprised him when the first shots cracked the cold, brittle blue air of that valley morning yet to be touched by the faintest intrusion of the winter sun.

“Bet that’s one of them sonsabitches shooting off his gun at a herder boy!” Grouard growled beside him. “Get ’em some Cheyenne ponies!”

“Don’t make me no never-mind, Frank,” Seamus said. “The bleeming ball’s been opened, which means you and me are up for the first dance!”

Maybe it was one of the Cheyenne in the village who heard the first thunder of the hooves, Donegan thought as the big bay surged beneath him, all muscle and foaming fear … perhaps a warrior snatching up his weapon and bursting into that frozen morning, standing naked to confront that trio of Sioux scouts.

No matter now: the whole bloody village was brought to life with battle cries and thunderous echoes from each side of the canyon—up ahead children screaming and women crying out,
the old wailing as they stumbled into the gray light of that terrible morn.

This dawning of a cold day in hell.

Warriors sweeping up weapons and cartridge belts, quivers and bows, hurriedly tying their war medicine at their loose hair or dropping the cords of pendants around their necks. Taking time for little else—this sudden attack did not allow them the leisure to paint, time to dress, the luxury of fleeing with blankets and robes. Instead these warrior would thrust their naked, shivering bodies between the first of the soldier scouts and their families. Protecting, defending. Laying down their lives.

And then Seamus realized what it was that was dragging its razorlike claws across the inside or his belly: he suddenly sensed how it must be to protect those you love, to defend your home, to stand and face the assault at all costs. Somewhere inside he sensed as he had never before sensed just how these Cheyenne warriors would fight this day—from lodge to lodge, rock to rock, yard by yard … and it scared Seamus down to the marrow of him.

Now Gordon’s soldiers were pressing hot upon the scouts’ tails, Mauck’s battalion coming hard behind them: a mad cacophony of men bellowing orders on the run above the deafening tumult of sound laid back upon sound within the re-repeating echoes quaking within that canyon—not a single mount slowing as the soldiers fanned out, sweeping into a broad front behind Donegan and those savage mercenaries Mackenzie brought there to destroy the Cheyenne.

As if they had suddenly emerged from the narrowing maw of a cannon, immediately before them lay the narrow plain—the enemy village no more than three quarters of a mile ahead. Behind him troopers whooped and hollered. Indian scouts cried out anew with their medicine songs. And every heel hammered unmercifully into the ribs and flanks and bellies of their heaving mounts.

Somewhere far behind him and to his right, where Mackenzie’s headquarters group would be, a lone bugle stuttered out the notes of the charge. Again and again it echoed back on itself from the terrible blood-tinged red walls.

As if any of these men had to be told, Donegan mulled to himself as he clamped tight and low to his animal. As if any of them had to be told they were to hurl themselves into the goddamned thick of it.

Ahead in that dusky darkness of a night graying into morn
Seamus made out the first faraway muzzle flashes. The sharp cracks of carbines stuttered a heartbeat later. Then the big drum suddenly throbbed again, this time not with the steady, rhythmic beat that had signaled last night’s revelry. Now it was beaten frantically, a call of alarm hammered out upon its taut surface, warning and awakening even the heaviest of dark-skinned sleepers.

At that moment Seamus watched the North brothers turn their battalion off the narrow terrace that ran along the mountain to their left and plunge their mounts down into the boggy creek bottom to make a recrossing. For what godforsaken reason, he could not figure out. While the Pawnee ponies jammed up in the the miry ground, slowed to all but a stop as they struggled up to their bellies in the muddy swamp, Seamus and the other scouts rumbled past.

Then in the growing clamor of gunfire and wailing women, Seamus turned—suddenly hearing the eerie croon of that Pawnee’s sacred flute again in the noisy cacophony of gunfire and screaming voices, surprised to find the first of the North scouts freed from the boggy ground, all of them laid out along their ponies’ necks, racing with total abandon once more toward the heart of the village, which for the most part lay along the south bank of the creek as it flowed to the east out of the canyon.

A few gunshots rattled behind him—among the Pawnee.

They must have run onto a herder out alone back there, Seamus thought as his horse swept across the grass slickened with icy frost toward the first of the deserted lodges erected in the starkly beautiful amphitheater, the walls rising above them five hundred feet in places, a thousand feet in others. In numberless icy brooks and freshets, waters tumbled down into a maze of shallow ravines, each one slashing the valley floor in its race to feed its waters to the Red Fork, each crevice thereby marked with the telltale path of willow and box elder.

As the lodges loomed closer, his nose came alive.

Woodsmoke and green hides laid out for fleshing, roasting meat and animal fat to be mixed for pemmican with last autumn’s cherries, the odor of fresh dung and the scent of unmitigated fear. Donegan had smelled all these before—as far back as the summer of sixty-nine and the destruction of Tall Bull’s village at Summit Springs.
*

On to the Comanche and Kiowa and Cheyenne camps huddled
at the bottom of Palo Duro Canyon, which rose majestically above the smoke-blackened lodges in just the way this valley rose above these lodges he and the rest of the scouts found themselves among of a sudden.

In the middistance the flashes of the enemy guns became a steady, pulsing light as the Cheyenne warriors fired, retreated to another lodge, turned and fired once more as they sought to stem the overwhelming tide … then hoped for nothing more than to protect the retreat of their families.

To his right Seamus could see that down the northern edge of the elongated valley ran a low plateau for something on the order of a mile. Ahead beyond the village the canyon itself disintegrated into a series of upvaults and deep ravines, flat-topped hills and snakelike gulleys where he could barely make out the black flit of bodies against the growing light of that cold day. Swarming into every recess in that rocky red sandstone maze—the Cheyenne were making good their escape among those rugged slopes that tumbled one upon another into the high white mountainsides just now touched with the rose of the sun’s rising this cold, cold day.

It reminded Seamus of the color of blood daubed, spilled, smeared upon the snow.

The way the warriors had fled to the steep sides of the canyon, there likely to take cover and train their fire down upon the village, Donegan realized Mackenzie’s dawn attack already had the makings of one damned cold day in hell.

H
e could not see if it was light yet, for he had been many, many winters without the power of sight. But behind his eyes where the sun never shined, Box Elder nonetheless knew. In his mind he could see what was about to happen as clearly as he had seen with his eyes as a young man.

In his dream he heard the thunder of the hooves before he heard it with his ears. Beneath him he felt them coming.

And he sat up.

“Bring me the Sacred Wheel Lance!” he cried, his voice thin and reedy with so much singing and praying among the rocks in the hills last night as the celebration had gone on at Last Bull’s big fire.

Now his throat was sore, and it hurt so to use it.

His young nephew, the son of a son of a friend who wanted the boy to apprentice to the great shaman of the
Ohmeseheso
, quickly snatched up the ten-foot-long lance at the end of which hung the round rawhide-braided wheel that was Box Elder’s special medicine—given him by the earth spirits so many, many summers ago when he had first begun to use his powerful gifts.

One of those gifts he had used time and again was the power to see what was to happen in some time yet to come.

He had seen the soldiers and their friendly Indians coming.

And now they were here!

Young Medicine Bear helped the frail old man throw back his blankets and the heavy robes and get to his feet.

“Put the long shirt over my head—hurry!”

The youth dropped the long, fire-smoked elk-hide shirt over the gray head, the four long legs of the animal almost brushing the floor of the shaman’s lodge. Besides that heavy shirt, Box Elder wore no more than a breechclout.

“My buffalo moccasins. Hurry—we must go!”

One at a time Medicine Bear shoved them on the old man’s bony, veiny feet, then rose to help Box Elder shuffle to the door and step out into the bitter cold.

“The sun is not at the top of the ridge?” the old one asked, unable to feel its warmth on his face as he emerged from the cold lodge.

“No—”

“Box Elder!”

He turned at the sound of the voice crying out his name. Already screams floated like shards of ice from the lower end of the camp. “Curly? Is it you?”

Then the warrior grabbed Box Elder’s thin arm. “It is I, old friend. Come—we must hurry into the hills with your Sacred Wheel Lance.”

“What of Coal Bear?” Box Elder asked, his voice high and filled with dread.

“He already has
Esevone
*
wrapped in its bundle, and I see they are coming this way,” Curly explained.

“Box Elder!” he heard Coal Bear, the Keeper of the Sacred Hat, call out to him.

“You have
Esevone?”
the old man asked, wishing his eyes could see, for his ears were already telling him of many guns beginning to explode at the far end of the valley.

“It is on my wife’s back.”

“She is with you? And you have
Nimhoyoh?
”
†

“I do, in my hands—here, feel it now, for we must go quickly!”

Box Elder reached for Coal Bear’s wrist, his fingers working down to the hand that held the round cherrywood stick about the length of a man’s arm. Suspended from the stick was a crude rectangle of buffalo rawhide, the edges of which were perforated, then braided with a long strand of rawhide. From the three sides
of
Nimhoyoh
hung many long buffalo tails, tied to the rawhide shield like scalp locks.

“Hurry, old friend!” Coal Bear repeated.

Laying a hand on Coal Bear’s arm, Box Elder started to move off. “All of us go together. I will flee with you and
Esevone!
Give the Turner to Medicine Bear so that he might carry it above him on his pony to turn away the soldier bullets!”

Coal Bear gave the heavy object to the young apprentice. “And we must let the woman walk ahead of us,” Coal Bear turned to instruct the other two men with them. “She carries the Sacred Hat and we must not walk too close to her.”

The blind shaman nodded, saying, “I think we should walk a little to the right and behind her, my friend.”

Other warriors appeared like shards of black ice through that cold mist slinking among the lodges, mist that hugged the ground with its bitter, bone-chilling cold. Peeling off to the left and right in a tight crescent behind the woman, Coal Bear and Box Elder, those determined men, formed a protective guard as Coal Bear’s wife walked toward the hills as slowly as if she were merely carrying the sacred object to another camp.