A Cold Day in Hell (48 page)

As the other warriors took cover behind rocks or trees, down in the brush or behind a finger of land at the opening to the canyon, Little Wolf nonetheless stood his ground. Just as he always had. For he was an Old-Man Chief—and his first duty was to protect the People, even at the sacrifice of his life.

From moment to moment one of his companions cried out in pain, declaring they had been wounded in the leg, or the shoulder, perhaps an arm or hand. All the while the soldiers and their wolves continued to advance slowly, warily, for they did not know that they greatly outnumbered Little Wolf’s pitifully small force protecting the mouth of the ravine as the women sang out above them.

So it was that the brave chief stood in the open that morning, doing his best to draw the enemy’s fire, to taunt them, to make the soldiers angry as he sprinted back and forth before their massed front. Showing the other warriors just how poorly the soldiers and their allies shot their weapons.

Of a sudden he felt the sting at his back. The force of it bowling him over and over in the cold snow that shocked his bare legs. Lying there, breathing quick and shallow, Little Wolf put his hand to his lower back, brought it away with a thin film of red beginning to crystallize in the terrible cold. Then he pushed aside the short tail on his war shirt. An ugly, narrow finger of ooze was all it was. A flesh wound.

“Hoka hey!”
he cried, leaping to his feet like a youngster a third of his years.

Little Wolf turned this way, then that so that his fellow warriors could see that he had not been seriously hurt.

A bullet whisked over the top of his shoulder—opening a painful furrow in the muscle atop his arm that hurt in the extreme cold, bloodying the shirt he wore.

“This is not our day to die, my friends!” he sang out, turning his back to the white men and their dogs who led the soldiers to this camp. “See me dance in the midst of their bullets!”

Others with him cried out with exultation, exposing themselves here and there, jumping out to take a shot, then falling back to reload and appear on the other side of the tree or rock or brush—their strategy causing the front rows of that massed assault to begin losing its stomach for fighting such daring warriors.

At times one or more of them were hit and bleeding, yet—like Little Wolf—they too suffered only minor wounds. At the mouth of the ravine they rallied around their chief, standing their ground to protect the ones who could not protect themselves.

After all, a man’s blood coagulated very quickly in the cold of such a terrible day.

Donegan watched as Lieutenant McKinney clutched the front of the surgeon’s coat with one of his bloody hands pale as the crusty snow beneath him—hoisting himself up slightly with the last shred of heroic strength that remained in his riddled body.

At least six bullets had struck the officer at the moment the Cheyenne rose out of that ravine and fired point-blank into the front of McKinney’s charge.

“Dr. La … LaGarde,” the dying soldier gurgled, blood bubbling at his lips. “See that … see my mother gets my … my—”

Then McKinney went rigid for a moment and fell backward onto the blanket where the survivors of his company had laid him only minutes before.

The lieutenant and the others who fell at the edge of that bloody ravine had been hurried behind this low red butte, where the surgeons were establishing their temporary field hospital. There was far less danger of any more Cheyenne bullets falling among these men here at the base of this gentle slope among the brush as the sun continued to climb in that dazzling blue sky above.

“Is he … is he dead?” one of the soldiers asked, snatching hold of the surgeon’s coat sleeve.

LaGarde shrugged off the man’s grip as he laid his head down on the bloodied chest. He listened intently, his eyes closed—then opened them to look up at the expectant faces closing in about him.

As. the surgeon used two fingers to ease down McKinney’s eyelids, he said, “The lieutenant’s dead. From every one of these wounds … hell, any one of which could have killed him on the spot, and all the goddamned loss of blood … why—it’s nothing short of a miracle that he lasted until you got him here.”

A big soldier grabbed hold of LaGarde, dragging the surgeon to his feet there beside the body. “But you couldn’t do a damned thing for him, could you?”

Donegan stepped in, putting his left hand on the soldier’s thick arm. “Leave it go, Cawpril.”

The man’s eyes shot to Donegan’s, filled with hurt as much as they were filled with rage. For a moment Seamus inched his right hand nearer to the butt of the pistol riding over his left hip.

Then the soldier sagged and looked back at LaGarde. “G’won now, damn you!” he snarled between his teeth as if he were trying his best to control his rage. “See what you and the rest of your cloth can do for the others.”

Without a word, only the gesture of tugging down his coat to straighten it, LaGarde turned away and stepped over McKinney’s body, ready to kneel beside one of the five other surgeons at work on the rest of the lieutenant’s wounded.

“How ’bout looking at this one, Doc?” Frank Grouard asked, tapping on LaGarde’s shoulder.

“What one?”

The half-breed pointed at Donegan.

“You’re bleeding?” the surgeon asked, turning to the Irishman.

“No. Just my shoulder.”

“You fall?” And LaGarde took hold of the Irishman’s left arm in both hands, beginning to raise it gently.

“No—easy there!”

“What happened?”

“A war club.”

“Back here across the shoulder blade?”

“I s’pose,” Seamus replied, beginning to wince in pain as the arm came up even more under the surgeon’s urging. “I don’t know for sure: I wasn’t really watching what was going on behind me—hold it! God-bleeming-damn!”

Releasing the arm slowly, LaGarde asked, “How far can you raise it on your own.”

“Don’t wanna raise it very far a’t’all.”

“Show me.”

“’Bout there,” Donegan declared.

“Don’t you think you ought’n keep him outta the fighting, Doc?” Grouard asked. “Just to keep a eye on it?”

“No way a few bruises gonna keep me outta this fight, you bloody half-breed!”

LaGarde shrugged. “You can see I’ve got lots of bleeding men here. Some of them gonna die soon too. So the two of you can go argue somewhere else for all I care.”

“But what about his arm and shoulder?” Frank demanded.

“It isn’t broken—if that’s what you’re asking,” the surgeon replied and turned away.

Grouard quickly stepped in front of the retreating doctor. “But don’t you think he should do something about it?”

“If he wants, he can tie it down. Wrap a bandage around his chest like this,” and he pantomimed the arm being splinted against the left side of his rib cage.

Seamus said, “I’ll be all right, Frank. Leave the man go to see to them others.”

“You’re about as mule-headed as a Lakota woman I once knowed,” Grouard grumbled.

Donegan grinned as he took up his rifle and started back for their horses. “Bet I’m prettier’n she was too.”

Frank stopped, cupping a hand underneath Donegan’s bearded chin, turning the Irishman’s face this way, then that before he replied, “You just might be at that, you ugly son of a bitch.”

Seamus knocked the half-breed’s hand away from his chin. “The hell you say. I’m just as pretty as the next man. C’mon, you horse-faced renegade—let’s go see if Mackenzie’s got something for us to do.”

“F
eather!”

Box Elder turned slightly at the sound of Medicine Top’s voice. He must be coming up the side of the slope, drawing closer. “I am asking for a blessing, my son!”

Then Medicine Top halted close to the summit of the hill, where the bullets still hit but with nowhere the frequency as they had. He reached out and touched his father. “I see a warrior along the ridgetop to your left.”

Box Elder turned his face in that direction, as if he could himself see. “Who is it?”

“I think it is Long Jaw.”

“Why do you tell me this?”

“He is drawing the soldier fire from you!”

“The soldiers are firing at him now?”

“Yes,” Medicine Top explained. “Once he appeared, the soldiers stopped shooting at you, and now they are trying to kill Long Jaw.”

“What is he doing?”

For a moment Medicine Top chuckled. “He is jumping around, back and forth on that ridge—making the soldiers look like fools for trying to hit him with all their bullets!”

From the hillside below him and from nearby where the women had gathered at the breastworks, into the sky now went
the cheers and strong-heart songs of those who watched Long Jaw’s bravery. And then a quick ripple of laughter.

“What does everyone find so amusing?” Box Elder asked, wanting to see the event through his son’s eyes.

“A dog has joined Long Jaw now on the edge of the ridge—and they are both running back and forth. He yells down at the soldiers and then the dog barks at the white men. But as much as the
ve-ho-e
would like to hit the man or the dog—they are doing no good. Bullets are striking the ground everywhere around them.”

Then there was an audible gasp from the spectators. Box Elder grew worried immediately. “Did the soldiers hit him?” he asked his son.

“No, father,” Medicine Top replied after a long moment. “He just dropped out of sight behind a big rock.”

As Long Jaw stood there behind the boulder, facing northwest to wave at them, the women renewed their buoyant strong-heart songs. Then he jumped back into the open, the dog at his heels once more, barking all the louder now as the man jogged back and forth, taunting the soldiers and their scouts.

“Long Jaw is back!”

“It is good,” Box Elder said as he brought the pipe stem to his lips. “I must finish my prayer now.”

As soon as Young Two Moon saw his family on their way into the narrow mouth of the deep canyon where they would climb to the rim to build breastworks, the warrior clamped his arms around his father and said farewell as they both leaped upon the bare backs of their ponies and rode off in different directions. Beaver Claws went to the south side of camp, where the Shoshone were firing down from a high ridge and the Wolf People were pushing in among the lodges in a fierce struggle. Young Two Moon urged his pony into a lope, guiding it right down through the middle of the village.

His long elk-hide shirt, his carbine and pistol, plus his two cartridge belts were all he wore over his breechclout and leggings. And before he left the family’s lodge, he had taken a moment to open the rawhide container where he kept the warbonnet, its feathers protected. Smoothing each one with a deft motion of his hand, Young Two Moon had tied the bonnet onto his head before stepping into the bitter cold of that morning, the double trailer long enough to reach the ground.

At the east side of the village the firing became general,
growing heavy. Up ahead through the mist dinging in among the lodges he spotted his good friend.

“Crow Necklace!” he called out to the horseman whose pinto darted back and forth as he fired at the advancing enemy pushing into the village. “Crow Necklace!” he cried again as he kicked his own horse into a faster lope.

But Crow Necklace did not seem to hear, for he suddenly reined about and galloped toward the south side of the village.

Just then Young Two Moon had heard the staccato call of the soldier bugle—cold and brassy on the dawn air. He wheeled about and headed north—toward the bugle call, knowing there would be soldiers where he heard such a brassy horn play its fighting song. He leaped his horse down the bank into the creek, then up and onto the rolling plain just in time to see the gray horse troop charging forward across the flat ground. Another group of soldiers rode off to their right toward the head of a faraway ravine. And an even larger bunch of the pony soldiers spread out and came galloping toward him, toward the creek and the village standing on the far side of the narrow stream.

Skidding to a halt, Young Two Moon yanked savagely on the single buffalo-hair rein, spinning the horse around and turning his back to the oncoming enemy. He could hear the bullets pass him more than he could actually feel the air they split in their passing. Back across the stream he raced the pony, into the heart of the village, heading for the south side of camp—where the fighting had already grown intense.