A Cold Day in Hell (63 page)

Too, he sat for a time with each one of the mothers who had lost their infants to the incredible cold. And he joined those who were rubbing warmth back into the hands and feet of the old ones too frail and sick to move about and warm themselves.

Again and again he instructed this group or that to sacrifice one of their ponies not only for food they could roast over the tiny fires, but so that the old people could stuff their hands and feet among the warm organs and blood.

Still, the
Ohmeseheso
had suffered greatly that first night after the battle. Many of the old ones, the sick, the weakest—they
had simply given up their spirits in the great cold, unable to keep the frightful temperature from their hearts.

Up ahead of him on the slope that gray-skinned morning as the sun blurred the eastern horizon to a narrow band of bloody red, a mother held the hand of one of her young children as they stumbled along, stiff-legged … while in the other arm she carried the frozen body of her infant who had died while struggling to nurse at its mother’s breast throughout the night.

How heavy his heart had become, for it seemed the very young and the very old were being ripped from the People. Perhaps all that would be left to his band would be those old enough to suffer the cold without dying, those young enough that the cold could not weaken their frail bodies.

All these winters of his life—through the battles and the migrations, in all that greatness and feasting, the women he had loved and the children who had sprung from his loins—so many winters that had flecked his hair with their snow … his heart had never been so heavy.

And he had never been quite so cold.

Last night he had squatted at a fire beside his missing son, Bull Hump, and some of the other old warriors, talking quietly while the keening surrounded them and the groans of the wounded reminded them all that there would be more to die.

Softly, Bull Hump had said, “The only thing that saved the lives of any of us was the smoke from so many guns—smoke which hung so low in the ravines and gulches, smoke which clung to the mountainsides so that the soldiers could not see us clearly as we fought. Had there not been so much gun smoke—more of us would have fallen.”

Now, as Morning Star reached the top of the icy, slippery slope and turned, the dry, cold air scratching his lungs with the torment of a porcupine-tail hairbrush, the chief gazed down through the bottom of the snow clouds at the valley below. Watching the last of his people struggling up the long slope through the timber, many crawling up hand over hand, barefoot, dragging tiny ones and the old with them through the depth of that new snow as they pushed ever onward into the soft underbelly of those clouds.

Up here where the smoke hung just beneath the clouds there clung the stench of death and destruction. Everything gone to ash and smoke. Those lodges of each warrior society exquisitely decorated with regalia, painted to record the exploits of their members, their finest deeds: a retelling of men and soldiers
and horses pitched together in struggles from the past. A glorious past.

Each man’s most important clothing was gone in the smoke. Beautifully tanned hides, quilled and beaded—a warrior’s holy clothes that he would wear into battle. Scalp locks and the medicine drawings on each shirt, the leggings, his fighting moccasins. The great spray and tumble of war eagle feathers worn by some, or the great provocation of the horned headdresses that adorned others.

But with the attack yesterday morning, there was no time to dress and paint while one said his prayers. Only a few at the upper end of camp had a moment to sweep up a sacred bonnet or a special amulet to give them strength in the coming fight. Their sacred war medicines, prayer bundles, all of it—everything except
Maahotse
and
Esevone
—was gone. What hadn’t been burned had been carried off by the enemy’s Indians.

Even the Sacred Corn, given by the Grandmother Earth to Sweet Medicine to feed his people at the beginning of time. How it had stabbed Morning Star’s heart to watch the soldiers throw the last few ears of their Sacred Corn into the fire. No more would the People know freedom from want with it gone. Now—he knew—they would always be hungry.

The
Ohmeseheso
were running again.

So Morning Star wondered if it would not have been better to die the death of a warrior in yesterday’s battle, along with his two sons and those grandchildren … better that than to watch his people’s greatness die at the bottom of those bloody footprints scattering up the silent, mourning mountainside.

In addition to the twenty-four soldiers and Indian scouts wounded in the battle, Lieutenant Homer Wheeler’s detail was attending to one of the Shoshone who had suffered a terrible abdominal wound. Because of the poor prognosis for a man shot through the intestines, the army surgeons didn’t hold out much hope for the scout named Anzi to survive long enough to reach the wagon camp. Since he was marked for death, the course of treatment was simply to make the patient as comfortable as possible and administer as much painkiller as was necessary.

For Anzi, Dr. LaGarde prescribed laudanum, a morphine derivative, and approved all the whiskey the Shoshone wanted. With such a combination coursing through his system, the warrior had somehow survived the night, lasting into the next
morning while Mackenzie’s cavalry prepared to leave the Cheyenne village behind.

But rather than slipping away, as the surgeons had predicted, the warrior instead began to insist upon more and more whiskey from his attendants through the long, cold night.

“Oh, John!” he would call out to one or another of the hospital stewards or Wheeler’s escort detail. It mattered little what the soldiers’ names were, because Anzi preferred to use that common expression many of the Shoshone gave when addressing any white man.

“What you want now, Anzi?” a soldier would ask.

“Oh, John! Heap sick! Whiskey! Whiskey!”

So all through that night and into the gray of dawn Wheeler’s troopers poured whiskey down the mortally wounded scout, as well as sharing some with a few of the other critically injured soldiers like Private Alexander McFarland, who lapsed in and out of consciousness. But by midmorning, as the cavalry was preparing to embark, Wheeler had been forced to kneel at Anzi’s side, explaining that there was no more whiskey for him, no officers’ brandy, either.

“No whiskey, John?”

“No whiskey. No more. None.”

Grim-lipped and resolute, the Shoshone slowly rolled to his side as if he were about to give up the ghost, when he dragged his legs beneath him and rose unsteadily between a pair of his fellow Shoshone, there at his side in a deathwatch.

“Where are you going?” Wheeler demanded, stunned as he called out to the Shoshone’s back.

Over his shoulder the wounded scout replied, “Anzi go ride. Warrior always ride.”

As tired as he was, Seamus Donegan nonetheless preferred to be one of the last out of the valley that Sunday afternoon. He hadn’t snatched a bit of sleep for two nights now, what with the march of the twenty-fourth, then with the way the Shoshone scouts caterwauled all last night after the battle, mourning their tribesmen, women, and children recently killed by the Cheyenne of this very village.

Shortly past eleven
A.M
. Mackenzie gave the order, and the scouts began driving more than seven hundred captured ponies ahead of them through the bogs and the willow thickets, heading downstream.

Minutes later the men swung into position by columns of
fours where possible, pointing their noses south by east toward the gap they had entered in the cold, gray-belly light of dawn the day before. Seamus wondered if he had become more accustomed to the deep cold, or if the temperature might be moderating, actually allowing it to snow gently once more on the dark, serpentine column snaking its way across the pristine white that bordered the Red Fork of the Powder River.

As he and those who closed the file on the column entered the boggy willow thickets, Donegan turned in the saddle one last time to look back on what had been the Cheyenne camp. Among the wispy sheets of the wind-whipped, billowy snow, he thought he caught sight of three Cheyenne warriors reentering the village.

He reined up, curious. Alone now as the sounds of the column inched away from him, the Irishman watched the trio of warriors move slowly from one pile of ash and rubble to another until they finally collapsed as if all the spirit had been sucked right out of them. As he nudged his heels into the bay’s flanks and moved out once more, Seamus listened to the distant, sodden wails of grief from those three warriors who sat in the ruins of their village, crying out in despair and utter pain, wailing with implacable grief.

Up ahead of him the men cursed and yelled, packers and soldiers alike, as they struggled with their mules and horses. The animals slipped and slid crossing every precipitous slope—skidding onto their haunches and braying in protest.

Meanwhile, Lieutenant Wheeler and his escort of two companies of the Third Cavalry quickly discovered it best to lower the travois with their wounded still attached by several ropes rather than careen down each treacherous hillside. The most dangerous slopes were the long ones, which required the soldiers to tie their lariats together as they had to lower each wounded man down more than two hundred feet, one at a time to men and mules waiting below. Once the ropes were untied from the travois, they were drawn back up the hill and another travois lashed in and lowered.

As the progress of the column was slowed, Seamus repeatedly caught up with Wheeler’s escort. Each time he lent a hand where he could, joking with some of the wounded, touching the shoulder of others who were clearly in great pain. Always offering what comfort he might give.

“Aye, and that last drop was a daisy, Irishman,” one old private snorted as his travois was tied up and made ready for another trip down the snowy slopes. “Why—I’ll have you know I
ain’t had sech a pucker of a toboggan ride since I was in knee britches!”

For the journey two men were assigned to each of the mules carrying the dead, to make certain the cantankerous animals did not break away and possibly disfigure their departed comrades by colliding against rocks and deadfall. Four men were positioned around each of the wounded: one to lead the mule, two to dismount and heft the travois around difficult terrain, and a fourth to lead the four cavalry mounts. At every stream crossing, the soldiers and packers were forced to dismount and unhitch the travois—carrying the wounded across the icy, slippery rocks by hand and on foot. To assure that the wounded troopers were given the finest of attention, Wheeler had assigned one noncommissioned officer for every five travois.

Because of such care only one accident happened that entire first afternoon. At one of the many repeated crossings of the Red Fork the mule jerked the travois out of the hands of the litter handlers and dragged the wounded soldier on through the shallow creek. But because of the length of the poles and the inclined position of the soldier upon them, he wasn’t soaked—only splashed by the skittish mule’s hooves.

Yet it wasn’t only those steep and narrow parts of the trail that made the day’s journey so treacherous.

Late that afternoon Seamus had gone ahead to reach that smooth, undulating ground the Lakota and Cheyenne scouts had christened “Race Horse Canyon.” To the rear arose yelps and curses, the clatter of hooves and squeak of leather. A wild-eyed mule careened its way with travois bounding and bouncing across the sage flats. Wheeling the bay quickly, the Irishman raced to catch up the runaway animal, slowing it until it turned with him and stopped—when Donegan immediately dismounted to lunge back to the wounded trooper still strapped in.

Breathlessly the Irishman asked, “You … you all right, sojur?

The hapless passenger caught his breath, blinking his eyes, then grinned gamely as he gazed up at Donegan to say, “Let her go, by damn! Whoooeee! If I had me some bells jingling, I’d think I was taking a sleigh ride back home!”

“Where are you wounded?”

“Hip, sir.”

“You want me fetch up a surgeon to come see to you?” The soldier shook his head bravely; then, as he shifted himself, his face clearly etched with pain, he said, “There’s others
hurt worse off’n me, mister. I’ll fair up in a minute or two. Just let me catch my breath, will you? And you can put this gol-danged mule back in line with the other boys.”

Donegan readjusted the thin blankets over the wounded man, tucking them in beneath the soldier’s chin.

“All right, Private,” he said quietly, feeling his eyes mist. “Let’s you and me head for home.”