Cries from the Earth (44 page)

“Get up here
now,
Trumpeter!” he shouted angrily, moving his advance detail into a gallop with a wave.

Up ahead at the base of the ridge that suddenly popped into view as they reached the brow of the hill, Theller and his men spotted the lone civilian firing off the second of those two shots from his rifle. Off to the left were a few of Perry's trackers, their horses milling as they watched the mid-distance where a handful of some Nez Perce horsemen disappeared from view around the end of the ridge to the east.

Disappeared no more than an instant before more horsemen suddenly burst into sight from behind an intervening knoll with a flattop that reminded Theller of a loaf of Delia's bread as it came out of the oven.

At the top of the next rise he threw up his arm and halted his detail, having sighted even more small groups of horsemen boiling their way across the bottomground. To the left and to the right those warriors spread themselves into a broad line that stretched from the base of one knoll to the next, effectively barricading the advance of Perry's battalion through that gap slashed between the hills.

He had skirmished with Apaches down on the Arizona border and fought Captain Jack's Modocs too—so Theller was convinced these warriors would turn and run once they were confronted with stiff resistance.

“We aren't helpless settlers you can murder,” he mumbled, watching the enemy horsemen starting to sweep closer and closer upon his left flank, where the smoother ground permitted their ponies to move all the faster.

“Trumpeter—now is the time!” Theller hollered. “Blow ‘Assembly' for the rest of the battalion!”

Wheeling his horse about as Jones yanked on the bugle cord over his shoulder, Theller hollered, “Sergeant!”

“Sir?” responded the Scottish-born Alexander M. Baird with a thick burr.

“Dismount the men and deploy as skirmishers to meet the Indian charge. I'm going to return to the column, bringing up the rest of the company on the double!”

“You heard the lieutenant!” Baird bawled in his undisguised brogue, wheeling on the detail.

Theller was just threading his horse back through the rest of the men who were coming out of their saddles when he saw Jones press the bugle to his lips and force out the first four stuttering notes of assembly—

But that was all Jones played.

A bullet smashed into the little trumpeter's chest, propelling him backward over the rear flanks of his horse to sprawl on the ground. Dead where he lay.

On instinct, and feeling he was suddenly about to thrash around in water way over his head, Theller—the infantry officer—kicked his horse into a gallop, lunging away, crossing up the slope.

Bring up the rest of Perry's F Company,
he kept repeating to himself as he left his detail behind while Sergeant Baird deployed them to meet the onrushing warriors.

Bring up that god-blessed F Company.

*   *   *

Young Yellow Wolf raced his horse out of hiding, joining the rest of those warriors following Ollokot and the older warriors the moment that lone Shadow fired those first two shots. A low, broad ridge on their left had been hiding the war party from view until the moment they charged into the open.

While they waited in position behind the ridge, they had watched Vicious Weasel's peace-talkers emerge into the open by riding around the west end of the long ridge, angling east across the bottomground as they hurried to intercept the Treaty Indians and those soldiers long before any threat could near the village. Suddenly they saw the six peace emissaries scattering for cover.

Then the echo of a rifle shot.

His attention had been immediately drawn to that lone rider who did not appear to be a soldier. He was dressed more like one of the settlers, or those who scratched at the ground up in the mountains. The Shadow rode a large white horse and wore a huge cream-colored big-four hat that made him stand out on the hillside. Some of the other warriors with Ollokot said they recognized the rider, at least that hat and horse. Said he was named Chapman—someone who had caused trouble for the Non-Treaty bands.

Yellow Wolf could believe it. The offer of those peace delegates had not been respected. That civilian in the big white hat had fired on their peace party!

“Look there!” one of the others shouted.

Not only did Yellow Wolf spot a small band of soldiers some distance up the slope behind the solitary white man, but even more soldiers were showing up beyond them. Now this was going to be a battle!

“I never thought I would see such a fine day for fighting!” shouted the old man riding beside him.

It was
Otstotpoo,
called Fire Body, an elderly warrior acclaimed as a good marksman, who was grinning at Yellow Wolf.

“I feared we would never again protect our people,” Fire Body hollered over the hoofbeats, riding knee-to-knee beside the young warrior. “Never take up the gun to protect our land!”

“Ho! Do you see that?” Yellow Wolf hollered, pointing at the small band of soldiers reaching the crest of a low hill.

“We've got them stopped!” Fire Body responded with a joyous yelp.

It took no more than four heartbeats for the old warrior to pull back on his reins and halt at the side of the cemetery hill where the
Nee-Me-Poo
buried their dead. From here in the bottom of the valley Fire Body aimed his far-shooting rifle, stolen by one of Sun Necklace's warriors from a settler's house in the last few days. Two counts after firing the weapon, Yellow Wolf watched one of the soldiers topple backward from his horse.

Suddenly the rest of those soldiers were leaping off the backs of their horses, dispersing in a crouch. Yellow Wolf could even faintly hear those frightened Shadows hollering to one another, they were so close already.

“I got the first one!” Fire Body cheered lustily. “Now, Yellow Wolf—you shoot one too!”

*   *   *

After sending Lieutenant Theller ahead with his advance guard, Captain David Perry rode at the van of the march as he brought the rest of the column down the undulating slope for the creek bottom. The citizen volunteers rode right on his tail. Forty yards behind them came F Company. Another interval of forty yards found Trimble and his H Company bringing up the rear of the march.

More than two miles down from the summit, after descending something on the order of a mile after leaving Mrs. Benedict behind to fend for herself until they finished with the hostiles, the head of the column emerged from a narrow ravine. Below them lay the widening canyon of White Bird Creek—and that meant they could well bump into some camp guards or the village itself at any time now. Day had broken.

“Halt!” he shouted, throwing up his arm.

As the column clattered to a halt behind him, he circled back around the knot of Shearer's volunteers to deliver his orders to Joel G. Trimble. “Pass the word along, Major,” he began, using Trimble's brevet rank. “The noncoms are to see that the men have stripped off their overcoats and have them tied behind their saddles. Company sergeants must confirm that every soldier has his carbine loaded.”

Then Perry reined about and returned to the front of the column. He kneaded a sore calf with one hand, finding the muscle cramped from the strain required of his tensed, stiffened legs while they were descending one sharp slope after another since resuming the march at four o'clock that morning.

From this vantage point Perry could see how the well-worn wagon road looped itself down the steep southwest side of White Bird Hill before it reached the valley itself. This was the only road leading up to the Camas Prairie, the route the Salmon River settlers relied upon in traveling to and from those settlements of Grangeville and Mount Idaho, to Lewiston far beyond.

To Perry's right, the west wall of the canyon rose abruptly to great heights. No chance of the hostiles escaping around his men there. And beyond the bottomground lay the Salmon River, still out of sight. To his left, looking east, the winding course of White Bird Creek spilled down grassy slopes sparsely dotted with timber, velvet hillsides scarred with erosion ravines thick with brush.

Gazing into the valley, Perry believed the village must lie right where the creek joined the Salmon. Between here and there, only White Bird Hill itself presented an obstacle to them now. Its mass appeared to rise right across the route he had chosen for their advance on the enemy camp.

A long, irregular shadow crossing its top indicated that the knoll must be split in half by a deep ravine. Just beyond that left half of the ridge lay the tree-lined banks of the creek—

It was an immediate reflex action: jabbing his spurs into the horse's ribs the instant he heard that first shot echo beyond the hill. As he reached the top of the crest on his heaving mount, Perry not only heard a second shot but also recognized that it was the civilian named Chapman who was firing at a half-dozen warriors in the mid-distance.

While the rest of the two companies continued up the long slope behind him, the captain watched the scene unfold below him in that rippled bottomground surrounded by broken ridges and the slopes of a series of low hills high enough to conceal the enemy camp, if not its full complement of warriors.

Ahead and slightly off to the left Perry spotted more than two dozen of the Nez Perce streaming out of hiding for Theller, who had halted his advance guard. Their horses appeared skittish as the nervous men milled around their leader.… He was probably in the process of ordering them to dismount to fight those oncoming warriors, holding them back by forming a thin line of skirmishers.

Suddenly one of Theller's riders was knocked off his horse. The rest quickly vaulted out of their saddles as if stung by a swarm of wasps. Almost half of the detail's horses wheeled about and whipped away from the troopers who failed to hang onto the frightened animals when they dropped to the ground.

Behind Theller, who remained mounted, the rest of his men still gripped their reins, not yet splitting out with every fourth trooper attempting to manhandle the mounts to the rear.

He doesn't have enough men to spare,
Perry brooded angrily, sawing his mount around and spotting the closest noncom.

“Sergeant!” the captain called. “Prepare the rest of F Company to make a charge!”

“You're leading us yourself, sir?” asked Sergeant Patrick Gunn.

“Damn right,” the captain growled. “I'm leading you in there, and Captain Trimble will bring H Company on our rear.”

As he reined his horse around in a half-circle to find how Theller's detail was bunching on the east slope of that low hill, from the corner of his left eye Perry noticed the civilians break away from his column with an exuberant whoop. The ten of them were bellowing lustily as they clambered over the low rise and on down the gentle descent into the bottom-ground, bound for Theller's position even as the lieutenant was turning his horse around and racing back for the head of the column above him.

Perry twisted around in the saddle, finding that Trimble had the men of H Troop arrayed in a compact column of eights in anticipation of their charge to support Theller's detachment—

Just then the noisy clatter of small arms yanked his attention completely to the right. Small carbines, repeaters … Indian weapons interspersed with the booming reverberation of old muzzleloaders. The cloaking trees and brushy ravine bottom suddenly belched even more riders tearing their way at a fury, their ponies lunging across the grassy bottomground toward White Bird Hill.

In no more than a matter of seconds, Perry fretted, Theller's men would damn well be swallowed up and overrun!

Chapter 35

June 17, 1877

As the ground below him began to boil with warriors, Ad Chapman reined up and did his best to count the redskins the way a cattleman tallied by fives, curling a finger down for every handful he added up. To his reckoning, a little more than fifty horsemen had come to fight the soldiers this day.

So when he accounted for both those friendly Nez Perce trackers and George Shearer's volunteers being thrown in with Colonel Perry's soldiers, that meant they had these damnable Non-Treaties on the downside of two-to-one odds.

Just beyond those naked horsemen in his front, Chapman could make out some of the pale lodges through the leafy trees, what with the mist beginning to burn off. From the looks of things, Ad figured the crazy bastards had pitched camp no more than a mile south of the place he had sold to John Manuel back in '74.

Glancing back across the slope, Chapman noticed about half of the soldiers heading down to reinforce that small detachment whom the warriors were just then sweeping around to flank. Wheeling left front into line, most of the reinforcements were yanking up their Springfields while a few of the noncoms were shoving their carbines back out of the way on their shoulder slings and drawing their long-barreled service revolvers from the mule-eared holsters angled sharply across their hipbones.

Farther back on the heights, the remaining half of Perry's men were just then moving out in eights, staying tightly bunched as they started down the slope.

From the edge of a large clump of brush where he remained in the saddle, Chapman spotted the ten volunteers suddenly rein around in their tracks, spurring back for the east end of the long ridge behind George Shearer, all of them coming his way.

“That's the way to pluck the daisy, boys!” he whooped, waving his rifle in the air as the militia came on at a gallop.

A bullet hissed past Chapman's ear, yanking him around with a jerk, surprised to find a pair of warriors who had dismounted nearby. One of them held their two ponies while the other aimed his rifle for a second shot in Chapman's direction. No small carbine, that had to be—some sort of buffalo gun to reach across the distance. That second bullet whined past him, close enough to make his asshole pucker. He kicked his horse in the ribs and sawed the reins hard to the right. Time to bust the hell out of that big gun's range.