Lay the Mountains Low (26 page)

“I have a ride for you,” offered this warrior, who was also called
Mimpow Owyeen
, or Wounded Mouth. “If you want to come with me.”

Running his tongue around inside his mouth, Yellow Wolf did not think his belly was particularly hungry for
breakfast. He squinted up at the older man, a father whose son was a Christian living on the reservation. “All right. Where do you want to ride this morning?”

“We will call out some other young men,”
Weesculatat
replied. “No older fighters—just young men like you. And we will go ride over to see who we might find along the Shadow road out on the prairie. There might be some horses, or rifles, maybe some fighting, too, if we catch anyone out.”

By the time
Weesculatat
and Yellow Wolf had moved through camp, calling out to other young men still a little groggy from their long night's celebration, two-times-ten riders were, strung out in a crude V that passed right on by the soldier camp.

“See down the road!”
Weesculatat
shouted, waving the arm that he pointed south across the prairie. The older man announced, “We have two in the hand!”

Yipping like playful coyote pups setting off to chase and harass a jackrabbit across a grassy meadow, a handful of the young warriors kicked their ponies into a gallop, reining for the pair of
suapies.

“You aren't going, Yellow Wolf?”
Weesculatat
asked.

“No,” and he shook his head as the pair of distant horsemen spurred their horses into a terrified sprint, both men lying low in the saddle and whipping their animals without mercy. “There are already enough to see to those unlucky soldiers. I killed two of my own yesterday.”

“This will be great fun to watch,”
Weesculatat
said as Yellow Wolf turned on the back of his pony to peer across the great heaving expanse of the prairie.

Surely there had to be a better game than this. What with all those Shadows holed up in the two settlements nearby, with so many
suapies
hunkered down in their gopher burrows on the Cottonwood, there had to be better sport for a real fighting man than wiping out two lonely mail carriers caught unawares and in the open.

It wasn't long before the soldier chief sent out some men who halted their horses, aimed their rifles toward the six
warriors closing the gap on the two horsemen, and fired three volleys.

It was easy to see how the soldiers aimed over the heads of those two oncoming riders so their bullets would land in front of the charging warriors.
Weesculatat
and the five others were just breaking off their chase when the breath caught in Yellow Wolf's chest.

“Now that's what I call a challenge for a fighting man!” he suddenly announced with a shrill cry, every muscle in his body tensing with anticipation. “See who is coming now!”

At the far sweep of grassy prairie, more riders just made their appearance, advancing from the southeast.

“Are they more
suapies
?” asked
Weesculatat
.

“I don't think so,” Yellow Wolf replied, one hand tensing on the reins, the other gripping the hardwood carbine he had captured at the White Bird fight. “None of them are dressed the same, and they are coming from the Shadow settlements.”

“Hi-yiii!
” the older warrior shrieked exuberantly. “Yes, this is far better for a fighting man!”

Two Moons reined up beside
Ollokot
in a cloud of dust their horses kicked up with their hooves. “String out!” Two Moons ordered loudly to the rest, all five-times-ten of the young men arrayed along the white man's road. “String out and make a broad line!”

Yellow Wolf agreed, “Yes—we will charge into them and break them up!”

By the time Two Moons and
Ollokot
got their fifty-plus warriors started off the road and onto the long sweep of rolling grassland, Yellow Wolf began to quickly tally the enemy. There were three fingers less than two-times-ten. It would be interesting to see when the Shadows reined up in a hurry as they spotted the warriors, turned around, and fled back for their settlement barricades. But … the horsemen kept coming! Instead of halting and wheeling about on their heels, the white men began to spread out, just as
Ollokot
's warriors were doing in a wide front.

“What trick do you think they are up to?”
Weesculatat
asked.

Yellow Wolf quickly looked over his shoulder, seeing how the mail carriers were just then reaching the soldiers sent out to rescue them and all were retreating to the rifle pits dug around the white man's buildings raised at Cottonwood. Still, there weren't any soldiers coming out to show themselves and lay down a cover fire to protect this bigger group of Shadows.

“I don't think they have a trick to play on us at all,” Yellow Wolf said as he saw how the horseman in the center was waving and wildly gesturing while the entire line of white men suddenly kicked their horses into a frenzied sprint. “They are going to try to beat us to the soldiers' gopher burrows.”

Weesculatat
flicked a look over his shoulder as their ponies lunged into a low, grassy swale. “It is a long way to race us to safety!”

Yellow Wolf quickly glanced at the distance. Many, many bullet flights to the hollows. If the soldiers did not come out to lay down some cover,
Ollokot
's war party could stop the outnumbered Shadows and cut them up one at a time.

Faint sounds erupted from the throats of those white horsemen as they raced closer and closer, heading on a collision course with the wide band of warriors. Then the first of their guns popped, a puff of smoke appearing at the muzzle of a belt gun, a gray mist whipped away behind the rider. Others fired, and Yellow Wolf heard the first snarl of a bullet as it sang past him. On either side of him, those who had firearms put them to use—more for noise and bluster than to do any good atop a racing horse.

Yellow Wolf hoped the others would not use up too much of their hard-won ammunition in such frivolous sport. They would need those bullets when the tough killing began. Better to save their cartridges until they were sure of hitting a target—

Yelling at the top of his lungs, Yellow Wolf swung his
kopluts
, that short hardwood war club, at the closest Shadow the moment both lines converged on the slope leading out of that low, grassy swale. In an instant the white men were beyond them, through the warriors and on their way to the soldier hollows.

Immediately all the warriors swung their ponies around in broad, sweeping curves, each rider leaning hard to the inside as he brought his horse tearing in an arch that nearly toppled a handful of the Nez Perce as they barely avoided colliding with one another. With yips and howls and screeches, too, they were after the galloping Shadows in a heartbeat, racing after the rumps of those fleeing horses, making as much noise as they could.

Yellow Wolf's throat was a little sore by the time he saw the first of the white men's horses stumble and pitch its rider into the grass. Another horseman quickly reined aside and took the dismounted Shadow up behind him.

“Yes!”
Weesculatat
cried. “Aim for their horses! Aim for their horses!”

“Put them on foot!” came the order from Two Moons.

Almost immediately another Shadow horse stumbled; then it kicked and bucked, throwing its rider clear before it settled onto the ground.

Up ahead of the white men, one of them had reached the top of a low hill where he threw himself out of the saddle and was waving with an arm that brandished a repeater. Yellow Wolf had a lever-action carbine like that in his mother's lodge. But she was with Looking Glass's people. How he wished he had that repeater now instead of this single-shot
suapie
gun.

One by one the rest of the white men were leaping off their horses around that first man, two of them lunging up on foot, their horses already down in the swale behind them.

“Yi-yi-yiiii!”
Yellow Wolf yipped, his blood running hot.

Hot because they had the Shadows stopped on the brow of that low hill and the white men were going no farther. If those few horsemen had kept on riding, chances were very
good most of them could have made it on into the soldier burrows.

But, as it was,
Ollokot
's warriors could now take their time and have some fun wiping out these foolish whites.

S
INCE
putting Mount Idaho behind them, Lieutenant Lew Wilmot and the other volunteers who rode with Captain D. B. Randall had done their best to save the strength of their horses. While he knew every man around him wanted nothing less than to gallop full-out for that soldier camp at Cottonwood Station, they nonetheless reined in then-mounts as they descended to the rolling prairie. No more than a fast walk. Save the horses' strength for when it was really needed.

But the endurance of the animals beneath them wasn't the only worry troubling Wilmot. As he looked around him, Lew quickly tallied the odds against this band of civilians if they did have to make a running fight of it. He himself had been up against it with the Indians more than once, but … besides Randall and three more, none of the other twelve had ever found themselves in an Indian fight.

As he looked around at the group tightly bunched behind their leaders, Lew realized there wasn't a good shot among them. Make no mistake, he thought: The odds were in favor of the Nez Perce who had cleaned up every command sent against them so far.

“You see the smoke, D. B.?” Wilmot asked. He had just spotted the signal fires burning atop Cottonwood Butte, which straddled the divide.

“Seen it a minute ago,” Randall said. “Likely that's them Injuns talking about those soldiers down below 'em.”

Lew was still brooding on the uncertain odds stacked against them if they ran into trouble after covering some two-thirds of the distance to Norton's ranch—when Wilmot's eyes caught some distant movement on the sweep of prairie far off in their advance, a little to their right.

“D. B., you look at all that ahead of us; I think we need
to hold up a minute,” Lew suggested to the man riding just ahead of him.

“All right,” Randall agreed. “Give us a minute to figger out what all this is.”

“Lookit all them horses!” Ben Evans cried behind him.

The herd slowly undulating off the last slope of the divide and pouring onto the prairie was impressive in size, to say the least. But it wasn't those Nez Perce horses that held Lew Wilmot's attention. It was those fighting men who suddenly popped up, right out of the low swale about halfway between Randall's volunteers and their village on the move.

“Here, Lew! Look for your own self.”

Turning, Wilmot found James Cearly handing him a small looking glass. Lew quickly twisted the outer section until the distant figures slipped into focus. Then he twisted it back, taking the advancing horsemen out of focus as he concentrated on the distant forms among the structures that were Cottonwood Station. The house, barn, and outbuildings appeared clearly, and all those soldiers rising out of their rifle pits, too, at least a hundred of them, watching, what was about to happen. Watching, and waiting.

“Have a look, D. B.” Wilmot jabbed the spyglass at Randall. “We don't stand a chance of getting to Cottonwood now.”

As their leader was studying the distance, most of the untried men behind Wilmot were shifting nervously in their saddles, an uneasy banter and hollow bravado coming over them as they stared at the distant line of more than a hundred-fifty warriors just then stringing itself into a wide but uneven V, its long side adhering to the Mount Idaho Road, the other angling across the pitch and heave of the Camas Prairie itself.

“While we still got time, we oughtta turn around for the barricades,” Lew proposed.

“No!” James Cearly screeched like a bull calf with its bangers tangled in some cat claw.

“I ain't never been yeller!” cried Frank A. Fenn,
^*
elected sergeant of their volunteer company just that morning.

“If we ride back to our families now, nobody's gonna say we was yellow,” Wilmot protested, refusing to listen to their angry protests. “Besides, that village is headed in the direction of our towns. Don't you boys figger we oughtta protect our families?”

“G' won back now if you don't wanna get in on the fighting, Lew,” Cearly snapped, edging his horse up on the other side of Randall's.

Even young Alonzo B. Leland, the Lewiston
Teller
editor's son, refused to consider retreat while they still had the chance. “Captain Randall, you can lead the rest of us through to the soldiers. I know you can.”

“That's right, Captain!” Cearly agreed boldly. “If anybody can get us through, you can.”

Lew pleaded one more time, “We've all got families to protect—”

But Randall sternly interrupted, “Helping them soldiers stop those Injuns is the best way I know of protecting our families back at Mount Idaho.”

His eyes darting across the rolling sea of tall grass, Wilmot grabbed Randall's elbow with one hand, pointing with his right arm. “Lookit that hill way off there to the left. We got time to make it there. That's the kind of place where we can make a stand, D. B. Just tall enough, let the Indians attack us there, we can wait for the soldiers to come out and drive 'em off—”

“No,” Randall growled, his eyes squinting testily. “I'll get everyone through to Cottonwood like I promised.” Then he turned away from Lew, looking at James Cearly. “Jim—I think it's time you took over for Lew. I need someone I can count on behind me, so you're lieutenant of this outfit now.”

Most of the group hooted and hollered like schoolboys on a summer's lark down to the fishing hole. Wilmot
quickly glanced around at them—looking into those eager faces, realizing there wasn't a single one of them who knew what they were about to plunge themselves into.