Lay the Mountains Low (76 page)

Running over the order of battle in his mind once more, Gibbon realized he had done just that hundreds of times since leaving the wagons and horses five miles behind.

Everything was ready, he told himself. A flawless plan that would end this Nez Perce war here and now.

All Colonel John Gibbon had to wait on now was the coming of this glorious day.

W
A
-W
A
-M
AI
-K
HAL
, 1877

 

BY TELEGRAPH

—

Indian News—Very Serious Trouble in Texas.

—

THE INDIANS.

—

Shooting Match at Fort Hall.

FORT HALL INDIAN AGENCY, August 2.—A band of Indians shot two teamsters at this agency this morning, one seriously and the other slightly, but neither mortally. The shooting was done under the excitement caused by a rumor that hostile Indians were approaching the agency. The shooting was an individual act and condemned by all the Indians in the agency. Agent Donaldson immediately called together the head Indians in council, who condemned the act and sent men in pursuit of the Indians who had fled. They have assured the agent that they shall be caught and brought back and they will guard against any recurrence of the kind. Everything is quiet and peaceful now.

“B
E CAREFUL, OLD MAN
,”
SHE WHISPERED TO HIM
.

Natalekin
leaned over in the dark, his cold, stiff joints paining him, and touched her wrinkled face with his fingertips. He could not really see her for the darkness and their fire all but dead now. But he would know the feel of her face anywhere. This would be their fifty-first winter together. Although his rheumy eyes had been growing more and more dim with every summer,
Natalekin
had no doubt he could pick her out of a lodge filled with women.

She patted the back of his hand as she rolled onto her
side. He rocked back, slivers of ice stabbing his joints. The damp cold of this Place of the Ground Squirrels had seeped clear down to his marrow. Dragging on the worn, greasy capote,
Natalekin
shuffled around the firepit for that tall, graying triangle that indicated the doorway of their darkened lodge.

Outside at the edge of the brush where he quickly watered the ground, he found that the mist was no longer gray beneath the cover of night. Already that dense fog rising off the creek, clinging to the tall willow, and scudding along the ground between the lodges was beginning to shine with a whitish hue, announcing the coming of first light far to the east behind that barren plateau beyond the camp.

Natalekin
heard the old pony snuffle in recognition as he approached, even before he spotted the animal tied there to the fourth stake left of the doorway or it saw him. One cold, throbbing hand followed the picket rope from its jaw down to the stake, untied it clumsily, then took a deep breath. It always hurt to climb atop this steady, old horse. He caught his breath again when he was on its back, letting the waves of cold pain wash through him and out again. A little colder every morning, this agony of growing old became like icy lances stabbing through his joints.

Wiping the hot tears from his eyes at that diminishing pain,
Natalekin
pulled the single rein about and nudged the old pony into motion. He blinked to help clear his foggy eyes of everything that prevented him from seeing what little his old eyes could still see while the animal led him past an old woman trudging between the lodges with her loads of firewood. Three others were already hunched over, starting life anew in cooking pits dug outside their lodges. On down to the shallow creek his old horse led him among the buffalo-hide covers and a few of those tall, bare cones of freshly peeled lodgepoles, stacked in their timeless hourglass shape, drying for their journey to the buffalo country.

At the creek's edge, the horse did not falter as it stepped into the water with a shocking splash to his bare legs. Together they parted the thick, drifting fog bank that seeped
along the low, cold, damp places near this north end of the camp, clinging tenaciously to the head-high willow as the pony carried him into the north end of that boggy slough tucked against the base of the nearby hillside where he would find the herd.

Natalekin
did not have to awaken so early of a morning just to bring his handful of horses down to water. Chances were they would wander down to the creek on their own, if they hadn't already. But he was an old man and couldn't sleep very well, or very much, anymore. Restless especially when the dark and the damp penetrated his bones with all the more bite. Better to be up and moving about, sensing a little warmth creep back into his body with his spare and economical movements—

Dragging back on that single rein,
Natalekin
halted the horse, letting the quiet, cold water settle around his bare ankles as he stared into the darkness. Then rubbed his dimly seeing, watery eyes with his fingertips. How far away was that?

He squinted, then shifted his head slowly from side to side, attempting to make out the dim forms. These were not horses he saw.

Quickly glancing up the grassy hillside, he could make out no more than the dark squirming of the herd on the slope above. His eyes came back down to the willows ahead. Had some of the horses wandered down into the creek bottom to water or graze on the tall, lush grasses sheltered by the thick banks of willow?

Or was it a prowling coyote? For the past two nights they had bayed and yipped from the hillsides at the camp dogs—

There! Now that was a sound he knew did not belong to a horse. Or a scavaging coyote, either. That breathy rasp, something just sort of a cough. These were hot horses. After rubbing his eyes again, he nudged the pony forward another few steps. Ten horse lengths away, no—less than that now. He could see the first three of them. Gradually he made out even more of them, nothing but shapes. Dim figures, mansized and -shaped, slowly taking form out of the swirling
fog snagged above this boggy mire where the creek slowed down and backed itself against the side of the hill.

Perhaps these strangers were those spies the chiefs said were keeping an eye on their camp yesterday. Shadows from the Bitterroot valley who had traded with the Non-Treaty bands, everything from whiskey to bullets. Belief was that such white men had followed the village over the mountains and down to this place—perhaps to do even more trading.

But he did not want them bothering the horses, did not want the strangers to even make an attempt to cut out a few of the
Nee-Me-Poo
ponies they would take back to their towns and ranches in the Bitterroot because the
Nee-Me-Poo
had so many—

Natalekin
heard the low voices. Unable to understand any of the words, he could nonetheless understand the harsh tone—like a knife blade grating across a stone—and thereby understood the meaning. These were not spies. Nor were they here to strike up some trading. These Shadows had indeed come to steal.

“Go away!” he called to them as he leaned forward on his pony.

Fuzzy and dreamlike—how he watched the yellow tongues of fire spew from the muzzles of those guns, puffs of gray, gauzy smoke drifting up from the mouths of each one, even before his weakened, arthritic body snapped back, back … back again with the terrible impact of each lead bullet.

His eyes were open as he spilled off the back of the pony, feeling the animal twist to the side, rising slightly on its hind legs as its rider tumbled into the waist-deep creek. Flat on his back on the stream bottom, staring up through the dark water. Eyes frozen, staring at the way the fog skimmed along the creek's surface just above him. Hearing the hollow, muted reverberations of those many guns that quickly answered the ones that had killed him. Watching the dark, shadowy figures move past, legs lunging, the water
churning with their hurried passage as they advanced on the village. But from here he could do nothing.

Realizing, too, he had no worry about smothering here at the bottom of the creek as the gentle current nudged him slowly around, easing his body downstream. A body that no longer ached.

Natalekin
realized he had already begun the journey of death.

F
IRST
Lieutenant James H. Bradley had brought his left wing of the attack into these tall willows at the bottom of the hill. He commanded no company of his own here; instead, he was the only officer leading both the cavalrymen and Catlin's thirty-four volunteers from the Bitterroot valley. Stepping off the low cutbank, he had quietly plunged into the frigid water that nearly rose to his crotch, so shockingly cold it robbed him of breath for a moment.

The rest came off the bank behind him, stretched out to right and left.

Since witnessing the Custer dead last summer, the lieutenant had been compiling his memoirs of that Great Sioux War. In fact, the day before departing Fort Shaw for the Bitterroot valley, he had completed his remembrances of 26 June 1876—the day before that terrible Tuesday when he had been the first to discover that gruesome field of death.
*

But what jarred him now was that he had intended to write another letter to his sweet Miss Mary waiting back at Fort Shaw, some word before he found himself caught up in finding this village. The last he had sent her was written at twilight back on the third of August, from Missoula City
before Gibbon decided to march after the Nez Perce with an undermanned force.

It has not yet transpired what we are to do, but it is probable we will remain inactive for a few days till Howard comes up from the west side of the mountains and the 2nd Cavalry battalion from the Yellowstone, and then we will push for the Indians.

Events had a way of catching up a man and hurtling him along with them. Maybe Gibbon was smarting at all the criticism Rawn was taking for his lack of action up the Lolo. That reflected on the Seventh Infantry. Or maybe the colonel was simply tired of all the rumors of his overcaution during the campaign of 1876. For the last year that had reflected on John Gibbon himself.

Bradley was a soldier. A good soldier. Yet the husband and father in him now made him regret not sending a letter back from Stevensville or Corvallis, some word sent with a civilian courier, just a note to tell her where they were going and what they were about.

As James Bradley stepped off the edge of the bank into the cold water, he had a remembrance of how he had ended that letter already on its way to his Miss Mary.

Kisses for the babies and love for yourself

Most of Catlin's civilians were gathered right behind him at his elbow as they slowly waded toward that last stand of willow shielding them from a certain view of the lodges. Across no more than a half-dozen steps, the water slowly rose past his waist, deeper, too, eventually drenching some of the shorter men clear up to their armpits. They slogged forward at an uneven gait, boots frequently slipping on the uneven creek bottom, shuddering with their cold soaking, parting the stringy mist with each step.

“Hold up!” one of the civilians whispered harshly, and a little too loudly, too, down to his right.

Everyone froze.

“One of 'em comin'!” another voice announced.

“How many?”

“See only one,” a different voice asserted. “On a horse.”

Of a sudden, there he was, taking form behind the gauzy fog. The warrior's pony eased off the far bank into the creek, gingerly picking its way across the rocky bottom, slowly, slowly without the clatter of iron horseshoes. The figure and his horse were swallowed by the dancing mist, then reemerged once more, a few yards closer.

Bradley heard low whispers murmured to his right among the civilians and wanted desperately to call out to them, to order silence. Nothing must spoil their surprise. Catlin's men must goddamn well wait until they heard Gibbon fire that shot announcing their charge into the enemy camp.

Maybe the lone warrior would somehow manage to pass on by them, if the civilians just stayed quiet enough, hunkered down in the willows—let that horseman ease past on his way to the pony herd on the slopes behind them. Then Bradley saw the rider wasn't going to bypass them unawares. The warrior stopped, cocking his head this way, then that.

He'd heard those goddamned volunteers whispering!

Leaning forward, Bradley looked harder than ever, studying the horseman—figuring he really wasn't a warrior at all. Not sitting his pony lithe and agile. It was an old man, nearly white-headed, wrapped in a blanket, maybe a blanket coat.

It surprised the lieutenant when the figure drew one of his legs up, bracing the knee atop the pony's spine, rising and rocking forward as if to have himself a better look at something.
Something?
Hell, the old bugger was trying to get a good look at their line! How could he disable the old man without firing a gun—