Reap the Whirlwind (25 page)

“What of you, General? How are you faring?”

“Me?” Crook asked, attempting to grin. “I’m fit as can be. In fact, while you get this expedition to bivouac for the night and get a pot of coffee going for me—I’m going out to look for something to add to my collection of bird’s eggs.”

“
I
f you want, I’ll ride on back and see what held up the column, Cap’n,” Seamus offered, the rain battering his shapeless hat.

Henry Noyes peered up at the tall Irishman from under his soggy brim. “No, that won’t be necessary, Mr. Donegan. We’ll all go back together.” He rose slowly from the patch of ground he had kept somewhat dry by crouching there at the edge of the willows under his gum poncho. “With the rain, our fishing’s gone to hell, anyway. No sense in any of us staying put, sitting out the storm while we could be doing something.”

“Like riding?”

Without answering the scout, Noyes turned away to the ten soldiers who were already drawing near when they saw their company commander getting to his feet. Behind them the mounts stood hipshot, heads hung, ears flicking with every hard pelt of the cold, wad-sized raindrops hurled down from the low sky.

“Tighten your cinches and prepare to mount.”

“We’re going somewhere, Captain?” asked Lieutenant Fred W. Kingsbury.

“To find out what’s happened with the column, men. Even with this storm, Mr. Donegan says they should have been here by now.”

Seamus glanced at the place the sun was falling, a pale blotch of light barely atop the peaks behind the bruised clouds. “A long, long time ago, Cap’n.”

“Lead us on, Mr. Donegan.”

“Aye, Cap’n.”

The storm eventually rolled on east, yet left behind a cold wind slinking down from those glaciers in the Big Horns behind the dozen riders. As twilight fell, the Irishman could not help shivering, pulling his collar up beneath the soggy brim of his hat as they plodded east across this high land shrouded in clouds and gloom.

He tried to choose the best path for their weary horses, the ground grown slick and soft, even at the divide they crossed in dropping over to the Prairie Dog. It was nigh onto slap dark by the time Seamus spied the first of the bivouac’s fires in the foggy distance. For some reason Crook was way off course, too far north and east. Probably realized it too late and had hunkered his men down here in the rain, Seamus surmised. Likely, though, the sort of man Crook was, the general hadn’t even told his aides that he had made a mistake. Hell, Crook was from the old school: an officer never admitted a mistake. Such an admission would make him lose face before his men. Cause the entire command to lose confidence in the old man. That sort of candor could seriously affect morale.

Crook’s silence about his error was likely every bit as dangerous as was the position the general had put his expedition in—here in the heart of enemy country. Having
brought them to the Tongue River. In the dark. Not knowing where the hell he really was.

But there would always be morning, Donegan knew.

Seamus took Noyes and his ten soldiers half a mile closer toward the dim, murky firelight before halting them out in the dark.

“Why are you stopping us here?” Noyes demanded. “We can see the fires. Our column is camped right over there.”

“That’s plain as paint, Cap’n,” Donegan admitted. “But I got a pretty good idea what Crook will do in putting out pickets and a running guard tonight. Just like he did last winter. You remember, Cap’n.”

Noyes bristled, forced to recall that stain upon his record when he had allowed his men to unsaddle and prepare coffee while two other companies pitched into the enemy’s village, sorely in need of reinforcement.

The officer’s eyes narrowed, and that broom-bristle mustache twitched. “What are you suggesting, Mr. Scout?”

“We sit out the night here.”

Noyes guffawed, raw and sharp. “Sit out the night? Here? We’re all soaked and hungry, Irishman. In that camp are tents and dry blankets and fires to warm us.”

“We can light our own fires,” he replied. “I’m telling you it ain’t safe to ride in there now. Telling you we oughtta go back to that draw we come out two hundred yards back.”

“Why you say it isn’t safe for us to go on?”

Donegan stared at the distant pricks of firelight through the drizzly fog as he explained. “Because I don’t want to be the first man killed on this expedition.”

“Killed?”

“Yes. Some green shave-tail shivering out there on picket duty, Cap’n. Not a one of ’em doesn’t know we’re in the heart of Injin country. Crook will have ’em all on alert tonight. Then in we come riding—bold as brass. No, sir. Go on ahead, you choose to, Cap’n Noyes. All you fellas—go right ahead and be the first men shot by some itchy-fingered shave-tail.”

The ten grumbled and whispered behind Noyes as the captain quickly brooded on it.

“All right, Irishman,” he snarled, swiping a drop of rain from the end of his pale nose. “Find us that ravine so we can make our own miserable little camp for the night.”

“We’ll ride on in come morning,” Donegan added.

“Damn right we will, Irishman. Come morning—when our scout doesn’t think we’ll be mistaken for hostiles.”

It was good to have the power of the sacred Buffalo Hat in their camp once more, Wooden Leg cheered.

Like the Seven Arrows of the Southern Shahiyena, the Hat would provide the protection of the Everywhere Spirit over this gathering of the Northern Shahiyena. With a little solemnity and much joyful celebration, Charcoal Bear had brought it to their first camp on Rosebud Creek. With this great medicine man of the Northern Shahiyena came the tribal medicine lodge as well as other sacred relics of Wooden Leg’s people.

For their second encampment farther up the Rosebud, they chose the place where in recent years a despairing woman had climbed eastward up a coulee and found a tree, where she hanged herself. It was a thing not talked about among his people. To hang—so that the spirit could not free itself from her mouth. Suicide was something an Indian did not understand.

Wooden Leg was so young then, but even with the wisdom he had gained in the years since, he could not begin to comprehend. What sort of madness would lead the woman to condemn her spirit to such everlasting death? To trap her spirit forever in her lifeless body—when it could not be freed to walk the Star Road to Seyan? What sort of agony of the heart would lead a young woman to such madness?

At this second camp an old, half-blind man tottered through the village, crying out his news that scouts had seen Raven People spying on their camp.

“Were the Crows looking to steal our horses?” Wooden Leg asked his good friend, Little Hawk. He was not much older than Wooden Leg, yet was already a proven warrior in Charcoal Bear’s band—one of those sworn to protect the Buffalo Hat.

“No. These Crow did not leave their villages west of
here to steal horses,” Little Hawk replied. “These are Crow scouts for the soldiers marching along the Elk River. I have heard Lakota scouts say they have even seen the mysterious houses that walk on the water, smoke pouring from two great mouths above them.”

“What wondrous things the white man brings to this land!” Wooden Leg exclaimed.

“But—the white man steals much more than he brings. Do not forget that, my friend.”

At the next camp on the mouth of Green Leaf Creek, more Shahiyena arrived from the reservations. They brought confirmation of the scouts’ reports.

“Many, many soldiers are being sent against us. From the west. The east. And soldiers are marching from the south.”

Here along the west bank of the Rosebud the great Hunkpapa medicine man called for the annual sun dance. While only the Hunkpapa participated in the dancing and sacrifice, thousands gathered to watch and pray. By the afternoon of the fourth day, Wooden Leg tired of watching and praying, so he rode south to a site he remembered from his boyhood.

At the base of the tall hills he came to the deer medicine rocks where his father first brought him as a youngster who could barely ride on his own. Later Wooden Leg had made a second journey to these sacred painted rocks when he had learned some of the important lessons in a man’s life. And now, at last, he was coming as a young warrior who had taken a vow to protect the lives of his people by laying down his own.

It was one of the most important oaths a young man of the Shahiyena could give before the sky and the Everywhere Spirit.

Dismounting there beneath the two towers of sandstone rock, where hunters of old would come before they went in search of deer and sometimes antelope, Wooden Leg went to stand between the two immense columns. Closing his eyes, he raised his face to the sun, spreading his arms, and asked for strength in his body, strength for his will. And wind to last him as long as this final fight with the white man might take.

Minutes later, as he opened his eyes, staring up between the two tall towers of sandstone, a long blackened streamer of dark clouds drifted across the sun, blotted out the afternoon’s light. And a voice told Wooden Leg to return to camp.

There at the Hunkpapa sun dance arbor, the voice told him—the Everywhere Spirit was already delivering His message of victory over the soldiers.

Moon of Fat Horses

T
he soldiers would fall into camp.

So it was foretold in Sitting Bull’s prophetic vision.

Having suffered for three days and nights, on the fourth the Hunkpapa medicine man had fallen into a deep sleep, his spirit taken to be with the Lakota’s Great Mystery. Wakan Tanka told the Bull that He was giving those soldiers to his red children because the white man had failed to listen to Him.

Headfirst, the soldiers would fall into camp.

A wild celebration had begun that night.

But Wooden Leg had already departed the great encampment before sunrise that first day when the Hunkpapa shaman sat staring at the sun as Black Moon pricked fifty pieces of flesh from each arm.

With ten other hunters the young warrior had gone in search of buffalo. Riding east, they crossed out of the valley of the Rosebud and climbed the divide that took them into the valley of the Tongue, where they turned south, still looking for some sign of a herd.

“Too many have come this way leaving the agencies,” Lame Sioux said, disgusted that they had seen no deer, elk, or antelope to hunt.

“Yes,” agreed Crooked Nose. “They have driven the game from this part of the country.”

Wooden Leg suggested, “I think we need to go farther south to find buffalo.”

“Yes, let’s go south!” echoed Little Shield.

Near Hanging Woman Creek they finally ran upon a small herd of less than half a hundred. That afternoon they killed three cows and a young bull. Nearby, the young warriors discovered a scaffold that had been desecrated, robbed of the dead warrior’s most valued possessions. Nothing remained of the body or the poles, only the remnants of an old buffalo robe and some shreds of blue blanket. There was no way for any of them to know if it had been a Lakota warrior or a People of the Raven burial.

Then the hunters decided to cross over to the Powder River in search of a larger herd. In scouting ahead Lame Sioux crawled to the top of a hill to scan the country through which they would have to pass. He signaled excitedly—a soldier camp! The other ten came quickly up the slope and dropped to their bellies to have a look for themselves.

“I want to have a closer look,” Wooden Leg said to the rest after studying the distant tents, and all those horses, his heart pounding.

“Me too,” Crooked Nose said.

But Little Shield cautioned, “We must make ready. And go on foot.”

“Yes, we should conceal our ponies very carefully,” Lame Sioux replied.

“I remember a place,” Wooden Leg declared. “We can hide the ponies and dress for our stalk on the soldier camp.”

When they had made their medicine and completed their toilet, painting themselves and bringing out their talismans, the eleven crept over the hills and through the brush on foot to have a closer inspection of the soldier camp under the cover of darkness. It took half the night to make their noiseless approach through the rugged coulees and along the creekbanks.

“I don’t see them anymore!” Crooked Nose suddenly
groaned when they again reached the hill where they had been that afternoon.

“Is this the right place?” Yellow Eagle asked.

“Yes—I remember! This is where I first saw the soldiers!” Lame Sioux protested.

Wooden Leg wanted to know, “Where did they go while we have been making our stalk?”

With nothing else for them to do now in the cold and rainy darkness, the young warriors decided to return to their ponies and sleep until dawn.

The late-spring sky still threatened overhead as the eleven awoke before sunrise. Now they rode without caution right to where the soldiers had last been seen and dismounted to prowl over the immense campsite. The carcass of a butchered animal was the first thing to interest Wooden Leg—one of the white man’s spotted buffalo. With his knife he and most of the others pared off slices of meat still clinging to its bones. These they warmed in the coals of several fires they stirred back to life.