Seize the Sky: Son of the Plains-Volume 2 (20 page)

With one end of a woolen thread he had poked through the eye of a needle, Calhoun carefully evened the strand and began his surgery by lancing the blister. But instead of merely pricking the skin, Calhoun drove the needle on through and out the other side so that the woolen thread itself lay in the irritated fluid. In this way he could watch the thread absorb the moisture before pulling the wool strand from the blister.

Lieutenant Charles DeRudio finally piped up, wanting to tell a story about his days fighting under Garibaldi in the Italian army. His fellow officers passed Tom Custer’s whiskey canteen the rounds once more.

This was a time in the west when most men carried
some
whiskey in a saddlebag or possibles pouch, after all—even those who might classify themselves as nondrinkers. John
Barleycorn was the proven specific taken for the “summer cholera” or “prairie dysentery,” really nothing more than bowel cramps often caused by a change in diet or water.

There was a lot of whiskey in that starless camp this night. And somehow that trader’s whiskey made the idea of the coming night march seem not so bad after all.

In his thick, peaty brogue, Keogh sang the words from the popular soldiering ditty currently making the rounds of the western posts. Practically every line brought a chorus of hoots and jeers and guffaws from the rest of his fellows.

On the second time through, the whole bunch joined in, raising a raucous noise down below that dark, fireless bluff.

As the Crows and a handful of Ree scouts lumbered in from the surrounding hills, they could hear the singing in the camp. The nervous scouts had been moving more and
more slowly as the Sioux trail widened and its dust lay deeper, scarred by thousands of travois poles plowing a wide road up the divide into the hulking darkness of the Wolf Mountains.

Cooke ran to fetch Mitch Bouyer when the Crows solemnly rode into Custer’s bivouac and slid tight-lipped from their ponies.

Each man squatted on the ground, still clutching the reins to his pony. Not a word would be spoken until the interpreter arrived. Eerie hung the silence in that end of camp while the young Absaroka trackers sat chewing on their silent, morbid red thoughts, waiting for the half-breed.

“They say they have some things to show you, General,” Bouyer started his translation for Custer. He nodded to Half-Yellow-Face.

From beneath their belts or pockets and out of their simple cotton shirts bought off trader Coleman at the Yellowstone, the Crows pulled hanks of hair still embedded in bloody flesh.

“Wait a minute here!” Custer muttered, squinting beneath the poor starlight. “Striker—bring me a lantern!”

Beneath the candle’s glow Custer could see at last the scouts had brought him the scalps and beards of white men.

Bouyer cleared his throat. “They tell me they run onto a spot where the Sioux were celebrating a recent victory over white soldiers.”

“White soldiers?” Custer’s voice rose, his eyes narrowing on Bouyer in the flickering candlelight. “Where’s the trail heading? Ask them that.”

White-Man-Runs-Him pointed as he growled in Absaroka, his arm thrown up the divide.

“Over the Wolf Mountains.”

“Would the Sioux camp on the Little Horn?”

“
Greasy Grass
, Custer,” Bouyer corrected sullenly, in a whisper. Mitch had read far more in what the Crow had said than he was telling the soldier-chief.

Still, the tone of the half-breed’s voice hadn’t been lost on the Seventh’s commander. “Out with it, Bouyer. There’s something you’re not telling me.”

“Just this,” said the beefy half-breed as he brought his dark eyes to square on Custer. “If the Sioux are celebrating a victory over some soldiers, it’s only going to make ’em full of spit and vinegar to have a go at your small bunch. I figure they’ve whipped that bigger outfit the Sun Dance camp drawings told us about today.”

“You’re forgetting one important fact, Bouyer.”

“What’s that?”

“They may—I say
may
—have whipped a bigger detachment of soldiers. But—” Custer paused for that dramatic effect he had studied in public speaking. “Those Sioux warriors haven’t fought a
better
regiment of soldiers than the Seventh.”

Bouyer snorted. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you’re intending to follow that trail over the mountains to the Greasy Grass.”

“Bouyer …” Custer held up the lantern so the Crow interpreter better saw his face. “I intend to follow that trail straight into hell if I have to. Now, you just ask these boys here about that trail, will you? You ask them if all these other trails that they claimed to see, show the Sioux to be splitting up now that they’ve whipped some white soldiers—or are those trails coming together?”

After conferring with the Crows and getting his answer from young Curley, Mitch turned back to Custer. “The trails are coming together. The Sioux gather on the Greasy Grass.”

Custer clapped his hands and leapt into a quick jig. “By Jehoshaphat! That’s the news I want!”

Bouyer wagged his head. “I don’t think there’s enough time left for me to begin understanding you, Custer. Here you ought to be worrying about all those trails coming together—I mean worrying. Instead you—”

“The only thing that would worry me now, Bouyer,” Custer interrupted the half-breed with a snarl, “is if those trails break apart. That’d mean the village I seek is splitting up. And if the village did that, we couldn’t find the Sioux. At the very least we’d have to chase after them. No, Mr. Bouyer.” He snapped his back rigid and slung the lantern toward striker Burkman. “I’m overjoyed to hear the Sioux
are gathering. My prayer is that they not find out about our coming. I pray I find them sitting in their camp on the Greasy Grass when I come riding up at a gallop to do what a soldier does best.”

“What’s that, General Custer?” Bouyer squinted, measuring the soldier-chief in the pale, fluted candlelight, dim starshine splaying down from the dark summer, canopy overhead.

“Why, Mr. Bouyer—a soldier’s job is to find the Indians and capture them.”

“Suppose they don’t want to be captured. What then?”

“I suppose we’ll have to do that other part of a soldier’s job. And that’s kill the ones who resist.”

Without a single word of reply, the half-breed signaled for his scouts to rise and follow him. The seven were suddenly gone from the corona of firelight, drifting away on noiseless moccasins like the summer breezes that nudged their way along the high bluff.

S
o it was, the mighty Lakota came together for the great buffalo hunt and a celebration of the old life as the great chief Bull had promised.

Lame Deer’s Miniconjou were some of the first to join up. Later the Blackfeet Sioux and the Sans Arc. On and on they came, adding their camp circles and pony herds to that great procession streaming across the plains until they reached the cool waters of the Rosebud, where they would hunt the buffalo in the old way, as in the long-ago days of their fathers’ grandfathers.

At long last summer hung like a whispered benediction over the vast sea of hills and creeks and red people. Moon When Chokecherries Grow Ripe for the Sioux. Moon of Fat Horses for the Cheyenne. June to the white man.

And one more time for the people to offer themselves up to the Great Mystery in thanksgiving.

Along the bubbling snow-melt waters of Rosebud Creek, the Sioux raised their circular arbor of some two hundred feet in circumference, its poles standing better than twenty
feet high in supporting the roof beams in their crotches. In prayerful celebration the combined tribes dropped the monstrous center pole in the ground so that it stood more than fifty feet high, reaching in prayer for the sun. Around the pole’s base lay a pile of painted buffalo skulls, their eye sockets open and staring, giving praise to the sun—as would those dancers who came in sacrifice to this place of honor.

Long, long ago … far back into any old man’s memory, the Medicine Lodge of the Sioux was believed to have originated from the ancient Cheyenne people, when the Shahiyena first pushed out of the forests and onto the plains. A ceremony held only when all the bands came together for the celebration of life granted them through the Great Mystery.

A warrior noted for his superior courage in battle and his great generosity to those less fortunate than he would be given the single honor of selecting one of the four trees to stand in each of the four cardinal corners of the Medicine Lodge. After each of the four warriors had chosen his tree, he would strike it with his coup stick four times to signify the killing of an enemy for the mighty Wakan Tanka. Then other warriors chopped the trees down, trimming their branches, assisted all the time by a group of young virgin women.

After the four trees had been dragged back to the Rosebud camp, each was painted with its significant color: green for the east, where the sun arose each new day bringing life; yellow for the south, whence comes the land of summer each year; red for the west, where the sun hurries to bed each night; and blue for the northlands of the Winter Man and his brutal cold.

Beneath this huge arbor the tribes would give thanks, offer their flesh, sacrifice their blood as the sun was reborn again and again and again during the long summer days of dancing. Around and around that monstrous center pole with its ring of death-eyed buffalo skulls, each painted red with blue stripes or yellow circles, the young men would dance, praying for a vision and giving their thanks for
another year of abundant life. A life lived in the old way on the lands of the ones gone before.

For each young man offering himself to the sun, the ordeal began by stripping to his breechclout and painting himself with his most powerful symbols. Only then could he present himself to the medicine men for the season’s sacred ceremony.

As he lay in the Sun Dance arbor, the young warrior would have his chest gashed open above each nipple. After the medicine man dug his fingers beneath the pectoral muscles and the blood flowed freely, the shaman would shove a short stick of peeled willow through the wound and beneath that muscle. These small sticks would then be attached to the long rawhide tethers already lashed to the top of that tall pole erected in the center of the Sun Lodge.

Gradually the ropes would be drawn up and tightened until the dancer was forced to stand on his toes, eventually drawing the bleeding, torn muscles of his chest out five inches or more. Between his grim lips would then be placed an eagle wing-bone whistle he would blow upon to draw the attention of the spirits to his prayers.

One after another in that hushed and prayerful sanctuary of the sun, the dancers rose to their feet and began to pull at the rawhide tethers binding them to the center pole they slowly circled, driven by the rhythm of the incessant drums. One after another the warriors joined in that grim, bittersweet dance around that pole, accompanied by the throbbing chant of the spectators and the high, eerie shriek of those bone whistles. With the power of the eagle at his lips, each young warrior raised his private call to the heavens above.

Here they would dance for hour upon hour, staring into the sun as it made its slow, fiery track across the sky. Praise be to the life-giver to all things.

On the afternoon of that second day of dancing and offering, Sitting Bull surprised everyone gathered at the arbor by presenting himself for this mystic ritual of denial and sacrifice. Never before had he taken part in the Sun Dance. While Crazy Horse himself had never participated either, the decision to dance beneath the sun was considered
a highly personal matter by the Sioux, and no man was ever criticized for not joining in the sacrifice of his flesh.

But today The Bull stripped naked and stretched himself upon the ground with his back to the center pole as the drums and the singing and high-pitched whistles droned on hypnotically.

His adopted brother tore at Bull’s flesh, in every move as exact as were the great visionary’s instructions. He was to use only a bone awl and a stone knife. No metal implement of the white man must touch his body. And with those tools of old, The Bull directed his brother to take fifty bits of flesh from each arm, beginning at the wrist and climbing to the curve of the shoulder; those hundred bits of flesh were to be placed solemnly round the base of the center pole on the painted buffalo skulls circled in offering to the sun and the greatest of all mysteries … life for the red man himself.

While most of the young dancers eventually struggled against their rawhide tethers so they might end their agonizing torture and self-mutilation—and escape the pain—The Bull instead danced on and on.

For the rest of that day and into the night. Then a second sun rose and fell, stealing its light from the face of the great Sioux mystic. After another night and spectacular sunrise, The Bull danced on with a strength that no man would know unless he himself had been touched by the greatest of all mysteries.

Blood trickling down his arms and off his barrel chest, Sitting Bull continued to send his prayers heavenward.

“May the People live as they once did, Great One! May the white man let us be!”

Yes, he danced for guidance in leading his people in the old ways. Yes, he danced to plead for wisdom in stopping the white man’s further encroachment on the old lands.

So it was on that morning of the third day that at last he fainted from hunger and thirst and utter fatigue. Sitting Bull crumpled to the hard-packed earth at his feet, ripping the willow sticks from his torn flesh.