Wolf Mountain Moon (37 page)

Miles had reveille sounded at four-thirty
A.M
. on the first day of 1877.

In that high-plains darkness most of the men stomped circulation back into their cold feet and legs around fires nursed throughout the night. Despite the bitter subzero temperatures most men did their best to act merry, toasting one another New Year's wishes with their steaming coffee tins. At five-thirty they were marching south beneath a brilliant moon still reflecting silver light off the icy-blue snow.

Not long after sunrise it was plain to every man that the wind had shifted out of the southwest, warming in the process. By midmorning the first of the gray rain clouds moved in, turning the frozen, snowy trail into a slimy slush. Man and animal alike fought for a foothold, sliding this way and that every yard they slogged up the valley of the Tongue. It was a wet and sullen bunch of soldiers that neared Otter Creek late that Monday afternoon.

As Seamus rode off the muddy slope of the ridge and back across the bottomland toward the column marching on the far side of the valley, he remembered none too fondly the endless days and nights of rain and mud and soul-sapping despair as he and others led Crook's stumbling, lunging command toward the Black Hills settlements. His stomach jerked with a twinge of nausea; those were memories that knotted a man's belly with the stringy taste of horse meat—

The first gunshot echoed like a dull crack from the far ridges across the Tongue. Then there came a scattering of shots. Donegan quickly looked over his shoulder at the hilltops behind him—relieved to find them empty—then jabbed his small brass spurs into the roan's flanks. The gelding burst into a lope, its hooves tearing up rooster-tail cascades of powdery snow.

On the far side of the frozen river he watched the lines of soldiers knot and unfurl, officers on horseback whirling and shouting, the wagon train brought to a sudden halt. Farther to the south at the head of the march, across the river past the naked willow and in among the cottonwoods, Seamus saw the flash of movement. Lots of horsemen. Now their foreign cries
cracked the cold, bursts of frosty breath jetting from each dark hole in their faces as they screamed back at the soldiers.

Leforge and his last two Crow, along with Bruguier, were hammering heels to their ponies, darting into that cottonwood grove. From the south end of the trees exploded at least two dozen horsemen, feathers fluttering, shields clattering, voices yapping as they fled upriver.

Seamus yanked back on the reins with his left hand, and the roan shuddered to a halt in the snow. With his right hand he dragged the Winchester carbine from its leather boot beneath his right leg. Knowing there was already a shell in the breech, he dragged back the hammer with his thumb as he shoved the butt into his shoulder and peered down the barrel. Squeezing off a shot at the escaping horsemen, he levered another round into the chamber and fired a second time before he figured the Sioux were simply too far for him to make any good of a third shot.

On the far side of the river Kelly had Leforge and the Crow on the way with Bruguier and Buffalo Horn close behind, all of them yipping and yelling as if they were an entire company. Thirty yards to their rear Miles stood in his stirrups, watching expectantly, ordering some of Hargous's mounted company into the chase.

Then, flinging an arm to the right and the left, the colonel bellowed orders no more than a muffled echo to Donegan. But as quickly the nearby officers were scurrying like ants among their outfits. While some instantly spread their men into a skirmish line on that eastern side of the river, others led their men cautiously onto the ice, across, and up the snowy bank on the far side, where they deployed the companies in a tight skirmish formation extending across the valley floor and up the slope of some slimy, icy bluffs, each man no more than five feet from the next.

Occasional gunshots cracked upstream, and from moment to moment Seamus spotted a glimpse of either the Sioux horsemen or Kelly's outfit, all of the riders bobbing in and out of sight as they rode up and down the rolling landscape. Quickly dragging his field glasses from his off-hand saddlebag, Donegan twisted the wheel and attempted to focus on the far scene. More than a mile away, the enemy disappeared beyond a far bend in the river. The only riders visible now were Kelly
and the rest. Luther flung his arm into the air, stopping those behind him as it appeared he bellowed out his orders to Leforge and the Crow in front of him.

“Good man, Luther,” Seamus said in a whisper, his breath huffing in a great cloud above his face as a cold mist continued to fall. “Those red bastards suck you into a mess of quicksand before you know it.”

He sighed audibly when he saw the entire bunch turn and head back to the column behind Kelly. Maybe there wasn't any coup to count this afternoon, but at least the Sioux hadn't sprung any trap—no ambush, no casualties, for that short, hot, running fight of it.

“By Jupiter, we could use Crook's cavalry, couldn't we, Donegan?” Miles roared as Seamus pushed the roan off the ice and into a grove of old cottonwood.

“As hard as these men might want to catch Crazy Horse,” Donegan replied, “it's like a tortoise and a hare for your foot soldiers to stay up with red h'athens on horseback.”

“Just give me Mackenzie's Fourth, and I'll show you better than he accomplished with the Cheyenne!”

“Mackenzie did all that Crook expected of him—and more,” Donegan protested, suddenly sensing the immense, unflappable ego of the soldier before him.

Those words were just sharp enough that it appeared they brought Miles up short, stung by the civilian's observation. Chewing a lip for a moment, Miles finally looked north, finding his scouts returning.

When he finally turned back to Donegan, Miles said, “Then the Fighting Fifth will just have to do on foot what Crook failed to do with Mackenzie's cavalry.”

“Find and catch Crazy Horse?” Seamus asked as more of the headquarters group brought their horses to a halt around them.

“You forgot one very important part of the equation,” Miles corrected. “Find and catch—and
defeat
—Crazy Horse.”

After suffering that cold night at the mouth of Otter Creek, where the rain soon turned into a frozen sleet that coated man, animal, and equipage with a layer of ice, Miles had his men up in the dark, gulping coffee and wolfing down their hard crackers. With the command up and about the
colonel ordered that the teams of slow-plodding oxen not be hitched to their wagons.

“Mr. Bowen, it's my belief we can cover the ground a little faster if the oxen don't have to pull their wagons,” Miles explained to the second lieutenant he had placed in charge of his supply train.

William Bowen asked, “We're leaving all the wagons behind, General?”

“No, Lieutenant. We'll take the company wagons along.”

“The ones pulled by mules,” explained Frank Baldwin.

“So what will become of the civilian's oxen?” asked Captain Casey. “Leave 'em behind?”

“I think it best that we don't,” Miles replied. “Unhitch them and drive them along with the column. We might just need those big brutes for food before this chase is over.”

“Damn right,” grumbled Edmond Butler, a tough forty-nine-year-old Irish-born captain. “In a pinch tough beef is better than no rations at all.”

Leaving behind the four huge freight wagons the oxen had struggled to drag through the snow, slush, and mud for the better part of four days, Miles trudged on, leading his infantry south on the trail clearly marked by the stolen cattle and all those unshod hoofprints. They had marched better than fifty-five miles already and would have at least that much more ground to cover before they reached the ground Crazy Horse had chosen for his battle.

“Was that a war party we bumped into yesterday?” Kelly asked the morning of the second after the blood-red sun began to rise low along the southeastern horizon. “Or was it only a hunting party?”

With a shrug Seamus replied, “Either way, Luther. I figure the h'athens knew we were coming—they have to have scouts hanging back to keep track of us.”

“Yeah,” Johnny Bruguier said, nodding.

“Or that bunch could've been out hunting to feed a lot of empty bellies,” Donegan continued.

“A big village like Crazy Horse got,” the half-breed stated, “it need lots of meat.”

Kelly turned to Donegan. “And we haven't run across much in the way of any game at all, have we?”

“One way or the other, let's just say that bunch of Sioux
was out hunting,” Seamus declared, shaking off a cold shiver as the wind picked up. “Hunting four-legged game … maybe hunting two-legged enemy.”

Early that afternoon the advance party was forced to divert the line of march far to the eastern side of the valley, where the going wasn't so tough but where the men were forced to march some distance from the Tongue. It wasn't long before they came across an abandoned camp of rustic shelters erected from slabs of wood, poles, and rocks, along with some sections of sod and thick boughs of cedar and evergreen.
^*
Here and there among the makeshift hovels lay the carcasses of butchered cattle.

“Smell that, Irishman?” Kelly asked.

Seamus put his nose in the wind and sniffed. Then sniffed again. “Tobacco smoke.”

“That isn't soldier smoke,” Kelly declared. “The column hasn't gotten anywhere close yet.”

“Warriors were here this morning, I'd wager,” Seamus replied.

“Keeping a close eye on us, aren't they?” Kelly asked. “Even returning here to these shanties to do it.”

“What you make of this, Luther?” Donegan asked as they both climbed out of the saddle. He hadn't seen anything quite like these heart-wrenching hovels since he'd been a young boy in poor famine-ravaged Ireland.

“I figure you'd be the one to know better'n any of us, Seamus,” Kelly answered as he knelt before one of the shelters and peered into its dark, snowy interior.

“How's that?” he asked, straightening as he bristled, thinking Kelly was marking him down because of his Irish roots.

The chief of scouts got to his feet and turned. “Why don't you tell me what Injuns with Crazy Horse wouldn't have their own lodges along?”

“Wouldn't have lodges?”

“What Injuns did Mackenzie run off into the countryside not so long ago?”

Donegan wagged his head dolefully, his eyes studying the pitiful hovels where human beings had actually taken shelter
from the brutal weather. “Cheyenne,” he answered quietly. “Morning Star's Cheyenne.”

“A proud people,” Kelly said with complete admiration, dusting the snow and mud from his knees and gloves.

“A damned
proud
people,” Donegan said, almost choking on the words. His eyes stung. “They'd rather live out in this weather, eating jackrabbits and gophers, sleeping under rocks and brush, than go back to the white-goddamned-reservation. I'll say they're a damned proud people.”

He turned away before his eyes betrayed him, and stuffed a big buffalo moccasin into the stirrup. Swinging into the saddle, Donegan said, “I'll go fetch up the general. He'll wanna see for himself just what sort of warrior we're following.”

“What do you mean?” Kelly asked, catching up his reins. “What sort of warrior?”

“I think Miles needs to know that he's following a bunch of iron-riveted hard cases what can live out here under rocks and scrub brush, running about on foot, eating what they got when they got it.”

Kelly nodded, his eyes fired with admiration. “Damn right I think Miles should know. He and his soldiers won't be going into battle with a bunch of young sprouts who'll fight only as long as it takes for their women and young'uns to pull out.”

“No, this outfit we're scouting for is due for a fight of it, Luther,” Seamus responded as he eased his horse around and Kelly came into the saddle. “Some of them ain't got nothing more to lose.”

Kelly nodded. “And that makes a man one hell of a tough bravo in a fight—when he hasn't got anything left to lose.”

“This bunch Crazy Horse has got around him now ain't the kind give up easy. These warriors are all breechclout and balls, Luther. I figure Crazy Horse is going to pick the ground where he'll stand and fight. Just like he done us at the Rosebud.”

Kelly slapped the end of his reins down on the horse's flank to put it into a lope, saying, “And just like General John Buford picked the ground to make his stand at Gettysburg.”

There had been times in the last five days when the scouts had turned about and reported to the head of the column that
the easiest route was that provided by the river itself. Their slow, tortuous march of the second was again that sort of day where the foot soldiers and the wagons made their way off the bank onto the ice to follow every twisting curve and corkscrewed turn of the Tongue, always on the lookout for soft ice and narrow stretches of open water where a warm spring fed the otherwise ice-choked river.

Due to weakening ice the column was forced to cross the Tongue four times with their exhausted, played-out animals. In the end they put no more than another five miles behind them that second day of 1877. Perhaps because they believed the overtired stock were not likely to wander astray, Lieutenant Bowen's detail soldiers did not corral the huge oxen.

At dawn on the third it was clear they had made a mistake.

It was also plain from examining the tracks of the cloven-hoofed beasts that the oxen hadn't been stolen—they had merely wandered away on the backtrail through the night. In the dim half light Robert Jackson was assigned to lead four of Hargous's mounted soldiers back to the north to round up the wayward stock while the column formed up and pushed off for the day.

No sooner had the five horsemen disappeared downstream and the rear guard marched out of sight than some twenty warriors kicked their ponies into a gallop, streaking off the hillsides in a blur, thundering down on Jackson's roundup detail. Shots echoed off the snowy bluffs.