Wolf Mountain Moon (65 page)

T
hat first morning alone again, Seamus climbed onto the bluffs that bordered the eastern rim of the Tongue River Valley, pausing for a moment to watch the soldiers at work below. Some threw stacks of folded tents into the wagons, others hitched the balky, braying mules into their traces, while others kicked out their fires and began to fall into formation for the drudgery of the day's march.

Somewhere in the midst of those four-hundred-some men were those who had become friends in the space of less than a month, along with those nameless soldiers he had joined in climbing the icy slope, shoulder to shoulder. Faceless men, all but their eyes hidden behind the crude wool masks. Soldiers young, soldiers old—ordinary men called upon to exercise extraordinary bravery: out of ammunition, when many might have retreated, those three companies fixed bayonets and kept on moving beneath the galling fire of the enemy.

The wind smelled of snow up there—a sharp tang wafting off that broken land to the north. Donegan pulled up the collar to his heavy buffalo coat, then slowly put his fingers to his brow in salute.

“To good sojurs,” he said quietly. “For service beyond the call of duty.”

Turning the claybank aside, the Irishman put the Tongue River at his back and continued his climb up the divide. Hours later, at the crest, he looked back—finding the top half of the Wolf Mountains obliterated by low slate clouds. More snow before the night was done. He knew the Bighorns arose from the plains somewhere to the southwest, but for now they were hidden by distance, by storm clouds, by winter itself. He prayed to see them off to his right one day real soon.

Down into the valley of Hanging Woman Creek they dropped, that claybank mare and he, following the frozen stream south by east until twilight. Wary and watchful all that day, he had stayed down from the skyline, constantly watching
the horizon to the west for enemy horsemen. At the edge of a frozen stream piercing a small grove of cottonwood saplings, Seamus took shelter as the sun continued to drain its light from the west. He decided not to build a fire, no matter how small. Instead he took the horse to the creek, broke a hole in the thick slate of ice, and let the animal drink its fill from the narrow trickle as he loosened the cinch.

Then Seamus looped the reins around a wrist, settled back down against the brush, and closed his eyes.

It was well past slap dark and snowing when the horse tugged on the reins enough to wake him in its search for some fodder to eat. It hadn't been enough sleep to make him feel rested, but he hoped it would be enough that he could ride on through till morning. After tightening the cinch Donegan cut himself a thin sliver of tobacco and laid it inside his cheek. It always helped to give him a little stir, the better to keep himself awake for what he had to do.

He covered the fifty-some miles of that southeastern bee-line to the Powder River in two and a half days, traveling at night in the most bitter conditions while temperatures once more dropped out of the bottom. At times he allowed himself a little fire, not really the sort for boiling coffee or frying his salt pork, just something small—the sort of fire that could cheer a man while a dull pewter sun came up in the east after a long night's ride, the sort of fire that could keep company with a lonely man as he stirred restlessly in his blankets throughout the day, dragging kindling together from time to time to keep that small fire going until it grew dark enough for them to move out again.

He watered them both twice a day—at morning and again at dusk. And never did he remove the saddle, choosing instead only to loosen the cinch while he dozed and the horse cropped at what grass it could find. There were times the animal nuzzled him during the day, awakening him from the light, fitful slumber Seamus allowed himself. Donegan stirred, stiff and cranky, untying the horse and moving it to another spot where it could dig and tear at more sustenance before he settled himself again. Much of the time the Irishman passed out in his blankets, sitting up with the Winchester across his lap and the Sharps laid out along his right leg. Other times he allowed himself the luxury of lying curled up on his side atop
the dried mattress of some windblown grass at the base of a tree, or wrapped fetally atop some spongy sagebrush that kept him above most of the drifted snow.

When the light began to fade and he found himself too cold and stiff to sleep any longer, Seamus began to move again, slowly. Scrounging about for more kindling, anything dry enough for him to use one of his few remaining lucifers. Build himself a fire just big enough to rub his bare hands over, flames only high enough that he could yank off the army's buffalo overboots, then tug off the calf-high boots, just to hold his damp stockings and cold feet there by the flames for a few minutes while he wiggled his toes and the sky went to dark.

Each time he gazed at those first stars coming out to announce the coming of night, he remembered the way her eyes had glimmered by a fire's light on their honeymoon ride north from the Staked Plain of Texas, across the wilds to Colorado Territory, and on north to find a roost for her, eventually, at Fort Laramie. Many nights spent camping beneath the stars themselves as new bride and groom, rolled and twisted together, leg in leg, for warmth beneath the layers of canvas and wool blankets, staring up at a black dome not far different from this.

He wondered if she ever came out at night down to Laramie, to look up at the sky and think of his being somewhere beneath those same stars. He wondered if it helped the loneliness for her the way it helped his. Like a warming balm a man would knead into a sore muscle or open wound—this looking up at the same sky she was under at that same moment. It made Seamus feel that much closer to her, not near so far away, as he finally stood, kicked snow onto the tiny pile of burning sticks, then tightened the cinch and rode off under that endless black dome.

Surely she looked up at those same stars. He was all the closer to her because of it. Donegan was certain she must feel his presence, too, when she gazed at the sky that looked down upon them both. How it brought him comfort.

Upon striking the Powder after those first fifty-some miles, he figured he had his way home. Follow the river south. Past the mouth of the Crazy Woman Fork—where he had begun ten long years of fighting the Lakota and Cheyenne in this land, coming to know why they guarded this country so
jealously. He had left childhood roots in Ireland to sail to Amerikay but found no home in Boston Towne, far less among the mobile, rootless, roaming camps of the Union cavalry. But once that terrible business was over back east, Donegan had wanted to be as far from all that had been as he could put himself.

Little had he expected that he would find a home in the west, to fall in love with the sheer immensity and rugged beauty of its towering mountains and endless prairies. Little had he expected he would ever find someone he so desperately wanted to share that home with.

“Stay warm, Samantha,” he would whisper to himself each dawn as he closed his eyes and put himself to sleep thinking of the two of them waiting for him at Laramie. “Soon …”

How far would it be? he asked himself. How many miles down the Powder to Reno Cantonment from here? Fifty? No farther. He figured it had to be more than seventy, as much as eighty, miles from where he'd first struck the Powder. But what with the twists and loops of the river, it was hard for a man to tell just how many miles for sure.

At times he would pass a bare buffalo skull lying akimbo along his trail, a horn and skull plate half-in, half-out, of a dirty skiff of snow. When the shimmering winter moonlight shone bright enough on the landscape, Seamus recognized the tracks of an occasional coyote or deer or antelope crisscrossing the wind-sculpted snow as the two of them rose and fell, climbed and descended, the vaulting, heaving country. Day before yesterday a few prairie dogs poked their heads up from their dark holes, emerging into the bitter cold and strong wind to bark in protest before darting back out of sight as man and horse passed on by.

Then late one night he spotted the dim outlines of the buttes far away to the southeast, limned there against the skyline as a distant blood-tinged sunrise awoke a world far east of the Great Plains. That pale-orange strata of Pumpkin Buttes … oh, how the sight of them made his eyes strain to make out something to the south of him—where Reno Cantonment should lay.

Seamus dared push on past sunrise that morning, so eager was he to see another's face, so hungry to hear a voice other
than his own. After all, Reno Crossing meant that he had returned to far more familiar country, perhaps even to a land where a man might travel in far less danger than when he plunged through the heart of Lakota hunting ground.

Early that afternoon, after more than 130 miles as a crow would fly, Donegan came in sight of those mud-and-log huts that Captain Edwin Pollock's Ninth U.S. Infantry had garrisoned in this northern country, an outpost at the precipice of a deadly land—this last supply depot for Crook's last campaign. As he set the claybank mare into a lope, drawing closer and closer, he saw that men were moving about, more coming out of the sod-and-frame barracks as he became more than a speck on the horizon. As he became a horseman. A man emerging from a deadly, bloody ground. A lone plainsman.

“Just where in the hell did you come from?”

“The Belle Fourche,” Donegan answered, his voice cracking a little from disuse, “by way of Tongue River Cantonment.”

“T-tongue River?” stammered a middle-aged soldier. “Miles's infantry?”

“Yes,” he replied, eyeing a man who approached drinking a steamy cup of coffee.

“You civilian? Ain't no deserter, are you?”

Donegan snorted. “Was I to desert, I'd be off to the diggings in the Black Hills, or up to Last Chance in Montana Territory. Last thing I'd want to do would be to put myself around sojurs.”

“See how stupid your god-blame-ed question was, Stacy?” another one declared peevishly.

One of them peered up beneath a hand shading his eyes and asked, “But you did come riding down from the Yaller-stone?”

Seamus's eyes danced over the faces that came out to gaze up at his in wonder and speculation, enjoying the music of the voices, the feast for his eyes.

“I did, that. Marching more'n a hundred miles with the Fifth Infantry,” Seamus explained as he laid his wrists across the saddle horn and let out a sigh. “Chasing Crazy Horse's village.”

“Crazy Horse!”

“He said the Fifth chased Crazy Horse!”

“Caught him too, we did,” Donegan said. “Had us a good scrap of it till a blizzard blowed in.”

The middle-aged soldier stepped forward. “My name's Pollock. Edwin Pollock. Commandant of this here fine post.”

“I remember you, sir,” Seamus replied, taking off a mitten and holding a hand down to the captain. “Name's Donegan, late of General Crook's Bighorn and Yellowstone Expedition.”

“You're a mite late catching up with them, Donegan,” Pollock said. “Crook's bunch passed through here before Christmas.”

“I know,” he said sadly, thinking back on that special holiday endured away from loved ones. “Crook himself sent me north to learn where Crazy Horse was.”

One of the soldiers gleefully declared, “And from the sounds of it you sure as the devil found out where Crazy Horse was, by God!”

“Come on down from that horse,” Pollock suggested. “We'll get some side meat frying for you, and I'm sure we can root out some beans and hard bread too.”

“Always beans and hard bread wherever the army goes!” a soldier retorted.

Seamus drank three cups of coffee right off, swilling them down as soon as they were cool enough to drink while his first hot meal in a week was still cooking. Those men of the Ninth Infantry sat and stood around him as he wolfed down the beans and soaked his tacks in a new cup of coffee sweetened with heaping spoons of sugar. Seamus couldn't remember when army food had tasted so good.

Maybe it was only that he was almost halfway home. Maybe that's what made something so simple as a hot meal of pasty white beans, crusty hard bread, and a greasy slab of fatty pork such a king's feast late that afternoon among soldiers who asked him everything imaginable about the war going on to the north with Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse.

Why, they acted just the way schoolboys out to recess or old men gathered at the mercantile to whittle and gossip would act, wanting to hear every detail, every last facet of commonplace events like marching up the Tongue, crossing on the ice, burying soldiers, capturing Cheyenne prisoners, and storming an icy ridge when the whole damned outfit was
down to its last few bullets. They fed him and coffee'd him and kept him talking until his throat was sore and it had been long dark for hours.

“We best let the man be now,” Pollock finally said.

He turned to peer out at the night. “My horse?”

“We've watered and grained him,” a soldier said. “Even rubbed some liniment on a sore on his right flank, just under the pad.”

“I'm obliged,” Seamus said thankfully. “Truly obliged to you men.”

“You can bunk right in here,” Pollock offered.

But the old soldier told Seamus, “Or spread your bedroll with the rest of us. When I cared for your horse, I brung your saddle and gear inside our humble barrack.”

“Yes,” Seamus decided suddenly, a tug at his heart deciding it. “I'll bunk in with you fellas if it won't put no one out.”

Yes—to stay a while longer among these men who had cared for him and the horse … feeling so weary.

Captain Pollock said, “From the sounds of all your riding, bet you ain't had yourself a proper night's sleep in a month of Sundays.”

Another man added, “I'll wager you could do with getting some shut-eye in out of the cold.”

“I'll push on come morning,” Seamus agreed as he stood, feeling the stiffness in near every muscle from being so long in sitting atop the half-log bench.