Lay the Mountains Low (52 page)

Just above the crossing, they entered the timber and began climbing toward
Weippe
. This wasn't like crossing the Camas Prairie, Chapman brooded. Now the column slowed to an agonizing crawl as the trackers up ahead tried to thread their way up a rocky, muddy trail, through the thick stands of windblown trees, over and around centuries of deadfall that lay like stacks of jackstraws a child might toss carelessly upon a thick green carpet where the new day's sun streamed through in broken shafts as it would slash through the slats of a garden fence. After a brief, hard downpour, storm clouds were beginning to break up.

After some twenty miles of tough going, they had stopped for an afternoon halt to blow the horses right after crossing the open meadows at the
Weippe
Prairie. Before thirty minutes had passed, the anxious major had the men hurry through their skimpy lunches of hardtack and bacon, then saddle up once again. On the far side of the soggy meadows they reentered the timber, and less than three hours later they reached a low summit that overlooked Lolo Creek. Here the wind-downed timber became even more of a nuisance to the civilians and soldiers, but ever more so for the artillerymen struggling to keep up with their howitzer.

Less than a hundred yards below them along the Lolo Trail, another stretch of open meadow beckoned. Beyond it the hoof-pocked path the Nez Perce village had taken now angled into narrow defile, thickly wooded.

At the tree line where they halted on the edge of the meadow, Reuben told Chapman and McConville, “Some scouts watching up there.”

“You hear 'em?” Chapman asked. “See 'em maybe?”

The Christian tracker shook his head. “Just feel they're close now.”

Anxiety stretched across McConville's features when he told Chapman, “While we wait here for Mason's soldiers to come up, why don't you send the six trackers ahead?”

Ad gave his order to Reuben, then watched the trackers cross the open ground and into the trees. It was becoming
clear the soldiers coming up behind them were advancing slower than ever.

“Ain't no way in hell that major gonna get us back to Kamiah by nightfall,” McConville grumped as they watched the trackers reach the far side of the open meadow,
*
where they began to penetrate the shadowy timber penetrated by irregular shafts of afternoon sunlight. Chapman wagged his head. “I don't think he figgers to have us back to the crossing at all until he's got some idea how far ahead the war bands got on Howard.”

“Hell, it's easy enough to see where the red bastards've been—just lookit the ground!” McConville declared, pointing at the forest floor disturbed by thousands of hooves.

“But Joseph and the rest are moving faster'n this outfit,” Chapman said as Mason and the cavalry came up behind them. He nudged his mount into motion. “From the looks of things they ain't packing many travois poles now to slow 'em up—”

He jerked back on the horse's reins at the shocking nearness of the gunshot, causing the animal beneath him to spin about and fight the bit until he quickly brought it under control. Two more shots rang out, then at least a dozen in quick succession—intermingled with cries and yelps from the timber just beyond the meadow … right where the six trackers had just disappeared into the shadows.

First one, then suddenly three, of the scouts burst from the timber, dismounted and without their army carbines, leading their horses with one hand and frantically motioning the white men back, back, back toward the cover of the far trees.

“God-
damn!
” McConville bellowed as he wrenched his horse around, making a dash back for the tree line.

Two other volunteers shot back with McConville, pounding the devil out of their horses for the cloaking shadows and the timber, but Chapman waited a heartbeat longer than the others—watching a horseman bolt away from the trees on the far side of the meadow. There should have been three of them, he thought. As the tracker got halfway across the opening, Chapman could see the rider was wounded, pressing a hand against a shoulder wound, his face as white as riverbank clay as he raced away as another quick rattle of gunfire rocked the woods behind him.

“Chapman!” McConville's cry stabbed out from the shadows. “Get your ass back here!”

Wheeling his horse, he flicked one more look over his shoulder, watching the line of trees for the Christian trackers called Abraham Brooks and John Levi, then jabbed his heels into the horse and raced for the timber. He was reining up beside McConville just as Captain Henry E. Winters was coming forward through the dappled light shafts streaking the forest.

“McConville!” the officer called out. “Colonel Mason sent his order for your volunteers to accompany my men to the front.”

“We was
at
the front, Cap'n,” McConville snapped. “So we already got us a pretty good idea them trackers run onto some rear guard. You see how they was shot up?”

Winters shook his head. “I only saw one of them wounded—”

“Two of 'em's missing,” Chapman interrupted as his horse came to a halt.

Straightening his spine, Winters said, “Be that as it may, we are under the colonel's orders to discover what we're facing. I'll expect you to obey those orders—”

A final gunshot rang out from the trees, its echo swallowed by the hills.

Without waiting for an acknowledgment from McConville, Winters turned in the saddle and hollered, “By fours—horse holders to the rear and remain at the ready! The rest, form a skirmish formation here at the edge of the
trees. Five feet apart, five feet and no more!”

Behind Chapman the soldiers were squeaking out of their saddles, attaching the throat latches and passing off three horses to every fourth man, who turned and started them back into the timber away from the attack formation.

“Keep your eyes open, men,” Winters reminded. “Don't let us get surprised … forward, E Troop. Forward!”

Chapman was willing to let the captain ride across that meadow and into the woods, but he himself left his horse tied at the edge of the trees still dripping with the remnants of the morning's thunderstorm and walked at the middle of that long line of dismounted skirmishers. They had made it no deeper than sixty or seventy yards into the forest cluttered with downfall when a soldier cried out to their right.

“Captain! Captain Winters! Come quick!”

Ordering everyone to halt and hold their positions, Winters turned in the direction of the voice. In twenty-five yards he and Chapman spotted the trio of soldiers clustered together, one of them kneeling over a body.

“You know him?” asked the captain, turning to Chapman.

“Name's Sheared Wolf,” Ad replied. “Took the Christian name John Levi.”

Winters asked, “He dead?”

“He's done for. Bullet in the head.”

At that moment Chapman and the others heard a groan from some nearby shadows.

“Careful, civilian!” Winters advised as Chapman turned aside and bounded off for the sound.

He could hear the others, their feet pounding through the forest behind him, as he approached the body. At least this one was still alive. Chapman dropped to a knee beside the scout.

The eyes fluttered a bit in the dark face gone pale and pasty. He had both hands interlaced over a messy gut wound.

“This one dead?” asked the first soldier to join him.

“No,” Ad replied softly, his eyes scanning the forest
ahead of them, then glanced over his shoulder to see how Winters was bringing his skirmishers forward through the dense cover. “He may live a little longer.”

“Chapman,” Abraham Brooks said softly, blood glistening on his lips. “Don't let me die here alone.”

“No, I won't let you die here alone, Abraham.”

Winters was growling orders at his men, inching his horse this way and that through the tangle of trees and deadfall, the clutter of stumps and the maze of brush, as he fought to keep his men in position to withstand a sudden attack. He came over to Chapman.

“How far before we get out of this tangle and back onto the Lolo Trail?”

Chapman stared up at him, dumbfounded at the question. “This is the Lolo Trail, Cap'n.”

For a long moment Winters blinked at Chapman, then gazed around him at the thick timber in which a man could easily lose his direction. “You're telling me the general intends to follow these Indians through this?”

Chapman shrugged and waved two of McConville's civilians over from the line of skirmishers. “There's a dead one back yonder a ways. Go find his horse and tie him over it. This'un—he's called Abraham—we'll make him a travois and get him back to the rest of the soldiers.”

“He gonna last long?” one of the civilians asked.

Chapman waited until the tracker's eyes clenched shut with another wave of agony. Then he wagged his head without uttering a sound.

 

*
This incident on the western end of the Lolo Trail took place near Musselshell Creek, about three miles from Orofino Creek—where the Idaho gold rush began in 1860.

K
HOY
-T
SAHL
, 1877

T
HE VOICE THROUGH THE DARKENED TIMBER AHEAD OF
them spoke with the
Nee-Me-Poo
tongue.

It said, “There are fresh tracks—tracks made this morning!”

“Christians?” Yellow Wolf whispered to the man beside him.

The older warrior nodded, his eyes never leaving the trees ahead where the disembodied voices emerged. Here they waited a short distance from the Bent Horn Trail.
*
These two were among the seventeen who had come down their backtrail, scouting for soldiers and Treaty trackers, stopping only briefly to eat their lunch of dried meat butchered from the white man's cows the warriors had killed on the
Weippe
Prairie two days ago.

Earlier that morning as camp was breaking, Two Moons had come among some of the young men saying, “We cannot remain here, idle. We must meet the soldiers and engage in another battle! They will not stop chasing us. Hear my words! Let our families travel on while the warriors go back to find a suitable place where we can lay for our enemies.”

A second voice talked in their language about the pony tracks. Then it advised the other that they should go tell the
suapies
their finding.

That's when the leader of this scouting party spoke loudly enough to be heard by those Christians.

“We are your relations,”
Wahchumyus
said. “This war leader called Rainbow declared, ‘Your skin, your hair, your
bodies—everything you have about you is the same as ours.' “

“Who is that who speaks to us from the shadows?” one of the trackers demanded.

“I am
Wahchumyus”
he answered. “One who knows you by name, Sheared Wolf.”

“Show yourself.”

Rainbow gestured for his men to advance to the edge of the tiny clearing. It was there they surrounded the five surprised Christians.

“Hello, my brother,” Yellow Wolf said to
Seekumses Kunnin.

“This is your brother?” Rainbow asked.

“Horse Blanket is my half brother,” Yellow Wolf explained, never taking his eyes off the older man who stood with the rest of the Christians. “We had the same father.”

“Give us your guns and cartridge belts,” Two Moons demanded of the trackers as he stomped up to them.

As the five dropped their soldier guns and unbuckled their belts, Rainbow said, “Do you remember that we caught three of you Treaty men at
Lahmotta,
then set them free with a warning not to lead the soldiers? I see you are not afraid of our warning, Sheared Wolf.”

“I broke no promise—”

“The soldiers!” a Christian's voice warned. “They are close on our heels!”

“You brought the soldiers with you?” Rainbow demanded of the Christians. “Your friends, the Americans, have chopped up our native land, spilling on it the blood of your relations! But still you help them against us. Every word you speak and every deed you do is a lie. But I will keep my word to you: the next
Nee-Me-Poo
we capture, we will kill at once. You, Reuben and Sheared Wolf, you are the two we really want—”

“He's running!” someone warned.

The instant Rainbow whirled with the noise of voices and feet pounding on the thick bed of pine needles, Sheared
Wolf and Reuben took off at a sprint in a different direction—all five of the Treaty captives were scattering.

Yellow Wolf did not wait for any order from his leader. The Christians were guilty of bringing soldiers down upon their own people. Sheared Wolf could have saved himself if he had agreed to go back to the soldiers and turn them around.

But instead …

Yellow Wolf shot the coward in the back as he was fleeing. They all watched Sheared Wolf hurtle forward, flopping to the ground between some mossy deadfall. Another man's bullet hit Reuben as the Christian was vaulting into his saddle and hammering away.