Seize the Sky: Son of the Plains-Volume 2 (30 page)

More brown-skinned riders dashed up, striking the lodge with quirts as Young Hawk and Red Bear tore aside the lodge entrance. Inside on a low scaffold lay the body of a dead warrior, his heat-bloated carcass wrapped in a beaded ceremonial buffalo robe.

With both hips shattered by a soldier bullet, Old-She-Bear, a renowned Sans Arc Sioux, had been dragged from the Rosebud battlefield as Crook’s troops struggled to hold their ground against the maddening horsemen under Crazy Horse barely eight suns ago. Because he had clung tenaciously to life at the time, Old-She-Bear had been loaded on a travois and pulled from the scene of the fight to the Rosebud camps. From there over the divide when the bands moved toward the Greasy Grass. The dying warrior slung behind a pony beneath the sun for each day’s journey, until his family and friends decided the old warrior was in fact looking out at them from eyes filled with shadows.

Here along this boggy creek the Sans Arc warrior had clung to life for several days, nursed by family who patiently waited out the old man’s slow death walk to the Other Side.

After his final breath had escaped the old man’s lungs, the relatives painted Old-She-Bear’s face with red clay and dressed him in his finest ceremonial elk-skin war shirt and leggings. Alongside the scaffold on which they laid his body, the family placed his feather-draped shield, bow, and quiver. Before leaving this death lodge for the last time, his relatives had placed some cooked meat and blood soup for Old-She-Bear’s trip to see his grandfathers.

As a final tribute the warrior’s favorite pipe, tobacco, and tender bag were laid beside him. When at last his journey to the Other Side was complete, the old man would enjoy having a smoke and talking with friends gone before.

To further desecrate this enemy’s lodge, Red Feather chewed the dried meat and swilled down the cold, scummy blood soup before he pulled his breechclout aside. He urinated on the body of Old-She-Bear and those sacred articles left behind by family and friends in celebration of a brave warrior.

Custer reined up as Red Feather stooped from the torn
lodge, gripping his penis and spraying the side of the buffalo hides.

“Gerard!”

From all the way back with Reno and Reynolds, the Arikara interpreter heard his name screamed as if it were some black curse. By the time Fred rode up to the lone tepee, Custer trembled with an uncontrollable rage.

“You tell these poor excuses for men, these Rees, that I’ve ordered them to ride on! By God, they were told not to stop for anything! They’ve disobeyed me once too often! Long Hair has been shamed by a bunch of ragged Arikarees, and I won’t have it!”

Custer was nearly shrieking, the color of his cheeks redder than a high-plains sunburn. Flecks of spittle dotted his rosy chapped lips. When Gerard started to speak, Custer plunged ahead, his fury still unspent.

“Gerard, you inform them they belong to you now.” Custer spit so the Rees would make no mistake understanding that he symbolically rid himself of them. “I do not want them. Tell these red bastards to step aside and let my soldiers through. My troops will take the lead if the Rees won’t. Tell your Arikaras I think they are women if they won’t fight the Sioux. And if they are a bunch of cowardly squaws, I’ll take their guns from them and send them back to their lodges, where their children can make fun of them for all the rest of their days. To laugh at them because they didn’t fight beside Long Hair when he destroyed the mighty Sioux!”

Instead of answering the general’s challenge, translated on Gerard lips, Bloody Knife and Stabbed both pulled their ponies out of the column and plodded off some distance from the soldiers. But Bear-in-Timber had long had a powder-keg temper. As the interpreter finished, the young warrior stood and shouted back at Custer, his own copper face flushed with anger.

“Long Hair, hear me! You take our weapons and send us home as cowards because we fear too many Sioux. You yourself told us we did not have to fight these Sioux, but that we owned their horses. Did you speak to us with two tongues, Long Hair? Do you now change your heart again
and call us squaws? If you would tell your own young soldiers of the Sioux beyond count waiting for them in the valley below … they would surely act the same as we. You keep that from your men. If the soldier-chief spoke the truth to your own soldiers, you would be many days taking their rifles from them and beating them back to your fort.”

Many of the Rees laughed behind their hands as Gerard translated that portion of the harangue.

Custer squinted his hollow, sleepless eyes, fuming. Gerard had seen the general angry before, but never this furious.

Gerard was afraid Custer might make an example of Bear-in-Timber for the others, to maintain discipline among his scouts. To let both Indian and trooper alike know that he wasn’t about to take any of their guff.

“Just tell them this, Gerard,” Custer growled like a hound with its guard hair up. He swallowed once, throttling some of his anger. “Tell them they can stay with us if they will fight. I don’t want them otherwise.”

At the moment Fred Gerard opened his mouth to speak, a young Ree scout called Good Face, along with an older warrior named Boychief, hollered out, signaling from a nearby knoll not far up the trail. Gerard leapt atop his horse and tore up the hill. He got to the top of the knoll, his own horse prancing barely under his control as he peered down the far slope for a moment, then kicked the horse back down the slope. The two Rees rode right on his heels.

“Indians, General!” Fred shouted.

“What? Where?”

“Maybe forty of them … could be more!” Gerard rasped breathlessly as he yanked on the reins, his mount sliding to a dusty halt.

Reno galloped up from his position. He had spotted the same hostile warriors. “They’re sitting just out of our rifle range, General!” he shouted, genuine fear constricting his throat.

“Funny thing, Custer,” Gerard added, wiping his hand across a parched mouth, thirsting for the liquid treasure in his saddlebags. “They just sat there, looking at us, like they expected us to be here.”

Custer studied Gerard carefully as the interpreter stuck his hand into his three-strap saddlebag to pull out another tin flask. Custer couldn’t help but smell the sweetish odor of the sour-mash whiskey as Gerard drew long and hard on the fiery elixir.

From the look on the general’s face at that moment, Gerard was certain Custer—a notorious teetotaler—wanted a drink.

From behind them arose that sudden shrill cry Custer had known as a boy growing up in Ohio and Michigan, then again when he attacked Confederate cavalry and artillery positions during the war. This shrill and famous Custer shout leapt from Tom Custer’s lips as he tore up on his charger.

Little brother had caught sight of the quarry himself.

Without invitation Tom held out his hand to Gerard, yanking the flask away from him. He drank every bit as long on the potent whiskey as had Gerard. When he handed the canteen back, Tom rattled the sagebrush hills once again with his wild war cry, a screech that would scour any white man’s throat. Any but Custer’s.

“Thirty days furlough for the first goddamned soldier who raises a scalp!” Tom shouted.

Down the waiting columns those who could hear young Custer’s promise raised their own cries of battle lust. It was part of the fever they must each experience, working themselves into a lather for the coming battle.

Custer said, “Good, Tom! Work some fight up in ’em!”

Tom took the flask again and threw some more whiskey down his throat, peering up the knoll … then down the dry coulee that Ash Creek followed in the rainy season.

A small bunch of Indians, eh?
he thought.

Tom gave the flask back to Gerard. They would share. Tom had never been selfish when it came to drinking. Whiskey was, after all, for sharing. For friends.

And he thought on those forty Sioux he had watched disappear over the knoll, riding out of reach.

Perhaps those Indians who had darted over the hill were nothing more than enticing decoys. After all, Tom knew as well as the next man how Crazy Horse had lured Fetterman
and eighty men over Lodge Trail Ridge ten winters ago. It was the oldest Indian trick in the book.

Tom glanced up, feeling the whiskey warm his hot, knotted belly. The Rees mounted their horses.

“Gerard!” Custer shouted. “Why aren’t your lazy Arikarees going after those Sioux? There are horses to be taken! Scalps and honors to be won!”

Tom climbed back into the saddle as Fred Gerard cursed his scouts prancing atop their skittish horses. Perhaps the horses themselves sensed the visceral fear of their riders. Gerard got no response from the younger members of his detail. On the ground nearby hunkered some of the older Rees, Bloody Knife and Stabbed among them. They tore up handfuls of the dry grass, tossing the blades into the hot breeze.

“Otoe Sioux! Otoe Sioux!”

“They claim there’s too many Sioux again, General. More than there are blades of grass.”

“You take them—take them all and ride with Reno!” Custer bellowed in disgust. “I don’t want the Rees with me. Nowhere near me!”

“They don’t want to fight so many,” Gerard explained weakly, whispering so that only Custer and Tom could hear his plea. “Not with you or Reno. There’s more Sioux than we can handle, General.”

“Bullshit!” Tom shouted.

Gerard almost said something to young Custer but turned instead to the general. “None of the Rees want to go any—”

“Take their guns, boys!” Custer suddenly spat in the direction of the Arikara scouts. “Take their horses too! Give them their old ponies back. I have no more use for these whining squaws! We’ve found the Sioux, yet these miserable wretches don’t want to fight. So be it, Tom. I’ll send them home to their lodges, where they can die toothless old men.”

Minutes later after a detail from Tom’s C Troop loped up with the Rees’ ponies, and the exchange of animals had taken place, the scouts still refused to ride the back trail. Instead, they clustered in a knot, afraid to leave the
protection of the soldiers. Many wailed their death songs against a background of horse snorts and blue-tongued curses from the stable sergeant retrieving the army mounts.

An eerie, wailing, profane chorus—fitting background itself for Custer’s descent into the valley.

Somewhere behind Custer’s own standard and the regimental guidons, back down the columns in those faceless rows of soldiers, a single voice rose strongly, clear in its baritone plea. A trooper, singing the words to “Out of the Wilderness”:

“C
APTAIN
Keogh! Take Cookey with you to Reno’s command,” Custer ordered, now fully in sight of the Little Bighorn.

About time he started stirring things up
, Keogh thought.
Time to get this bleeming attack under way
.

“And when I get there, General?”

“Inform the major I want him to take his men across the river below and attack the village as fast as he deems prudent, he’s to charge the village. Tell him he will be supported by the whole unit.”

Turning from the wide-eyed major minutes later after delivering Custer’s message, Keogh and Cooke watched Reno lead his men down the dry bluffs of Ash Creek toward the Little Bighorn for about half a mile before the pair wheeled and kicked their mounts back to Custer’s outfit waiting some three-quarters of a mile up the Ash Creek trail. They hadn’t ridden far when the sound of clattering hooves made them turn and rein up.

Its nostrils flaring in the staggering heat, Gerard’s mount
lagged wearily, already lathered from its valiant charge up the back trail. All the two officers could now see of Reno’s men was a heavy dust cloud over the red-eyed bluffs hugging the river below. It appeared the major had made his crossing of the Little Bighorn.

“Cooke!” Gerard croaked, licking his lips as he reined up between the two soldiers.

“What t’is it, Gerard?” Keogh’s brogue peeled off the rolling R’s.

“Major Reno sent me with his compliments—”

“What’s the news?” Cooke bit his words off impatiently.

“He’s already met the Indians.” Gerard offered his whiskey canteen to Cooke.

Cooke shook his head, but Keogh greedily scooped it from the interpreter’s hand with his own big paw.

“I pass up no man’s whiskey!” he bawled with a sour grin.

Cooke watched the Irishman swallow, then went back to studying Gerard. “Reno’s spotted the Indians, you say?”

“We crossed the river. Spotted the bastards then. Lots of the red bastards. You can see their naked bodies as they ride to and fro down in the river bottom, down in the trees and marsh as we was crossing. We also seen the tips of their lodges downriver a throw or two.”

“Damn,” Cooke whispered, “but the queen’s got her a one-eyed jack sneaking into her bedchambers, eh! Custer’ll be tickled!” He slapped his thigh in amusement, startling his own skittish mount.

“You’ll take the major’s message on to Custer, won’t you? Reno’s desperate for the general’s promised support—”

“Make no mistake,” Cooke answered enthusiastically. He glanced at Keogh. “The general will want to hear all about this, he will.”

“Here, my good man,” Keogh belched, holding his arm out with the empty canteen at the end of it.

Gerard shook the canteen. “My God! You’ve emptied the damned thing.”

“’Ave any more about you, Gerard?” Keogh interrupted him, feeling the warm whiskey jolting against the pasty hardtack and greasy salt pork in his belly like clashing lines
of calvary. “I’d be willing to have me a go at another one of them, if you’re willing to sell.”

Gerard eyed him severely, then his face lightened. “When would I have my money?” he asked suspiciously.

“Soon as we hit Lincoln.”

“I don’t know—”

“I’m good for it, Gerard,” the big Irishman said gruffly, sticking out his hand impatiently.