Wolf Mountain Moon (61 page)

Quiet enough to hear the howling, wolfish wind and the groans of the wounded carried across the backs of ponies, cradled by horsemen if possible, any way the wounded could make this journey back toward the village that was sure to be on the move already.

Out of the dance of snow Wooden Leg suddenly recognized the two Lakota who had been with him to rescue Big Crow. He hurried his pony toward their horses. Between them walked another pony, Big Crow astride the animal, but bent over and tied against the horse's neck. The Lakota rode knee to knee with the wounded war chief, each of them holding on to Big Crow so he would not fall.

“He is dead?”

One of the Lakota shook his head. “I think he is alive.”

“Big Crow!” Wooden Leg said with excitement from just behind the wounded man's pony.

Without raising himself up or twisting around, without so much as moving his head, the war chief mumbled, “Is that you, Wooden Leg? I cannot see.”

“It is me,” he answered. “I am here with you, Uncle.”

“Good,” he said with a fluid-filled cough. “Then you tell these
Ho-ohomo-eo-e
^*
that they must let me go and leave me behind.”

“Leave you behind?”

He gasped in pain. “You must leave me here, Wooden Leg. I am going to die anyway.”

“This is what you truly want?”

“It is my last wish,” Big Crow declared bravely. “Carry me no farther.”

After explaining to the two Lakota that a warrior must not ignore a dying man's last wish, Wooden Leg led the others a little ways up the now-dry fork of a creek that in spring would flow down to the Tongue River. After no more than four arrow-flights in distance, Big Crow spoke again.

“Here. No farther. Find a place. Then leave me.”

“Yes—the rocks are good here,” Wooden Leg told the dying man.

When his pony came to a stop beneath him, Big Crow said quietly, “Go back to the rest of the warriors. Go on to the village. Tell my people that I have done my share to rescue the prisoners taken by the soldiers.”

“I will tell them,” Wooden Leg promised, his throat tasting sour with this parting from a great warrior. “For many generations to come, unto my grandchildren's grandchildren, the
Ohmeseheso
will know that an honorable man has died fighting for his people.”

Not far ahead stood some large sandstone rocks on the north side of the ravine. Among them the three found a narrow crevice and therein made a place for the dying man.

Wooden Leg sighed with the heavy weight of a boulder on his chest. “You Lakota choose to bury a man on the open prairie,” he explained to them as they cleared the last of the loose shale from the floor of that crack high in the tall rocks.
“Tse-Tsehese
warriors prefer to be buried among the rocks of this earth. The quicker to return our bodies to the dust of our Earth Mother.”

Across the floor of that narrow crevice they spread a buffalo robe; then all three gently carried Big Crow up to that crack far up the side of the sandstone formation. With a valiant struggle Wooden Leg finished the task by himself, inching the war chief's body back into that crevice the width of his hand at a time.

“Big Crow, can you hear me?” Wooden Leg asked when he could move the man no farther.

For a long time there came no answer. He feared Big Crow had died while he'd been placing him in the death position. At long last the young warrior touched the war chief's face. It was cold. He sighed, ready to leave this hallowed place.

“I am no longer of this earth,” Big Crow said in a hushed whisper that surprised the young warrior before him.
“Eshesso!
This be the way of all things! Go now, Wooden Leg—and protect our people … always.”

For a few moments longer the young man sat there by the body he had folded back into the rocks, then covered with a blanket upon which he'd laid the beautiful warbonnet, all that time wondering if he really had seen Big Crow's lips move or not. The man's skin was cold and his eyes were closed as if in death.

Wooden Leg wasn't sure if he had heard those last words with his ears … or in his heart.

When he finally stood, the two Lakota warriors patiently waiting at his back, Wooden Leg whispered in reply.

“Like you—I will lay my body down and give my life to … to protect my people.”

Chapter 37
8-10 January 1877

D
amn, if it wasn't cold, despite all the fires these soldiers had blazing in their bivouac.

Maybe it was merely the howl of the wind, or the icy rip of each flake of snow as it slashed against a man's skin—but Luther Kelly couldn't remember when he had ever been colder.

After the last shot was fired from Pope's artillery, Miles could finally order Lieutenant Mason Carter's men of Company K, Fifth Cavalry, out of the snow and into the timber to begin building fires near the wagon camp. They were shortly joined by Lieutenant Cornelius Cusick's F Company of the Twenty-second, who trudged back across the ice on the Tongue River to shouts of victory.

During the five long hours of that morning's battle, the men of both outfits had hunkered down in their snowy rifle pits, shivering without stop as the fight raged on around them—unable to make themselves warm as the blizzard rolled in, not even allowed to move about to relieve themselves for fear of being picked off by troublesome Indian marksmen.

Then, once they had a few minutes around their fires and Miles had sent two other companies chasing after the retreating warriors, the colonel ordered Carter's and Cusick's weary
troops back to the bottomland to dismantle what tents the wind hadn't toppled and hurtled away down the valley. What tents the soldiers brought back to the wagon camp at the foot of the plateau they struggled to raise where they could, in no special pattern, as the blizzard continued to build in strength throughout the afternoon.

Surgeons Tilton and Tesson had their stewards remove the nine wounded from the battlefield, making them as comfortable as possible in tents erected near fires down in among the cottonwood near the riverbank. Corporal Augustus Rothman of Casey's A Company was the lone fatality—dying instantly when a bullet smashed into his forehead during that gallant charge up the ridge against overwhelming odds. His fellow soldiers wrapped the body securely in a gray blanket and placed Rothman in one of the wagons until Miles would determine where ultimately to bury the corporal—on the battlefield or back at their Tongue River Cantonment.

Late that afternoon Ewers and Dickey brought their outfits limping back as twilight deepened the already gloomy weather. They reported in to the colonel their estimation that they had followed the retreating warriors for some three miles before turning around to fight their way back through ever-deepening snowdrifts piled up by the ground blizzard, to struggle against a wind that continued to chip away at their resolve.

At dusk the snow became an icy sleet, then gradually turned sodden. By dark the blizzard had wrung itself out and become a cold, driving rain. Men scurried here and there to secure dry wood where they could find it and prepared to spend a wet, miserable night around smoky fires.

Just past dark the first sniper fired into camp. A picket answered the shot. A few minutes later a second bullet tore through the bivouac, striking a cast-iron skillet with a loud clang and scattering the surprised soldiers. Luther Kelly momentarily looked up from his beans, then calmly scooped another spoonful into his mouth.

“Goddammit!” Miles roared, interrupted at his supper and leaping to his feet.
“Baldwin!”

“Sir?” Frank Baldwin was there immediately.

“You and Bailey get moving to the company commanders,”
Miles growled. “Tell them to put out their fires for the rest of the night.”

“P-put out their fires?” Bailey repeated.

“Yes—you tell them it's my order!” Miles snapped. “I don't want a single man killed by these damned snipers.”

Kelly watched the two officers take off in different directions, waiting with Miles to hear the first loud protests drift back from the cold, drenched soldiers ordered to extinguish their fires for their own safety.

“Some Cheyenne snipers fired into our camp the night after Mackenzie drove them all into the hills,” Donegan explained as he reluctantly kicked some more wet snow onto the hissing limbs at their feet.

The last of the yellow-and-blue flames went out with a sizzle, and the entire bivouac slowly pitched into darkness.

“Bringing up Mackenzie, eh?” Miles grumbled like a man nursing a wound that would not heal.

Donegan started to apologize. “Didn't mean nothing by it—”

“Well, gentlemen: I certainly feel we've accomplished every bit as much today as Crook did with Dull Knife's Cheyenne,” Miles bristled defensively. “And we did it without any of Mackenzie's goddamned cavalry!”

Kelly flicked his eyes at the Irishman and gave a tiny shrug before he said, “A damn good job of it too, General. I think what you and your men can be most proud of is that you've bested the Lakota and Cheyenne on their own ground—where they chose to fight you.”

“Bloody right,” Miles said. “They picked this ground for their fight, didn't they, Kelly? And they damn well took the high ground, too—didn't they, Kelly? And—by the planets—we still drove them off! But, Mr. Kelly … I say Casey, Butler, and McDonald are due the lion's share of the praise!”

“Right, General,” Kelly replied with genuine agreement. “You put the right officers at the right place on the field. Make no mistake about that, Seamus Donegan—the general here accomplished this whole campaign with no more than one officer to lead every company.”

“True as sun there.” Then Donegan cleared his throat. “I can't remember when I've seen soldiers any braver than the men of those three companies who took the ridge.”

Miles nodded thoughtfully in the rainy darkness. “Yes, thank you, Mr. Donegan. These men … men of mine were stalwart today, weren't they? Despite the ground, the weather, and nearly running out of ammunition—they stayed in the scrap until the job was done, by damn!”

“Are we headed back to the Yellowstone?” Kelly asked.

“Perhaps in another day,” the colonel answered with a sigh. “I've got an itch to find out what became of the hostiles' camp. So in the morning I mean to scratch that itch.”

Near daylight on the ninth the rain had again become a wet, soggy snow as the men turned out, boiled coffee, and fried their ration of salt pork. Some chose to soak their hardtack in their coffee, while others softened up the frozen, rocklike crackers in the bacon grease at the bottom of their mess kits. It was just about the most miserably cold, wet camp that Luther Kelly could remember ever awaking to.

After breakfast Miles selected six companies to join him in his search for the Crazy Horse village upriver. In addition, he brought along Lieutenant Hargous's mounted detachment, as well as his company of scouts. He left behind only Cusick's F Company of the Twenty-second to throw out pickets around the wagon camp as well as to post spotters atop those bluffs the Sioux and Cheyenne had defended the day before.

Behind the colonel and his staff, behind his scouts and mounted riflemen, the half-dozen companies were spread out in a wide skirmish formation that extended from the hills on the west side of the Tongue all the way across the river to the bluffs on the east bank. Miles led them out at a cautious pace, no man certain when they might encounter the enemy's rear guard or an ambush.

Instead, all they came across near midday that Tuesday was a campsite the enemy had abandoned sometime before the battle. Because of all the recent snow and rain, it proved impossible for the scouts to tell just how old the site truly was. For the better part of a quarter of an hour, the men all watched Miles silently move among the now-dead fire pits until he stopped, staring south for the longest time.