want Hammond’s horse! Give us Hammond’s horse or take the consequences!” Uncomprehending, Little Soldier grinned foolishly back at him, but First Shoot understood enough English to grasp Hardwick’s meaning. He began to angrily shout and a discomfiting murmur arose and spread through the ranks of the warriors. Stepping forward, he flung his buffalo robe to the ground in a passionate gesture. Others followed suit, Stripping off their clothes. Farwell trotted his mule back and forth between the two white men and the Indians, holding up his arms in supplication, doing his best to cajole them in the Assiniboine tongue.
“They’re getting ready to fight,” said Hammond anxiously. “Throwing off their clothes so if they take a bullet it’ll be a clean wound. We better pull stakes.”
The Assiniboine were nearly naked now, taunting the whites, brandishing muskets, making the air whine as they whirled poggamoggans threateningly above their heads, shaking bows and lances as Farwell desperately pleaded with them.
“Farwell, clear out!” shouted Hardwick. “Clear out or, damn your hide, I’ll fire anyway!”
“Don’t you do it!” screamed Farwell. “Not with a white man between you!”
Hardwick and Hammond, carbines levelled, were backing their horses away from the shrieking Assiniboine. Suddenly, Hardwick’s horse reared. Hammond had fired.
A frantic scramble to suck leather, clawing to keep his seat. The horse slammed back down on its forelegs, hard, popping him up, skidding his boot out of the stirrup. He heard the dull pop of a musket discharging, caught the dazzle of the haunch of Hammond’s horse, spinning in a tight turn. Farwell flew by him, wide-eyed and screaming, clinging to his mule, slashing it into a clumsy, slew-footed gallop with his reins. Fumbling with his boot to retrieve the lost stirrup, fumbling with the Henry, without aiming Hardwick squeezed a shot off over the flank of his horse. Then he was pounding after Hammond and Farwell, flattening himself low in the saddle, brutally slapping his pony’s rump with his rifle barrel. A spasm of muzzle-loader fire erupted at his back. He shrank down further, pinching himself as small as he could. His neck tingled with the expectation of a bullet.
With the white men between them and the Assiniboine, the wolfers sat their pawing, stamping horses, holding fire. The Indians pursued on foot, little patches of black musket-smoke puffing into the air as they ran and fired, ran and fired. They were reloading fast, shaking powder into the barrels of their guns and spitting bullets into the muzzles, in their haste omitting to use wadding, so their shot did not carry far or accurately.
Hammond reached the wolfers and bellowed, “Run for cover, boys! The coulee! The coulee!” as he galloped by, heading for the narrow gulch which lay like a wound in the breast of the prairie. But the nervous wolfers held their ground on whinnying, panicked horses.
A row of tense white faces shimmered sidelong in the eye of the Englishman’s boy. He heard harsh, whispered curses directed at no one; shouts of encouragement to Hardwick that Hardwick could not hear. Distance and time were mirages, bending and shimmering like the hot air. Closer yet farther. Sooner yet later.
And then Hardwick and Farwell
By the time the Englishman’s boy dismounted, the narrow confine of the crevice was ringing with rifle-fire. He picked out Grace’s blue-handkerchiefed head and ran to him doubled over, jerking his horse down the shallow coulee bottom after him. He could hear someone screaming, “They’re coming! Lord Jesus, they’re coming!” He flung himself down beside Grace. Here the coulee was only four feet deep, forming a natural rifle pit.
Dragging himself up on his elbows, he surveyed the ground he’d just covered in precipitous retreat, an open expanse dotted with clumps of wolf willow and sage. Over this the Assiniboine were advancing from patch of cover to patch of cover, firing their muzzle-loaders, reloading, then skittering and zigzagging their way forward to discharge another shot. Behind them the camp was emptying, women rushing children and infants into thick timber which, once it closed on them, resumed its placid front.
Already the Englishman’s boy could count three of the attacking Indians lying broken on the landscape like dolls hurled to a nursery floor. Ten yards from the lip of the coulee Farwell’s wounded mule lay on its side, its head rising and falling as the strength bled out of it with every pump of its heart.
“Your mouth’s hanging open,” Grace said. “Close it and fire.”
In that instant, the Assiniboine let loose a volley and swept up out of the willow and grass with sharp, piercing cries. Fox-fast and fleet, they shredded the screen of gun-smoke issuing from their muskets with their charge.
The Henrys began to bark up and down the coulee like a pack of hounds on the scent. The Englishman’s boy was firing fast, the sweat pouring into his eyes in a blinding, stinging rain. For a terrible second, he believed the Assiniboine were going to pass unscathed through the hail of bullets, pour into the coulee stabbing and clubbing. But the attack ripped apart, like rotten cloth. The abrupt sprawl of men into the sage stunned the Englishman’s boy. They dropped like all the deer he had ever shot cleanly and fatally. The attack stuttered, hesitated, the Indians withdrew in confusion. A cheer went up in the cutbank.
The Englishman’s boy slid down the face of the slope, pulled off his derby, mopped his brow with his sleeve. His mouth was bone-dry. He’d tried to draw a bead on those twisty, slippery figures but they’d leapt and dodged so as to freeze his finger on the trigger. In the end, he’d only pointed and fired, pointed and fired. He didn’t think he’d got himself one.
Hardwick was walking up and down the trench, asking each man, “How many rounds you got left? How many rounds?”
Grace answered tersely, “Enough.”
Hardwick took one glance at the bandoliers looped over the shoulders of the Englishman’s boy and passed on.
John Duval was calling for water. Hardwick shouted, “Nobody drinks yet! We don’t know how long we’re going to be pinned down here! Water’s rationed!”
The Englishman’s boy dug a pebble out of the side of the cutbank, put it in his mouth to suck. The blistering heat roiled in the coulee.
The wolfers pricked their ears. Out there, someone was chanting. It ran toward them like a wave, washed over them, receded, swept forward once more.
“Death song,” said Grace to the boy.
The men crouched in the coulee, gripping their guns, listening to a man preparing to die. The chant rose and fell, rose and fell. Suddenly it stopped. In the distance, a man stood up out of the scrub, straight as a lodgepole pine. It was First Shoot in his wolf-skin cap. The wolfers began to fiddle with their sights, adjusting them for the range. First Shoot didn’t give them time enough to sight him. He pumped his musket to the sky three times, sprinted forward. The Soldier’s Society soared up out of the grass like a covey of birds. A second force of hostiles gushed up behind them, older men not so fleet, not so agile as the first, all of them whooping.
This time, the Assiniboines did not skirmish forward, discharging their weapons. It was a pell-mell assault, a dash of supple swiftness, a foot race to the coulee. The speed, the audacity of it stunned the men huddled there. The Assiniboine came pelting forward, leaping sagebrush, veering and twisting like a hunting wolf pack, quick, terrible.
A sheet of flame scorched the air. The death-song singer did not break stride; it was as if the muzzle flashes were a curtain of beads, insignificant, to be brushed aside. He drove on, hot, direct as fire burning down a fuse to a powder keg. Fifty yards, forty.
Then the powder keg exploded. The curtain refused to part. His heels skidded out from under him, kicked up, flesh fountaining in a spray of blood. The white men worked the levers of their rifles madly, shot swinging through the warriors like a heavy scythe mowing hay, everywhere the human grass shivered when it met the sharp blade, wavered, fell in a windrow of bodies.
The Indians broke and fled.
A shout went up in the coulee, punctuated by rebel yells. Random shots spat on fleeing backs. An Assiniboine fell, staggered to his feet, was scythed again.
The surviving Indians retreated to an opposing coulee from where they began to lay down fire. Now in a defensive position they had time to prime and load with calculation. The use of wadding gave them greater range and accuracy. Despite smooth-bore, single-shot weapons, their numbers made for a steady, debilitating sniper fire which penned the wolfers in the coulee. Whining, whistling shot kept them ducking. A ball struck a stone near the
