delicious food in their bellies, Bourke found flagging spirits begin to brighten among Clements’s wounded. Even in grumpy Lieutenant Von Leuttwitz himself.
That afternoon John had begged himself some of the liver from an antelope killed along the trail. The meat would not stretch far; nonetheless, the lieutenant carried his treasure into camp in his nose bag as if it were a kingly ransom. For long and glorious minutes he suspended it on a green limb, broiling the liver over some pulsating coals, preparing supper for himself and the general. They had no more than halved their modest portion when a loud ruckus erupted at the commissary headquarters nearby.
In Lieutenant Bubb’s absence the chief butcher and his men had to answer the demands of almost two thousand ravenous soldiers and civilians, expertly dividing what they were given each night in the way of ponies to be slaughtered for supper. This night the butcher stood there in his blood-crusted woolens, shaking his gleaming knife at a dark-skinned Mexican prospector up from the southern border of Texas, one of Major Stanton’s Montana Volunteers. In a spicy blend of two languages the Mexican threatened the butcher for killing a Sioux pony the volunteer had had his eye on and was anxious to save for his very own use once the expedition broke up back at Fort Laramie.
Back and forth they argued, the chief butcher brandishing his big and very lethal knife, the Mexican pounding his chest with one hand and provocatively wagging his gun in the other until Lieutenant Colonel Carr stepped in and broke it up. Scattering the curious spectators, Carr turned on the volunteer.
“Go on now. Get back to your camp and cause no more problems tonight, or I’ll see you put under arrest and thrown in irons at the first military reservation we come to!”
With menace in his dark eyes, the sullen Mexican turned about, intending to take up the reins to the Indian pony he had ridden up to the commissary, the same Sioux pony he had been riding since the capture of the enemy’s herd.
Up stepped four of the butcher’s assistants. The first flung down a frayed bridle at the civilian’s feet. The second dropped an old and tattered saddle blanket into the mud. Then the grinning third dropped a scarred and much-used saddle atop the filthy blanket. And the final butcher’s assistant stopped in front of the Mexican to hold out a long, thick strip of fed meat on the end of his huge butcher knife.
“Your pony?” the assistant asked. “Why, mister—General Merritt told us we needed just one more horse to make enough provisions for tonight’s mess. Saw yours standing right there. Closest to commissary … so we knew you wouldn’t mind.”
The volunteer began to sputter in that heated blend of English and Mexican, mad enough to spit nails when Carr once more stepped between him and the butchers.
The lieutenant colonel tore the lean meat off the butcher’s knife and slapped it into the Mexican’s hands. “Looks like this is your ration for the night. I’d suggest you go cook that steak before it goes bad on you.”
Chapter 46
12 September 1876
The worst was yet to come.
When the men rose stiffly that Tuesday morning, no one had any idea what awaited them as they morosely stood around the smoky fires in that darkness before dawn and tried to warm themselves in what soul-robbing fog and mist clung to the banks of Owl Creek.
This was to be the day strong men reached the end of their ropes and lay down to die in the mud beside that endless trail crossing an unforgiving wilderness.
No sooner had Crook given his command for the column to form up than the rain moved in, starting gently at first but within an hour falling in such solid sheets that a man had to hunch his shoulders up and turn sideways against the force of the storm, just the way horses and mules would turn their rumps against a howling norther. Lumbering into the gales, the infantry led out at four A.M., Clements’s train of wounded in their midst, each one grumbling in his own private misery beneath the onslaught of Mother Nature’s worst. An hour behind them the cavalry set out. Nearly two of every three troopers were already afoot, stumbling along through the thickening quagmire beside those in their company still mounted on the bony horses.
Under Crook’s orders Major John J. Upham selected 150 men from the Fifth Cavalry, all mounted on the best of the captured ponies, to follow up that lodgepole trail they had crossed the day before. Given the limited rations the commissary could provide from its dwindling supplies— two ounces of dried buffalo meat per man, a few coffee beans, and what pony meat each soldier had managed to save from last night’s supper—Upham’s troopers disappeared into the mist, heading south by east down Avol Creek toward Bear Butte.
With the old arrow wound stiffening his shoulder in a hot pain, Charles King watched his friends leave, gratified that his horse, Donnybrook, wasn’t deemed strong enough to go with Upham’s patrol. Nonetheless, he was still very much perplexed and confused by Crook’s decision to send out that scouting party.
When the general had been confronted with a force of attacking Sioux the morning of the tenth, Crook had marched the column away. Then, upon finding a fresh but small trail, the general had waited more than twelve hours before deciding to send some of his cavalry in pursuit. Those very inconsistencies had begun to cause cracks in the confidence King held for the general. What Charles feared most was that the tenacious bulldog Crook wasn’t all that sure himself of just what he should do anymore.
So the lieutenant took his hat off and waved at some of those Fifth Cavalry friends who turned and bid a halfhearted farewell to those they were leaving behind that cold and gloomy morning. In minutes Upham’s patrol was swallowed by the land and the incessant rain.
Because Major Mason’s battalion was that day assigned to bring up the rear of the march, ordered to sweep along with them any and all stragglers, Charles King did not leave Owl Creek until just past seven A.M. The wind came up, inching down the temperature, seeping into the marrow of every one of those once-hardy fighting men until all a man could think of was just taking the next step. Wondering when he would lose the willpower, the guts just to keep moving. Already the neuralgia in that old Apache war wound made King grit his teeth with each flush of sudden, hot pain.
It wasn’t much past nine when the first horses started to play out. Along the left and right flanks rang the pistol shots as more and more of the troopers went afoot, caching their saddles and bridles in growing piles left upon the barren prairie. Heaving their soggy saddle blankets to their shoulders, the unhorsed soldiers set off on foot. At the rear the dismounted horse soldiers began to straggle farther and farther behind in a weaving, wobbly, unsteady column snaking south by southwest toward the prominence of Inyan Kara.
Twice that morning when Clements’s own stock failed and gave out, the surgeon had to beg ponies off those officers who rode the Sioux horses. One time he went from man to man, pleading, until he reached Charles King, who reluctantly slid from his saddle and handed over the reins, barely able to rotate that shoulder wounded years before in Arizona.
“God bless you, Lieutenant,” Clements said before turning away into the spinning curtains of rain, dragging the pony behind him through the deepening gumbo.
Men stumbled past King as he stood there, settling up to his ankles in the pasty mud, and swiped his glove across his face. It did not help. With the swirling sheets of rain, his face was wet a moment later. He looked south, finding he could not see the head of the column where Crook rode. Too far away in the roiling mist.
King turned and squinted into the north, holding down his hat’s flapping brim against the rising gusts of wind, wondering just how far back they were strung out. One by one the men of his own Fifth Cavalry trudged past, planting one boot on the slippery, adhesive prairie, leaning forward to yank the other foot out of the gumbo, then drag it forward, a most conscious act by men whose will to live diminished perceptibly with every single one of those tortured steps.
“Goddamn. Goddamn. Goddamn. Goddamn. Goddamn,” one of them muttered quietly as he heaved himself
