Seamus’s eyes stung a moment, sensing the rise of a deep respect, something more like admiration, for the officer at that moment. “What say you let us lead you, Lieutenant?”
“M-my way?”
Seamus nodded.
“You … you would?” Sibley said, taking a step forward, as if he really didn’t believe.
Seamus turned for a brief moment, his eyes touching the other two scouts. Then he looked back at Sibley. “That’s right. All … three … of … us.”
So it was that they took that great, unexpected gamble with what they thought was left of their shredded, sore-footed, pinch-bellied lives. And made another long night’s march of it into the heart of that Indian hunting ground.
The sky was beginning to gray with the coming of false dawn as they reached the banks of a stream.
Sibley asked, “What is this, Bat?”
Pourier answered, “Big Goose, I say.”
Grouard nodded in agreement, standing wide-footed as he could without actually squatting.
“What time do you have, Sergeant Day?” Sibley asked.
“Just after three A.M., Lieutenant.”
“Let’s keep going,” Seamus told them.
“Cross another creek?” came a whimper from the darkness that swallowed the group behind Sibley and his noncoms.
“That’s right,” replied the lieutenant.
“That water’s cold as ice,” Valentine Rufus said, stepping forward.
Sibley inquired, “Was it you complained?”
“No. It was me, Lieutenant,” and another soldier inched forward.
“Collins. You been holding up till now—”
Henry Collins tried to explain. “I can’t face another crossing. Getting soaked, sir. I’ll not make it to the other side.”
“I’ll help you,” Sibley offered.
“No, Lieutenant. Leave me.”
“Me too, sir,” Sergeant Cornwall added.
The officer tried to coax the pair, cajole them, even threatening them with court-martial if they did not follow.
“You can shoot me now—or I can just wait here for the Injuns to get me, sir,” Collins admitted. “But I ain’t going another step.”
Finally Sibley relented. “If I leave you two here, you must promise to stay right here. Stay back to the brush over there. We’ll send horses for you. You won’t have to cross another swollen river on foot.”
It was just as well, Donegan decided. Let them stay there so the rest could press on while the light was coming on that ninth day of July. Sibley could not risk the lives of the others while he argued with the obstinate pair. Funny, he brooded as they cat-walked down into the cold waters of Big Goose Creek, how men who will resolve to face bullets and war clubs and scalping knives won’t dare set foot again into a mountain stream. Courage is not only a fleeting thing for some, he thought, but a fickle mistress as well.
By the time the detail crossed to the south bank and plodded on, Grouard told Sibley he figured they still had a dozen miles left to go. The cold of the stream poured through what was left of the soldiers’ battered boots cut and carved by rocks and hard abuse. On they limped into the coming of day, heading for the mouth of Little Goose Creek. Haggard and starving, the men fairly dragged their rifles through the dust and grass, the detail getting strung out for several hundred yards through the tangle of willows and cottonwoods.
Near five o’clock they spotted some warriors moving from south to north, off to the east of them. With little or no cover to speak of, none of the men made any effort to conceal themselves. Instead they watched the distant horsemen move on past.
Seamus said, “If they saw us—”
“They had to see us,” Bat interrupted.
Donegan kept his head turned as he walked. “But they ain’t coming.”
“Figured they didn’t see us,” Grouard said.
“No way they could miss us,” Pourier protested.
“Must think we’re from their village.”
Sibley grabbed Donegan’s arm, clutching it in weary desperation as he pleaded, “You don’t think that big village has attacked Crook, do you?”
“Ain’t like Injuns to attack an army camp.”
“Still, they jumped us at the Rosebud,” grumbled Sergeant Day.
“We ain’t got far to go now,” Seamus gave as his only reply. “Just keep moving: we’ll be having breakfast with the rest of Crook’s boys.”
They grumbled, whispered, murmured among themselves. Yet they kept moving. That was most important. Keep them moving.
“The birds!” Sibley squealed suddenly.
Until that moment Seamus hadn’t been aware of them. Those tiny prairie wrens, each no bigger than the palm of his hand. The branches of the trees and willow were thick with them. Chirping and warbling with the coming of day.
“One of ’em ain’t much more’n a mouthful,” Donegan replied.
“A mouthful?” asked Sergeant Day. “I could do with just a mouthful. What do you say, Lieutenant?”
Sibley asked, “Mr. Donegan—care to go bird hunting with us?”
Some of the men threw down their carbines and tore at the buttons to their cavalry tunics. Bare-chested, they crept as close to the birds as they dared, then flung their shirts over the branches. After a few frantic attempts, met only with a maddening flutter of hundreds of wings, Sibley cried out.
“I got one! Dear God—I got one!”
The lieutenant carefully pulled a hand from beneath the shirt he had used as a net and produced a small sparrow. With a sudden snap of the bird’s neck Sibley began yanking clumps of feathers from the creature’s tail, back, and breast. Then as Seamus and some of the others watched, the officer sank his teeth into the raw, red, feathered flesh of the small bird.
Donegan asked, “Don’t you wanna cook him first, Lieutenant?”
The bird between his teeth, Sibley looked up at the Irishman, his eyes glazed in some primordial ecstasy. He licked his bloody lips as he reluctantly took the bird out of his mouth, sucking so he would not lose a single drop of all those juices. Wagging his head, he replied, “Don’t want to take the time to get a fire started.” Then he bit down ravenously again on what was left of the tiny breast.
Pourier wagged his head and said to the lieutenant, “That’s pretty rough.”
“Yes, Bat,” Sibley replied, his mouth turned a bright crimson, “but I’m so hungry that I don’t know what to do!”
In the following minutes others began to capture their prey, devouring the tiny birds raw, the meat and blood still warm.
Donegan said to Pourier, “Let’s see if we can find some of those Injin turnips you told me of.”
Leaving the bird hunters behind as the sky lightened, the pair strode through the brush with their knives ready for digging. From time to time Bat would drop to his knees, showing Seamus the leafy top of the wild plant, uprooting it with his knife. Hastily scraping the moist dirt from the plump tuber, one or the other would split his treasure in half and share what he had just unearthed. At first Donegan thought it tasted like licking the bottom of a stable stall and figured the root couldn’t give him much animal strength—the way the bird meat would those who were devouring the wrens and sparrows. But the prairie turnips just might give him enough that he could limp on in to Crook’s camp.
“Let’s show the lieutenant and his men what to look for, Bat.”
Back among the soldiers, Pourier held out two of the leafy tufts and instructed Sibley’s men on how to find the turnips in the boggy ground. Within minutes the soldiers had scattered to dig up their own.
It wasn’t long before the sun rose off the east, red as a buffalo cow’s afterbirth strewn upon the new prairie
