pointing at the soldier.
Seamus said, “Frank—ask them why they’re laughing at that soldier.”
After a few moments of talk back and forth, Grouard turned and said, “They asked me if I knew what kind of meat they had in their lodges. Said I figured it was buffalo, maybe antelope. So they laughed at me and said the soldiers ain’t give ’em enough time to be hunting buffalo, and the antelope hunting has been poor.”
His eyes narrowing, Donegan asked, “So what kind of meat is it?”
“Nothing we ain’t been used to lately,” Grouard answered with a wry grin. “Seems everybody in this country took to eating horse and pony.”
“What the hell you think Captain Jack’s up to?” Grouard asked a minute later.
Not far away the white scout Crawford hurried down the slope of a hill standing to the north of the village, pulling one of the packers’ mules behind him. At Crawford’s shoulder ran newsman Robert Strahorn. They stopped at the first crude rack of poles erected outside a lodge and began to tear the strips of drying meat from the rack, stuffing them into the canvas panniers lashed to either side of the mule’s sawbuck. In a momentary lull of fighting a shot suddenly echoed in that creek bottom. The mule sank on its forelegs, rolling onto its side as Crawford and Strahorn dived for cover behind a lodge.
“Hey, Lieutenant!” the poet scout hollered out.
On a nearby hill Frederick Schwatka answered, “What can I do for you, Crawford?”
“We got us a sniper out there.”
“Shit, we have us a whole passel of snipers!” the lieutenant bellowed.
“How ’bout seeing if you can catch sight of any smoke over yonder that will tell us where that sniper’s laying in.”
“Can’t see any gun smoke, Crawford!”
“You just watch with them glasses of yours now,” Crawford hollered. “He’ll be sure to make a try for me when I come out!”
Up bolted the white guide, jumping from cover and sprinting to the far edge of the creekbed some fifty feet away, where he turned in the slippery mud, then raced back as another shot rang out just as he reached his hiding place.
“The sniper ought to be over there,” Crawford instructed, huffing and breathless. “Try your glasses over by that big tree.”
Sure enough, Schwatka wasn’t long in declaring, “I got him in sight, Jack.”
Crawford asked, “Send some of your boys over to root him out, will you?”
After a squad of the lieutenant’s men made short work of the sniper, Strahorn and the scout went back to the dead mule and succeeded in pulling free one of the canvas panniers, filling it with the stringy pony meat they took to share between the hospital and those officers overseeing the fight from the nearby hilltop north of the village.
“What they yelling about now, Frank?” Donegan asked minutes later when some warriors among the rocky ledges across the creek began to holler again.
“They say Crazy Horse is coming.”
“Crazy Horse,” Seamus repeated. “His own self, eh?”
“They say there’s a lot of camps in the area—just what I told Mills before he got us in this fix.”
“So Crazy Horse is gonna come rescue the Sioux before Crook can come rescue us—that it?”
Grouard nodded. “Something like that, yeah.”
“Hey, cheer up, you damned half-breed,” Donegan said. “Just remember that Crazy Horse doesn’t know what we know.”
“What do we know he don’t?”
“That Crook’s coming.”
Frank wagged his head. “Yeah. He’s coming. But he might just get here too late to help us.”
Donegan looked around at the village, letting Grouard wallow in his despair. They had flushed the enemy from their homes and driven them into the hills, driven them up the bluffs that commanded a view of the camp. True, Mills did control the village and half of the hostiles’ pony herd— but the captain hadn’t been able to capitalize on his victory. A fierce and determined counterattack by the Sioux had forced the soldiers to dig in and establish a defensive perimeter, fighting with what they had left of their meager and dwindling ammunition.
“No matter what,” Seamus finally remarked as he watched the movement of warriors on the distant shelves along the face of the bluffs, “at least Crook’s got him his first victory of this goddamned Sioux war.”
“Forty lodges,” Grouard replied. “It ain’t much, is it?”
“After months of frustration, trailing the hostiles all over the territory—I’ll bet the army will take what victory they can get after disappointments at the Powder River and the Rosebud, after Custer was butchered at the Little Bighorn.”
Grouard grinned. “Any little win better than nothing, eh?”
“I guess we’ll just have to wait till Crook gets here,” Seamus said morosely a while later.
“Yes, Irishman. Crook or Crazy Horse,” Grouard replied. “We just have to see who gets to us first.”
Chapter 40
Moon When Leaves Turn Brown
American Horse thought they would be safe camped beside Rabbit Lip Creek at the foot of the cliffs that nearly enclosed their village on three sides. These bluffs had been carved over time by rain and melting snow, cut by smaller ravines and larger canyons running jaggedly to the valley floor, sculpted by the ever- present wind that blew along their heights to form every terrace, every one of the shelves that made climbing easy for the children who came here to play.
As protected as this place was, still the soldiers had found them.
Long time back scouts said the soldiers divided. Some staying on the Yellowstone while another army marched east, then turned south on the trail of American Horse’s own Miniconjou and the other villages camped in the area. But, those scouts reported, the soldiers were running out of time: their horses were failing them, and more than half of the white men were already afoot.
Most of the old men agreed that the soldiers were not a threat. The army could not travel fast enough to catch up to American Horse’s people before the Miniconjou reached Bear Butte.
But now he peered through the leafy bullberry and other brush at the mouth of the ravine where he and some of his people had fled with the opening shots—as the ponies thundered through camp and the soldier bullets fell on the taut lodge skins soaked by days of rain like the falling of hailstones.
Out there on the muddy side of the creek bottom lay Little Eagle’s granddaughter, only minutes old when the soldiers attacked. The young mother had no husband, for he was one of those killed in their great victory over the soldiers on the Greasy Grass. A glorious death!
But now Little Eagle’s daughter was alone. Without a husband she lived again with her parents while her time drew close. She carried a warrior’s child in her belly.
With the first hoofbeats, warning shouts, and gunfire, she had stumbled from her birthing bed with the newborn infant wrapped beneath her blanket, frightened and screaming while Little Eagle slashed a hole in the side of the lodge and her mother shoved her into the cold wind and rain. Around them madness swirled as ponies and people stampeded out of camp, away from the hairy-mouths and their angry guns.
Running for the creek bottom, the woman had been struck by a bullet. As the mother fell, the newborn pitched from her arms into the brush. The soldier’s bullet had passed through the mother’s shoulder and smashed into the infant’s head the instant before the woman stumbled and fell.
Forced to leave everything behind but what they had on their backs, American Horse and his woman came across the young mother moments later in their own escape, finding her blood seeping into the puddle of mud
