the nearby field hospital, Smith didn’t figure he had slept for more than an hour at a time all night long.
Each time he awoke, he came to with a start, slowly realizing where he was, listening to the groans of those in pain and the voices of those men on picket duty, or what soldiers were unable to sleep. And each time he came awake, the private always found Mackenzie pacing back and forth. At first he figured the colonel was attending to one matter or another, but Smith soon came to realize Mackenzie had instead slipped into some kind of deep depression.
William Earl liked the man, and it bothered him to find Mackenzie so sorely troubled. It even shook the young private to the core to have seen the colonel openly cry when he learned Lieutenant McKinney had been killed at the ravine.
The following morning Smith scribbled in his journal:
I don’t believe he slept at all that nite. His mind must of been troubled about some thing. I don’t know what, for he is the bravest man I ever saw. He don’t seem to think any more about bullets flying than I would about snowballs.
By dawn all of the killed and wounded soldiers had been brought in and accounted for, since it was generally believed the Cheyenne would resume the battle as soon as there was enough light for them to see their targets. Instead, the hilltops and rocky ridges were eerily silent as night bled into that Sunday, the twenty-sixth of November.
“It’s just as well,” Mackenzie murmured over his breakfast of black coffee as the sky grayed. “Last night in officers’ conference I decided that even the infantry would pay too high a cost trying to dislodge the warriors from the rocks in these mountains. Sadly, I now realize we’ve already paid too high a price for this victory.”
For a time Smith figured his commander might be morose simply because of losing so many casualties to the enemy, while at the same time during that officers’ meeting last night Mackenzie could personally verify no more than twenty-five warriors killed from the many reports. To justify so many dead soldiers, he should have clearly killed many, many more Cheyenne.
“But those are only the bodies which fell into our hands, General,” Wirt Davis had coaxed.
“How well we all know that the Indian drags off most of his comrades,” said John Lee.
“Perhaps,” answered a perplexed and clearly agitated Mackenzie as his men went about settling on the official accounting of the enemy dead.
The Pawnee had taken six scalps. Two soldiers had taken another pair of scalps. Frank Grouard himself had lifted one scalp. While one lieutenant reported he had personally killed one warrior, Captain Davis stated his company had killed six to eight more. Then Cosgrove’s Shoshone stated they had dropped four Cheyenne warriors. A one-eyed civilian scout claimed to have killed another warrior. And the combined Sioux and Arapaho scouts tallied another dozen enemy killed.
That cold, snowy morning as Mackenzie penned his official report, gray clouds hung low along the silvery mountaintops ringing the red valley. While the men stomped their cold feet and trudged about through six inches of new snow, enjoying their coffee around the cooking fires, Mackenzie sent out some of his Cheyenne and half-breed scouts to make contact again with the enemy—perhaps now to coax them into surrendering after the awful cold of last night.
But as much as the scouts called out to the hills in their native tongue, there was no answer but their echo. Cautiously they inched up the slopes toward the breastworks at the upper end of the valley, fully ready to encounter an ambush. Instead, the snow only became deeper, nearly covering all the tracks. The Cheyenne had been gone for some time.
Returning to the valley at midmorning, the scouts reported to Mackenzie what they had discovered. The numerous black rings of long-dead fires had been drifted over with new snow. Deep trails showed how the many had struggled single file up the rugged slopes for more than five miles into the mountains. The broad scoops of old snow told of many travois used to carry the dead and wounded warriors as the defeated Cheyenne disappeared into the wilderness. And they did not forget to mention the occasional patches of blood not yet covered by snow at the tops of the mountainsides.
But what spoke most eloquently were more than a half-dozen pony carcasses found here and there along the trail. Once the tribe’s most prized possessions, those horses were now the Cheyenne’s only food.
“You say they did what with the entrails?” Mackenzie asked the scouts for a clarification.
Interpreter Billy Garnett repeated, “It’s what a Injun’ll do, General. They’ll shoot the pony and slit it open soon as it’s dropped. They pull everything right out of the belly so the old ones getting froze up can stuff their hands and feet into the gut piles to keep from dying.”
“Dear God in heaven!” Mackenzie gushed in a whisper. “How … how many of those fresh carcasses did you find?”
“At least six, General. But we turned back—likely more on over the top. We didn’t dare get up that far. They had themselves a strong rear guard forted up and ready for us.”
“The enemy’s gone—you’re sure?”
Garnett nodded, saying, “’Cept them what’s staying behind to keep a eye on your army.”
“Yes,” Mackenzie replied as if his mind were elsewhere. “Now that I have stripped them of their pony herds and destroyed everything they own … the enemy will want to know what more I’m up to. Yes, by all means: let them flee through these mountains if that’s what they want. And for now, we’ll let the forces of ‘General Winter’ deliver the final blow to the Cheyenne.”
Late the night before, while the snow had fallen as thick as cottonwood fluffs drifting down from the low- slung clouds, Young Two Moon had stealthily crept toward the camp where the soldiers continued their destruction of their village. Far from the firelight that lent an eerie, otherworldly crimson glow to the bellies of those snow clouds, the young warrior waited, and watched, as the
It was long after that soldier camp grew quiet enough to hear the moans of their wounded that Young Two Moon suddenly remembered the few lodges that had been pitched some distance away from the main camp— across the creek and closer to the base of the red bluff where the soldiers had dragged all those who had fallen in battle.
There were no fires burning, no flames casting their glow upon the undersides of the clouds from that direction. Perhaps …
Alone, Young Two Moon slunk back up the slope of that western hill into the thick, soft, icy cold of that snow-cloud before he began traversing the hillside. It took him a long time to pick his way toward the site of those abandoned lodges, in and out of the shallow ravines, crossing from willow clump to willow clump in the darkness— stopping every few steps to listen to the sodden, silent night for the breathing, the boot sounds of any soldier-camp guard standing his rotation.
What a wonder! For some reason the Everywhere Spirit had seen to it that these lodges had been spared.
Yet, despite the fact that the lodges were still standing, for the most part the white man’s scouts had already plundered the dwellings. Growing less hopeful as he entered first one, then the second, Young Two Moon found only three old buffalo robes among them all—hides so poor and bare-rubbed that the enemy scouts had thought them all but useless.
Still, they had proved to be a valuable treasure to a people who had nothing.
As he had gathered up that third thin robe, someone downstream cried out sharply, in a language Young Two Moon did not understand. A shot was fired in the darkness—then a long rattle of gunfire was punctuated by shouting among the white men.
One of their camp guards must have thought he heard something, the young warrior brooded as he slipped away into the darkness.
Quickly he retraced his steps, dragging those three robes back up the mountainside to the first fire, where he helped wrap an old woman and two of her grandchildren within one of the robes. At the second and third fires up the slope, he watched the abandoned robes enwrap several little ones huddling together to share their mutual warmth. For the most part, the adults were too cold to utter any thanks as they crouched by the fires, rubbing bare hands together over the flames, kneading the frozen flesh of their naked feet, gazing up at the young warrior with eyes pooling with gratitude.
