A cold gust of wind slashed across Wheeler’s face when he turned slowly, thinking he had heard Mackenzie’s voice. The lieutenant shivered suddenly as he rose to greet the commander, his stomach growling hungrily, feeling the stupor of having gone without sleep for a second night.
“Lieutenant Wheeler.”
“Yes, General. Good morning.”
“Morning. Yes. Mr. Wheeler, I came to see how you were getting along. We’ll be moving out before noon.”
“I’ll be ready.”
“I see.” Then the colonel pointed down to the end of the row of travois. “Why are your men standing there holding those travois and wounded?”
“I have only four packers, General,” Wheeler said. “It takes two packers to lash up the travois to a mule. So some of my men are waiting with the wounded men who will be the next to have mules brought up for them.”
“Your men can’t get this done any quicker?”
In utter exhaustion he looked down at his boot caked with snow and ice. “No, General. My boys don’t know a thing about a proper mule hitch. But if I had—”
“—more packers,” Mackenzie interrupted, “you could hitch them all up at once. Is that correct?”
“Yes, sir. About the size of it, exactly.”
The colonel turned to his regimental quartermaster as they started away. “Mr. Lawton—see that Wheeler gets the help he needs. Immediately. And then we’ll leave him alone. He seems to know what he is about.”
Wheeler watched Mackenzie’s back for a moment more, his weary mind sliding here and there in unconnected thought … wondering if he would have time to grab a nap before they would be moving out.
Morning Star ached to the bone with fatigue and cold.
Through that long night he had kept moving from fire to fire with the others as his people trudged step by frozen step more than five miles into the mountains. As wounded as was his own heart with his personal loss, Morning Star did what he could to console the relatives of those warriors who had been killed, their bodies fallen into the enemy’s hands.
Too, he sat for a time with each one of the mothers who had lost their infants to the incredible cold. And he joined those who were rubbing warmth back into the hands and feet of the old ones too frail and sick to move about and warm themselves.
Again and again he instructed this group or that to sacrifice one of their ponies not only for food they could roast over the tiny fires, but so that the old people could stuff their hands and feet among the warm organs and blood.
Still, the
Up ahead of him on the slope that gray-skinned morning as the sun blurred the eastern horizon to a narrow band of bloody red, a mother held the hand of one of her young children as they stumbled along, stiff-legged … while in the other arm she carried the frozen body of her infant who had died while struggling to nurse at its mother’s breast throughout the night.
How heavy his heart had become, for it seemed the very young and the very old were being ripped from the People. Perhaps all that would be left to his band would be those old enough to suffer the cold without dying, those young enough that the cold could not weaken their frail bodies.
All these winters of his life—through the battles and the migrations, in all that greatness and feasting, the women he had loved and the children who had sprung from his loins—so many winters that had flecked his hair with their snow … his heart had never been so heavy.
And he had never been quite so cold.
Last night he had squatted at a fire beside his missing son, Bull Hump, and some of the other old warriors, talking quietly while the keening surrounded them and the groans of the wounded reminded them all that there would be more to die.
Softly, Bull Hump had said, “The only thing that saved the lives of any of us was the smoke from so many guns—smoke which hung so low in the ravines and gulches, smoke which clung to the mountainsides so that the soldiers could not see us clearly as we fought. Had there not been so much gun smoke—more of us would have fallen.”
Now, as Morning Star reached the top of the icy, slippery slope and turned, the dry, cold air scratching his lungs with the torment of a porcupine-tail hairbrush, the chief gazed down through the bottom of the snow clouds at the valley below. Watching the last of his people struggling up the long slope through the timber, many crawling up hand over hand, barefoot, dragging tiny ones and the old with them through the depth of that new snow as they pushed ever onward into the soft underbelly of those clouds.
Up here where the smoke hung just beneath the clouds there clung the stench of death and destruction. Everything gone to ash and smoke. Those lodges of each warrior society exquisitely decorated with regalia, painted to record the exploits of their members, their finest deeds: a retelling of men and soldiers and horses pitched together in struggles from the past. A glorious past.
Each man’s most important clothing was gone in the smoke. Beautifully tanned hides, quilled and beaded—a warrior’s holy clothes that he would wear into battle. Scalp locks and the medicine drawings on each shirt, the leggings, his fighting moccasins. The great spray and tumble of war eagle feathers worn by some, or the great provocation of the horned headdresses that adorned others.
But with the attack yesterday morning, there was no time to dress and paint while one said his prayers. Only a few at the upper end of camp had a moment to sweep up a sacred bonnet or a special amulet to give them strength in the coming fight. Their sacred war medicines, prayer bundles, all of it—everything except
Even the Sacred Corn, given by the Grandmother Earth to Sweet Medicine to feed his people at the beginning of time. How it had stabbed Morning Star’s heart to watch the soldiers throw the last few ears of their Sacred Corn into the fire. No more would the People know freedom from want with it gone. Now—he knew—they would always be hungry.
The
So Morning Star wondered if it would not have been better to die the death of a warrior in yesterday’s battle, along with his two sons and those grandchildren … better that than to watch his people’s greatness die at the bottom of those bloody footprints scattering up the silent, mourning mountainside.
In addition to the twenty-four soldiers and Indian scouts wounded in the battle, Lieutenant Homer Wheeler’s detail was attending to one of the Shoshone who had suffered a terrible abdominal wound. Because of the poor prognosis for a man shot through the intestines, the army surgeons didn’t hold out much hope for the scout named Anzi to survive long enough to reach the wagon camp. Since he was marked for death, the course of treatment was simply to make the patient as comfortable as possible and administer as much painkiller as was necessary.
For Anzi, Dr. LaGarde prescribed laudanum, a morphine derivative, and approved all the whiskey the Shoshone wanted. With such a combination coursing through his system, the warrior had somehow survived the night, lasting into the next morning while Mackenzie’s cavalry prepared to leave the Cheyenne village behind.
But rather than slipping away, as the surgeons had predicted, the warrior instead began to insist upon more and more whiskey from his attendants through the long, cold night.
“Oh, John!” he would call out to one or another of the hospital stewards or Wheeler’s escort detail. It mattered little what the soldiers’ names were, because Anzi preferred to use that common expression many of the Shoshone gave when addressing any white man.
“What you want now, Anzi?” a soldier would ask.
“Oh, John! Heap sick! Whiskey! Whiskey!”
So all through that night and into the gray of dawn Wheeler’s troopers poured whiskey down the mortally wounded scout, as well as sharing some with a few of the other critically injured soldiers like Private Alexander McFarland, who lapsed in and out of consciousness. But by midmorning, as the cavalry was preparing to embark, Wheeler had been forced to kneel at Anzi’s side, explaining that there was no more whiskey for him, no officers’ brandy, either.
