strict silence, for a column moving into position for the attack, unaware that it has already been discovered by the Cheyenne, is not allowed the luxury of a great deal of noise.
Everything that could be tied down had to be kept from causing racket. Although they were ordered not to smoke, not to light a match for their pipes, many consoled themselves with their favorite briar anyway. By and large the officers turned away without scolding—knowing that for these men forced to endure this subzero march, a bowl of Kentucky burley could be a small but meaningful pleasure.
From time to time orders were whispered back down the column for the troops to reform in columns of twos, but soon came another command for the men to proceed in single-file through the winding, narrow passages they encountered. As the column strung itself out for more than five miles on such occasions, the men were required to stop and wait at times for more than half an hour before they could move on. While many impatiently waited out the backed-up muddle, some of the older hands dismounted and slept right where they hit the ground, reins tied around their wrists. Other men merely dozed in the saddle despite the plunging temperatures. More and more it was proving to be slow going with all the delays, with the rise and the fall of the trail—considering they already had the scent of their quarry in their nostrils and should have been closing in for the kill.
The ranks grew all the more quiet as the darkness swelled around them like an inky, purple bruise until the ground finally smoothed, growing less rugged after they had pierced the outer wall of the mountainside. On the far side of the high peaks above them the sun sank beyond like death’s own grave as soldiers and scouts alike followed the Arapaho Sharp Nose’s trail out of the narrow gorge where they had been strung out for more than half a dozen miles, those eleven hundred men inching along in the coming dusk one at a time as the land began to lead them up, up from the plain into the darkest recesses that would ultimately draw them into the veritable heart of the Big Horn Mountains. No longer were they in the land of the curious prairie dog that would stick its head up from a hole for a peek and a protest at the passing beasts before ducking back into the warmth and darkness of its protective burrow while the frozen men and animals plodded past.
Here the cliffs and towering monuments of stone closed in around them on both sides, seeming to slam shut on their rear too—forbidding any retreat.
In the west the sky had turned from rose to purple to indigo, lowering as they pushed on through the glittering, frozen darkness, feeling their way step by icebound step in their heaving climb to over thirty-five hundred feet among the juniper, stunted jack pine, and cedar. Every man, horse, and mule of them stumbling, slipping, sliding sideways on icy patches where the sun hadn’t penetrated between the narrow battlements of wind-eroded red rock.
Every now and then at a particularly difficult ravine an order came back for the column to “close up, close up!” Each time those at the head of a company would report to the troop in their advance that they had successfully made the crossing; the last man of that troop calling out to the company behind them in the dark, bringing them on with nothing more than the encouragement of that voice coming out of the gloom of that oppressive, frozen darkness.
And with every narrow stream or creek they were forced to cross, the cold, frightened horses splashed the icy water onto their riders, drenching the troopers, leaving every man frozen to his marrow, every animal shuddering in uncontrollable spasms.
Throughout their long night march the overanxious allies hurried past the slow-plodding soldiers on right flank or left, darting by singly or in pairs, all of them urging their ponies faster than the troopers pushed their big cavalry horses—until every one of the scouts had coagulated at the front of the march.
Ready to strike.
As the moonless winter night squeezed down, a man here and there fell out to await the tail of the column— those few who precariously clung to their saddles, careening side to side as if they were about to retch, stricken with that strange and sudden malady known as altitude sickness, perhaps numbed by the endless cold, even those few in any battle-ready regiment who are always taken with a sudden case of unquenchable fear.
From time to time in the coallike blackness it tried to snow. None of them could really see it snowing, able only to feel the frozen crystals sting the bare, exposed, and stiffened parchment of their cheeks and noses as the wind tossed and gusted through each narrow defile while the column drew closer.
Closer.
Again and again the forward scouts whirled back to Mackenzie and his staff through that long, cold night— urging the soldiers to press on, faster, ever faster … morning was coming and the village was near. Impatient were the auxiliaries all to be in position before first light. On and on the scouts prodded the white men to hurry. Morning would soon be upon them. The time for attack.
“Better that we let our Indians feel their way ahead as far as they want to,” Mackenzie muttered to those around him sometime late that night. “Some itch tells me there may well be a trap laid for us up there, the way those scouts are leading us through these narrow canyons. Perhaps the Cheyenne have a surprise waiting for us.”
But as much as they feared it, as ready as they were for it, as closely as the soldiers watched the rising tumble of rock around them—there came no ambush.
So dark and cold and suffocating was the night that Seamus began to believe they were the only creatures stirring in this part of the world. So small and insignificant did he feel here at the bottom of each gorge, beneath a sky so black that it seemed to go on forever, sucking every hint of warmth right out of the earth.
Donegan could not remember ever seeing as many stars as this back east in Boston Towne. Even away from the cities and the streetlights—never could the sky be as brilliantly flecked, for only here was the air so dry. He licked his fevered lips and remembered the amber jar stuffed in his pocket. Once more he dabbed the cold dribble from his inflamed nostrils with the huge bandanna that hung around his neck, then swabbed more of the tallow over the end of his nose, into the wide, oozy cracks on his lower lip.
Would they ever get into position to make their charge and begin the attack before daylight?
Or would they find they had to lay to another day in some pocket away from the village and not be able to have their fight until the twenty-sixth?
He fretted at their snail’s pace, knowing most of the others must be every bit as anxious as he was to get on with the fight. Now that they were there, now that it was cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass office monkey, there simply was nothing that could warm a man up like a fight for his life. A good blood-throbbing scrap of it.
How he wanted to get this over and done with, then home to both of them.
I’ll figure out the boy’s name on the trip back, he promised himself again. Time enough to do that, Seamus. Get this fight out of the way—and you can name your son.
Near two o’clock the column squeezed itself again through a narrowing crimson defile the scouts from Red Cloud’s agency called “Sioux Pass.” For more than five miles the column snaked through the tall, rocky canyon, the immense walls of which were stippled with stunted trees. Directly above them glittered no more than a long angular strip of star-studded sky. Ahead in the distance hung the silver-blue quarter of a moon, quickly falling into the west after its own brief ride across the heavens.
“Eight more miles,” came the whispered word back from the Indian trackers leading them through the darkness.
Eight miles below the valley where the scouts claimed Mackenzie’s soldiers would find the Cheyenne village, they struck the Red Fork of the Powder River. Out of that bleak, early-morning darkness two horsemen approached the head of the column. They proved to be Red Shirt and Jackass, the two Sioux scouts who had stayed behind to keep an eye on the village. It was plain to see that their ponies were done in: Jackass’s animal stumbled, about with its weary rider and eventually fell. Both men jabbered excitedly about seeing many ponies and even counting a few lodges in the dark. During the brief halt the pair was fed hardtack and cold bacon, then told to rejoin their fellow warriors as the column pressed on into the darkness.
Hoar frost from every nostril and mouth hung like a thickening blanket over the entire serpentine column eventually slithering itself out of the rocky gorge, emerging upon a patch of smoother, more open ground some half-mile wide by three miles in length, which the Sioux had long ago named the “Race Course.” Behind them to the east, the first telltale narrow thread of gray light stretched atop the distant horizon.
How close were they now?
While Seamus and the head of the march spread out there where the narrow ravine widened beside the nearby stream tumbling over its icy bed, its faint echo splashing off the canyon walls, the rest of the column came to a halt behind him. The men quieted their animals without instruction from their officers. And listened.
