tall willows and around a sharp right-hand bend to the valley’s throat.
“Lieutenant Dorst—it’s time to order the charge!” Mackenzie bellowed above his group, again rising in the stirrups, finally ripping the floppy-brimmed hat from his head and waving it enthusiastically as his adjutant pranced up on his mount. Then the colonel turned to Crook’s aide. “Captain Bourke—would you care to take the order for our charge back to Major Gordon and his battalion?”
“I’d be honored, General!” Bourke replied, twisting his horse about in a tight circle and giving it his heel to race back across that patch of open ground.
Mackenzie was then waving his hat, emphatically signaling. “Major North! Now! In with your Pawnee battalion!”
Those forty-eight allies had stripped off coat and saddle, down to the barest battle dress, maintaining enough of their uniforms so that the soldiers would recognize them in the din, confusion and fear of the fight now about to open in all its color and splendor, the crushing weight of its blood and its terror.
“Major Cosgrove!” Mackenzie hollered as the North brothers galloped off, shouting their orders, the Pawnee sergeants twisting about on the bare backs of their ponies to pass on the commands to each troop of the battalion as an excited babble of many different tongues rose over the command. “You and Lieutenant Schuyler—in with the Shoshone! Take and hold that high ground on our left flank! In with you, now!”
Brave Wolf did not join in the dancing last night.
The Contrary warrior and a few of his friends successfully eluded the Fox Soldiers who were charged with preventing anyone from leaving camp … but slipping out was easy, for it seemed Last Bull’s warriors had celebration on their minds. Women and dancing. Women and laughter.
It was easy for Brave Wolf and his friends to sneak from camp, thread their way through the leafless brush, and climb the plateau north of the village where one or more of them kept a vigil throughout those frigid hours among the rimrocks. Expecting the soldiers to approach the camp sometime during the night and attack once dawn had arrived.
In the cold light the flames from the huge bonfire were eventually allowed to fall, and at last the Fox soldiers allowed the People to stumble off to their beds. So weary were they from dancing nonstop across the night.
An old man looked up from his bed and asked his son, “You have been up in the rocks?”
Brave Wolf nodded in answering his father as he ducked into his family’s lodge. “Yes. We saw nothing. Some of us heard a rumble, in the east. But … we saw nothing.”
“They are coming,” his father declared, his eyes wide with anxiety.
Brave Wolf glanced at his mother, looking at them both, a blanket pulled up to cover most of her well-seamed face, only her frightened eyes showing like radiant pools in the dim light. His two wives and his children were already soundly asleep in their robes and blankets.
“What do you want me to do, Father?”
“Do not take off your moccasins,” the old man instructed. “Take nothing off … so you will be ready when the soldiers come here.”
“My mother is ready?” Brave Wolf asked.
“We did not take off our clothes,” his father replied. “None of us—not your wives and children—so we will be ready to run to the cliffs when the shooting starts.”
Swallowing with growing apprehension, Brave Wolf settled on his haunches before the dead fire his father was beginning to rekindle with shaking hands. “I told you, Father: we saw nothing. No sign of the soldiers—”
“You remember Box Elder’s vision?”
Brave Wolf nodded.
His father continued, “I believe the power of that man’s medicine. All the times Box Elder told our people some event was about to occur, it came true. I believe he is right when he told the village he saw soldiers attacking us here.”
“All right, Father,” Brave Wolf said as he crawled over to his blankets and robes. “I too will sleep with my clothes on—so I will be ready when the soldiers come.”
Around Seamus and Bourke crowded the Sioux, Arapaho, and the Cheyenne scouts under Lieutenant William Philo Clark and Second Lieutenant Hayden Delaney, their ponies prancing, sidestepping smartly—every man wound as tight as the mainspring in a two-dollar watch.
Mackenzie’s big chestnut was among them in the next moment. “Mr. Clark! Mr. Delaney—as ordered, you will lead your battalion up the center and into the village!” The colonel’s eyes fell on Donegan as men yelled and horses grunted. “You—Irishman! Watch that pretty head of hair!”
“Aye, Colonel! Hep-haw!” And they were all off like the rush of a wave crashing upon the shore, him and his bay carried away at the front of those Indians, who suddenly freed their wildest screams and screeches all around him.
He was part of it, this rising of his gorge, this swelling of the animal within him. And then Seamus was bellowing along with the Indians, his throat raw with the cold, the muscles in his neck bulging as his horse tore down into the willow with the rest thundering all about him.
The cold along his cheeks stung every bit as much as the whiplash of those eight-foot-tall bare willow branches slapping, clawing, snatching at him and the others as they threaded their way across a little feeder stream, up the other side, the horses slipping on the icy ground, slashing the far bank with their hooves, a few of the ponies going down—the cries of their riders swallowed over with the rest of the clamor. Men left to climb back out of the frozen mud and boggy marsh, to remount and follow in the wake of those who clung to their wide-eyed, frost-snorting mounts like hellions thrust right out of the maw of Hades and flung headlong into this new dawn.
Right through the narrowing neck of the canyon where the riders could race four abreast now and on into the widening valley where the lieutenants shouted and Cosgrove bellowed—leading their Shoshone to the left, their ponies scratching for a hold on the red-rocked side of the slope they began to ascend, one horse at a time, climbing, climbing to reach that high ground where they could seize a commanding field of fire over the village.
Now the Pawnee were beginning to cross to the far side of the creek to the south of the canyon. Slowed, their ponies cautious, as they slipped and fought for footing again on the ice-rimed banks, most of the animals hurtling into the water—legs flailing in the air as they came down into the shockingly cold creek—rising with a struggle to leap across the stream with their riders and vault to the far side, sprays like cock’s combs roostering into the gray light of that bloody dawn, the first crimson light of day smeared recklessly on the tops of the high red bluffs above them all. The Pawnee screeched and cried out, exhorting one another, brandishing their carbines, many of them clamping the reins in their teeth as they splashed one another in that mad race to be the first in among the lodges … to be the first in to claim the finest of those Cheyenne ponies.
Among them one lone Pawnee shaman blew on a wooden pipe, its high-pitched notes rising with a waver above the hammer of hooves and the grunts of the horses, the cracking of ice and the snapping of bare willow limbs against legs and saddles and muscled pony flanks. A sound not unlike the wet, steamy whistle of the boats in Boston Towne’s harbor, these notes the man blew as they raced along—a strange, eerie war song that lifted the guard hairs on the back of the Irishman’s neck. Made that huge scar across the great width of his back tingle once more with alarm.
He had been swept up in half a hundred charges during the Civil War, riding stirrup to stirrup with brave men only heartbeats away from death, their bodies shredded by grapeshot and canister erupting in their midst. Seamus had been wounded before—hit not by shrapnel from Johnny Reb cannons, but hit instead by bone from the comrade riding to the left or right as their gallant troop set out behind the colors and banners and battle streamers for the enemy lines.
But nothing had ever stirred in him the feeling of being so carried away, of being so ultimately helpless against the powerful thrust of this moment in time, the way this charge reached down inside him and yanked him up by the balls. His heart rose to his throat, raw as it was—then he realized he was screaming at the top of his lungs with the rest of the copper-skinned scouts.
It surprised him when the first shots cracked the cold, brittle blue air of that valley morning yet to be touched by the faintest intrusion of the winter sun.
“Bet that’s one of them sonsabitches shooting off his gun at a herder boy!” Grouard growled beside him. “Get ’em some Cheyenne ponies!”
“Don’t make me no never-mind, Frank,” Seamus said. “The bleeming ball’s been opened, which means you
