Two Bulls and White Frog were both wounded more than twice. Wooden Nose was shot through the neck and could not speak, for his throat filled up with blood—yet all three remained steadfast with their Sweet Medicine Chief.
Among their numbers only Charging Bear and Tall Sioux were not wounded in that desperate struggle at the mouth of the ravine as the shadows shifted and the sun crawled relentlessly toward midsky.
When the last of the women and old ones had clawed and scrambled their way to the breastworks, and their village was deserted of all but the dead, the wounded Little Wolf finally turned to his comrades.
“We can go now. Up the canyon to the ridge where our families wait.”
“They have our village!” Bull Hump protested, his face smeared with blood and tears.
Little Wolf laid a hand on the shoulder of Morning Star’s son. “Pay heed—for you are like a nephew to me, Bull Hump. Our fight is far from over—but we have many dead and many who will die from their wounds if we do not care for them now. It is time we disappear and choose another place and time to fight this enemy.”
Try as the soldiers did to drive the Cheyenne warriors back into the recesses of the snowy, rocky heights surrounding the valley that morning, the enemy doggedly remained in range of the village.
Mackenzie could have inflicted more casualties among the warriors by pushing his advantage, ordering his men into the hills after the troublesome snipers. Which was sure to mean many, many more soldiers brought back to lie beneath blankets upon the cold ground there at the hospital knoll.
Instead the colonel chose to consolidate his grip on the village and inflict his punishment on the Cheyenne in a more dramatic and possibly far-reaching way. At the same time, he had to assure that his men did not waste their precious ammunition as the day wore on and the battle became a long-range duel. Using a dozen orderlies along with his aides Dorst and Lawton, as well as William P. Clark and even John G. Bourke, as couriers who raced back and forth alone across that dangerous half mile of no-man’s-land where the Cheyenne marksmen did their best to kill rider or horse, Mackenzie sent strict orders to his units deployed in every corner of the valley that they were to conserve their resources at all costs.
For the moment it appeared the Cheyenne were doing no different. All too readily did the warriors realize just how few cartridges they had snatched up to carry away from their lodges at the moment of attack. So what few shots they did aim at the soldiers were meant to garner the maximum demoralizing effect on the colonel’s men.
At the same time, to Mackenzie’s growing aggravation, not only had the Cheyenne apparently figured out the range of the Springfield carbines, but they appeared to be using their ammunition more wisely than his soldiers. Too, many of the warriors constantly slipped from crevice to rock, from rock to bush—moving into effective range, forcing the soldiers to keep their heads down, at times even luring some into giving chase up the sides of the hills and along the ridges, thereby bringing the white man into range of their guns.
Yet for the most part, as exasperating as the day was for Mackenzie, his soldiers reaped one small victory after another.
With his F Troop, Captain Wirt Davis laid plans to turn the tables on perhaps as many as a dozen warriors who had doggedly remained behind some rocks fronting a bluff, where the soldiers simply could not dislodge the enemy. Davis spread the word, then ordered his men to retreat on the double, turning and sprinting to the rear of a sudden. Sure enough, the eager warriors followed headlong, howling in victory, sure they were about to cut apart the rear of the soldier retreat when Davis’s men suddenly leaped into a shallow ravine, turned, and fired a deadly volley into the onrushing Cheyenne.
Those warriors not killed or critically wounded as the gun smoke cleared quickly retreated in panic and dismay.
Another group of Cheyenne took shelter in a shallow cave among the rocks on the north side of the valley. From there they put up a valiant fight until all were killed by Wessels’s company, who poured volley after volley into the dark recesses of the hillside.
At the rocks where Seamus had joined Grouard, Frank North, and a contingent of soldiers that morning, the warrior marksmen on the knoll were becoming all the more troublesome in forcing the surrounding white men to warily remain behind cover while from time to time more horsemen appeared on the open plain, each of them singing their war songs and shouting to the high ground, crying out to the Shoshone and Pawnee, to the Lakota and their brother Cheyenne—demanding the enemy to come out and do battle honorably; man to man.
And behind them all, on the distant ridge where they had erected their breastworks, the women keened and the old men sang their strong-heart songs—a strange, eerie, discordant background to the occasional burst of rifle fire that echoed off the cold red heights. From those rocks the Cheyenne could not escape without endangering their women and children for the time being, nor could they be dislodged without inflicting serious casualties on Mackenzie’s troops.
During the long-range sniping, a cavalryman disregarded orders to keep down and out of sight until the snipers could be ferreted out. Instead, he curiously raised his head and shoulders above the rock where he had taken cover and immediately earned a bullet through the jaw for his foolhardiness. Unconscious, he pitched forward against the side of the slope, head twisted in such a way that he drowned in his own blood as others watched helplessly.
Despite that one soldier’s fate, a particularly obnoxious trooper from the Fifth Cavalry had begun to boast that no Cheyenne bullet would find him.
“Ain’t a red-belly can hit me!” he bragged.
Goaded by his more cautious fellows, the soldier began to expose more and more of himself to the distant enemy as his bravado became all the heartier … until a bullet finally found him.
A stunned silence fell upon the soldiers as the wounded trooper collapsed.
“Yes … they can too, Cap’n,” the trooper cried out in shock and pain as he stared down at his own blood. “Give ’em hell for me!”
As it turned out, his wound was but a slight one, and the soldier was soon back with his company at the skirmish line—this time showing a more healthy respect for the abilities of the enemy.
Throughout the rest of the morning and into the afternoon, the man’s comrades good-naturedly gave the soldier no mercy as they continued to roar with laughter, lightening everyone’s spirits as they repeatedly called out to one another in the midst of that terrible battle, “Yes, they can too!”
“Yes, they can too!”
*
* Little Bighorn River.
Chapter 33
Big Freezing Moon 1876
After leaving his wife with the other women near the breastworks, Black Hairy Dog plunged into the dangerous and rugged landscape at the northwest rim of the valley. Together with a handful of other warriors, the Keeper of the Sacred Arrows climbed over and around rocks, slid down the steep sides of ravines, and then clambered back up the far side, again and again through every one of those thickly timbered wrinkles until he found the spot he knew
A level thumb of ground jutted out into the valley ever so slightly. Here Black Hairy Dog would bring the power of the
“Quickly!” he told those who had followed him. “Gather up the white ‘man’ sage for me.”
Without a word of question or protest the others bent in search of not just any sage, but that pale variety considered both male and sacred by the
First he released the thick sheet of buffalo rawhide and set it aside. Next he untied the top of the kit-fox-skin
