Across the stream they dashed again, only three of them this time, zigzagging as they ran through the willow and up onto the flat beneath the red ridge where the Shoshone began to call out their taunts and shoot down into their midst. Quickly Dog and another grabbed the dead man’s arms while the third snatched up the burial blanket. Turning, grunting, dragging, weaving this way and that, the trio lumbered back to cover with the body as the bullets slapped the icy snow and zinged off the red rocks, rattling among the nearby lodges like hailstones.
Back at the mouth of the narrow ravine, all three were panting as the others congratulated them on their courage.
“We must remember this day,” a young warrior said, gulping air.
Dog replied, “We will remember this day—and all Crooked Lances will remember where our chief fell.”
“How will we remember?” asked another.
“I put a red stone on the spot, marked with the sign of Crow Split Nose. We will remember—for at that place a brave man died for his people”
* George Armstrong Custer,
† The
*
* Little Bighorn River.
Chapter 34
25 November 1876
“Sweet Mither of God,” Seamus mumbled under his breath as he, the North brothers, and Frank Grouard recrossed the far eastern end of the snowy valley and entered the village after driving the Cheyenne snipers from the rocks.
More times than he cared to count he had set his feet down upon one battlefield or another, through all those battles serving with the Army of the Potomac and then Sheridan’s Army of the Shenandoah, through ten long years of war between white and red, enduring this struggle between all that was wild and those who sought to tame all that was less than civilized.
Here at the opening of the lodge circle’s horns, here at the eastern fringe of the village it was plain to see the Cheyenne had no chance to flee before the soldiers’ scouts were upon them. Here most of the casualties fell beneath the hooves and the bullets of Mackenzie’s onslaught. Here among their homes, their possessions, their families.
By the time Donegan reached the village after driving off the snipers, a handful of the canvas agency lodges had already been set afire by the Pawnee. The thick hide lodge covers would have to wait till the fires grew hotter. But for now, no more than a half-dozen agency lodges smoldered, their canvas hanging in blackened tatters to the charred spires of peeled lodgepole straining at the sky in a graceful spiral, oily smudges of destruction giving stench on the downwind.
The stiff wind was cruel that day. Despite the bright, bright sun. Seamus gathered the ends of his tall collar in one fist and held it over his nose and mouth as he rode slowly through the devastation, past the bodies of men and women already stripped and scalped by the scouts. Everything still too fresh, and the air far too cold for any decay.
Yet the stench of death clung to this place.
Dead cavalry horses and Indian ponies lay here and there, perhaps bunched near a spot where some fierce fighting took a great toll—those dark, stiff-legged lumps frozen on the hoof-churned snow. Some time ago the uninjured animals on both sides had been withdrawn, now protected back in the ravines, behind the snow-laced red ridges where the enemy’s bullets could not find them.
“You there!”
His attention snagged, Seamus turned slightly, finding a young soldier hollering at a handful of Pawnee loosely surrounding the body of an old Cheyenne woman.
“Shit,” Donegan grumbled, and reined his bay in the group’s direction.
“I told you sonsabitches to leave the woman alone!” the frustrated picket cried out more in desperation and disgust than in anger.
The Pawnee held their rifles pointed at the ground for the most part, but they smiled at the soldier as if they could shoot him just as quickly and guiltlessly as they had the woman if he nettled them any further. Not a one of them spoke.
Donegan shouted, flinging his voice over his shoulder. “Frank! Major North!”
The older of the brothers signaled Grouard and Luther to follow Donegan.
Seamus came to a halt, crossed his wrists over the saddle horn, leaning forward so his right hand lay near his pistol. “Frank, you think you can get your boys to leave off the women and the old ones?”
Frank North bristled. “With my own eyes I’ve seen how the Pawnee have suffered at the hands of these people—”
“They ain’t suffered a goddamned thing from that old woman!” Donegan snapped, about ready to pull the gun on those grinning Pawnee scouts.
The major’s eyes glared a moment, then softened, and he turned away from the Irishman, saying something in Pawnee as he shooed them away with his arm. The scouts shot the young soldier and Donegan one last look of derision before they moved off among the plundered lodges.
“I told ’em,” the soldier grumbled morosely, stepping up to the body sprawled on the bloody snow. “Told ’em I found her—in that lodge right there.”
Seamus asked, “What’s your name, son?”
“Private Butler,” he answered, staring down at the woman’s body. Between the bullet hole at close range and the crude scalping, there wasn’t much humanly recognizable about the head. His hands shook as they squeezed his carbine. “S-second Cavalry. I told ’em to leave her be. Said I was coming back with something to tie ’er up with so’s I could take ’er somewheres the general could talk to ’er a bit.”
“I suppose she was armed?” Luther North asked.
Butler looked up at the younger brother. “If you’re asking because you figure that’s why your Pawnee killed her—the answer’s no. The old woman wasn’t armed when I found her hiding under a blanket and some robes. Shaking like a autumn leaf. She could barely walk when I dragged her to her feet.”
“Yeah, lookit that legs of hers,” Grouard replied, kneeling beside the corpse. “She’s had trouble healing that old wound.”
“Likely she got herself left behind,” Frank North surmised.
“And shot before we could take her prisoner,” the soldier growled.
“The army don’t often take prisoners in a fight like this,” Luther North boasted.
“That’s plain as the nose on my face!” Butler snapped. “Look around you! Ain’t a prisoner left in this hull goddamned village, is there?”
The elder North swiped the back of his glove across his cracked lips and said, “I suppose there isn’t, soldier,” then quickly nudged his horse in the ribs and moved past the private and the old woman’s bloodied body. “C’mon, Grouard. Mackenzie wants you and me to put a count to these lodges before we start torching any more of ’em.”
“You going with us?” Luther North asked Donegan.
“Naw. I’ll stay around here for a while,” Seamus replied, easing out of the saddle. For a moment he watched the three civilians inch through camp, counting aloud; then he walked the bay over to some willow, tying off the horse.
Turning, he stepped over to the back of a lodge where the canvas cover had been slashed open at the moment of attack. Parting the fold with his two hands, Seamus peered inside, his eyes adjusting to the dim light. An interior liner of undressed hides hung from a rope strung around the circumference of the lodge from pole to pole to
