Wolf Mountain Moon: The Battle of the Butte, 1877

with little but the clothes on their backs and a few lodges to hold all of them.

Maybe if they kept going south to the Elk River, across and beyond … maybe they would eventually locate the camps of the Crazy Horse people. The Hunkpatila and Bad Faces should be wealthy this winter. They had not been fighting the soldiers all through the autumn.

Across the last few weeks Sitting Bull had been trading with the Red River Slota for what he needed even more than blankets and food—rifles and bullets, along with more than twenty mules to carry the fifty heavy boxes of ammunition his warriors would use to fight the soldiers to a decisive conclusion come spring.

So with those mules and those bullets and guns, with his people and their few meager belongings, Sitting Bull had headed away from Fort Peck, crossing the frozen river and plunging into the breaks south of the Minisose, back toward the Redwater River country. Day by day they would have to march south and east, climbing toward the divide that would eventually drop them into the valley of the Elk River. From there it would be a few short sleeps until they found Crazy Horse somewhere on the Powder, perhaps on the Tongue.

Then, with the ammunition and weapons the Hunkpapa had traded from the northern metis, the reunited Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull bands would be ready for that final war against the wasicu soldiers come the spring, when the new grass filled the bellies of their fattened horses and brought the buffalo herds back once again.

Chapter 10

7-8 December 1876

“Get up, soldier! Stand up, damn you!”

Hearing that curse from one of the old files behind him, Frank Baldwin stiffly turned his horse about and moved back down the line of soldiers painfully trudging into the howling gale. For these few moments, at least, he would have the hurling snow at his back.

There out of the darkening mist as the last layer of daylight seeped from the western horizon, Baldwin spotted the group. Two older soldiers hunched over a third, pulling the man to his feet with a struggle.

“Lemme … lemme be,” he pleaded, flinging his arms about like a stocking doll.

“Naw, I ain’t gonna lea’f you, faith,” one of the men explained, his voice softer now as he attempted to cradle the reluctant soldier beneath his arm.

“Not me neither,” the other said, sweeping a long arm around the third man’s waist, and with a mighty heave raised the soldier nearly off the ground between them. “Couldn’t live with myself knowing I left you out here.”

“Don’t! Don’t take me,” the rag doll pleaded. “Lemme sleep.”

“No sleeping—Baldwin’s orders, faith,” the old graybeard said, scooping up the young soldier’s rifle out of the drifting snow, then stepping up to shove his shoulder under the failing infantryman.

Baldwin said, “If he falls again, give him the point of your bayonets.”

Both of the older men jerked up in surprise to find the lieutenant all but upon them as they stumbled to a halt there on the trail so many feet were carving out of the snow.

“Beggin’ pardon, sir,” one of the two chattered, fighting to keep his misshapen kepi on in the stiff wind as he peered up from beneath the rumpled brim at the lieutenant on horseback, “I cain’t bring my own self to jab a fellow Fifther with me bayonet. I save such a punishment for them blooming red-bellies.”

“Jab ’im, soldier,” Baldwin ordered. “If that’s the only way to keep the man moving—give ’im your bayonet. Is that understood?”

Both men swallowed, glanced at each other and the soldier between them, then nodded.

“Understood, sir.”

Baldwin started to turn, hearing more growling and yelps from back up the line of march, but instead turned round to the trio once more. “Listen, men—I don’t cotton to using the bayonets either. But you must understand. If you don’t keep every last one of us moving till we reach Fort Peck, then some might just lay down and die right here. How do you men want it?”

“Sir—beggin’ pardon?”

“You want half the men in your company falling out to die along this road? Or will you use your bayonets as I’ve ordered you to do?”

“W-we’ll bring ’em all in with us, sir,” the old graybeard replied. “Trust in that, Lieutenant. Trust in that.”

“I will,” Baldwin said. “Because I know what you’re made of, soldier.”

Then the lieutenant turned away and urged his weary horse to plod back up the line of stumbling, wobbly men hunching over to shove their way into the stiff, changeable wind that was blowing an icy mix of wet snow and dry crystal right into their faces. Not a moment passed that Frank did not watch a man collapse to a knee, perhaps to both. By and large most men waited a few seconds to rest, catch their breath as others trudged, stumbled, fell around them on the trail, then pull themselves slowly up, hand over hand on their rifles until they stood on wobbly pins once more. Again they would lean into the wind, forcing their legs to follow somehow.

All round them voices begged to be left behind so they could just sleep. Others pleaded to die right then and there—since it was clear they were all going to die anyway before Baldwin’s lonely battalion made it back to the safety of Fort Peck.

Yet there were more voices, stronger voices, deeper and more confident voices from those who shouted down the naysayers, who suffered this same unthinkable torture but fought back by grumbling and grousing and cursing up a blue streak in the raw, unrelenting face of that Montana blizzard. The sort of man who might often complain himself about lack of sleep or the poor rations of sidebelly and old crackers not fit for a man in prison, the sort of man who would grumble about putting in fatigue duty back at the Tongue River Cantonment, or curse his superiors when he had to dig a new latrine or corduroy a bank for the wagons or chop down trees to somehow construct just one more bridge across one more nameless goddamned creek.

But it was just that sort of double-riveted soldier who rose to the need and pulled lesser men out of the snow now as the wolfish wind howled, pulled others not quite as strong out of the frozen snowdrifts that might otherwise be their graves. The sort of man who pushed and yanked and even poked with his bayonet to be sure that every other soldier in front of him kept moving.

Just to keep all of them moving together into the teeth of that brutal storm. One crippling step at a time.

The sort of man who was bound and determined that every last one of them would make it back to Fort Peck alive. All. Without the loss of a single man.

At the head of the march the men in charge of the pack train had their own problems with the balky mules. Baldwin had put them up there for a purpose: to break trail through the deepening snow and near-insurmountable drifts. With the snow and that cursed wind blowing head-on against them, the men were far past numb. And with numbness begins the creeping fatigue, the irrepressible drowsiness that convinces a man he needs only to sit down, curl up, and rest awhile—then he’ll be fit enough to march on, invigorated and refreshed.

Frank wondered if his own brain were growing cold, and slow, and just might not be as sharp as he needed it to be to get these hundred-plus men back to safety. If he failed them, they might well all die.

“Get that man up!” the lieutenant bellowed, the ice cracking on his cheeks and beard, sprinkling the front of his dark wool coat with moonlit glitter. “Get him moving—jab ’im if you have to!”

This new bunch of soldiers looked up at Baldwin; then one of them pulled his bayonet from its scabbard and prodded their fellow with the sharp tip. The soldier down and floundering in a snowdrift tried again and again to shove the long knife aside whenever it jabbed him.

“Awright!” he hollered, grabbing on to the muzzle of another man’s long Springfield, raising himself painfully with his own rifle as a crutch. “I’m standing, Lieutenant! I’m standing, by God!”

“Standing isn’t good enough—I need you to march, soldier!” Baldwin shouted, his words hurried on by the