To live up to the oath he had pledged to himself and to her so many summers before this. He had promised … no, he had
Custer knew now he had to see her again. With every fiber that was at his command. He had to see Monaseetah and the boy.
After all, Yellow Hair had never lied in his life.
CHAPTER 11
IT was nothing more than ignorance really.
These white men—soldiers and scouts alike—they assumed all the deserted camps the regiment ran across during their march of 24 June were merely successive camping sites of the same village on the move.
The Crows and Rees knew better.
Bloody Knife as well as any.
The aging, veteran Arikara tracker understood these converging sites were in fact the continuous camps of several large bands having joined here on the upper Rosebud. What angered him into even stonier silence was that he and the other scouts could not convince the soldiers that they were fools if they refused to see the camps were the same age.
Beginning that long and very hot day, anger became a bitter potion the Indian scouts would be drunk on before another sun had risen.
At each of the abandoned campsites, the convergence of a growing number of lodge rings and fire pits joined the abandoned wickiups along the river’s bank. And on the outskirts of every abandoned camp, the grass was found close cropped for miles around, the herd-trampled meadows generously speckled with droppings already dry and crumbly beneath a relentless Montana sun.
Site after site passed, each the same as the last, except that most of the soldiers found they had to agree it appeared the camps were growing larger, until it appeared as if the circles no longer had any room for the normal camp horn but needed instead to raise more and more lodges back in every bend and twist of the riverbank.
At the upper end of each abandoned campsite, the scouts drew up their horses and read each other’s expressions on their stony copper faces. No need of saying anything more. For here, on the southern edge of every camp, the many trails converged into one broad road, plowed and furrowed by Indian ponies, the thousands upon thousands pulling travois.
Half Sioux himself, Bloody Knife realized by now that the hostiles were heading over the spine of the Wolf Mountains. And his medicine helper told the old Ree that the Sioux knew they were being followed.
For the Crows and Arikaras, what had once been the powerful medicine of this journey to whip their old enemies with the pony soldiers had slowly turned sour in their mouths. Instead of Custer leading them to a great victory and a trip to Washington City, the Long Hair was taking them with him into a valley shadowed by the wings of death.
Bloody Knife, Red Star, Stabbed, and others gazed at the half-dozen Crow scouts when Fred Gerard wasn’t watching or Lieutenant Varnum was busy chattering with Custer. Neither group could speak the other’s tongue. They didn’t have to. There was a universal language any man could read, plain as paint on every scout’s face—red eyes flinty and stoic so as not to betray the dark secret the white men simply refused to believe.
One young Ree named Horns-in-Front actually began to whimper quietly when he and Bloody Knife came across a huge stone at the site of one of the abandoned villages. The stone had been painted with primitive glyphics symbolizing two buffalo bulls. One had been drawn beside a bullet, and the other held a lance—both animals charging one another. Horns-in-Front trembled as he listened to Bloody Knife and the old man Stabbed discuss the symbolism in the Sioux drawing.
Then the young scout whimpered in fear.
Spotted-Horn-Cloud rushed the shambling, shaken youngster and slapped Horns-in-Front hard across the mouth, drawing blood.
That got Custer’s attention.
Bloody Knife turned as well, watching the general drop from his big horse. Custer strode up quickly, examined the stone for himself, then asked his question in sign of his old friend, The Knife.
“What does this mean?” His freckled hand pointed to the drawings.
“Pony chief—the aging Arikara’s hands moved more slowly than usual—“it says there will be a hard and long fight for any enemy who chooses to follow the Sioux on this trail.”
Instead of replying, Custer slipped off the big hat and ran a palm over the reddish blond stubble on his head. More trail weary than exasperated, he remounted his mare and loped out of the murmuring ring of scouts without another word.
A few hours later the scouts reached the largest camping site yet seen on the march up the Rosebud.
What now gave them all pause was the sight of the close-cropped grass extending for miles around in all directions across the rolling hills and timbered meadows beside the creek. Clearly the scouts could see that this site had been used for many days.
And then the general’s brown-skinned trackers came to understand why the tribes had halted their leisurely march here at this beautiful spot in the shadow of the Wolf Mountains.
Close by the river on a grassy bottom that,
Mitch Bouyer slipped up silently to stand near a speechless Custer just inside the outer reaches of that massive framework of poles. It was not until the general rose from the ground, a handful of hard-packed earth cupped in his deerskin glove, that he finally noticed the half-breed scout at his shoulder.
“Tell me about this, Bouyer.”
The Crow interpreter was a few moments before answering. Then his words filled the brittle, dry silence surrounding the Sun Dance Lodge with a stifling gloom. “Custer, I’ve never seen one this big. Not in all my years living with the Sioux.”
“That mean something?” Custer snapped, not looking Bouyer in the eye, but staring instead at the buffalo skulls and the monstrous center pole those skulls surrounded. “For it to be so big?”
“I think it’s safe to say it means something, General.”
The Crow interpreter felt moved by the immense size of the arbor constructed of pine boughs and lodge pole, every trunk showing its recent age and just now beginning to weather beneath the prairie’s summer sun. But what was most impressive of all to the scouts and Bouyer both was the size of that massive center pole, where hung some of the tattered rawhide tethers still.
The tethers danced on the late-afternoon breezes.
Bouyer understood more than any man there that afternoon what all those hundreds of rawhide tethers meant. He had grown up with the Sioux. He had watched men sacrifice themselves and their bodies in thanksgiving to the sun in this way.
What swept over Mitch, shaking him to his core, was the realization that the Lakota were preparing as never before some powerful medicine for a most special purpose.
If the Sioux of Sitting Bull truly did know soldiers were dogging their back trail, then the Lakota were making medicine as they never had for one powerful big fight.
Near the huge center pole’s base the Sioux had driven a tall stake into the hard-packed earth.
Tom Custer passed his brother and the half-breed Sioux scout, the first to dare venture into the bowels of the Sun Dance Lodge itself. Sergeant Jeremiah Finley of Custer’s C Company joined Tom.
Crossing the pounded, baked ground to the center of the lodge now shadow-striped by the afternoon sun, Finley knelt to touch the hair tied to that single stake at the foot of the monstrous pole.
“Captain Custer! C’mon over here, sir!”
“What is it, Sergeant—” Tom began, watching Finley get to his feet, holding the dried scalp up at the end of his arm for all to see. “I’ll be go to hell. Will you look at that sonuvabitch.”
Wasn’t a man gathered round Finley in grim silence who didn’t realize that the sergeant had found a white
