Seize the Sky

Fit during the War,

But I never did see

Sich fatiguing before.

One day I’m on guard,

The next cuttin’ ice,

Then on Kitchen Police,

Which ain’t over-nice!

A fourth layin’ brick

(I ain’t used to the thing),

A fifth day on guard,

With just three nights in!

On the second time through, the whole bunch joined in, raising a raucous noise down below that dark, fireless bluff.

I enlisted to sojur,

Not stay out half the night!

As the Crows and a handful of Ree scouts lumbered in from the surrounding hills, they could hear the singing in the camp. The nervous scouts had been moving more and more slowly as the Sioux trail widened and its dust lay deeper, scarred by thousands of travois poles plowing a wide road up the divide into the hulking darkness of the Wolf Mountains.

Cooke ran to fetch Mitch Bouyer when the Crows solemnly rode into Custer’s bivouac and slid tight-lipped from their ponies.

Each man squatted on the ground, still clutching the reins to his pony. Not a word would be spoken until the interpreter arrived. Eerie hung the silence in that end of camp while the young Absaroka trackers sat chewing on their silent, morbid red thoughts, waiting for the half-breed.

“They say they have some things to show you, General,” Bouyer started his translation for Custer. He nodded to Half-Yellow-Face.

From beneath their belts or pockets and out of their simple cotton shirts bought off trader Coleman at the Yellowstone, the Crows pulled hanks of hair still embedded in bloody flesh.

“Wait a minute here!” Custer muttered, squinting beneath the poor starlight. “Striker—bring me a lantern!”

Beneath the candle’s glow Custer could see at last the scouts had brought him the scalps and beards of white men.

Bouyer cleared his throat. “They tell me they run onto a spot where the Sioux were celebrating a recent victory over white soldiers.”

“White soldiers?” Custer’s voice rose, his eyes narrowing on Bouyer in the flickering candlelight. “Where’s the trail heading? Ask them that.”

White-Man-Runs-Him pointed as he growled in Absaroka, his arm thrown up the divide.

“Over the Wolf Mountains.”

“Would the Sioux camp on the Little Horn?”

“Greasy Grass, Custer,” Bouyer corrected sullenly, in a whisper. Mitch had read far more in what the Crow had said than he was telling the soldier-chief.

Still, the tone of the half-breed’s voice hadn’t been lost on the Seventh’s commander. “Out with it, Bouyer. There’s something you’re not telling me.”

“Just this,” said the beefy half-breed as he brought his dark eyes to square on Custer. “If the Sioux are celebrating a victory over some soldiers, it’s only going to make ’em full of spit and vinegar to have a go at your small bunch. I figure they’ve whipped that bigger outfit the Sun Dance camp drawings told us about today.”

“You’re forgetting one important fact, Bouyer.”

“What’s that?”

“They may—I say may—have whipped a bigger detachment of soldiers. But—” Custer paused for that dramatic effect he had studied in public speaking. “Those Sioux warriors haven’t fought a better regiment of soldiers than the Seventh.”

Bouyer snorted. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you’re intending to follow that trail over the mountains to the Greasy Grass.”

“Bouyer …” Custer held up the lantern so the Crow interpreter better saw his face. “I intend to follow that trail straight into hell if I have to. Now, you just ask these boys here about that trail, will you? You ask them if all these other trails that they claimed to see, show the Sioux to be splitting up now that they’ve whipped some white soldiers—or are those trails coming together?”

After conferring with the Crows and getting his answer from young Curley, Mitch turned back to Custer. “The trails are coming together. The Sioux gather on the Greasy Grass.”

Custer clapped his hands and leapt into a quick jig. “By Jehoshaphat! That’s the news I want!”

Bouyer wagged his head. “I don’t think there’s enough time left for me to begin understanding you, Custer. Here you ought to be worrying about all those trails coming together—I mean worrying. Instead you—”

“The only thing that would worry me now, Bouyer,” Custer interrupted the half-breed with a snarl, “is if those trails break apart. That’d mean the village I seek is splitting up. And if the village did that, we couldn’t find the Sioux. At the very least we’d have to chase after them. No, Mr. Bouyer.” He snapped his back rigid and slung the lantern toward striker Burkman. “I’m overjoyed to hear the Sioux are gathering. My prayer is that they not find out about our coming. I pray I find them sitting in their camp on the Greasy Grass when I come riding up at a gallop to do what a soldier does best.”

“What’s that, General Custer?” Bouyer squinted, measuring the soldier-chief in the pale, fluted candlelight, dim starshine splaying down from the dark summer, canopy overhead.

“Why, Mr. Bouyer—a soldier’s job is to find the Indians and capture them.”

“Suppose they don’t want to be captured. What then?”

“I suppose we’ll have to do that other part of a soldier’s job. And that’s kill the ones who resist.”

Without a single word of reply, the half-breed signaled for his scouts to rise and follow him. The seven were suddenly gone from the corona of firelight, drifting away on noiseless moccasins like the summer breezes that nudged their way along the high bluff.

CHAPTER 13

So it was, the mighty Lakota came together for the great buffalo hunt and a celebration of the old life as the great chief Bull had promised.

Lame Deer’s Miniconjou were some of the first to join up. Later the Blackfeet Sioux and the Sans Arc. On and on they came, adding their camp circles and pony herds to that great procession streaming across the plains until they reached the cool waters of the Rosebud, where they would hunt the buffalo in the old way, as in the long-ago days of their fathers’ grandfathers.

At long last summer hung like a whispered benediction over the vast sea of hills and creeks and red people.