Determined to walk to the picket-line where his horse was tethered, Thompson wandered through the camp of sleeping men scattered on the ground, appearing to him as if they were dead. Among the mounts the frightened soldier noticed for the first time how gaunt and poor the animals all were becoming under the severity of the regiment’s march up the Rosebud.
And under his breath, Private Peter Thompson cursed General George Armstrong Custer for punishing those animals and his men so damned hard right before he would ask them to fight the Sioux.
Then he prayed some more.
Down near the southern end of camp, striker Burkman had seen no sense in curling up beneath his coat for an hour or so before the command would push off up the divide. Instead, John stayed up with Custer while the general scribbled in his journal, from time to time sipping at the cool creek water he poured from Burkman’s battered, blackened coffee pot.
Across his taut, sunburned cheeks, the orderly sensed the breeze darting past like a snowshoe hare scampering off from a winter-gaunt wolf. Here, there … then gone.
At times a quick burst of phosphorescent green lightning would illuminate the starless canopy overhead, eerie fire igniting itself out of the low, solid cloud banks that made Burkman feel closed in, surrounded. Smothered. Anxious and afraid, Burkman decided he would wait up with his boss, his commander, his master. And see the new day in as they drove over the divide to corner their quarry.
Custer had been confiding matters to his journals, words and thoughts he knew someday would see the public eye. From his hand, on those pages, were discussions he held with himself about this person or that, often wrenching up from his bowels his deepest and most sensitive feelings about where he had been and where he was certain Destiny herself called him.
And while Custer knew the coming battle was his road to Olympus, another part of him hinted that he might be marching to Valhalla, that sacred hall of Odin, the Norse god of war. There Odin—the supreme deity of Norse legend—received the souls of heroes slain in glorious battle. Odin would forever be there to welcome the heroes home.
Custer set his pencil back to work beneath the flickering candlelight as the breezes tousled the paper where he struggled to put down his thoughts upon this lonely, lonely night of homecoming:
I have never prayed as others do. Yet on the eve of every battle in which I have been engaged, I have never omitted to pray inwardly, devoutly. Never have I failed to commend myself to God’s keeping, asking him to forgive my past sins, and to watch over me while in danger.… After having done so, all anxiety for myself, here or hereafter, is dispelled. I feel that my destiny is in the hands of the Almighty. This belief, more than any other fact or reason, makes me brave and fearless as I am.
As General George Armstrong Custer closed his leather-covered journal and rose to his feet, stretching the kinks out of his trail-weary back, his dog Tuck raised her muzzle to the low, ominous sky overhead, howling.
The hair along Burkman’s spine stood on end. Then the striker began to cry quietly. So the general would not hear.
John oft understood animals better than he understood the ways of man. Frightened, with a crushing sense of dread, Private John Burkman remembered dogs can sense death coming a long, long way off.
All along the bluffs their brassy voices ricocheted.
Horse guard roused company sergeants from their brief, troubled sleep. Sergeants nudged men from their slumber with a tap of a toe and an urgent word. And with that spreading commotion, the horses and mules grew excited until it seemed the whole valley reverberated with the noise of men and animals as an army began a new march.
Because of that thick dust adding to the black inkiness of the night, Myles Keogh’s I Company and others had to grope blindly along the trail, listening to the plunk of a carbine, the rhythmic ping-ping-ping of a bouncing tin cup tied to someone’s saddle or the comforting clatter of iron-shod horses scuffing over the rocks up ahead. Still, at times some of the lagging troops had to stop and whistle or holler out to the men ahead just to get a response so they could resume their ride into the darkest jaws of night.
At long last the march became more struggle than it was worth, and Custer’s quiet command was whispered back along the strung-out columns.
“We’re to rest here for the rest of the night, boys,” Keogh growled. “Pass it along. Take care of your mount, then grab some winks.”
They had marched some ten miles in total darkness and would wait here for the coming of morning in this deep defile at the foot of the divide. Most of Keogh’s men went about unsaddling their weary mounts as suggested, rubbing them down with twists of dried grass. Some of I Company realized only too well how their lives were irretrievably tied to their horses. All the good care a soldier gave his animal today just might save his life tomorrow or the day after.
Here and there other troopers built small fires in the lee of brush or rocks. Coffee was boiled, a black potion strong enough to disguise most of the bitter tang of alkali in the water of the creek they followed up the slopes of the Wolf Mountains.
A potion more fit for the likes of hell than those poor souls about to descend the valley of doom come first light.
Close to two-thirty A.M. Varnum and his scouts reached the Crow’s Nest, some twenty-five miles from where they left the columns behind. Red Star, the young Ree, along with a Crow named Hairy Moccasin, was assigned to push into the highest reaches of the Nest, there to watch for the graying of the sky at dawn.
Meanwhile the rest would lay their heads upon a curled arm and sleep down in a pocket at the foot of the Nest, awaiting word from the two with eyes at the top of the divide looking into the valley of the Greasy Grass.
That first faint light to touch this northern prairie was slipping out of the east when Hairy Moccasin hooted soft as a night owl to his fellow Crows. Below him just some twenty feet, scattered upon the ground like sleeping children, the Crow scouts stirred from their cold beds, attentive to the mournful owl hoot from above. Quietly, one by one, the Crows began to chant their personal death songs, singing their prayers to the Grandfather Above.
To the eerie wail of those songs the Rees awakened. Several rushed to try squeezing into the narrow neck at the top of the Nest. The Crows, flushed with anger, bitterly shoved the Rees back, huskily jabbering in Absaroka.
The Crow asked for Varnum. No one else would they allow to the top but Custer’s pony soldier.
Wiping gritty sleep from his eyes, the lieutenant elbowed his way through the anxious Rees and scrambled up to join Hairy Moccasin and Red Star. White-Man-Runs-Him breathed hot on Varnum’s neck, standing right behind the white man to peer into the awakening valley below. In the graying light Charlie thought he was able to spot those two Indian lodges the scouts told him they had run across in their travels last evening before returning to the command with the portentous news for Custer.
Then the scouts directed Varnum to look far beyond and to the north, into that distant valley of the Little Bighorn.
“Look for
Again the soldier strained his tired eyes, this time looking for worms they said would be wriggling across the valley floor. Still he could see nothing of the herd, blaming his trail-weary eyes, reddened and irritated by the gritty dust of the march. Besides, he rationalized, he had just ridden some seventy-five miles without much sleep to speak of. No wonder his eyes weren’t working as they should.
In disgust Varnum slid back down to the pocket below the Nest and drew out his tablet and pencil he used to scratch a hurried message to Custer.
“Here, Red Star,” Charlie whispered, holding up the dispatch for the Arikara scout to see, using his poor sign language to explain the important mission. “I want you to go to the pony chief—”
The growing excitement and buzz among the Crows and Rees diverted Varnum’s attention at that moment. On his feet he could himself see why the Indians were hopping mad. Down below on the east slope of the divide, the regiment’s camp fires could be plainly seen only ten miles off, glowing like hundreds of pinpricks of orange red
