Seize the Sky

“It’s up to you, Tommy!” Yates said coolly, old hand that he was, his eyes set more serious and deadly than Tom had ever seen them. “Turn ’em around. Pick up Keogh and Calhoun after we’re up the slope—”

“Slope?” Tom asked.

Yates swallowed, his eyes flicking up the slope past the point where companies L and I held off better than a hundred now. “Best you get us up that hill like the general wanted.”

Tom made no mistake in reading the urgency in that veteran’s no-nonsense declaration. He nodded automatically. Never had anything been so clear to him in his life. Autie had wanted him to get the men to the top of the hill. From where they stood right now down in the river, he wasn’t all that sure how far away that hill really was, but he figured his older brother wanted to get there to make a stand until the reinforcements arrived.

The only chance they had was Benteen, returning with his men, bringing McDougall’s pack train. Tom figured they could hold out till then. Autie knew they could hold out.

That’s what he tried to tell me, Tom thought. Just get to the top of the hill. And whatever you do—hold on.

CHAPTER 22

THE Hunkpapa and Santee camps thundered with victory cries now that the soldiers who had attacked them were cornered in the timber, retreating across the river and into the hills beyond.

More and more warriors rode back into the camps, returning from the battle in the valley, carrying scalps they brandished on their rifle muzzles or waved aloft from lances and coup sticks. A few even carried complete heads they had hacked from their victims. These were Santee warriors mostly, for they were the last tribe to practice this ancient ritual of decapitating an enemy.

Everywhere the women raised their high, shrill tremolos and ululating cries, sounding the ages-old approval for bravery and success in battle. A high-pitched trilling of the tongue was about all war chief Gall could hear—that and the pounding of blood hot at his ears.

Pizi, as Gall was known among the Sioux, had discovered his two wives and three young children dead near the southern edge of the Hunkpapa camp where they had gone to dig roots that morning.

Two women and three children dead. The first casualties of Major Marcus Reno’s assault on that far fringe of the great gathering along the Greasy Grass. An ignoble beginning to a bloody little battle that would rage but two hours from the time Reno’s soldiers fired their first shots, until there were no longer any alive on last-stand hill.

Trembling with primeval fury, Gall rose slowly from the bloody bodies of his family. He was alone. No wives now—no children to carry his line in their veins. His eyes afire with a blood-lust, the war chief finally heard that rifle fire coming from the northeast across the river.

He gazed up toward the hills, seeing the smoke from Indian and soldier guns alike near the top end of Lower Medicine Tail. Then to his wondering eyes came the most fantastic sight of all—frantic soldiers scattering in wild, disordered retreat up the hills leading away from the Miniconjou Ford, away from the Medicine Tail Coulee itself.

Soldiers in retreat, like a wolf spider trying to fight off the infuriating, overpowering charge of black ants. Their huge army mounts leapt and stumbled. Gall sensed what terror those wasichus must feel at this moment—easy enough for the soldiers to glance back over their shoulders and see what waited for the man who couldn’t drag himself out of the mouth of that coulee.

Right behind the last frightened, white-knuckled trooper, the Cheyenne and Sioux were streaming across the shallow ford like maddened, vengeful wasps.

Surely many of Custer’s soldiers must have blinked, and blinked again, after rubbing their eyes clear of dust and tears.

Could it be they really saw what galloped toward them?

Right in the middle of that horde of warriors splashing across the river rode a handful—no more than a dozen at most—screaming, riding their ponies backwards!

Completely naked, this dozen carried nothing more in their hands than long sticks aflutter with feathers and scalps. Hideously painted, they smacked the rumps of their ponies repeatedly to spur them after the retreating soldiers. Riding backwards, courting death, shrieking like a pack of banshees straight out of hell itself. The contraries’ suicidal bravery pricked every other warrior into a wild charge across the ford and up the hillside.

Like a flock of wrens and sparrows suddenly wheeling about and chasing a troublesome, predatory hawk, the first warriors flung themselves after the screaming, crying, frightened soldiers, who kicked and whipped and beat their weary, lathered horses. No bottom left in those army mounts. It was too late—nowhere near enough time for grazing on their march up the Rosebud, and too little sleep crossing over the Wolf Mountains, not to mention no water to speak of in the last few hours. The horses were done in.

Gall rallied his warriors and led the hundreds of determined, blood-crazed Sioux, already hot from their battle in the timber, across the ford and up the slopes, dogging the cavalry’s heels.

His blood aboil, the war chief knew his task was to push the pony soldiers back from the village, so no more women and children would have to die by soldier bullets. Then Gall would kill them … slowly, methodically … each and every one of them. Right down to the last soldier who had defiled their great camp and ridden down into this valley to attack a camp of the small and helpless ones.

Gall promised himself no wasichu soldier would remain alive to torture. He understood that for these frightened white men to see there was no chance for escape, for them to realize that the end was near and not know when that last bullet would come—all that was torture enough.

Pizi, the Sioux war chief, wanted to wallow in white blood the way a buffalo bull wallows in mud to rid himself of fleas and ticks. Already his nostrils filled with the stench of death … wasichu death.

“No one left standing!” he shouted now as his followers burst from the top of the lower Medicine Tail Coulee. “No soldier left alive!”

Many of the warriors glanced at their war chief for that fraction of a moment. Most knew he had lost his entire family to these soldiers he hungered to wipe from the earth. It was right what Gall asked. The pony soldiers deserved to die.

“For our women and children!” Gall shrieked as the troopers above him stumbled, wheeled, and turned, dropping to the ground to set up a ragged skirmish line around some screaming officers.

“Wipe every last soldier from the breast of our Mother! KILL THEM ALL!”

Some two hundred twenty-five men had followed George Armstrong Custer in his march down the Medicine Tail Coulee.

Of that number only a handful of Crow scouts would live to tell of the horror on that ridge to disbelieving white ears in the decades to come.

In those first moments after Custer had been blown out of his saddle, the Sioux had shrieked down to the river crossing, bolstering the four brave Cheyenne warriors who had turned Custer’s gallant charge into a harried retreat to certain death. With the smell of blood and victory fresh in their nostrils, the Sioux warriors had turned from the Reno fight in the valley and spurred their little ponies north toward the other soldiers who were reported ready to attack the villages.

So many hands were already bloody from the battle with the soldiers in the valley. Dark, wet scalps hung dripping from their belts. That paint they had quickly applied when the attack was sounded had now become smeared and furry with valley dust. Many were already drunk with victory. Most probably carried army carbines in their hands and wore those bloody blue-and-gray army shirts they had taken off the bodies of soldiers slaughtered down in the timber in the wake of Reno’s mad retreat.

To wear a dead soldier’s bloody tunic into battle with these others—such would work powerful medicine on these soldiers clustering in fear atop the hill.

While the young warriors charged up the slope, the women and old men scurried up to the high points of land east of the river to watch the battle take form.