Seize the Sky

The ribbon of water separated her from him. This Goat River, slowing her desperate sprint toward the hill where Hiestzi waited for her.

She had seen his flag … that crimson, so like blood on winter’s snow … and sky blue, so like the winter in his eyes.

It was his flag. It fluttered in the hot breeze up there on the spine of the swaybacked pony ridge, as if it meant to signal to her and her alone. Hiestzi had wanted her to see it. Monaseetah knew that—as surely as the dust stung her eyes and the powder stank in her nostrils.

Hiestzi has come back for me as he promised seven summers ago! My husband comes for me a last! His promise fulfilled …

Myles Keogh had watched Calhoun take the first fatal shot, marveling from afar at the stamina of his friend —not seeing the last, for the young lieutenant was lost in a swirl of dust and burnt powder smoke as the crimson wave swept up and over the burnt-sienna brow of the hill.

For a moment Myles wondered absently if that lone rider would make it.

Some yellow-livered coward, Myles cursed. Running—rather than dying like a man …

But Keogh had his own problems now.

The warriors who had overrun Calhoun were inching their way in ever-increasing numbers toward I Company. The big Irishman watched but a moment more, mesmerized, while some of the Sioux began to beat and pummel the wounded clustered on the brow of Calhoun’s Hill. They shot the wounded and dying with their own weapons as the soldiers cried out for mercy. They fired arrow after arrow into the limp bodies, hacked at them with tomahawks and stone clubs. Close enough that Myles could see the enraged faces, painted and horrendous, every one distorted with blood-lust as they turned from the Calhoun dead to glare longingly up the spine toward Keogh’s Wild I Company.

It was a sight that would make many a lesser man worry about losing his lunch or wetting his pants.

Hundreds upon hundreds, and still hundreds more, warriors streamed out of the villages now that they had driven Reno back up the bluffs, now that they had taken time to put on their paint and say their war-medicine prayers. Smeared with grease and charcoal, painting their faces black for victory. Skin painted yellow with blue hailstones … red with green horns surrounding their eyes … blue with red stripes down the chins.

Devil paint fuzzed with yellow dust and sweat … and smeared with white men’s blood.

Some had charged up the hill totally naked, contraries mostly. They attacked the soldiers with little willow sticks hoping for a glorious death that would catapult their spirits into the other world of forever-happiness. Contraries ran naked through the tall grass, their cocks and scrotums bouncing as they leapt up the slope, offering their frail, naked copper bodies to Wakan Tanka after they had pledged their undying obedience in this personal vow of sacrifice.

Others rode up the hill with only a blanket or half robe lashed about their waists. Only a few wore feathers in their hair. Most simply did not have the time to ornament themselves at first for the valley fight. But by now many had stuffed hands into fire pits and dragged out charcoal to smear across their chests and shoulders. Perhaps mud at the riverbank. Anything to make themselves more hideous to those young, frightened soldiers laying eyes for the first time on battle-crazed warriors on this dusty Montana hillside.

There wasn’t a green recruit kneeling behind his overheated carbine on Keogh’s slope who didn’t imagine he had died already and been dragged kicking and screaming straight into the maw of hell.

While one warrior tied on his long headdress, its brim speckled with dragonflies and butterflies, another wore something much more primitive and provoking of fear in his enemy. Sun Bear strapped a single buffalo horn to the center of his forehead and dashed on foot up the hillside.

With the tall grasses waving beneath a gentle breeze across the entire slope, Keogh’s men were able to watch those warriors still working over Calhoun’s dead. Down below they saw the thousands of spectators—many young boys and old men riding back and forth just out of rifle range at the river. Women splashing across the Greasy Grass to join the swelling crowds of those who sang the young warriors on to greater feats of daring. Women who shook their skinning knives aloft, urging the warriors on so they could be about their own bloody work over the bodies of the slain soldiers.

Along the slope and the spine of the ridge, Keogh’s soldiers heard the high, wailing cries of the women.

“Don’t let them catch you alive!” one of Keogh’s old files shouted to the frightened shavetails in his squads. “What I could tell you about Fetterman’s poor boys … but—just don’t let them bitches get their bloody hands on you!”

Slowly it sank in. A fate worse than a thousand deaths awaited the man who let the squaws get their hands on him.

Some of Gall’s warriors broke off from the slaughter on Calhoun’s hill and moved north along the ridge toward Keogh’s position. The air filled with their blood-chilling cries, joining the screams and shrieks from the women below, mingled with the high-pitched prayer-sounds of the eagle-wingbone whistles constant and droning on the hot breeze that stirred the yellow dust and maddened the eyes.

Now and again that same breeze blew flecks of stinging foam off the handful of lathered horses left to Keogh’s fear-riddled command. A man’s ass tightened all by itself whenever an army mount galloped by, its saddle empty, wet with blood.

As the wild, crazed horses went down, thrashing in their death-throes, the mood along the ridge became more desperate still. A horse made a perfect target while the soldiers always did not. Men hid down in the grass. The horses could not.

Slowly, methodically, the warriors concentrated on the big animals, whittling away at the horses, spilling their riders.

Funny how a soldier always stayed with his fallen horse, for protection from arrow and bullet alike, or simply because with his horse down and dying, there was no longer any means of escape. A few unhorsed troopers tried to run, out along that bumpy backbone of a ridge toward the last knoll far away—north, where the general had gone. The scared ones and the smart ones alike.

Most who had abandoned Company L hadn’t made it. Those who fled I Company didn’t make it either. They died like scattered kernels of corn on a threshing floor, shot and trampled and bludgeoned beneath the red onslaught before they had been up and running but a moment or more.

Riderless horses were allowed to break through the Indian lines, clattering down to the river where the young boys and old men captured them all. It was easy enough. Even though the big mounts did not like the smell of Indians, their intense thirst overpowered their instinctive sense of caution. Seized by young hands, these big, colorful horses were led across the river into the camps by proud new owners, their saddlebags jingling musically with ammunition to use in the army Springfields captured in the valley fight or on Calhoun’s Hill.

More Springfields overheated, jamming along that ridge-top position Keogh had scratched out for his company. The verdigris coating the shells worked like cement, hardening under the heat of rapid firing until at last a shell refused to break free with the ejector. Several soldiers threw their rifles away in disgust and frustration after breaking knife blades on frozen shell casings.

Many of the warriors gathering below Keogh’s ridge believed the soldiers were simply touched by the moon, gone crazy. There could be no other explanation for the troopers tossing aside their carbines.

All the while Keogh’s men retreated into a smaller and smaller force near the crest on the east slope of the ridge. Their numbers slowly dwindled, exactly as Calhoun’s position had before them. The handful of those left alive from Calhoun’s Hill had run up the slope toward that big monolith of a man, Myles Keogh, like a lighthouse in the fog of that yellow-dust madness. Keogh kept calling out above the battle din, letting them all know he was standing there, rallying them round him like a group of schoolboys rallied beneath the spreading arms of a huge oak, strong, sturdy to the last.

“Goddamn their black hearts to perdition!” the Irishman hollered, his eyes watching some of his men abandoning their squads to pierce the smoke and dust shrouding Custer’s companies farther north. On the last, very last, knoll.

“May the bastards spend their eternities quivering in hell’s own furnace!”

Sergeant Bustard himself dragged up two wounded, one beneath each of the huge ham hocks he called hands. After slinging the soldiers behind the protection of a dead horse carcass already attracting its share of