The skirling bugs, the jeering owls, the deep
Discordant snoring of the men asleep
Upon their guns, mules blowing in the hay.
At last the blanching summits saw the day.
A drowsy drummer spread the news of morn.
The mules began to nicker for their corn
And wrangle with a laying back of ears.
Among them went the surly muleteers,
Dispensing feed and sulphurous remarks.
The harness rattled, and the meadow larks
Set dawn to melody. A sergeant cried
The names of heroes. Common men replied,
Sing-songing down the line. The squat hills heard
To seize and gossip with the running word—
Here! Here! Here! Coffee steaming in the pot,
Woodsmoke and slabs of bacon, sizzling hot,
Were very good to smell. The cook cried “chuck!”
And when the yellow flood of sunrise struck
The little prairie camp, it fell on men
Who ate as though they might not eat again.
Some wouldn’t, for the day of wrath arose.
And yet, but for a cruising flock of crows,
The basking world seemed empty.
Now the sun
Was two hours high. The axes had begun
Across the Piney yonder. Drowsy draws
Snored with the lagging echoes of the saws.
The day swooned windless, indolently meek.
It happened that the pickets by the creek
Were shaken from a doze by rhythmic cries
And drumming hoofs. Against the western skies,
Already well within a half a mile,
Came seven Indians riding single file,
Their wiry ponies flattened to the quirt.
A sentry’s Springfield roared, and hills, alert
With echoes, fired a ghostly enfillade.
The ball fell short, bit dust and ricocheted.
The foremost pony, smitten in the breast,
Went down amid the rearing of the rest
And floundered to a dusty somersault.
Unhurt, the tumbled brave emerged to vault
Behind a comrade; and the seven veered
To southward, circling round the spot they feared
Where three far-stinging human hornets stood.
Now one of these went running to the wood
To see what made the logging camp so still.
Short breath sufficed to tell the tale of ill
He brought—the whole crew making off in stealth
And going to the mountains for their health,
The mules stampeded!
Things were looking blue.
With shaking knees, uncertain what to do,
The pickets waited. Whisperings of death
Woke round them, and they felt the gusty breath
Of shafts that plunked and quivered in the sod.
As though men sprouted where the ponies trod,
The circling band now jeered them, ten to one.
They scanned the main camp swinking in the sun.
No signal to return! But all the men
Were rushing round there, staring now and then
To where the foothills, northward, broke the flat.
A pointing sentry shouted: “Look at that!
Good God! There must be thousands over there!”
Massed black against the dazzle of the air,
They made the hilltops crawlingly alive—
The viscid boiling over of a hive
That feels the pale green burning of the spring.
Slow-moving, with a phasic murmuring
As of a giant swarm gone honey-wild,
They took the slope; and still the black rear piled
The wriggling ridges. What could bar the way?
Dwarfed in the panorama of the day,
The camp was but a speck upon the plain.
And three remembered eighty lying slain
Beside a ford, and how the Winter strode
Numb-footed down a bloody stretch of road
Across strange faces lately known and dear.
“I guess we’d better hustle out of here,”
The sergeant said. To left, to right, in front,
Like starving kiotes singing to the hunt,
Yet overcautious for a close attack,
Scores pressed the fighting trio, falling back
Across the Piney campward. One would pause
To hold the rear against the arrow-flaws,
The pelting terror, while the two ran past;
Then once again the first would be the last,
The second, first. And still the shuttling hoofs
Wove closelier with gaudy warps and woofs
The net of death; for still from brush and break
The Piney, like a pregnant water snake,
Spewed venomous broods.
So fleeing up the slope
The pickets battled for the bitter hope
Of dying with their friends. And there was one
Who left the wagon boxes at a run
And, dashing past the now exhausted three,
Knelt down to rest his rifle on his knee
And coolly started perforating hides.
Bare ponies, dragging warriors at their sides
And kicking at the unfamiliar weight,
Approved his aim. The weaving net of hate
Went loose, swung wide to southward.
So at last
They reached the camp where, silent and aghast,
The men stood round and stared with haunted eyes.
’Tis said a man sees much before he dies.
Were these not dying? O the eighty-one
Bestrewn down Lodge Trail Ridge to Peno Run
That blizzard evening! Here were thirty-two!
And no one broached what everybody knew—
The tale there’d be and maybe none to tell
But glutted crows and kiotes. Such a spell
As fastens on a sick room gripped the crowd—
When tick by tick the doctor’s watch is loud,
With hours between. And like the sound of leaves
Through which a night-wind ominously grieves,
The murmur of that moving mass of men
To northward rose and fell and rose again,
More drowsing music than a waking noise.
And Captain Powell spoke: “Get ready, boys;
Take places; see their eyes, then shoot to kill.”
Some crouched behind the boxes, staring still
Like men enchanted. Others, seeming fain
To feel more keenly all that might remain
Of ebbing life, paced nervously about.
One fortified the better side of doubt
With yokes of oxen. That was Tommy Doyle.
(Alas, the total profit of his toil
Would be a hot slug crunching through his skull!)
And Littman yonder, grunting in the lull,
Arranged a keg of salt to fight behind;
While Condon, having other things in mind
Than dying, wrestled with a barrel of beans.
And others planned escape by grimmer means.
Old Robertson, with nothing in his face,
Unlaced a boot and noosed the leather lace
To reach between a trigger and a toe.
He did not tell, and no one asked to know
The meaning of it. Everybody knew.
John Grady and McQuarie did it too,
And Haggirty and Gibson did the same,
And many others. When the finish came,
At least there’d be no torturing for them.
Now as a hail-cloud, fraying at the hem,
Hurls ragged feelers to the windless void,
The nearing mass broke vanward and deployed
To left and right—a dizzy, flying blear,
Reek of a hell-pot boiling in the rear.
And now, as when the menaced world goes strange
And cyclone sling-shots, feeling out the range,
Spatter the waiting land agape with drouth,
The few first arrows fell. Once more the south
Was humming with a wind of mounted men
That wove the broken net of death again
Along the creek
