Lay the Mountains Low

by Terry C. Johnston

  Out there in the grass, the warriors were swarming over the first of the six wounded men who hadn’t made it into these rocks, each of those soldiers shrieking in terror and pain, their high voices more shrill and grating than the war cries—

  A Nez Perce bullet spun John Burk around. He landed across the lieutenant’s legs. Ryan dragged the body off Rains, knelt again, and continued to fire with his carbine.

  Rains continued to speak in a practiced, even tone. Gotta keep their spirits up. “We can do this. We can do this, men. One of you, give me Burk’s carbine. Load it and put it in my hands.”

  Lampman had just handed Rains the dead man’s carbine as more than ten of the warriors dismounted and spread out in a broad front to fire their weapons when Lampman himself was hit, low in the back of his head. Blood and brain matter splattered over Rains’s face as the private fell atop Burk, knocking the lieutenant’s carbine aside.

  With a great exertion of conscious thought, Rains picked the carbine up, his gloves gummy with blood. So much blood.

  Just how in Hades did you go through the whole of two goddamned wars and never get a scratch, Father dear?

  A brigadier goddamned general—that’s how, he thought as he brought the sticky carbine to his cheek and gazed down the barrel at the warriors popping up out there in the grass.

  Someone groaned and fell into the grass out there to his right. Dying noisily. Rains prayed the man would die quick. Sounded like Roche. Godblesshim.

  How did my own father command a guard of soldiers that protected the Walla Walla councils back in 1855, out here in this northwest territory, and not suffer one damned wound? How had my father played a role in the multitribal wars that followed those councils … and not once have a bullet blow a hole through his belly?

  “Goddamned lucky, weren’t you?”

  “What did you say, Lieutenant?” Quinn asked.

  “Nothing,” Rains said, his tongue thick with blood. “Just … we’ve got to keep them from getting any closer in that grass. They can hide. So, shoot low up that hill, men. Shoot low and conserve your cartridges until Whipple gets here with relief.”

  Richter was next out there in the grass. Then Moody right behind him. The bullets that hit them shoved both soldiers back into the grass as they were crabbing toward the rocks. Not a good thing. The red bastards could see how few of them were still alive.

  Ryan whimpered when a bullet slammed into the side of his head. But he didn’t make noise for long. Almost immediately, Quinn was bending over his bunkie, laying the dying soldier down before he bent over to pick up his friend’s carbine—when the private was hit twice and his own body flopped over Ryan in a leg-twitching sprawl.

  The next time Rains threw back the trapdoor on his carbine, he found a cartridge already shoved into the breech. For a moment he thought the extractor wasn’t working, that the empty cartridge had been fused into the chamber with heat and verdigris—but he was able to extract the copper case from the weapon, finding it hadn’t been fired.

  “You stupid son of a bitch,” he cursed himself as he shoved the cartridge back into the action and snapped the trapdoor closed over it.

  He had been so intent on watching the warriors crawl up through the grass, watching as those six men were picked off and whittled down one by one, that he had forgotten to fire the damned carbine after reloading it.

  The forestock was gummier as he brought it up to his cheek, aimed at a figure in the grass, then pulled the trigger.

  While he was reloading with his sticky, bloody gloves, pulling a shell from Ryan’s pocket, he willed his eyes to make a count. All the rest were down.

  Getting so weak, barely able to lift the weapon … by the time he could get the carbine back into position, Rains found David Carroll lying in a heap out there twenty yards away, curled up like a cat on an autumn day, groaning and pawing at the bubbling wound low in his’ chest.

  Who in Hades is going to hold off the red bastards till Whipple arrives? Everyone else gone already. I’m the only one for them to save now.

  For a moment he stared at two of them lying here, close enough for him to touch: Quinn had been driven backward by the impact of the bullet that had killed him, hurtled against the low rock where he had been kneeling, then slid down to crumple across Richter.

  Irish and German, Rains thought as he stared at their death masks. Only one of us for Whipple to save now. All the Irish and German dead. Wasn’t for the Irish and German … there’d he no goddamned frontier army.

  Gradually he became aware of the quiet. So very, very quiet as he fumbled in Ryan’s pocket for another cartridge. Empty. Maybe Burk there had some. Where was the man in this jumble of arms and legs and blood and brain … and his own gut?

  Grown so quiet out there now that he could hear the red bastards whispering, even hear the rustle of the tall grass as they moved closer.

  Carefully, slowly—a few heads rose in the grass, dark eyes staring at him.

  More than a dozen of them—

  His fingers located a cartridge in Burk’s pocket. Frantically he shoved it into the action as the warriors started to slink toward him in a half-crouch. The copper case pasted to the blood-crusted fingers of his gloves.

  Maybe Whipple will hear now … now that things have gone so damned quiet up here.

  Snapping the trapdoor down, he dragged the hammer back but found he didn’t have the strength to raise the carbine to his shoulder. Rains could only position the butt against his lower chest. The instant he fired he realized his shot went wild, but the warriors nonetheless flung themselves into the grass momentarily.

  With an ear-numbing shriek, in unison they rose as one and rushed him in a blur.

  He watched the first, then a second and third gun explode, each muzzle spewing fire from close range. He felt the dull racket in his head; an instant later his chest was on fire.

  Too late to call for Whipple. Too late.

  But it was time to call for his father. A brigadier goddamned general would know what to do now. Just call for the general.

  “Father … General … tell me, what am I to do now, s-sir? Help me…. Sh-show me now how a good officer dies.”

  * These rocks, still visible today on private property, are actually some 750 feet south of the old Lewiston-Mount Idaho Road.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  KHOY-TSAHL, 1877

  THIS WAS BUT HIS TWENTY-FIRST SUMMER, BUT HE HAD himself killed four of the suapies who had come to attack their Lahmotta camp. Young though he might be, Yellow Wolf stood second in warrior rank only to Ollokot, Joseph’s young brother.

  Yellow Wolf had been the one who made the most noise out there in the grass below the boulders, jumping up to show himself here, then there. Never the same place twice as the others crept in, slowly, silently. This young warrior called He-mene Mox Mox made the noise in the grass, shouting and calling out to draw the horse soldiers’ attention as Five Wounds led the others in for the kill.

  Six of the suapies had fallen from their horses before the fight even began, hit during the last mad scramble. The other half barely made it to those low rocks before Yellow Wolf’s friends got started on the serious killing. When the rest made the last rush, there was but one last shot fired from the white man. As their bullets struck that last Shadow, his rifle slowly spilled from his hands covered with those bloody gloves.

  Yellow Wolf knelt before him, looking into the man’s face, seeing how it was drenched with blood from that bullet hole almost directly between the soldier’s eyes. Blinking repeatedly, the white man seemed to stare right through Yellow Wolf, his lips starting to move, sticky with the blood that drenched the Shadow. Yet all that came out of the soldier’s mouth was a chicken sound … cluck. Cluck. Cluck. Cluck—

  “Do you know what he is saying in the Shadow tongue?” asked Five Wounds as the older warrior knelt beside the inquisitive Yellow Wolf.

  “No. I never learned any of the white man talk,” Yellow Wolf replied. Then he looked deep in
to the man’s eyes, saw the eyelashes coated thickly with blood that seeped from that bullet wound between the eyes. Noticed the way the soldier looked right on through him as if he weren’t there. “Maybe,” he said to Five Wounds and the others who were starting to pilfer through the pockets of the other five soldiers, “this one is asking me to help him die quicker.”

  “Perhaps that’s true, that he cannot live,” Wahlitits said. “His body is too badly hurt.”

  Red Moccasin Tops added, “But he still lives. He is a strong warrior, refusing to die. He is like Nee-Me-Poo.”

  Five Wounds shook his head. “No Shadow is like us. But, this one is strong enough to live if he wants to. But he has to want to live”,

  Old Dookiyoon, known as Smoker, took his ancient flintlock horse pistol from his belt and wagged the muzzle near the soldier’s left ear. That gun had belonged to his family for three generations—handed down from the early days of contact with the Boston Men.

  “We cannot leave him like this,” Smoker said with a hint of sadness to his voice. “He will be too long in dying.”

  “And he was a brave fighter,” Yellow Wolf asserted with a measure of respect. “He deserves to die quickly, this brave fighter.”

  Suddenly Smoker said, “Yes. Die quickly, brave fighter.” And he immediately shoved the muzzle of his old pistol against the Shadow’s chest, pulling the trigger.

  The force of the big lead ball caused the white man to topple to the side, where he lay quietly, no longer clucking like a chicken scratching feed on the ground between lodges.

  Yellow Wolf was just beginning to feel better about it when the body stirred and the soldier slowly, painfully, raised himself back to a sitting position there against the rocks splattered with some of the man’s brain. Once the Shadow was upright, he began to quietly cluck again: his lips moving ever so slightly, the tip of his blood-thickened tongue appearing as he made his strange talking sound. Yellow Wolf wished he knew the white man’s language. Then the eyes rolled slowly around, as if looking over the half-dozen or so warriors gathered closest to him. Those eyes studied Yellow Wolf’s friends as blood continued to ooze from the head wound, dripping over the eyelids and lashes.

  “Ho, ho, Smoker!” Red Moccasin Tops snorted with laughter. “Your old gun—it is weak as a young foal’s penis! It did not kill this strong, strong Boston Man, even up close!”

  Just as Smoker was about to argue, wrenching up his pouch to begin reloading the old flintlock pistol, Two Moons stepped up, clutching his kopluts in his hand. Without a word, be swung it against the side of the soldier’s head with a hard crack that knocked the dying man over again.

  “Stop!” Yellow Wolf yelled, waving his arms at the old warrior. “Get back, Two Moons! Get back from him!”

  Five Wounds grabbed the young warrior by the elbow. “Yellow Wolf—it is all right what Two Moons does. He is doing what is best for this soldier now.”

  For a moment, Yellow Wolf looked at Two Moons’s face, then reluctantly nodded as he looked down at the soldier, watching how the man struggled to breathe. “Yes. I see. We have no healer with us. Poor, poor Shadow—he is suffering.” Then he drew in a long sigh. “All right. Maybe we should put him out of his trouble now.”

  “You, Yellow Wolf?” asked Two Moons.

  “Yes.”

  The old man handed the young warrior his short-handled war club. Yellow Wolf gripped it securely, raised it over his shoulder, then drove it down into the top of the white man’s head. The suapie grunted. Then he hit the soldier a second time. And the enemy made no more sound.

  Bending on his knee, Yellow Wolf put his face down close to the soldier’s, looking into those unblinking eyes, watching those bloody lips and tongue for any movement. There was none. And now he closed the eyes. They were no longer staring up at him, gazing into Yellow Wolf’s soul and asking for assistance.

  “You have helped him?” Five Wounds asked.

  Rocking back on his haunches, Yellow Wolf handed the kopluts back to Two Moons. “Yes. The last one is dead now.”

  “CAN you believe that?” asked Captain Henry Winters. “They’re pulling off!”

  Stephen G. Whipple nodded in disbelief. “Even though they outnumber us, we’ve driven them off.”

  Minutes ago as he had listened to the faint, distant booming of the Springfield carbines, Whipple had been advancing with more than seventy of his enlisted, leaving their Cottonwood camp in the care of fewer than thirty soldiers and volunteers. Instead of riding to the sound of those guns, Whipple grew confused by the echo of that gunfire—halting his command on the eastern side of that low saddle while he studied the slope and timber above him.

  Wondering why Rains had ridden out of sight. With that gunfire so near, Whipple surely expected to see the lieutenant and his detail come galloping right over the top of that ridge any moment now. He waited, waited … then the gunfire died off—

  When suddenly a broad band of warriors arrayed themselves before his men at the top of the hill.

  “Rains must have driven them off!” Whipple cheered to Winters. “He’s driven them into us!”

  Whipple dismounted the entire body and ordered horse holders to the rear, instantly reducing his tactical force by one-fourth. The rest he spread out on a wide front, double distances between each of the soldiers as more warriors appeared on the hillside, making bold and provocative movements along his skirmishers’ front. Now there were more than a hundred of the enemy facing them, horsemen who occasionally fired their rifles and shouted at the soldiers.

  It became painfully clear to the captain that Lieutenant Rains and his ten-man detail were not going to reappear, full of life, herding a small war party toward Whipple’s seventy-man battalion. They were lost, swallowed up by these Nez Perce who slowly advanced as Whipple prepared his men to withstand the charge … but that assault never came. Not in the two hours his battalion held their ground on the side of that hill. For some reason that Whipple and Winters could not fathom, the warriors—who clearly outnumbered their soldiers—never pressed their advantage.

  He shook his head as the Nez Perce mounted up and pulled back late that afternoon. “Should we withdraw, Captain?” Winters asked.

  “We should continue our search for Lieutenant Rains,” the captain replied. “But the enemy outnumbers us. I’m certain they will prevent us from advancing.”

  Winters regarded the lowering sun. “Might I suggest that we countermarch to Cottonwood?”

  Whipple sighed, “We’ll search for the bodies come morning.”

  Just before dusk, Whipple formed his battalion into a square around their horses, then slowly marched back to Cottonwood without having seen another Nez Perce throughout their retreat. As his battalion rode down into the wide gulch of the Cottonwood, he grew uneasy about their position, the fading light, and the close proximity of the enemy.

  As night fell, he had his men establish a small defensive perimeter at the top of an adjacent hill where Whipple felt safer than down in the bottom with those gutted, abandoned, ghostly ranch buildings. Here at least they could command the high ground, able to see greater distances across the rolling Camas Prairie, too.

  Not long after moonrise, the captain dispatched two couriers to carry word of the Rains affair to General Howard—the second leaving a half hour after the first.

  Cottonwood, 10:30 P.M.

  (Tuesday)

  Joseph with his entire force is in our front. We moved out at 6 P.M. to look after the Indians reported. Rains, with ten men moved on ahead about two miles. We heard firing at the foot of the long hill back of Cottonwood, and mounting a slight elevation saw a large force of Indians occupying a strong position in the timber covering the road. Nothing could be seen of Rains and his party and we fear they have been slaughtered. We moved up close enough to see we were greatly outnumbered by enemies strongly posted. Night was approaching and after a consultation of all the officers it was decided to return to this place and hold it until Perry … should arriv
e. There was no diversity of opinion in this case, and there is no doubt that the entire command would have been sacrificed in an attack. We shall make every effort to communicate with Perry to-night and keep him out of any trap …

  Whipple, Cmd’g

  Cottonwood Station

  That done, Whipple had just begun to fitfully doze a little after midnight when a lone Christian tracker rode in, slipping down from the north.

  “I’m amazed you got through from that direction!” the captain exclaimed as the friendly handed Whipple a folded letter. “That country was swarming with warriors earlier today.”

  In his dispatch, Captain David Perry informed whomever the courier would find in command of the closest outpost that he would be setting off from Fort Lapwai before first light with his supply train, moving south under a twentyman escort.

  “With the Nez Perce crawling across the countryside, we desperately need those supplies and especially that ammunition,” Whipple told his officers he had called together in the starry darkness.

  Lieutenant Shelton said, “I feel a bit uneasy about Colonel Perry, sir.”

  “To tell the truth, so do I,” Whipple admitted. “Captain Winters, our entire battalion will depart at first light and march north to meet up with, and provide protection for, Colonel Perry’s supply train.”

  “I’ll see the men are awakened at five.”

  After his two army couriers returned after becoming lost in the darkened and unfamiliar terrain, Whipple himself spent the rest of that sleepless night waiting out the coming of the time when his noncoms would move among the enlisted, jarring them awake. No fires and no pipes. Which meant no coffee or fried bacon. Just a few crumbly bites of the inedible hardbread washed down with water from the Cottonwood before they moved out in the waning darkness of that morning, the anniversary of the nation’s independence.

  After crawling little more than two miles in the gray dawn, they stumbled across the remains of yesterday’s massacre—at least, they found twelve of the thirteen bodies.