Lay the Mountains Low

by Terry C. Johnston

  In heartbeats he got his wife inside the concealing brush with the boy. She held out an arm as he gently slid the boy across the blood-soaked grass, nestling their son against his mother.

  “Stay here until I—”

  “Don’t go!” she whimpered in a gush.

  “There is a fight,” Wounded Head said as he bent over her and kissed her damp cheek. “If the Creator decides that I am to come back for you, I will return when the fighting is over.”

  “Father?”

  “I brought you both here where you will be safe,” he told the boy. “And when you cry, do not cry out loud so those soldiers will find you like hungry wolves sneaking through the willow. Bite down on your teeth so they do not hear you cry. I will come back for you when this fight is done.”

  In a matter of a few breaths he was back beside his lodge, stabbing a slit through the side of the spongy dewsoaked hides. Diving inside, he quickly gathered his soldier rifle and cartridge belt taken from the suapie he had killed at the Lahmotta fight back in the season of Hillal. While he was buckling the belt around his waist, he heard a familiar voice sing out a brave-heart song just beyond the lodge cover—the great warrior Rainbow, calling for the men to rally around him.

  “I am here, Rainbow!” he shouted as he crouched from the lodge door and dashed around the side of his home.

  Already more than ten warriors stood or knelt around Rainbow as Wounded Head ran up—all of them concentrating their fire on a cluster of soldiers they had pinned down at the edge of the village, on the cutbank where the white men could not gain any more ground. “A Shadow for every bullet!” Rainbow yelled.

  Sliding up beside the great warrior, Wounded Head went to one knee and dragged back the hammer on his short soldier carbine. As he sighted along its barrel, Rainbow continued to shout encouragement above them all. His gallant, brave voice suddenly made Wounded Head remember the words known to so many of the Nee-me-Poo: this great fighting man’s vow.

  “I have the promise given me by the spirits that in any battle I engage in after the sun rises” Rainbow had told and retold of his powerful vision, that sacred wyakin or warrior’s medicine, “cannot be killed. I can therefore walk among my enemies. I can even face the points of their guns. My body will be no thicker than a hair. The enemies can never hit me with their bullets. But … if I fight any battle before the sunrise—I will be killed!”

  The shock of that sudden remembrance shot through him like a bolt of summer lightning, Wounded Head immediately twisted around, peering over his shoulder at that low bench east of the village—terrified to find that, even though it had grown light enough to dispel all the dark, murky vestiges of night, the sun had not yet made its appearance over the edge of the earth.

  “Rainbow!” he shrieked in panic, reaching up to seize the great warrior’s forearm. “Look! The sun! It hasn’t shown its face yet today!”

  His cry of encouragement ceased in the middle of a sentence as the war chief turned suddenly, staring in panic over his shoulder at the eastern bench a long, long time. Then the fear faded from his face. Gone was the terror that had clouded his eyes only a moment before. He turned to gaze down at Wounded Head, laying his empty hand on the warrior’s shoulder, the look upon his face one of deep calm now.

  Rainbow said, “Tell my brother, Five Wounds—that this is a good day to die!”

  Once more the war chief turned to face the assault, again raising his voice against those four-times-ten he and the few were holding back while the women and children made their escape from the village. Standing unafraid in the midst of the others who knelt or lay on their bellies to make themselves smaller, Rainbow refused to cower in the face of all those bullets.

  Of a sudden, no more than four paces from them, a tall soldier leaped from behind some brush. The much shorter Rainbow raised his weapon at the same instant and the two enemies fired together. But the great warrior’s action clicked—his carbine was empty. The white man’s bullet struck Rainbow squarely in the breast, knocking him backward a wobbly step.

  The tall soldier immediately whirled on his heel and dived back into the bushes.

  “Rainbow!” Wounded Head shouted, bolting off the ground for the war chief.

  As Rainbow collapsed to his knees, then crumpled backward into the grass, that look of calm on his face seemed to grow all the more serene as he cried out to others, “Fight on! Remember always to fight on! You must fight—”

  His last words were choked off by a gush of blood.

  But before anyone could grieve Rainbow’s death rattle, Grizzly Bear Youth shouted a warning. This warrior named Hohots Elotoht lunged to his feet and darted for the tall soldier who reappeared from the bushes with his rifle reloaded. As Grizzly Bear Youth leaped for him, the hammer on the soldier’s gun snapped without firing—exactly as Rainbow’s had done the instant before he was killed.

  Now the two enemies brandished their empty weapons overhead as they raced toward each other—colliding with a crunch of bone, falling to the ground in a heap. It was immediately clear to Wounded Head how much smaller Grizzly Bear Youth was than the bigger white man. In moments the soldier had the warrior pinned to the ground.

  As he struggled for his life, Grizzly Bear Youth cried out to his wyakin for power to defeat this big enemy!

  The warrior was soon answered and managed to somehow drag himself out from under the soldier—yet the white man quickly gripped Grizzly Bear Youth around his neck and began to choke him. At that moment Lakochets Kunnin burst from some nearby willow, landing right beside the wrestlers, and fired his carbine into the suapie’s side.

  It did not take long for the soldier to let go of Grizzly Bear Youth, stumbling backward before he collapsed against the brush and lay perfectly still. Nearby the smaller warrior sank to his knees, clutching his forearm. Blood oozed between his fingers.

  “Your bullet broke my arm!” he cried out to Lakochets Kunnin.

  “Maybe it did,” said this warrior called Rattle on Blanket, “but I saved your life!”

  While they argued, Wounded Head turned to stare down at the great warrior Rainbow, who had been offering encouragement and hope with his final words, in his last act of defiance … even though it was a battle waged before the coming of the sun, before the awakening of his powerful wyakin. He had refused to shrink from his duty to his people—

  When Wounded Head looked up, none of the other fighters remained. He was alone with the body of Rainbow. The others were scattering this way and that as the soldiers finally began to gain ground, quickly advancing on the spot where Wounded Head knelt over the great warrior’s lifeless body.

  “If you can be killed,” he whispered to Rainbow, starting to weep as he closed the man’s blood-splattered eyelids, “then we all can be killed.”

  HE could not remember when his head had ever hurt this bad.

  Nor could Private George Leher* recall just where he was, what day it might be, or what he was doing flat on his back—finding himself dragged along the wet, soggy grass by the older woman who took shape as he came to and his blurry eyes began to focus.

  It took a few moments, this realization did, what with the bullet wound to the head that had knocked him senseless. Struggling to remember how he had come to find himself lying flat on his back, Leher recalled bits of things the way a man might tear up the whole sheet of a memory into tiny pieces of confetti and toss them into the air. A panic gripped him, as he realized he never would get all those pieces back together again, not in the same order, nor with all the details intact….

  She gripped him by one heel, tugging him over the ground one yard at a time, his ankle pinned beneath her armpit as she struggled to drag him to the closest tepee, his rifle used as a crutch in her other hand while she lunged forward a few feet, replanted the weapon, and lugged him a little farther.

  The numbness he felt radiating through his body from the head wound gave him such panic—just knowing that he was powerless to do a damned thing to save himself for
the moment.

  That’s when he remembered that he had just come out of the water, cold and wet from his midchest down, hearing the enemy’s rifles crack all across their front, seeing the enemy flitting here and there, watching a bullet hit Captain Logan himself—when lights suddenly exploded in his head.

  Since the old shrew could have finished him off where she found his body if she’d had a knife or ax, she must be dragging him toward the lodge to kill him there.

  Leher tried to twist his leg free of her grip.

  The woman immediately stopped and peered back at him with an angry face, screeching at him in her strange talk that only made his head hurt even more. She shook his rifle at him menacingly, then turned around and started off again.

  This time the private somehow willed his loose leg to coil up, cocking it near his body—then lashed out at her.

  His water-soaked boot caught the older woman in the small of the back, sending her sprawling with a yelp of surprise.

  His head swam as he slowly rolled onto his hip, spying the rifle lying between them. Rocking forward, he seized it by the butt and began to drag it toward him in his left hand just as she pounced forward and snagged hold of the muzzle.

  Back and forth they tussled with it, she gripping the barrel in one hand and swinging her closed fist at his head like a club, forcing him to duck this way, then that, as his right hand crawled up the stock, farther and farther, reaching the wrist, then the trigger guard, finally to yank back the hammer—

  When the weapon went off, it blew a bullet through the side of her face as she was leaning away, almost as if she had realized in that final moment what was about to happen to her. The close impact of that bullet striking her in the head drove the woman backward a few feet, her body flopping against the dew-dampened buffalo-hide lodge.

  She slowly slid down the tepee, the pulpy side of her head smearing the hide cover with a wide, moist, red track until she came to a rest on the ground, staring at him—her eyes already glazing in death before her silent mouth moved one last time. Then she teetered to the side and fell on her shoulder to budge no more.

  With his head still ringing from his own wound, Private George Leher felt along his prairie belt and pulled one of the long copper cartridges from its canvas loop. When he flung up the trapdoor, the extractor shot the empty cartridge from the smoking breech and he jammed home the fresh round.

  Snapping down the trapdoor and dragging the hammer back to full-cock, he took a deep sigh and closed his eyes a minute more—relieved that he had possession of his rifle once more. No squaw was going to drag him anywhere. None of these screaming bucks was going to get close enough to finish him off.

  He’d just lie there by the side of this lodge and wait until one of Logan’s A Company came back to find him …

  Act like he was dead till someone came along to help.

  He clenched his eyes shut a moment longer, praying that next person would be a white man.

  * Variously spelled Lehr in some of the Big Hole battle literature.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  WA-WA-MAI-KHAL, 1877

  BY TELEGRAPH

  —

  Indian News—Very Serious Trouble in Texas.

  —

  THE INDIANS.

  —

  Sitting Bull Heard From.

  WASHINGTON, August 8.—A letter from the United States consul at Winnipeg says: Near Sitting Bull’s encampment a war party of twenty-seven Sioux robbed the traders of three kegs of powder and one bag of bullets. Besides Sitting Bull’s band there is an equal number of Sioux refugees from the Minnesota massacres of ’62 and ’63, over whom Sitting Bull seems to exercise much influence.

  ONE DAY HE ALONE WOULD CARRY HIS ELDERLY UNCLE’S name, but for the present, this ten-year-old was merely known as Young White Bird.*

  Awakening with the first rattle of gunfire, the youngster was dragged from beneath his sleeping blanket by his mother as his father, Red Elk—a brother to Sun Necklace—dashed from their lodge. Bullets ripped through the lodge-skins, pattering like hailstones and splintering the new poles.

  “Come with me, Son! Run, run!”

  He followed his mother outside, where they immediately started for the closest protection: a bunching of tall willow some of the charging soldiers had just abandoned as they thrust into the village. Here and there favorite ponies were hitched near the lodges, where they would be close when a man or youngster went to see to the herd. One by one, these animals were being killed on their tethers. As they neared the brush, his mother cried out, shaking her free hand. It dripped with blood as she held it up for her son to inspect. A bullet had clipped off a finger and the end of her thumb.

  Young White Bird was just reaching out to cradle his mother’s wounded hand when they both flinched the instant another bullet struck the hands they had joined. His left thumb was severed now, the splintered end of the whitish bone poking out of the raw, bloody stub on his hand.

  “We can’t stay here!” she cried. “To the water!”

  They lunged toward the nearby creek, leaped in, and waded across a narrow tongue to reach a patch of overhanging willow, where they sank to their haunches in the cold water so only their heads would be showing to any soldiers on the riverbanks.

  No sooner had they squatted among the branches than a young girl appeared on the bank opposite them. Naked, she jumped into the water and quickly swam toward the willow where Young White Bird and his mother were hiding.

  “Come in here with us!” his mother sang out.

  The young girl reached them just as three more children, all about Young White Bird’s age, appeared at the same spot on the bank and hurtled themselves into the water without hesitation. They floundered and splashed, kicking their way across the languid stream to reach the willow and the three who waited under the branches.

  Through the noisy din of battle Young White Bird recognized his uncle’s voice, raised loud and strong above the racket of gunfire.

  “Why are you young men retreating! Are we going to run to the mountains and let the white men kill our women and children? It is far better that we should be killed fighting!”

  His uncle’s words gave him a fierce pride.

  A soldier suddenly stood on the bank, then disappeared as quickly. The next few minutes were filled with terrifying screams and the shouts of frightened white men, before a different soldier appeared on the opposite bank, looked across the water at that group huddled beneath the willow. He, too, disappeared without taking any action.

  The moment he was gone, a young woman of no more than fifteen winters, naked to the waist, bolted over the edge of the bank at full speed as if she were being pursued. She hit the water flat on her belly with a painful smack, immediately churning her arms like wind-driven limbs on a high-mountain aspen during a strong gale.

  Young White Bird and his mother reached out to offer their hands to her, pulling the young woman into their temporary shelter just as another girl about his own age crawled to the edge of the bank on her belly, flopped over the precipice, and landed in the water.

  “Get her, Son!”

  He swam out to retrieve the girl, dragging her back to rejoin his mother.

  “See there, how she was wounded in the arm,” his mother said, holding the young child’s upper arm out of the cold water. The girl winced as he peered at the bullet wound. He could see all the way through the ragged bullet hole—

  One of the youngest children shrieked in terror the instant a young woman—old enough to marry and have a child of her own—pitched off the bank into the stream but did not move much to save herself from the water.

  “Bring that one to us!” his mother commanded.

  Her body was limp as he dragged it, bobbing gently on the current, toward their hiding place.

  “Help me place her head on the sandbar so she can breathe,” his mother said.

  The older girl helped them. She asked, “Will she live?”

  Gravely Young White Bird�
��s mother shook her head. “I don’t think so. She has a big bullet wound in her chest. But we can help her breathe until she either wakes up or she dies.”

  He looked at the young woman as she lay in his mother’s arms, finding her very pretty. Young White Bird did not remember ever seeing this unconscious one before. He thought she was one of the prettiest young women he had ever seen. Her blood colored the water around her body.

  “Soldiers!” one of the children cried out before an older one could get her hand clamped over the child’s mouth.

  Young White Bird counted seven of the suapies spread out on the far bank, all of them training their rifles at the clump of overhanging willow. Just as he was about to yell in protest—to curse the white men for killing women and children—his mother shoved his head under the water.

  Sputtering, he leaped back up for air, finding his mother had stepped from beneath the overhanging branches, both arms raised, waving them from side to side, yelling in the white man’s tongue.

  “Women! Only women and children here! Do not shoot! Only women and children!”

  First one, then two more of the soldiers slowly lowered their rifles, talking among themselves. Finally the rest of them took their rifles from their shoulders and quickly backed away from the creek bank.

  “You saved our lives,” the young woman told his mother when the suapies were gone.

  Young White Bird’s mother wagged her head as she lifted the youngest children onto the grass bank opposite the village.

  “Saved your lives only for a little while,” she said grimly. “Let’s do what we can to save you for good.”

  HE had to restrain himself to keep from cheering aloud!

  Colonel John Gibbon had rarely been this elated before. His men had control of the village about twenty minutes after those first confusing shots rang out. The Nez Perce were on the run, driven from their lodges. And it appeared some of Catlin’s civilians had a good chance to capture the horse herd and get it started on their back trail, depriving the warriors of mobility and escape.