Lay the Mountains Low

by Terry C. Johnston

  But when he attempted to drag the legs under him preparing to get back onto his feet, Woodruff realized it was more than mere muscle fatigue. The pale sky blue of his wool britches was spotted with glistening blood. Both legs. Just above the knees.

  Mortally scared, he immediately grabbed both burning wounds and squeezed, hopeful it would relieve the rising pain, then quickly felt along the big bones for any fractures.

  “Thank you, God,” he whispered.

  Woodruff’s head sagged back in his shoulders as he closed his eyes, grateful the bullet that had sliced through both legs had missed the bones. Otherwise, he would have lost both legs.

  Oh, Louie, he thought of his wife as he opened his stinging eyes, smearing a tear across a powder-grimed cheek with the back of his bloody hand.

  At least I can still dance with you on our next anniversary!

  WHILE most of the warriors who had taken part in the capture of the big wagon gun now went back to fight the soldiers who were hiding down in their hollows, Yellow Wolf and his mother’s brother, Light in the Mountain, rode off up the slope, leading a small scouting party to search for more soldiers who must surely be coming their way.

  Not far up the trail, the scouts divided, most continuing right on up the mountainside to put themselves above the soldiers who had escaped the village and taken refuge in the trees, while Yellow Wolf and Light in the Mountain stayed with the route the wagon gun soldiers had taken when they turned around and fled during the capture of their weapon. Farther and farther the two rode, without seeing any sign of the white men.

  “These soldiers have run very fast,” sighed Light in the Mountain as they finally brought their ponies to a halt.

  “Do you think they have run all the way back to the settlers’ valley?”* Yellow Wolf wondered.

  “I hoped we could see Cut-Off Arm and his soldiers coming over the mountains,” said his uncle. “At least to run across some of their big wagons filled with supplies and more ammunition.”

  “Listen, you can even hear the guns of Ollokot’s warriors firing from so far away,” he told his uncle. “Since we did not find the soldiers, or their wagons, let’s go back and see if we can help the families.”

  “Maybe there is something for us to do in the village, to help the wounded,” Light in the Mountain suggested.

  As they backtracked down that trail both the village and the soldiers had used to reach the Place of the Ground Squirrels, Yellow Wolf began to hear the first faint wails of grief rising from those in the encampment. As the pair reached the bottom and were beginning to angle left to see how the fight was going at the siege area, both riders heard a loud scream—one clearly made by a man.

  Thinking one of their own might be in danger, they immediately kicked their ponies into a lope for the tall willows in the boggy bottom. It was there they came upon a scene of three older women hunched over a figure wearing the muddy pale blue britches of a soldier.* His legs kicked and flailed as two of the old women pinned him down and a third squatted over him, straddling her victim. She had a bloodied knife clutched in both of her hands, poised with it over her head, preparing to plunge it into the soldier a second time.

  The wounded man screamed even louder this time, kicking with his legs as the two warriors came upon the brutal scene.

  Down slashed the knife as the soldier attempted to twist out of the way. Just when he turned his head to the side, the woman jammed the big blade into the side of his neck, blood squirting from a ruptured vessel, spraying her in the face and across her breasts.

  His back arched in agony, his legs thrashing. On and on the white man begged and pleaded, fighting from side to side as his clothing and the ground beneath him grew soggy with blood. For a brief instant his eyes caught and held on Yellow Wolf’s, then rolled back in his head a little as the old woman plunged her knife into his neck a third time. The soldier went limp and stopped fighting.

  The other two women slowly dragged themselves to their feet, wiping their blood-splattered hands and arms on the white man’s britches. That’s when the three noticed the two warriors.

  “He was already wounded,” the knife holder explained as she wiped off the man’s blood on her torn and soot-smudged dress. “I wanted to help him die faster. Even though my son did not die fast this morning when one of these soldiers shot him. So I think this suapie got better than he deserved.”

  “Does he have any bullets on him?” Light in the Mountain asked.

  The woman shook her head. “There was no gun or bullets near him. He must have lost them running from the village.”

  “Or,” Yellow Wolf commented as he looked up the hillside to where the gunfire was sporadic, “the other soldiers took his gun and bullets for themselves when they left him behind to die a hard way.”

  “Let’s go see these soldiers who would leave one of their own behind in battle,” his uncle suggested.

  “Yes—I want to see what sort of creature would leave his friends behind to die at the hands of women.”*

  Now that he and the other men had rallied and taken back their camp here in the river bottom, Lean Elk’s curiosity was drawn by that loud roar of a wagon gun. He knew a little something about such weapons. The half-breed Frenchman galloped uphill to lead in the dismantling of the soldier cannon.

  Showing the others how to use the white man’s tools found in the wagon boxes, Poker Joe directed the loosening of each hub and the removal of the wheels. The warriors had great fun starting these heavy wheels spinning and bounding down the hillside toward the creek bottom. With the gun eventually removed from its wagon, several of the stronger men worked hard to pitch the shiny brass barrel down the slope, watching it tumble and bound through the saplings trees and over the soft ground until it came to a stop just two short arrow flights below them.

  That’s when Bird Alighting took over the destruction, pulling his skinning knife from his belt and showing the others how they were going to dig a hole in which to bury the cannon.

  “It’s a great pity you destroyed this gun.”

  Turning at the words, Bird Alighting, Poker Joe, and the others looked up at the older horseman who had stopped above them. Of this warrior Joe did not know, he asked, “Why such a pity?”

  “I know how to use this kind of gun.”

  Very dubious of such a claim, Poker Joe got to his feet and walked over to the horseman. He asked, “How would you know such a thing?”

  “I learned when I was with the soldier chief named Wright.”

  That almost sounded convincing to Joe. “You fought alongside the soldiers in that war with Wright?”

  “Yes,” the horseman answered. “Against the Cayuse and Yakima. That’s where I learned.”

  “Did you ever fire the gun yourself?” Bird Alighting challenged.

  “No, but I watched them load and fire it over and over again, so I know how the white men do it.”

  Poker Joe looked down at the half-buried fieldpiece and shrugged. “Too late.”

  “Yes,” the horseman said as he eased away. “And too bad. We could have used it to dislodge those soldiers from their rabbit hollows over in the trees.”

  *The Bitterroot valley.

  *Historical testimony reveals that this soldier was in all likelihood Private Michael Gallagher, musician, attached to D Company of the Seventh U. S. Infantry.

  *Big Hole battle historians have documented that as many as eight of Gibbon’s soldiers and Catlin’s volunteers were indeed left behind in the retreat, eight white men still alive to one degree or another at that point when the rest made their mad dash to the hillside point of timber. These men were discovered by the women, old men, and boys who eagerly scoured through the brush to find any such white enemies still breathing. After Ollokot’s warriors had pulled back the following day and Howard’s men had reached the scene a day after that, upon a search of the creek-bottom battlefield these eight bodies were discovered—not one of those wounded still alive after the Nez Perce had finished them off
in a most horrific manner.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

  AUGUST 9, 1877

  LIEUTENANT CHARLES WOODRUFF FLINCHED AT THAT next dull thud—more lead slamming into human flesh.

  The distinctive slap made his own wounds ache all the more, his soul whimpering as the men around him were hit, one after another.

  Sometimes he could tell when a bullet struck bone. Other times it was no more than a moist slap as lead penetrated soft tissue. Woodruff couldn’t help cringing when he heard a man cry out in pain, begging for help from his bunkies.

  One at a time, the wounded were adding up, not just the ones they had managed to drag up here with them in the retreat but also those wounded the snipers were accounting for as Nez Perce marksmen sighted in on the soldiers’ perimeter. By now there wasn’t a white man who still had his hat on—they made such fine targets of a fellow.

  Without a surgeon along, they had no clean bandages for each new wound. Instead, the men did what they could, pulling free their long shirttails and using their dirty digging knives to hack off wide strips of greasy, soiled cloth. At first it had galled Woodruff to see how the old files and the civilians spit a little tobacco juice into the wounds of their comrades before knotting a bandage over the puckered hole, but it didn’t take long for him to accept that this was the way of things with these veteran frontiersmen.

  Still, for a few of the worst cases, mere tobacco juice wrapped up with a piece of shirttail wasn’t nearly enough to stop the bleeding of a blood vessel nicked by a Nez Perce bullet.

  An old sergeant was the first to crab over to a rifle pit to help two young soldiers with their seriously wounded comrade. Quickly fingering a rifle cartridge from a loop on his prairie belt, he snapped open his pocketknife and deftly pried the lead bullet loose from its copper casing.

  “Hoi’ ’im down, boys,” he grumbled as he positioned the open cartridge right over the oozy leg wound.

  As the two soldiers rocked their weight on top of their reluctant comrade, the old file reached in one of his belt pouches and pulled out a sulphur-headed lucifer he stuffed between his front teeth. Now with the fingers of his left hand, the old sergeant gently spread apart the ragged edges of the gaping wound and up-ended the cartridge before tamping the last of the black powder grains into the hole with a dirty fingertip. He quickly brushed away the excess powder, then leaned back.

  As the sergeant pulled the match from between his teeth, the wounded soldier on the ground quit thrashing a moment, gazing up at the old file, and said, “H-hell, that wasn’t so bad, Sarge.”

  But when the old soldier dragged his thumbnail across the head of the match, the young soldier went cross-eyed staring at the sudden flare as the whitish-blue flame inched closer and closer to his wounded leg. “Wh-what you gonna do with that—”

  His question was instantly answered as the sergeant laid the burning lucifer down against the pocket of black powder with a sudden fiery phfffft. Spitting a momentary tongue of flame, a narrow tendril of greasy smoke rising from the wound, the fire had done its work, cauterizing the injured blood vessel.

  “Looks like he’ll be out for a while,” the sergeant said, inspecting the soldier by gently raising the unconscious man’s eyelids. He rolled back onto his knees and crabbed away, passing the young lieutenant on the way to his rifle pit.

  The sergeant nodded at Woodruff and said, “How your bullet holes, sir?”

  “T-they aren’t bleeding like his was, Sergeant.”

  The old file grinned, his eyes crinkling. “Call me if you need me, Lieutenant.”

  Woodruff gulped, knowing exactly what the soldier was referring to. “A fine job over there, Sergeant. Man won’t bleed to death now.”

  “Thankee, sir,” he said, a little embarrassed as he started to move on. “Jus’ a li’l something I picked up many a year ago during the Great War.”

  WHEN Yellow Wolf and his uncle reached the point of timber on the hillside overlooking the camp, a sporadic rattle of gunfire was still continuing as Ollokot’s warriors settled into the siege around the suapies. Many of the men on all sides were continuing to sing or chant their war and victory songs—each warrior calling on his wyakin, his individual spiritual power.

  Yellow Wolf rode up to a knot of men surrounding Five Wounds, the famous warrior called Pahkatos Owyeen.

  The grieving warrior stood in the middle, talking in low tones to the rest as Yellow Wolf slid off his pony, tied it to a nearby sapling, and stepped over to listen to their quiet discussion. He recognized the grave expressions on all the faces … but most especially that ghostly look on Five Wounds’s face. His skin had taken on a gray pallor that only served to accentuate the reddened eyes, swollen from much crying.

  That’s when Yellow Wolf remembered the courageous death of Five Wounds’s best friend, Rainbow, earlier that morning in the village fight.

  “This sun, this time,” Five Wounds was saying as he stared down at his repeater, “I am going to die.”

  “You are going to make a bravery run against the suapies?” asked Ollokot.

  “No, this is not a run against them,” Five Wounds explained. “I am going to charge right into their burrows and have them kill me when I reach them. Kill me when I am so close I can see the fear in their eyes.”

  His words, perhaps more the tone of Five Wounds’s voice, immediately tugged at Yellow Wolf’s heart. He knew the story—every Nee-Me-Poo knew that tale by heart—how these two had begun their friendship as small boys, a kinship that would be nurtured over more than two decades as they traveled ancestral lands and journeyed many times to Illahe together—sometimes fighting enemies, side by side, in that buffalo country far to the east.

  Theirs was a bond not of blood but of the heart, even of their very spirits. And now that Rainbow had been killed, every man gathered there knew it was Five Wounds’s day to die as well. Everyone knew that years ago the two brothers-in-arms had taken a vow that they would die on the same day.

  No one dared stand in his way as he sought to fulfill his vow to Rainbow.

  Otskai rode up and dismounted, holding out a soldier canteen as he stepped toward the group. “Five Wounds—see what I have found in the village.”

  “I am not thirsty,” Five Wounds said.

  Removing the stopper, Otskai held the canteen under Five Wounds’s nose. “This isn’t water, my brother.”

  “Whiskey,” Five Wounds said, taking the canteen. “Yes, I will have a drink now.”

  “The white men drank whiskey before they attacked us?” Yellow Wolf asked as Five Wounds passed him the canteen, but he passed it right on. He never touched liquor.

  “My brother is killed today,” Five Wounds reminded those who needed no reminding while each man took a sip from the fragrant canteen. “And I shall go with him … while the sun is in this sky. We will die together the way his father and my father died together in the buffalo country. They lay side by side where the battle was the strongest. And now I shall lie down beside my warmate. He is no more and I shall see that I follow him.”

  Yellow Wolf remembered how the two fathers had been killed in a fight with Lakota over on the eastern plains. “Do you want us to lay down some cover fire as you make your charge?”

  The dark, red-rimmed eyes in that tortured face turned to the younger man as Five Wounds said, “Yes. That would help me to get as close as I can to the white man’s burrows before their bullets kill me.”

  Ollokot seized Five Wounds’s forearm in his, and they shook, wrist to wrist. Several other men offered their arms, too, and Five Wounds took the forearm of each, to grasp in that manner of men who have suffered hardship together, men who have stood against powerful enemies together, men who have repeatedly placed their bodies between their families and the suapies … together in the brotherhood of warriors.

  It made Yellow Wolf’s eyes mist as Five Wounds turned away from him and the others, stepping to the edge of the shallow, narrow gulch that separated them from the soldiers.

&n
bsp; Instead of immediately dashing for the white men’s hollows, Five Wounds paused to look up at the sky, declaring, “Rainbow—may your spirit look over me now. I am coming! I am coming to join you!”

  As those last words escaped his tongue, Five Wounds bolted away at a sprint, racing around the head of the ravine and dodging between trees as the first of the soldier bullets began to whine around him, some smacking the narrow trunks of lodgepole pines, others snapping off small branches.

  They saw the first bullet hit Five Wounds, striking him in the shoulder, momentarily slowing his gait as the impact shoved him around to the side, knocking him off-stride but for an instant until he shrugged off the injury and ran even faster, half bent over, nearing the soldier burrows.

  The others joined Ollokot as their war chief started singing his own war song in a loud, strong voice. Yellow Wolf raised his voice with the rest. In chanting their own medicine song, Five Wounds’s warrior brothers were sending him on his way to meet his dearest friend—their songs his medicine songs at this fragile moment between life and death. Their combined strength would become his strength alone for as long as he needed theirs to accomplish this last great act of friendship.

  A bullet ripped into Five Wounds’s thigh, sending a shudder through his body, causing him to slow noticeably. He was limping—but still he plunged on, closer, ever closer, to the soldier burrows.

  Now the white men were yelling, some of the men beginning to stand behind their rifle pits, shouting at one another and pointing their weapons at that lone oncoming warrior. It was as if all those rifles were suddenly trained on Five Wounds, fixed on him alone.

  One of the bullets that snarled his way smacked into his chest, blowing out a large hole in his back—but it did nothing to stop the man now that he was nearing his goal. Five Wounds was almost close enough that he could throw his kopluts at the soldiers….