O’DRISCOLL LEADS METZGER and the others as they round the tree line into the gully, their horses splashing, smashing through the thin sheen of ice on the stream. He sees the mass of cavalry ahead of them turning, firing into the tree line, flashes of fire followed by billows of smoke, and the cavalrymen turning in their saddles, pistols pointing into the wood. Whatever they are firing at is obscured suddenly in all the smoke and like Kohn, some thirty yards behind him on the upper bank of the stream, Michael hears the gathering howl from the cottonwoods and sees the ambushers emerging from the trees, the vague shapes of them coming, fifty, a hundred, in the swirling gunsmoke, and terror sparks down his spine and through his legs and his horse feels it too and lurches for the high ground and he lets her.
“Metzy,” he shouts. “This way, Metz.” His breath is barged from him as he is thrown back in the saddle, gripping tight to the reins as his mount eats yards of frozen hillside, kicking snow behind her as she climbs and then reaches the top of the low hill, bounding over it and into a raised and frozen meadow onto which, from all sides, hundreds more Indians come, howling, howling, some on foot, many more on horseback and what seems but a handful of blue-coated soldiers in a frenzy of terror. Horses are jerked this way and then, bolting for one side of the meadow only to find more Indians there, turned back and more Indians are coming. An arrow passes so close by Michael’s ear from behind him he can hear its hiss, feel it carve the air.
“Michael!” It is Metzger’s voice and his friend now comes thundering up to him, his mount’s eyes wide and white with terror. “They are everywhere coming behind us.”
A bugle sounds from across the meadow above the howling, a weak and incoherent bleating, a panicked cavalry bugler attempting to blow some sense of order to the fight or to the retreat and without waiting for an answer from O’Driscoll, Metzger raises his own bugle and sounds the order to retreat, loud and sharp in the icy air. He does not wait to be ordered to do it, in essence taking command of the fort’s riders, mustering them to flee behind the blaring of his bugle.
Michael scans the meadow—flailing tumult, pistols and rifles firing, smoke beginning to cloud the field—and then spurs his mount forward, north, away from the fort. There appear to be fewer Indians to the north of the meadow. He has his Colt in one hand and fires as he rides. Around him there is slaughter, the snow churned to mud and blood and Metzger is behind him and then is not. Michael sees an arrow strike Daly in the throat, another in the chest and Daly falls and Michael lashes his mount with his reins, horse and man thundering through the storm of ambush.
As he rides, long reins lashing, his senses are alive to flashing aspects of the battle. There is powder smoke in the air—he can taste it now and knows the taste well—and the heat of the beast beneath him; there is blood and glinting steel and bodies battered to the frozen ground. Most of all there are Indians and in their hands are every manner of swinging blade and bludgeon, gun and bow, spear and scalping knife. Michael has a flashing view of a bluecoat crumpling to the ground, an ambusher upon him before the soldier has hit it.
He is nearly clear of the tumult, more than halfway across the frozen meadow, when an arrow strikes his thigh with a force that feels as if he has been hit with a hammer, the arrow driving through muscle, deflecting off bone and emerging partly from his leg to enter his horse, pinning his leg to the beast as the horse bucks and turns and then continues on, riding, riding. Another arrow strikes his mount and she stumbles nearly to the edge of the meadow, to the decline there, the shelter that might be had in the cottonwood trees if he could make them.
Another arrow strikes Michael’s horse now and she falls and he is thrown, his fall tearing the arrow from the side of his horse. The breath bursts from his lungs as he hits the frozen ground and he gasps, bright lights like fireworks exploding in his eyes. He lies on his back, his mouth yawing for air and it comes finally, a deep relished breath that brings back with it the sound of the slaughter around him. Above him there is a brief respite of blue sky between the clouds. Around him there is smoke and blood and howling. He feels the approaching footsteps through the ground on his back.
KOHN HEARS THE BUGLE call to retreat as he crests the rise into the meadow and his eyes are drawn to the bugler and next to him is O’Driscoll who spurs his horse and begins to race across the meadow as if straight into the heart of the fighting, firing his pistol as he goes, and Kohn follows.
He is closing on O’Driscoll when he sees his quarry’s horse fall and watches as O’Driscoll is thrown. Watching this Kohn feels but does not see his own horse stumble as she crushes someone or something beneath her hooves, and from his left comes a rider, an Indian on a pony painted in bright shades of ocher, tomahawk raised, and this Indian closes suddenly, faster than Kohn imagined possible, the tomahawk coming down.
Kohn twists in his saddle and fires his pistol and the hatchet glances off his shoulder with a thud and lodges itself in the thick leather of his saddle and for a galloping moment he and the Indian are riding side by side, the Indian trying to wrench the tomahawk from the saddle and Kohn trying to thumb back the hammer of his Remington and finding his arm paralyzed by the axe blow and, as if sensing this, his horse turns abruptly away, pulling the Indian still gripping the tomahawk from the back of his own horse to the frozen ground. A fine horse, Kohn thinks. A wonderful beast. He scans the meadow as he rides, his eyes passing over the battle around him, looking for the fallen O’Driscoll.
Before Kohn has put forty yards between them, the Indian is back on his feet and he draws an arrow from the quiver at his back and strings it to his bow. He looses the arrow at Kohn and the arrow flies true and straight.
49
December 21, 1866—Little Piney Creek Bank, Dakota Territory
JONATHAN SITS OUTSIDE HIS TIPI ON A LOG AT A SMALL fire and listens to the distant sounds of battle. The scout sees the lieutenant coming along the riverbank on his crutches.
“Jonathan, I would have thought you might join in the hurly burly, my friend,” the officer says. His face is pale, his eyes yellow.
Jonathan motions with his hand. “Too many to fight. Only them who want death today choose to fight.”
Molloy coughs and the coughing continues for some time. He holds a kerchief to his mouth and when he is finished coughing, he does not check it for blood because he can taste the blood in his mouth.
“The wisest among us, Jonathan. Where is your winter wife?”
The Pawnee nods up stream, towards the mountains. “She went away with the other Cheyenne. They are afraid. Of what is coming.”
Molloy notes that many of the tipis that were along the riverbank on their last visit are gone. A few remain but are silent, void of life, their fires cold. “You’re not fighting but you’re not afraid.”
“I will go when you pay my wages.”
Molloy smiles. “Of course. Here you are, my friend.” Molloy takes his billfold from inside his tunic and counts out thirty dollars. He hands the money to Jonathan who takes it without speaking and puts it into a leather purse worn on a thong around his neck.
“And tell me this,” Molloy says. “Our friend Two Doves. Is she gone away as well?”
“She is there where she always is.”
“She’s not afraid like the others?” Molloy smiles.
Jonathan notices that the distant firing has all but ceased, the battle drawing to a close in the foothills beyond the fort. He says, “If you have nothing in life, you do not fear death.”
Molloy laughs and begins coughing. When he is finished, he wipes his mouth with his sleeve. “No, Jonathan. No you do not. God speed to you, sir. We will not be requiring your services any further.”
The Pawnee nods to Molloy. There is nothing more for him to say.
END
HISTORICAL NOTE
Wolves of Eden is set during Red Cloud’s War (1866–68)—an uprising of Sioux, Northern Cheyenne and Arapahoe Indians against the encroachment of migrants to the gold
fields of Montana. In response to Indian attacks on travelers, the U.S. Army sent several companies of infantry to protect white “pilgrims” and establish a fort on the Bozeman Trail in the isolated Powder River country in the Dakota Territories. Nearly half the soldiers manning Fort Phil Kearny—and thirty-odd of the eighty-one killed in the ensuing Fetterman Massacre of the fort’s troops by Indians, the Battle of One Hundred in the Hand, as it is known to the Lakota Sioux—were native-born Irish immigrants or first generation Irish-Americans.
As such, Fort Phil Kearny as seen in this novel was a real place. It is a real place and you can visit a wonderful recreation of the fort—the original was abandoned in 1868 and burned by Red Cloud’s warriors—just outside of Storey, Wyoming.
To spare the reader the same confusion I experienced during my research, I have changed the name of another fort which features in the novel—Fort Kearney, in present-day Nebraska—to Fort Caldwell.
Many of the events in the novel are as true to the historical record as I could render them within the bounds of fiction. The crime for which the brothers stand accused is fictional, though based on similar incidents in other Western forts. The crimes perpetrated by the government and army of the United States on the indigenous peoples of the American West are real. Fiction has nothing on them.
Kevin McCarthy
November 2017
Dublin, Ireland
BIBLIOGRAPHY
I read upwards of fifty books—or parts of them—when researching this novel, some better than others but all useful in their own way. The first of these, and the text that drove me to further investigate the role the immigrant Irish played as soldiers in the genocidal conquest of the American West, was Nathaniel Philbrick’s The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Set ten years after the events in my novel, it is nonetheless an invaluable and gripping examination of the Battle of Little Big Horn—the Battle of the Greasy Grass. As in Fort Phil Kearny and the Fetterman Massacre, a disproportionate number of the government soldiers killed in that battle were Irish-born, and reading of this in Philbrick’s brilliant book inspired my initial researches into the subject.
The Fetterman Massacre by Dee Brown is a very readable, popular account of the building of Fort Phil Kearny and the events leading up to—and the aftermath of—the Battle of One Hundred in the Hand as seen in this novel. The definitive account of these events, however, is Where a Hundred Soldiers Were Killed: The Struggle for the Powder River Country in 1866 and the Making of the Fetterman Myth by John H. Monnett, not least because Monnett gives equal weight in his account to the testimony of the Indians who fought in Red Cloud’s War.
For a first-hand account of life at Fort Phil Kearny, Absaraka: Home of the Crows by Margaret Irvin Carrington is a wonderfully written—if sanitized and obfuscating in relation to her husband’s responsibility for the deaths of his troops in the Fetterman Fight—memoir of life as the wife of the commander of a frontier outpost.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author would like to thank the following: my agent, Jonathan Williams, for his expert representation and editing; Starling Lawrence, Emma Hitchcock and the staff of W. W. Norton for their faith in, and tireless work on behalf of, Wolves of Eden; Allegra Huston for her expert copyediting and editorial suggestions; Bernard Wassertzug for his expert help with the Yiddish spoken by Kohn in the novel; Moya Nolan for her photographs; my mother and first reader, Juliet McCarthy, and novelist Ed O’Loughlin for their vital, occasionally brutal, professional edits; Colin McCarthy, Susannah McCarthy, Niall Hogan, and Diarmuid O’Dochartaigh, who read and offered valuable feedback on late drafts of the novel; Andy Connolly and Cynthia Olson for so generously lodging and feeding me on my trip to New York; Giles Steele-Perkins and Marty McGlynn for their amazing hospitality on my trip to Boston; Suzanne Matson of Boston College for her inspiration and advice, literary and academic; the staff and patrons of the Wagon Box Inn, Storey, Wyoming, for their hospitality and generously-shared knowledge of the Powder River Valley; the staff at Fort Phil Kearny, Wyoming, for their help with my research; all my colleagues and staff at ODC—particularly my jobshare partner, Carmel Hogan—for their support and tolerance; Breda Dunne, Mary McCarthy and Sergo Gabunya, Geoffrey “Jefe” McCarthy and Karen Fullencamp, Jonathan Grimes, Gina Pavlovic–McCarthy, Seamus Dunne, Eamonn Dunne and Susan Dunne for their support and encouragement; likewise my good friends Dennis Carolan, Alex Connolly, Giovanna Tallarico, Julie Cruikshank, Georg Ulrich, Niall and Natasha Mahon and Kieran and Teresa Roe; most especially, the author would like to thank Regina, Áine and Eibhlin, without whom this novel could not have been written.
ALSO BY KEVIN MCCARTHY
Irregulars:
A Sean O’Keefe Novel
Peeler:
A Sean O’Keefe Novel
This is a work of historical fiction. Apart from the well-known actual people, events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to current events or locales, or to living persons, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2019 by Kevin McCarthy
All rights reserved
First Edition
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact W. W. Norton Special Sales at [email protected] or 800-233-4830
Book design by Lovedog Studio
Production manager: Lauren Abbate
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: McCarthy, Kevin, 1968– author.
Title: Wolves of Eden : a novel / Kevin McCarthy.
Description: First edition. | New York : W. W. Norton & Company, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018019191 | ISBN 9780393652048 (hardcover)
Subjects: | GSAFD: Western stories.
Classification: LCC PR6113.C3673 W68 2018 | DDC 823/.92—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018019191
ISBN: 9780393652055 (ebk.)
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 15 Carlisle Street, London W1D 3BS
Wolves of Eden Page 35
