Wolf Mountain Moon

by Terry C. Johnston

  Chapter 10

  7-8 December 1876

  “Get up, soldier! Stand up, damn you!”

  Hearing that curse from one of the old files behind him, Frank Baldwin stiffly turned his horse about and moved back down the line of soldiers painfully trudging into the howling gale. For these few moments, at least, he would have the hurling snow at his back.

  There out of the darkening mist as the last layer of daylight seeped from the western horizon, Baldwin spotted the group. Two older soldiers hunched over a third, pulling the man to his feet with a struggle.

  “Lemme … lemme be,” he pleaded, flinging his arms about like a stocking doll.

  “Naw, I ain’t gonna lea’f you, faith,” one of the men explained, his voice softer now as he attempted to cradle the reluctant soldier beneath his arm.

  “Not me neither,” the other said, sweeping a long arm around the third man’s waist, and with a mighty heave raised the soldier nearly off the ground between them. “Couldn’t live with myself knowing I left you out here.”

  “Don’t! Don’t take me,” the rag doll pleaded. “Lemme sleep.”

  “No sleeping—Baldwin’s orders, faith,” the old graybeard said, scooping up the young soldier’s rifle out of the drifting snow, then stepping up to shove his shoulder under the failing infantryman.

  Baldwin said, “If he falls again, give him the point of your bayonets.”

  Both of the older men jerked up in surprise to find the lieutenant all but upon them as they stumbled to a halt there on the trail so many feet were carving out of the snow.

  “Beggin’ pardon, sir,” one of the two chattered, fighting to keep his misshapen kepi on in the stiff wind as he peered up from beneath the rumpled brim at the lieutenant on horseback, “I cain’t bring my own self to jab a fellow Fifther with me bayonet. I save such a punishment for them blooming red-bellies.”

  “Jab ’im, soldier,” Baldwin ordered. “If that’s the only way to keep the man moving—give ’im your bayonet. Is that understood?”

  Both men swallowed, glanced at each other and the soldier between them, then nodded.

  “Understood, sir.”

  Baldwin started to turn, hearing more growling and yelps from back up the line of march, but instead turned round to the trio once more. “Listen, men—I don’t cotton to using the bayonets either. But you must understand. If you don’t keep every last one of us moving till we reach Fort Peck, then some might just lay down and die right here. How do you men want it?”

  “Sir—beggin’ pardon?”

  “You want half the men in your company falling out to die along this road? Or will you use your bayonets as I’ve ordered you to do?”

  “W-we’ll bring ’em all in with us, sir,” the old graybeard replied. “Trust in that, Lieutenant. Trust in that.”

  “I will,” Baldwin said. “Because I know what you’re made of, soldier.”

  Then the lieutenant turned away and urged his weary horse to plod back up the line of stumbling, wobbly men hunching over to shove their way into the stiff, changeable wind that was blowing an icy mix of wet snow and dry crystal right into their faces. Not a moment passed that Frank did not watch a man collapse to a knee, perhaps to both. By and large most men waited a few seconds to rest, catch their breath as others trudged, stumbled, fell around them on the trail, then pull themselves slowly up, hand over hand on their rifles until they stood on wobbly pins once more. Again they would lean into the wind, forcing their legs to follow somehow.

  All round them voices begged to be left behind so they could just sleep. Others pleaded to die right then and there—since it was clear they were all going to die anyway before Baldwin’s lonely battalion made it back to the safety of Fort Peck.

  Yet there were more voices, stronger voices, deeper and more confident voices from those who shouted down the naysayers, who suffered this same unthinkable torture but fought back by grumbling and grousing and cursing up a blue streak in the raw, unrelenting face of that Montana blizzard. The sort of man who might often complain himself about lack of sleep or the poor rations of sidebelly and old crackers not fit for a man in prison, the sort of man who would grumble about putting in fatigue duty back at the Tongue River Cantonment, or curse his superiors when he had to dig a new latrine or corduroy a bank for the wagons or chop down trees to somehow construct just one more bridge across one more nameless goddamned creek.

  But it was just that sort of double-riveted soldier who rose to the need and pulled lesser men out of the snow now as the wolfish wind howled, pulled others not quite as strong out of the frozen snowdrifts that might otherwise be their graves. The sort of man who pushed and yanked and even poked with his bayonet to be sure that every other soldier in front of him kept moving.

  Just to keep all of them moving together into the teeth of that brutal storm. One crippling step at a time.

  The sort of man who was bound and determined that every last one of them would make it back to Fort Peck alive. All. Without the loss of a single man.

  At the head of the march the men in charge of the pack train had their own problems with the balky mules. Baldwin had put them up there for a purpose: to break trail through the deepening snow and near-insurmountable drifts. With the snow and that cursed wind blowing head-on against them, the men were far past numb. And with numbness begins the creeping fatigue, the irrepressible drowsiness that convinces a man he needs only to sit down, curl up, and rest awhile—then he’ll be fit enough to march on, invigorated and refreshed.

  Frank wondered if his own brain were growing cold, and slow, and just might not be as sharp as he needed it to be to get these hundred-plus men back to safety. If he failed them, they might well all die.

  “Get that man up!” the lieutenant bellowed, the ice cracking on his cheeks and beard, sprinkling the front of his dark wool coat with moonlit glitter. “Get him moving—jab ’im if you have to!”

  This new bunch of soldiers looked up at Baldwin; then one of them pulled his bayonet from its scabbard and prodded their fellow with the sharp tip. The soldier down and floundering in a snowdrift tried again and again to shove the long knife aside whenever it jabbed him.

  “Awright!” he hollered, grabbing on to the muzzle of another man’s long Springfield, raising himself painfully with his own rifle as a crutch. “I’m standing, Lieutenant! I’m standing, by God!”

  “Standing isn’t good enough—I need you to march, soldier!” Baldwin shouted, his words hurried on by the rising wail of the wind. “March! Fast or slow … I don’t care. Just stay on your feet and keep moving!”

  It had been that way since dark. How many hours ago now?

  Just before they had set off into the raging blizzard, as the last of the men were stuffing themselves with their rations, Baldwin had gone from company to company, ordering each commander to choose the eight or ten who were strongest of body and will to walk at the rear of each outfit with the officers, all of them with their bayonets fixed.

  Their situation grew all the more desperate as the night wore on. Sometime well past midnight and after miles of grueling march—Frank could not get his turnip watch freed, for his pockets had frozen shut—he ordered those hearty soldiers assigned the pack string to lash all the unused rope to the sawbucks and string the lines out to the rear. Then the call was made up and down the column of wobbly, weaving, near-dead men.

  “Every one of you who believes you can’t possibly go on under your own steam—grab hold of the rope,” Baldwin instructed each group within the sound of his voice as he yelled against the keening wind. “And hold on for your life.”

  He knew the next few miles and hours might well be their lives.

  There were times when he had to coax what he thought would be the last bit of strength out of his horse, prodding it to the front of the column repeatedly, where he would give his order to those soldiers with the mules who were following a half-dead Vic Smith.

  “By damn, boys! It’s a sad, sad sight back there.
This walking isn’t near enough. For fifteen minutes we’ve got to trot these beasts!”

  “T-trot ’em, Lieutenant?”

  “Trot ’em, soldier,” Baldwin snapped. “At a walk is no longer good enough. The men are fading on me—I must get their blood moving! Keep these dumb brutes moving at a trot. Now!”

  With stiff salutes the first half-dozen soldiers turned back to their duty, whipping the balky, braying animals until first one, then another, and finally the rest of the snow-crusted beasts lumbered into a rolling trot, yanking on the ropes that pulled the hapless, frozen, blizzard-beaten soldiers along through the snowdrifts being broken by those hooves.

  On and on Frank went, in and out of the saddle himself, up and down the line, many times pulling his flagging horse behind him just so he could stir up his own circulation by walking, so he could show them that he wasn’t above busting through the icy, crusty snow himself. Baldwin wasn’t sure just when it happened, so numb was his mind, so splintered was his judgment—but he stood among a half-dozen men, lending a hand to their struggle to hoist one half-dead man atop Baldwin’s horse when—

  “Listen, sir!”

  Frank turned dumbly, blinking, his face so cold, his eyelids barely moved in the swirl of snow.

  “I don’t hear anything, goddammit!” one of the others grunted, holding up his share of the soldier’s weight as they shoved the unconscious man across the lieutenant’s saddle like a wet sack of oats.

  A nearby voice cried, “That’s all of it!”

  “Exactly!”

  “The wind …,” Baldwin whimpered with exhaustion, so tired he didn’t even have the strength to cry with relief. “It’s stopped.”

  Another man yelped with glee. “The gol-danged storm’s gone and blowed over us!”

  All around them men began to lumber to a halt, slowly able to stand straighter now that they did not have to hunch over against the gale-force winds, able to open their eyes fully and peer out beneath the frost-crusted eyelashes. Slowly each one came to understand, causing some to pound one another clumsily on the backs, croaking their cheers and congratulations with cracking voices.

  Then near the front of the march the men started demanding quiet, silence … like a flow, the call rippled back along the column as every one went dumb, listening.

  There, every now and then beneath the rustle and shove of the dying wind, they heard a gunshot. Distant. So far away the gunshots were almost muffled.

  “That’s gotta be the fort!” one cried out.

  The rest celebrated all over again. To be within hearing distance of Fort Peck.

  Baldwin didn’t have the heart to tell them it might well be nothing more than the ice thickening in the river, no more than the cottonwoods popping in the brutal, soul-numbing cold.

  Somewhere deep inside him he knew he had to let them go on believing they were nearing the post. Keep them moving … and believing that it was just beyond the next hill, perhaps. So he reminded them. Then, when they were beyond that rise and the fort still did not loom into sight, Frank told them he was certain the post lay just around the next big bend in the Missouri.

  “Yes, yes,” one of the soldiers cried. “I remember it ’sactly that way. Same’s the lieutenant said!”

  And so they somehow continued to stumble on through the darkness, and into the coming gray of day.

  The sun never appeared at sunrise that Friday, the eighth of December. Nothing more than a dull lightening patch at the horizon behind the fury of the storm rumbling east. On through the snowdrifts they persevered, mules pulling the weakest among them, soldiers prodding their fellow soldiers, Baldwin clutching the horse’s reins for dear life so that he himself would not fall there beside the trail. Praying that the stumbling horse would not go down.

  Not until they reached Fort Peck.

  Images danced and swam in front of him with the stark-white landscape: the spiderwebs of leafless brush and tall cottonwoods, the stark outline of ridge and bluff top against the graying sky here two, maybe three, hours past sunrise. Dim mirages leaped out of the darkness at the periphery of his vision so sudden, they scared him, bringing him instantly awake. So otherworldly was it all that Frank wondered at times if he was still alive.

  Each time he worried, Baldwin worked up the strength to call out to the soldiers around him, to hear his own voice, mostly, before he slipped completely away. “C’mon, men! Just a few more yards! Yes—I think I see it now!”

  Frank found himself longing to see the post materialize out of all that white more than anything since he had wanted sweet, pretty Alice Blackwood to marry him during the insurrection of the Southern states. Trying so hard to remember her face with his cold, numb mind while he licked at his frozen lips that cracked and oozed—how did her mouth taste on his … then heard the soldiers up front with the mules shout.

  He looked up, expecting to find Alice before him, hoping she could wrap her arms around him and make him warm again.

  But it was only a group of buildings swimming dark and shadowlike out of the frozen mist that coated every branch and rock. Buildings. Logs stacked on top of one another. At first he could smell the smoke, then saw each curl rising from the stone chimneys.

  “W-we made it, boys!” His voice cracked with cold and emotion as he turned, nearly stumbling in the deep snow as his horse continued on without him.

  Baldwin jerked in a grotesque, wild motion to free his frozen, cramped hand from the reins so he could lurch back along the column, hollering at the top of his lungs.

  “We made it, boys!” he bellowed. “I see it! There’s fires and food and shelter. Keep going! Keep going!”

  Later that morning after the men had shed their empty haversacks and dumped weapons in the corners of every cabin within Fort Peck’s stockade, the battalion gave Baldwin three cheers, and then three more for those men who had kept the mules pulling the ropes, and finally three cheers for the old files so good with their bayonets. And when the cheering died down and the men had wiped their eyes dry once more, those three companies of the Fifth Infantry roared their huzzahs to Frank Baldwin for pulling them all through that blizzard.

  Not an animal down. Not one man lost.

  Chapter 11

  8-14 December 1876

  As soon as it was light on the morning of the eighth, Leforge and Lieutenant Colonel Whistler dispatched a party of ten Crow warriors with what pack mules Quartermaster Randall could spare, each one loaded down with enough grain and forage to see Captain Snyder’s column all the way in to the Tongue River Cantonment. They even carried sketchy and inaccurate news claiming Samuel J. Tilden had been elected president back east.

  Snyder’s battalion would not drag into base until the afternoon of the tenth, having put more than 330 miles behind them in their month-long hunt for the roaming Sioux.

  After recuperating for a day and most of the next night, Luther S. Kelly himself pulled out again early on the ninth with two more of Leforge’s Crow scouts, this time starting north on the trail hoping to locate Miles’s battalion. Chances were good they would be found somewhere on the divide above Big Dry Creek.

  Early on their second morning out, Kelly and the two Crow trackers were heating up some coffee and broiling some antelope flank steaks when they heard a pair of distant shots come to them on the wind. Without a word he immediately kicked snow into their fire, gave sign, and the three of them quickly saddled. Mounting up, they cautiously pushed north more than a mile, keeping to the ravines and coulees so they would not be caught against the skyline.

  On a patch of ground lying in the gentle saddle between two rounded knolls, it was clear even from a distance that the snow had been disturbed. They waited a few moments there, smelling the air, listening for more gunshots, watching the hilltops. Only then did they inch forward to stop on that patch of ground where it appeared a small herd of buffalo had sought shelter during the recent blizzard.

  One of the Crow motioned the others over, pointing to the ground across the sid
e of the hill. A recent set of boot prints. Then a second set, the tracks coming around the brow of the hill to join the first.

  These were definitely white men. And Luther figured the only white men out and wandering about had to be soldiers.

  After mounting up and pushing on with the Crow for close to a mile, Kelly found he could smell woodsmoke before he ever saw its wispy trail rising beyond the ridge. The three rode as close as they dared with the horses, then dismounted and crept in the rest of the way on foot.

  Around the base of a low ridge crusted with wet, frozen snow, the three dropped to their bellies, staring at the distant figures. Slowly they made out the scene: no lodges; a heap lot of wagons and mules; and the men all wore soldier clothes. It was clear from all the activity around the wagons, what with the teams being backed into their hitches, that this bunch was preparing to break camp.

  “Bear Coat,” Luther said out loud as he stood, his hands making sign.

  The Crow followed him back to their horses, where they mounted up and rode on in to the soldier bivouac, frightening the first of the outlying pickets as they appeared at the top of the snowy hill. In a moment more soldiers were being deployed, readied for attack, until they realized there were only three horsemen coming slowly toward the camp.

  “Kelly!” roared Miles as the three approached. “By Jupiter, it’s good to see you!”

  “Haven’t froze yet, General,” Luther replied. “Though it wasn’t for want of a blizzard trying.”

  “We were caught in it too. Had to leave a few of our mules behind, but we didn’t lose a man in all that muck,” Miles explained, extending an arm to point at one of the last fires still going. “Care for a cup of coffee?”

  “Don’t mind if I do, General.”

  “How’s Captain Snyder’s battalion faring?”