by Lori Benton
Warriors and sachems gathered around to hear the answer to that question balanced on all their tongues.
“They called that one who leads them coward, those colonels,” Ahnyero said, still catching his breath. “For wanting to await the signal, they all but called him traitor. Herkimer lost his temper. He bid them march.”
“He sends no scouts?” Honyery said in disbelief.
“Too many of them do not trust us, brothers. I am sad to say it. But that doesn’t mean we must hang back. You,” Ahnyero said to one standing by, “come with me. And you.” He chose several more warriors. “Thayendanegea knows these hills. There will be ambush waiting. Let us keep these ones from blundering into it if we can.”
“Take me with you.” Two Hawks grabbed Ahnyero’s arm before he stepped away, but Ahnyero shook his head.
“It is a bad feeling I have about this day. You stay back with these soldiers, flank them if you will, but do not come ahead.”
Two Hawks clenched his jaw, sick to his marrow of being pushed aside out of danger. Then he looked into Ahnyero’s eyes and knew there would be danger for all today, no matter where they met it.
Ahnyero grasped his arm in farewell. “Listen for my voice. If there is ambush, I will not be silent about it.”
The warrior-blacksmith took up his shot bag, slung his rifle at his shoulder, and ran to join the scouts hurrying to get ahead of the militia column led by the insulted General Herkimer astride a white horse.
William had passed half a mosquito-bitten night dozing in the position he’d taken up with the rest of the company. Morning brought light enough to see beyond the beech tree he’d leaned against and a climbing heat that already had him sweating through his coat. The uniform green of the Royal Yorkers made for decent woodland concealment, but the wool was stifling.
He washed down stale bread with a swig from his canteen, as did the rest of Watts’s marksmen staggered out to either side of him along the ridgeline. On his left was young Robbie MacKay, with whom he’d been paired to fire since Sam’s desertion. The lad was visibly trembling.
A corporal came by to inspect their readiness and collect knapsacks to convey to a site for safekeeping through the coming fight. William checked his flint, priming, cartridges, saw Robbie did likewise. They were perched some forty yards up a slope thickly wooded and choked with brush. Below and to the east ran a wide ravine with a shallow stream at its center. William couldn’t see the road that climbed out of the ravine, ascending a ridge to the east, but knew what lay beyond that rise of land studded with hemlocks. Word had spread of the ambush conceived by Joseph Brant and the Seneca war chiefs, Cornplanter and Old Smoke. Yet another ravine lay beyond that ridge, a boggy creek at its bottom. The road from the east crossed the swampy ground on a causeway of corduroy logs, then climbed the dividing ridge, a passage no army traveling with cumbersome baggage wagons could negotiate with speed.
Before dawn, Cornplanter and Old Smoke had arrayed their Seneca warriors across both slopes of the western ravine, while Brant took his Mohawks east of the dividing ridge. Once Herkimer’s regiments were over that ridge and down the other side, it was there in the western ravine, some six miles from the fort, the trap would be sprung. There the Royal Yorkers must halt the brigade’s march, while Brant and his Mohawks cut off their retreat and the Senecas and rangers swarmed down upon them from both sides.
Most of the marksmen lay in wait on higher ground, while the Indians concealed themselves within the lower trees, ready to rush the rebels after the first volley of fire. William knew they were there but couldn’t see them. He’d memorized the few square yards he could see. The mottled trunk of the beech. Trampled moss and ferns around its base. The debris of beechnut shells where some small animal had made a repast. Beyond that, he was as blind as the rebels coming up the road would be should they scan the slopes to either side.
He waited, sweated, anticipating the first sign of the rebel vanguard coming into sight, heat dulling his thinking despite the quickened current of his blood. Impressions of his surroundings penetrated in fragments…the rising tension of his fellow Yorkers, reddened faces glimpsed through summer foliage; a muffled cough; a curse; the whine of mosquitoes; the drone of flies.
At some point, he realized the morning, though warming, was no longer brightening. He gazed upward through spreading branches. The overcast had thickened, darkened, though he’d heard no thunder. A murmur reached him on the still air, a voice praying: “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name…”
In that singular moment, knowing he might well be drawing his last peaceful breaths on earth, it came to William with clarity and a longing that wrenched his gut; he knew what it was he wanted. A father, one who would never betray him. Maybe that father existed only in Heaven, not on earth, but he wanted to survive this so he could find it out.
Help. Please. A pathetic prayer, but it was the best he had and for all the love what was taking this Herkimer so long? Had the ambuscade been detected? Were they being flanked by the rebel militia even now, about to be the ones taken unawares?
A few yards off, someone raised the very question, sharp with the unbearable stretching of nerves. Someone else told him to shut it. Then like a heralding breeze, word came rippling along their hidden ranks. A vanguard of scouts ranging ahead of the column, pausing to drink at the stream farther back along the ravine, had been taken out with silent arrows, their bodies dragged into the brush. Oneidas.
The air was heavy, still, as if the life had been sucked out of it. William gripped his musket as he strained to catch movement, some sign of Herkimer’s advancing column. Eerie silence cloaked the ravine, save the faint chatter of the stream and the buzz of insects…which became the buzz of voices, swelling louder, and the tramp of feet, the clank of metal, the creak of leather.
William waited for Watts’s signal.
At the popping of muskets, he nearly jumped straight into the air. Startlement erupted to his left and right, followed by bewildered questions. The rebel column wasn’t yet in sight. Had the trap been sprung too soon?
Before the shots finished echoing, trilling screams filled the air. The Indians were rushing into battle. Shouts and the crack of firearms clashed. Then Captain Watts was shouting, “Forward and hold the road!” and William was out from behind the beech tree, skidding through the brush, hurtling down the slope, beside him the frightened blue of Robbie’s eyes.
They burst from cover, running toward the smoke of battle where one resonant, commanding voice could be heard above the din.
Halfway down the ridge between the ravines, Two Hawks heard the bellowing voice of Nicholas Herkimer, saw the general on his white horse passing back along the lines of the first and second regiments pinned at the bottom of the western ravine, clustered in knots. The bodies of those struck down in the first volley of gunfire littered the road. The general’s horse leapt them, dodging warriors who came rushing from the trees with tomahawks and clubs. The Americans were caught in a panic, many rushing to and fro, running into one another, but some had kept their heads and were returning fire in ragged spurts, shooting into the onrushing warriors.
Horsemen of the regiment behind Two Hawks came swift along the steep road, hooves drumming beneath his moccasins. Oneida warriors who had hung back near the center of the column loosed their war cries and rushed forward on the descending road, dropping down into the battle below.
Two Hawks went with them, rifle gripped, tomahawk thrust through his sash. Fear clotted his throat, for himself and for Ahnyero, who’d given no warning of this ambush as he’d promised to do.
Pushing that fear down, he leapt to the side, took aim with his rifle, and fired at a ranger rushing out of the woods to his left to attack two militiamen fumbling to reload their guns. He was up and running as the ranger dropped, reloading as he went, keeping near Honyery and Two-Kettles-Together. For a time he fought beside them. Always moving. Never making himself a clear target. The fighting ways of Senecas and Mohawks
were their own ways—hit fast and run. Deflecting their blades was a matter of timing and anticipation. That these were brothers attacking them was a blade that could not be deflected. That blade pierced deep.
They were in among the second militia regiment now, a welter of bodies lurching and grappling and bleeding, half-obscured by choking smoke. Shouts of “Close up! Form up!” shrilled between the firing of muskets and the screams of men. Two Hawks couldn’t tell if this ambush was becoming a slaughter or reforming into a proper battle. He’d heard his father say that to judge a battle when you are in the midst of it is hard to do. Mostly a battle is what happens an arm’s length away.
Not far past the length of Two Hawks’s arm, there was Herkimer again, his horse struck, the beast falling to the road, white legs thrashing, pinning its rider. Men of the general’s command rushed forward to pull him free. A volley erupted from a company on the road. The smoke of it came between Two Hawks and the general being helped into the wood, wounded. Then the militia, grappling with powder horns and ramrods, were rushed at again by painted warriors hacking with clubs and blades.
Two Hawks got busy fending off attack, mostly from rangers crashing through the wood. He struck at their grim faces, parried thrusts of blade and bayonet, looking for soldiers in Johnson’s green coats but not seeing them. Had William’s regiment taken no part in this? Were they back at the fort?
He staggered under the passing blow of a Seneca’s club, which he caught and thrust aside with his rifle before it did more than glancing damage to the head it had meant to crush. That smarting head was thinking furiously: should he fight through the ravine to the other side, get to the fort, find his brother while all these Indians and rangers were away?
A Mississauga rushed at him. Two Hawks ducked and lunged aside. The warrior swept past, but in lunging, Two Hawks’s foot came down in a boggy patch. He stumbled, pushed up, and ran in a crouch for the trees north of the ravine. He took a moment in cover to catch his breath, tugging free his tomahawk. Amazingly he was still within sight of many of the Oneidas he’d come out with from Oriska. He saw Honyery kill a man attacking him, then take a wound in the wrist. Two-Kettles-Together snatched away his rifle and reloaded it for her husband while he wielded his tomahawk in his unwounded hand. Louis Cook, in cover not far from Two Hawks, leapt into the open and fired a killing shot at an enemy marksman lying in the fork of a downed tree.
At the high, piercing scream of a woman, Two Hawks turned back, thinking it would be Two-Kettles-Together, but he didn’t spot her now. Were there more women in this fight?
One at least. Hair in a long braid whipping behind, she came vaulting over the end of a fallen tree where smoke hung thick, drifting through the dense wood. Only for an instant did he see her, then she vanished into the drifting haze. But her face in that moment of screaming flight was frozen in his mind.
It was Strikes-The-Water.
34
With their first forward push into battle, the Royal Yorkers had kept in formation where the terrain allowed, clambering over down wood and rocks to get into combat. Halting at Watts’s command, they’d taken cover and fired in pairs into the gray wall of militiamen pressed shoulder to shoulder in the road ahead. With no notion whether he’d hit anyone, William snatched a fresh cartridge and reloaded, only to find it impossible to fire again without hitting their own Indians darting in to attack the rebels, their struggles obscured by dust and smoke—friend and foe indistinguishable in the surging mass and the din of screams, commands, and gunfire.
Clusters of militia began breaking from the melee. Men retreated across the creek, scrambling for the trees. William felt a hot surge of hope that this might be quickly over. Then Watts ordered bayonets out. They were going to charge the fleeing rebels.
Instinct screamed to escape this hell, not plunge into its heart. Steeling himself, William took cover behind another tree, a pine oozing tangy resin into the heated morn. He fumbled the triangular blade from its scabbard. Around him bayonets locked into place with a clatter of metal sockets. Robbie MacKay’s hands shook so badly he dropped his. William snatched it up and affixed it for him. They formed ranks in the road, and, led by Captain Watts and his lieutenants, the company advanced.
The rebels at the column’s head, those still ambulatory, had reached the trees. Many were still visible, dodging fallen timber, blundering through thickets, scrabbling, a few crawling, dragging wounded limbs. The Yorkers entered the wood, loosed a volley after the rebels, and, on the tide of a raging shout, charged through the acrid billow of their firing.
The land rose under William’s feet. Dense heat and dimness closed around him. Smoke clogged his throat. He blinked streaming eyes clear in time to leap a man’s body before he sprawled across the tilted slope, joints jarring as he landed. He slid backward in leaf mold and ducked to steady himself with a hand to the ground.
A hatchet hurled from an unseen hand sliced the air where his neck had been, taking the hat off his head. A musket ball plowed into a nearby stump in an explosion of woody matter that peppered his face like hornet stings. To his right another ball struck a Yorker he didn’t recognize in the confusion; the man’s face contorted in a scream. William was set upon next by the shooter, bearing his discharged gun as a club. The man had a gash through one powder-blackened eyebrow, dripping blood down his cheek; his eyes were blue and ginger lashed, his front teeth missing.
By instinct more than calculation William got his bayonet raised and met the charge with a repelling thrust. He felt the blade puncture cloth and skin, jar on bone, then slide in deep.
With a rush of foul breath, the man slammed the butt of his musket at William, catching him square in the chest, a blow that seemed to stop his beating heart. He lunged back, withdrawing the bayonet as the man slumped to the ground. William finished him, caught in a contradictory grip of grief and relief that shook him like a rat in a terrier’s teeth.
Rebels were falling under blades left and right, Yorkers under the assault of hatchets and knives wielded by those cunning enough to avoid the bayonets. His heart was going again now, savage and desperate, slamming against bruised flesh. Beside him one of Watts’s lieutenants—Singleton—used his musket to club a rebel militiaman. Driven to his knees, the man scrabbled for his dropped gun, swept the weapon around, and fired upward.
Singleton crumpled.
Militia were retreating deeper into the wood, up to the high ground between the ravines, brown- and beige- and gray-clad forms vanishing in brush and smoke. Others took cover to reload and fire back. The charge had faltered.
Amid the clamor, William heard Watts’s voice shouting but couldn’t make out the order. Press on? Retreat?
Singleton had taken the ball through his leg and was lying at William’s feet cursing, bleeding. William grabbed the green coat of another Yorker stumbling past. They got the lieutenant on his feet and half-dragged him down to the road.
In the open William saw the other Yorker was Robbie, and he laughed to see the lad alive, making Singleton curse the more as they maneuvered him past bodies already plundered and scalped. Around them, others of Watts’s company staggered from the trees clutching wounds, some supporting bleeding comrades, streaming sweat or tears down blood-grimed faces.
For the first time William wondered whether he’d been wounded beyond the bruising thrust he’d taken in the chest. He felt on the verge of toppling. But that was due to heat and fatigue and Singleton’s dragging weight. They deposited him at last near the head of the ravine, in a clearing serving as depot for the soldiers’ belongings and the wounded brought off the field—a place for the officers to regroup. A dozen prisoners were bound to trees, eyeing the Indians present with dread.
Once William saw Singleton into the regimental surgeon’s care, then drained his canteen to slake a raging thirst, he realized Sir John was in the clearing, talking animatedly to the Seneca chiefs, Cornplanter and Old Smoke, while Colonel Butler and half a dozen of his rangers looked on. William couldn’t
make out what Johnson was saying; his own ears were ringing.
Spying Captain Watts standing behind the colonel, he edged nearer.
Sir John, flushed with heat and fury, wasn’t best pleased with the Senecas. “Your young warriors sprung the trap prematurely! Now Herkimer is entrenched, his regiments regrouping, our momentum stalled.”
The gleaming faces of Cornplanter and Old Smoke were a study of rigid pride and resentment. Only their eyes showed the shock they felt at the ferocity of the battle still underway back up the ravine. Or perhaps its cost. William had passed through a sea of bodies littering the creek and road. Indian losses were nearly as heavy as those of loyalist and rebel.
“Herkimer’s boys took the worst of it,” Butler interjected. “No chance in a thousand they can rally to advance now.”
“They are not defeated,” Sir John countered. “They hold the one defensive position in this terrain Brant chose. Now you wish to inform me,” he said, turning again to the Senecas, “that you’ve had enough and will not command your warriors to assault them again?”
Old Smoke spoke for them. “Too many have died, when it was promised we would not even have to fight. We wish revenge, but not at the cost of more brave men. We will have our revenge on these prisoners.” The war chief swept an arm, banded with tattoos, at the captured militiamen slumped against the trees. “If the warriors wish to fight on, they may do so. That is for each to decide.”
Sir John’s jaw bulged with its clenching, but he kept his composure as he ground out, “Where is Brant?”
“He and his warriors plundered the baggage,” Cornplanter said. “Some have gone after soldiers who fled east. They are running them down like wolves after deer.”
“I could better use them here.” Sir John looked around, finding Watts behind him. “How stands your company? What are your losses?”
