Long Winter Gone sotp-1

by Terry C. Johnston

  Across the river a dog began to bark, its call soon taken up by another.

  Murky light spread behind the hills like alkaline water strained through a dirty pair of trooper’s stockings.

  A few more minutes. A few more anxious heartbeats, and he would lead them splashing across the Washita, victory assured before that new sun ever rose above these ancient hills. Wrapped securely in winter’s cloak of deep hibernation, the Washita valley slept on.

  Little Rock stirred and listened again. Now he was certain. The dog he heard wasn’t snarling at another in camp.

  He sat up, straining at the thick blanket of silence laid over the sleeping camp. In his dark lodge he quickly pulled on his clothing and wrenched up his old muzzle loader, checking the priming in the pan.

  For a heartbeat the old Indian gazed down at his young daughter, peacefully cocooned in childlike slumber. Wisps of last night’s fire hung like skinny ghosts refusing to depart, suspended beneath the dark smoke hole. Up in the narrow opening he could make out a growing light in the sky, knowing dawn would come to the valley in little more time than it took a man to eat his morning meal.

  Slipping quietly through the doorway, he stood. Listening to all the air told him. Again the two dogs barked from the far side of camp where the sun rose each morning. Something told him they didn’t bark at each other. Perhaps at something across the river—some predator roaming through the horse herd.

  He moved east, through the cadaverous lodges and around those hard, frozen droppings left behind by more than ten times ten ponies three young Kiowas had driven through the Cheyenne camp late yesterday afternoon.

  It did not matter. He had not truly been asleep anyway. Little Rock never was able to fall back to sleep each night after his daughter awakened him with her nightmare screaming.

  In minutes he found himself down at the sharp slope of the bank. The river lapped quietly beneath a thin scum of ice within the webby red willow nodding in the breeze above the slow-moving water.

  Again the dogs barked … moving to his left now. He crept back along the bank toward camp. Perhaps the dogs tormented a hungry wolf, wandering about with an empty winter-belly, hoping to drag down a poor, weary, winter-old mare.

  With his breath freezing his cheeks, he stepped from the cover of some overhanging oaks. The dogs lurched back and forth in the shallow icy water, barking at the anonymous north bank.

  Little Rock’s eyes crawled across that short span of the cold river collared in fog. His old eyes strained to penetrate the swirling gray mist. Still the dogs yipped and howled, barked and splashed, snarling at the far side of the stream. The fog slowly danced and cavorted … lifting momentarily.

  He could not be sure.

  Little Rock crept down the bank. Cracking through the ice at water’s edge, he found his footing shaky on the slippery rocks. Three more greasy steps brought him out to the river’s main flow. The stinging mist lifted fully for the first time. Only then did the dark trees on the steep northern bank relinquish their frightening secret.

  Pony soldiers!

  “Aieeee!” That frantic sound clutched his throat as surely as the icy current clawed at his spindly legs. Tugging, making it hard for him to turn and sprint out of the river. Struggling against the Washita’s icy flow, he raised his rifle in the air and slipped an old finger against the trigger.

  Make it to the bank now! If I cannot … must fire a warning shot.

  The fog that momentarily swirled off the river to expose the cavalry to Little Rock had at the same time revealed the old Indian to the troopers.

  Major Joel Elliott’s mind seared with the dilemma dropped in his lap. He wasn’t sure if he should stop the old man. But the Indian had a rifle held up in his hand. No mistaking that. And no mistaking that the old man had seen Elliott’s men waiting like a long ribbon of black ghosts picketed among the icy trees.

  With a damning frustration Elliott understood he would be alerting both the camp and the rest of the regiment to his predicament if he fired at the old man. Yet that was exactly what it appeared the old man himself was about to do.

  Only one way to get the jump on that goddamned village.….

  “Sergeant Major Kennedy!” he barked.

  “Yessir!”

  “Kill that Indian!”

  Without dropping his reins, the veteran trooper answered by throwing his carbine to his right shoulder, pressing his cheek along the frozen stock. The deep rumble of the Spencer tore through the low-hanging mist. Kennedy rarely missed.

  The bullet caught Little Rock squarely between the shoulder blades. With both arms flung wide, his old muzzle loader went tumbling across the frozen mud at the river’s edge. A gaping hole blown in his chest where his heart once beat, he stumbled two more slippery steps. Then took one last lunge as his wet, gut-slimy moccasins fought to hold the rocky bottom. It no longer mattered. He could walk no more.

  As the old man crumbled into the skiffs of snow at the water’s edge, the village disappeared from view behind the gentle slope leading to the water. Little Rock pitched face down into the frozen crust lapping at the edge of the icy Washita.

  An old man robbed of time to sing his death song.

  CHAPTER 7

  SITTING a quarter-mile away, Custer recognized the roar of an army carbine. No throaty boom of an Indian muzzle loader. What he heard had been the report of a Spencer.

  Custer knew his troops had been discovered. Better to plunge ahead now that the whole camp had been alerted. His troop commanders would be anxious and confused. It set his gall to boiling having his hand forced.

  Whirling on his bugler and the regimental band behind him, he waved his arm. “Sound the advance!”

  As Custer had planned, young John Murphy, the bugler, began first, blowing the charge that would send the regiment dashing into the village. As those initial stirring notes of the charge faded over the river, the band struck up the first strains of the rollicking, stirring drinking tune “GarryOwen.”

  Custer burst from the trees. On Dandy’s heels galloped his four companies. Left behind, the regimental trumpeters broke off raggedly in discordant notes as moisture from their warm breath froze in the brass instruments. The fighting men plunged ahead.

  The battle of Washita was on.

  Downstream from the main command, past the high slope where Cooke’s sharpshooters stood, Elliott’s cavalry had to struggle down the same steep embankment that Custer’s companies plunged over. A slope high and steep enough to preclude an immediate charge. Instead, Elliott’s grumbling troopers had to lead their horses down the vertical bank by leaping the animals off the lip of the slope into the icy unknown of the river below. Once the first soldiers made the water and were able to spur their staggering horses toward the village, wave after wave of troopers dived into the Washita. That very delay in the charge allowed the Cheyenne a precious few seconds of breath to sort out the nightmare of the attack: time only to draw a blanket about their naked shoulders, a heartbeat allowing some of the women and children to run while the men covered their escape.

  Myers’s troops were practically in the village before they fell under the eyes of an old woman out gathering some deadfall for her breakfast fire. Busy scouring through the snow and ice that coated everything, she wheeled to hear the horses an instant before the black forms loomed from the blood-thick mist. With hundreds of hooves they thundered on over her. One young trooper aimed his carbine at the solitary, blanket-wrapped figure. A lead bullet tore through the center of the old woman’s chest.

  Calls Twice at the Moon was dead as she hit the snow, her frail body sliding backward before she was trampled beneath iron-shod hooves. The back of her blanket a patch of bright crimson across the dirty snow beside her scattered bundle of tiny sticks.

  With the soldier’s charge, the warriors, their women and children, and with the old ones, of many winters, all came clawing out of their sleep-warm robes and blankets like so many grass beetles scattering in panic from beneath an overtu
rned buffalo chip. Scurrying in all directions. No direction at all. Warriors shouted, directing the old and weaker ones as each fighting man searched for some route of escape.

  There was nowhere to run.

  In those first few seconds pure bedlam whirled around the charging, slashing soldiers. Thompson, Elliott, and Myers reached the shrieking camp within seconds. Custer’s four companies galloped up from the Washita as the lieutenant colonel himself pressed on into the heart of the hostile village with Captain Louis M. Hamilton at his side.

  What few Cheyenne camped in the center of the village were more fortunate then those who had pitched their lodges near the horns of the camp circle. They alone had a few precious seconds to decide what to do, where to go. That is, until Elliott pulled in on the east side of camp, plugging the last escape route south of the river. Custer’s crude noose tightened around the village, strangling those who had escaped slaughter in the initial charge.

  Everywhere the Cheyenne turned, rifles spit yellow fire, and long, slashing knives sang a wheezing death song through the frozen air. No chance for the warriors to stem the blue tide and turn the avalanche already burying their sleepy village.

  Women and children and old ones died in the mud alongside their fighting men.

  Like a deafening thunder, the roar of thousands of rounds from the Springfield swallowed the keening cries of the dead and dying. Curses of frightened soldiers mingled with the war whoops and valiant death chants sung by young warriors standing their ground, ready to die.

  “There!” Custer pointed, showing Captain Louis Hamilton three warriors disappearing behind a lodge.

  “Got ’em!” Hamilton replied, his throat raw from barking orders, cheering his men across the river.

  Custer knew Hamilton as a fearless, proven leader. In the young captain’s veins coursed the blood of colonial patriots. Grandson of no less than Alexander Hamilton himself.

  “Go that way! I’ll flank them over there!” Custer drove his spurs into Dandy’s ribs with brutal urgency.

  Custer swept around the side of the lodge, searching for three warriors. He saw only two. Hamilton had disappeared.

  As the young captain galloped after the warriors, he twisted to the left to aim his pistol across his body. His frightened mount strained against the bit. Too late Hamilton realized he was vulnerable, presenting a broad and inviting target to the solitary warrior who wheeled on him, raising a rifle.

  Funny, he thought in that blink of an eye as he watched the ragged puff of blue smoke blossom from the Indian’s weapon, looks just like one of those old rifles the peace commission gave the Cheyenne for putting their marks to the treaty at Medicine Lodge Creek. Damned old muzzle loaders never were any good—

  Hamilton never heard the weapon’s blast. His chest burned with a sudden fire. His body snapped rigid, legs clamping around the gaunt ribs of his wild-eyed mount. As Hamilton’s convulsive corpse rode the terrified horse another thirty yards through the village, the warrior Cranky Man ducked behind a lodge to reload his trusted weapon.

  Hamilton tumbled from his horse. Cranky Man’s bullet had penetrated his twenty-four-year-old heart. He never got a good look at the wrinkled old man who had killed him.

  After shooting the other two warriors, Custer spurred on toward the knoll just south of the village. To his right he watched a young trooper savagely yank his horse’s head to the side as he slashed at a stocky warrior. The mount reared in protest as the soldier clung to the bucking animal. A Cheyenne trained his old rifle on the young pony soldier.

  Custer fired on instinct. Beneath a puff of blue smoke he watched the warrior crumple to the ground like a sack of wet oats, a bullet through his head. With his mount once more under control, the young soldier darted off to continue his fight, not realizing his life had just been saved by his regimental commander.

  Eagerly Custer wheeled Dandy hard to the left, charging to the knoll, knocking down another warrior beneath the huge animal’s pounding hooves. Aiming his pistol at the same time, Custer fired point-blank at the trampled Cheyenne.

  “That one won’t fight again,” he said aloud to himself.

  Reining up atop the low rise, he brought Dandy sharply around as the first smudge of gray light splashed across the battle site. From the knoll he would watch the rest of the skirmish raging below. Glancing at his pocket watch, Custer saw it had taken barely four minutes for him to cross the Washita, charge through the village, and reach the knoll.

  * * *

  Down with Elliott’s command rode Captain Frederick W. Benteen at the head of Company H. Finding himself near the center of the village, he worried how many shots he had left in his pistol. He was about to find out.

  A young, owl-eyed warrior jumped from behind a lodge, his bowstring taut. Benteen fired. The warrior dropped as another dashed in front of the same lodge, tearing off at a full sprint. The captain pulled the trigger. No bark, no familiar buck in his hand.

  Benteen jammed his empty weapon in his holster and secured the mule-ear while the other hand yanked his carbine from its boot beneath his right leg. He wheeled to find another target.

  Benteen caught sight of a stocky youth bursting from a lodge near the center of camp, grabbing for the single rawhide rein of a lone war pony tethered there. Judging the boy to be no more than fifteen years of age, Benteen decided against killing him. Following at a hand gallop, he signaled the boy to give himself up.

  But instead of surrendering, young Blue Horse wheeled his pony smartly and fired at the pursuing soldier. As the nephew of Chief Black Kettle, he realized a warrior must either escape or die trying. Though short of youthful in appearance, this warrior had lived twenty-one summers, fighting Pawnee, Osage and Kaw many times. His choice was simple. He would kill this pesky soldier.

  Like the whine of a persistent mosquito, Benteen felt a bullet slice the air by his face. He heard the familiar crack of a carbine as the youth raced off again, only to wheel a few yard away and fire a second shot. Then a third.

  That one hit something with a loud, wet smack. Before he could react, Benteen’s mount pitched headlong, spilling him across the snow.

  “That’s about enough, you damned rascal!” he growled, scrambling to his feet.

  Up ahead the young warrior bellowed his victory song. He had unhorsed a pony soldier!

  By now Benteen couldn’t care less how young his enemy was. He shouldered his Springfield and fired as Blue Horse again raised both his rifle and defiant song to the dawn sky.

  An army-issue bullet caught him square in his bare chest, tumbling him heels over head off the rear of his war pony into the dirty snow.

  Unhorsed, Benteen crouched, slashing his ammunition pouch from the dead mount, then darted back into the village.

  Second Lieutenant Algernon E. Smith, who had crossed the river with Custer’s four companies, galloped knee to knee with John Murphy, the bugler who had signaled the attack. Just ahead of them darted a Cheyenne cloaked in a dirty red blanket, scurrying toward a cluster of keening women. Smith slid to a halt beside Murphy as the young bugler threw his carbine to his shoulder.

  “Murphy! Don’t fire!”

  Flashing a quick Irish anger, Murphy glared at Smith.

  “Can’t you see it’s a woman, son?” Smith hollered, waving his left arm, wounded so badly in the Civil War that he could barely raise it above his shoulder.

  “Yessir! Now I do!”

  “By damn—find yourself a buck to kill!” Smith blared, spinning his horse around and dashing into the fray once more.

  Murphy whirled suddenly at the hackle-raising howl coming from one of the Cheyenne women who had by now been herded by the troops. His eyes must be deceiving him—for now that old squaw he had seen running had dropped her red blanket. The Cheyenne was not a woman.

  The old warrior drew back on the bowstring of a weapon he no longer concealed beneath the dirty blanket. He raised his thin, reedy war cry as Murphy ducked off the far side of his mount—a move that saved his li
fe.

  Instead of taking the arrow in his chest where it had been aimed, Murphy sensed a blinding flash. The iron point grazed the young soldier’s brow, entering above one eye, tearing the flesh and scraping the bone before it ended its flight just above the ear. Yet with all its force, the point had not penetrated Murphy’s skull.

  Stunned, he flopped from his horse like a hooked fish brought to the bank, certain he was a dead man. An arrow fluttering above his eye, Murphy rolled across the ground, feeling his empty stomach lurch. In his hand he recognized the comforting feel of the carbine. The old warrior shot a second arrow. Murphy squeezed the trigger, rolling out of the way.

  Murphy’s bullet knocked the Indian backward into the knot of shrieking, screaming captives. The warrior was dead as he sank to the ground.

  The bugler caught his breath, swallowing hard, choking down the pain of the arrow still hanging in his scalp. After he had broken the shaft and pulled the arrow out by himself, Murphy daubed at the oozing wounds with a dirty bandanna he yanked from his own greasy neck. The next task was to rip the graying scalp from the old warrior’s head. He stuffed the dripping trophy in the folds of his blue tunic, smearing his wool shirt with the Indian’s warm, sticky blood.

  Damn, but his feet were cold.

  For seasons without count, Black Kettle had counseled peace with the white man. So many times he had been promised his people could live where they wanted and hunt where they must. Despite the repeated broken government promises to all tribes roaming the southern plains, the chief remained sure that a way would be found allowing red man and white to live side by side.

  With those first early-morning blasts of rifle fire, shouts of soldiers joining the valiant death songs of angry warriors and screams of women and children, Black Kettle yanked his wife from the warm robes of their bedding. Stumbling from their lodge, the couple plunged into the terror.

  Nearby stood some war ponies Cheyenne warriors always staked in camp. Black Kettle frantically tried to lift his woman onto a pony but found he didn’t have the strength left in his cold, tired bones. He crawled atop the nervous, mule-eyed animal, grasping its mane in one hand. The other he extended for his wife to grab, and held stiff his naked foot for her to use as a step. Together they struggled to get her seated in front of him on the prancing, skittish pony, frightened by the shrill noise and gunfire, made madder yet by the smell of gunpowder and fresh blood.