Dying Thunder

by Terry C. Johnston

  Perhaps, Quanah feared with some of the serpent’s wisdom he had acquired, it had more to do with their failure to defeat the white hide men at the settlement of earth lodges.

  Instead of the great herds slowly migrating before the shifting winds of the ever-changing seasons, now there were only the great piles of bones and skulls and stinking carcasses reaching ever onward toward the horizon as far as any man could see. Those bleaching bones, along with the coming of the wolves and buzzards and all manner of carrion eaters.

  Yes, he had seen the killing grounds with his own eyes. And would never forget. How could a man, he asked himself, forget those places where the tai-bo hide men made their stand, the ground littered with brass casings like so many flecks of gold among the stalks of grass, lying there used up and abandoned against the gray dust of the prairie, the gold slowly turning green with the seasons?

  How would he ever be able to forget? Was he to forget?

  But here his people and the other tribes could try to forget the tragedy visited upon them by the buffalo hunters—here in this beautiful place of color carved by the spirits, dotted with cool springs, draped with gurgling waterfalls. It was spoken of by the old ones around the fires that the pale-skinned warriors who wore the strange metal heads had marched out of the south and visited this very place in their wanderings. Before they had retreated once more to the south, never to return to the land of the Comanche.

  At times a thought nagged him, the way a gnat would at times buzz persistent at Quanah’s eyelid. Perhaps, he brooded, he ought to take his people south where the pale-skinned metal-head soldiers had disappeared centuries before. Many times had he led the young warriors to that land of the dark-skinned Mexican Indians to raid for horses and cattle and other plunder. Perhaps there the yellowlegs would not dare to follow.

  And every time he worried on this, another voice from within told Quanah he had time enough to decide on moving his people south, far away from the reach of Three-Finger Kinzie and his soldiers. He had enough time to decide on moving south beyond the coming cold reach of winter’s icy winds.

  Quanah left his hand on her small, firm breast as he watched the fireflies spiral to the darkened smokehole above him. Once again he marveled that her skin was as soft as the belly of a newborn puppy. Perhaps later he would suckle milk from the breast. Perhaps.

  Here to the peace of this quiet canyon valley his people had gathered to begin preparations for the coming winter. Every lodge was filled with meat dried to last until those first hunts of the spring that would always follow the time of great cold. Food and shelter and wood here to last them through the time of great cold. It was enough, if only the soldiers would leave be the women and children of these wandering bands—women who daily hung the meat out to dry, pegged out the hides to be fleshed, children who ran and laughed and played along the dancing waters of the sparkling creek gurgling through the floor of the canyon where Quanah’s people once more retreated to hide from the yellowlegs.

  Closing his eyes to sleep, he drank in the fragrant air touched by the perfume of the mesquite wood burning in his fire.

  Here once more his people would be safe.

  37

  September 28, 1874

  He couldn’t remember the last time he slept. But right now, outside of feeling Samantha’s warm, willing flesh beneath his, sleep would be the most delicious thing Seamus could imagine.

  Here he was, inching his way down this narrow foot trail, leading his horse, clinging almost by hope and a prayer alone to the bloodred vertical cliff of Palo Duro Canyon with the rest of Lieutenant Thompson’s scouts. The first men Mackenzie had ordered over the side, down to the valley floor where the colonel would engage the enemy.

  It was just past four o’clock in the morning, a few stars still out in that crooked strip of sky above him.

  “Mr. Thompson,” an anxious, pacing Mackenzie had told them minutes before as the rose light of dawn was shot through with golden lances along the eastern edge of the whole world, “take your men into the canyon and open the fight.”

  Almost an hour ago the scouts had brought the colonel and his troops to the edge of the Palo Duro—yet there was no apparent way down. But by marching northwest for more than a mile along the canyon rim, the Tonkawas finally located this narrow goat trail.

  Donegan had charged headlong into a solid phalanx of Confederate infantry; galloped hale and hearty into the teeth of row upon row of Confederate artillery, each black throat spewing grapeshot and canister and bone-shredding death; and he had held men together under the best the Sioux and Cheyenne could throw at them. But this, this was something different, teetering on the brink of a sheer, precipitous drop.

  Most of all Seamus was afraid of letting any of the others know just how scared he was at this moment. An enemy he could see, dodge, avoid, fire back at … that was something he could deal with. But his descent into the shadowy, murky, mist-shrouded bowels of this canyon was moment by moment becoming the most harrowing experience of his life. And for one of the few times in his life, he had to suffer with that fear rather than fighting it off through nerve-numbing action—tasting his fear there on the back of his tongue, like sucking on an old brass cartridge.

  Donegan was near the front, sliding along as slowly as he could between Sharp Grover and Sergeant John Charlton. Behind them came the Tonkawas and Seminoles, most painted enough to satisfy their personal spirits, yet still dressed in blue tunics to accommodate their fears of being taken for the enemy in the heat of the coming fray. Horses snorted up and down the canyon wall as the scouts slowly worked their way down the narrow switchback trail that clung like a dark ribbon in the shadows of dawn to the crimson rock. Overhead Seamus made out the muffled voices of officers and enlisted as Mackenzie’s troops followed the scouts into the darkness of this great laceration gouged out of the Staked Plain.

  They had a thousand feet to go, down into darkness all the way. And this last thousand feet of Mackenzie’s campaign would take a cold, cast-iron, double-riveted kind of nerve to get them all down to the fighting ground.

  Troop A, under the capable Captain Eugene B. Beaumont, had been selected to lead the attack with Thompson’s scouts, who would be allowed to break off and capture the enemy’s pony herd. Mackenzie knew as well as any commander on the plains what it would mean to his enemy to lose those ponies.

  The chill rising from the canyon this dawn was almost ghostly, climbing on the shoulders of the mist and remnants of last night’s fires. Seamus caught the first whiff of cedar smoke carried on the breeze that nudged the hair at his shoulder. The air grew colder as they dropped farther and farther into the shadows of the canyon. From time to time as he inched his way down, he dared look below to the valley floor—and for but a glance he allowed himself, Seamus saw the forest of buffalo-hide lodges mingled in among the cedar and mesquite and cottonwood and chinaberry, pale as a white man’s sun-cured skin against the darker green of the luxurious grasses. Smoke laid against those dark-leafed, shadowy trees like a gauzy veil upon an Irish bride’s dark hair.

  “Lor’, feddas,” one of the black-skinned Seminoles exclaimed behind Donegan as the mists parted and the scouts caught a momentary glimpse of the immense herds, “lookit all the sheep an’ goats grezzin’ down there.”

  Just behind him, Seamus heard Charlton reply, “For sure we got a big surprise coming for those red-bellies.”

  For these gut-wrenching moments, the great, grazing herds were the farthest thing from Donegan’s mind. He slid along the red wall a step at a time, obsessed with his fear that the warriors below were only waiting for them, knowing the army was coming. Any moment now, he was certain as his heart pounded in his ears, the Kiowa and Comanche and all the rest would begin to pick off the enemy—Thompson’s scouts and Mackenzie’s troops—trapped like fish in a barrel, pinned helplessly like clay targets against the crimson canyon wall, listening to the rasp of saddle leather and the jingle of bit-chains, and the pounding of his own heart.

/>   This descent was truly as the anxious colonel had characterized it when he had turned from Thompson’s scouts to begin explaining the trail to his officers. Words that faded behind Seamus as he had started down the trail, straight down into Ranald Slidell Mackenzie’s “jaws of death.”

  Captain Napoleon McLaughlin was ordered to hold his battalion in reserve at the top of the trail while Mackenzie joined Captain Beaumont’s men at the point of attack. These and other things Seamus tried desperately to work over in his mind as he slid along the trail, keeping his back brushing along the sandy wall step by step. Seamus didn’t know how long they had been inching their way down. It seemed like at least twenty minutes, perhaps longer. And they were only halfway to the valley floor. His horse snorted, yanking its head back suddenly at it lost a foreleg. Loose rocks tumbled.

  “Easy, son. Easy,” Grover whispered back to him.

  Donegan drew down on the reins gently, rubbing the animal’s muzzle, then put his reluctant feet in motion once more. The animal’s fear made him feel better about his own. But now he became sure the warriors below could hear his heart pounding in his chest like a huge, rawhide-headed war drum. Little else could he make out but the surging of his own heart as foot by foot, yard by yard, Thompson led his scouts, Mackenzie and eight companies of the Fourth Cavalry into the sleepy maw of the Palo Duro.

  “Great jumping thunder!” a voice cried up ahead. Thompson’s.

  As suddenly, Seamus was craning his neck, finding the dim form of a warrior not far below them, perched among the rocks near the bottom, waving his red blanket. Dropping it in a flutter of shadowy movement, the warrior swept up his rifle.

  “Get that sonofabitch!” Grover hollered at Thompson, yanking his pistol from his belt.

  Donegan gulped, hurling his body against the canyon wall while the two guns roared as if one. He watched the warrior hurtled backward against the pale rocks and crumple.

  As quickly, there came other sounds down to his right, among the trees and mesquite brush and willow clustered along a narrow ribbon of creek glowing silver in the coming light of day. Another warrior suddenly appeared out of the shadows and timber. He cried out his war song, his head thrown back and voice shrill in echo, beating his chest with a hand before he turned and disappeared.

  “Get moving, men!” Thompson shouted at the top of his lungs. “Get down as fast as you can and form up!”

  Then the lieutenant and Grover were gone in the murky gray light. Donegan peered up the canyon wall, the far extent grown bright red now as the rising sun lanced its beams halfway down to the valley floor. Along that narrow thread of trail were strung the buglike shapes of man and horse, sliding, slipping, hurrying as best they could now that they had been discovered. Orders barked up and down the canyon, echoing over the report of those two simultaneous shots disappearing up the canyon, swallowed by the sheer immensity of this valley.

  Another gun roared off to his right. The warrior who had cried out his war song had returned, thrown his rifle to his shoulder and fired his shot. Seamus stumbled onto the short, steep slope that would take him another twenty feet to the valley floor as the Indian fired his second shot.

  There was no way Thompson could have enough men down to enjoin the fight before the warriors would engage them. For what few were there with Donegan now, it was like dropping a raw buffalo hump tenderloin into a pack of hungry wolves.

  “Sonofabitch!” Grover was yelling somewhere to his right.

  Then in a blur of motion at his left, Donegan saw the older man, his pistol drawn, firing two times, then a third as the warrior catapulted backwards, his bare chest smeared rosy in the coming light of day.

  * * *

  Quanah was just then emerging from his lodge into the chill shadows of dawn. The Kwahadi camp was the last of five circles clustered along the twisting creek.

  The first, faint gunshot rumbled from up the canyon, farther north.

  He pulled his breechclout aside, shivering as he wet the ground. A hunter already busy this morning, he thought. Likely far up by the Kiowa camp of Red Warbonnet, near the mouth of Blanca Cita Creek.

  Peering up at the distant lip of the canyon wall some thousand feet above him, Quanah marveled once more at the colors of this special, sacred place. A breeze noisily raised itself through the dry leaves of the cottonwood about him as he filled his lungs with the chill air. Even the nearby stream smelled of the red earth of this place. He listened, frowning suddenly.

  Stepping closer to the stream, it was as if the red-colored water were telling him something not quite intelligible in its gurgling passage across the canyon floor.

  He stood there listening to its words: almost a warning, it seemed.

  Quanah jerked at the next shot, his heart seized in his throat at the third that followed on its heels. Spinning barefoot in the damp, dew-laden grass, the war chief felt a sudden flare of white-hot rage for Mamanti, the Kiowa with the owl medicine. The shaman had consulted his sacred stuffed owl days ago when the war bands had come to the canyon. Yes, the owl had told Mamanti—this is a safe place for the villages to stay the winter.

  Other shamans, Cheyenne and Comanche, had concurred.

  But then the soldiers had come marching. Still, Mamanti and the rest had vowed the yellowlegs would never find the canyon. Instead, Three-Finger Kinzie could be driven off by decoys the way a sage hen would feign a broken wing to draw the predator from her nest.

  So his Kwahadi had rested in peace.

  “Get up!” Quanah yelled to his wife and children.

  Their eyes opened wide. Without question they were pulling on clothing and dragging moccasins over their feet.

  “Take only what you can carry,” he told them as Tonarcy handed him his rifle.

  From the dew-cloth liner rope she pulled his medicine bag, then a quiver filled with arrows and his short bow. He knelt and stuffed his huge Walker Colt pistol into his belt, then stopped, lunging for his wife as their three children clambered out the lodge door. Quanah embraced her quickly, then held her face in his hands.

  “Guard them with your life this day, woman,” he told her.

  Then bent his head to kiss Tonarcy, drinking in the taste of her as if it had to last him a lifetime.

  “Go!” he said, pushing her through the door.

  She turned, hesitant, the children calling to her. Then rushed into his arms once more, embracing him, her ear pressed against his pounding heart. His eyes moistening, he knew he would always remember the fragrance of her hair.

  Tonarcy finally tore herself from him and disappeared into the shadows of lodge and tree and canyon wall.

  In the distance he recognized the brassy-throated call of a bugle, knowing it would be the white man’s summons to his warriors. This was the echo of Three-Finger Kinzie’s challenge, fading slowly, drifting down this bloodred canyon.

  This was no less than Kinzie’s personal challenge for Quanah to come do battle.

  Quanah whirled, straightening the quiver over his shoulder. He yanked up the single buffalo-hair rein to the dun-colored war pony he had staked beside his lodge and leaped atop the animal’s short back.

  Throwing his chin back, the Kwahadi war chief raised his death cry to the coming sun, the echo of its call reverberating back again and again around him like a physical thing, around and over his warriors as they flocked to him from every corner of their camp, raising their own cries.

  The women and children were on their way into the deepest recesses of the canyon, fleeing the threat. His warriors were ready now. Unpainted as they were—they were ready.

  They would cover the retreat of their families with their own lives.

  * * *

  From behind every tree and rock, the Kiowas were sniping at the excited Seminole and Tonkawa scouts as Lieutenant Thompson barked his orders, attempting to regain control of a bad situation.

  “Front into line, goddammit!”

  “They don’t know what the hell you’re wanting them to do, Lieutenant!
” Donegan shouted above the clamor.

  The soldier pursed his lips in frustration then nodded. “Charge! Just charge, goddammit!”

  Then Thompson savagely sawed his mount about in a tight circle and kicked the frightened animal into motion. The rest were off like grapeshot from a cannon. Behind Donegan arose the confused jumble of orders and snorting horses and angry men mixed with a generous helping of gunfire and tumbling rocks kicked loose by those still winding their way down that narrow thread of a trail into Mackenzie’s jaws of death.

  As the scouts surged forward into the mist and shadows, the lodges came into clear view, beyond them the first of the horse herds. Already the Kiowa were falling back, firing and yelling to one another, covering the retreat of their families. They stopped and turned, firing from a boulder here, a thick cottonwood there—firing, reloading, and firing again before they hurried on like bits of ghostly flotsam among the mist and shadows and trees.

  To Donegan’s left a Seminole’s horse screamed out, its head wrenching about cruelly as it pitched its rider into the mesquite brush, crumpling instantly, legs thrashing and splayed on the bloody grass crushed beneath it.

  He had watched horses die before, more than he believed he could ever count. Three had gone down under him during those hours and days of manmade hell at Gettysburg alone. And all the others—he squeezed his mind off of it of a sudden, the way a man would squeeze dust from his eyes. Tears streaming, because he could not shake the pain it gave him to watch the great, graceful animals fall screaming in death. Donegan drove his own horse on into the canyon, through the lodges, racing in among the warriors.

  His left thigh stung.

  Suddenly the horse pranced sideways, lost its gait, then burst off at a gallop again as Seamus peered down at his leg. The canvas britches fluttered mid-thigh along the furrow that grazing bullet had slashed in his flesh. It burned with the cool breeze as the horse beneath carried him on, step by leaping step into Mackenzie’s canyon of death.