Lay the Mountains Low (37 page)

Yellow Wolf gazed into the young woman's frightened eyes a moment as she held out her hand. Yellow Wolf touched it for but a moment, feeling her long, slim, cool fingers—

“Yellow Wolf!”

He whirled around, finding
Wemastahtus
on the low bluff just above him. Then he turned for one last look at the young woman, her eyes full of fury and fight, eyes telling him what her lips did not need to say.

“I am coming!” he yelled at
Wemastahtus
, not taking his eyes off her just yet. “We have an enemy to fight today!”

Her face softened for him but a moment before he turned away, scrambling up the slope.

“Toohoolhoolzote
is already rushing to the bank with a few of his men,”
Wemastahtus
announced as they raced their ponies through the camp, heading for the lodge of Yellow Wolf's mother. “I think that old war man wants to be the first to sneak up behind the soldiers!”

Stripped to nothing but his breechclout like the other warriors rushing past them, Yellow Wolf ducked back out of the lodge with one cartridge belt buckled around his waist, slipping a second belt over his left shoulder. Now with his sixteen-shot repeater in hand as he went into battle for the first time in many weeks, Yellow Wolf snatched the long lead rope from his friend, then leaped onto the pony's narrow back. Together they raced to the closest ford just upstream
from camp, finding
Toohoolhoolzote
and a few others had already reached the far side—more than twenty, these first to answer the old warrior's call to action, all of them pitching across the river, racing to throw their bodies between their families and the attacking soldiers.

Behind them on the west bank the chiefs were shouting their orders to the rest—by this date in their war with the soldiers and Shadows numbering close to three hundred men of fighting age. Quickly they split all those remaining warriors in two groups, both of which would remain behind to protect the camp. One started to stream toward the north, the direction from which the cannon fire had come, where that group of Shadows might still be pinned down on their hilltop. The other group raced to the south, the direction where they had believed Cut-Off Arm was still camped with his soldiers. And those boys too young to fight drove more than two thousand ponies up the gentle slope west of the village, reaching the top of the plateau, where the herd would be safe from the army's loud guns.

“Koklinikse!” Toohoolhoolzote
bellowed his scolding command at those who swarmed onto the east bank behind him. “Move faster! Faster!”

Slinging water as they came out of the Clearwater, the first of these most eager of the young men reined their horses into the timber dotting the sharp side of the bluff. Yellow Wolf's strong pony quickly vaulted him into the lead, clawing its way into one of the two jagged ravines
^*
that carried the defenders in an ascent to the top of the ridge some nine hundred to a thousand feet above the river. Both hearts beat fast, lungs gasping hungrily for air, as man and horse lunged to the top—a leap at a time—the hoofbeats and war cries of the others right on their tail.

Slipping from the mouth of the rugged right-hand ravine, Yellow Wolf yanked back on the reins of his heaving
pony. To his left a dark swarm of soldiers covered the ridge top and prairie to the north of him. They were scurrying around, some headed this way and others headed that way, not seeing him or the first warriors to bristle up on his sides.
Suapies
running in all directions, forming up then breaking apart as they moved here and there—a strange preparation for a fight.

As his pony caught its wind, Yellow Wolf watched a stream of soldiers break off and start down another wide ravine leading to the river below. “Can't you see the soldiers!” he screamed at those who had rushed to the top right behind him. “They're going to attack our camp! Come on now—we must get up close and do some shooting at them!”

Without waiting for a word or sign of agreement from the others, Yellow Wolf jabbed his bare heels into the ribs of the animal and shot away, sprinting across that broad flat south of the massing soldiers. A wide canyon suddenly separated the young men from those white enemies. Leaning far back on his horse's spine, Yellow Wolf urged the horse down the steep wall of the ravine, then rocked forward as the pony clawed its way up the far side, until he found himself in rifle range of the
suapies
. Now these first warriors had placed their bodies between the soldiers and the spring. The white men would have no water today!

“Tie your horses here!” growled the deep bullfrog bass of old
Toohoolhoolzote
as his exhausted pony lunged out of the wide cleft in the ridge and hoof-slid into a thick stand of trees.

As one the two dozen followed the war chief into a small copse of tall pines, leaped to the ground, and tied off their horses, out of danger from soldier bullets. At the edge of those trees the old chief's young fighters could see how Cut-Off Arm's soldiers would soon be making for the edge of the bluff … and from there they could descend into the valley and attack their village.

“Come, all you young men!”
Toohoolhoolzote
cheered.
“Eeh-heh!
We have to stop those soldiers from reaching our camp!”

“Amtiz!”
Yellow Wolf yelled. “Let's go! We must throw our bodies between the end of this ridge and those soldier guns!”

“B
LESSED
Mary and Joseph!” he growled as the firing grew hotter and the Indians stopped their advance dead in its tracks.

First Sergeant Michael McCarthy wasn't sure just how many of those redskins they were confronting at the edge of the bluff, but he was sure it had to be at least a hundred!

At least, that's how many warriors Perry's cavalry battalion believed had stopped them cold in the valley of the White Bird last month, a little less than the size of the attacking force that flung itself at Perry's Cottonwood bivouac and somewhere close to the same number of horsemen who had jumped the seventeen civilians racing for Norton's ranch. So it made perfect sense a hundred or more of the Nez Perce fighting men must have rushed up the draws to reach this ridge-top prairie, where they managed to stall Howard's advance in a matter of minutes.

Surely the general and his officers could repulse this handful of troublesome snipers, having some 450 men at their command after Howard had waited to gather all his troops and all those supplies before setting off across the corner of the Camas Prairie after the hostiles!

On the eighth of July Howard's advance had recrossed the Salmon at the mouth of the White Bird. Pushing on with H and I Companies of the First U. S. Cavalry, the general's men passed by those shallow graves, a few of which were marked by hats suspended at the tops of short sticks, most of the skimpy dirt having settled into the depressions, what with the heavy rains. By midnight they rendezvoused with Perry's battalion in Grangeville, learning that the Nez Perce were camped on the South Fork of the Clearwater. On the outskirts of town, Howard established what he christened
Camp Randall, in honor of the civilian who gave his life in this struggle back on the fifth of July.

Just after dawn that Monday morning, Perry pushed on for the Clearwater with his four companies of cavalry, crossing to the east side of the South Fork on the Jackson Bridge, which some Nez Perce raiding party had attempted to torch in recent days. The horse soldiers went into camp on the long slope behind the burned-out buildings of Thelbert Walls's ranch.

Meanwhile, it took part of the eighth and most of the ninth of the month for Miles's infantry and Miller's artillery batteries to ferry themselves across the mighty Salmon—having virtually run out of supplies by the time they established their wretched bivouac at the mouth of the White Bird: without food or tents or dry blankets. Finally, early on the morning of the tenth, Captain Miles of the Twenty-first Infantry led in his battalion of eight footsore companies. Every man jack of them bailed out of the wagons Howard had sent down to the Salmon for them, collapsing into the grass at Camp Randall, where they promptly fell asleep, knowing it wouldn't be long before they would be ordered back on the road to catch up to the cavalry once more.

Over on the South Fork at Walls's ranch, in those first dim shadows at daylight on the tenth, one of the cavalry pickets opened fire on another guard, making for a brief but lively exchange until the camp discovered they were shooting at themselves and things quieted down once again while they waited out the day and those wagons filled with foot soldiers. They finally rumbled across the bridge and into the midst of the burned-out ranch just before 8:00
P.M.
Told to quickly build their fires, choke down their supper, then climb into their blankets, Howard's command learned they would be marching on the enemy at first light.

By 7:30
A.M.
on the eleventh, Howard gave the honor of the lead for the day to Trimble's H Company, this time behind a local guide, James T. Silverwood, and a contingent of Nez Perce scouts under Ad Chapman. Behind the rest of Perry's cavalry battalion came the infantry, then the pack
train, along with a few horses detached from the main body, while the artillery brought up the rear, A few miles out of Walls's place, the advance ran across a small bunch of mares and their foals, horses that Chapman identified as having been stolen from his ranch. To the army's way of thinking, that was a clue they might be closing on the enemy. Trimble put out skirmishers and they resumed their march.

In short order, they were climbing a thousand or more feet to reach the high ground between the South and Middle Forks along a well-used mining road, forced to inch back farther and farther from the edge of the bluff where they had hoped to keep an eye trained along the Clearwater for signs of the enemy village or war parties. Hour after hour that clear, breezy morning, the ravines grew deeper, scarring the landscape of the plateau, each one more choked with brush and boulders than the last.

As the sun rose higher, and hotter, too, talk was Howard had designs on trapping the enemy between their column and McConville's gutsy volunteers who had gone out days ago to locate the village and were known to be under seige somewhere north of the advancing soldiers.

Captain Joel G. Trimble's H Company was about a half-mile in the vanguard, just emerging from a forested area onto more open prairie, where clumps of brush and small stands of trees made for a thick fringe on either side of the rolling grassland. Three of the civilian scouts in the lead came racing past, on their way to Howard with a report that they had just spotted some Nez Perce herders driving stock over the edge of the bluffs toward the Clearwater below.

Within minutes Howard ordered the artillery to the edge of the bluff and his vanguard to about-face. Far in the lead, McCarthy's H Company was marching slowly, deliberately watchful, when they heard that first distant cannonshot off to the south. Trimble halted his skirmishers and sent a courier back to headquarters to learn what had developed. In minutes the order came racing back that they were to turn about and support the pack train. After all, it contained
the many thousands of rounds of ammunition—just what the Nez Perce would covet most.

Dashing up on the double, McCarthy's men found Captain George B. Rodney's D Battery of the Fourth U. S. Artillery—assigned that morning to protect the pack train—taking some harassing fire. Already one of the packers had been killed. As McCarthy's H Company came to their assistance, another packer was struck in the head, dead before he flopped to the ground. There followed a sudden rush of motion on the far side of the frightened packers and their bawling mules when the pack train suddenly split in the middle and a handful of mounted warriors belched through the widening gap, waving blankets at the terrified mules.

Through the heroic efforts of both companies, only one of the mules galloped off behind the raiders. But that mule was carrying two large crates filled with ammunition for the twelve-pounder, a mountain howitzer.

One thing was for certain, McCarthy thought. These sure as hell weren't reservation Injuns!

In a moment more both Rodney and Trimble were shouting orders for their officers to prevent a repeat of that sudden, frightening rush by the red horsemen on their small ponies, warriors who seemed to appear one minute and be gone the next. Dismounting their cavalrymen, Rodney formed his troopers into a column of fours on the prairie side of the bawling, braying, anxious mules, while Trimble likewise formed him men up on the bluff side of the pack train before they started the mules back to the south, carrying that valuable ammunition to the rest of the command.

McCarthy hadn't really noticed the terrain as they marched north, figuring he had been half-dozing there with the rocking of the saddle, the heat and intensity of the sun at its midday strongest. Now as they steered the pack train around the head of a deep ravine, the sergeant saw how this patch of ridge-top prairie was cordoned off north and south by a pair of rugged ravines less than a mile apart. Thick brush not only lined both gulches, but tall trees shaded the
sides of those ravines—which meant the enemy had ample cover on three sides of this field where Howard was just now setting up an extensive perimeter: north and south, as well as to the west, along the edge of the ridge itself.

Escorting the pack train around the head of a deep ravine and into a slight depression at the center of that crude semicircle some seven hundred yards across, which the deploying troops had established on the grassy flat, Trimble and Rodney brought the balky mules to a halt near the head of that ravine, where Howard and his staff were just then establishing their headquarters. It was plain to see that their delay in getting the pack train and their companies around that wide ravine had allowed the Nez Perce those critical minutes they needed to establish themselves in the shady timber on both sides of the draw.