Lay the Mountains Low (39 page)

Back, back, back the soldiers pushed, slowly gaining ground … but only one hand span at a time. Although they now outnumbered the young warriors some twenty-to-one, the
suapies
paid for that ground with some blood and plenty of sweat under the broiling sun. Although
Toohoolhoolzote
and the other fighters rallied one another with cheers of encouragement, the pressure finally became too much and the old chief gave the order to leave the timber and slip down
into the edge of the ravine. The instant the soldiers found the warriors were no longer keeping them pinned down, their fighting chiefs ordered them to make a charge.

On they plunged toward the timber.
Toohoolhoolzote
stopped and whirled around in a fury, kneeling as he aimed his old one-shoot muzzleloader. It hissed and the round lead ball found its mark, driving a soldier backward off his feet at the same moment the squat warrior scrambled to his feet and joined the others in running from that timber where the bullets buzzed like angry bees, smacking the trunks of trees, zinging through branches—

Suddenly Yellow Wolf slammed his bare feet to a halt. He had forgotten his horse! All of them had forgotten their ponies!

Wheeling about, he squatted and peered off to where the horse holders had taken their animals. The four were nowhere to be seen! They had abandoned the ponies as soon as the firing grew too intense even for
Toohoolhoolzote
. And the rest of the fighters were scampering behind the old chief toward another patch of timber west of the
suapies
.

Yellow Wolf felt the anger rising in him like a fever. The holders had abandoned their horses, and the others had abandoned him. That was a good horse and he wanted it back, even though the soldiers approached the edge of that narrow patch of timber. It was a disgrace for a fighting man to lose his horse to the enemy in battle.

Death while recapturing one's horse would be preferable to leaving the fight without the animal!

At first he started to creep through the trees; then he realized he wasn't going to get there in time to rescue the pony if he did not run. The young warrior took off at a sprint, jumping low rocks and dodging around the pines until he reached the animal, yanked its lead rope loose, and hurled himself onto its back—no matter the whine and whiz of bullets coming into that stand of trees.

Yelling at the top of his lungs, Yellow Wolf did his best to drive off the other horses, sweeping those that would be
herded before him as he pressed low against his pony's neck and followed the route taken by
Toohoolhoolzote
. Bullets sang past, striking the ground and singing off the rocks, smacking trees, as the horse carried him down one side of the wide ravine and desperately clawed its way up the steep side onto the plateau once more. He recalled the words of his uncle, Old Yellow Wolf: “If you go to war and get shot, do not cry!”

Just remembering that admonition helped him be brave. Better to die with his horse than to turn away from the fight without it.

In heartbeats the snarling of the bullets was fading behind him. The crack of rifles no more thundered about his ears. He had reached the timber on the south side of the saddle. Dismounting, he tied off his strong brown horse, letting it regain its wind and graze while he started toward the sound of firing on that south side of the fight. Near a copse of trees he came upon a stand of large boulders where many men—mostly older—had gathered to talk about the fighting, make plans, and catch their wind, too. To the
Nee-Me-Poo
this was a “smoking lodge,” where older warriors whose day had come and gone now passed their pipes around while discussing the fight others were making against the soldiers.

The sting of the tobacco smoke stung his nose and made his eyes water as he hurried past. Yellow Wolf never had smoked. He did not like it, and it made his head sick when he smelled others burning tobacco. Moving into a lope, the young warrior hurried to the east where the sound of gunfire was the heaviest.

At the edge of the timber he noticed how many of the finest warriors were flat on their bellies behind low boulders they had pushed before them, right out of the timber and into the tall grass, sneaking up on the soldier lines. They had good guns to use against the
suapies
this day! In little time they had captured more than three times the number of his fingers in new firearms from those soldiers dead or frightened and fleeing from White Bird Canyon. And the
warriors took a dozen more from the men they ambushed some distance away from the soldier burrow holes at Cottonwood. This meant that now a good deal more than half of the
Nee-Me-Poo
warriors had guns to carry into this hot fight with Cut-Off Arm's men.

Many of those guns had been used most effectively against four, even five times their number, stopping the soldiers in their tracks and forcing them into that protective square while the rest of the warriors rushed out of the valley—once everyone realized the village would not be threatened—and climbed to the plateau to join the fight. Cut-Off Arm must surely be hiding somewhere in the middle of his
suapies
, concealed among the horses and mules at the center of the square in a low depression where he would be safe.

There was no manhood in having others do your fighting for you like that!

The young warrior spotted his uncle, Old Yellow Wolf, lying in the middle of those veteran fighters where the noise was the loudest and the shooting the hottest, firing his soldier gun at the enemy. Beside him lay another old fighter who refused to go to the smoking lodge. Fire Body, called
Otstotpoo
, had killed the first soldier at the White Bird Canyon fight—his bullet hitting a man who blew on a brass horn.
^*
Tomyunmene
was on Yellow Wolf's uncle's left side. The faces of all three were flecked with bloody scratches caused by flying rock chips as soldier bullets careened off the boulders they lay behind to take their shots.

This had to be the most exposed part of the entire line of these patriots fighting for their country!

Yellow Wolf plopped on his belly as the bullets hissed around him. There were no trees or shade here to hide within. Only these low boulders.

“I see that hat again!” Fire Body announced in a raspy whisper.

“Can you hit it?”

“I did twice before!” the veteran warrior answered Old Yellow Wolf.

He took careful aim through the long sight attached to the top of the rifle barrel and squeezed the trigger.

Tomyunmene
shouted, “You took off that Shadow's hat!”

“Three times now!” Old Yellow Wolf cried, slapping his bare thigh in joy as his nephew crawled up beside him and took a place behind the low boulders.

“Welcome, young one!” cried
Howwallits
, the one called Mean Man, sometimes referred to as Mean Person. “I see you brought your rifle today. You will see lots of game to hunt out there in the grass. Look carefully and you won't fail to find yourself a target—”

A bullet smacked the edge of the rock to Yellow Wolf's left, knocking off a large chunk, then ricochetting off to strike his uncle just above the eye, driving the older man's head backward. Old Yellow Wolf grunted as he flopped onto his side … then lay still.

“Uncle! Uncle!” Yellow Wolf shouted far too loudly as he brushed the bright, gleaming blood from the older man's face.

Bullets immediately followed the noise, forcing the warriors to hug the ground for a few moments.

When the soldier fire lessened, Mean Person suggested, “See if breath comes from his mouth, or the nose.”

Yellow Wolf laid his ear against his uncle's face, trying to hear the movement of air. But with so much yelling coming from both sides of the fight, he could not tell.

“Lay your head over his heart,” Fire Body ordered. “Press your ear tightly and feel for the life.”

After what felt like a long, long time, his uncle's chest moved a little, and Yellow Wolf believed he heard a little flutter of the old man's heart.

With great joy, he shouted, “I think my uncle will live again!”

 

*
This battle site, located on private land, stands on what is today called Battle Ridge, just above the present-day community of Stites, Idaho.

*
Cries from the Earth
, vol. 14, the
Plainsmen
series.

J
ULY
11, 1877

T
HEY HAD BEEN FIGHTING THESE REDSKINS FOR MOKE
than three hours by the time Howard ordered Captain Evan Miles to take some of his infantry in a charge on the ravine lying at the northern extreme of the battlefield—a patch of grassy prairie that extended a scant mile and a half wide north to south and a couple of miles long east to west—where the troops, both foot and horse, were forced to fight in the open, their only protection the tall grass just starting to turn with these last few days of searing heat.

While the first few weeks of this campaign, indeed the beginning of summer itself, had been cool and rainy at best, the past handful of days had turned unmercifully hot as storm clouds disappeared from the sky and the sun reemerged with a vengeance—seeming to burn like fire right through an enlisted man's flannel and wool.

First Sergeant Michael McCarthy had first unbuttoned his tunic, praying to the Virgin Mary for a breath of air to stir; just a little breeze it could be. Then he had pulled off the tunic completely, stripped down to his sweat-drenched gray undershirt like most of the other men in Trimble's H Company.

He and the rest, too, were all beginning to dwell more and more on the subject of water. Was there a pond of it back in that center of their perimeter with the supplies? Or would there be a cool spring or gurgling creek somewhere in those trees currently held by the enemy? Where in blazes would his next drink of water come from?

Miles's attack on the northern ravine had been so successful that by 3:30
P.M.
Howard had ordered Captain Marcus P. Miller to take his artillerymen and launch the same offensive against the timber west of their enclosure. Breveted a colonel during the Civil War, Miller was an 1858
graduate of the U. S. Military Academy and a workhorse who had spent his entire career in the Fourth U. S. Artillery. Having fought at Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville, he came west to battle Captain Jack's Modocs. It was Miller's leadership of an artillery battery that rescued the survivors of Canby's peace commission after the general was brutally assassinated.
^*

But today Miller's charge bogged down when the resistance proved fierce and the warriors would not be moved. The rest of that afternoon and into the long summer evening, the battle settled into a sniping match between the two sides as both the Nez Perce and the soldiers devoted time between shots to scratching at the hot dirt, attempting to hollow out a shallow rifle pit—the infantry using their trowel bayonets, the cavalry having to plow with their belt knives and scrape with tin cups.

With the sun having slid off midsky, the hottest part of the day had come as it slowly sank to the west, baking this plateau of drying grass and parched soldiers.

The hottest fighting of the battle was yet to begin.

F
ROM
time to time the
suapies
turned their big-throated gun on the timber where so many of the warriors had taken up positions after they rode up from the valley floor. Most of the time the noisy charges overshot the horsemen who had followed
Ollokot
out of the village, but every now and then an explosion showered the men with dirt and tree branches or wounded some horses.

“We must take that big gun!”
Ollokot
exhorted the men from the many bands who had shown up to fight on this west side of the ridge.

Their first three charges at the gun emplacement and those soldiers hunkered down there were as unsuccessful as the quick dash they had made among the pack train earlier that afternoon. Each time
Ollokof's
warriors were driven back … but each time his men managed to get a little
closer, a little closer to the big-throated gun. Withdrawing with his warriors,
Ollokot
vowed with the failure of each charge that their next attempt would bring them success. But a fourth and fifth assault only got them to within two long horse lengths of the weapon.

A final attempt might just force the soldiers back enough that
Ollokof's
warriors could seize the powerful weapon, when they could turn and use it upon the soldier lines.

As he dashed back and forth along his wavering lines of naked warriors,
Ollokot
watched a soldier crawl out through the tall, dry grass until he lay directly beneath the cannon. From that position the
suapie
could load the weapon without exposing himself any more than he had to. As the white man started to slide backward in the grass,
Ollokot
realized the soldier was about to fire the gun. And had to be stopped before he touched fire to the back of the long weapon.