Lay the Mountains Low (85 page)

Gibbon turned away for the creek bank, even more amazed that the double wounds did not give him any complaint at all. Squatting on the grassy bench next to the stream, he pulled off his boot and stocking, then tugged at the leg of his britches until he could begin to bathe the wounds with the cold water. Some movement at the corner of his eye caught his attention and he looked up—

To find a large number of warriors having crossed the stream opposite the village to the west side, where they were making their way through the brush toward the horses and the timber. Several of the Nez Perce were already skirmishing with a few of Gibbon's men, those warriors succeeding in driving off the herd by waving pieces of blanket at the animals, shooing them north along the grassy hillside, eventually sloping back into the valley once they were away from the soldiers and the fighting.

But even more of the warriors streamed into the trees on the hillside directly above the enemy camp, taking positions above his men at work in the village.

It was not only as clear as the coming sun that his men had just lost any crack at those horses Bostwick hadn't wanted to drive off in the early-morning darkness because of possible horse guards … but also clear that some troublesome warriors were about to flank his men—securing the hill behind and above his line, where they could do a lot of damage.

Of a sudden he became aware of a growing clamor—voices and gunshots quickly and steadily rolling his way from the village he thought his men had secured. Gibbon scrambled up the bank to find the Nez Perce darting this
way and that on both sides of his men. Try as they might, his companies hadn't been able to hold the warriors off those units assigned to torch the lodges.

Here and there soldiers were already dragging their wounded comrades back from the firing lines to a safer place. Trouble was, Gibbon was coming to realize, there wasn't much of anyplace safe here in the village now. Not with Joseph's hellions throwing everything they had back against his lines in a fierce concerted counterattack.

It hit the colonel like a bucket of cold water dashed in his face: He had committed a blunder in not pursuing the enemy on out of the valley, driving them far from their homes.

From everything he had ever learned of the Sioux and Cheyenne on the northern plains, once soldiers had them on the run from their camp, once the warriors had their women and children on the way, the fighting men would dissolve and disappear.

Not so these damned Nez Perce. They weren't about to merely cover the retreat of their families, then pull back and disappear themselves. These warriors appeared determined to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, which Colonel John Gibbon had planned to snap shut on them at dawn. Measured by every axiom and theory taught at the U. S. Military Academy, these unlettered stone-age warriors had turned the tables and were now getting the best of his classically trained officers.

Where was that damned howitzer?

He whirled to the left in frustration and anger, looking most longingly toward the side of the hill where the path out of the timber had carried his units down to this valley. That gun crew should have had the howitzer here by now!

“Lieutenant!” he cried.

Woodruff trotted over to the edge of the cutbank. “General—your leg, it's better?”

“Forget the damned leg,” he growled. “Pass the word among the officers. We've got to begin a retreat. Get me Captain Rawn—”

“R-retreat, sir?”

“To that point of timber, across the creek—there!” he said as he pointed. “Rawn's company will lead the file. I tried to hold them in reserve as long as possible, so I Company will form a skirmish line they will hold long enough to get the rest of us through to the hillside. Remind every one of the officers that all dead and wounded must go with us.”

“Of course, sir! All dead and wounded.”

“Let's make this orderly, Mr. Woodruff. Impress that upon Captain Rawn and the other officers. Orderly. We don't want this to become a …,” and Gibbon paused, having started to say the word
rout,
but instead he finished by declaring, “We want to assure we hold on to our victory we've won here.”

F
OR
as long as they could, the young men around Yellow Wolf and
Kowtpliks
made a furious struggle of it, throwing themselves against the soldiers who were attempting to tear down and burn the lodges.

A woman screamed behind the warriors, a terrified mother—shrieking that she had left her five children beneath buffalo robes in that lodge the
suapies
had just set on fire. Her little ones were being consumed by the flames and there was no way for the men to drive back the soldiers, to get anywhere close to that lodge as the smoke turned black and curled upward in the heavy, damp air. From inside that lodge Yellow Wolf heard the pitiful screams of the helpless ones over the rattle of gunfire.

He vowed to kill as many of these monsters as he could this day, to avenge this terrible, tragic war being made on the women and children.

First one soldier, then a second, and finally a third went down before Yellow Wolf's accuracy with that rifle. Each time he pulled the trigger, he saw a white enemy fall. And when he could, he hurried in to seize the dead man's gun, freeing the cartridge belt from his waist. He passed them and the soldier weapons on to warriors who had no firearms of their own. One by one, those rifles were turned against the Shadows and soldiers. It was for the lives of the women
and children that the warriors were fighting, throwing the battle back into the faces of the enemy.

If the
Nee-Me-Poo
were whipped in this fight, it was better to die in the struggle than live on in bondage with freedom gone.

“Look at them now!” Five Wounds roared.

“They are running away from us!” Yellow Wolf shouted in glee as they all leaped to their feet and started rushing after the escaping soldiers.

Many of the white men stumbled in the brush, bumping into each other, tripping over their own feet as they rushed out of the village, down into the creek, then slogged up the other side into the bogs and mire of the slough, desperate to reach that point of timber angling down from the western slope. It was as if the whites refused to put up much resistance—all of them become creatures to be herded by the Nez Perce rushing up from behind.

Upon reaching an open space among the tall willows, Yellow Wolf spotted a lone soldier no more than a few steps away. No one else had spotted that soldier who was moving almost too cautiously, perhaps slowed down by the thick brush or the muddy, foot-sucking mire of the slough.

The
suapie
was so intent on escape that he had not noticed Yellow Wolf, so the warrior decided he would touch this soldier while he lived—a great feat of battle courage.

But suddenly—the soldier must have somehow
felt
Yellow Wolf directly behind him, because the white man whirled without warning, hoisting his gun up to fire. But Yellow Wolf fired first, knocking the soldier down. He did not move as Yellow Wolf came up to stand over him, reloading.

After waiting a moment for any sign of life, he knelt to take the soldier's gun, his belt filled with bullets, and a strange knife, too.
*
Giving the rifle and most of the ammunition away to a warrior who had none, Yellow Wolf followed
after the others who were pursuing those fleeing soldiers. But as he came to the creekbank where the stream made a hard turn to the west, he immediately stopped, jerking up his rifle, pointing it at the soldier who stood at the steep bank, staring directly at him.

But the white man did not fire. He made no movement. No sound of any kind. Ready to pull the trigger, Yellow Wolf advanced cautiously—eventually to realize the soldier was already dead, somehow propped against the bank, standing rigid in death!

“We have them surrounded in the trees!”
Ollokot
hollered from above as Yellow Wolf reached the bottom of the hill.

“They cannot escape?” he asked.

Red Moccasin Tops shook his head. “Warriors stopped them from above—no way for them to get away now!”

Yellow Wolf took a deep sigh, then looked across at the village. He said, “I want to go back to the camp for a while—to see what they did to our homes.”

“This is a good thing,” Five Wounds said, a grim sadness surrounding him. “When you come back, you tell me what the soldiers have done to our village.”

Halfway down to the camp, Yellow Wolf had just emerged from a thick stand of willow when he happened upon the body of a soldier sprawled in the damp grass near the creek bank. Here was another rifle and more cartridges, too!

But as he knelt down to retrieve the weapon off the ground, the soldier came back to life—jerking up an arm, swiping the point of a knife just past the end of Yellow Wolf's nose. As the warrior lunged backward, out of the way of the blade, he dropped his carbine and instinctively lashed out with the
kopluts
that hung from his wrist. In a loud, resounding crack, he connected against the man's head—sending his soldier hat sailing.

Pouncing on the
suapie,
Yellow Wolf finished him off with the man's own knife, the blade that had almost taken off his nose. As he caught his breath there beside the dead
man, the warrior noticed another soldier lying in some brush nearby. His eyes were closed—so Yellow Wolf was concerned that this one was also feigning death.

The warrior poked and prodded the body with the muzzle of his rifle to assure himself the soldier was fully unconscious. After digging around in the man's pockets, the warrior opened a leather pouch strapped over the white man's shoulder, finding inside a little of the hard, crunchy bread and some greasy bacon, too. He would take it to eat for his lunch later on that morning. While he thought he should finish off the wounded soldier, Yellow Wolf nonetheless left the man alone and continued on into camp. It was plain from the chest wounds that the soldier couldn't live for much longer.

“Kill him!” came the shouts from a chorus of throats just beyond a cluster of lodges as Yellow Wolf approached.

He hurried to the scene, where many angry people shoved tightly around Looking Glass and Rattle on Blanket, who together held the arms of a captured Shadow, who, from his clothing, was certainly one of the Bitterroot valley settlers.
*

“No!” Looking Glass snapped at the angry crowd as Yellow Wolf shouldered his way to the front of the ring. “Stay back and he will tell us some news!”

“This one was playing dead so he could sneak away!” a woman cried out in anger.

Looking Glass shouted back, “So for being a coward he should die?”

All around them in that smoky village arose the wails of grief mingled with cries of horror, fury, and revenge. It was clear why most in that group wanted to kill this prisoner, now that they had time to extract some exquisite torture from their victim.

“Get him to tell us some news from the army,” Looking
Glass demanded of Rattle on Blanket. “These soldiers who have followed us here from Idaho country.”

After exchanging some Shadow words back and forth, the warrior turned to Looking Glass and said, “This one says these are not Cut-Off Arm's soldiers.”

“Who are they?”

“They came from this Montana country, like
Ollokot
believed,” Rattle on Blanket explained. “This Shadow tells me news of Cut-Off Arm: that he is following behind us very swiftly. Perhaps even to be here by this afternoon so his soldiers can continue the attack on our camp.”

That brought a great and anguished wail from the crowd of women and old men, every person fearful of even more destruction and death.

“We must leave in a hurry!” a woman yelled. “Get away before Cut-Off Arm's soldiers catch us again.”

“Looking Glass!” someone accused bitterly. “I thought you told us we would be safe when we left Cut-Off Arm and his soldiers back in Idaho!”

Another angry woman snarled, “Yes, Looking Glass—you said the war was over when we came here to Montana!”

“Look at us now!” screamed a third. “You said we would be safe here—the war over for us—so you forced us to stay in this camp when so many of us wanted to hurry away!”

An old man shrieked at Looking Glass, “Yes—many of us wanted to hurry away, but you would not let us!”

“We still can go to the buffalo country,” Looking Glass proposed. “We must gather up all that we have and start out today—”

“This Shadow says there are more Montana settlers waiting for us between here and the buffalo country,” Rattle on Blanket interrupted suddenly. “He says the settlers from the mining towns are coming to attack us before we can reach the land of the
E-sue-gha.”

“So we will reach the land of the buffalo by another trail,” Looking Glass promised, his eyes darting about anxiously
like those of a man distrustful of those pressing in around him. “Make another trail of our own if the Shadows try to block us from joining up with our friends.”

Rattle on Blanket asked, “What do we do with this one when we leave this camp?”

“Take this Shadow to my lodge,” Looking Glass ordered. “I'll keep him there until I want to dig more news out of him.”

With both of the prisoner's arms pinned behind him, Rattle on Blanket started the Shadow across the middle of camp. They hadn't gone but a few steps when out of the crowd lunged a woman who stopped them, raising her loud, shrill voice to Looking Glass in complaint.

“Why do you let this Shadow live anymore?” she demanded, jabbing a finger at the chief. “He's told you all he is worth! My brother is already dead by the hands of these strangers. And I watched my children die when the white men set fire to my lodge! Let me kill him myself!”

With that last word of hers, the woman reached up and slapped the Shadow across the face, so hard it immediately raised a bright red mark on his cheek, clearly visible even though the man had not shaved in several days.