Lay the Mountains Low (92 page)

“The smoke! My God—it's dyin' off!”

Sure as sun, the wind had suddenly shifted and blew the fire right back on the scorched hillside. Starved for fuel, the flames were swiftly snuffed out. No longer did the afternoon breeze carry the thick, stifling clouds of gray right into the soldier lines.

With his eyes tearing now that he could actually begin to see some distance beyond their ragged rectangle of rifle pits, Woodruff whispered a silent prayer, the first he had said in many a year.

He vowed to the Almighty that he would pray a little more often from here on out.

 

*
See chapter 55.

W
A
-W
A
-M
AI
-K
HAL
,
1877

I
N THEIR THIRD ATTEMPT TO RETRIEVE THE BODY OF RED
Moccasin Tops, a group of warriors led by Old Yellow Wolf managed to lay down enough harassing fire that Bighorn Bow, called
Tahwis Takaitat,
crawled under a barrage of soldier bullets and pulled
Sarpsis Ilppilp
away from the soldier hollows.

“You have done what I wanted!” roared Sun Necklace in relief.

By the time they carried the body out of the timber to the mouth of the ravine, a small crowd of old women had gathered in the creek bottom, patiently waiting to assist the family with the burial. It was not the first such ceremony those women had helped with that day. Yellow Wolf and his mother's brother stood by while the women cleaned the warrior's body, then wrapped it in a new blanket. After laying the body on a travois, they began walking their pony into the timbered hills, planning to leave Red Moccasin Tops in a secret place.

When the oldest among the women determined the spot, she signaled the others to halt. There they quickly went to work scraping at the soft forest floor, gouging out a final resting place for this hero's body.

“I remember a time early this summer, when he showed me his shell necklace,” the dead man's father said quietly, standing to the side with Yellow Wolf and his uncle, joined by the oldest woman in charge of the burial party. “He said his medicine would be strong when he wore it into battle.”

“He was right,” the matriarch added, a slight lisp to her words due to the loss of so many of her front teeth. “Red Moccasin Tops
was
bullet-proof from the neck down when he wore it around his throat.”

“Did you see how strong his medicine worked at that first battle against the soldiers?” Sun Necklace asked the woman proudly. “When the
suapies
attacked us in
Lahmotta?”

“I did see with my own eyes,” she replied, her old eyes filled with wonder. “After the fight was over and the soldiers all ran away … Red Moccasin Tops came back to the village and leaped off his horse in front of a big crowd of us who were singing the fighters' praises. I noticed how many bullet holes punctured his red flannel shirt and the blanket around his neck, but not a single bullet wound in his flesh!”

“After I gave him a hug of congratulation,” Sun Necklace explained, “he took off the gun belt he had strapped around his waist—”

“Everyone standing there saw how many flattened, misshapen bullets fell from his shirt then,” the old woman concluded. “Because they were trapped beneath his shirt and spilled out when he finally took off his belt.”

“The
suapie
bullet hit him many times that day, yet not a one of them penetrated his flesh,” his proud father remarked.

Then Sun Necklace fell silent for some time as the women laid the shroud into the long, shallow hole and started to scoop dirt back into it with their hands. “Some soldier made a lucky shot this day, to kill my son with a bullet that struck him above his medicine necklace.”

“And what of your promise, Sun Necklace?” Old Yellow Wolf asked the father.

“Promise?”

“To give the wolf hide away to the man who rescued your son's body.”

He nodded once. “Yes. I forgot about that. I will have to think about that—and talk to his mother, too.”

“But that was a vow you made to those young warriors!”

Sun Necklace's face hardened like flint, his eyes glaring at Old Yellow Wolf and his nephew. “Why should I be held to a promise made in the heat of emotion—at the death of my son? His mother is a medicine woman. She made him
that wolf-hide cape. It is she who should decide what becomes of her son's talisman.”

“But
you
offered it—”

“That makes little difference,” Sun Necklace interrupted. “It was never mine to offer.”

Yellow Wolf watched the father turn his back on them as he stared down at the last of the burial process. The old women laid some rocks and several logs on the site before they stood and dusted their hands on their clothing.

This is not good,
Yellow Wolf thought to himself.
First we had Looking Glass denying the strong medicine of several warriors who had bad visions about this Place of the Ground Squirrels
…
and now this revered war chief, Sun Necklace
—
who led so many of the first attacks on the Shadows in the early days of this war
—
he is breaking a blood oath made in battle, when death hovers near every man.

Even though the
suapies
were huddled in their burrows and Cut-Off Arm was still far away, Yellow Wolf shuddered with a chill of defeat.

The white man had already defeated them.

While the
Nee-Me-Poo
might run to the buffalo country, they would never be the same people they had been before these troubles. No longer were the chiefs listening to quiet voices of the spirits around them. No longer would those spirits guide the actions of chiefs who broke their vows to the people.

How could such men of little honor ever hope to protect, much less lead, the
Nee-Me-Poo
… now that the People were running for their lives?

H
ENRY
Buck wondered if there would be anyone to bury him with such care and affection when he died.

Watching a few knots of women and old men as they went about their grim business of burying their dead in the creek bottom brush or dragging the bodies away toward the eastern plateau on travois, the civilian wondered if he would be missed nearly as much when his name was called from the great beyond.

As he sat alone with his thoughts, he brooded on how many of those victims were women and children—realizing now in the fading light of dusk that Gibbon had unleashed pent-up men on a sleeping village where shadowy figures darted from lodges in all directions, where every Nez Perce was a potential enemy. In the heat of that sort of warfare and battle, chances were more than good that many of those half-naked, blanket-wrapped forms hadn't been warriors at all.

But then … was anyone in that village entirely innocent of what outrages of murder and rape, theft and arson had been committed back in Idaho?

They were all guilty to one degree or another, he decided. Man, woman, child.

Henry tried to convince himself that the reason he suffered such gloomy thoughts was only because he had gone without sleep for so long. Because he was sitting here, pinned down without any food or water, surrounded by an enemy that might well kill him before sunrise, now that dark had come to bring an end to that bloody day.

Every time he tried to convince himself that Gibbon and the others were right in punishing these Nez Perce, some tiny hairline fractures began to splinter his certainty. All he had to do was watch the women, little ones, and old men go about their grim burials on the outskirts of that village for Henry Buck to finally realize this never had been a war of warriors. Right from the beginning of the troubles over on the Salmon River and the Camas Prairie, too, this hadn't been a story of men making war on men.

No, right from the first spasm of violence this had been a drama that swept up the women and children, a tragedy that made all the innocents not only unwitting victims but unwilling participants, too. The Nez Perce had started this tragedy by making war on
all
whites—not only men. So to Henry, it stood to reason that the army and its civilian volunteers made war on
all
Nez Perce … wherever they could find them.

The Indians gave the first hurt, attacking homes and families.
The white man struck back, attacking homes and families.

Why had he ever thought that war was an honorable profession practiced between warriors? To consider it a noble art—practiced by fighting men, by those who truly understood its deadly risks? With this bloody day everything he had once believed had been turned on its head, his whole world yanked out from under him.

As the hours of siege had dragged by that afternoon, he kept reminding himself that once their families had cleared out of the village, the warriors would in all likelihood end their sniping and pull back. And once that red noose was loosened, the soldiers and Catlin's civilians could slip down to the creek to fill what few canteens they had among them, splash some cold water on the backs of their necks, and … and hell—he didn't know what the blazes any of them would do next.

But he watched those last three women attack a lodge cover together in the half-light of dusk, tearing it down, then tying all the belongings onto a travois suspended behind one of the ponies, many other pony drags already bearing what Henry took to be the wounded, slowly angling up the side of that plateau east of camp. At the top they struck out across the prairie.

South,
he thought. Back for Idaho. Perhaps they were making for their homeland after this battle had proved so disastrous for both sides.

Home.
It sounded damn good right then.

Then his heart clutched as he realized those Nez Perce never would have their old homes again—no matter how long they fought or where they ran. That was all a matter of long ago now. There could never be any heading
home
for them.

As the sun sank behind the mountains and threw an immediate darkness on the Big Hole, the night sounds began softly, slipping out of the forest around them, the slough somewhere below. Not just the chatter of the animals out there in the night, not only the frightening war cries and
death oaths of the warriors who still made their presence known from time to time … but the whimpering sobs of a few of the soldiers and civilians as the cold black blanket of night settled over the hillside and a man felt much more anonymous, far more alone.

Many of the wounded begged for water. Some pleaded for a doctor. A few anguished for a bite of food when all any of them had to chew on was some raw, stringy horse that had been lying out in the sun all day, bloating and flyblown. To Henry's way of thinking, there were a thousand good reasons for any of them to cry.

No food but raw, rancid horse. No water, neither.

And precious little hope for what the new dawn would bring.

I
T
seemed as if daylight never would come to Lieutenant Charles Woodruff. Nights in the mountains were always cold, even at the height of summer.

Before dawn that morning the men had abandoned their heavy coats, leaving them behind with the bedding and supplies back in Kirkendall's wagons. Woodruff wondered once or twice about those seventeen soldiers and three civilians left up the trail at the wagon camp. Had the same warriors who overran the howitzer grown curious and back-trailed to overwhelm the wagon guard?

Most, if not all, of the men in the compound began shivering as the night deepened and temperatures slid lower and lower. More than twelve hours ago they had all waded through that creek below, some of the men forced to make a crossing in water that lapped up to their armpits. In a wild retreat, they had splashed and slogged their way back through that deep creek and boggy slough to reach this hillside. So once the sun's relentless heat dissipated with the coming of night, the men began to tremble and quake in their damp clothing.

He did not want his thoughts to drift to his three wounds. So Woodruff willed his mind to busy itself with other things as the darkness deepened and some of the more than forty
wounded men whimpered, sobbed, or outright cried for water, food, and a merciful relief. He knew that several of the men even suffered from more than one wound.

The rest of Gibbon's command put their anger, frustration, and fears into work: doing what they could in the dark to make their breastworks a bit higher, digging their rifle pits a little deeper. As the stars came out and a sliver of moon arose from the far horizon, he could hear soft scraping sounds of rocks being piled one on the other and the scratch of bayonet and knife where earth was slowly separated from itself at this corner or that of their little corral.

Charles wondered if these men who were still whole in body were soldiers and citizens who had never claimed to be totally without fear—merely men who struggled to keep their fear from paralyzing them as he did.