Seize the Sky: Son of the Plains-Volume 2 (18 page)

Beginning that long and very hot day, anger became a bitter potion the Indian scouts would be drunk on before another sun had risen.

At each of the abandoned campsites, the convergence of a growing number of lodge rings and fire pits joined the
abandoned wickiups along the river’s bank. And on the outskirts of every abandoned camp, the grass was found close cropped for miles around, the herd-trampled meadows generously speckled with droppings already dry and crumbly beneath a relentless Montana sun.

Site after site passed, each the same as the last, except that most of the soldiers found they had to agree it appeared the camps were growing larger, until it appeared as if the circles no longer had any room for the normal camp horn but needed instead to raise more and more lodges back in every bend and twist of the riverbank.

At the upper end of each abandoned campsite, the scouts drew up their horses and read each other’s expressions on their stony copper faces. No need of saying anything more. For here, on the southern edge of every camp, the many trails converged into one broad road, plowed and furrowed by Indian ponies, the thousands upon thousands pulling travois.

Half Sioux himself, Bloody Knife realized by now that the hostiles were heading over the spine of the Wolf Mountains. And his medicine helper told the old Ree that the Sioux knew they were being followed.

For the Crows and Arikaras, what had once been the powerful medicine of this journey to whip their old enemies with the pony soldiers had slowly turned sour in their mouths. Instead of Custer leading them to a great victory and a trip to Washington City, the Long Hair was taking them with him into a valley shadowed by the wings of death.

Bloody Knife, Red Star, Stabbed, and others gazed at the half-dozen Crow scouts when Fred Gerard wasn’t watching or Lieutenant Varnum was busy chattering with Custer. Neither group could speak the other’s tongue. They didn’t have to. There was a universal language any man could read, plain as paint on every scout’s face—red eyes flinty and stoic so as not to betray the dark secret the white men simply refused to believe.

One young Ree named Horns-in-Front actually began to whimper quietly when he and Bloody Knife came across a huge stone at the site of one of the abandoned villages. The
stone had been painted with primitive glyphics symbolizing two buffalo bulls. One had been drawn beside a bullet, and the other held a lance—both animals charging one another. Horns-in-Front trembled as he listened to Bloody Knife and the old man Stabbed discuss the symbolism in the Sioux drawing.

Then the young scout whimpered in fear.

Spotted-Horn-Cloud rushed the shambling, shaken youngster and slapped Horns-in-Front hard across the mouth, drawing blood.

That got Custer’s attention.

Bloody Knife turned as well, watching the general drop from his big horse. Custer strode up quickly, examined the stone for himself, then asked his question in sign of his old friend, The Knife.

“What does this mean?” His freckled hand pointed to the drawings.

“Pony chief—the aging Arikara’s hands moved more slowly than usual—“it says there will be a hard and long fight for any enemy who chooses to follow the Sioux on this trail.”

Instead of replying, Custer slipped off the big hat and ran a palm over the reddish blond stubble on his head. More trail weary than exasperated, he remounted his mare and loped out of the murmuring ring of scouts without another word.

A few hours later the scouts reached the largest camping site yet seen on the march up the Rosebud.

What now gave them all pause was the sight of the close-cropped grass extending for miles around in all directions across the rolling hills and timbered meadows beside the creek. Clearly the scouts could see that this site had been used for many days.

And then the general’s brown-skinned trackers came to understand why the tribes had halted their leisurely march here at this beautiful spot in the shadow of the Wolf Mountains.

Close by the river on a grassy bottom that,
come every
spring, was buried beneath the swirl of winter’s runoff stood the huge Sun Dance arbor of the Lakota nations.

Mitch Bouyer slipped up silently to stand near a speechless Custer just inside the outer reaches of that massive framework of poles. It was not until the general rose from the ground, a handful of hard-packed earth cupped in his deerskin glove, that he finally noticed the half-breed scout at his shoulder.

“Tell me about this, Bouyer.”

The Crow interpreter was a few moments before answering. Then his words filled the brittle, dry silence surrounding the Sun Dance Lodge with a stifling gloom. “Custer, I’ve never seen one this big. Not in all my years living with the Sioux.”

“That mean something?” Custer snapped, not looking Bouyer in the eye, but staring instead at the buffalo skulls and the monstrous center pole those skulls surrounded. “For it to be so big?”

“I think it’s safe to say it means something, General.”

The Crow interpreter felt moved by the immense size of the arbor constructed of pine boughs and lodge pole, every trunk showing its recent age and just now beginning to weather beneath the prairie’s summer sun. But what was most impressive of all to the scouts and Bouyer both was the size of that massive center pole, where hung some of the tattered rawhide tethers still.

The tethers danced on the late-afternoon breezes.

Bouyer understood more than any man there that afternoon what all those hundreds of rawhide tethers meant. He had grown up with the Sioux. He had watched men sacrifice themselves and their bodies in thanksgiving to the sun in this way.

What swept over Mitch, shaking him to his core, was the realization that the Lakota were preparing as never before some powerful medicine for a most special purpose.

If the Sioux of Sitting Bull truly did know soldiers were dogging their back trail, then the Lakota were making medicine as they never had for one powerful big fight.

Near the huge center pole’s base the Sioux had driven a tall stake into the hard-packed earth.

Tom Custer passed his brother and the half-breed Sioux scout, the first to dare venture into the bowels of the Sun
Dance Lodge itself. Sergeant Jeremiah Finley of Custer’s C Company joined Tom.

Crossing the pounded, baked ground to the center of the lodge now shadow-striped by the afternoon sun, Finley knelt to touch the hair tied to that single stake at the foot of the monstrous pole.

“Captain Custer! C’mon over here, sir!”

“What is it, Sergeant—” Tom began, watching Finley get to his feet, holding the dried scalp up at the end of his arm for all to see. “I’ll be go to hell. Will you look at that sonuvabitch.”

Wasn’t a man gathered round Finley in grim silence who didn’t realize that the sergeant had found a white man’s scalp.

“Take it.” Tom gritted his words out between clenched teeth. “Show it to Autie.”

“Autie, sir?”

“The general, goddammit! My brother!” Tom snapped like a brittle twig, his eyes never straying from the brown hair.

After George Armstrong Custer had viewed the scalp in silence and showed it to his scouts, he asked Finley to pass it among the troops.

“Why you wanna do that, Autie?” Tom asked as Finley strode away.

“Don’t you understand, dear brother—just what kind of effect that scrap of bloody hair will have on the men?”

Though he would never be famous for being as smart as his older brother, Tom Custer could never be accused of being on the slow side. A smile crossed his sun-raw face.

“Good,” he whispered, approving. “Not a soul knows whose goddamned scalp that is … even when it was taken. But every one of the men will see that it was a white man’s head of hair.”

“You read sign savvy enough, Tom.”

Near the huge Sun Dance Lodge, Bear-in-Timber, another young Arikara scout, found a sandbar at the bank of the creek where the surface had been purposely smoothed so pictures could be drawn in the flat, sandy surface.

Figures heading south, up the Rosebud, unshod ponies all. Behind them a smaller group rode on shod horses—soldiers, it was plain to see. It didn’t take an experienced plainsman like Fred Gerard to understand that.

“They’re telling all the Sioux who are still coming to join up, that there’s a small bunch of soldiers dogging the main camp’s tail,” Gerard interpreted for Custer as Bloody Knife and Stabbed bent over the drawing, slowly tracing the lines with their scarred fingertips.

“You telling me the Sioux know we’re on their trail?” His voice rose a pitch.

“No, General,” he replied, shaking his head. “Funny thing of it, from what these Rees are saying, we aren’t the soldiers the Sioux know are following ’em. Maybe so—there are some other soldiers this far south, some of Gibbon’s boys, you suppose?”

“Crook!” he roared. “That’s got to be it. I’ll be horn-swoggled. Crook’s got thirteen hundred troops marching up from Laramie to join with Gibbon and Terry.” His look cut into Gerard’s red-rimmed, hung-over eyes. “Ask Bloody Knife—if the Sioux know about Crook, do they know about us?”

Gerard could tell Custer’s whole day depended on the answer to that solitary question.

“Stabbed says the Sioux haven’t got an idea one we’re on their back trail,” Fred answered.

“By God’s back teeth, that’s good news!” Custer leapt to his feet, clapping. His smile disappeared. “Except—if Crook gets there ahead of me to snatch my victory right out of my hands!”

Custer wheeled, his boots plowing through the sandbar pictures.
“Saddle up’, boys!
We’re on the march!”

In the twinkling of an eye, Gerard had watched Custer go from whispering and worried to bellowing like a castrated calf.

“General!” Myles Keogh’s peat-moss brogue brought Custer up short of climbing in the saddle.

“What is it, Captain!” he barked.

“The Crows over there,” and Keogh threw a thumb back to indicate Bouyer and the Absarokas gathered round a
framework of willow boughs. “They found something you should take a look at, sir.”

“Another wickiup, Myles? I’ve seen quite enough of them in the last couple days.” He leapt smoothly atop Vic. “Let’s be moving out, gentlemen.”

Keogh snagged Vic’s bridle, halting Custer. “Sir, I think you should take a wee peek at what them Crows wanna show you … now, sir.”

Gerard himself heard the anvil-hardened sound of the Irishman’s words. Custer must have heard it too, for he studied the big captain’s black eyes only briefly.

Whatever Myles Keogh might be accused of, he would never be accused of frivolity. As well as any man, Fred Gerard knew the Irishman’s reputation for being, a hard drinker and having a way with the ladies—but Keogh always meant what he said.

Custer followed the Irishman, Gerard not two steps behind them both.

“Another wickiup, Bouyer?”

The Crow interpreter wagged his head as he looked up at the general. “No. A sweat lodge. Pit in the center. Warriors heat up the rocks in this hole over that fire pit there. They carry ’em in here … dribble some water on ’em to make steam.”

“Don’t lecture me now, Bouyer!” he barked. “I know what a sweat lodge is. Get on with it and tell me why this one is worth my time.”

Mitch Bouyer squinted at Custer, a look narrowed as hard and as straight as his words had ever been spoken to a white man. Half his blood, after all, came from a white father. Trouble was, that Sioux half to his blood didn’t take kindly to any man dressing him down, especially if that man was an army officer.

You’re not here to work for this Custer
, he kept reminding himself.

Still he couldn’t quite escape the feeling that his own ass was about to be slung over the very same fire as Custer’s.

“General, what I do is for your soldiers. Not for you.”

Custer turned on Bouyer, a strange look in those sapphire
eyes. Mitch figured he had struck some nerve someplace beneath that raw-boarded exterior.

“Just so you understand, I know you don’t like me, Custer. But that don’t bother me a damn. ’Cause I’m learning there’s not much to like about you either. But what I’m gonna do is put away that bad taste in my mouth while I tell you what the Crow found here. I’ll do what I promised No Hip Gibbon I’d do.”

“So why don’t you help me, Bouyer? I want this regiment moving again, and plenty fast. I’ve got Sioux to catch.”

That interruption brought Bouyer up short, like someone had grabbed hold of his testicles and yanked on them with a jerk.

“Sioux to catch, General? Well, why don’t you take a look over there? Step on up where them Crow boys are. Good. You take a look, and you’ll notice a ridge of sand those Sioux’ve piled up there to snag your attention.”

“Mine?”

“That’s right. Now on the other side of that hump of sand, you see some horses drawn with iron shoes.”

“Cavalry?” Custer asked, smiling.

“Ain’t Brigham Young’s Mormons chasing Sioux this far north, General,” Bouyer replied, his voice dripping with scorn.

When a few soldiers behind him snickered at Mitch’s joke, Custer whirled and glared flints. The troopers snapped silent, as startled as if the general had flung January ice water on them all.

“Now you see on the other side of that ridge there … the Sioux’ve scratched some pony tracks—Indians. This time you make no mistake of it.”

“What are those figures in the middle?” Custer bent over the bank, peering down at the drawings scratched in the sun-cured sand.

“Soldiers, General. Your soldiers.”

Custer straightened. “I see.”

“No, Custer,” Bouyer bit his words off. “You don’t see. Least, you don’t see with the eyes of these Sioux warriors you’re hell-bent on cornering.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Look again there, and you’ll see the soldiers are all pointing headfirst into that Indian camp.”

The general reluctantly tore his eyes from Bouyer’s copper face to peer down at the sand drawing while the silent Crows rose, creeping off to their ponies as if some unspoken cue had been given.

“I understand their simple drawings, Bouyer. The Sioux show my soldiers charging their camp.”

“No!”
Bouyer blared. “Dammit! These Sioux are showing your little ragtag outfit here falling right into their camp. To these Sioux falling headfirst means
dead
. You get it, General? Your men are falling into the Sioux camp like fish flopping on the bank of this river. Dead and drying in the sun.”