The Veteran (33 page)

The Crow party rode north and they rode hard. One of them had been with the army in the summer and knew that the bluecoats had posted a big reward for the white renegade, enough to buy a man many horses and trade goods.

They never made the Bozeman Trail. Twenty miles south of the Yellowstone they ran into a small patrol of cavalrymen, ten in all, commanded by a lieutenant. The former scout explained what they had seen, using mainly sign language, but the lieutenant understood. He turned the patrol south for the mountains, with the Crow acting as guides, seeking to cut the trail.

That summer the news of the massacre of Custer and his men had swept America like a blast of cold air. Far to the east the high and mighty of the nation had gathered at Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, to celebrate the first centenary of independence on July the Fourth, 1876. The news from the western frontier seemed unbelievable. An immediate inquiry was ordered.

After the battle the soldiers of General Terry had scoured the fatal hillside, seeking an explanation of the disaster. The Sioux and the Cheyenne were twenty-four hours gone and Terry was in no mood to pursue them. Reno’s survivors had been relieved but they knew nothing beyond what they had seen as Custer and his men rode out of sight behind the hills.

On the hillside every scrap of evidence was gathered and stored, even as the decomposing bodies were hastily buried.

Among those things collected were the sheets of paper stuck in the long grass. Among these were the notes taken by Captain Cooke.

None of those who had stood behind Custer when he interrogated Ben Craig was left alive, but the clerkish notes by the adjutant said enough. The army needed a reason for the disaster.

Now they had one: the savages had been forewarned and were fully prepared. The unwitting Custer had ridden into a massive ambush. More, the army had a scapegoat. Incompetence could not be accepted; treachery could. A reward of one thousand dollars was posted for the taking of the scout, dead or alive.

The trail went cold, until a party of Crow saw the fugitive, with an Indian girl behind him, riding out of the Pryor Mountains in the last days of October.

The lieutenant’s horses had rested, fed and watered through the night. They were fresh and he rode them hard to the south.

His career was at stake.

Just after the sun rose Craig and Whispering Wind reached the Pryor Gap, a defile of lowland between the main range and the single peak of West Pryor. They crossed the defile, cantered through the foothills of West Pryor and emerged into the badlands, rough country of grassy ridges and gullies that went west for fifty miles.

Craig had no need to use the sun for guidance. He could see his target in the far distance, glittering in the morning sun beneath a cold blue sky. He was heading for the Absaroka Wilderness, which he had hunted as a boy with old Donaldson.

This was terrible country, a wilderness of forest and rocky plateaus where few could follow, and it ran upwards into the Beartooth Range.

Even from that distance he could see the icy sentinels of the range. Thunder, Sacred, Medicine and Beartooth Mountains.

There a man with a good rifle could hold off an army. At a creek he paused to give the sweating mounts a few gulps of water, then pressed on towards the peaks that seemed to nail the land to the sky.

Twenty miles behind, the six warriors, eyes scanning the ground for the telltale marks of steel-shod hoofs, kept up a fast trot that saved their ponies’ energy and could be maintained for mile after mile.

Thirty miles to the north the cavalry patrol pressed south to pick up the trail. They found it at noon just west of West Pryor Peak. The Crow scouts suddenly reined in and circled, staring at a patch of sun-hardened earth. They pointed down to the marks of steel horseshoes and the spoor of an unshod pony close behind. A short distance away were the traces of other ponies, five or six in all.

“So,” murmured the lieutenant, “we have competition. No matter.”

He gave the order to continue westward, though the horses were beginning to tire. Half an hour later, cresting a rise in the plain, he took his telescope and scanned the horizon ahead. Of the fugitives there was no sign, but he saw a puff of dust and beneath it six tiny figures on pinto ponies trotting towards the mountains.

The Cheyenne ponies were also tiring but so, they knew, must be the mounts of the fugitives up ahead. The warriors gave their horses water at Bridger Creek, just below the modern village of Bridger, and half an hour’s rest. One, ear pressed to the ground, heard the drumming of hoofs coming from behind, so they mounted up and rode on. After a mile their leader pulled away to one side, hid them all behind a knoll and climbed to the top to look.

At three miles he saw the cavalry. The Cheyenne knew nothing of any papers on a hillside, nor of any reward for the runaway wasichu. They presumed the bluecoats must be hunting them, for being off-reservation. So they watched and waited.

When the cavalry patrol reached the parting of the tracks it stopped while the Crow scouts dismounted and studied the ground. The Cheyenne saw the Crows point ever westward and the cavalry patrol continued in that direction.

The Cheyenne kept up with them on a parallel track, shadowing the bluecoats as Little Wolf had shadowed Custer up the Rosebud. But in mid-afternoon the Crow spotted them.

“Cheyenne,” said the Crow scout.

The lieutenant shrugged.

“No matter, let them hunt. We have our own quarry.”

The two parties of pursuers pressed on till nightfall.

The Crow followed the trail and the Cheyenne shadowed the patrol. As the sun tipped the mountain peaks both groups knew they had to rest the horses. If they tried to go on their mounts would simply collapse beneath them. Besides, the ground was becoming harder and the trail more difficult to follow. In darkness, without lanterns, which they did not have, it would be impossible.

Ten miles ahead Ben Craig knew the same. Rosebud was a big, strong mare, but she had covered fifty miles carrying a man and equipment over broken ground. Whispering Wind was not a skilled rider and she too was at the end of her tether. They camped by Bear Creek, just east of the modern township of Red Lodge, but lit no fire for fear it might be seen.

As darkness fell the temperature plunged. They rolled themselves in the buffalo robe and in seconds the girl was fast asleep. Craig did not sleep. He could do that later. He crawled out of the robe, wrapped himself in the red trade blanket and kept watch over the girl he loved.

No-one came, but before dawn he was up. They ate, quickly, some dried antelope meat and a quantity of corn bread she had taken from her teepee, washed down with creek water. Then they left. The pursuers were also up as the first light revealed the trail. They were nine miles behind and closing. Craig knew the Cheyenne would be there; what he had done could not be forgiven. But he knew nothing of the cavalry.

The land was harder, the going slower. He knew his pursuers would be catching up and he needed to slow them by disguising his trail. After two hours in the saddle the fugitives came to the confluence of two creeks. To the left, tumbling out of the mountains, was Rock Creek, which he judged to be impassable as a way into the real wilderness. Straight ahead lay West Creek, shallower and less rocky. He dismounted, tied the pony’s tethering rein to the horse’s saddle and led Rosebud by the bridle.

He led the small convoy off the bank at an angle towards Rock Creek, into the water, then doubled back and took the other waterway. The freezing water numbed his feet, but he pressed on for two miles over the gravel and pebbles. Then he turned to the mountains on his left and led the mounts out of the water into the dense forest.

The land now rose steeply beneath the trees and with the sun shut out it was chill. Whispering Wind was shrouded in her blanket, riding bareback at a walking pace.

Three miles behind, the cavalry had reached the water and stopped. The Crows pointed out the tracks seeming to lead up Rock Creek and after conferring with his sergeant the lieutenant ordered his patrol up the false trail. As they disappeared, the Cheyenne reached the two creeks. They did not need to enter the water to hide their tracks. But they chose the right creek and trotted up the bank, scanning the far side for signs of horses coming out of the water and heading for the high country.

After two miles they found the signs in a patch of soft earth across the creek. They splashed over and entered the forest.

At midday Craig arrived at what he thought he remembered from his hunting trip years before, a great open plateau of rock, the Silver Run Plateau, which headed straight to the mountains.

Although they did not know it, they were now over 11,000 feet high.

From the edge of the rocks he could look down towards the creek he had followed and then quit. To his right, there were figures down there, where the two creeks split. He had no telescope but in the thin air visibility was extraordinary. At half a mile these were not Cheyenne; they were ten soldiers with four Crow scouts. They were an army patrol coming back down Rock Creek, having realized their error. That was when Ben Craig understood the army was still after him for liberating the girl.

He took his Sharps rifle from its sheath, inserted a single cartridge, found a rock to rest it on, set the sights at maximum elevation and squinted down into the valley.

“Take the horse,” old Donaldson had always said. “In this country a man with no horse has to turn back.”

He aimed for the forehead of the officer’s mount. The crash, when it came, echoed through the mountains, backward and forward like rolling thunder. The bullet took the lieutenant’s horse just to the side of the head, high in the right shoulder. It went down like a sack, the officer with it. He twisted an ankle as he fell.

The troopers scattered into the forest, save the sergeant, who threw himself behind the downed horse and tried to help the lieutenant. The horse was finished but not dead. The sergeant used his pistol to put it out of its misery. Then he dragged his officer to the trees. No more shots came.

In the forest on the slope the Cheyenne dropped from their ponies to the carpet of pine needles and stayed there. Four of them had Springfields looted from the Seventh, but they also had the Plains Indian’s lack of marksmanship. They knew what the young wasichu could do with that Sharps, and at what range. They began to crawl upwards. It slowed them down. One of the six stayed in the rear, leading all six ponies.

Craig cut the blanket into four pieces and tied one quarter round each of Rosebud’s hoofs. The material would not last long between steel shoe and rock but it would hide scratch marks for five hundred yards. Then he trotted southwest across the plateau towards the peaks.

It is five miles across the Silver Run and there is no cover.

After two miles the frontiersman looked back and saw specks coming over the ridge onto the rock shelf. He trotted on. They could not hit him and they could not catch him. A few minutes later there were more specks; the cavalrymen had led their mounts up through the forest and were also on the rock, but a mile east of the Cheyenne. Then he came to the crevasse. He had not been this high before; he did not know it was there.

It is steep and narrow, Lake Fork, with sides wooded with pine and a freezing stream at the bottom. Craig turned along its edge and looked for a place where the banks were shallow enough to cross. He found such a place in the shadow of Thunder Mountain, but he had lost half an hour.

Pushing himself and the horses to the limit, he led them down the ravine and up the other side to another and last sheet of rock, Hellroaring Plateau. As he emerged from the gulley a shot whistled over his head. From across the ravine one of the troopers had seen movement among the pines. His delay had not only let his pursuers catch up, he had shown them the way across.

Ahead of him was another three miles of flat running before the towering palisades of Mount Rearguard, among whose jumbled rocks and caves no man on earth would ever take him.

In the thin air two humans and two animals gasped for oxygen but still he pressed on. Darkness would come soon, and he would disappear into the peaks and ravines between Rearguard and Sacred and Beartooth Mountains. No man could follow a trail up here. Beyond Sacred Mountain was the watershed divide and after that it was downhill all the way into Wyoming.

They would lose the hostile world, be married, dwell in the wilderness and live for ever. As the daylight faded Ben Craig and Whispering Wind left their pursuers behind and headed for the slopes of Mount Rearguard.

In the dusk they climbed above the rock plain and met the snowline where the whiteness of the peaks is never melted.

There they found a flat ledge, fifty yards by twenty, and at the back a deep cave. A few last pines shrouded the entrance.

Craig hobbled the horses as darkness fell and they cropped pine needles beneath the trees. The cold was intense, but they had their buffalo robe.

The scout hauled his saddle and remaining blanket into the cave, loaded his rifle and laid it by his side, then spread the buffalo skin by the mouth of the cave. Craig and Whispering Wind lay on it and he pulled the other half over them both. Inside the cocoon the natural warmth of human bodies returned. The girl began to move against him.

“Ben,” she whispered, “make me your woman. Now.”

He began to slip her buckskin tunic upwards over her eager body.

“What you are doing is wrong.”

It was utterly silent this high on the mountain, and though the voice was old and frail the words, in the Cheyenne language, were quite clear.

Craig, his hide shirt gone and bare-chested in the freezing cold, was at the entrance to the cave, rifle in hand, in a moment.

He could not understand why he had not seen the man before. He sat cross-legged under the pines at the edge of the flat rock. Iron-grey hair hung to his naked waist, his face was wrinkled and lined as a burnt walnut. He was of immense age and piety, a tribal shaman, a vision-quester come to the lonely places to fast, meditate and seek guidance from the infinite.