Trumpet on the Land (25 page)

Then, in the middle of the stream, one of the last handful to brave the deceptively strong current slipped. Flipping backward when his feet lost their purchase on the streambed below, he collided with the man behind him. Beneath the icy flow they both disappeared as those around them all set to bellowing. Sibley pushed forward in the stream, Sergeant Day turned slowly and pressed back toward midstream … then the two poked their heads up again, standing a few yards downriver, sputtering and gasping for air.

“I … I lost my rifle, Sarge,” the first, Private Henry Collins, apologized.

The second wagged his head, shaking it like a wet dog, as he bent over to peer into the frothing surface of the water, shuddering uncontrollably. “D-damn you, P-private!” Sergeant Oscar Cornwall chattered. “Made me lose my carbine too.”

“Go on, men,” Sibley prodded them now. “Get out of this water.”

“Need my rifle,” Collins whimpered.

Cornwall turned on the private, his big hands opening and closing in futile anger. “What you need is a good beating for making me lose mine, you horse's ass!”

Seconds later they were all standing on the far bank, heaving with their exertions against the cold, their famished bodies having struggled against the weighty shove of the current, shuddering with cold. Each of those who had left their clothes on sorrily stood dripping, the grass and dirt beneath them grown soggy on the far bank. Sibley emerged from the water, teeth chattering, to plop onto the ground and frantically untie his clothing, yanking it on as quickly as any man could who was convulsively shaking.

kneeling with Bat, Seamus helped the half-breed
gather some dry grass beneath some willow, knotting it before Pourier set fire to his twist. Over it the two laid larger and larger twigs.

Sibley came over, shoving his foot down into a boot. “Another fire, Bat?”

“I figure your men can use a fire about as much now as they did last night.”

“Might make 'em feel some better after that crossing,” Donegan explained. “Maybe a wee bit more ready to set off again. How about you letting them take a little rest here for a while?”

“Yes,” the lieutenant answered. Already the liver-colored bags beneath his eyes sagged with extreme fatigue. “We all could do with some rest.”

A half hour later Pourier stood with the Irishman to kick dirt over the coals. “Time we pushed on,” Bat said.

The rest slowly got to their feet, some in their still-soggy uniforms. Warmed by his dry clothing after the cold plunge, Seamus turned to start away again, finding Grouard doubled over at the waist, wobbling, nearly ready to keel over.

“You gonna be all right?” he whispered to the half-breed.

Grouard replied, “The river cold … and cold tied my sore belly in knots.”

“Can you stand?”

With great discomfort Frank eventually straightened, his breath coming ragged and fast with the pain. “There. Little better.”

Pourier came over and stopped. “You want me to lead off?”

“No, Bat. The Irishman showed me this morning: if I keep moving, I'll be all right. Keeps my mind off it.”

Seamus watched Grouard set off slowly, lumbering up the right bank that rose to disappear into a seemingly sheer wall. One by one the soldiers followed. Finerty and Becker fell in near the middle where they could. Sibley and Donegan brought up the rear as the two half-breeds led them up
a steep trail climbing that rocky canyon wall, climbing ever on toward the sky. For most of the trip upstream they were forced to inch one boot right in front of the other along a narrow trail no more than a foot wide. When there were stunted juniper branches or the exposed roots of pine and cedar the men could cling to, the soldiers moved hand over hand. When there was nothing else but the cracks and protrusions on the rock wall itself, the men slowed to a crawl, inching along some five hundred feet above the frothing waters that poured between huge boulders below them. Above, the top of the canyon was still another two hundred feet away.

Yet they made it. As dangerous as it had been, they all gathered at the top of that rocky shelf and caught their breath with sheer relief. Not one of them was curious enough to peer back over the edge into the canyon they had just scaled. After resting for a few minutes they set off again into the rolling, timbered slopes that led them toward the foothills. Through the next few hours they stopped every mile or so for a rest, using shade when they had it, keeping a close eye on their backtrail as they grew wearier and wearier. Calling a halt more and more often, their meager supply of strength flagged.

By early afternoon the men began to complain of thirst, their tongues swelling, sticking to the roofs of their pasty mouths. With another patch of rugged country behind them, Grouard and Pourier started them down toward the river bottom once more. In pairs and trios the men lumbered to the water's edge, gathering where the Tongue eddied in a shallow pool. They would lean out on their elbows, drinking long and deep of the cold river. With no canteens saved after the ambush, they were able to take none of the icy water with them. Only what a man could drink before pushing on.

Back toward the line of timber on the slopes above, Grouard led them, heading for a point pocked with numerous boulders, Donegan trudging second in file. No more than a quarter mile had they covered when the half-breed
suddenly dived onto his belly. He twisted about, signaling frantically for the rest to flatten themselves on the ground. He was holding a finger to his lips as Seamus dragged himself up beside Grouard.

Donegan whispered. “What'd you see?”

Without saying a word Frank pointed back to the north, the direction they had fled earlier in the day. Donegan spotted the two dozen or more warriors, easy enough to make out at this middistance, emerging from the edge of a hillside, on the march east toward the gentle country.

“From here I can't see if they're painted for war or not,” Donegan whispered.

“Don't matter,” Frank grumbled. “They find us out here, it won't mean nothing that they ain't painted. They'll have our scalps.”

The lieutenant slid up behind them, stopping near their boots.

“A war party?”

Grouard only nodded.

Sibley asked, “What you want us to do?”

Quickly Donegan looked this way and that. Above them, in the direction Grouard had been heading, stood a low knoll cluttered with small boulders.

“Up there,” Seamus suggested.

Grouard nodded. “Lieutenant, take your men up there to those rocks. Keep 'em low. And quiet. We can make a stand of it there.”

Without a complaint Sibley pushed himself backward and went about giving his men their orders. One by one those frightened scarecrows got to their feet and scurried up the slope in a crouch, diving in among those rocks, where they sat heaving loudly. It was the toughest exertion they had endured all day.

“You think they might be that bunch what ambushed us?” Seamus asked.

Grouard shook his head finally. “Don't believe so. See? Don't seem like that bunch is following tracks.”

Seamus replied, “They are moseying pretty easy, at that.”

“Could be a hunting party.”

More horsemen emerged around the edge of the distant hill. Donegan said in a whisper, “Could be they're a big war party.”

“Chances are,” Grouard said glumly, pushing himself up from the ground slowly, his face showing the measure of his pain.

Pourier watched the pair approach, the last to reach the rocks. He asked, “Are they coming?”

“Likely they are,” Grouard said quietly.

Donegan watched the effect of those words on the two dozen men scattered in among the boulders. He heard Sibley sigh, watched the lieutenant get to his feet, standing there as a clear target should the enemy present themselves at that very moment.

“All right, men. We must be ready to sell our lives as dearly as possible.”

“Jesus God,” John Finerty whispered, wagging his head and making the sign of the cross.

Patting the newsman on the shoulder fraternally, Seamus glanced at Finerty's big shoes, a soldier's brogans clearly too big for the civilian, curved up at the toes the way they were. He grinned, for they reminded him of a leprechaun's green slippers—had they not been constructed of such heavy cowhide, thick-soled and scuffed nearly free of all black dye during the past few weeks of campaigning in the wilderness.

“We're in pretty hard luck of it,” Sibley continued, his voice even. “But damn them—we'll show those red scoundrels just how white men can fight and die, if necessary.”

“We'll take all we can with us,” vowed Corporal Warren.

“That's right,” Sibley continued. “We have a good position here among these rocks. Let every shot you make count for an Indian.”

Seamus watched the men silently go about the inspection
of their weapons and ammunition, reminded how men of a certain kind hunker down and go strangely quiet when confronted with the prospect of certain and sudden death. Reminded how some men grow loudmouthed and boisterous, strutting like fluffed-up cocks, while other men go crazed and cowardly … but those who never really think of themselves as particularly courageous just don't say a goddamned thing—because they're dealing with it inside. Men grow quiet, thinking on loved ones left behind at home. Worrying more about those they would be leaving behind than about their own desperate situation.

It always was the quiet ones who struck Seamus as the bravest of all.

Looking around him, he felt sure they could make a stand of it right there in those rocks, even if they were outnumbered, three, maybe even four, to one. On their left, not far off to the north in the direction where they had come that day, there lay a steep precipice that overhung the stream where they had just quenched their thirsts. Off to their front the woods thinned out on the eastern slopes of the knoll. To the south there wasn't much cover at all across the rolling hillsides. Still, to their rear they were well protected by an irregular line of boulders of all sizes. To the south, on their right—that was the only direction the enemy horsemen could make a charge out of it.

For the next hour the scouts, soldiers, and civilians watched the war party cross leisurely from left to right, eventually heading onto the heaving plain cut into turkey tracks by the jagged flow of those many feeders of the Tongue River.

Behind Donegan, Pourier got to his feet in the lengthening shadows of afternoon. “Time we should go, Lieutenant.”

Sibley looked over his men one more time. “I think we should rest awhile more.”

“Already had a rest,” Grouard said, stiffly shifting from one sore buttock to the other.

The lieutenant sighed. “I ought to give the men a little more rest.”

Seamus looked them over himself. Their eyes had filled with growing despair, sagging in weariness, the skin on their faces gone haggard with fatigue. Nothing but water for over a day. Finally the Irishman gazed at the sky, calculating the sun's fall. He turned to Grouard, then to Pourier. They both nodded weakly.

“All right, Lieutenant. Suppose we sit tight right here for a while. Maybe till the sun goes down.”

“Yes,” Sibley replied in a voice that registered no victory, much of the verve gone out of his speech. “Till the sun goes down.”

Chapter 15
8-9 July 1876

“T
ime to get your men up and moving,” Seamus said as darkness sank down on the Tongue River. He turned from the lieutenant to watch the men wake one another slowly, most every one of them moving in that painful manner of men gone too long without something in their bellies.

Kneeling by Grouard, the Irishman said, “Let's go, Frank.”

“Don't know that I can,” the half-breed complained, shifting from one buttock to the other. “Why'n't you just leave me to come along later?”

“C'mon now, I ain't leaving you,” Seamus said. Shifting his rifle to the left hand, he reached down to cup his right under Grouard's arm.