Cry of the Hawk

27

Moon of Fattening

NEVER BEFORE HAD Pawnee Killer been so proud of his warriors.

Stripped of almost everything his people owned, his angry warriors were making a wreck of the Smoky Hill Route: burning, killing, looting, running off all stock from the road-ranches. With every new day, Pawnee Killer’s people were regaining what they had been forced to abandon in the valley of Pawnee Fork to the soldiers who had put the villages to the torch.

For the rising of six suns now, the warriors had brought fear to the white men who laid the heavy iron tracks that carried the smoking horses. They had killed many of the workers and run off the rest who fled on their tiny machines that never strayed from the iron tracks. Then the young warriors set to work, bending rails and burning cross ties.

The real fun began two days later when a column of dark smoke appeared on the far horizon. The smoke kept shifting. Never staying in the same place on that bleak meeting of earth brown and sky blue.

Pawnee Killer stepped from the cross ties to the rail bed, and in so doing his moccasin brushed the great, heavy iron rail. It trembled, ever so slightly, but nonetheless trembled beneath his foot.

Cautiously, as one would approach a deadly snake, the Brule chief went to his knees, bending over the iron rail. Then gingerly laid his ear to it, as he would lay his ear on the ground to learn of the approach of enemies or buffalo. Many of the rest had halted their destruction, watching him in curious fascination.

“It hums!” he declared, grinning, raising his head.

Others now fell to their knees along both of the long rails, yelling for quiet, bickering, shoving for a place along the cross ties. Every one of them bent over, an ear on the rails.

They laughed and shouted their joy.

“The white man comes. It is his smoking horse that brings him!” shouted Pawnee Killer. “Let us welcome him!”

There were several white men on that train comprising a belching locomotive, wood tender, and a flatcar filled with armed white men. With a screech of brakes, a peculiar and new sound to Pawnee Killer’s ears, the hissing, smoking engine slowed atop its iron rails as the white men hollered out warning to one another, craning their necks from window holes in the smoking monster, spotting the torn-up tracks.

The great, heavy, belching iron horse did not slow soon enough.

It eased off its tracks like a huge, old herd bull, derailing into the burned cross timbers, striking the heated, bent rails with a loud, shrill scraping that raised the hairs on the back of Pawnee Killer’s neck. Then slowly, like that herd bull settling in a buffalo wallow, the engine sank off the edge of the roadbed and eased over as the white men scrambled off the flatbed car.

Pawnee Killer’s warriors swept into motion, and their own keening war cries rose to the hot, pale sky overhead.

The monstrous bulk of the engine lay on its side, hissing, spitting steam like winter’s gauze over a prairie river come the Moon of Seven Cold Nights. Inside the belly of the huge monster, a gurgling, roiling, spitting rumble belched and blew while the white men dug in behind the wreckage and made it known they had come to fight.

For better than two hours, Pawnee Killer’s warriors charged past the white men, burrowed like frightened field mice where the red-tailed hawks cannot get at them. A few of the warriors were winged, hit with a lucky shot when they did not drop on the far side of their ponies in time.

And when he called off the attack late that afternoon, Pawnee Killer did not even know if they had killed any of the white men who rode the iron monster now lying mute and motionless. As the war chief drew up and halted on a nearby hill, looking back this one last time, that steam engine now reminded him of some gelded stallion. Impotent and powerless.

“Hopo!” he yelled to the others, who swirled around him, flush with victory, three carrying the scalps of the white men who did not make it to cover quickly enough at the beginning of the attack.

“H’gun! H’gun!” they cheered him with the Lakota courage-word.

“It has been a good day—watching the smoking monster die!” he cried, shaking his bow at the end of his arm. “A good day for the white man to be reminded what will happen next time he follows the tracks of our people!”

The rains of April had come and gone as the central plains slipped into the warm days and cool nights of May.

And with them, Custer had led his eight companies into Fort Hays to resupply before he could even begin to consider resuming the chase of those hostile Cheyenne and Sioux who had so far successfully eluded him.

Upon their arrival at Hays, the word on every lip was talk of the destruction being made of the entire Smoky Hill Route. Stages attacked, a train derailed, and workers killed. Track crews had abandoned their roadbeds and were fleeing east to safety, demanding action from the army. The entire freight road to Denver City had been shut down. Nothing was moving, except the warrior bands who continued to harass the outlying forts.

Fort Wallace, far to the west along the Federal Road had been under daily attack. And even the nearby Fort Dodge down on the Arkansas was far from immune. Only now, reports had it, Kiowa chief Satanta himself had led a massed raid on Fort Dodge and had driven off more than a hundred head of stock, all while dressed in that pretty blue uniform, resplendent with braid and brass buttons—a gift from the head of the department, one General Winfield Scott Hancock.

“Gonna take some time to get these animals ready to go back out on the trail of those war bands.”

Jonah Hook turned at the sound of the voice. Shad Sweete strode up in the falling light. The ex-Confederate stooped to snatch up another handful of grass, using it to curry his horse.

“I hear some of them soldiers give Custer a new name few days back,” he said to Sweete. “Horse-Killer.”

The big man snorted a quick, light chuckle. “He drove the animals hard, eh?”

Jonah’s gut tightened. “He drove us and his men even harder. No graze or forage for the animals. Little water from camp to camp. A real sin, Shad. Treating stock the way he done—and all the time, coddling up to his hounds the way he does. Takes better care of those dogs than he does his own men.”

The surprising cold of spring coupled with the sudden and early heat of an approaching summer had taken about all there was in the way of strength from the regiment’s mounts. Yet worse still was to find upon their arrival at Fort Hays no feed and forage waiting. Traders and government sutlers had been there before the Seventh Cavalry rode in—weeks ago bartering and selling it off to the tribes.

Hundreds of horses and mules were led onto the prairie to graze as best they could on the new grass.

“Injun ponies live on the stuff,” Hook said as his horse snapped off some more of the growing stalks with a crackling crunch.

“But these horses of ours never meant to live wild and free on the prairie like Injun ponies, Jonah,” said Sweete. “Injun pony bred to eat grass all night and run all day. These horses of Custer’s—they don’t have a snowball’s chance in the hand of the devil hisself.”

Off in the distance, a prairie wolf set up a brief howl. Then another in the pack answered.

“There are critters live off this hard land. And some what can’t, so you’re telling me,” Jonah said as the eerie howls faded.

“Just like the warrior bands, Jonah. They’ll live off the land, running and fighting, and running again. But Custer’s cavalry—these young soldiers—they ain’t fit to run and fight on what the land gives ’em. They need their bacon and hardtack and beans.”

“You see what they had for supper tonight?”

Sweete nodded. “Moldy salt pork. And the hardtack so full of weevils, I swear mine walked right off the plate from me!”

Jonah laughed along easily with the old scout.

“Listen, son—these traders been selling the army what a sutler calls surplus.”

“Goods from the war?”

“The crates is marked with the dates it was packed—years ago, during your war back east.”

“Damn. Didn’t know a man could stoop so low as to send soldiers such food to eat.”

“Some of the bastards back east even sending crates filled with rocks.”

“Can they make ’em pay, Shad?” he asked, stuffing the last handful of grass beneath his horse’s muzzle.

“Government contracts, boy. Never anything be done about it.”

“So we starve along with Custer’s soldiers, that it?”

“Pray you don’t come down with scurvy like some already has. Cholera spreading through some of the other stations, Jonah. Pray you keep your health.”

“Injuns don’t get sick like that, do they?”

He wagged his head. “Not less’n they get too close, rubbing up against the white man, they don’t.”

For all the serious illness, for the lack of food and, worst of all, for all the lack of hope—there was one sure-fire remedy: desertion. And over the next few weeks of despair and waiting for supplies in the growing heat, a growing number of the Seventh U.S. Cavalry tried the remedy.

Yet at Fort Hays there was one officer not about to let pass the slightest infraction of rules, much less insubordination and mutiny. Not to mention out-and-out desertion. Custer vowed he would deal with every infraction swiftly, and harshly.

Without trial, soldiers who had been accused of an infraction of some military regulation or another were confined during the day to a large hole dug in the Kansas prairie, climbing down on ladders that were as quickly pulled up until sunset. It was then those soldiers still conscious from the excruciating heat were allowed to climb onto the cool prairie once more.

Drunks were quickly dealt with: given a stirring ride at the end of a dunking stool that repeatedly plunged them into the Smoky Hill River.

At first deserters were “skinned”—half their heads shaved by the regimental barber. When that did not prove enough of a deterrent, deserters were stripped to the waist and horsewhipped. Yet even then, each morning saw a few more failing to report at reveille. That’s when Custer ordered sentries thrown around the entire regimental bivouac, given instructions to shoot first and ask questions later if a soldier was found outside of camp.

But as hard as he was on his regiment, Custer also gave some relief to the sickening chow his men were forced to eat. He organized hunting parties to push into the surrounding country, killing deer, elk, antelope, and bison. Along with relieving the monotony of the moldy salt pork and weevil-infested hardtack, the hunting parties Custer ordered out gave the Seventh Cavalry a chance to fire their weapons from horseback, improve their aim, and become more familiar with the countryside so different from what most had grown up with back east.

Then on 18 May, Mrs. Elizabeth Custer herself had rolled into Fort Hays, been swept up into her husband’s arms, and spirited off to the privacy of his canvas-and-log shelter.

“Makes a man ache for his own family,” Sweete said quietly as he watched Jonah turn grimly away from the happy reunion.

“Makes a man wanna find those who stole my family.”

Hook shuffled off to find himself a piece of shade.

“When we’re ready—we’ll see what we can do to find hide or hair of that bunch took your kin,” Sweete said as he came to the younger man’s side.

“I’m ready now!” He stopped and wheeled on the mountain man. “We’ll get saddled and pull out right now.”

“Whoa, Jonah! Ain’t as easy as all that. We signed on—”

“You signed on to stay. As for me, I can be gone as easy as I signed my name. Had me enough, Shad. You coming with me?”

He shook his head. “Not yet. Not taking off like this neither. Time comes … we’ll track. Go clear back down into the Territories if’n we have to. Don’t you ever doubt we’ll come up with something.”

Jonah felt the gall rising to his throat. The sudden flare of anticipation and hope warming him once more, so long buried—and now so quickly doused with the cold water of Sweete’s reason.

“Damn you, Shad Sweete!” He captured a fistful of the old man’s greasy calico shirt. “I’ll do it alone, I have to.”

“You go now—hell, you go alone anytime—them roving bands of warriors make a prickly pear of you in no uncertain way.”

“I learned how to take care of myself,” he snapped, turning away.

Shad snagged him by the arm just as quickly. “You watch your temper—”

“Take your hand off my arm!” he snarled at the older man who towered over him.

“Watch your temper … and you’ll keep your hair, Jonah.”

“You saying you’re the one who’s gonna take my hair?”

Sweete released the sinew-tough, rail-thin arm. “No. I don’t figure that mangy scalp of your’n worth the trouble of cutting on, Jonah Hook. I’m just trying to make sense—”

“You coming?” He shook his arm, rubbing it where the big man had held him.

“No.”

“Then I’m going with Artus.” His lips formed a thin line of determination.

“He won’t go.”

Jonah stopped and turned on his heel slowly, hands balled on his hips. “How you so sure?”

“’Cause it’s plain to me that his side of the family got all the common sense.”

It flooded over Jonah, all the rage and disappointment tumbling together into one acid knot eating a hole in the soul of him, plain as the hot Kansas sun overhead.

“When?” Hook finally asked as the tears simmered in his eyes, tears he refused to release.

“When our job’s done with Custer. I gave my word when I signed on. That’s a bond. We’ll go only when the job’s done.”