Cry of the Hawk

32

July, 1867

THEY HAD COVERED at least half the ground from the South Platte to Fort Wallace, marching on a trail a shade east of south.

Shad Sweete was today riding point, far in the advance of Custer’s columns. Alone. For three days Jonah Hook had been assigned to bring up the rear of the columns, closing file and watching the backtrail for both stragglers and lurking hostiles. At least that’s what Custer called it.

Yet it was really nothing more than Custer’s way of punishing the civilian scout for what had happened back at the South Fork of the Republican. Make Hook eat the dust of the entire regiment and wagon train as the command ground its way through the low, grass-covered hills of western Kansas. Every night a few miles closer to Fort Wallace and the Denver Road. That much closer to some real food and some shade.

Someone had reminded Sweete this morning that it was the twelfth. July. Just the word itself had always made him hot enough even without this midsummer sun suspended overhead. At least it was nudging off midsky now. Casting a little bit of a shadow it seemed. Not like at full high, when the only shadow a man could see was directly under a horse’s belly.

It was in that bright light shimmering off the rolling prairie land that he spotted the big-winged black birds fluttering down to roost not far ahead. They were cackling, fighting among one another over their carrion—but scattered momentarily at his approach. The great buzzards came to a rest just yards away, craning their great wrinkled necks at the man as he brought his horse to a halt, having first circled upwind.

A terrible stench greeted Shad when he drew close.

Trying not to breathe through his nose, he ground-hobbled the horse with the rein, then stepped up, cautiously, his eyes watering with the strong smell of death. His skin already crawled, knowing this was only the beginning of it.

“Damn,” he muttered when he recognized what was left of the telltale brand on the torn meat of the rear haunch.

Without slowing, the old man snagged up the rein and did not use the stirrup to vault atop the saddle. In a tight circle he brought his horse around, hammering it with his heels. He feared he knew already.

At the top of the next hill, he was sure of it. Ahead of him, in that broad bowl of rolling country, he spotted three more … then a fourth … four bunches altogether, knots of the big-winged black birds swirling overhead, landing, kee-rawing, then ripping flesh from bleaching bone.

He had seen enough and turned his horse around, pounding hooves back across the sunbaked prairie to the head of the strung-out cavalry column. Shad could see Hickok’s mouth O up, and imagined what the chief of scouts was hollering back to Custer.

“Rider coming in, General! It’s Sweete.”

He brought the big Morgan mare hard around, slowing her, nostrils flaring as he matched the gait of the lieutenant colonel’s mount.

“You and Hickok might wanna come have a look. Something I run onto that will snag your interest, General.”

“Indians?” Custer asked, his pale, sunburned face flushing with excitement.

“Not exactly.”

“Some sign of hostiles?” Hickok inquired.

Shad leveled his eyes on the young chief of scouts. “All the sign a man would care to see.”

Custer turned in the saddle, flinging orders to his adjutant and to the officer of the day to continue their march at the present pace. Then he broke out Major Elliott, along with a sergeant and a half dozen men to escort the two officers behind the two scouts.

“Lead on, Mr. Sweete.”

Without a word, Shad reined away from the head of the column, pointing his nose a little more east of south than the line of march had been taking.

“Buzzards?” Custer inquired as they topped the knoll where they could see the first gathering of the huge flesh-necked meat-eaters.

“Something dead down there, General,” Hickok said.

Custer cleared his throat, removing one of the damp deerskin gloves and stuffing it in his belt. “Mr. Sweete will tell us if we’re going to find a body down there.”

“Only a horse.”

He led them far around the bloating carcass of the white horse, coming back into the stinking carrion on the upwind drift of the prairie breeze rustling the dried grass. That gentle wind and the noisy protests of the scattered buzzards proved the only sound, besides the slow clop of the hooves, then the scrape and grind of Custer’s boots as he got down, alone, and strode purposefully forward to have a look for himself.

He came back to his mount after but a moment, only then removing his hand from his mouth and nose.

“There’s more, Mr. Sweete?”

Shad waited for Custer to swing into the saddle. “Up yonder, General.”

“More of the same?”

Pursing his lips to keep from puking the words, he wagged his head. “No. It’s soldiers.”

Sweete and Hickok watched Custer’s lips form the word, but left it unspoken as he sighed, his eyes narrowing on the middistance. “Take us to them, Mr. Sweete.”

They put the miles behind them, not that many, really. But enough to see it had been a running battle. By the time they topped the last knoll and Shad reined up the entire escort, the flat, sun-shimmering bowl lay before them, populated now with only the kee-rawing, noisy birds of prey.

“One of ’em had his horse go down on him back there,” Shad explained. “Signs of his boots tell it. He was running hard. Iron-shod hoofprints circled back, picked the fella up, and they tried to make it double.”

Custer swallowed. “They didn’t make it, did they?”

“None of ’em, General. I figure that first bunch of buzzards up ahead, down there—just one horse and two bodies there—they made a hell of a fight of it.”

The lieutenant colonel ground his teeth. “Let’s go.”

One horse. Two men. One directly in the tangle of the dead animal’s legs, taking cover. The other body a few yards off. Either dragged there by the warriors working over the bodies, or by the huge, broad-winged birds attempting to drag off their stinking meal-claim.

“This the first time you’ve seen what a warrior can do, General?” Hickok asked.

Custer shook his head, swallowing hard. “No.” He looked up at the old mountain man. “Who was it—the bunch who did this?”

“I got an idea, General. Let’s go see the rest afore I say for sure.”

There were two more horse carcasses, each with a man’s naked, white, bloated, and sunburned body nearby—each man having fought to the end alone—until they came upon the last stand, where the eight had dropped their horses and hunkered down to make a fight of it to the last.

“Bastards didn’t leave much of ’em,” Hickok said, holding his bandanna over his mouth and nose.

Shad breathed through his mouth. Still the stench of it stung his tongue with a sour burn. High meat, he thought. Just what them goddamned buzzards love to eat. High meat going to soup under this unforgiving sun. He prayed to be long gone from there, but knew he would stay until the column arrived and this bunch had a decent burial.

“They were on the road to Fort Wallace?” Custer asked.

Hickok glanced at Sweete. Shad nodded.

“Yes,” Hickok answered. “Headed that way.”

“Likely they figured they would meet up with some sign of you between the Platte and Wallace,” Shad explained.

Custer ordered three of the soldiers to ride back and bring the columns on at moderate speed. A burial detail … shovels … and some prayers were needed over these men, is what he told them before sending the trio off.

“Second Cavalry,” said the lieutenant colonel.

“You know any of them, General?”

“Can’t say as I do, Hickok.” He pointed at the one body with long, black, unbraided hair. It had been stripped and scalped, but for the most part remained unmutilated. Something clearly evident compared to the butchery practiced on the other eleven bodies.

“Who was that?”

Hickok shook his head.

“Name of Red Bead.” Shad looked away to the west where the sun would not fall for many hours yet. Too many hours, and he wanted to be far away by then. Not that he was particularly superstitious about death. But Red Bead and his soul would haunt this ground forever.

“He Cheyenne … Pawnee?” Custer asked.

“No, General. He was Sioux.”

Custer looked up with those blue eyes of his, glaring into the tall mountain man’s face. “You mean he was Sioux … like the ones who killed him?”

Shad nodded.

“That why they didn’t take his scalp?”

“They respected him. Whoever it was killed this bunch—someone knew Red Bead and didn’t want his body touched for the long trip across the Star Road.”

“He died as bravely as the rest,” Custer commented quietly. “I’ll say prayers over his grave as well.”

“You want to show your respect for how brave that Injun died, General Custer,” Shad stepped right up to the soldier, “you’ll wrap his body in a blanket and leave it lay right here. Don’t you dare say your white medicine words over his body. It would be a mighty bad sign to do such.”

“Just leave his body here? Not bury him with military honors?”

“He’s already been honored by whoever killed him, General,” Shad explained. “Just let his body be … for the wind and the birds of prey … and the winters yet to come visit this sacred place.”

Jonah hadn’t seen such savagery in longer than he could remember—if ever.

Two of the white soldiers with Lieutenant Lyman S. Kidder’s doomed patrol had evidently been alive enough when the warriors reached them; then they had been tortured to death. Two small fires over which to exact some excruciatingly delicious agony on their prisoners while death lingered, hovering closer and closer.

Every nose hacked off. Faces hammered into pulp. Tongues severed at the root. Shoulders, elbows, wrists, hips, knees, and ankles all with sinews and tendons severed. Flopping loose as a wood marionette when the burial detail hauled the bodies over to each shallow grave. Other soldiers were assigned to bring along the severed limbs.

Naked, white, puffy bodies were lowered into the shallow, yawning holes and quickly covered up by the grunting, puking burial detail, each man sweating through it, some collapsing. The officer in charge had to order another man up to complete what the others could not. Few made it through without losing what they had left in their bellies from breakfast many hours before.

Each body pierced with so many arrows had reminded Jonah of the soft velvet pincushion his mother had used almost daily back in the Shenandoah, down in the shadow of Big Cobbler while he was growing into a man. Before he moved to Missouri. Before he marched off to war behind General Sterling Price. And ended up never seeing his family again.

He squeezed the thought from his mind—the way he wrung his socks out once they reached Fort Wallace. Hard, even savagely—he forced the thought from his mind every time it came to haunt him with not knowing. Trying again to concentrate on that image of his mother’s pincushion—so he would not have to remember the image of those twelve bodies, each bristling with no less than forty, perhaps fifty shafts, silently rustled by the omnipresent prairie wind.

It was something he was coming to think on less and less now. Only out here on the plains was the wind always blowing. Not like this back where he was born, nor in that Missouri valley where the curtains still hung, motionless in the broken windows like the eye sockets on buffalo skulls. Out here, the wind always blew.

It cleansed the land and the air that moved over it. Without stop, he figured. Nothing lasted for long out here. But then, everything stayed the same forever here too. Funny, but to his way of thinking right now as he sat in a little patch of shade beside the limestone walls of Fort Wallace, Kansas Territory, that fit in some type of symmetry.

Nothing lasted long out here. Yet everything stayed the same forever.

Victory … or death. He thought often on that now. Seeing that the doomed dozen had been given little choice but to die with as much honor as each of them could muster. Dying was lonely, even with others around you. No man do it for you. It came down to it, Jonah had seen enough of the dying already. Came close a couple times himself. The coldest he had ever been. Wondering at the time if he’d ever be warm again.

And here he sat, sweating in this piece of shade as the sun settled. A Monday he was told by Wheeler, the contract post commissary agent, 15 July.

Custer strode out of the post commander’s office into the easing of the sun minutes later, yanking on his sweat-stained deerskin gloves. He tugged down the big, cream-colored, broad-brimmed hat and adjusted the blood red tie at his Adam’s apple, letting the breeze nudge it over his shoulder among the strawberry curls.

He was a sight, Jonah had to admit. The man who had cut a swath through one Confederate horse outfit after another. Twelve mounts shot out from under him. The Yankee who whipped J.E.B. Stuart at Gettysburg back to sixty-three. And the one who bottled up the old man himself, Robert E., in the wood down to Appomattox near McLean’s new farmhouse.

Custer.

By God, the man was pulling out from this run-down motley collection of limestone buildings and adobe dugouts with an escort of four officers and seventy-two troopers, leaving the rest behind with Major Elliott and what soldiers the Seventh’s own Captain Frederick W. Benteen already commanded here at Wallace. Custer was hurrying east as fast as those with him could follow.

Upon arriving here yesterday, the lieutenant colonel had greedily read dispatches wired from Fort Harker far to the east along the Smoky Hill, learning of the terrible flood that had required Harker to be abandoned. Word had it cholera was ravaging the forts of central Kansas. No other news had been received at Fort Wallace. Nothing from Sherman nor Sheridan. No letters from his beloved wife either.

Jonah cursed Custer for that, then smiled. At least the lieutenant colonel, that Yankee from Michigan, knew now how it felt not knowing where his wife was.

What’s more, the Seventh needed fresh horses to continue their stalking of the plains tribes.

Food enough here at Wallace. Enough to last until Custer was back again with those horses. After the man had sworn to find Libbie and hold her in his arms for one, perfect, summer day.

Jonah watched the man with the cinnamon curls fling his arm forward and set off at the head of his detail, that crimson tie fluttering.

Damn you anyway, Custer, he thought, dragging himself to his feet as the sun eased out of the sky and the air became a squeeze more tolerable.

“You go find your woman, Custer. This goddamned campaign’s over—and you ain’t killed yourself a Injun one. Gone off and shot your own men though … and found the bodies of dozen more good soldiers killed trying to get dispatches to you. But you—you ain’t shot a Injun one.”

Jonah watched the backs of the last pair of the seventy-seven dusty troopers lope out of sight. Custer set a blistering pace.

Yet as much as he hated Custer, Hook understood just how a man could feel down in the private, blackened, buried pit of him—afraid for the not knowing. Not sure if he ever would know what had become of his own woman.

If nothing else, at least he shared that in common with the Michigan Yankee with the long strawberry curls.