A Cold Day in Hell: The Dull Knife Battle, 1876

Chapter 26

Big Freezing Moon 1876

He could not see if it was light yet, for he had been many, many winters without the power of sight. But behind his eyes where the sun never shined, Box Elder nonetheless knew. In his mind he could see what was about to happen as clearly as he had seen with his eyes as a young man.

In his dream he heard the thunder of the hooves before he heard it with his ears. Beneath him he felt them coming.

And he sat up.

“Bring me the Sacred Wheel Lance!” he cried, his voice thin and reedy with so much singing and praying among the rocks in the hills last night as the celebration had gone on at Last Bull’s big fire.

Now his throat was sore, and it hurt so to use it.

His young nephew, the son of a son of a friend who wanted the boy to apprentice to the great shaman of the Ohmeseheso, quickly snatched up the ten-foot-long lance at the end of which hung the round rawhide-braided wheel that was Box Elder’s special medicine—given him by the earth spirits so many, many summers ago when he had first begun to use his powerful gifts.

One of those gifts he had used time and again was the power to see what was to happen in some time yet to come.

He had seen the soldiers and their friendly Indians coming.

And now they were here!

Young Medicine Bear helped the frail old man throw back his blankets and the heavy robes and get to his feet.

“Put the long shirt over my head—hurry!”

The youth dropped the long, fire-smoked elk-hide shirt over the gray head, the four long legs of the animal almost brushing the floor of the shaman’s lodge. Besides that heavy shirt, Box Elder wore no more than a breechclout.

“My buffalo moccasins. Hurry—we must go!”

One at a time Medicine Bear shoved them on the old man’s bony, veiny feet, then rose to help Box Elder shuffle to the door and step out into the bitter cold.

“The sun is not at the top of the ridge?” the old one asked, unable to feel its warmth on his face as he emerged from the cold lodge.

“No—”

“Box Elder!”

He turned at the sound of the voice crying out his name. Already screams floated like shards of ice from the lower end of the camp. “Curly? Is it you?”

Then the warrior grabbed Box Elder’s thin arm. “It is I, old friend. Come—we must hurry into the hills with your Sacred Wheel Lance.”

“What of Coal Bear?” Box Elder asked, his voice high and filled with dread.

“He already has Esevone* wrapped in its bundle, and I see they are coming this way,” Curly explained.

“Box Elder!” he heard Coal Bear, the Keeper of the Sacred Hat, call out to him.

“You have Esevone?” the old man asked, wishing his eyes could see, for his ears were already telling him of many guns beginning to explode at the far end of the valley.

“It is on my wife’s back.”

“She is with you? And you have Nimhoyoh?”†

“I do, in my hands—here, feel it now, for we must go quickly!”

Box Elder reached for Coal Bear’s wrist, his fingers working down to the hand that held the round cherrywood stick about the length of a man’s arm. Suspended from the stick was a crude rectangle of buffalo rawhide, the edges of which were perforated, then braided with a long strand of rawhide. From the three sides of Nimhoyoh hung many long buffalo tails, tied to the rawhide shield like scalp locks.

“Hurry, old friend!” Coal Bear repeated.

Laying a hand on Coal Bear’s arm, Box Elder started to move off. “All of us go together. I will flee with you and Esevone! Give the Turner to Medicine Bear so that he might carry it above him on his pony to turn away the soldier bullets!”

Coal Bear gave the heavy object to the young apprentice. “And we must let the woman walk ahead of us,” Coal Bear turned to instruct the other two men with them. “She carries the Sacred Hat and we must not walk too close to her.”

The blind shaman nodded, saying, “I think we should walk a little to the right and behind her, my friend.”

Other warriors appeared like shards of black ice through that cold mist slinking among the lodges, mist that hugged the ground with its bitter, bone-chilling cold. Peeling off to the left and right in a tight crescent behind the woman, Coal Bear and Box Elder, those determined men, formed a protective guard as Coal Bear’s wife walked toward the hills as slowly as if she were merely carrying the sacred object to another camp.

While they moved along, Box Elder held his Sacred Wheel Lance over his head so that the whole group would have its protection from the soldier bullets. First in one hand, then in the other, back and forth he switched it as his thin, bony arms grew tired holding the long lance in the air so that its power could rain down upon them all … but he would not let any of the younger men carry it. Nor did he falter in this duty to his people.

The Sacred Wheel Lance would make them all invisible so the soldiers and their terrible Indian scouts would not see them fleeing with Esevone.

Cries of the dying and screams of the frightened, thunder of hoofbeats and hammer of footsteps, rushed past their little party like a spring torrent cascading from these very mountains, bullets snapping branches and slapping the frozen lodges—but none of it gave Box Elder’s group any concern.

All around them the People ran and the enemy raced.

It was as if Box Elder and the rest were not there.

The hard, icy, compacted snow whined beneath his winter moccasins made of the thick buffalo hide with the fur turned in as Young Two Moon plodded across its silvery surface beneath the last of the night’s starshine. Day was coming.

And with the dawn, so too would come the soldiers.

He believed it not in his mind, but knew it in his belly. With a certainty he had experienced few times in his young life.

Although he was a Kit Fox—and duty bound to obey and serve last Bull—Young Two Moon had seen the soldiers with his own eyes, even walked among them and joined the soldiers’ many Indian scouts at their fires as they spoke in the Shoshone* Pawnee, Ute† and Bannock, even Lakota and Cheyenne tongues! Such a force of pony soldiers and their many, many wolves were not out in this country, surely not out marching in this mind-numbing cold, on a lark.

But that’s just what it seemed to be: a lark for Last Bull and the rest of his Kit Fox Soldiers, who enjoyed themselves far too much bullying the entire camp so that no one could flee to the breastworks, escape to safety, prepare to defend the village.

But Young Two Moon was an honorable warrior. Sadly, reluctantly—he took his place with his warrior society and kept everyone in the camp dancing and singing.

By the time he wearily reached his family’s lodge at dawn, it seemed everyone had already gone to sleep, so exhausted were they from that night-long dance, around and around and around the drum when instead the young men should have had fighting on their minds. Not young women.

It was dark in the lodge. And cold here too. He let his eyes adjust to the dim light as he squatted near his parents’ bed at the back of the lodge. And struggled for a moment more before he knew he had to speak what he had been fighting all night.

“Father.”

He waited a moment.

“Father?”

“What do you want?” Beaver Claws grumbled with fatigue.

“I want my family to get up and dress. Now.”

The man rolled toward his son, pulling the buffalo robe back from his face. When he spoke, his words became frost in the gray light of dawn-coming. “You want us to get dressed? We just came here to sleep! Be quiet and go to bed.”

“Please, father. Get the family up and dressed and come with me,” Young Two Moon pleaded, then turned slightly, hearing the rustle of blankets, finding his father’s second wife rising to an elbow to listen at the side of the lodge.

“The soldiers?” the older man asked.

“Yes. It will be soon,” he replied, his voice thinned by urgency. “Please hurry! The day is nearly here! We must go to the far end of the canyon, climb into the rocks where you will be safe!”

“All right,” Beaver Claws answered in a louder voice, then patted the woman beside him on the rump as he sat up, the blankets and robes falling from his bare chest. “Everyone! Get up! Get dressed! This young warrior believes the soldiers are coming—and I choose to believe him … because he has seen the enemy with his own eyes!”

Black Hairy Dog was not used to such cold as this.

For generations beyond count his people had ranged the southern plains. But now that the white man had rounded up the many clans and forced them onto the reservation in the southern country,* he had fled north with the Sacred Arrows once his father, Stone Forehead, had died.

Now the powerful objects were Black Hairy Dog’s responsibility. On his aging shoulders rested so much of the fate of his people. He was one to trust the visions of the old ones much more than he trusted the preening talk of the war chiefs.

There had been much strutting last night as the People gathered around the great, roaring skunk and danced shoulder to shoulder, sliding their feet a step at a time, the throbbing circle moving right to left, following the path of the sun.

Last Bull’s brash young men, drunk with their sudden power, swayed in the dance, singing out to boast of their war coups over the Shoshone. One of them held aloft the withered hand and arm of an enemy woman. Another cavorted about with a bag filled with the right hands of twelve Shoshone babies. Another, called High Wolf, proudly displayed his necklace of dried fingers. Flitting overhead in the fire’s light wagged some thirty fresh scalps tied at the ends of the long poles as the Kit Fox warriors and their wives sashayed in and out of the grand circle.

When the People warmed to the celebration, the older trophies came out. A warrior swirled into their midst wearing the fringed buckskin jacket he had taken from the body of the man he had killed in the terrible fighting at the north end of the hill above the Greasy Grass River. Another proudly sported the black hat emblazoned with the chevrons of a cavalry sergeant. Instead of a heavy blanket, another warrior pranced about in his soldier-blue caped mackintosh.

All around them voices sang and whooped until they were hoarse. And danced until their legs could barely move in those moments just before sunrise when the drum fell silent and the loudmouthed Kit Fox Soldiers told everyone to be off to bed.

“No soldiers are coming! Do not believe the Elk Scrapers—they are frightened old women! No soldiers are coming!”

So Black Hairy Dog laid his weary bones down in his robes and tried to sleep, but could not. Unable to shake the feeling deep in his marrow that for days had convinced him the village must be moved … time and again he remembered how nearly forty winters before a warrior society among his southern people had beaten the Keeper of the Medicine Arrows with their bows for publicly opposing them.

Again it was the power of the Arrows’ intangible medicine pitted against the might of angry and prideful young men.

He pulled his clothes back on, then clutched a robe around his shoulders as he went to the nearby brush where he had tied his ponies to keep them close. Knowing in his heart that the soldiers were coming. The soldiers always came.

Black Hairy Dog began to drive the ponies up the southeastern slope of the canyon, away from the village, when he heard the first yell break the cold, misty silence on the floor of the canyon.

Then heard that first shot.

And from that far end of the village he heard that first Cheyenne cry out as a woman spilled onto the bloody snow trampled beneath the onslaught.

“The soldiers are here!” Black Hairy Dog screamed, turning in the deep snow, tripping and falling—then picking himself back up to stumble down toward the village. “Hurry! Hurry! The soldiers are here!”

Damned funny, Seamus thought as the horse lurched beneath him, then fell back into its ground-eating stride.

For the life of him he couldn’t figure out why the first of the Cheyenne warriors appearing out of the cold mist were firing at the heights south of the village. They weren’t acting as if they realized the soldiers and their scouts were all but upon them. Instead, the warriors fired and dodged, dropped to one knee and fired, aiming at the Shoshone that Cosgrove and Schuyler had raced to the high ground. Up there Seamus could see the Snake dismounting, horses being led back from the edge of the cliff where the scouts plopped onto their bellies and began to pour some harassing fire down among the Cheyenne lodges.

Not far away, on Donegan’s right, he watched some of the Sioux and Cheyenne scouts peel off for the village, leaving Mackenzie and his headquarters group suddenly exposed. A moment later a Cheyenne warrior leaped to his feet atop the low plateau on the north edge of the valley, leveling a rifle at the soldier chief.

Seamus no more got his mouth open to shout a warning than the colonel’s orderlies all fired their pistols into the warrior. He was pitched back, spinning about, rifle tumbling out of his grasp as he disappeared into the brush, Mackenzie and his orderlies thundering on past.

To Donegan’s left Frank and Luther North led their Pawnee among the first lodges, which were pitched at the end of the camp near the mouth of a dry creek clogged with leafless underbrush and stunted alder. From their left, near the opening of that ravine, a blanketed form sprang up directly in front of Lute North, who whirled his carbine down at the target and fired at almost the same instant that Frank pulled the trigger on his carbine. The shock of both bullets at that range catapulted the Cheyenne warrior off his feet, back into the brush as the horsemen raced on by.

Behind them the Pawnee yelped their approval and praise for making that first kill, “Ki-de-de-de! Ki-de-de-de!”

Singing out, the coatless battalion pushed on for the village, hoping for plunder, ready to fight hand to hand for enemy scalps as they plunged through the camp, intending to meet Mackenzie’s soldiers on the far side and thereby seal off all chance for the Cheyenne to escape. But the delay caused by their recrossing the creek to join Mackenzie minutes before now doomed the colonel’s plan of attack to frustration, if not ultimately to failure.

Already Donegan could make out the dark forms of the Cheyenne spilling from the west end of village far ahead, making for the high ground like coveys of quail flushed from the protective undergrowth.

“Dammit,” he muttered, realizing that with the Cheyennes’ flight, this was bound to turn into a long struggle of it. The warriors would quit fighting only if Mackenzie’s men were able to capture the women and children.

As Seamus reined up at the downstream fringe of the lodge circle, he turned the bay around, then wheeled the horse around again, searching out a target for the long-barreled .45-caliber Colt’s revolver. North of him across the flat ground he saw Mackenzie and those outfits at the head of the charge slow—

A bullet hissed by.

Then a second snarled past his left ear, splitting it painfully.

“God-damn!” he bellowed between clenched teeth. As many times as he had been seriously wounded, still, nothing he had experienced had ever hurt with so much raw-edged torment as that wound to his ear as the cold breeze made every nerve come alive in the ragged laceration.

Jamming his pistol back into its holster over his left hip, Seamus tore off his gloves and yanked at the knot in the greasy bandanna tied at his neck. Ripping off his hat, Donegan quickly whirled the bandanna around several times to make a long bandage he quickly lashed around his head. When it was tied, he pulled on his hat and again hauled out the pistol just as his horse snorted and sidestepped.

Losing his balance with the animal’s sudden move, Donegan spotted the approaching warrior from the corner of his eye as he was pitched from the saddle into the snow.

The lone Cheyenne skidded to a stop, kicking up a slow-rising rooster tail of fine snow with his feet as he brought a repeating carbine to his bare shoulder.

Rolling onto his belly as he landed with a cascade of snow, Seamus stretched out his arm, turned on his side, and squeezed the trigger. Sensing the jolt of the pistol in his paw, he continued his tumble sideways while drawing the hammer back with his thumb a second time.

He felt a bullet whine past him. Too damn close.

Rolling up onto his knees, Seamus brought the pistol’s front blade to that spot where his instinct told him Indian had been … and pulled the trigger again. He watched the slug slam into the warrior’s chest, knocking the Cheyenne off his feet. Spilling backward into the half foot of trampled snow, he skidded on his back a few feet before coming to a stop, arms and legs crooked and unmoving.

The amphitheater around Seamus thundered with the deafening rattle of hooves, shouts of men close at hand, and distant screams of the women bursting out of the far end of the village.

He dragged his legs under him and rose to his feet, dusted some of the snow off his front with that seven-and-a-half-inch pistol barrel, then turned at the hammer of hoofbeats bearing down upon him.

Past him on both sides burst more of the Sioux and Cheyenne scouts, led by Three Bears, streaming into the heart of the village.

Turning, Donegan whistled to the bay, then swept his hat out of snow, shoving it down so hard on the bandanna and flesh wound that it made him wince. Snagging the saddle horn in both gloved hands with the pistol between them, he vaulted atop the horse without using the stirrup and slammed the small rowels of his spurs into the animal’s muscular flanks, it bolted off, straining to catch the scouts plunging into the mass of hide-and-canvas lodges.

Ahead of him the Sioux and Cheyenne advance was slowing, some men dismounting in a noisy, shouting whirl as the fighting became hotter. Less than a hundred yards away Cheyenne warriors were retreating one lodge at a time, fighting hard even in the face of the enemy horsemen.

Off to Donegan’s left the pony ridden by the Sioux chief Three Bears reared, wheeled, and shuddered, becoming unmanageable in the midst of all those singing bullets and shrill voices, wing-bone whistles and lead slapping into the frozen lodge covers. After a great leap while it bowed its back, the pony suddenly tore from side to side crazily, then bolted straight for a cluster of lodges where the rifle fire from a knot of Cheyenne was the hottest.

Almost as fast as the pony bolted away, another Sioux named Feathers on the Head recognized the trouble Three Bears faced. Slamming his quirt down on his own pony’s flanks, he bent low along the withers to avoid the enemy’s bullets. He was all of thirty feet behind Three Bears when the war chief’s horse wheeled to the left, leaped down the creekbank and up the far side, into the other part of the village still firmly held by the Cheyenne—only to halt suddenly in a spray of snow, go stiff-legged, and keel over, spilling its rider against a drying rack loaded with meat, and into the side of a canvas lodge.

Feathers on the Head was across the embankment and among the enemy lodges before a dazed Three Bears even had his legs under him. The horseman held out a foot and extending a hand as he wheeled his pony about, putting himself and his animal between the Cheyenne and his war chief, grunting as he pulled Three Bears up behind him.

It was a pretty, pretty show, Seamus decided, watching the two of them spin about in the next heartbeat, all four of their legs kicking the pony into a gallop to speed them out of that devil’s den of whining lead.

Something warned him, something so airy and ethereal—yet with enough substance that he thought he recognized it as Sam’s voice in his ear, crying out. Seamus jerked around, certain he would find her there, the voice had been that real. Instead, at seventy yards he saw them coming, ten, perhaps a dozen of them: bare-breasted warriors yelling as they raced toward him.

In that next breath Donegan realized he was alone.

With the whine of a bullet passing by his cheek, the Irishman collapsed along the neck of the bay and slapped the long end of the reins down its front shoulder, feeling it explode into motion beneath him. The animal leaped back out of the brush, across the icy stream, where it slipped twice before clawing its way up the cutbank to the north side of the Red Fork, hooves cutting into the crusty snow as lead followed man and horse across the flat toward Mackenzie and his bunch now that the other companies were just emerging along the north side of the canyon.

The cold, icy fingers of frozen mist were only then beginning to lift from the willow-clogged bottom ground.

Why everyone believed Hades was hot, Seamus figured he would never understand. As far as he was concerned, this morning had all the makings of hell itself.

* The Sacred Buffalo Hat.

† The Sacred Turner.

* Sosone-eo-o.

† Mo-ohtavaha-taneo, “Black People.”

* Darlington Agency for the Southern Cheyenne, Indian Territory.