Cry of the Hawk

9

Moon of Geese Shedding Feathers

THE DAY AFTER they had killed all the wagon soldiers along the North Platte River, the warrior bands had begun to wander off to the four winds.

No chief could hold together such a great gathering. It was time to prepare for another buffalo hunt, perhaps follow some of the antelope herds. After all, it was a time of celebration that had begun that very night as they danced over the scalps Roman Nose’s Shahiyena had taken near the white man’s fort. Many of the dancers wore the fine blue tunics with brass buttons taken off the soldier dead.

By now the young Oglalla war chief had become a shirt wearer among his people. To put on the white, brain-tanned shirt that reached his knees meant Crazy Horse pledged his life to his people. For their safety he would die. His was a sacred vow, much respected, and with it coming much medicine power.

“H’gun! H’gun!” the old ones had shouted out the Lakota courage-word as he took his oath as shirt wearer.

This brave one who thought so little of himself, who had offered his body as a decoy time and again to lure the white walking soldiers into traps.

Yet in this rich season, Crazy Horse sensed the stab of something intrude upon the celebration of his life—like the piercing pain of a lance point. Runners had come, bringing word from those bands who had stayed close to the Holy Road and the fort called Laramie.

It was there, the young scouts reported, that the soldiers were growing in number, every week more numerous, like puffballs sprouting on the prairie following a spring thunderstorm. Only then they had struck their camp of tents at the fort—marching north as quickly as their mules and wagons would allow once they had crossed the North Platte.

“Who is this man bellowing that all Lakota and Shahiyena males over twelve summers will be killed by his soldiers?” Crazy Horse demanded as the scouts told their story to the war-band leaders: Red Cloud, Young Man Afraid, and High Backbone.

“He is the one who leads his army toward our hunting ground.”

“We must show this soldier chief that we will not stand for his army shoving its fist down the throats of our people,” Crazy Horse vowed, eyes narrowing. “Instead, we will make this soldier chief choke on his own blood!”

“H’gun!” howled Young Man Afraid. “First the soldier chief must find us—and that is not going to be easy.”

But the young scouts had sobering news to tell the warrior chiefs. The soldiers were guided by Indian trackers.

“Tell us of these trackers,” Red Cloud demanded.

“Scalped-heads,” the scout leader replied. Pawnees. “Ten-times-ten. And some mud Indians from the great mud river.” Omaha and Winnebago. “They lead the soldiers into our hunting ground.”

“Our ponies are strong,” Crazy Horse said as the others fell silent. “They have their bellies full of summer grass, and the winds are cooling in their nostrils. We can ride circles around the soldiers and their scouts—and poke our heads up where the white man will not expect us to be. Let us go drive the white man from our hunting ground this one last time. Let us go make the white man bleed!”

“They’re paying you how much?” Jonah asked, disbelieving.

“Five dollars a day,” Shad Sweete answered. “Bridger’s getting ten. He’s chief of scouts.”

“I never seen that kind of money in my life.”

“Scouting pays well. Bad thing about it, you got to eat army food.”

“Why can’t we hunt?”

“You wander off to hunt, likely it will be your scalp hanging from some brownskin’s lodgepole.”

“I think your brain’s been boiled by the sun, Shad. We ain’t seen a feather since we left Laramie,” Jonah said.

“Don’t you ever doubt it, son. They’ve been watching us ever since we crossed the North Platte.”

“Connor ready for ’em?”

“Damn right, he is. That little redheaded Irishman is taking the war right to the Sioux and Cheyenne up there in the Powder River country.”

“He sure as hell is a fighting man, for a Yankee,” Jonah agreed.

“You liked the way he formed his outfit back at Laramie when Walker’s men refused to march, eh? Connor gave them sunshine soldiers five minutes to fight or get walking.”

“That was some show when those guns and field pieces were turned on Walker’s men.”

“This bunch with Connor all think this trip is a lark for ’em,” Shad grumbled as they rode along, the entire column of cavalry, infantry, and 187 wagons strung out for more than two and a half miles. “Some of these greenhorn soldiers lay eyes on antelope or buffalo and go off running their horses to death, like this was some Sunday social.”

Jonah said, “Every Injun in fifty miles knows this column’s coming, don’t they? The way that platoon set fire to the grass day before last. Smoke cloud that high had to tell them we was coming.”

On north from the four columns of Pumpkin Buttes, the pebbled bottom of the murky Powder River became a welcome sight that fourteenth day of August, after Connor’s soldiers had crossed so much dry country north of the North Platte. But while the general had his troops making camp on the level benchland between the sharp bluffs and the river, right where he would soon order Colonel J. H. Kidd and his 250 men to begin building his Fort Connor, Jonah Hook followed Sweete downstream.

Two miles from the soldier camp, the scout stopped, listening, eyes scanning the river bluffs. “Look there, Jonah. And remember it well.”

“What you want me to see?”

“Those circles, all over—where the dried grass been trompled down.”

“Who?” Then he caught himself. “Injuns.”

“Lodge circles, son. A fire pit in every one. And each circle likely means three warriors of fighting age. You remember that too.”

“Those little brush shelters there by the riverbank. That for the children to play in?”

“Hell, no,” he said, smiling, some of the nervous watchfulness gone from him. “Those the places where the young warriors sleep when they’re too old to stay with their families, but don’t have a squaw of their own yet. They lay brush and blankets over the top of those wickiups to keep out the rain.”

“How many warriors was here, Shad?”

He wagged his head. “More’n that little Irishman can cut his way through in a day—if they decide to ride down on us.”

Two days later, Jonah heard his name called and turned to find Sweete riding up to him, leading a second horse through the scattering of tents.

“C’mon, Jonah!” he huffed. “We’re going scouting.”

He didn’t need a second invitation. Hook took the reins and climbed aboard. “Where to?”

“Riding out with some of North’s Pawnee. North by west. See if we can scare up some sign.”

The Pawnee trackers were not long in doing just that.

By midmorning, they came across a fresh trail of some two dozen hostiles, including at least one pony dragging a travois. The Pawnee immediately grew excited. They halted and milled about a moment, talking excitedly among themselves, then dropped to the ground to tie up the tails of their ponies. Each one prepared himself for the coming fight by performing his personal medicine.

Hook watched, wide-eyed, as most stripped off their army tunics. Others adorned themselves, smearing paint on face and chest, tying feathers in hair and the manes of their ponies. When all was ready, the group leapt atop their ponies and rode on with a single wild cheer.

That cry sent a chill of anticipation down the Confederate’s spine, like a ghost from Platte Bridge Station.

Yet for the next four hours as they dogged that enemy trail, the entire Pawnee battalion led by Major Frank North fell eerily quiet.

“They’re moving fast,” Sweete whispered to Jonah.

“We’re gonna have to move faster, aren’t we?” He watched Shad nod. “Who are they, this bunch?”

“Can’t tell for sure. But my money would lay on them being Cheyenne. If I know any tribe, it’s the Shahiyena.”

“Shahiyena,” he said the word, rolling it around on his tongue the way a man would a quid of chew. “They’re the bunch you said killed Lieutenant Collins at the bridge.”

“Had to been. Sioux liked the man. Cheyenne still carrying a mean heart for what happened down on the Little Dried River last winter. They ain’t giving no quarter to no white man—and they ain’t expecting none either, Jonah.”

He wasn’t sure if it was the late-summer heat, or if it was the pinched look of determination on Shad’s face, but Hook sensed a rumble of apprehension troubling his bowels. He caught himself gazing about at the other riders, Pawnee all except for North and Sweete and himself, hoping these Indians would know how best to fight other Indians when the time came.

Trouble was, Jonah wasn’t reassured. It was one thing to march out to fight Indians with a group of soldiers around you and a mountain howitzer backing you up—not that it was anything like the heavy field artillery both sides battered one another with at Corinth and on up at Brice’s Crossroads. And it was an entirely different matter when you were riding out with Indians to fight Indians.

“You stay close,” Shad whispered, his great hand gripping Jonah’s arm in a sudden lock, then releasing the hold. “We’re going to a gallop, son.”

The words were barely out of the scout’s mouth when the trackers hammered their ponies into a run behind North and his Pawnee sergeant. Hook figured they had decided to eat up ground faster, chew away at the hostiles’ lead.

Steadily up, then down, the swales of the rough, rolling land bordering Powder River, the Pawnee tenaciously clung to the trail as the sun eased down behind Cloud Peak in the faraway Big Horns. Twilight came over the high land, and with it North halted his Pawnee. The trackers had a quick, animated discussion with their white commander. Sweete came back to find Jonah sitting in a small patch of grass, where he was watching their two horses graze.

“North’s sending about half of his bunch back.”

“Why?”

“Their ponies are done in. They’ll go back and tell Connor what we’ve found—and tell him we’re going on in to find the enemy.”

He swallowed. “Then you figure to stay on the trail?”

Sweete knelt in front of Hook. “You don’t have to come, Jonah. I came to tell you to ride back with the Pawnee.”

Something pricked his fierce pride of a sudden. “Sure—so the rest of you can say I didn’t have the balls to ride with you after those Cheyenne warriors—that it?”

Sweete smiled. “That mean you’re coming along with me?”

“Damn right it is, old man,” he snarled, getting to his feet. “Anyone gonna say Jonah Hook ain’t got the bottom to chase these red savages down, better be ready to eat his words.”

“No one said you ain’t got the grit, Jonah,” Sweete said, backing up with a huge smile. “Figured there was fire in you when I met you, first off.”

Later that evening after half the trackers had headed back to Connor’s camp on their played-out ponies, North and Sweete pushed the rest on down the Powder until total darkness made it impossible to pursue the hostiles any longer.

“North’s sending two of his best ahead on foot to stay with the trail.” Sweete settled onto the cold ground beside Hook, their horses nearby, jaws grinding the dry, brittle grasses with a reassuring crunch. “Get your saddle off and wipe that horse down with some grass, son. We’ll pick up and move out soon as it gets light enough to follow in a few hours.”

As far as Hook was concerned, it was still too damned dark to do anything but sleep when the old scout rousted him from the warmth of those two blankets he had wrapped himself in beneath the whirling stars overhead. So he was amazed that by the time he had tightened the cinch and remouthed the bit he had loosened while the horse grazed, the sky along the east had grayed enough to allow a man to pick out nearby landmarks and just barely make sense out of the trail that hugged the bank of the Powder River.

It gave him a newfound respect for not only the Pawnee trackers, but for Shad Sweete as well.

“One of these days, you get to Missouri like you said—I want you to teach me everything you know about tracking the enemy.”

Sweete smiled slowly. “Don’t have to wait till I come visiting you and your family down in Missouri. We got plenty time to get started on your lessons while we’re here.”

Just before sunrise, they came up on the two trackers North had sent ahead. Unable to understand either the Pawnee tongue or the sign language used in that gray dawn, Hook nonetheless sensed he understood the import of their talk. Especially when he looked on down the direction the trail was taking and spotted what the trackers were indicating.

Thin wisps of smoke rising slowly into the still, cool dawn air. Behind the bluffs not that far downriver.

“They’re Cheyenne, all right!” Sweete whispered with fiery excitement. “Northern—and that means they’ll fight like the dickens, Jonah. You loaded and ready for bear?”

“S’pose I’m ready as I’ll ever be, Shad. We gonna follow ’em again till we catch ’em?”

“Shit—we’ve caught ’em. Them two hurried back to meet us along the trail—to tell North the Cheyenne was already packing up to move out.”

As North and Sweete led their forty-eight Pawnee around the base of the bluff toward a thick stand of alder bordering the Powder, Hook caught his first glimpse of the quarry they had chased for a day and most of the night.

“Watch out for the women, if there be any, Jonah,” Shad instructed at the Confederate’s side. “But just remember the squaws can be as deadly as the bucks. They’ll fight hard as their men—God bless ’em. Heya!”

Hook watched as the old trapper licked the pad of his thumb, then wiped it down the bridge of his nose. Wetting his thumb again, Sweete made a cross just below the brim of his old hat, swiping across the eyebrows. As North kicked his bunch into a gallop with a wild screech, Shad opened his eyes, having made his private medicine. He grinned over at the startled Hook and added his voice to the wild calls of the Pawnee and the not-too-distant cries of the Cheyenne.

“Hopo! C’mon, Jonah—it’s a good day to die!”

With the surge of his own hot adrenaline, the sweep of the charging horses kicking up dust and clods of yellow soil into his nostrils, the wild cries of both Pawnee and the retreating Cheyenne, who now understood they were being attacked by Indians and not white men, Hook fought down the bile of fear for the unknown.

His hands were sweating on the reins and as he thumbed back the hammer on the carbine, finding the cap securely hugging the nipple. A trickle of cold ran between the cheeks of his ass as they burst past the stand of alder where the Cheyenne had camped for the night. The odors of their fires were strong in his nostrils as they shot through the grove. Something foreign on the wind as well—it made him think he was actually smelling the warriors who had spent the night on that ground.

Bullets sang through the air, their music brutally yanking him back to surviving in battle once more. But there was no clear battle line. The Cheyenne had spread out on their front, half heading toward the riverbank, and the others hurrying toward the low, chalky bluffs. Already among them were the first of the Pawnee, cutting off the escape of those Cheyenne who stayed atop their ponies.

Most of the enemy had dismounted and were turning their animals loose before wheeling around to find cover and return the Pawnee fire.

The cries of animals and men were loud in his ears—nothing new, for he had been blooded all the way from Pea Ridge to Corinth where the Yankees found him in that scooped-out depression he had crawled into when he could not retreat—not with that bleeding leg wound that seeped his juices in a greasy track across the forest floor.

The Yankee army surgeons had told their prisoner his leg would have to come off. But he had refused their suggestion of help by knife and saw.

“Better to die soon with two legs, than to die the slow death of a cripple prisoner of the Yankees, with no hope of running for it,” he had told them, gritting his teeth on the pain that tasted like sucking on a rusty iron nail.

Instead, Jonah had requested whiskey and got brandy instead, along with sulfur to pour into his own wound. Two days later he dug the Union minié ball out while the surgeons watched, unashamedly amazed at the Rebel’s grit. Pinching that smear of lead bullet up between his fingers, and slowly opening the pink purple muscle with slow strokes of a surgeon’s straight razor, Hook swallowed down more and more of the pain with each heartbeat. Along with more of the brandy he asked for, and poured into the wound when he finished—then promptly passed out.

Jonah found a target ahead, climbing the low bluff just in front of him. Lining the warrior in his sight, a sudden rustle of brush made him glance to his left as a warrior sprang from the alders and willow, yanking up his captured rifle.

There was no time to think, or aim. Jonah whirled and pulled the trigger as he saw the warrior’s muzzle spit a burst of orange. Like jagged teeth scraping across his flesh, the bullet stung his upper arm at the same instant the Cheyenne was catapulted backward into the underbrush.

Jonah stood there, breathing deep, slowly climbing down from the saddle, gripping his bloody arm. Never had he killed anyone so close. The Indian lay there, not moving while Hook quickly glanced at the long, bloody track parting the sleeve of his blue army tunic. He didn’t like wearing Yankee blue anyway.

“Arrrggghhh!”

He had time only to spin, finding a second warrior leaping over the dead body, a small-headed tomahawk held high in the air. Hook met the charge with only his muscle, pushing the weapon into the air with his empty rifle. Both men tumbled, the warrior falling forward, Hook collapsing backward with the force of the collision.

The warrior sailed on over, sprawling on his back as Hook arose, swung the carbine, and connected in the Cheyenne’s rib cage full force. Air exploded from the warrior as he reeled backward, clawing for the knife at his belt.

With a shrill growl that rose to become the Rebel yell, Hook charged the ten feet separating them, driving the rifle butt into the Indian’s chest. The knife dropped. Hook smashed the butt into the Indian’s jaw.

The warrior collapsed, his mouth spurting shiny crimson across his yellow face paint, splattering his chest. He growled back, like a wounded animal, dragging feet under him, preparing to rise.

Taking the rifle barrel in both hands, Hook swung it just as he had battered axes at trees in both the Shenandoah Valley back in Virginia, and on that land he cleared to build a home for Gritta and their children. That quiet, narrow valley back home.

Blood splattered on him as the buttstock cracked against the skull.

The Cheyenne collapsed like a damp lampwick.

Jonah Hook stumbled backward one step, then two. And on the third, he collapsed as the creeping darkness washed over him.