Cry of the Hawk

23

Late March, 1867

“WHAT YOU MEAN you can’t use him?” Jonah Hook asked the two soldiers and long-bearded, unkempt civilian seated behind the table in the shade of this fort porch.

“Your friend there—”

“He’s my goddamned cousin!” Hook snapped.

The officer sighed, smoothing his waxed mustaches this early spring day and continued, “Your cousin doesn’t have enough experience out in this country to warrant the army hiring him as a scout.”

“What am I going to do?” Artus Moser asked in a husky whisper, his eyes telling of his fear. “You got hired on, Jonah.”

Hook stared at the toes of his boots, bewildered.

They had come here counting on the both of them getting hired on to scout for the forthcoming campaign. When the chief of scouts and the officers here gathered learned of Hook’s months of experience along the Emigrant Road and with General Connor’s Powder River Expedition as a U.S. Volunteer, not to mention the fact that he had been employed last fall as a buffalo hunter for the Kansas Pacific Railroad, the army promptly snatched up this tall, gangly Southerner the way summer rain fell in this part of the plains: fast and furious.

Hiring Moser as a scout was a different matter altogether.

“Why can’t you use him?” Hook asked of the long-bearded, middle-aged frontiersman who sat quietly chewing on the stump of a much-battered briar pipe.

“I’ve tried to explain that to you,” interrupted the double-barred officer.

“What if he rides along with me—at no pay?”

The officer slammed an open fist down on the table. “I’ve told you, mister. Now—if you keep at this, you’ll likely find yourself without a job as a scout.”

“I doubt that, Lieutenant,” said the frontiersman, speaking for the first time, and getting a stony glare from the officer for his trouble.

The soldier grimaced and said, “I’ve been given the task of helping you by General Custer himself—”

“And a fine job you’re doing too. But I’ve been hired by the general as chief of scouts, and I’ll hire and fire my own scouts, thank you.” He turned back to Hook. “Besides, any man who went along on that Powder River campaign had to know Gabe Bridger and Shad Sweete.”

Hook smiled, relief washing over him suddenly. “Damn right I knowed both—and those two taught me some on that expedition.”

“That’s why I hired you, Hook. You got the makings. It’s just that your cousin here don’t know a Sioux or Cheyenne from squat.”

“He fought in the war.”

“That was a white man’s war.” The frontiersman tried to make it come out gently, packing his smoldering pipe with a fingertip.

“If he don’t get to come with me—I s’pose I gotta move along.”

“Just as well,” growled the officer, dipping his pen into the inkwell and preparing to scratch the name from the rolls.

The frontiersman clamped a hand around the soldier’s wrist. “You’re fixing to walk out on a good job if this bunch don’t hire on your cousin?”

“I am. Always enough for a man to do out here. I wasn’t looking for my last job when it found me. I s’pose I can always find something to eat and a place to sleep while I’m waiting for something else to come along.”

“Good,” the frontiersman said. “Both of you’ll do.”

Jonah Hook was drawn up short by that. “You mean Artus can come along as a scout?”

“No, I didn’t say that. But I know the wagon master, named Grigsby, is looking for teamsters and herders for the remuda we’ll be wrangling along with the wagon train. If Moser here can handle a wagon or horses—he has him the chance to work with Grigsby.”

“Where we find this wagon master?”

He jabbed the air with the stem of his pipe. “Off yonder.”

Hook glanced in that direction, toward the trees that lined the nearby Smoky Hill River. Then he held out his hand to the chief of scouts. “Thank you, mister. Didn’t catch your name.”

“Joe Milner.”

“You’re the one they call California Joe?”

He beamed. “That’s right.”

“Shad Sweete told me some about you! Knew you up to Oregon country before he give it up and come back to the mountains.”

Milner was smiling broadly, his stained teeth dull against his dusty beard. “After me and Shad helped Ol’ Zach settle them Mexicans down, I got me a pretty wife out to the California diggings before moseying up to Oregon country to try my hand at settling down. Nancy Emma is her name—and she give me a passel of young’uns before I decided I had to come back to these parts just like Shad done. Something about all this open country.”

“Ain’t it true,” Hook replied.

“I’d like to palaver later with you boys,” Joe said as he rocked back in the chair again, stuffing the pipe stem between lips all but hidden beneath by his overgrown mustache. “Catch up on what ol’ Sweete is up to. You both come round.”

“I’ll look to do that before evening.”

They had made it through the worst of the winter. That was enough for any man to take some pride in. Those two weeks lost to him with the bullet-fever in that line shack, then the long time mending with regimental surgeon Porter at the Fort Hays infirmary, and finally the last two months spent getting through the waning days of winter in that dugout they had made for themselves against the side of a hill overlooking Big Creek, not many miles from Fort Hays itself. There had been some small measure of security felt by both Hook and Moser in staying those last violent months of winter near the frontier fort. At times the pair had run across small patrols of cavalry riding this way or that on one errand or another—always seen in the distance, loping along in their column of twos, rarely with a guidon or flag fluttering above their determined purpose.

Were it not for Moser’s skill in tracking deer and finding antelope out on this rolling tableland of central Kansas, they might not have fared as well as they had through that prairie winter. But both men had emerged from the dark days and endless nights of that dugout renewed in some unspoken way. Clearly closer to one another.

With that time behind them both, Jonah better understood his cousin’s need of him here in this foreign land, and dared not tug on that bond hard enough to snap it in two like a rawhide whang.

And without saying anything, Artus showed he understood his cousin’s need for the woman through those long weeks. Hook was clearly grieving in his own way the loss of Gritta, perhaps drowning himself in the squaw’s flesh in some way to numb the pain come of the loss of his family.

Moser put his own thoughts on the coming campaign, his muscles to the task, thereby finding a way to salve his own wounds brought of deep loss.

In this late March there were fourteen hundred soldiers gathering for the coming campaign General Winfield S. Hancock would lead. Besides infantry foot soldiers, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer would ride at the head of eight companies of his Seventh Cavalry: the sword Hancock intended using to punish the Sioux and Cheyenne who had been raiding and killing, stealing, raping and kidnapping up and down central and western Kansas.

Every bit as pressing to the morale of the army itself was the news of a late-December disaster now common knowledge on the high plains. For what was still an inexplicable reason, Captain William Judd Fetterman had disobeyed the orders of his commanding officer and led another eighty soldiers and two civilians to their deaths up on the Bozeman Road, lured into a seductive trap miles from Fort Phil Kearny. Two thousand warriors wiped out the entire command in less than thirty minutes of battle.

The frontier army clearly chafed at the bit, anxious to even the score.

While the military on the plains for the past two years had labored to separate itself from the wholesale slaughter of Indians committed at Sand Creek by some Colorado volunteer militia, the leadership in both the War Department and in the Department of the Missouri were not much concerned now in any distinction between the horse-mounted warriors committing the depredations and the noncombatants back in the villages.

“We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women, and children,” wrote William Tecumseh Sherman to his superior back in Washington City, Ulysses S. Grant.

Indeed, General John B. Sanborn, one of the commissioners appointed to interview frontier officers in his investigation of the Fetterman Massacre found that, “Army officers of high grade openly proclaim their intentions to shoot down any Indian they see, and say that they instruct their men to do likewise.”

Sales of weapons and ammunition to the Indians were suspended in the Department of the Platte in July of 1866. Yet it was not until January of 1867 that General Hancock issued the same order forbidding such sales in his Department of the Missouri. Forever the one given to thoughtful deliberation, Hancock had waited until both his superiors in Washington City, Grant and Sherman, agreed on the need for keeping weapons out of Indian hands.

“You hear the news?” Moser asked.

Jonah Hook turned as his cousin came up. “What news?” He went back to lashing his bedroll into a gum poncho.

“About that Dakota Territory where you was last year. The Powder River country and all.”

“What about it?”

“Whole fort’s buzzing about it. Half a regiment wiped out by Injuns up there just afore Christmas.”

He stopped, slowly looking over his shoulder at the man who cast a shadow over him this early morning. “Where?”

“Place called Fort Phil Kearny they say,” Moser explained. “Cap’n named Fetterman marched off over a ridge with his men—and it was over in less’n half an hour.”

Hook wagged his head in disbelief. “Where’s this fort?”

“They say northwest of the Powder. Near a river called the Tongue.”

“I know that country.”

“That’s why I come to tell you soon as I heard.”

A fear suddenly clutched him in its talons. “Any civilians killed with them soldiers?”

“Word has it two was killed. They was all butchered like hogs for slaughter, Jonah.”

“I don’t doubt it, cousin.” He swallowed hard, rising. “I had two friends up there scouting for the army.”

“Bridger and Sweete?”

He nodded. “Lord, I pray they weren’t the ones butchered with those soldier-boys gone off marching where they shouldn’t.”

Moser wrung his hands in front of him, searching for the right thing to say. “Then just what the hell we doing—marching off with these soldiers?”

Jonah gazed off onto the distant prairie, past the fort grounds and buildings and spring-dampened parade. “Let’s just hope this bunch of soldiers is more’n those Injuns wanna tackle right now.”

“Hope, hell, Jonah! I’m all for praying!”

The wagon boss named Grigsby hollered for his men to account for themselves at the wagon yard, where there was no lack of work backing mules and horses into their traces and trees in preparation for this first day’s march from Fort Hays into Indian country. Off Moser went, with Jonah tying his horse near California Joe’s and Jack Corbin’s.

“I’ll be off yonder for a bit,” Hook told them.

“Hancock’s got us pulling out soon,” Milner replied. “We’re leading his column, Hook. So don’t you be late.”

Jonah grinned. “Never.”

He found her minutes later, where he knew he would.

She was sitting near the dugout where they had fared the winter together, squatting on a buffalo robe, her legs tucked at her side as she drove a bonehandled awl through the thin buckskin she had tanned herself that spring. The Pawnee woman did not immediately look up, though Hook was sure she had heard him draw near.

“Grass Singing,” he said as he settled before her. Still she would not look at him.

Jonah took her chin in his hand, raising her face to his. Only then did he understand why she had been reluctant to look at him.

“You’ve been crying,” he said in English.

She gently pulled her chin from his rough palm and blinked her eyes clear, then went back to poking animal sinew strung with large, moss green beads through the hole she had made with the awl.

“I don’t know how to tell you this,” he said, himself searching for words that would touch her as his hands moved silently before him in sign. A part of him withered when he realized she was not watching his hands, much less comprehending most of his white man’s tongue.

“Hell, some of this you’ll understand, I hope. The rest—well, the rest I hope you’ll figure out down the road some.”

He reached for her hand. She pulled it away as the first large drop of salty moisture spilled down a cheek, no longer held in check, pooled in those blackcherry eyes. Jonah took her hand in his a second time, and now she did not resist.

“I got to go, Grass Singing.”

“Take me,” she said, her eyes imploring him as they flooded.

“Can’t. This is war.”

“My people take women … families on war path.”

“My people don’t. You’ll stay behind. Go find what’s left of your family in Abilene.” And the cold of it hit him as surely as the rising of the warm spring sun caressed the side of his face. “Maybe you can understand I got to keep moving. If I don’t, I can’t ever hope to find my own family.”

She set her beading down, using her hands to sign. “Your family is no more.”

His mind struggled with the concepts she formed with her hands. “No more family,” he repeated, then comprehended. “It’s not true. Who says this?”

Grass Singing said it aloud. “Moser.”

“He lies, woman,” he said it aloud too, forgetting to sign. “My family is alive. Somewhere. I’ll find them. I’ll find every one of them.”

“You go on a fool’s journey,” she signed. “I have prayed to the Great Everywhere that it would not be your final journey.”

He snorted self-consciously. “Me? No—I’m not ready to die.”

Her eyes moistened more. “There is the smell of death all around you.”

“That’s just the blood you’re smelling—”

“I talk now of the death spirits. Their stench is heavy around you, Hook.” The last word she spoke aloud, as there was no sign for his name.

While the rising sun warmed his face, nonetheless a chill splashed down his spine as she said it. Afraid to admit that she might know something he did not. He chose to leave, and now.

Hook stood, reached for her hands, and pulled her up into a tight embrace.

“I will not die, Grass Singing.” He spoke into the top of her head where it rested below his bearded chin. “And come the time when I ride back through this country, I’ll look for you. You have helped me live—not just this bullet hole”—and he tapped his chest—“but the big hole put in my heart when my family was took from me.”

She pulled away from him to sign, “You grow old looking for a few pebbles lost at the bottom of a great pond.”

He caught himself before he struck her, his hand hung in midair near her cheek, looking down at her moist eyes.

“You got no right to tell me what to believe in … tell me what to give up on.”

He whirled from her, moving to his horse.

“Hook!”

She hurried after him, flung herself, and wrapped her arms about him before he could rise to the saddle. She sobbed openly, the wild keening of a squaw losing her man.

“Grass Singing—I want to come back,” he explained, crushing her against him. He kissed her gently, then held her at arm’s length as she stood there, arms at her side, sobbing. “But I can’t come back to you until I have this done and over with. Some way … you try to understand.”

Hook was in the saddle quickly, hammering the horse’s flanks with his boot heels, intent on hurrying as fast as he could from this place. Hoping she would in some way understand his quest.

Hoping too that she was wrong—praying now that he did not carry the stench of death on him.