Cry of the Hawk

26

Moon of First Eggs

HE EARNED HIS name early in life.

Pawnee Killer.

He hated them. Almost as much as he hated the white man.

And lately he had learned some of the Pawnee up north of the Republican River had not only scouted into the Powder River country two winters back, but were now hiring on to be the eyes and ears for the white man’s army.

Pawnee Killer smiled. It was meant to happen.

As much as what he had been telling his band of Brule and the bands of Shahiyena Dog Soldiers who traveled with his people—the soldiers were bound to come.

Make no mistake—these were fighting bands.

Down south, the Comanche and Kiowa and a few others were doing their best against a growing tide of white men: soldiers, settlers, those who laid the tracks for the great, smoking iron horses, the traders who brought bolts of cloth and the tinkling hawks-bells that made the Indian women lust for new things. They struggled on the southern plains, with hope still alive.

Up north Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapa were doing their best to stay away from the white man. Red Cloud’s Bad Face Oglalla were still reveling in their defeat of the soldiers last winter at the Battle of the Hundred in the Hand, far up on what the white man called the Bozeman Road. But Red Cloud had not succeeded in driving the soldiers from their three forts in the heart of that Lakota hunting ground.

So for now, it seemed, the soldiers had turned their attention to these central plains.

Not that far north along the Buffalo Shit River, what the white man called the Platte, others were laying more iron tracks. And down here south of the Republican, what the Cheyenne called their Plum River, another band of white men labored to lay more tracks toward the far western mountains, where the sun went to sleep at the end of each day.

Pawnee Killer was sure that the white man had focused his attention on this great buffalo ground as surely as a warrior would aim the iron-tipped point of his arrow at the heart of a young bull.

And now he was sure. The army had come. With five other chiefs, he had gone to talk with the three white men who scouted for the soldiers. Quickly he had grown angry and turned about, not content to talk further with the three. Instead, he would remain with his fighting men. When the soldiers came, they would stand and fight until the women and old ones, the ones too small to fight themselves, all had escaped.

Then the great warrior bands would disappear across the mapless prairie, like spring snow before the snow-eating chinook.

Hancock did nothing to inspire the trust of those fighting bands.

He sent Custer’s cavalry to surround the great village at sunset on 15 April. The lodges were still there, as were the racks groaning beneath drying strips of buffalo meat. Surrounding every lodge were staked the bloody hides being fleshed by the women. From a few smoke holes appeared wisps of smoke.

But except for a few dogs that had remained behind to enjoy an easy feast on the drying meat, the great village was empty.

“They’ve f-fled, General,” Custer stammered as he leapt to the ground beside Hancock’s luxuriously appointed army ambulance.

“By damn—tell me they haven’t!”

Shad Sweete edged up, hanging onto his reins. “They’re heading north and west, General.”

Hancock regarded the old scout a moment. “Where’s Hickok?”

“Him and some of the others stayed behind in the village.”

“They’re plundering it?”

“No, General. Stayed behind with some of the rest who found a little girl.”

“A white prisoner?”

Sweete shook his head. “Half-breed. She was left behind when the rest took off.”

“Savages used her pretty bad, General,” Custer broke in.

Hancock’s eyes narrowed as he brought the back of his hand to his mouth. “The disgusting—”

“You want her brought to our camp?” Sweete asked.

Custer turned to the scout, seeing that Hancock was not about to answer. “Have one of the surgeons see to her, Sweete. If not them, one of the hospital stewards.”

“Custer,” Hancock said as he settled back against the canvas campaign chair he had placed in the ambulance, “we’ll bloody well make these bastards pay one of these days.”

Jonah Hook wasn’t sure why he had stayed behind with the others when Shad had gone riding off with Custer to report to Hancock that the village was empty.

But now as the light was falling from the sky, he knew it had something to do with the little girl he had been the first to find among the empty, abandoned lodges. Something to do with thinking about his own daughter. Hattie would be twelve this spring, he thought. Not much older than this little thing.

He held the half-breed child in his arms, wishing it were Hattie he were rocking. As the light faded from the lodge, so did those scared eyes he hesitated to look into.

She had fought him like a frightened animal at first, until she gave up—perhaps her hope gone, perhaps all remaining strength. Then she had collapsed into his arms as he knelt atop a buffalo-robe bed, strewn with blankets not taken in the hasty retreat.

When the others had shown up, she had explained to Shad Sweete in her broken Cheyenne what the warriors had done after the women and old ones had abandoned her.

“When the others gone off, running with what they could carry,” Shad explained to Custer and the scouts who had gathered in that gloomy lodge, “a dozen or so of them young warriors rode back here to have their fun with her. She’s half-breed you know. And to them bucks—it makes her white.”

“You’re saying that while we were parleying with their chiefs,” Hickok growled, “some of those red bastards came back here?”

Shad had only nodded as Custer whirled, slapping his quirt against the top of his boot.

“You there, Sweete. Come with me—back to Hancock. The rest of you can eat what you can find here. Chances are I’ll talk Hancock into freeing me to pursue these vile heathens this very night. If not to punish them for escaping us—then to punish them for what crimes they have committed against this … this child.”

“Stay with her, Jonah,” Sweete had said in a whisper before he left the lodge. “Chances are you’re the only one she’ll let near her now. I’ll see about getting a surgeon to help her back with Hancock’s soldiers.”

That night there hadn’t been much they could do for the girl, with the exception of washing her wounds caused at the hands of those who had repeatedly raped her. It took hours before she would let one of the hospital stewards close to her. Near morning, Jonah laid the girl on some blankets at the back of an ambulance, where she slipped contentedly into sleep, her head in the lap of the steward.

As the eastern sky stretched into a bloody pink, Jonah wearily found the rest of the scouts just then beginning to move about their fires.

“You need some coffee, Jonah,” Sweete said, trudging about the low flames of his breakfast fire with his blanket draped from his shoulders, slurring the ground.

Hook settled nearby, where the old mountain man patted the ground. Jonah pulled a blanket around his own shoulders against the predawn chill. “What I need is sleep. Forget the coffee, old man.”

“You’ll want the coffee, Jonah. We’re riding out in a few minutes.”

“Not until I get some sleep, I’m not.”

“Hancock’s asked that I stay with him and California Joe. He plans on heading down to Fort Dodge from here.”

“Good. Just as long as old Thunderass don’t climb into his ambulance till I get me a little shut-eye.”

Sweete dragged the coffeepot from the fire as he cleared his throat. “You ain’t going with Hancock.”

Hook opened one eye into the murky darkness and glared at the old trapper. “What you figure on me doing—I don’t go with you?”

“Custer asked for you go with him and Hickok.”

Hook closed the one eye and sighed. “He did, did he?”

“We’re riding out soon as you have a cup of coffee,” a new voice drew close from the darkness.

With the one eye opened again, he found the dusty, prairie-crusted long hair of normally dapper James Butler Hickok hanging disheveled about his face.

“I had my way about it—there’d been a few more of you goddamned Yankees I’d a’killed afore you put a end to the war,” he grumbled.

“Rise an’ shine, friend—there’s a trail of Injuns we’re bound to follow.” Hickok ran fingers through his hair.

“Likely it’s a war we’re off to start, Bill.”

Hickok straightened, allowing the Confederate room to kick his way out of the blanket. “You’re wrong there, Reb. Wasn’t us started this war.”

In their hasty flight, the bands left only small trails for Hickok’s scouts to mull over, deciding which to follow. But follow they did, heading north in the general direction of the many dim tracks, onto the open prairie, leading Custer and his eight companies of the Seventh Cavalry rapidly behind them.

North of Walnut Creek, Hickok left the guiding in the hands of others while he motioned Hook to join him in pulling away from Custer’s column. Without a word of explanation, Hickok set a bruising pace, the rising sun constantly on his right cheek as they loped across the rolling tableland of central Kansas Territory. It was late that day when the pair reined up at a stage ranch, embers smoking still.

Hook let his eyes run over the scene quickly, then glanced at Hickok.

“You ever see something like this, Jonah?”

“I fought that war, same as you,” he answered quietly.

“I know. But—you ever see anything like that?”

Hickok pointed his Spencer carbine at the blackened, bloated bodies of the two ranch hands, burned among the charred wreckage of this way station along the Smoky Hill Road.

“I’ve smelled this afore, Hickok—in Missouri.”

Hickok nodded. “Some of the worst of it happened on the borderlands. Let’s get.”

No one had to drag him from that place. Problem was, it was only the first of many the two ran across over the next two days.

“Looks like everything west of Hays been hit, General,” Hickok explained when he and Hook dismounted before Custer that third week of April, after they had returned from their far-ranging scout.

“All the same story?” Custer asked, his blue eyes narrowing.

“Every station … burned out. All the stock run off. Workers what didn’t make it out, we found butchered,” Hook answered.

At that moment they stood among the ruins of Lookout Station, only fifteen miles west of Fort Hays. The burned bodies of three men had just been found near the smoldering debris.

“They don’t even look like something once human,” Custer muttered in something close to a curse.

“Likely, they were tortured by the red bastards,” growled a handsome soldier standing at Custer’s elbow.

“Little doubt of that, Tom,” Custer said to his younger brother. Then he suddenly turned to his adjutant, animated once more. “Mr. Moylan, pass along the order for our command to move off two miles and make camp.”

Jonah stood dumbfounded as the long-haired lieutenant colonel and his staff strode off, their shadows lengthening beneath the all but gone western sun. How many could look at this scene and not have his stomach turned? And not grow angry? Not be changed?

For three days after Custer had marched off to continue the hunt, General Winfield Scott Hancock debated with himself on just what to do with the captured, empty Indian village on Pawnee Fork.

Agents for both the Cheyenne and the Brule Sioux gave it their best to convince Hancock to be a gracious victor.

“The bands fled only because of their fear of your amassed might, General,” declared Edward W. Wynkoop. “They’re mortally afraid of another Sand Creek massacre.” Shad Sweete had watched as Hancock’s eyes grew steely. “I am a professional soldier, Major Wynkoop. In no way similar to that minister-turned-butcher named Chivington!”

Colonel Jesse W. Leavenworth attempted his own appeal. “General, to put that village to the torch as you have been suggesting would only add to the flames already scorching the central plains. You will make war certain by not staying your hand and showing the tribes your benevolence.”

Hancock smiled, calling out to the old scout. “Mr. Sweete—that is a good one, isn’t it? Benevolence for these warrior bands?”

Shad watched both the agents turn to look in his direction in the steamy shade provided by the canvas awning strung from the top of Hancock’s ambulance. He cleared his throat. “Truth of it is, General—these bands understand only one thing. War.”

Wynkoop bolted up. “I protest, General—”

“Give my scout a chance to finish, Major Wynkoop!” growled Hancock.

“And,” Sweete continued, “the warrior bands fear only one thing. Death.”

“There,” Hancock sighed, sinking back into his canvas campaign chair. “This man’s spent his entire adult life out here in these far western regions. No one understands these Indians the way Mr. Sweete does, gentlemen.” He tapped a finger against his fleshy lower lip, then stroked it down his chin whiskers.

“Gentlemen, I’ve decided. Satisfied that this village acted in bad faith by fleeing before we had a chance to talk of peace has proved they were a nest of conspirators. This command will burn the village before we move off toward Fort Dodge.”

The next morning, 19 April, as the bulk of his troops marched south, Hancock’s selected tarried behind to set fire to the village on Pawnee Fork: 111 Cheyenne and 140 Brule Sioux lodges, along with robes, blankets, meat, utensils, parfleches filled with clothing, and abandoned travois.

Less than a week later, the general met with a delegation of Arapaho and Kiowa chiefs who had already learned of the destruction of the villages, though their bands roamed country far south of the Arkansas River. The moccasin telegraph rapidly spread the word.

A buoyant Hancock at last delivered his war-or-peace message he had intended on delivering to the Cheyenne and Sioux.

“I don’t know if you can trust the word of that one, General,” Sweete whispered in Hancock’s ear as he and the general looked over the assembled chiefs, seated on blankets and robes before Hancock’s table.

“What’s his name?”

“Satanta.”

“Which means?”

“White Bear. He’s the slipperiest of the Kiowa headmen.”

“But you yourself just translated his most moving and eloquent speech, claiming his people would forever abandon the road to war against the white man.”

“General, you’ll come off the fool if you go believing in the word of Satanta,” Sweete said quietly as Hancock passed by him.

The general took a full-dress uniform, replete with gold braid and tassels, from the arms of his adjutant and strode over to Satanta. There, in a grand presentation, he handed the Kiowa chief that freshly brushed uniform as a symbol of the peace just made between the army and White Bear’s Kiowa.

“You see, Mr. Sweete—how he smiles. How this grand gift makes the rest of his headmen smile. We have just forged a lasting relationship with Satanta’s people.”

“General, you ain’t done nothing but give another war chief something to wear when he rides down on white settlements to burn, rape, and kill.”