Days Without End

CHAPTER FIVE

IMAGINE OUR HORROR and distress then when we saw those Oglala boys sitting on their horses on the horizon. Two hundred, three, just sitting there. Our own horses were skeletons. They were getting water but little else. Horses need regular fodder, grass and such. My poor horse was showing his bones like they was metal levers sticking out. Watchorn had been a small plumpish man but he weren’t no more. You coulda used John Cole for a pencil if you coulda threaded some lead through him. We were a day out on the prairie and the horses only had the first bright green slivers of grass to graze on. Half an inch. It was too early in the year. We were yearning to see wagons, our crazy wish was to see a herd of them buffalo, we started to dream of buffalo, thousands upon thousands, stampeding through our dreams, and then we’d wake in the moonlight and see only that, piss yellow and thin in the chill darkness. Temperature dropping down the glass till it was hard to breathe it was so cold. The little streams smelling of iron. At night the troopers slept close together in their blankets, we looked like a mess of prairie dogs, sleeping close for life. Snoring through frosty nostrils. The horses stamping, stamping and steaming out frosted tendrils and flowers of breath in the darkness. Now in these different districts, the sun came up that bit earlier, more eagerly, more like the baker putting fire into his bread-oven, in the small hours, so the women in the town would have bread bright early. Lord, that sun rose regular and sere, he didn’t care who saw him, naked and round and white. Then the rains came walking over the land, exciting the new grasses, thundering down, hammering like fearsome little bullets, making the shards and dusts of the earth dance a violent jig. Making the grass seeds drunk with ambition. Then the sun pouring in after the rain, and the wide endless prairie steaming, a vast and endless vista of white steam rising, and the flocks of birds wheeling and turning, a million birds to one cloud, we’d a needed a blunderbuss to harvest them, small black fleet wondrous birds. We were riding on and all the while, ten fifteen miles, the Oglala moving with us, watching. Might have been wondering why we didn’t stop for eats. Didn’t have no eats to eat. It was Trooper Pearl knew they were Sioux. Said he recognised them. Don’t know how he did, seeing as they were so far off. The flood had took our Shawnee scouts who’d a known. With our diminished numbers we were two hundred now, maybe a little less. The major hadn’t done a roll call for days. Sergeant Wellington was the only one indifferent, it would seem. If he knew one song out of the mountains of Virginia he knew a hundred. If he knew one song about a poor dying mother lonesome and her children far away he knew a thousand. And the cruel creeping raw vicious scraping voice he had. Mile after mile. And the goddamned Oglala Sioux or whoever it was out there keeping pace with every painful step. I was beginning to think it would be a welcome release if they just charged up now and did for us. It would stop that miserable caterwauling anyhow.

Mid morning then of this drear day Sergeant perks up suddenly, his singing dying away. He points out on the plain a horseman detaching from the distant group. Had a high pole with a pennant on it, waving in the fluttering breeze. The major stopped our whole troop and got us to clump together. He was giving a sight of ten lines of men with twenty riders each ready with muskets to the approaching Indian. The Indian didn’t seem to think much of this, he came on, we could see him clearer now. Then he stops half way, just sits there, his horse stirring about a little like they do. Champing, backing off a step, being settled again by his rider. He was just beyond musket range. Sergeant was anxious to try a shot but the major stayed his hand. Then the major spurs his horse and goes forward out of position, heads off across the scutty grasses. The sergeant bites his lip, because he doesn’t like this, but can’t air an objection. Major thinks Indians gentlemen like hisself, he hisses.

So we’re paused there and of course the flies find us quickly and if we have nothing to gorge on, they do. Ears and faces and backs of hands get a going over. Damn little black devils. But we almost don’t heed them, you can see all the men sitting forward on their saddles, as if they could hear the parlay about to take place, but no chance of that. Off there now we see the major reach the rider and now he is stopped and now we can see the mouth of the Indian moving, and the head nodding, and the hands going in sign language. The air is so tense even the flies seem to stop biting. The prairie is as quiet as a library. Just the tremendous grasses folding, unfolding, showing their dark underbellies, hiding them, showing. The little shucking sound of that. But most of the business was sky. Huge endless sky all the way to heaven most likely. The major and the Indian talked for about twenty minutes, then the major suddenly wheels around, comes trotting back. The Indian watches him for a few moments, sergeant begins to draw a bead on him then, but there’s no emergency, the Indian pulls the head of his pony round, and goes back placidly to his friends. The major comes on daintily enough, that’s one fine horse he has, one of those pricy mounts, skinnied up now though.

What’s the news? says the sergeant.

He wanted to know what we’re doing out here, says the major. Looks like we’re north of where we thought. These ain’t treaty Indians.

Goddamn mongrel sonsabitches what they are, the sergeant says, and spits.

Well, he said they have meat and he would give it to us, says the major.

The sergeant didn’t seem to have an answer to that. The men were amazed, relieved. Could it be true? Sure enough we saw the Indians leaving the meat. Then we went over to get it, by which time they had cleared off completely. Just vanished away like they do. The fire-makers and the cooks got going and then we had roasted buffalo. We were pulling it a bit raw from the fire but no matter.

It was such a wild crazy pleasure simply to eat. To champ on actual sustenance. It was like the first time we ever ate. Mother’s milk. Everything we were that had started to seep away because of the hunger was returning. Men were talking again and then the laughter was returning. The sergeant was affecting to be angry and perplexed. Said the meat was likely poisoned. But it weren’t poisoned. Sergeant said no one ever likely understood Indians. They’d had their damn chance to kill us and they hadn’t took it. Goddamn stupid Injuns, coyotes had more sense. The major must of decided to say nothing. He was quiet. The two hundred sets of teeth chewing away. Swallowing the big blackened lumps, bellies growling.

Well, I gotta say, said Trooper Pearl. I be thinking well of Indians now.

The sergeant looking at him with a wolf ’s eyes.

I gotta say, thinking well of them, Pearl says again.

The sergeant gets up in a big huff for himself and goes off a piece and sits by himself on a grassy mound.

It got to be accounted a happy day.

We were four or five days from the frontier, we reckoned, just a bit of a ride now to Missouri and what we called home, when a storm came in over us. It was one of those bleak ice storms, everything it touched freezing, including the bits of our bodies showing. I never rode in anything so cold. We had nowhere to shelter and so were obliged to push on. After the first day the storm decided to go worse. It made the world into a perpetual night but when the real night came the temperature maybe was down to forty minus, we didn’t know exactly. Our blood said bottom of the scale. It’s a queer wild feeling, that freezing. We laid neckerchiefs across our mouths and chins but after a while little good it did. Our gloves froze and soon our fingers were fixed fast around the reins like our hands had deceased and gone to their reward. Couldn’t feel them which was maybe just as well. The wind was all icy blades and might have shaved the beards and whiskers of the men but that they had already froze to metal. We all went white, frosted from our crowns to our toes, and the black, the grey, and brown horses were all turned white now. The blankets of chill white rheum over everything was not warming. Picture us, two hundred men riding into that wind. The grasses themselves crackling under the hooves. Above in the black sky torn and rent by invisible violence just now and then fleetingly the burning white orb of the moon went flying. We feared to open our mouths for one second or the moisture would freeze them ajar. The storm had a lot of prairie to cross and all the days of the world to do it. It must have been as wide as two countries. It passed over us and through us. But for the Indian victuals we would of died in the second day. It was just enough belly fuel to carry us out the other side. Then we saw other trouble. Big sunlight followed the storm, and our clothes seemed half-melted, like unravelling felt. Many of the men were in atrocious pain just as soon as the ice melted off them. Trooper Watchorn’s face was as red as radishes and when he pulled off his boots we could see his feet were no good either. Next day his nose was black as soot. It was like he was wearing something on it, burning dark and sore. He couldn’t put his boots back on for any money and he wasn’t the only one in travail. There were dozens in a bad way. Soon we come to the river that marked the frontier in that part and we push the column forward into the shallow waters. The river was two miles wide and about a foot deep all the way. The horses threw up the water and soon we were drenched. That didn’t do Trooper Watchorn much good, howling now. There was pain in him like no man could bear. There was others as bad but Watchorn had headed further in his brain somehow and when we reached the far bank the major was required to pull him from the horse and get him trussed up somehow, because he wasn’t no human creature now exactly, Watchorn. We were spooked as hell. That howling man, and pain so painful we seemed to feel it too somehow. Then they trussed him up because he was banging his face with his hands and he had to suffer the indignity of being lashed belly down to his mount. Then in a strange mercy he sank into a stupor, and in that condition we reached our destination much bedraggled and harassed. In the fort hospital in the coming months men lost toes and fingers. Frostbite the doctor called it, frost carnage more like. Trooper Watchorn and two others didn’t live past the summer. Gangrene got in and that’s a dancing partner no trooper chooses. And then they were in the funeral parlour like I told, all decked out in spare uniforms, and additions made to their losses, Watchorn with a wax nose and shaved clean as a stone courtesy of that embalmer. But looking dandy enough. It sure took the proverbial cake.

I guess poor Trooper Pearl had the worse fate. The major hadn’t forgotten after all. Court martial and even though the officers presiding had no real notion of what his offence might have been given that Trooper Pearl was a victor in an Indian engagement something about the major’s high moral tone got into proceedings and then Pearl’s goose was cooked. It was me and five other troopers were gave the job of dispatching him. He made a noble end of things. Looking a bit like Jehovah now because he had grown a long black beard in captivity all down his breast. We shot him through the beard to reach his heart. Joe Pearl went down. His father came in from Massachusetts where they was from and took the body home.

John Cole said he might have enough of Indian fighting just presently but we got to serve out our term agreed and we were content to do that because we got to be. We sure getting poorer and uglier in the army but better than be shot, he said.