Seize the Sky

CHAPTER 21

FEW of the wasichu scouts and soldiers riding into Miniconjou ford had any idea how frighteningly accurate were the scouts’ predictions of the strength of the Sioux village across the river.

Custer himself knew of the venal Indian agents falsifying their counts on official reports sent to Washington City to assure an uninterrupted westward flow of goods and annuities. Yet in that summer of 1876, the army could only begin to guess how far the agents would go to cover their tracks.

Instead of nine thousand six hundred ten Indians residing that summer at the Spotted Tail Agency, there were in reality only two thousand three hundred fifteen.

The rest were gone visiting friends and relatives in that great summer encampment along the Greasy Grass.

Instead of twelve thousand eight hundred seventy-three at Red Cloud, there were only four thousand seven hundred sixty.

Down at Cheyenne River only two thousand two hundred eighty instead of seven thousand five hundred eighty-six. And over at Standing Rock, where there should have been seven thousand three hundred twenty-two Sioux that summer, all but two thousand three hundred five had left to join Sitting Bull.

The warriors were gathering, their souls burning for the fight of Bull’s mighty vision. Still they came, more warriors and families had arrived each day to join up until this greatest of all villages stretched for more than three miles up and down the valley of the Pa-zees-la-wak-pa.

Already better than fifteen thousand joyous celebrants sharing the old life in the valley of the Greasy Grass this last week of the Moon When Chokecherries Grow Ripe. Using the ages-old means of counting three warriors of fighting age for every one of those two thousand lodges, a man could easily see how any soldier’s bowels could pucker to consider that in that camp slept, ate, danced, and courted something between forty-five hundred and six thousand warriors ready to carry arms against any invading army.

And of those, better than half were seasoned, hardened veterans of plains warfare.

Not only the veterans—every fighting male snarled for a fight. Every one with a father, brother, uncle, or cousin who had been killed by the soldiers. In every male boiled blood hot for those soldiers destined by the Dream to ride down on their camp circles. For if any army was brazen and foolish enough to march down on this greatest of all gatherings in Lakota history, this epic encampment would be the last sight to greet their terrified, death-glazed white eyes.

In those few days it had taken them to cross the divide after fighting Red Beard Crook, the Sioux learned of another army in the country. Scouts had seen the Fireboat-That-Walks-on-Water up on the Yellowstone for days now. Some had even noticed the dust of a large compliment of soldiers marching on the Rosebud where Crazy Horse had scattered Red Beard’s forces a few days earlier.

And now on this balmy evening a crippled and leathery old Sans Arc village crier hobbled through his camp. As white men reckoned with time, it was a Saturday, the twenty-fourth of June, in the year of 1876. The crier’s high, reedy voice sang out that unthinkable news.

“Soldiers are coming, people! Heed my words! The Dream says it is so. Soldiers come with tomorrow’s sun!”

Neither the Sans Arc nor any other camp circle paid the old man any heed. Surely Crook or any other soldier-chief wouldn’t be crazy enough to attack so large a gathering. It would be unthinkable. Yet more than a few did remember the details of Bull’s vision.

The soldiers would fall into camp almost as if committing suicide.

Others had heard that scouts reported seeing dust clouds on the divide. Some saw trails of iron-shod hoofprints.

That afternoon leaders of the various bands decided it best to post camp sentries on those ridges and bluffs east of the river to prevent any glory-seeking young warriors from dashing headlong out of camp to hunt down soldiers. If an army was indeed coming to fight the Sioux, then let those pony soldiers march all the way into the camps as Sitting Bull had foretold.

No warrior had the right to capture glory for himself by striking the first coup and ruining The Bull’s vision. Instead, the old men wanted this to be a battle to cloak the entire nation in glory and honor.

By sundown that warm Saturday evening, camp guards rode along the bony ridges east of the Greasy Grass like the spine of a sway-backed old mare. Soldiers were coming. Everyone knew. The words sat on every lip. Nervous and impatient, the Sioux and Cheyenne would have to wait for the army to ride down on their camps.

Up at the northern end of that village in the Cheyenne camp, four young warriors announced they would sacrifice themselves during the coming battle with the pony soldiers. As twilight settled over their Goat River, a dance and celebration got under way for Little Whirlwind, Close Hand, Cut Belly, and Noisy Walking. This was to be their last night on earth. Their last night among friends, they boasted before everyone in camp. Tomorrow they would give their lives in battle.

As the sun sank like a red-earth ache behind the distant Bighorn Mountains, a solitary figure slogged out of the river on foot, trudging up that slope at the far northern end of the long ridge. Up from the fragrant thickets of crabapple and plum and wild rose, he climbed into the tall grass and wild buffalo peas. Not a one of the posted camp guards challenged the lone Hunkpapa chief come here to sing his thunder songs and pray for guidance now that his great vision was about to see fulfillment.

With a purple sky deepening to black out of the east, this short, squat man left behind little bags of tobacco and red-willow bark, each bag tied to a short peeled willow shaft he had jammed into the ground near the crest of that hill at the northern end of the pony-back ridge. His powerful thunder medicine told him that here on this most hallowed ground, the last desperate fight would take place.

Here on the knoll, Sitting Bull prayed his final blessing for those wasichu soldier souls soon to be sacrificed, given to propitiate the Great Powers of the mighty Lakota nations.

Dawn of the next day stretched over the valley of the Greasy Grass, and with the first pale light to the east along the brown, hoary caps of the Wolf Mountains, a high, shrieking death wail erupted through the sleepy Hunkpapa camp.

Four Horns, the wife of Sitting Bull’s uncle, had died as this new day was born.

Filled not only with grief but with a renewed awe at the mysterious workings of the Great Powers, The Bull knew this woman’s death presaged the great victory of his dream.

Far back into the memory of any of the old ones, it had been told that with the death of the wife of an important man would come a momentous event.

Sitting Bull closed his eyes and prayed again for those blessings he had asked on the hill above the river. From that very knoll the soldiers would see the entire village spread before them.

From that dry, grassy crest the troopers would see why the powerful Wakan Tanka had turned them over to the fury of the Sioux.

* * *

Farther north in the Oglalla camp, a Canadian half-breed who spoke passable English sat at a smoky dawn fire, refusing to lay his head down for sleep. Unlike most of the warriors, who had gone to their robes just before dawn, this nameless one sat staring into those yellow licks of flame darting along the dry cottonwood limbs, sensing the portent of some great event. What stirred him most already this cool gray morning was the strange behavior of Crazy Horse.

Before most battles the great war chief was normally composed and reserved. Not today as the sun was born again in the eastern sky. The Horse stomped in and out of his lodge many times: scurrying back and forth around his pony, checking and rechecking his personal weapons, and repeatedly inspecting the war medicine he carried in a small pouch tied behind an ear.

With grease and a vermilion pigment, the war chief mixed his paints, plastering a brilliant handprint on each of the war pony’s hips for speed this day. On one side of the animal’s neck he drew a dripping scalp lock, on the other side his fingertip traced out a bloodied arrow.

Filled with nervous energy, he went for a ride to other nearby camp circles yet returned a short time later. In and out of his lodge he paced again.

Something refused to release its grip on his spirit. Something that told him this would be a day like none other before … or ever to be again.

Crazy Horse’s most important fight was at hand.

A Miniconjou warrior called High Pipe drew himself from the icy water of the Greasy Grass and stood shivering beneath the first licks of sunlight breaking over the Mountains of the Wolf. When his morning prayer was spoken, and the air had warmed his body, the warrior strode back to his camp circle, finding his uncle, Hump, anxiously awaiting him.

“You must collect your horses, High Pipe,” the old man solemnly advised, dark eyes darting suspiciously to that bony ridge east of the river.

“Why, Uncle?”

“Something is going to happen this day,” Hump asserted. “Bring your horses into camp so your wives can pack them when trouble begins.”

“Uncle, there are plans to move the camp circle today,” High Pipe soothed, a hand on the old man’s shoulder. “Farther north some, toward the country of the antelope. The Cheyenne lead the way. There is no need for alarm.”

“Something bad will happen!” the old man protested, not understanding his nephew’s sense of calm.

“What, Uncle? Tell me what you see.”

“Many dead. Much blood. More than any one man has ever seen with two eyes! And I hear our people crying out in joy and sadness—both.” Hump wagged his head and stared at the ridge.

“A day for celebrating, yet a day we will long remember with a stone of sadness upon our hearts.”

Blackfoot Sioux chief Red Horse had awakened his lodge early and taken the women and children of relatives into the meadows and hills west of their own camp circle. There they would spend the long summer morning using antlerdigging tools hunting for tipsina, a tasty wild turnip root filled with starch.

From those hills of their digging, they would eventually notice the dust cloud suspended above the soldiers marching north along the pony-back ridge east of the river.

And know that Bull’s mighty vision had come to pass.

A wizened Cheyenne mystic named Box Elder had been troubled all night by a recurring dream in which he watched an advancing regiment of pony soldiers marching down off the ridges to the east of the river toward the Cheyenne camp. Again and again that same dream plagued him each time Box Elder closed his eyes to fall asleep.

At dawn he hobbled from lodge to lodge among his relatives and friends, warning them of what he had seen in his troubling dream. Some kept their mouths shut, while others chuckled behind his back as he tottered off to spread the tale.

But some Cheyenne “Crazy Dog” warriors openly howled like rabid wolves at the old man—the supreme insult showing they believed the old man had finally gone mad, and it would be best if he was taken into the hills and left for wolf bait.

Since the great camp would be making another short march this day, some of the Cheyenne women had begun to dismantle their lodges and slowly pack household goods for the impending trek.

Monaseetah kept one eye on her older boy as he played with young friends near the lodge. Her younger, Yellow Bird, never wandered far. He clutched her skirt as the parade of four brave young warriors snaked its way through the Northern Cheyenne camp. Cut Belly and Noisy Walking, Close Hand and Little Whirlwind, marching proudly behind the camp crier, who sang out that these four boys would die in glory this day, die protecting their village.

“People! Look at these!” the old man cried that bright, cool morning. “You will not set eyes on them again. They go away to die this day! Never more will you look at them!”

Miles away up the Greasy Grass in the Hunkpapa camp, Rain-in-the-Face attended a late-morning feast at the lodge of a venerated old warrior. A few bites had been taken when they heard the first rattle of rifle fire and knew those many shots came not from Sioux guns. The rifles must belong to wasichu soldiers.

“They are coming into camp!” the great war chief Rain hollered as he leapt to his feet, swinging aloft the stone war club he carried at all times. “The Bull has told it. His dream has come to pass. The soldiers fall into our camp!”

Dashing back to his lodge, Rain snatched up his rifle, a bow and quiver filled with rosewood arrows, before leaping atop his favorite pony. Many of his friends clustered round him as they raced toward the valley action, catching but a brief glimpse of another group of soldiers loping north along the ridge beyond the river.

In a moment Rain’s Hunkpapa warriors overtook a young woman named Tashenamini, or Moving Robe. This did not startle Rain in the least, for she had rescued her brother’s body from the Red Beard battle a week before. Ever since that time the Hunkpapas had called the Rosebud fight “The Battle Where the Girl Saved Her Brother.”

Rain smiled, singing out a blood-chilling greeting to the young girl. She brandished her dead brother’s coup stick above her head, shouting again that she would avenge his death this day.

“Many soldiers will fall!” she screamed into the noise and the dust. “There will be much blood on my hands before the sun has crossed this sky.”

With a deep sense of pride, Rain bellowed a war cry for all to hear. “Fear this pretty bird, wasichu soldiers! She may be pretty as a sparrow, but she carries the talons of a war eagle!”

“Behold!” shouted another. “A pretty bird rides among us!”

Rain’s grim smile broadened. The beautiful unmarried girl would make his young men fight all the harder.

One final warning before Rain and his warriors reached the soldiers falling headfirst into the Hunkpapa camp.

“Beware that no man hides behind her skirts!”

Just as Sitting Bull had dreamed that potent vision of his, soldiers were falling into the Hunkpapa camp circle.

Unbelievable.

If the village had truly believed they would be attacked by soldiers, perhaps more of them would have torn down, packed up, and tramped off without delay during the morning hours. Yet the only lodges coming down were those belonging to families who wanted to get an early head start on the day’s journey down the valley. Another five or eight miles more toward the Yellowstone.

So no more than a handful of women in each circle busied themselves pulling their lodge skins from the poles when pony soldiers charged toward the south end of camp.

As word spread through the villages, pandemonium and confusion and fear raced on its heels like prairie fire along the Greasy Grass. Women shrieked, children cried, and the old ones wailed. And in the middle of it, war ponies neighed and whinnied while warriors shouted their prayers aloft into the singing air: Sioux praying to Wakan Tanka and the young Cheyenne men to their Everywhere Spirit Above.

Dashing like water-striders across the flat surface of a pond, women scurried about to locate their children. Likewise the little ones darted in and around lodges, shrieking for their mothers. Amid the din, the old and the infirm struggled, hobbling along on their own if they could. Everyone beginning to head west, escaping from the camp circles. West, toward the hills and safety.

“Take what you can carry and flee before the pony soldiers ride into camp!”

With their frightened children in tow, the women yanked down their husband’s most potent medicine bags and sacred objects to go with them into the western hills. No white soldiers must defile the power of their men.

Heralds scooted back and forth through the eight camp circles, shouting their news and mystical omens, raising their shrill and magical wishes for those young ones heading south into the fight. Hand-held drums throbbed their primitive beat as eagle wing-bone whistles sent an ear-piercing cry to the hot summer sky overhead.

In all the frightening noise and confusion, there nonetheless arose some sense of ages-old order: The women and children and frail ones must escape. Staying behind, the warriors would hold off the attack, giving those weaker ones a chance to flee.

“Will the pony soldiers stop at nothing?”

Each time the white man attacked, he threw his soldiers against a village of women and children … against the sick, tired, old ones.

“What kind of beast is this wasichu anyway? What kind of savage makes war on women and children … and those ready to die?”

Young Hunkpapa warrior One Bull drove his ponies east toward the river for morning watering, herding them in from their pasture, when he heard the first shots. Not too far to the south.

Leaping atop a pony bareback and gripping its mane with both hands in the shape of a narrow vee, he dashed into the camp circle to find the circle already in a wild disarray. Shouting and dust and screaming and a flurry of mad activity.

“One Bull!”

Turning, he saw Sitting Bull emerge from his tall red-and-black lodge, carrying a shield and stone war club.

“Give me your rifle, young one,” the chief ordered quietly.

Obediently One Bull handed over his old muzzle loader. “Yes, Uncle.”

“You will ride with these into battle, One Bull,” the Hunkpapa mystic declared evenly. “My shield and my war club are my symbols of authority, my power in battle. Take these in my place and go meet the soldiers. Talk with them, if they will talk, so we can end this killing. Tell them I will talk peace to save the lives of our children. Go now! You carry the power of your chief. Lead your men wisely, Nephew!”

The young warrior leapt on The Bull’s pony secured with a rawhide bridle and let fly a shrill war cry. He held high the coveted war shield of Sitting Bull, then vaulted away, leading close to a hundred warriors into the skirmish with Reno’s charging troops.

After he watched the warriors gallop off to the fight, Sitting Bull buckled on his leather cartridge belt, stuffing an old cap-and-ball revolver in the holster. He then took up his Winchester carbine.

Yet before he would fight this day, The Bull knew he must find his old mother. He tore off into the choking dust kicked up by a thousand hooves galloping out of the Hunkpapa village. Before his eyes his own mystic vision swam with frightening reality.

At the center of all the screeching pandemonium, some camp guards were busy at their important task. One at a time the buffalo-hide sections of the huge Teton Sioux council lodge came down from their poles. It would not do to let the enemy cast their defiling eyes on this sacred lodge. As each section was bundled, it was hefted aboard the back of a pony and the animal led west into those coulees and hills, where the white soldiers would not find the lodge.

Past this calm, deliberate crew of Hunkpapa guards raced a middle-aged Cheyenne warrior, holding aloft a blue jacket he had stripped from one of the first soldiers killed as Reno began his frantic retreat into the timber at the river. Stone Calf wanted his Sioux cousins to see this battle trophy—and remember well.

“Look, my friends!” he bellowed with rage. “Heed this marking on the pony soldier’s clothing!”

His gnarled finger pointed out the crossed sabers and that 7 nestled atop their apex.

“This is a good day for the Shahiyena, my cousins!” he roared. “A good day for the Cheyenne!”

A crowd of the curious gathered, slowing their dash to the battle or their flight into the hills for a moment to listen to the old Cheyenne’s story.

“These soldiers are the same who attacked my village—when Black Kettle camped us along the Washita many years ago! Aiyeee! These are the very same pony soldiers who killed my mother! The ones who butchered my wife and children when they could not escape the soldier bullets that winter dawn before the sun rose above the blood and stink of our dead people! I have been alone since these soldiers murdered my family!”

Shouts of praise and wails of despair arose all round Stone Calf as he continued. “This day my heart is once again made whole. The circle is complete, my cousins! The circle begun on the Washita is now made whole once more!”

“Hear it! The circle is healed!” roared another warrior who took the bloody cavalry blouse from Stone Calf and brandished it aloft on his rifle.

A woman raised a fiery limb from her midday cookfire, torching the torn blue tunic. Once flames enveloped it, the blouse fell in shreds to the ground amid cheers and shouts of both Sioux and Cheyenne celebrating the thrashing given those white soldiers down in the timber at the river.

“Let us go show these soldiers what we do to evil men who attack a village of women and children!” one woman shrieked, in one hand brandishing a bloody knife and in the other an old cap-and-ball revolver. “Women! Do not run. We will fight and die alongside our men!”

Before she could lead the throng away, an Oglalla horseman galloped up and reined in his pony, cascading dust over them all.

“More horse soldiers!” he rasped hoarsely, pointing to the sun-bleached ridges to the east beyond the river. “More soldiers riding on the hills above! Come fight, or they will overrun the villages!”

“Where?” many asked, panic rising in their voices.

“We cannot see any horse soldiers!” an old man declared with some sarcasm.

“This is only wild talk,” someone suggested. “Come, we must go kill those soldiers cowering in the timber to the south!”

“Wait! Aiyeee!” It is true! Look!” a woman screamed, pointing at the grassy hills across the river.

Pouring out of the mouth of the upper Medicine Tail Coulee and into the lower gully that reached all the way to the Greasy Grass itself, rode a long column of pony soldiers.

“Soldiers come!” The Oglalla messenger beat frantic heels against his pony’s flanks and tore off to carry his warning to the north.

“We must stop these soldiers,” one of the Santee Sioux warriors shouted, rallying those around him. “To the ford! We will cut off their charge!”

As most of this crowd dashed off toward the river, a small, ugly mob rumpled into camp from south of the Hunkpapa circle. These Santees had just captured an old friend who long ago had married a Santee woman. Now that this prisoner rode with the pony soldiers, the Sioux realized they had every right to consider Isaiah Dorman a traitor.

A big black-skinned Arikara interpreter, Dorman begged for his captors to kill him quickly and be done with it, savvy enough to know what fate awaited him if they did not.

“Just kill me now and throw me away! Kill me!” he shouted in Sioux at his tormentors.

Instead, one of the Santee men spit into his shiny black face and rubbed his spittle on the soldier’s eyes.

“You do not deserve to die like a man, Teat!” a warrior shouted Dorman’s Santee name, given him because of the dark color to his skin, like a nursing mother’s nipple. “Instead, we will give you over to the women for their amusement. A traitor like you deserves no better than a camp dog’s death.” He turned to the women. “Tie him to a tree!”

After they lashed Dorman’s arms and legs to a cottonwood so he could not fall, they started using the soldier for target practice. The Santees filled his legs with so many bullets, he could no longer stand, collapsing suspended against his rope bindings. Only then did the archers begin their grisly work. Again and again they fired arrows into Dorman’s body, but none of them enough to kill him right off.

“We don’t want you to die quickly—not the death of an honorable man,” an old man growled into the black face shiny with beads of sweat and pain. “You must die like a dog butchered for the pot. I want to hear you whine and whimper!”

When at last they cut him down from his tree, the Santees dragged the black soldier onto the prairie, where they stretched his body out among the hills of a prairie-dog town. Here the squaws continued their gruesome work, hacking little pieces of black-pink flesh from arms or legs or chest, bleeding him into tin cups that they repeatedly poured into an old blackened and battered coffee pot.

“Wasichu sapa must die slow!” one old hag spat into his face. “Black white man must die hard!”

In the midst of his painful torture, Isaiah Dorman harkened back to that last morning at Fort Lincoln, remembered his Santee wife tearfully telling him of her nightmare, begging him not to ride with Custer.

Now all the Negro soldier could do was die alone. His was a one-man job if ever there was one. Isaiah didn’t have the strength to cry out anymore, not with all the pain he had to endure, not with all the blood seeped from his body, drop by tormented drop.

Dorman just didn’t have the strength to do anything but die. And he did that just as bravely as he could.

Oglalla warrior White-Cow-Bull had stayed up into the early morning hours celebrating with the others their victory over Red Beard Crook.

His head ached from too little sleep and too much dancing as he lumbered up from the timber by the river, where he kept his wickiup with other young bachelors. The Cow wandered to a fire tended by an old woman, its greasy smoke rising to the hazy midmorning sun that boded a sultry summer day.

“Old woman,” he declared as he stood over her hunched skeletal form, “give me some food.”

For a long moment she stared up into the sunlight at the warrior, blinking her moist, rheumy eyes. Among the Sioux it was custom for young warriors without families of their own to be fed by those they supplied with camp meat. She-Runs-Him recognized White-Cow-Bull and speared some chunks of meat from her battered kettle for his breakfast.

“This day the attackers come to our village,” she slurred, gumming the words from a toothless mouth as she presented him the steamy bowl.

“How is it you know this, Grandmother?” he addressed her in polite form.

“I know no more but what I see behind my eyes,” she answered before disappearing into her lodge.

He knew she would not put her head out until he had finished his breakfast and was gone.

With nothing better to do this late morning, the young Oglalla determined to ride north to the Cheyenne camp in hopes of catching a glimpse of Monaseetah. When she had refused his offer of marriage, her words hurt like the cut of the Sun Dance knife—yet, if he tried again, perhaps he still might win her.

He must convince her that her soldier-husband would never return for her. It had been far too long already. Seven years should be long enough to wait for anyone. The soldier’s son waited all this time at his mother’s side.

Long enough to wait for any man—especially for a lying wasichu soldier.

“Let me help you with that,” the Cow declared when he found Monaseetah dragging some deadfall up from the river with Yellow Bird at her side.

“I can manage.” She smiled the brave, pretty smile of hers that lit up her face. “I have learned to manage on my own.”

Rebuffed in a gentle way, White-Cow-Bull turned off to visit Roan Bear, a Cheyenne friend who this day as a member of the Fox clan was in charge of guarding his camp circle. The Bear sat protecting the lodge where his Northern Cheyenne people kept their Sacred Medicine Hat made of the hide of a buffalo head and its horns. While the Southern Cheyenne revered their holy Medicine Arrows, these northern cousins revered the Hat.

In the welcome shade of that sacred lodge, Roan Bear and White-Cow-Bull, proven warriors both, shared again their favorite war stories and tales of a first pony raid. Above their laughter the sharp crack of rifle shots came from the south on the dry breeze.

Both leapt to their feet about the time a young Oglalla rode into camp shouting.

“Pony soldiers! Pony soldiers! They attack the Hunkpapa circle! Come! Come help in Sitting Bull’s vision!”

“We go!” The Cow shouted, grabbing his friend’s shoulder.

“No,” Roan Bear answered softly. “My duty is with the Medicine Hat. Because of the danger, I must take it far away to the prairie beyond the pony herd. There it will be safe from our enemy dirtying it. Only when another Fox warrior comes to relieve me, can I go fight the soldiers. Only when I know the Hat is safe, can I offer myself in battle as a Crazy Dog.”

“Look here at the old one!” White-Cow-Bull pointed out the Cheyenne chief, Lame-White-Man, who rushed past with nothing but a small blanket wrapped at his waist.

“I was taking a sweat bath,” the middle-aged chief announced with a self-conscious smile. “I do not have time to braid my hair, nor do I even take time to dress. With my rifle and this belt to hold my blanket up, I am ready to fight the pony soldiers.”

“Go, old man!” Roan Bear exhorted. “Go and fight well this day!”

“Bear!” a young Fox warrior cried out, loping out. He carried an old smoothbore muzzle loader.

“Sleeps Late? Have you come to carry the Medicine Hat far from the evil ones?”

“Yes,” he answered breathlessly, eyes blinking in the dust many others stirred up. “If you wish to fight, I will carry the Hat into the hills for our people. I would consider it a great honor, brother. A great honor to protect the Hat from our enemies.”

“Go then, little brother.” Bear handed the teenage warrior a fur-wrapped bundle enclosing the sacred object. “Protect it with your life.”

Sleeps Late stopped and turned after a few steps. “Protect our village, Roan Bear. Protect our people with your life.”

“Aiyeee!” Bear’s voice rose above the tall cottonwoods with the power of a war eagle. “This is so, Sleeps Late! It is a good day to die!”

“Nutskaveho!” Cheyenne war chief Two Moons rushed by, leading his war pony he always kept tethered at his lodge. “White soldiers on the hills above! Run for your horses! Run for your horses!”

“What is this?” Roan Bear yelled at the chief.

“More soldiers are coming!” Two Moons shouted back over his shoulder. “Some fight the Hunkpapas, and now the others come to attack our own camp circle! Nutskaveho!”

The Cheyenne camp belched free its young warriors to join the valley fight near the Hunkpapa village as soldiers dismounted in the timber along the river. Roan Bear and White-Cow-Bull for the first time saw the two long columns of soldiers ride off the ridge into the upper Medicine Tail Coulee. Heartbeats later gunfire erupted, echoing from the coulee itself.

In the time it would take to kindle a pipe, the two young warriors watched the soldiers who led drop from their horses to return fire, then remount.

“Nahetso! They will ride straight into our camp if they cross the ford!” Roan Bear shouted at two of his young friends, throwing an arm up to show the pair those soldiers riding down from the hills, coming in their direction.

“If they cross, they will sweep our people away as the warm chinooks eat the winter snows!” Bob-Tail-Horse replied, knowing exactly what needed to be done. “We must guard the ford!”

“You cannot!” old man Mad Wolf hobbled up, crippled with age. “There are too many pony soldiers coming down to the river. We need help. You must go to the Sioux camps and tell them of the other soldiers coming to cross the river. You four cannot do this alone, Nephew! Those pony soldiers will kill you!”

“Perhaps,” Bob-Tail-Horse replied calmly, a look of serenity crossing his face, giving it a strange light. “But only the heavens and the earth last forever, Uncle! A warrior is called upon to fight for his people and to give his life up for the Powers when he is called. Only the earth and sky will last. We who are warriors must die!”

“Hey! Hey! Naonoatamo! Naonoatamo! We honor you! We respect your bravery!” his three companions shouted as the four dashed toward the river crossing at Medicine Tail Coulee.

As soon as young Big Face tossed the old muzzle loader up to Bob-Tail-Horse, this oldest of the Cheyenne warriors galloped off toward the crossing. When they broke from the trees, the four were confronted with a flat, grassy bank that ran some twenty yards down to the river. Scattered across this grassy lip lay a jumble of cottonwood deadfall. As the warriors dropped from their ponies, three Crow on horseback appeared on the high bluff across the river, just above the ford itself.

“There are our enemies!” Bob-Tail-Horse exhorted his companions. “Shoot them, my brothers! Rip the wings from those Sparrowhawks!”

With the old muzzle loader he alone lobbed a shot up at the bluff. Before any of the others could fire their weapons, the fluttering tips of soldier flags were seen racing down the bottom of the coulee, while the air filled with that noisy rattle of shod hooves and soldier saddles.

“May you Sparrowhawks die a thousand endless deaths for bringing the soldiers down upon our women and children!” Roan Bear hurled his curse at the Crow scouts, who watched the soldiers approach the ford.

With the momentary appearance of the soldiers at the mouth of the coulee, the young Cheyenne warrior did a brave and provocative act: After handing his rifle away, Roan Bear turned his back to the three Crow horsemen and pulled his breechclout aside to expose his buttocks. It was a universal way to show what he thought of his enemies—daring the Crows to shoot him while he was disarmed and taunting them by presenting a round, and most inviting, target.

Then he challenged them further, shouting, telling the Crows what Cheyenne women would do to them once they got their hands on such despicable dogs unworthy of the title of warrior. At that moment Roan Bear had no more time to worry himself with the Crows.

The soldier column rattled to a noisy halt at the ford seconds before the lead horseman plunged his big, blazefaced sorrel into the cool waters of the Greasy Grass.

This brave one riding in the front wore buckskin britches and had atop his head a big-brimmed hat that shielded his pink, sunburned face. Right behind the leader rode two others, both carrying small flags that snapped in the warm breeze.

With a jerky wave of his arm, the man on the big stocking-footed sorrel shouted something over his shoulder to his soldiers, urging them into the ford.

A mighty, chilling sound rose from the throats of those white men streaming down out of the coulee as they followed their leader into the river.

As quickly, another noisy challenge sailed across the river from the lips of those brave four who had chosen to sacrifice their lives at the crossing. Their shrill cries filled the air as they stared down the barrels of their weapons and knew only they could stem this cavalry charge. If the soldiers made it across the river and pushed through the undefended village, they would have the Indian forces cut in half. Defeat of the tribes would be assured.

One choice only—to turn the soldiers somehow, to force them back across the river until more warriors could come up. These four could not allow the pony soldiers to cross the Goat River and gain its western bank.

How pink and hairy these white soldiers are! The Cow marveled, gazing at the buckskinned cavalry leader splashing into the water, the white-stocking legs of his sorrel spraying a thousand tiny jewels over its rider’s buckskin britches.

“This is a brave one!” Bob-Tail-Horse shouted to The Cow as he took aim on the leader. “I will wear his scalp proudly!”

Tom rode a few lengths behind Autie as the head of the column reached the mouth of the coulee. Custer surged ahead, into the river, splashing wildly and waving his arm for the others to follow.

“The villages are abandoned!” he shouted.

True enough. Or so it seemed to Tom. The lodges and camp ahead showed no activity. The village had fled.

Autie’s two flag-bearers urged their horses down into the cool water, where they had to fight to keep the animals moving. So much water and so much thirst. The horses fought their bits.

Then the young bearer of the regimental standard spurred his animal. The horse struggled against the bit, then surged forward.

At the moment the trees ahead erupted with that single rifle shot, the standard-bearer’s mount leapt alongside Custer’s horse.

The big lead ball struck the young soldier in the side of the face. The exit wound left little of the back of his head. Blood and gray matter splattered the soldier-chief.

Tom watched his brother jerk his reins in. He wheeled crazily as Vic fought her bit, bringing the animal under control in the knee-deep water midstream. Custer gave Vic the business end of those gold spurs. The big animal lurched on across the middle of the cold, rushing stream.

Instinctively White-Cow-Bull pulled the trigger on his old Henry repeater.…

As his .44-caliber bullet smashed through George Armstrong Custer’s chest, the shock wave sent the pink-faced soldier tumbling over the back of the big horse, into the turbulent water.

Almost by command his blaze-faced sorrel pranced once-round on the rocky bottom of the stream and loped back to where the soldiers skidded to a halt.

Their leader lay face down in the water. Some soldiers dropped from the saddle to fire their carbines at the Indians hidden behind their cottonwood fortress. At the same time, two other troopers stumbled along the rocky river bottom to retrieve the young soldier’s body when it began to drift off on the bobbing current.

Three more soldiers dropped to the cold, tumbling waters beside their fallen leader. One of these wore buckskins too. His gray hat fell into the river.

“Autie!”

Tom’s frantic cry bounced along the ragged river bluffs as he dashed forward, watching his brother pitch backward from his mount. As if it all happened in slow motion, Tom reached out—trying to check Custer’s fall.

But he got there too late. Autie already floated in the water. Some soldiers at the head of the column dropped to the river, forming a protective barrier around the general, while the rest of the command milled and jostled—suddenly numbed and dumbstruck.

Lieutenant Smith was there in the river after the next beat of Tom’s heart. George Yates right behind him.

The big blond captain from Monroe, Michigan, eased the general out of Tom’s arms, turning Custer over, bringing his face out of the bloody water.

Tom stared, lips trembling and unable to talk, unable to move, staring at that huge red stain spreading like soft flower petals across the left side of Custer’s gray shirt.

“Get his horse, goddammit!” Yates bellowed.

Tom didn’t know what to do. Autie had always given the orders. Except in that wild unthinking charge at Saylor’s Creek—when no one dared an assault on the Confederate artillery battery … no one, that is, until Tom cried out and led the charge himself.

“T-tom …”

He looked down into his brother’s face clouded with pain, with confusion and fear. And watched a gush of blood pool at the corner of Autie’s cracked lips, beneath that bushy, strawlike mustache.

“Autie!” The word slid like an elegy past Tom’s lips. Never before had his older brother been seriously wounded in battle. So damned lucky, never suffering like the many, many others … “M-my God! You’re shot!”

“Hill …” Custer bubbled his one-word command at the face swimming before his glazing eyes. “Get us back up the hill.”

As his heavy head slowly drooped, the general fell silent.

“Is he dead?” Fresh Smith demanded coarsely, suddenly very afraid.

Those precious seconds at the ford became confusion. Then confusion gave itself to the beginnings of panic that spread through the ranks. Milling, shouting wildly, this headless army bottled itself at the mouth of Medicine Tail Coulee. While above them on the hillside, Calhoun and Keogh watched in concern.

Custer’s own companies weren’t moving across the river. Stalemated. And that spelled anything but hope in the hearts of Keogh’s rear guard.

By now more warriors had slid behind the cottonwoods, returning the random soldier fire. Bullets pinged off the low bluffs directly behind the troopers or slashed into the river around them, sending up tiny eruptions.

Yates had been busy over the body, covering it while he felt at Custer’s neck for a pulse. Then he pulled back momentarily, cursing himself. No wonder he couldn’t sense a pulse beat … his gloves!

Instead, the captain bent to put an ear against Custer’s chest. Almost as if they stood enclosed in some foggy dream, the shooting and shouting around the small knot of officers stopped suddenly, the horses quit neighing or fighting their bits, and the warriors across the river mysteriously fell silent.

There was powerful medicine made at this place.

“He’s alive!” The Michigan soldier rose dripping from the water, bawling to the bone-pale sky above. “By God in heaven—the general’s alive!”

“Get his horse!” Tom cried out, instilled with hope, instilled with life himself now. And Vic was suddenly there. “Help me, dammit! Get Autie up! Up there on Vic. Get him on his horse!”

“It’ll be all right,” Lieutenant Smith droned over and over. “It’ll be all right now.”

Fresh Smith and George Yates helped sling the general over the saddle before Tom leapt atop Vic himself, squaring himself behind the cantle where he could cling onto his brother’s body, steadying it for the coming ride. Lieutenant and captain caught up their own mounts, swinging into the saddle and splashing out of the stream.

From across the river, in their cottonwood deadfall fortress, the screams and shouts grew louder. And beyond them the shrieks grew more in number. Above a pounding of pony hoofbeats.

“We’re in for a scrap of it now, Tommy!” Smith said it evenly, looking back over his shoulder.

“Sounds like the gates of hell have opened up, George!” Smith shouted to Yates.

“It’s up to you, Tommy!” Yates said coolly, old hand that he was, his eyes set more serious and deadly than Tom had ever seen them. “Turn ’em around. Pick up Keogh and Calhoun after we’re up the slope—”

“Slope?” Tom asked.

Yates swallowed, his eyes flicking up the slope past the point where companies L and I held off better than a hundred now. “Best you get us up that hill like the general wanted.”

Tom made no mistake in reading the urgency in that veteran’s no-nonsense declaration. He nodded automatically. Never had anything been so clear to him in his life. Autie had wanted him to get the men to the top of the hill. From where they stood right now down in the river, he wasn’t all that sure how far away that hill really was, but he figured his older brother wanted to get there to make a stand until the reinforcements arrived.

The only chance they had was Benteen, returning with his men, bringing McDougall’s pack train. Tom figured they could hold out till then. Autie knew they could hold out.

That’s what he tried to tell me, Tom thought. Just get to the top of the hill. And whatever you do—hold on.