Seize the Sky

CHAPTER 22

THE Hunkpapa and Santee camps thundered with victory cries now that the soldiers who had attacked them were cornered in the timber, retreating across the river and into the hills beyond.

More and more warriors rode back into the camps, returning from the battle in the valley, carrying scalps they brandished on their rifle muzzles or waved aloft from lances and coup sticks. A few even carried complete heads they had hacked from their victims. These were Santee warriors mostly, for they were the last tribe to practice this ancient ritual of decapitating an enemy.

Everywhere the women raised their high, shrill tremolos and ululating cries, sounding the ages-old approval for bravery and success in battle. A high-pitched trilling of the tongue was about all war chief Gall could hear—that and the pounding of blood hot at his ears.

Pizi, as Gall was known among the Sioux, had discovered his two wives and three young children dead near the southern edge of the Hunkpapa camp where they had gone to dig roots that morning.

Two women and three children dead. The first casualties of Major Marcus Reno’s assault on that far fringe of the great gathering along the Greasy Grass. An ignoble beginning to a bloody little battle that would rage but two hours from the time Reno’s soldiers fired their first shots, until there were no longer any alive on last-stand hill.

Trembling with primeval fury, Gall rose slowly from the bloody bodies of his family. He was alone. No wives now—no children to carry his line in their veins. His eyes afire with a blood-lust, the war chief finally heard that rifle fire coming from the northeast across the river.

He gazed up toward the hills, seeing the smoke from Indian and soldier guns alike near the top end of Lower Medicine Tail. Then to his wondering eyes came the most fantastic sight of all—frantic soldiers scattering in wild, disordered retreat up the hills leading away from the Miniconjou Ford, away from the Medicine Tail Coulee itself.

Soldiers in retreat, like a wolf spider trying to fight off the infuriating, overpowering charge of black ants. Their huge army mounts leapt and stumbled. Gall sensed what terror those wasichus must feel at this moment—easy enough for the soldiers to glance back over their shoulders and see what waited for the man who couldn’t drag himself out of the mouth of that coulee.

Right behind the last frightened, white-knuckled trooper, the Cheyenne and Sioux were streaming across the shallow ford like maddened, vengeful wasps.

Surely many of Custer’s soldiers must have blinked, and blinked again, after rubbing their eyes clear of dust and tears.

Could it be they really saw what galloped toward them?

Right in the middle of that horde of warriors splashing across the river rode a handful—no more than a dozen at most—screaming, riding their ponies backwards!

Completely naked, this dozen carried nothing more in their hands than long sticks aflutter with feathers and scalps. Hideously painted, they smacked the rumps of their ponies repeatedly to spur them after the retreating soldiers. Riding backwards, courting death, shrieking like a pack of banshees straight out of hell itself. The contraries’ suicidal bravery pricked every other warrior into a wild charge across the ford and up the hillside.

Like a flock of wrens and sparrows suddenly wheeling about and chasing a troublesome, predatory hawk, the first warriors flung themselves after the screaming, crying, frightened soldiers, who kicked and whipped and beat their weary, lathered horses. No bottom left in those army mounts. It was too late—nowhere near enough time for grazing on their march up the Rosebud, and too little sleep crossing over the Wolf Mountains, not to mention no water to speak of in the last few hours. The horses were done in.

Gall rallied his warriors and led the hundreds of determined, blood-crazed Sioux, already hot from their battle in the timber, across the ford and up the slopes, dogging the cavalry’s heels.

His blood aboil, the war chief knew his task was to push the pony soldiers back from the village, so no more women and children would have to die by soldier bullets. Then Gall would kill them … slowly, methodically … each and every one of them. Right down to the last soldier who had defiled their great camp and ridden down into this valley to attack a camp of the small and helpless ones.

Gall promised himself no wasichu soldier would remain alive to torture. He understood that for these frightened white men to see there was no chance for escape, for them to realize that the end was near and not know when that last bullet would come—all that was torture enough.

Pizi, the Sioux war chief, wanted to wallow in white blood the way a buffalo bull wallows in mud to rid himself of fleas and ticks. Already his nostrils filled with the stench of death … wasichu death.

“No one left standing!” he shouted now as his followers burst from the top of the lower Medicine Tail Coulee. “No soldier left alive!”

Many of the warriors glanced at their war chief for that fraction of a moment. Most knew he had lost his entire family to these soldiers he hungered to wipe from the earth. It was right what Gall asked. The pony soldiers deserved to die.

“For our women and children!” Gall shrieked as the troopers above him stumbled, wheeled, and turned, dropping to the ground to set up a ragged skirmish line around some screaming officers.

“Wipe every last soldier from the breast of our Mother! KILL THEM ALL!”

Some two hundred twenty-five men had followed George Armstrong Custer in his march down the Medicine Tail Coulee.

Of that number only a handful of Crow scouts would live to tell of the horror on that ridge to disbelieving white ears in the decades to come.

In those first moments after Custer had been blown out of his saddle, the Sioux had shrieked down to the river crossing, bolstering the four brave Cheyenne warriors who had turned Custer’s gallant charge into a harried retreat to certain death. With the smell of blood and victory fresh in their nostrils, the Sioux warriors had turned from the Reno fight in the valley and spurred their little ponies north toward the other soldiers who were reported ready to attack the villages.

So many hands were already bloody from the battle with the soldiers in the valley. Dark, wet scalps hung dripping from their belts. That paint they had quickly applied when the attack was sounded had now become smeared and furry with valley dust. Many were already drunk with victory. Most probably carried army carbines in their hands and wore those bloody blue-and-gray army shirts they had taken off the bodies of soldiers slaughtered down in the timber in the wake of Reno’s mad retreat.

To wear a dead soldier’s bloody tunic into battle with these others—such would work powerful medicine on these soldiers clustering in fear atop the hill.

While the young warriors charged up the slope, the women and old men scurried up to the high points of land east of the river to watch the battle take form.

This would truly be a fight. The soldiers in the valley had turned and run away. These on the hill had nowhere to run. They had to turn and fight.

From the Medicine Tail Coulee the pony soldiers had struck out north by east, riding hell-bent for leather to the highest ground. Always take the high ground, they had been taught. Secure that high ground, General Custer’s damp lips had reminded them before he slipped into blessed unconsciousness.

Once the soldiers reached that hilltop, the thousands upon thousands of spectators watched them spread out in a thin skirmish line along the ragged, grassy spine three-quarters of a mile long.

“Ride, you wolverines!” Tom Custer hollered to spur on the Michigan boys gathered tightly round him in their charge, like a blue fist sheltering the general slung over the saddle in front of Tom, his spirit oozing out of him with every drop that soaked his saddle red.

“Ride, goddammit!” Tom bellowed again, goading his men to the top of the ridge, where he could finally turn and look back into the valley.

There at the southern end of the spine, Tom gazed at the throbbing lines of black ants scurrying out of their anthills, streaming in a solid phalanx across the river, splashing up the slope toward the retreating cavalry.

“Troops, dismount!” he hollered, then his eyes darted over to Yates.

The big Michigander nodded and flashed him a huge, grim smile. It had been the proper order to give.

“Form skirmish lines—out—left flank! Out—right flank!” George Yates bellowed, already on the ground, pistol out and waving at the stragglers.

Not all the soldiers heard Tom Custer or George Yates. Not all could. There was simply too much sporadic shooting and yelling, besides all the horses neighing, bucking, and fighting their handlers. The animals had smelled the rippling water when they loped down into the Medicine Tail, then were refused a drink, lashed all the way to the top of this dry, dusty ridge without a chance to lap their muzzles in the cool river. Sadly the greenhorns didn’t stand much of a chance controlling their wild mounts, rearing, fighting the bit—crazed with thirst.

Some soldiers clung to their saddles, while others stayed on the ground. A few riders spurred in and out of the skirmish formations, shouting orders, waving commands down the line—officers mostly, or veteran sergeants. Anyone who would take charge. Time and again a few cooler heads turned and glanced down the grassy slope into the river valley at those great camp circles spread like clusters of buffalo-hide jewels strewn across the green velvet of the meadows.

They knew in their guts that no man had ever seen such a gathering before and lived to tell of it.

“Form up that left flank! They’ll sweep us off the top if you men don’t hold!” Tom shouted at his end of the spine of high grass and cactus after the general had been placed in the care of his own C Troop.

Keogh, Yates, Smith, and Calhoun spread the word, working feverishly among their men, attempting to wrench some order out of the panic in their flight up the slope.

Frightened out of their wits, most of the raw recruits simply let the reins go. Horses reared away in the melee, dust, and noise, nostrils flaring and eyes wide as nose bags with fear—then galloped off downhill toward the river and water, big oxbow stirrups flapping. Ammunition jingled in every saddle pocket. The mounts of some were gone for good.

“Tommy boy!”

It was Keogh’s voice young Custer recognized above the din of the first carbine shots as some of the veterans turned, dropped to their knees, and began to return the Sioux fire. He wheeled Vic on the mare’s haunches, darting back to slide from the bloody saddle near the Irishman.

“Lookee there, man!” Myles pointed downhill. “We got them bastards stopped for a wee bitten moment or two!”

Sure enough the warriors were piling up behind the brow of the hill, most releasing their ponies, driving the animals back downhill to the river and the villages beyond. From a clump of grass or shadowy sage, the warriors tried to fire a potshot every now and then.

For the time being, the tall grass would hide a soldier lying prone, but only until that soldier fired his carbine. Then a burst of blue powder-smoke betrayed him. And the Indians returned his fire. Perhaps the noisy rattle of Henrys and Winchester.

For close to an hour the soldiers held Gall off while the warriors fired volley after volley from their repeaters or old muzzle loaders into the scattered lines of white troopers. Here and there a young soldier might hear for the first time that soapy smack of lead pounding into a human body. They were still breathing, and still alive—holding the Sioux at bay.

There wasn’t any widespread nervousness or anxiety or fright … not just yet.

They had the Indians held down for the time being. Dr. Lord was working on Custer right up there in that ring of dead horses. The general would be on his feet again soon, and then they’d fight their way out of this red nightmare.

With Custer to lead them, they could fight their way right through the bleeding heart of hell.…

Beyond the throbbing movement just down the slope, Myles Keogh peered at warriors massing at the river, crossing the silvery ribbon of water before they streamed north, racing toward the far end of the sway backed ridge.

If those red buggers sweep the end of this ridge …

He didn’t want to think any longer on it.

“Myles!”

Keogh turned. Tom Custer was hollering, waving his pistol in the air. “George! Jimmy!”

When Tom called, the inner circle hunkered on the run to Tom’s central position beside the general. Young Custer knelt in the grass and sage, his brother leaning against him. Dr. Lord sweated over a wet, blackened belly dressing that was drying about as fast as it was sopping up the flow that didn’t seem to want to stop. A soldier’s bloody tunic lay in Custer’s lap.

“General!” Keogh growled in surprise as he knelt at Custer’s side. Myles found himself marveling at the strength in the man.

He’s never truly been wounded before … not a bullet hole in all this time … taking it now like it’s something happens every day. Not many would take a close-range shot like that and still be breathing, much less rousing, eyes open, like he is—

“Myles …” Custer coughed up some blood, a pink froth bubbling over his lower lip.

“General,” Dr. Lord whispered, pressing down on the compress all the harder, “don’t try to talk now.”

“End of the ridge …” Custer sputtered.

“You want us to go to the end of the ridge?” Tom asked anxiously, eyes darting nervously along the spine of grass and sage.

Custer nodded, weakly, eyes half-mast and watery.

“He’s right,” Keogh replied in a whisper. He pointed down the slope at the warriors streaming off to the north. “We don’t get to the end of this ridge … north—the bastards can have full run at us when they ride up the north slope. Down there at least we keep them at bay.”

Tom looked at each one in turn. “That means we’ll have to protect both ends of the ridge.”

Calhoun nodded.

Yates wiped a hand across his dry mouth. “Keogh’s right. We don’t keep ’em off both slopes … we’re done.”

“We’re done as it is,” Lord whined, his greenish face gone white with fear as his wet hands worked in the general’s warm, sticky blood.

“We’re not done, goddammit!” Tom snapped. He peered again at each of his old drinking partners, longtime friends who had lived so much life with him and the gallant Seventh.

“Up to you now, Tom,” Calhoun said it for all of them.

“The gauntlet’s passed, Tommy!” Keogh cheered as best he could.

Here we kneel, commanders of five of the best horse companies in the whole gawdamned world, Myles thought to himself. We’ll make it—by the saints—we’ll make it!”

“Don’t you think we ought to be moving!” Lieutenant Algernon Smith suggested, shouldering in on the tight huddle around Custer. “Like the general ordered, Cap’n Custer?”

“Fresh is right, Tom,” Yates replied.

“Yes.” Tom gazed round at the others. His brother’s most trusted officers.

Myles placed a big paw on Tom’s chest, stopping him. “Who’s to ride to the ridge?”

“Why … all—”

“No,” Keogh growled low, like a wolf with a den to guard. “Cainnot be that way, Tommy. Who the hell’s to support the retreat? Who’ll stand behind to guard the rear?”

Tom remembered Autie’s words. “Calhoun,” he squeaked with a dust-dry throat ever tightening. “Autie asked you to stay and support our rear. Cover the retreat.”

There wasn’t a flinch of an eye nor a betraying muscle twitch along his jaw that said Jimmy Calhoun wasn’t ready to do exactly as ordered. Stay behind and cover their backsides as the rest retreated along the dusty ridge.

“Yes, sir!” Calhoun shouted as he snapped a salute. Then he bit his lip a moment. “I told the general, Tom … told him personal I’d not be found wanting when it come time to prove how deeply I appreciated my commission he put me in for.” He dragged a hand beneath one eye, smearing dust in a hot streak. “Suppose that time’s come, ain’t it?”

Before Tom could respond, Keogh rose to his feet beside Calhoun. Two big oaks hovered over them all like huge Doric columns.

“With your permission, Cap’n Custer,” Keogh began, a smile on his thick lips above that black Vandyke beard, “I Company will assist Lieutenant Calhoun in the rearguard action, sir!”

Staring up into the cruel sunlight that sucked at his juices, sensing those two long shadows stretching out of the bone yellow sky, hulking shadows of his two friends, George Armstrong Custer fought back the tears. The warm syrup of his own blood choked him as he tried to spit some words out.

Still he knew he could show his men just what he thought, exactly how he felt, by doing something he had never done before in front of any of them. His tears told them all how deeply he had been touched by their time together. And how he felt about what they were ready to sacrifice for one another.

Tom looked up from his brother’s silent, smeared face. “I think the general approves of your request, Myles.” His quiet, choking voice sounded strange, distant, after Keogh’s loud, lusty proclamation.

Tom saluted Keogh there in that bright light. “Permission granted to lay back in support of our march along with Lieutenant Calhoun.”

“George …” the general whispered in a red bubble, vainly reaching for Yates’s hand.

The captain bent so he could hear Custer’s liquid whisper at his ear. When Yates leaned back and returned his hat to his head, Lieutenant Smith spoke that question every one of them shared.

“What’d he say?”

“Al, he told me to assume command … if Tom should fall.”

Tom Custer nodded, saluting Yates. “Autie would want it that way: the Michigan boys around him. If I drop, you take care of the general, George. No matter what! You hear me? AH of you? You damn well take care of the general. He must not fall into their hands—”

“He won’t be left behind!” Smith shouted, fussing bravely with the bright crimson tie fluttering below Custer’s neck.

Funny that I should notice it now, Keogh thought. That tie’s the same damned color as Custer’s blood, bright and wet against the general’s gray jersey pullover.

“We’ll see he goes with us,” Yates replied softly. “Come the end, the general won’t be taken alive.”

Tom gulped. “I suppose we all know what’s expected of us?” He straightened his Custer chin proudly. They all nodded without reply. “We make it to the end of the ridge, we can hole up till Benteen gets here with the pack train. Reinforcements. We’ll last.”

Suddenly Tom whirled, grabbing Keogh’s shirt with one hand, clutching Calhoun with his left. “After Yates, Smith, and I have the end of the ridge secured, I want a protected retreat back to us from you two. Fall back—orderly.”

Tommy’s finding command a bit harder than he thought it be, Keogh thought. That whipped-dog look in his eye—save as many men as we can comes time we fall back.

Keogh glanced at Calhoun, finding the blond lieutenant staring at him, smiling grimly. All three knew what the chances would be of the two ever rejoining the rest at the end of the ridge. Any man with but one good eye could peer down the slopes and see that where there once was a halting, a starting, and a stopping among the warriors, now a shrieking red wave rumbled up the hill.

It was time for Custer’s command to move out—those who were lucky enough to be moving at all. Those who would have a little time bought dearly for them by Calhoun and Keogh and their two little companies of gallant soldiers.

Whittled down like dry grass before the winter wind.

Gall had led his warriors across the river. Flying pony hooves sent cascades of spraying, jewellike water and muddy sand high into the air over them. Sioux faces grim and hideously painted.

Death to them all!

Straight up the hillside they charged into the face of that terrible wall of soldier fire. Two warriors tumbled off their little mustangs in the first volley, the bodies rolling to a stop among the tall grass and cactus. Others rushed in to drag away the bodies of those fallen, out of range of the soldier’s guns. Ahead of them along the spine, many of the soldiers were shouting, running for what horses were left them now.

Gall stood uneasily, watching. Some of the white men stayed behind—kneeling or stretched out on their bellies in the tall grass, firing their carbines as calmly as they could at any copper-skinned target that presented itself.

But those soldiers leaving to dash north along the spine—they were the frightened ones. Gall realized they were scared only because they had been given a chance to live now. Hope can be a terrible burden for a man with nothing else to cling to.

Those left behind—those men gathering about Calhoun and Keogh like cottonwood saplings round two tall, powerful oaks—they knew what their odds were. Perhaps best to take your bullet or arrow here and now rather than drag the damned thing out.

That’s why such an eerie calm descended among those hardened veterans and green recruits that long afternoon on Calhoun Hill. Few men had ever experienced that singular feeling and lived to tell another soul of it. A peaceful, purposeful calm that passes over a man when he is finally reconciled to his own passing. Especially a soldier, young or old, when called upon by duty and friendship to cover the retreat of his brothers-in-arms. To give up his life so that others might have a better chance of holding onto theirs.

Something over an hour had crawled past since the Sioux and Cheyenne had driven the cavalry back from the river’s edge and up that dusty slope. Gall was growing impatient. Along with Crow King, Iron Dog, and Big Road, he decided this popping their heads up to shoot at the soldiers was no smarter than suicide.

There is a better way, a safer way to fire into these soldiers clustered in tiny groups near the hill.

As word spread through the entrenched Sioux positions, the warriors brought out their bows in force at long last—and a storm of iron-tipped arrows began to rain death upon the troopers. While a warrior had to expose himself to fire his gun simply because a bullet travels in a straight path, an arrow could be sent into the sky in a graceful arc, whistling down to pierce horse or man alike.

Sergeant George Finckle lay his body over Custer’s once more, protecting it from the shafts of darkness flittering down across the sun, falling from the sky in waves of iron-tipped hail. He watched others mount up behind Smith and Yates, fighting their horses, sprinting north if they had control.

“Get him loaded fast!” Tom Custer bellowed, dodging the red hail.

Arrows clattered into saddle gear and dead horses. Battering gear and piercing horses. God, they make a racket! Finckle thought as he knelt over the general. Damn, he’s out again.

George looked around. Dr. Lord worked on a soldier with a shaft all the way through the back of his neck. The man was drowning in his own blood, legs thrashing just the way Finckle remembered the chickens thrashing about the yard back home. Spraying bright hot blood just like this.

Jeezuz! A horse sounds just like a man screaming when it goes down, dying.

Men shouted as the arrows struck, or they cursed when the man next to them drew his last breath, yanking at that bloody shaft in his back or gut.

The soldiers who had leapt aboard their horses to escape the falling death from the sky didn’t stand any better chance. They were hit as surely as those men left behind when the arrows rained. Saddles emptied, horses reared and broke free, bolting downhill in a noisy clatter.

For the first time bedlam began working its evil on that end of the ridge as soldiers scurried this way and that like sow bugs from an overturned buffalo chip. A few savvy old files even pulled the bodies of dead bunkies over themselves. The only protection from the iron-tipped messengers of red death.

“Buglers!” Tom’s raspy rawhide voice carried over the melee.

He must want to be the last to ride outta here, Finckle considered. He’s staying till we get the general up on his horse. He’d not dare leave his brother’s side.

“Sound the charge, buglers!” Tom ordered, waving his pistol in the yellow dust that clung to everything in a sticky film.

From the saddlebags of the two company buglers came those shiny brass bugles they had not blown for three days now. In a stuttering, discordant melody, the buglers raised their tune along the grassy spine.

“If it’s the last thing I’ll do, Finckle …” young Custer snarled, “I’ll organize this retreat, by God!”

“Cap’n?” Finckle gazed up through the dust and the powder smoke.

The general was conscious again when Tom slid up beside his brother in the tall grass.

“Blow for Benteen, Tom,” he sputtered. “Benteen must hear us …”

Tom didn’t answer. He leapt to his feet, dashing among Smith’s gray-horse troop to Find the buglers, whose brassy notes sailed over the slopes.

They weren’t hard to find, not with those shiny instruments gleaming like mirrors strapped to a man’s soul in the sun. Shiny and yellow beneath a bone-dry summer eye glaring down on their last hill.

Tom grabbed one cowering bugler hiding behind a horse carcass to blow his horn. Then Custer yanked the other trumpeter to his feet as well.

“Blow ‘Assembly’!” Tom ordered flatly. “Then try ‘Officers’ Call.’ Just keep blowing till I tell you to stop! Blow, goddammit—blow!”