“If these two are here with Bill Rowland,” Crow Necklace said sadly, “then there must surely be more of our people here with them.”
“I am ashamed for them,” Young Two Moon said, a sour ball of disappointment thick in his throat. “We have come to this: the white man making some of our relatives hunt down the rest of our people.”
After watching the singing and the games for a while, the pair moved on through the firelit darkness, walking below the soldier bivouac until they reached the camp where some Indians spoke a strange language.
“Who are these people?” Crow Necklace asked in a whisper.
For some time Young Two Moon stood and listened, studying the warriors who for the most part wore pieces of soldier uniforms. “I believe they must be the Ho-nehe-taneo-o, the Wolf People.”*
“Many, many winters have they have scouted for the soldiers.”
Looking about them in all directions, Young Two Moon grew frightened for the first time on this journey. The disappointment he had felt in finding Tse-Tsehese from the agency was now replaced by the beginning of fear for his people. He waited and did not lead Crow Necklace away from the camp of the Wolf People until the enemy had all gone to their war lodges made of blankets laid over bent willow branches, until the enemy’s fires burned low. In all that time of waiting his fear slowly boiled into hatred—until he decided they must do something to injure these ancient enemies.
When the whole camp had grown very quiet, Young Two Moon led his friend toward the enemy’s horses. They selected three of the nicest ponies the Wolf People had tied to a picket rope and cut them loose. Then the two started back across the length of the river bottom, skirting the camp to reach the spot where the other two scouts waited.
But in passing by the Arapaho camp, they found a fire still glowing cheerfully, around it a few Indians singing and eating, and a warrior frying cakes in a skillet. Beside the fire sat a large stack of cakes. The warm, luring fragrance was simply too much for Young Two Moon’s empty stomach. It growled at him not to walk on by.
“I must get me some of those cakes from that man,” he explained to Crow Necklace.
“I am hungry too. But what do we do with these horses?”
He thought a minute, trying to keep his stomach from speaking louder than his good sense. “We will let them go here. They should not wander far before we have eaten our fill.”
They released their stolen ponies, then walked boldly toward the fire. Just as they reached the light, two soldiers rode up and shouted to the Arapaho in English.
“Stop your singing and keep your eyes open!”
The soldiers rode off once the Arapaho fell silent. Grumbling, the Indians trudged off to their beds, disappearing within their makeshift war lodges. As the last Arapaho went to his blankets, the two Cheyenne scouts dashed in, scooping up a handful of the hot flour cakes, then cut loose three more ponies.
Crow Necklace claimed one, and Young Two Moon led the other two back to find their friends.
They found Hail and High Wolf curled up beneath their blankets, back to back—asleep. And discovered that their four Cheyenne ponies had wandered off.
“Hail, you come ride with me,” Young Two Moon said. “Jump up behind me. High Wolf can ride a horse, and so can Crow Necklace.”
They did their best to follow the tracks of the four horses and eventually found them, heading north by west, wending their way back home to the village.
Now they climbed onto the backs of their own war ponies, and leading their three captured animals, the four young scouts set off at a gallop into the cold and the dark.
They had news to tell Morning Star, Little Wolf, and the other chiefs.
The ve-ho-e soldiers were coming!
* 21 November 1876.
* Pawnee.
Chapter 22
22 November 1876
“A damned sad place to be at this hour.”
Seamus turned at the voice, finding old Bill Rowland stopped a few yards behind him in the cold black seep of predawn. “A sad place to be any time of the day.”
The scout waited a moment more, then moved up quietly to stand beside the Irishman. Married to a Cheyenne woman back at the Red Cloud Agency, Rowland already had proved his worth by translating for the auxiliaries Crook brought along to hunt down the hostile winter roamers. Now that the general was no longer chasing after Crazy Horse, but had instead heard tell of a large Cheyenne village somewhere close in the mountains, the Powder River Expedition might well find a man with Bill Rowland’s talents highly valuable in very short order.
It wasn’t snowing again, cold as it was, but every molecule of moisture in the air had frozen, making it hurt to breathe, the very air around him like icy grit against Donegan’s skin as he slipped his hat back on his head.
“You know any of ’em?” Rowland asked, gesturing across the collection of grave sites at the outskirts of the old fort—now no more than a collection of charred stumps of construction timbers protruding like blackened, splintered bones poking from a gaping, rotted wound.
The Irishman shook his head, tugging his soft-crowned felt hat down upon his long hair that tossed in the harsh wind. “No. Not really, I didn’t.”
“Thought you might have,” Rowland said. “The way you come up here … when none of them others could give a damn if—”
“Sojurs like them don’t need reminding of dying when they’re fixing to set off to fight,” Seamus interrupted, then thought better of it. “I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to snap your head off, Bill.”
The older frontiersman shrugged it off. “Don’t make no nevermind to me.”
“You come to fetch me?” Seamus asked, refastening the top collar button on his blanket-lined canvas mackinaw.
“They’re setting off. General wants us now.”
For a few moments more Donegan continued to gaze reverently over the dozen busted, dry-split headboards, each one bearing a wind-scoured and unreadable name, a good share fallen beneath the deep snow but more leaning precariously at their last stations there in the flaky soil above the gallant roll call of those who had given their all to this high and forbidding land.
“Tell me—the Injins leave this place alone, don’t they, Bill?”
“Yes,” Rowland answered quietly as he reached his horse and rose off the ground. “Place like this is powerful big medicine to the Cheyenne. They’ll go half a day around to keep out of the way of such a place.”
“Smart,” Seamus said as he took up the reins and stuffed a foot in a stirrup, rising to the saddle.
“For the Cheyenne?”
“For any man,” Donegan replied. “Any man what does his best to keep out of death’s way.”
He nudged the big bay into motion beside Rowland, putting behind them the crumbling adobe walls that would not hide the rusting debris of iron stoves and broken wagon wheels, a solitary broken-down wagon box, and a half-burned artillery carriage for a mountain howitzer.
He was venturing back into this hostile wilderness, crossing the milk-pale Powder River as he had times before, again to put his body into the maw of this ten-year-old fight … come here again to this tiny plot of ground to think and pray alone, remembering many faces, knowing very few names of all those who had dreams and hopes and families. For those who had fallen on this consecrated ground, Donegan would always say his prayers as his mother had taught him—to go down upon one knee and to bow his head before the presence of something he could not begin to comprehend, but knew existed just the same.