Now it was inching into autumn and those treaty Indians had to make way in their villages for that old murderer called Famine. That filthy dark-hearted scrawny creature that wants the ransom of lives. Because government food that was promised was late or never coming. The major was looking vexed and tormented. His honest heart had made promises, that how he saw it.
It was in the time of noisy weather that the first trouble came. We rode forth to meet it. Thunderstorms busted open the air and threw heaven-cast pails of light over that landscape that had no walls, no ends. God in his farmer’s apron, scattering the great seeds of yellow brightness. The hinterlands beyond the mountains breathing a fiery white breath. Nathan Noland with his tender ears already ruined by years of musket-fire deaf for three days after. Riding in a bruised becalmed gap between that ravenous display and the coming clatter of the rain. Then rain flattening the grasses like bear grease flattens a squaw’s hair. Sergeant Wellington was happy now because Sioux from some village westward had fallen on some strayed emigrants and ripped them from hopeful life. So the colonel had gave him fifty men and said to put a stop to that. Seems it was those Oglala friends of the major but that didn’t stop the order.
First Lieutenant puts us into two companies and he takes twenty men and goes sharp westward by his compass and us and the sergeant set off scouring out a little river ravine where he reckons that village might lie. The watercourse runs for ten miles north-east looks like. The whole country has started to steam because the sunlight is roasting off the rain. The grasses start to sit up again almost naked to the eye. A giant rousing. Three thousand bears throwing off the winter looks like. The stream itself mad as goaded bulls tearing down between its drenched rocks. Meadowlarks larking everywhere looking pleased with themselves and the skeeters in wholesale flocks everywhere. We ain’t feeling cheerful because rocks above you favours the enemy. That’s in all history. We were expecting to see the sergeant’s savages any moment popping up. But we went on all that day and further up the country where there were no streams only the baking silence of the plains. Then the sergeant disgruntled gives the order to retrace our steps and he is cursing that he let the new Pawnee scouts go with the lieutenant. These are very elegant boys in good uniforms better than what I had. But the lieutenant took them.
White men just no good for tracking cross country like this, he said, surprising us. Sounded like praise.
We camped up where our paths had furcated and we slept as best we could in our nightcaps of skeeters. We was happy men to climb out of blankets at earliest dawn. We washed our weary faces in the stream now calmed by the hours passed between. Rains in it must have passed on towards the Platte river and soon enough pour down into the Missouri. Strange to think of all that as we tried to shave our cheeks with blunted razors in the sparkling waters. Handsome John Cole whistling a waltz still residing in him out of New England.
Then we’re just poking about the place there waiting for the lieutenant to come back. Sergeant tells us to dry the lurking rain off our sabres or they will rust for sure. Then we fodder the horses best we can. Ain’t a trooper alive don’t love his horses. Spavined brute is loved. Nothing much to do then. Lige shows his skill at cards again and cleans out Starling Carlton. But we’re only playing for blades of grass, we ain’t got no money till the end of the month, if it comes then. Pawnee scouts were nearly going off last month because their pay didn’t come and then they seen we had nothing either so they calm down. Sometimes when you’re far from the sweet bells of town nothing comes out to you. Feels like they forget you. The goddamned boys in blue.
So the sergeant tells us to mount up and then we ready the horses and then we ride out along the way the lieutenant went, following the hoofprints best we could after the big rubber of the rain. Rain likes to keep things discreet, not show the way. But we go like that, Sergeant cursing all the while. Sergeant has a big hard stomach these days, says it’s his liver. Way he drinks whisky it might be. Youth has gone out of him anyhow and he looks like a old man. Like we got ten faces to wear in our lives and we wear them one by one.
Two miles on we got the shackles of the heat lying on us again, so hot the country begins to shimmer like the desert. We had the sun half behind us to the south which was some mercy. Wasn’t a man among hadn’t had his nose skinned off a hundred times. Bear grease is good for that but it stinks like an arsehole and anyhow we ain’t seen bears for a long time.
Jeez Christ, says Starling Carlton, if this ain’t hot.
So then it got hotter. You can feel your back begin to cook. Pinch of salt and a few sprigs of rosemary and you got a dinner. God Almighty, the heat. My horse don’t like it much and is beginning to stumble along. Sergeant is riding a nice mule he got in St Louis because he says mules is best and he ain’t wrong. We’re just going along while the sun hammers on us without anyone able to stop it. You could arrest sunlight for attempted murder out on the plains. God damn it. Then Starling Carlton just falls off his horse. If he knew when he was born and had a paper it wouldn’t show too many years. Falls clean off his saddle and strikes the powdery earth. So the sergeant and another trooper push him back up and give him water from the bottle and he looks all startled and ashamed like a girl farting in chapel. But we’re too hot to mock him. On we go. Then off in the distance Sergeant thinks he sees something. Truth to tell Sergeant is as good as a scout for seeing things but we don’t like to tell him that. So now we dismount and are leading our mounts and we are keeping best we can to a low line of scrub and other rubbishy rocks that happily snakes off towards whatever the sergeant seen. Feet swole in the boots and now every inch sweating including feels like the very eyeballs.
Quarter mile off the sergeant stops and makes a reckoning. He can’t see nothing moving he says but he sees plenty wigwams there and we can see them too, black shapes pointing up to the stupendous white acres of the sky. He don’t like what he sees. Then he barks a quick order and we’re into the saddles again and we don’t feel no heat now. Sergeant puts us into a double line and then by God he gives the order to charge. Out there in the silent prairie with only the perpetual wind for music and he tells us to charge. Ain’t there an old story about a windmill? But we spur the flanks till we draw little scratches of beaded blood. Horses wake up out of their stupor and catch the atmosphere. Sergeant shouts draw sabres so he does and now we show our thirty swords to the sunlight and the sunlight ravishes every inch of them. Sergeant never has given that order in all our time because you might as well light a fire as draw a sabre in the brightness as far as signals go. But something has the wind up him. Suddenly an old sense of life we haven’t remembered floods back into us. The air of manhood fills our skins. Some can’t help hollering and the sergeant screams at us to keep the line. We wonder what he is thinking. Soon we are at the fringes of the tent town, we tear through in a second, like riders in an old storybook, sweeping in. Suddenly we reach the centre. Suddenly we rein in mighty fast. Horses are flighty, excited, snorting, they’re spinning round so it’s hard to keep a bead on what’s to be seen. What’s to be seen is our twenty other troopers all dead looks like. They’re all dead lying about in the centre of the camp, clumped up, looks like shot really sudden, so that most of the heads are pointing nigh in the same direction. Lieutenant’s head in addition cut from his body. Hats gone, belts, guns, sabres, shoes, and scalps. Nathan Noland with his copper-coloured beard and eyes open to the sun. Tall wiry man from Nova Scotia, R.I.P. Halo of black blood. There’s only two Indians there, dead as dollars. We’re surprised the Indians didn’t take their dead with them. Must be a story there. Otherwise the camp is clean empty. You see the pole marks where the Indians left. Had to go so quick they didn’t pack the wigwams. Kettles still, here and there, with fires under them still. Sergeant dismounts and lets his mule walk off. Walk to Jericho for all he cared. He takes off his campaign cap and scratches his bald pate with his right hand. Tears in his eyes. God have mercy.