“Hush,” she replied, beginning to rise. “Come, now. The others are going.”
“Going where, Mother?” Yellow Bird spoke for the first time since he had been yanked from his warm bed and dragged from the cozy lodge to the safety of this hilltop.
“I do not know, my sons. But,” she gazed back over her shoulder at the blazing twinkle of many fires lighting the snow, reflecting red orange on the low clouds overhead, “we no longer belong here.”
She cried silently that Black Night March, tears freezing on her cheeks as she shuddered with more than the cold. Time and again she stopped, rewrapping the one wool blanket around them all, the one blanket she had to share with her two sons. Reminding herself it had been right to leave the Indian Territories of her people, to live with her cousins among the northern bands where she could be free. With the hope still burning in her breast that one day her husband would find her.
Through the deep snow and darkness of that long winter night, Old Bear’s Northern Cheyenne struggled on, guided by stars and the wind that hurried them along the ridges of that icy country, carrying only what they had on their backs. They told each other to keep moving. Those who stopped too long would not be with them when the morning sun reached into the sky.
Near daybreak some of the young warriors appeared on the hilltops, signaling with their blankets and robes.
“They ride ponies, Mother!” Yellow Bird cried. “Ponies!”
“Yes …” Monaseetah cried too, with silent tears.
Down from the gray slopes, the young men drove their recaptured ponies, leading the mustangs into the scattered remnants of Old Bear’s band. First the old ones were lifted out of the snow and set atop the strong young backs of the Cheyenne ponies, clutching manes and thanking the young brave protectors of the helpless ones.
Then the women and children.
“Now! We ride to The Horse’s camp,” shouted White-Cow-Bull, an unmarried Oglalla warrior from Crazy Horse’s village who had been visiting friends among Old Bear’s people when Crook and Reynolds attacked.
He directed the rest of his Oglalla brothers and some of the Cheyenne warriors to ride as sentries along the far ridges, searching the land for sign of more soldiers as he led the survivors in the line a bee would take to its hive. Once their noses were pointed north, White-Cow-Bull galloped back along the ragged column of stragglers. He reined up beside the beautiful Cheyenne woman.
“You are warm?” he asked.
“I am.” She did not take her eyes off the broken, trampled snow beneath her pony’s nose.
“And the boys?”
Monaseetah held them both in front of her on the pony’s back. “Warm too.” She knew the handsome Oglalla warrior had eyes for her alone.
He waited a long, aggravating moment, as if searching for something more to say to the woman who did not want to talk to him.
“We ride to The Horse’s camp now, Monaseetah. You will survive. Your sons will survive as well. We have strong ponies between our legs now, and the Cheyenne have always been a strong people. You will survive—and you will remember the night the soldiers burned your village!”
White-Cow-Bull suddenly yanked his pony away from the slow march, leaving the woman behind. He hammered his heels against the pony’s ribs as he galloped toward the front of the column, kicking up a spray of snow into the new red light emerging at the edge of the world.
“Ride, Shahiyena!” the Oglalla shouted down the line. “Follow me to freedom!”
For three days the Cheyenne marched before coming to the camp of Oglalla chief Crazy Horse. There the Sioux took in their friends, giving them clothes to replace the frozen, tattered remnants of what they had carried away on their backs from Old Bear’s winter camp.
Empty, gnawing bellies were filled from the store of dried buffalo and antelope put away for this winter season by the Oglalla. Old Bear’s people warmed themselves around Sioux fires, talking about the Black Night March they had survived. After three days it was decided that together Crazy Horse would lead them all to join up with Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapas.
When at last all three bands would camp together, they could decide how to defend themselves from the soldiers who had come to force them back onto their reservations.
Three more suns rose and fell before they found The Bull’s Hunkpapa village along the Creek of Beavers, nestled for protection against the late-season snows beneath the Blue Mountains.
After many hours of council, it was decided the survivors of Red Beard’s attack could travel with the Sioux. The three formed an alliance for the protection of those Northern Cheyenne of Old Bear. After all, the tribes agreed, the soldiers had attacked a Cheyenne village. Not the Sioux. The soldiers had not burned and plundered an Oglalla or Hunkpapa winter camp.
Talk was that the soldiers must be hunting Cheyenne once more, as they did on the Little Dried River in Colorado Territory twelve winters ago. As they stalked down the Cheyenne on the Washita eight winters gone.
This three-way alliance was formed for their mutual safety during the buffalo-hunting season drawing near. And because the Cheyenne themselves were the hunted ones, they would act as the point of the march on these nomadic wanderings come the short-grass time.
Following the march leaders were the Oglallas, while the Hunkpapas of Sitting Bull would act as rear guard. It was The Bull’s contention that the best way to avoid trouble was to stay as far from the white man as possible. If they could but avoid the army, he reasoned, there would be no worry of attack.
Slow marches of a few miles each day that winter-into-spring as the three villages moved up the Powder. With the full warming of spring awash over the northern prairies, they marched over to the Tongue.
And slowly, slowly, on to the Rosebud.
Every day The Bull sent out runners to the other bands trapped in bitter despair on the reservations.
“Look what I have!” Bull boasted. “You on the agencies have nothing but what the white man chooses to give you … when he chooses to give it. While I and the others have what Wakan Tanka has always given His people. Come, bring your guns! We will hunt in the old way. On our old lands. Where the white man will bother us no longer.”
All through the spring and the first reaching of the short-grass to the sun, many trails from north and south and east slowly began to merge together like strips of sinew wrapped into bowstring. Days of spring sped into summer, and one by one the little tracks of a lodge or two moved off the agencies, eventually joining others, their travois poles scratching the earth like the little streams and creeks feeding the mighty torrent of a river.
The Sioux were now as they had not been for many, many winters. Once again they were gathering with the old spirit, the old courage, the ageless power. There flowed a new life vibrant in every man, woman, and little babe strapped on the travois. They would go where the white man could not reach them.
Sitting Bull would take his people to those ancient hunting grounds, where they would not be bothered by the white man.
Sitting Bull would take them to the Rosebud.
By four o’clock that first afternoon, Custer halted the command on those open, minty bottomlands fragrant along the west bank of the Rosebud. Here the westerly breezes sweeping down from the Wolf Mountains would drive away troublesome mosquitoes come nightfall. The river at this point ran some thirty to forty feet in width, only three to five feet in depth, clear running but slightly alkaline, and with a gravel bottom that caressed the tired feet of many a trooper wishing to cool himself in its pleasant ripples that evening.
At sunset “Officers’ Call” was sounded by Custer’s chief trumpeter, Henry Voss. Word buzzed through camp that the officers would find Custer’s bivouac beneath his headquarters’ flag tied to a bullberry bush in the direction of the march.