Only he would ever know what happened twenty-one summers ago.
Following an early-morning attack on a Brule Sioux village camped north of the Shell River, what the white man called his Platte, instead of taking scalps, General Harney’s troopers had brutally slashed the pubic hair from the dead squaws littered among the smoking ruins of the village. Around those defiled bodies terrified children wailed as the soldiers completed their bloody task.
A fourteen-year-old Oglalla boy named Curly had been visiting cousins in the village Harney attacked. That frosty morning Curly was forced to witness this methodical butchery by Harney’s crack infantry as they slashed and tore and laughed about the mutilated genitals.
Years later after the death of his only daughter to the white man’s cholera, this young warrior changed his name. In a dream quest he was told he would ride a wild horse, leading his people to avenge the many wrongs of the pale-skinned earthmen.
Curly was no more. Crazy Horse was born.
Down below the soldier hill now, all along that grassy slope, crawled Miniconjou and Sans Arc warriors, along with a mixture of Left Hand’s Arapahos and whoever else wanted to lob a few shots at the hold-outs.
In a rough crescent looping round that southern flank over the back of the ridge were stationed the angry, swarming-hornet Hunkpapa soldiers led by Gall and Iron Dog. They were bolstered by the strength of Cheyenne Crazy Dog warriors led by Bob-Tail-Horse and war chief Two Moons, who had by this time had a horse shot out from under him.
On this far slope of soldier hill sat the impatient Oglalla warriors, itching for permission to charge on over the troopers. They would act as cavalry themselves, riding light and fast up that long north slope. Led by their spiritual master. Led by Crazy Horse.
With the latest Henry and Winchester rifles, both lever-action repeating weapons, in addition to those army carbines captured in the valley fight and on Calhoun’s hill, the warriors encircling the last-stand hill had the soldiers outgunned in those final minutes. For speed of firing the repeaters worked admirably. For long-range sniping the Springfield carbines were the best.
Earlier in the afternoon Crazy Horse had lost a handful of warriors in his first charge at the soldiers. As the troopers had been chased out of the coulee to the top of the spine, The Horse had led his Oglallas across the river and along the minty bottomlands. Like blackbirds swarming after a hawk, they followed him around the brow of the hill and up its north slope—just in time to meet Smith’s E Company. Right then and there the surprised soldiers clattered to a halt and hunkered down for a stand. Crazy Horse had them bottled up but good. No longer any place to go, no place to run.
The Oglallas had swept on up through the soldier ranks, touching here, striking out there with lance and hawk and rifle … until the great yellow cloud of dust blinded everyone, and the screams and shouts and wild grunts grew deafening to the ears. Then, as suddenly as Crazy Horse had come, he was gone. His Oglallas with him, battering Keogh’s I Company against Galls Hunkpapa infantry.
Crazy Horse had stopped the frantic retreat of Custer’s soldiers. With nowhere to run, no place to hide, the troopers milled about, confused and bewildered.
And frightened. For as the yellow-and-red dust lifted from the brow of the hill, the young soldiers with Tom Custer looked down to see the mighty Oglalla army waiting for them at the bottom of the north slope, taunting them, playing with the wasichu troopers the way a badger will play with a little brown field mouse before he gobbles it up alive.
For too long the Sioux and Cheyenne had waited to have such a victory as this. They wanted to savor it, knowing what that wait did to those few left atop the hill.
They swarmed round those hundred twenty troopers at first, noisy like enraged bees stirred from a hive someone has knocked with a stick. They swarmed on the north and west and south, hot for combat, their blood boiling for a chance at some close-in fighting. As the minutes dragged by, Crazy Horse and his Oglallas calmly watched pandemonium and insanity spread through the soldiers like winter’s first frost slicking icy scum across a pond.
Officers darted here and there, trying to wrench some semblance of order from their frightened men. Army horses with empty saddles reared and bucked and tumbled, tearing away from their handlers, spooked by the waving blankets and the shrill cries and the bullets and arrows slapping their flanks like stinging wasps. And everywhere the white men began to fall—some screaming in pain at their wounds, others falling without any sound at all.
For some of those iron-gutted veterans, it became desperately clear that Custer had made a crucial mistake in judgment. When he had forged down that trail beside Ash Creek against the advice of his scouts, the general plainly intended to have his victory over the Sioux here and now—or he would die seeking his destiny along these flowered hillsides bordering the Greasy Grass.
No man could ever claim Custer had a fear of being wounded or a fear of death. Neither had ever been a part of George Armstrong Custer’s life, and no such fear would attend his death.
The last twenty or so who remained huddled near Custer could watch how the general slowly, bravely slipped away without a yelp or cry of pain through that long afternoon. As they had admired him in life, so they would admire the way he died.
Those twenty rolled up their sleeves and burrowed down behind barricades of dead horses, some animals gut-shot and still trumpeting in pain, sounding so human as they thrashed their way into death, the stench from their ruptured bowels pungent on the hot, steamy air. Those last twenty worked quietly, fiercely at their weapons, prying the shells out if they could, and if that took too long, throwing aside a carbine and reaching for another. With but twenty men left on that hill, there were a lot of weapons to choose from.
By now some of them had both hands filled with the heavy Colt revolvers, like Billy Cooke, standing and plugging away methodically at the hundreds of warriors who snaked up through the tall grass to fire silent arrows into the air, watching their arc whistle down into the dead horses, the dead troopers, and hearing every now and then a muffled scream when a live soldier felt the iron sting.
And still that double handful kept the warriors at bay. It had been close to an hour and a half since the general had been slung over his McClellan, in his brother’s grip while they rode like hell up the ridge. For these last twenty that hour and a half seemed like hell gone on forever. Eternity is something hard for a man to swallow when he’s choking on his own bile.
Overhead the sun seemed to fall, not into the west, but easing right down on the hill itself. Hotter, drier—and the air got meaner with it. Filled with the buzz that is summer on the high plains. Blowflies and mosquitoes, beetles and ants, scurrying through the little desperate ring of soldiers. All matter of creature called to the sugar-sour blood spilled across the thirsty soil.
And everywhere the mean, scorching air roared with sound if a man stopped for a moment to listen.
All about them rang those thousand and one distinct sounds that added to the nightmare. The shrieking of the women, urging their warriors on. Those shrill cries of the warriors themselves. That high-pitched, constant keening of the eagle wing-bone whistles. The drum, drum, drumming of thousands of hooves racing back and forth along the slope. That mournful creak of dry saddle leather as a horse thrashed, working against its bloody cinch. The whimper of a soldier dying, forgotten by his bunkies and fellow troopers because they had their own problems at the moment … maybe because those bunkies were all dead anyway and beyond worry now.
Above it all rose that wild cry of the wind rushing down from the Wolf Mountains: stalking, hunting like a feral predator. Knowing there would soon be bones bleaching and burning beneath a hot sun—before the day was out. Bones for that feral wind to whistle and sing over for all time to come.