“We best be getting.”
Seamus nodded and urged his horse away with a tap of his heels. Then glanced once more at the torn earth clawed up and sniffed over. “Wolf Mountains, you say?”
Grouard nodded. “Chetish. Injun name for them.”
“Ain’t no Injins gonna camp in the mountains.”
“You’re right, Irishman. But by moving down the Rosebud to keep out of sight of any wandering scouts they may have out—it means we’ll eventually have to cross over them low mountains.”
“Then that big camp is west, ain’t it?” Donegan replied. “Like you said: in the valley of that Greasy Grass.”
“See the sun on them clouds?”
Donegan peered west, gazing at the distant haze laced with the first tendrils of a sunset’s delicate light painted a golden rose but underlaid with an angry belly of bloodhued crimson. “That’s smoke, Grouard.”
“Your turn to be right, Irishman.”
Seamus said, “Covering their tracks, ain’t they?”
“Burning the grass because something’s for sure driving them south.”
“Terry’s army, by God,” Seamus replied. “Crook’ll wanna know.”
“Yes, Terry—maybe even Custer’s Seventh,” Grouard said all too quietly, “herding Crazy Horse and my old friend Sitting Bull right down into Crook’s lap.”
“I suppose we ought to go see for ourselves, Frank.” Seamus nudged the big horse toward the timber bordering the hillside once more. “Go see if Sitting Bull’s coming for Crook.”
What a glorious day it had been!
Here in the final days of Wicokannanji, the Lakotas’ middle moon, Wakan Tanka had showered his people with honor, blessing all Lakota for all time!
For all time to come, the white man would cease to trouble American Horse’s people.
Indeed, the soldiers had come. Soldiers had fallen into camp! Exactly as Sitting Bull’s vision had disclosed. It was almost more than an aging warrior could ever hope would happen—yet American Horse had seen it with his own eyes. In his ears had echoed the screams and wails of dying soldiers, the war cries of the Lakota and Shahiyena so driven in fury that their bodies still trembled volcanically for hours after the battle. Yes, and he had seen the first of the white men fall there near the river, then more along the southern end of the ridge. And with his own eyes he had watched as Wakan Tanka touched some of the soldiers with the moon, for there was no other reason that could explain why the white men turned their guns on themselves all along the length of that terribly hot ridge.
No other explanation for a simple man like him to understand how or why the soldiers would take their own lives. It was something American Horse finally turned over to the Great Mystery, only because there was no other way for his heart and mind to deal with the overwhelming power of it.
Wakan Tanka had promised those soldiers to the Lakota. In no more time than it took for the sun to move from one lodgepole to the next, the Great Mystery had kept His promise to His people. This was not for man to wonder, but to accept.
American Horse would accept.
For days the nomadic camps had known about the soldiers to the north camped along the Elk River.* Scouts rode out from the villages daily to shoot at the soldiers, and to steal ponies from the Sparrowhawk People,† the scouts working for the Limping Soldier.‡ Some of the Lakota scouts even brought back word that white men traveled in smoking houses that walked on water!**
Then in those first days following their great fight on the Rosebud, when the camps were ever watchful of the soldiers to the north, Crow King arrived with his many lodges. The following day the mighty Gall rode in with his people, welcomed by the shouts of the thousands. Yes! Every warrior, from the youngest and untried, to the oldest scarred veteran of Harney’s fight on the Blue Water—they vowed they would all be ready when the Great Mystery delivered them the soldiers of Sitting Bull’s vision.
Then came that sleepy morning after so much singing and dancing, courting and feasting—that warm sunny morning when the first reports came that soldiers had been spotted far away near the crest of the Chetish Mountains. Sitting Bull, Gall, and the rest promptly doubled their akicitay the camp police, in a fierce attempt to keep all the eager, fire-blooded young men from racing out for glory.
“No man must make contact with the white man away from this camp,” demanded Sitting Bull, the Hunkpapa mystic.
Gall spoke even more fiercely. “The coming fight must not be started anywhere but here among this great gathering!”
How important it was to all Wakan Tanka’s people that the prophecy be ordained on this day!
What glory the fight had been for them all, American Horse thought now as he moved south with the great cavalcade, astride his pony moving slowly down the west side of the immense procession that stretched for miles, spread up to a mile in width, as they plodded toward the White Mountains* to harvest lodgepoles. He, like most of the other warriors, rode the flanks of the colorful parade, ever watchful for signs of the enemy—whether that proved to be those soldiers said to be hurrying down from the north, or perhaps some of the Sparrowhawk People or more Corn Indians,† like those who had scouted for the soldiers who fell into their camp the day before. American Horse wanted to believe—really believe—that there would no longer be any danger from soldiers hunting for Lakota and Shahiyena villages. How he wanted to believe they would live and hunt, laugh and love in peace from now on.
The way his father, Smoke, had said it was for a long time before the white man began pushing west along the Holy Road that took him to the land where the sun went to bed each night. The way it was before then … the way it could be again now.
How American Horse prayed it to be so.
*The Yellowstone River.
†The Crow Indians.
‡Colonel John Gibbon, commanding, Montana column.
**Paddle-wheel steamboats supplying the army’s river depots.
*The Big Horn Mountains.
†The Arikara or Ree Indians.
Chapter 7
26 June 1876
Dusk was falling as they stumbled across that wide, wellbeaten trail crossing the divide between the Rosebud and the Little Bighorn. Even in the lengthening shadows, Donegan and Grouard could read the story of the encampment’s passing many days before, the earth tracked and chewed by thousands of lodgepoles dragged behind more ponies than any man could possibly imagine.
Yet … atop that trail of unshod hooves and moccasin prints lay another of iron-shoed horses and peg-booted men. An army on the move.
The pair found the column’s first campsite not that far west of the Rosebud on the trail up the divide, then ran across a second some distance down from the crest—where the troops had stopped and started coffee fires, smoked their pipes and slept, curled up in the trampled grass and dust.
“Didn’t they have any idea what they were marching into?” Seamus asked.
“Only a blind man would fail to see what waited for them down there,” Grouard answered just past sunset as they reached the top of the divide and gazed upon the valley of the Greasy Grass.
There in the west, shoved clear up against the deep indigo and purple of the foothills and benchlands on the far side of the distant river, lay a pall of smoke, its belly underlit in orange-tinted hues from the tongues of miles upon miles of grass fires.
“That ain’t lodge smoke,” Donegan grumbled quietly as they moved down from that high place, down the banks of Ash Creek toward the valley of the Greasy Grass.