Cry of the Hawk

Much later in the day as the sun eased over into the last quadrant of the sky, there came a flurry of activity along the banquettes as soldiers shouted that they had spotted three men running in from the west.

“What’s your name, soldier?” Anderson demanded as he met the first of the trio of grimy, smoke-blackened survivors at the middle of the rifle pits, near Jonah Hook. Others clustered around the three as well.

“Corporal James Shrader, sir. Company D.”

“You with Custard’s outfit?”

“Was,” he gasped, eyes wide and every bit disbelieving he had made it in. “He ordered me to take four men out in advance and probe the trail in. We heard the howitzer fire back yonder—and Custard sent us in to find out what was happening here.”

“I ordered the field piece fired to warn the sergeant.”

“Yessir,” Shrader said, self-consciously. “When the Injuns rode down on us, we got cut off from the rest.”

“What happened to those who remained with the sergeant?”

“Don’t rightly know. We was more downstream from Custard and the wagons. But we could hear. The men put up a fight of it for a long time. And another bunch was close on our tails—about to find where we’d taken cover. Then a big, ugly Injun come riding down the edge of the coulee we was hiding in. He waved his rifle and called out to the rest. And they followed him like a swarm of hornets for the wagons down the ravine. That was the last we heard of any firing from Custard’s bunch.”

“You three hid all afternoon?”

“Yessir—five of us in the brakes near the river bottom. Private Ballew was knocked out of the saddle, and they swarmed over him there in the ravine. Private Summers was coming up the bank with me when he was hit and fell. We three is all that’s left.”

“Lieutenant Walker, take these men and get them something to eat and drink. You’ve done well, Corporal.”

“We got out with our hair, Major. And right now—that’s good enough for me.”

7

Moon of Cherries Blackening

AMONG THE SHAHIYENA of the North, he had long been known as Sauts, meaning the Bat.

That winged night animal swooping down on unsuspecting prey was his medicine helper.

But because of his huge beaklike nose, over the past few years more and more of his own people had taken to calling him what the few white men who came among the bands called him: Roman Nose.

So it was that this towering, muscular warrior became Woquini, or Hook Nose, to his own people. Above all, the most powerful war chief of the Northern Cheyenne.

Up and down the length of the hills overlooking the soldier fort on the south side of the river, Roman Nose passed by small groups of warriors, Lakota and Shahiyena both, sitting and talking, smoking their pipes and eating jerked meat, discussing the fight of yesterday when they had killed the soldier chief on the gray horse, perhaps talking of driving the soldiers back into the timber walls earlier today.

Warriors waving blankets on top of their lookout posts to the west caught his attention. More soldiers coming. Wagons.

This time the Shahiyena would show the Lakota how to kill all the white men. Roman Nose was still angry about the fighting yesterday. The Lakota had allowed too many soldiers to escape back across the bridge. Only eight scalps taken. It was not enough to pay for the horror suffered by Black Kettle’s people on the Little Dried River.

The white man’s bridge would have to run red with blood before Roman Nose had avenged the deaths of the many in that cold winter camp stinking with butchery.

By the time the Cheyenne war chief arrived at the scene, he found his warriors had already forced the five white-topped wagons to halt in the sandy bottom of a shallow ravine. The white men had circled the wagons in a crude oval, freeing the mules from their hitches about the time a hundred Lakota under Crazy Horse rode down on them.

It made Roman Nose laugh to watch the frightened white men release their mules and go bounding back across the sand to the shelter of the wagons. Some of the Lakota drove the mules off to camp while others chased after five horsemen who raced for the soldier fort.

On the hillside above the timbered ravine, Roman Nose dismounted, spread his small blanket and took out his short medicine pipe. Filling the bowl with tobacco taken in the raids of last winter, he smoked, watching his warriors begin firing at the soldiers and civilians trapped in the circle of their wagons. Time enough to watch and enjoy.

But the white men poked loopholes through the sides of the wagons, and killed a few of the more daring warriors who attempted to ride close enough to hit a soldier or count coup.

So as the afternoon dragged on, and the sun grew hotter, like a white eye in the sky that seemed to be scolding him, Roman Nose grew restive, watching the lack of progress while the Cheyenne dead mounted.