Trumpet on the Land: The Aftermath of Custer's Massacre, 1876

“Tell the general we’ll have a report for him when we get back,” Seamus said over his shoulder as he moved off with Grouard, each of them pulling his horse behind him.

“Get back? From where?”

“North!” Grouard growled.

Donegan added, “Where the wild Injins play, Johnny. Where the Montana and Dakota columns are having all the fun … up on the Greasy Grass where the wild Injins play!”

“You’ll watch yourself, Seamus?”

“Indeed I will, Lieutenant!”

The pair had their mounts quickly grained while they rolled up blankets inside gum ponchos, packed a little coffee, salt pork, and hardtack into the saddlebags already heavy with ammunition for their rifles, plus a pair of belt weapons apiece—those .45-caliber 1873 long-barreled single-action Army Colt’s revolvers. While Grouard favored the .45/70-caliber Springfield carbine, that shorter cavalry model, Donegan had grown quite attached to the eleven-pound Sharps single-shot cartridge rifle sold him by teamster Dick Closter immediately following their fight with Crazy Horse on the Rosebud. Seamus had given the ten-year-old Henry repeater a fitting burial after dark that night before Crook began his retreat south: burning the battered stock in his coffee fire to finish the destruction begun in the furious hand-to-hand fighting. A redeeming end for the weapon that had seen the Irishman through a decade of Indian fighting.

With each of them tying a small sack of oats to the back of his saddle, the two scouts mounted up and moved north by east along Goose Creek, striking the Tongue River itself by late afternoon. With every mile they put behind them, Donegan became more acutely aware that they were drawing another mile closer to what all evidence was showing had to be the biggest gathering of hostiles ever assembled on the plains. They hugged the timber where they could. But when their route lay across open ground, they left horses tied in sheltered coulees as they bellied up to the crest of hilltops to examine the country they were about to traverse. And never did they take their eyes off that cloud of smoke and dust thickening to the north. Occasionally Seamus would test the caliber of the wind, sniffing to see if he could smell grass smoke. Figuring that when he got his first good whiff of it, he and Grouard would be nearing the thick of things.

Leaving the Tongue, they had struck out overland, almost due north for the Wolf Mountains far in the distance, by and large following the expedition’s line of march toward Rosebud Creek better than eight days before. The sun was in its final quadrant of the western sky by the time they reached the army’s creekside camp the morning of 17 June, to discover that the bodies of those soldiers killed in the battle had been dug up.

“Looks like predators,” Donegan said as they looked down on the shallow graves, the whole scene carpeted with paw prints.

“The Wolf Mountains up ahead,” Grouard replied as he knelt to have himself a closer look at the ground. “What else would you expect in this country?”

“Damn them! Can’t even give a sojur-boy a decent resting place but the carrion eaters won’t dig a body up and drag it off from its final sleep.”

“Maybe not all wolves,” Frank added sourly as he leaned back on his haunches.

“Injins?”

“Might be.”

“Sonsabitches!” he swore with quiet force, slapping a glove across his pommel. “Godless savage h’athens—”

“Don’t you remember what Crook’s soldiers done to ever’ scaffold we come across so far?”

Donegan pursed his lips. Yes, he could remember how the soldiers had desecrated the Lakota burial platforms, searching for souvenirs, taking what they wanted before gleefully dumping the bones in nearby creeks or perhaps leaving the rotting remains to whatever four-legged or winged predator might be attracted by the wind-borne odor of death.

His gray eyes narrowed, bright with an anger he could not direct at any one enemy for the moment. “You made your point, Frank.”

“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.”