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

“I’ll give you this one, Irishman. Were it a game of cards, I’d gambled against you and lost. But you were right—them Injuns are firing the grass behind ’em as they go.”

Above the thick layer of roiling grass smoke the summer sky remained pale, almost translucent, for the longest time of that evening, and when the moon came out behind the scouts, and the stars finally winked wakefully in a scatter across that darkening sky, the entire canvas allowed just enough light for an experienced plainsman to continue down, down into the valley as they followed that great churned trail the thousands upon thousands had followed.

Some distance from the Greasy Grass they came upon the place where it appeared the soldiers had divided, some of the regiment moving off to the left, gone to the southwest. The rest continued on down toward the Little Bighorn. A short time later they found the trail divided again—this time more of the regiment crossed to the left side of the creek and continued toward the bluffs hiding the Greasy Grass. It was here that Frank chose to steer them north.

Seamus asked, “Why don’t we just follow this trail down to the river? Find out what come of this bunch?”

Grouard shook his head, peering into the darkness, as if divining something no more than a handful of miles away. “The river is bordered on this side by rough, high bluffs. This much I remember from this old camping spot of the Lakota. We will go north, moving around that bad stretch of country.”

Donegan watched the half-breed move his horse away silently in the coming cool of that summer night as darkness and silence swallowed them both. And he wondered if Frank Grouard was feeling like he was a Hunkpapa or Hunkpatila warrior again, sensing something unseen out there in the darkness, even miles away yet. Something mystical that pulled the half-breed on. Something that might have been pulling Frank Grouard onward ever since last winter when the scout performed the impossible in the middle of a high-plains snowstorm and brought Colonel John Reynolds’s cavalry across a rugged divide and right down on an enemy village nestled along the Powder River.

If Frank Grouard could do that, there was something uncanny about the man. Maybe something even unholy.

And that made Seamus Donegan shiver as he put his own horse in motion, following the half-breed into the deepening darkness of that summer night.

He had grown up Catholic, learned his catechism early at his mother’s knee, then later beneath the thick leather strop of a series of stern priests who ruled the village school with an iron Celtic hand. Growing up Catholic in Ireland had come to mean that he too was superstitious. There were the legends of the first nomadic Celts and the mystical druids and, of course, tales of the Little People. Damn right, Seamus grew up every bit as superstitious as these savage heathens he’d been fighting for a full bloody decade come this very summer.