Wolf Mountain Moon Read online

  Tugging the wide wool scarf farther up his raw cheeks and nose, Seamus dabbed at the tears pooling in his eyes. It was a wind strong enough that the roan beneath him kept quartering around, bitter enough to make Donegan tuck his own head down to the side, turtling it as far as he could within the big upturned flap of the collar on his wool mackinaw. Thank the merciful saints for the wolf-hide cap Richard Closter had handed him that morning before Donegan had ridden away in the dark behind those three sullen, silent Indian scouts. With a scrap of old wool scarf from last winter’s campaign to the Powder with Crook and Reynolds just long enough to pull over the top of his head and down over his ears, Donegan clamped it in place with the wolf-hide cap he tied beneath his chin with a pair of thongs.

  Around his neck twisted and tossed the drawstring on his wide-brimmed prairie hat, which the wind tugged this way and that, shoving and fluttering with each gust. The wool muffler and wolf hide were both much better for this weather and this wind, he thought as he raised a horsehide gauntlet mitten and snugged the furry cap down to the bridge of his nose. Then he blinked more tears away as he steered the horse off the ridge, down another ravine that come next spring would be a creek. For now the bare willow and alder stood out like skeletal claws against the deep, drifted snow pocked in those places hidden back from the short-season’s southerly sunlight.

  In the dim glow of their tiny fire that first night away from the army column, he and the sullen Three Bears had talked with their hands about the task that lay before them—what would eventually face the lone white man once the four of them had reached the mouth of the Little Powder and the White River Agency Sioux would turn back.

  Tell me if I am a fool to go on down the Powder.

  For a long time the old warrior stared into the low flames and glowing bed of crimson coals, his face shining like polished copper. We believe the Crazy Horse people are upstream. And he had pointed south.

  So it would be safe enough for me to follow the Powder down to the Elk River?*

  With a wag of his head Three Bears finally looked up into Donegan’s face. The chances are good the Hunkpatila have already started downstream … moving north to reach Sitting Bull, Gall, and the fighting Hunkpapa.

  Seamus pointed. To the north?

  Three Bears nodded.

  Then I should not go down the Powder.

  It is not wise.

  At that fire of theirs in the shadow of Inyan Kara† the Lakota instructed him to cross the Powder after they had parted company, to ascend the divide that would lead him over to Mizpah Creek, take him beyond that to Pumpkin Creek and eventually to the Tongue itself.

  For three and a half days they pushed their ponies through the cold and the snow from dawn till dusk. But the White River Agency scouts would not travel after sundown. Nor could Seamus get them started before light. Which meant the four of them sat out the long winter nights around a tiny fire built back against the overhang of some washed-out bluff, or far up from the mouth of a deep ravine so the glow of the low flames would not reflect their reddish hue so readily against the low clouds and snowy landscape.

  Those nights Donegan found he would doze in fits, remembering how it was to hold Samantha. How he had cradled his baby boy and paced that tiny room above the Fort Laramie parade. Other times he had nightmares of the terrible cold that never warmed during that long day in hell along the Red Fork Valley. Recalling the sounds of war, the inhuman cries of man and horse, the flitting shadows of a half-naked enemy: women, children, old ones fleeing into the hills. What Mackenzie’s Fourth had started … winter would surely end.

  The destruction of the Northern Cheyenne.

  Only those strong enough would make it, he knew. Where they were headed now in the trackless wilderness, no man could know for certain. But a safe bet would be that the Cheyenne were once more limping for the safety of the Crazy Horse people. Starving, bleeding, freezing—stripped of everything but their pride.

  At least he had a small fire, Seamus consoled himself as he shivered through his lonely watch each night, arms tucked around his legs, chin resting on his knees while the others tried sleeping. And at least he had his heavy winter clothing, along with two thick blankets and that old wolf-hide hat of Uncle Dick’s. He had the clumsy buffalo hides wrapped around his boots while many of the fleeing survivors had no moccasins. He had warm wool gloves he kept stuffed inside the stiff horsehide cavalry gauntlets. He had so much, and Morning Star’s Cheyenne had so little…. How was it they always managed to survive?

  Was it their hatred for him and his kind that kept them warm? Was it that fury smoldering down inside each one of them that allowed the Cheyenne to survive?

  He wasn’t sure just how much the temperatures had moderated since leaving Crook’s command, but he was sure that during the last three days it had finally climbed above zero … before plummeting again as the sun fell each night.

  That’s what he reminded himself now as he turned and glanced to the south one last time. Just keep the sun behind my left shoulder like they told me, he thought that afternoon. Don’t take the first creek flowing south. And he was not to turn off at the second either, Three Bears had reminded him more than once before they had parted.

  Instead, he was to wait until reaching the third—that would be the Tongue River.

  So he was alone again.

  As spooky as they were, the Lakota didn’t like traveling at night. But tonight Seamus figured he would do just that, to make up some ground and time, at least until he and the horse grew too weary, or it became too dark to pick out good footing from something slick and icy.

  A day and a half, Three Bears had explained. If a man is careful and watches over his animal—a day and a half to the Tongue River.

  If he pushed on tonight, and pushed hard come daylight, he might well reach the Tongue sometime around sundown tomorrow.

  How far from there?

  To the Elk River? The war chief had blinked rapidly, staring off into the cloudy night, calculating, remembering, sizing things up. Maybe another three days. Four perhaps.

  I’ll make it in three, Seamus had been promising himself. All told, that made it another day and a half cross-country to the Tongue, then something on the order of sixty or so miles down to the Yellowstone, where he would run onto the army’s cantonment, deliver his dispatches, fill himself with hot food more than once, and maybe even sleep for the better part of twenty-four hours beside a sheet-iron stove before he resaddled the freshly grained roan and pointed their noses south.

  Each time he dwelled on it, Seamus was struck again with just how far south a journey he would be facing once he started for home. Not just to return all the way to the upper reaches of the Powder, or to the Crazy Woman Crossing, even farther to Fort Fetterman on the North Platte … but much, much farther still to reach Fort Laramie, a final ninety twisting miles beyond.

  The wind seemed all the colder now as the sun continued to sink behind him. The country around Donegan seemed all the more desolate and foreboding, scarred by erosion, cut by coulee and ravine and mud slide—all of it buried now in a mantle of white beneath the leaden dome of never-ending sky. Colder still because he was beginning to realize he would not be home for Christmas, his son’s first. And chances were damned good he wouldn’t make it back to Samantha to celebrate the arrival of a new year either.

  At least the two of them were safe. At least they were warm and had decent food for their bellies. Small comforts like those went a long way to cause him to straighten his back, to stiffen his resolve. He would push as hard as it was prudent to push. Then, tonight, when he finally dropped from the saddle, Seamus decided he would build himself a warming fire—something big enough to keep him from freezing. After all, he doubted there would be any warriors out and moving in this horrid cold, across this desolate stretch of country after sundown … not even Morning Star’s Cheyenne, or the Hunkpatila of Crazy Horse.

  Chances were, they’d be keeping an eye on Crook’s column. They’d ha
ve no suspicion of a lone horseman slipping through this unforgiving winter wilderness on his lonesome.

  Yet he told himself it could not be a fire big enough that it would warm him too much. He realized he must stay cold enough that deep sleep was impossible. A man who slept too deep in these temperatures never awoke again. Instead, Donegan realized he must stay just cold enough that it was impossible to sleep for long at a stretch: he must arouse himself early enough to move out before false dawn. Mounting up and pushing on beneath the light of the waxing moon, on through the day, past the next sundown until he knew they both could go no farther without some rest. How he would depend on this strong, wide-hipped roan gelding across the next few days.

  They watered together, and they ate together twice a day—as the horse grazed on some ground blown clear by the incessant wind, or a patch of grass where Seamus had kicked aside most of the snow, and he tore at the stringy jerked meat—how it made his mouth water to watch the whitetail, the mule deer, the elk cross his path … knowing he didn’t dare take a shot in Indian country.

  Best just not to think about his belly, or the cold. Or to let his mind slip too far south to Fort Laramie.

  Tomorrow morning he vowed he would have them up and away again after that bright winter moon had slipped from the sky, riding into the darkness for those two hours or so before the sun ever began to make its brief appearance far to the east, climbing into the thick blanket of clouds that hovered over this endless aching land as far as the eye could see.

  For now he pointed them toward the Mizpah in the fading light of that shrinking day. A lone horseman hurrying across a great white landscape like a hard-shelled dung beetle trudging across some cottonwood fluff. The yawning expanse around him swallowing all sound, he found it so eerily quiet the horse’s muted hoof falls were near all he heard, save for the wind tumbling across the icy crust of the snow. That, and the thoughts tumbling through his head.

  So quiet was it out here that he could dwell on Sam and the boy. Out here where the mind had far too much time to think, and the heart had far too much time to ache.

  He was a man being paid well to do a dangerous job, Seamus reminded himself, and yanked the wolf-hide hat down against the stiffening wind. No doubt that he had made sure his little family was taken care of with army scrip … whether or not he returned to them from this lonely journey. This was simply a job too good for a husband, a father, a family man to pass up.

  Just the sort of man the army might look for when it needed a fool to set off on a fool’s errand.

  Fool or not … Seamus loved Sam and their boy more than he loved life itself.

  *The Yellowstone River.

  †Devil’s Tower

  Chapter 1

  26 October-3 November 1876

  Sitting Bull had given him the slip again.

  There wasn’t much that could gall Nelson A. Miles the way that did.

  After he had managed to stay right behind the warrior bands he’d flushed and fought at Cedar Creek,* nearly all the Sioux leaders had given up their flight—some even turning themselves over to the soldier chief as hostages in good faith that their followers would return to their reservations. The arrival of supply wagons on Thursday, 26 October, ultimately convinced chiefs like Pretty Bear and Lame Red Skirt, Bull Eagle and Small Bear, even White Bull and Foolish Thunder, to give up rather than cause their people to suffer the continued harassment of the Bear Coat’s “walk-a-heaps.”

  But not Sitting Bull.

  The irascible Hunkpapa had managed once again to elude his white nemesis when he splintered off from the other Lakota leaders, taking no more than thirty lodges with him across Bad Route Creek to sneak away, slipping down the north bank of the Yellowstone while the soldiers were in hot pursuit of the greater part of that village continuing to flee south from Miles’s Fifth Infantry.

  At first, however, despite the walk-a-heaps’ harassment, the bands remained committed to their traditional philosophy of fighting and fleeing, which enabled them to hunt buffalo and live their lives in the manner of their grandfathers. The best Miles could manage was to get them to say they would talk a bit.

  Which suited the colonel just fine … for the moment. In the meantime he had ordered his train of empty wagons on east those twenty-four miles to the Glendive Cantonment for supplies.

  By the time that supply train returned, carrying enough rations to permit the Fifth Infantry to continue its chase another twenty days, Miles’s hunch had paid off in a big way: those wagons had indeed proved to be the straw that broke the will of the Northern Sioux to resist.

  When they came to the army’s camp to talk terms of surrender, Lame Red Skirt and the other Miniconjou chiefs repeated their assertions that their people lacked clothing for a long winter’s march; besides, their horses were far too poor to make the journey—yet they vowed their intention of going in to the agencies.

  “Look upon my wagons,” Miles explained to the headmen through his interpreters. “With my supplies I can follow you wherever you attempt to go.”

  The dark eyes of those Lakota seated in council with Miles regarded the wagons filled to the gunwales with boxes and barrels and kegs of supplies. They could see for themselves that the soldiers were dressed warmly around their fires, their bellies full while the fragrance of frying pork perfumed the winter air … at the same time their people cried out in hunger, suffered with the cold as the season advanced and the creekbanks began to rime with ice.

  Miles had them just where he wanted them. But now that they were ready to surrender, he damn well couldn’t take the massive village back to Tongue River Cantonment with him. There simply wasn’t enough to supply his troops and all these Sioux in hopes of lasting out the coming winter, until the river ice broke up and the first steamer arrived from down the Missouri.

  Nor could he dare take the time needed to escort this bunch of Sioux all the way over to the Cheyenne River Agency, a decision that would take his men right out of any chance of catching up to Sitting Bull.

  The Bear Coat ended up proposing that the chiefs give him their solemn promise to turn themselves in to their agents at Cheyenne River. In addition, Miles declared that five of their number must volunteer to stay behind with him, those men to be delivered to an army prison in St. Paul, Minnesota, as a means of guaranteeing the eventual surrender of their people at their agency.

  Lame Red Skirt and the other Miniconjou chiefs repeated their assertions that their people lacked clothing for a long winter’s march and their horses were far too poor to make the journey.

  Fuming with indignation, Miles stormed to his feet before the chiefs seated on their robes, which were spread over a thin layer of crusted snow. Clearly impatient to be after the big prize, he slapped one of his thick gauntlets against the side of his leg and said, “This is my final offer: I will see that your people have rations to make the trek to your reservation. And I will allow your bands thirty-five days to make the trip. In addition, I agree to give your people five additional days to stay right where they are now so your men can hunt buffalo for meat and hides.”

  For a long time the chiefs huddled, talking among themselves. Finally Lame Red Skirt stood, dour-faced.

  “I will go with the Bear Coat, to show the goodwill of my people.”

  One by one the other leaders rose in turn from their robes to be counted among those who would fight no more. The older White Bull, a Miniconjou and father of Small Bear. Foolish Thunder, Black Eagle, and Sun Rise, all three Sans Arc. Then, too, Bull Eagle and Small Bear vowed they would be responsible for getting their people to the reservation in the days Bear Coat had allowed them. In that timely journey, more of the headmen vowed they would not fail the soldier chief: Tall Bull, Yellow Eagle, Two Elk, Foolish Bear, Spotted Elk, and Poor Bear.

  As each leader stood to make his surrender, Nelson Miles felt his heart leap anew. Better than twenty-five hundred Miniconjou, Sans Arc, and Hunkpapa—accounting for more than three hundred lodges—had surrendered wi
thout the Fifth Infantry firing another shot.

  Maybe now he had a chance to get his hands on the old, elusive Sitting Bull himself.

  Maybe tonight Miles would sleep better than he had in a long, long time. Perhaps even a far better sleep than he had experienced since he had come to these northern plains last summer to find both Crook and Terry unable or unwilling to get the job done.* At the least Miles could boast that the rigors of campaigning and the chase after his archnemesis had caused him to shed a few pounds since leaving Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

  What he felt ready to accomplish here in the north would perhaps be even more important than what he had accomplished on the southern plains.† Miles was looking in the eye of what might well be the greatest test of his military career. Simply put: the commander who defeated Sitting Bull or Crazy Horse, the man who corralled and herded the great war chiefs back to the reservations—why, that man would have his general’s stars handed to him on a silver platter. And there might even be a special place in Washington City carved out for him too.

  Although he knew it would never be easy for foot soldiers to catch the elusive warrior villages, Miles remained steadfast in his belief that his Fighting Fifth could whip the Sioux horsemen every time the enemy was engaged.

  After writing his wife of his success securing the chiefs’ surrender, as well as carefully phrasing some correspondence with Mary’s uncle, General William Tecumseh Sherman, Miles penned a dispatch to General Alfred H. Terry in St. Paul:

  I consider this the beginning of the end. [The Indians] are very suspicious, and of course [are] afraid that some terrible punishment will be inflicted upon them [should they go in to their agencies]…. While we have fought and routed these people, and driven them away from their ancient homes, I cannot but feel regret that they are compelled to submit to starvation, for I fear they will be reduced to that condition as were the southern tribes in 1874.

  “What now of Sitting Bull, General?” asked Captain Wyllys Lyman as the wind came up, blowing right out of the north, picking up bluster as it roared across the breadth of Montana Territory.