Wolf Mountain Moon Page 6

“And from going back too,” Miles said, assessing their precarious situation.

  “All right, men,” Baldwin cheered. “Let’s put our backs into it! Heave!” he grunted along with the others shoving against their poles, pushing with the power of their legs against the mighty river’s current. “Heave! Heave!”

  As suddenly as they had been jarred by the snag, a rifle shot cracked the cold air. In that heartbeat every man onshore turned to look this way and that. A second rifle shot rang out from the pickets Miles had thrown around their bivouac. In a moment it began to strike home that they might well be under attack.

  Miles stood clumsily, steadying himself against the bobbing of the icy current. Flinging his voice to the north bank, he demanded, “What’s the meaning of that firing?”

  A voice onshore cried, “Indians coming!”

  Beside the Missouri his soldiers milled, called out to one another, turned this way and that as the officers began to shout their commands.

  “Damn it all!” Miles grumbled as he sank to his knees on the rocking raft.

  Baldwin couldn’t agree more. Here they were, caught at midriver, helpless and without weapons while the main body of the column was damn well caught with its pants down watching this river crossing.

  “Fall in!” Miles shouted through the gloves he cupped round his mouth. His red face showed his frustration and growing anger. “Fall in, dammit!”

  Captain Ewers shouted, “Assembly, General?”

  “Damn right,” the colonel replied, cupping his hands to hurl his voice at the north shore once again. “Bugler—sound assembly. Look lively! Look lively, now!”

  Confined as they were to their position on the river below the steep banks, Baldwin could see nothing beyond those soldiers right on the bank, men darting here and there to begin forming up company by company, their lieutenants and sergeants barking orders before the first outfits started scrambling up the shelf onto the prairie itself, where another shot rang out just then.

  Just one. Still no general firing, no yelps and war whoops. Yet Baldwin knew those cries of battle could come at any minute when the warriors swooped down on the main body of the Fifth.

  But as quickly as the first shot had surprised them all, the first half-dozen soldiers onto the prairie turned back against the flow of the hundreds, waving their arms, shrieking above the panic as they split the ranks to trot down among the general’s nervous staff onshore. In less than a minute Bailey was at the water’s edge, shouting out to the raft.

  “What’s he say?” Miles demanded of the men around him.

  Baldwin repeated, “Bailey’s saying it’s only a false alarm, General.”

  “No Indians?” Pope inquired.

  “Says it was elk,” Frank explained with a wag of his head. “One of the pickets started shooting at a herd of goddamned elk.”

  “Who announced that it was Indians?” Miles growled.

  “Some nervous Nelly,” Baldwin said, then chuckled. “General, I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be in that man’s shoes when you get your hands on him!”

  “Damn right,” Miles growled. “Here we are without weapons, at the mercy of this blessed river—”

  The raft suddenly convulsed against the powerful current, shifting a little more to the side as it came around and stopped—even more firmly locked against the snag.

  As the following minutes rolled by, the men found their raft beginning slowly to list even more to one side in the ice-laden current, forcing more of the slushy river over the sides of their raft, pushing a swirl of bitterly cold water up to froth around their knees. Clinging to the ropes for their lives, the soldiers began to shiver, their teeth chattering as Baldwin and Pope shouted back and forth to those on the north bank.

  It wasn’t long before some of the men in Wyllys Lyman’s I Company had the canvas-covered wagon-box boat down the shore and into the water, a complement of soldiers kneeling inside at the gunwales, using army spades as paddles. Again, sheer muscle was pitted against the growing strength of the river’s frightening ice floes. As the rescuers bobbed close, one of Baldwin’s soldiers tossed the end of their longest section of rope to those in the wagon box. Lyman’s men promptly tied it off before the wagon boat was carried on across the Missouri’s current.

  Struggling against the powerful current and the battering of the huge grating ice chunks, the soldiers from I Company finally paddled their way to the south shore, where Private Thomas Kelly leaped over the gunwale and waded through the chilling water that boiled up to his armpits, dodging hunks of ice to clamber eventually onto a section of solid ice. Once there, he crabbed onto the bank. On firm footing at last, Kelly shook himself like a dog before his trembling hands fought to tie off the other end of the long rope around a cottonwood of generous girth.

  That task completed, the men of I Company pulled themselves to the south bank, where several of the soldiers remained behind in the hope that the rest of their regiment would soon be joining them before nightfall. Then those left of the wagon-boat crew turned around inside their craft and dipped their spades into the river once more, pushing back toward the raft as the hundreds on the north bank erupted into a spontaneous cheer.

  When Lyman’s soldiers reached Baldwin’s raft, the lieutenant tossed them the end of another length of one-inch rope he had secured to his tilting craft still snagged near the middle of the river. As the wagon boat slipped away into the current, its crew paddling for the north bank a soldier slowly played out the rope connected to the raft. Thunking, scraping, groaning—more and more ice chunks smacked against the side of the wagon box, slid along the side with a noisy, frightening racket, then bobbed free, floating on downriver.

  Of a sudden the solitary wagon-box soldier reached the end of that rope. “Goddammit—help me, for the love of God!”

  Nearly all the rest of the paddlers dropped their shovels into the bed for those next desperate moments at midstream, every one of them clutching the rope as the current shoved against them, starting to urge them downstream in a bobbing arc.

  “There’s no way we can do this, General!” Baldwin shouted above the cries of the men on both shores who watched helplessly, the soldiers trapped in both rivercraft wobbling with the icy current. “They just don’t have enough rope to make the north bank!”

  “Tie it off there, men!” Miles commanded the wagon-box sailors, pointing to a large snag that poked its thick branches above the surface near the bobbing craft.

  “Secure it to that sawyer!” Baldwin echoed.

  As half the men in the wagon boat returned to their paddles, fighting to bring their craft back toward the snag against the power of the current, the rest held on to the waterlogged rope with the last of their strength, blue hands and soaked mittens gripping for all they were worth.

  Meanwhile onshore several of the officers recognized the dilemma and ordered another wagon box taken from its running gear and quickly wrapped in oiled canvas. After more than an hour and a half of watching the crews of both the raft and the wagon boat barely holding their own against the mighty Missouri, the second wagon boat was shoved into the current by some men of ? Company, loaded with several long sections of rope, the end of which was attached to a cottonwood on the north bank.

  Here at midafternoon, with Miles, Baldwin, Pope, and their dozen soldiers still stranded on the rocking raft and water continuing to swirl up to their knees, men on both banks began to cheer, for it appeared the rescue was about to take place … just as bigger and bigger ice floes began to bear down the river’s surface. Rubbing, jabbing, creaking against one another—blocks as big as boulders. The Missouri was beginning to fill with ice scum once more as the temperature continued to drop, and with it the late-autumn sun.

  “Sweet God in heaven!” one of the men of I Company in the nearby wagon boat shrieked.

  The rest of the soldiers on the raft and the second wagon boat looked upstream where he was pointing. Better than a mile away they could see it coming, tumbling slowly, roiling on t
he river’s surface: a chunk of ice as big as a cabin itself. It’s dirty luster bobbed in the current, easily filling a third of the Missouri’s span.

  “Don’t panic, men!” Baldwin cheered them. “We don’t know for sure where it will go! Just hang on!”

  “Cut the rope!” came the immediate cry from the second wagon boat as the soldiers squirmed in fear while that huge chunk of ice bore down on them.

  “Cut the goddamned rope!” another rescuer shouted.

  Then another bellowed like a stuck calf—crying that they had to save themselves.

  “No—don’t do that!” Lieutenant Pope ordered. “You can’t abandon us!”

  “Steady, men! Steady! Pull yourselves in here!” Baldwin demanded. “Now, heave against that line. Hurry! Hurry!”

  Inside that rocking second wagon boat the frightened men scrambled for their spade paddles, dipping deep and sure into the river, trying their best to steady the craft as Private Richard Bellows of ? Company seized the rope securing them to the north bank and began to fight the waterlogged knot. Alone.

  “No—cut the son of a bitch!” one of his companions cried.

  Instead, Bellows hunched over his work with numbed fingers, struggling.

  The others began to take up the chorus. “Cut it! Cut the line now!”

  The ice chunk rumbled closer and closer.

  With the danger no more than twenty-five yards away Bellows finally got the knot untied in the waterlogged rope, looped it around both his trembling hands, and hunkered down in the bottom of the wagon box, where he braced his legs against the creaking gunwale just as the huge chunk hit them.

  As the box spun around, two other soldiers threw down their spades and leaped to Bellows’s aid, each of them grabbing hold of the rope to join the courageous private. They grunted as the ice groaned and banged against the side of the wagon box.

  “We can’t hold it!”

  “Let go of the bastard!”

  Then Baldwin shouted above the noise of men onshore and the rumbling clatter of ice whacking and creaking against the raft and wagon boats, “Let go and save yourselves! For God’s sake—let go and make for shore before you’re swamped!”

  Just then the three soldiers on the line were jerked to their feet as another side of the tumbling ice chunk keeled around and slammed into the wagon box.

  “Let the damn thing go or we’ll be broken to splinters!”

  The two soldiers released their hold on the rope and instead locked their arms around Bellows, who struggled to maintain his grip. With an agonized cry of pain as the rope burned through the cold flesh of his hands he freed himself, and their raft, into the mercy of that merciless current.

  “Row, goddammit! Row for shore!” Miles shouted above the crash of ice against wood.

  As Private Bellows sank exhausted to the bottom of the wagon box, the rest of the men dived to take up their paddles, bending to their knees, rocking forward again and again as they forced their spades into the ice scum while the box swung slowly around and around, swept downstream in the midst of those growing chunks of ice. They were struck again by a huge lump of ice, then a patch of clear water appeared above them, upstream. That would be their one chance.

  All the chance brave men would ever need.

  Now the drenched soldiers sank their oars in deadly earnest, gradually turning the wagon box against the current that frothed over the sides of the gunwales as they brought it crosswise. Slowly, demanding the last bit of strength from their bodies, the last flicker of sheer grit from their will, the soldiers inched their wagon box toward the north shore as they were tossed downstream.

  More than a mile later those men of E Company reached the willow and some cottonwood saplings against the bank. Two of the soldiers, then a third, lunged over the sides of the box, into the freezing water that lapped at their waists, each one helping shove the box into the shallows, where they no longer were subject to the will of the powerful tug that was the Missouri’s current.

  A spontaneous roar erupted from their mates upstream as men jumped up and down in joy, slapping one another in celebration of what bravery they had just witnessed from the dozen men aboard that second wagon boat.

  “General—it’s high time we get the hell out of here ourselves,” Baldwin suggested quietly at Miles’s shoulder.

  “I couldn’t agree with you more!” the colonel replied resolutely. “All right, boys—let’s cut ourselves free of the south bank there. Just cut the damned rope … that’s good. Now, pull away for all you’re worth! Make for the north shore!”

  As the rope attaching them to the south bank was freed, the ungainly raft rocked against the river’s surface all the more, listing at an even more precarious angle in the strengthening current. Baldwin’s dozen began to scramble into position as the huge craft bobbed. Ahead of them the soldiers in the first wagon boat dipped their spades into the river and began their crawl toward the north shore—slowly, steadily slaving over their exertions as the river ice bore down on them.

  “Pull now!” Baldwin ordered as the men on the raft came up and took their places along the ice-coated rope securing them to the north bank. “Pull as if your life depended on it!”

  There wasn’t a man there who didn’t realize their lives did depend on it.

  “There’s no one else going to free us from this snag now,” Miles reminded them as he took up his own place along the line. “We must do for ourselves, boys!”

  Hunching over their work, the soldiers fought for balance on the rocking raft while water splashed and danced up to their waists. Then came the first loud creaking.

  At first Baldwin feared their flimsy craft was breaking up—the strain simply too much for that wood and rope. But in that next moment the raft lurched sidelong in the current, pitching some of the soldiers to their knees, sliding toward the icy current as others on the raft shouted, every man holding out his hand to another. Together those fifteen kept one another from being hurled headlong into the river.

  Into the frozen, slushy Missouri—where a man might have as little as half a minute, no more than two minutes at the most, to fight alone against the river before he was too cold to struggle any longer. Each of them knew if they were swept into the current that it would be a sure, quick sentence of death.

  The minutes crawled past as Baldwin’s men strained beyond human endurance at their icy rope, Miles and Pope in among them—no officers and enlisted here. They were all in it together. Either they would reach the shore as one, or they might well drown in the cold Missouri, one, by one, by lonely one.

  “Goddammit—pull you sonuvabitch!” one soldier grunted, then quickly glanced up to find the colonel was the one to whom he had just given that profane order. “B-beg pardon, Gen’ral!”

  “Apology accepted, s-soldier,” Miles grunted with the rest. “The rest of you bloody well heard this man! Now, pull—goddammit!”

  Foot by foot felt like inch by inch as the surface seemed to rise about them and the edge of the raft came free of the sawyer. Now they were level once more on the surface of the Missouri, no longer captive of that huge Cottonwood snag embedded in the river bottom. Now it was just the fifteen against that raging, icy river. What strength those soldiers still had in their aching shoulders, their trembling arms, the burning muscles in their legs that cried out in protest and quaked as the men braced themselves against the overwhelming roll of the powerful river … and what indomitable will.

  Yard by yard now they were beginning to make some headway.

  “That’s it, boys!” Baldwin cheered, feeling the burn of tears at his eyes.

  A final third of the river’s width to go.

  Onshore the hundreds of soldiers and civilians were jumping, cheering, calling out their encouragement, waving, pounding one another on the back, darting here and yon in a growing, swelling crowd that began to surge downstream, slowly following the raft as it was relentlessly whirled downriver by the current. Already at least half a hundred were sprinting in amo
ng the frozen willow and cottonwood saplings, helping the soldiers in the second wagon boat leap ashore, securing the box to the bank with those icy ropes.

  There were still fifteen on the river.

  “Ho—for General Miles!”

  The cheer went up as the raft inched closer.

  “Hurraw for our shipwrecked general!”

  Suddenly there were two dozen or more splashing into the current as Baldwin’s men inched toward the bank. Slowly they worked their way out toward the raft—water up to their knees, then waists, and finally icy chunks bobbing at their armpits as they lunged out to help.

  Not for a moment did the men onshore stop cheering as the first in the water reached out and grabbed hold of the blue, frozen hand offered by one of the soldiers on the raft. They clasped, then cheered themselves. In a heartbeat others were there, pulling and pushing on the raft as Baldwin’s men wearily unlocked their cramped, cold, icy fingers from the rope and sank back with a sigh, and some with tears in their eyes, as around them men danced in the shallow water and slapped their backs, laughing at the jokes many made of this biblical flood and how flimsy was this Noah’s ark.

  Baldwin dragged a hand beneath his nose as he jumped into the shallows and turned, sputtering his thanks to all those soldiers who together had brought that raft in to shore here late in the day after they had been imprisoned midriver since morning.

  “Huzzah!” Frank croaked with emotion above the noisy clamor.

  “Huzzah for our shipwrecked general!” came the cry from a nearby enlisted man.

  Baldwin tore his sealskin cap from his head and whirled it aloft. “Hazzah for the Fighting Fifth!”

  Chapter 5

  Waniyetu Wi 1876

  When the Bear Coat’s soldiers reached Fort Peck, the foxy old Sitting Bull instructed some of the agency Indians to give the army scouts some bad information.

  “Tell them the Hunkpapa are fleeing west,” he ordered.

  They did just that, and the scouts believed them.

  But when the Yanktonais hurriedly returned to the Hunkpapa village, they carried news that cut Sitting Bull to the core.