THEY CROSSED THE frozen Saskatchewan River when there was light enough to see. The river had been frozen solid for many months, but now it was just past the middle of March and the ice had thinned out a bit and there was water flowing underneath. Scouts were sent across to check the ice; they came back and said it was safe to cross. Dumont said the men left in the fort would build rafts while they were gone. The ice would start to break up early in April.
“We leave with two hundred men, but we don’t come back with two hundred,” Dumont said.
Two hundred men and two light wagons: one wagon for supplies, blankets, two big tents, bandages, and splints; the other for a light and heavy Maxim gun, a Hotchkiss .37-millimeter Revolving Cannon, boxes of ammunition for the Mausers and the rapid-fire guns. Gatling’s modified Light Maxim was in the wagon, in a rigid-framed leather-covered case. He’d put it in there after everything else was loaded. He didn’t want to have to dig for it if they ran into trouble.
Two hundred men on two hundred horses; forty remounts to be put into service if horses died, or were killed by gunfire, or injured themselves and had to be put out of their misery. If injured horses had to be killed, it would be done with a long, old-fashioned bayonet that had been sharpened for such a purpose. Dumont said not a single shot was to be fired after they left Batoche. North Battleford, their objective, was eighty miles west, and maybe they thought they didn’t have to be too careful for a good part of the journey. If they thought that, then they were goddamned fools, Dumont told them in a menacing voice. Even here, just across the river from Batoche, they were to maintain silence. Everything that could rattle had to be kept tied down. They would sleep no more than four hours a night, and they could talk then provided they talked in a whisper.
“But I want to hear sleeping, not talking,” Dumont said. “And nobody has de right to ride in de wagons unless he is very sick or breaks his leg.”
Away from the river they moved through low hills covered with pines. Light snow fell on the little army as it headed west. If the snow got heavier, Dumont told Gatling, the métis would strap on the snowshoes that hung from their saddles and lead the horses. Dumont said he thought the worst of the snowstorms were over, but the weather was as fickle as a flighty woman, and they had to be prepared for the worst. In the end, it was up to the Almighty.
Riding with the métis was a fighting priest everybody called Pere Mulet, which meant Father Mule in English, because he rode a big evil-tempered mule while making the rounds of his parish. The métis said he was as stubborn as the big animal he rode.
Dumont told Gatling about Father Mule as they rode at the head of the column. Towers, blank-faced and silent, rode beside and slightly behind Gatling. Before they left, Gatling had told Towers that he hadn’t said anything the night before because Dumont had wanted the plan kept secret until the last moment. Towers had thanked Gatling for explaining that.
“Pere Mulet, he has terrible temper,” Dumont said. “But Almighty God forgive him for dat. He is a saint.”
“A saint with a Mauser rifle?”
“An instrument of God,” Dumont said, and to him what he said wasn’t a joke.
Two hours later the road came down out of the hills and they started across a wide, shallow valley with a hard north wind blowing through it, exposing the ice beneath the snow. It had been flooded before the winter freeze set in, and was now an enormous sheet of ice. They dismounted to take the weight off the horses, but it was hard work coaxing and pulling the sliding, frightened animals to the other side.
It took an hour to get across, and they mounted up again and made better time. But in places where the snow had drifted deep, they had to climb down and pull and push their horses through the drifts before they could mount up again. They had to do this time after time, but the métis were uncomplaining, and patient with the kicking, plunging horses.
The snow let up for a while and a pale sun gave them better light, but it remained bitter cold all through the day, and it got colder when it began to get dark. Here in this bleak country the sky was gray or dark: gray during the short hours of daylight, black by night. But sometimes at night the sky cleared and blazed with stars. This happened when it was too cold to snow, and on such nights there was a hard crust on the surface of the snow, and now and then a tree trunk split, making a sound like a rifle shot.
By seven o’clock that evening, after having traveled for twelve hours, they were twenty miles further away from Batoche. During the day, when they stopped to rest the horses, Dumont allowed them to boil their tea over small charcoal fires that were extinguished as soon as the tea was ready to drink. At night, all lights were forbidden. Any man stupid or careless enough to strike a match to light a pipe would have the hot pipe stuffed up his ass. Dumont said he would do the stuffing himself, and the métis believed him.
“Chew tobacco,” he told them. “It’s good for de digestion and doesn’t make noise. One more thing, my friends. It’s all right to belch if you do it like gentlemen. Put your hand over your mouths and release de air through your fingers.” The métis laughed and Dumont said, “Not so loud. If you have to laugh, do your best to imitate de British-Canadian squires who belong to de private—No Métis May Apply—clubs in Regina. Say ‘Ha-Ha’ and let it go at dat.”
Late that night, while the men were sleeping, a scout that Dumont had sent far ahead of the column came back and reported that four militiamen and a Blackfoot Indian were watching the road from the top of a high hill with brush growing up to the top and down the other side.
“Five-six miles from here,” the scout said.
Dumont told the scout to wake up Baptiste and two métis named Pascal and Leon. They were saddled up and ready to move out in a few minutes. Dumont told Gatling where they were going. Gatling didn’t offer to go with them. This was work for silent, stealthy men who could move through snow country like gray wolves; they were better at it than he’d ever be, and there was nothing to prevent Towers from slipping away if there was no one to watch him. The métis avoided Towers because they connected him with Manley. That was all they knew about him. They had no reason to suspect him of anything.
Dumont and the four men disappeared into a thick stand of pine trees that bordered the road on both sides. Gatling was sharing a tent with Dumont. Towers bedded down in a sleeping bag close to the tent. He was asleep now, or seemed to be, and Gatling went into the tent, covered himself with a pile of blankets, and slept. But it wasn’t a sound sleep and when he woke up for the second time his watch said it was ten-fifteen. He wasn’t worried about Dumont, but if anything happened to him, this expedition would fall to bits.
No longer sleepy, he went out and walked about twenty feet from the tent and stood there thinking. He was ready to go back when something struck him on the back of the head and knocked him face down in the snow. A blinding pain knifed through his skull and he fumbled for his gun and got it halfway out before it was wrenched from his hand. He staggered to his feet and saw Towers holding the gun on him. He hurled himself at Towers, but there was no strength in his body, and Towers smashed him over the head with the barrel of the Colt. He dropped like a stone.
He opened his eyes. Dumont was rubbing snow in his face. He felt as if he’d been frozen solid. “What the hell happened?” Dumont’s voice was rough, impatient, angry. “Towers is gone. I see you lying dere, but first I look for Towers. I see your holster is empty, so I know he have your pistol. Your rifle is gone from the tent, and I know he have that too. Bad, Gatling. Ver’ bad. Bad for you, we don’t catch him. You know what time you got hit? You got hit with a rock. With dis rock.”
Gatling’s head still hadn’t cleared. “I got hit about ten-twenty.” Gatling looked at the rock in Dumont’s hand. “I couldn’t sleep. I looked at my watch. It was ten-fifteen. I went out and walked down toward the road. I stood there a few minutes thinking about things. Then I got hit and went down.”
“How can dat happen? How can he creep up on you without you hear him? A man like you. It don’t make sense, Gatling.”
“He threw the rock. He couldn’t have got close to me any other way. While I was down I heard somebody running. I tried to get my gun out, but he grabbed it away from me. My head cleared a bit and I went at him hard as I could. Another rap on the skull knocked me cold.”
There was no sympathy in Dumont’s voice. Usually Dumont put a lot of feeling into what he said. Now his voice was flat and unemotional. His anger had turned cold. “You should have made him use de gun. Fire de gun. De shot would have brought de métis running. They would have hang him. Now he is gone and have a three-hour start. Maybe we didn’t catch him.”
“Did you—”
Dumont nodded. “Yes, we kill dem with our knives. Only de Blackfoot and one man was awake. It is not important. I am going after Towers. Talk is wasting time. Get de Irish doctor to fix your head.”
The Irish doctor was a dentist who hadn’t had enough money to get all the way through medical school. The métis had no doctor, so Dumont had taken him away from Major Fitzsimmons. That left Fitzsimmons with one real M.D. and a man who had worked as a male nurse in Union Army hospitals during the Civil War.
Gatling felt the lump made by the gun barrel; his fingers came away wet with blood. But there wasn’t that much blood, and except for a godawful headache he was steady enough on his feet.
Dumont called for Baptiste, and he appeared rubbing his eyes. He stared at Gatling. Dumont clicked his fingers and told him to pay attention, and he straightened up. Speaking rapid French, Dumont rattled off a string of orders. Baptiste nodded and went away, and Gatling heard the métis grumbling as they rolled out of their blankets.
“I have told him to get de column moving,” Dumont said. “Maybe it take whole day, more dan dat, to catch up to Towers. I don’t want to come back here, all dat way. Lose time. Métis follow my tracks. I told you go see de doctor.” Gatling didn’t budge. “I don’t need a doctor. I’m coming with you. It’s my fault. I argued for keeping Towers alive.”
“We got no time talk about dat. You want to come, okay. You don’t keep up I leave you behind. You have use snow-shoe?”
“Often enough.”
“Okay, I see what you can do.”
Towers’ tracks went uphill instead of leading down to the road. Two guards were watching the road; there was a third man posted higher up at the base of a crumbling cliff. Up there they found the guard sprawled in the snow with a knife wound in his chest. Blood soaked his shirt and stained the snow. He was barely breathing. Dumont said his pulse was very weak.
“I tink he die,” Dumont said. “We leave him. Dey look for him, den find him. Maybe de Irish doctor can do someting.”
Gatling got a mind picture of what happened. Towers had climbed the hill, making just enough noise to be heard, but not acting sneaky. The guard had been surprised, but not too suspicious because Towers was now Gatling’s man. The guard had probably asked him what he was doing out of camp, then Towers had stabbed him in the chest and left him for dead.
“Look like he have your knife as well as your gun,” Dumont said.
Gatling reached down to his boot; his long-bladed knife was gone.
Towers’ tracks went along the base of the cliff for about five hundred yards, then turned down toward the road. He would be well past the two guards by then. On the road he would make better time.
“He don’t use snowshoe so good,” Dumont said, looking at the tracks that went on ahead of them. “See how he lift de snowshoe ’stead of sliding it. Will make his leg tired he don’t get de hang of it. You use snowshoe all right.”
“Sure,” Gatling said. They didn’t use snowshoes much in the States, only in the northern states that bordered the Canadian line, where there were a lot of French-Canadians. Most Americans didn’t like them. Gatling had used them in northern Montana, during Army service. Some commanding officer had gotten the idea that his men could track Indians faster if they used snowshoes. The experiment had not been a success.
They moved on for five miles without talking. Then Dumont said, “Why you not want to kill Towers when I say we got to do it?”
“I thought he could be useful in some way,” Gatling answered. “Then I figured it out. I thought, fill his head with false information and let him escape. After I got your approval, that is.”
“What false information?”
“Like how many more guns and men were coming from the States. Large shipments of weapons, hundreds—maybe thousands—of volunteers. Not hired gunmen, volunteers. It’s been twenty years since the Civil War, but there’s a lot of anti-British feeling left over from it. Thinking maybe they get to grab half the country, the British would’ve come in on the Southern side if the North started to lose.”
Pushing along fast, Dumont said, “Hey, I don’t want no history lesson. I have read a book. Make de point.”
Gatling said, “I think Towers might’ve believed the part about the volunteers. About the gun shipments? We got four wagonloads of guns through, didn’t we? What’s to stop other shipments? It’s a long border.”
“You tell Towers and we let him escape and he tell de high-ups and dey pull back troops to watch for dese volunteers and guns. Is not a bad idea. It could have cause plenty of confusion. De smart high-up would listen to Towers report, den say, ‘Dey have let him escape so he can tell us dis horseshit story. I am telling you, gent’men, dis ting don’t sound true. Is a plan to make us chase de wild goose. Make us send soldiers to guard the border and look for men and guns dat don’t exist. So we don’t do nuttin’.’ But de rest of de high-ups, dey argue dat dey can’t just do nuttin’. Can’t take de chance. De story could be true—”
“What’s that up ahead,” Gatling asked, cutting in. “I saw something move.”
“Is a deer crossing de road,” Dumont said. “Let’s go. Dis plan, you would have ask me ’bout it? Okay. Den why didn’t you tell me?”
“I wasn’t sure it would work. Simple as that.”
“Not so simple. But like I say, not a bad idea. Make no difference. Towers have escape and we have to waste time catching him. What you tink make him run off tonight?”
“Because he heard the talk about the militiamen and the Indian up ahead. The way he figured it, there had to be other scouting parties in the area. They would get him to North Battleford.”
“And dey would be waiting for us. Gatling, is possible we don’t catch dis spy. Dat fact have to be face. If we don’t, I have to decide if we go on or go back to Batoche.”
They followed Towers’ tracks all night. Dumont moved on relentlessly, offering no encouragement to Gatling, who hadn’t used snowshoes for years. His thigh and calf muscles ached, but he’d be damned if he’d lag behind. And if he fell behind, he’d never catch up.
First light was gray and cheerless. “See he rest dere,” Dumont said, pointing. “He stamp his feet, den sit down. I don’t know if he have food. He could have hide some from ever’ meal since we leave Batoche. I don’t know if he will stop to sleep.”
Night came early; all they saw was Tower’s tracks going on ahead of them. It snowed for an hour and the tracks disappeared. Now and then, Dumont stooped and brushed away the fluffy top snow with the side of his hand, uncovering the faint impression made by snowshoes.
“He don’t leave de road yet,” Dumont said. “When he do, it will be to sleep a few hours. What bother me is he may not come back to de road. If it snow again and he leave de road, and we don’t pick up de tracks, I tink we lose him.”
Morning brought more snow, so heavy that Dumont couldn’t find tracks of any kind. Dumont pointed down the silent, snow-covered road. There was no movement of man or animal. Dumont said, “De road turn and go northwest ’bout five mile from here. Towers can find North Battleford if he have compass and stay on northwest course. That would make sense. Snow will stop soon. When we get to turn in de road and dere is no tracks, den we go cross-country.”
They reached the bend in the road; snow still fell and there were no tracks to be seen. The snow let up after they were gone a mile from the road. On the far side of a high ridge, they picked up Towers’ tracks.
“He is tired,” Dumont said. “Moving slower dan before. De tracks are deep. He is laying his feet down heavy. Come on.”
Next morning, when there was light enough to see, they climbed a long, high slope and there he was—a tiny black shape making its way up another long slope at the other side of a deep valley. Gatling uncased his binoculars and brought the climbing man in close. Towers had the Mauser slung across his back and he swayed as the high country wind pushed him hard.
“Couple of miles,” Gatling said, handing the binoculars to Dumont.
Dumont used the binoculars and handed them back. “More dan a couple of miles. He look closer, de air is so clear and dere is sun.”
While they were crossing the valley, climbing down and back up, Towers went over the top of the ridge without looking back. Gatling put the binoculars away. Beyond the ridge lay another valley to be crossed, another long slope that had to be climbed. The slope was so steep that Towers had taken off his snowshoes and was crawling on his hands and knees.
They were about a hundred yards up the slope when Towers sensed something that made him turn. He couldn’t have heard them. There was nothing to hear. He rolled over on his back and got off one shot that smashed the stock of Dumont’s rifle. Dumont was knocked back, lost his balance, and went tumbling to the bottom. He rolled over a shaley ledge and fell into a deep hole. Gatling ran and stumbled and slid down to the ledge. On the slope deep snow was threatening to become a snowslide. Dumont lay on his back with the wind knocked out of him. The snow had cushioned his fall and he struggled to his feet. He knew he couldn’t get out of the hole without help.
“Idiot!” he roared. “I am not hurt. Go after him, you fool!”
Gatling started back up the slope. The snow had shifted, and was piled up in places, and it was hard to climb over it. Wind and powdered snow stung his eyes. Pale sunshine came and went as wind-driven clouds sailed across the sky. Crawling and slipping, Towers was close to the top. He turned and bolted off three shots. One came close, the others missed. Towers was crawling again, faster now because he knew how close to death he was. In a minute he’d be over the top. Gatling lay still and sighted in with the Mauser. A fierce gust of wind blew snow in his face. Some of the snow stuck to the barrel of the rifle, and he had to brush it off and sight again. Towers raised up for another shot and Gatling shot him in the chest. He rolled all the way down. The packed snow began to slide and Gatling scrambled along the side of the slope, trying to get away from it. The edge of the slide knocked him aside and he went rolling himself. He managed to stop short of the deep hole where Dumont was trapped.
Dumont had been trying to climb the shaley, crumbling walls. His gloves were badly torn. He looked up at Gatling. “Did you get de son of a bitch?”
“I got him,” Gatling said. “He’s buried under a mountain of snow. Throw me up your hatchet.”
All the métis carried a small hatchet called a “trimming” hatchet. It was used for trimming the branches off small trees. The back of it could be used as a hammer. It had many uses. Its straight, sharp edge could split a skull like a melon.
Gatling chopped down a small pine, trimmed off the branches, and cut handholds in the trunk. He stuck it down into the hole and Dumont climbed after he made sure his rifle was securely in place.
He didn’t thank Gatling, who didn’t expect to be thanked. He took back his hatchet and stuck it in his belt. “Have to replace de stock,” he said, meaning the damaged rifle. “Too bad dere had to be shooting. Other militia scouts could hear.”
“You won’t find any scouts back here,” Gatling said. “There’s nothing to scout back here. Scouts will be watching the road. We’re a long way from the road.”
“Such a cheerful man,” Dumont said sourly. “Hope for de best. Look on de bright side. I hope you’re right.” They got to the road and discovered that the column was ahead of them. It took them about an hour to catch up. Baptiste had been in command in Dumont’s absence. He said the forward scouts hadn’t seen anything. He said he had ordered the scouts to stay a mile ahead of the column. “You hear any shooting?” Dumont asked him.
Baptiste looked surprised. “No shots. I would have told you. What is it, Gabriel?”
“Nothing,” Dumont said. “You better get some sleep, Gatling. Me too. We sleep in de wagons. Are you hungry?”
“I’ll eat after I sleep,” Gatling said. “I’m too tired to eat.”
“Tired! A big, tough man like you! How can dat be? But I will sleep too. Just so you won’t feel bad. To keep you company.”
Gatling slept like a dead man; beside him in the jolting wagon, Dumont snored. It wouldn’t have made any difference if he’d been beating on a drum. Gatling wouldn’t have heard him no matter how much noise he made.
Baptiste woke them six hours later. “Gabriel,” he said. “De fort is only five miles away.”