Hancock didn’t have the first clue about how to fight Indians and made the 7th suffer for his ignorance, driving them mercilessly across the plains to go against the southern tribes, with nary a contact to reward their labors.
How could Custer describe the grimness of the scout to Libbie? A description of the plains was beyond him for the simple reason that they were so singularly lacking in feature. Constant wind shredded the parched prairie grass. Waves and swells of grass as far as the eye could see, restful as the waves of an immense arid ocean. Riding the prairie was like being in a small boat on a vast inland sea.
Custer was dead tired of flat.
If he had been one of the creatures who burrowed underground, a worm or prairie dog, he could have described the vibration of the unseen buffalo herd passing miles away, how it tumbled through the earth, how his dogs felt it thrum through their feet, a blood pulse that livened them although he could not guess the cause, attributing their excitement to the long column of horses, mules, and wagons that stretched out behind him like some slack, shedding animal across the plains.
He must not forget to mention the heat—how the sun scoured the hills, burned the low, nondescript bushes, pulled the last wet from the grass, faded the wildflowers in their bloom. It was so dry he couldn’t find the saliva to spit, but he wouldn’t write to Libbie about that.
The wind’s direction shifted and carried a strong scent to the dogs’ noses—not the everyday ones of flour, oil, dried meat, or even the stink of thousands of unwashed men, or the fresh stench of their shit along the sides of the trail, or the sweeter reek from cattle and horses—but an ancient, greasy, unctuous odor, unfamiliar and unsettling. In spite of the dogs’ exhaustion, their wiry bodies set to prancing, with whinging barks as they circled around the horses’ legs until Custer gave them the command of release. The hounds rocketed away across the prairie.
Far behind, a calf bawled its misery. Along the line he heard dust-caked men mumble a dirge of complaint about the trail, the length of the march, the poor quality of their food and drink, the paltriness of the pay, and the stinginess of praise given by their martinet commander. Most of the postwar military were there simply to secure rudimentary employment, the low wages and hard conditions ensuring men of a desperate order.
Did they know or care how much he had been loved by his men during the War? Ask any of them, they would sing his praises. He had letters by the boxful. One soldier told the newspapers about Custer rescuing him on the battlefield after a bullet struck him in the leg. Not only did he carry the man from harm’s way but also made sure he got treatment. I would have given my right arm to save his life—aye, I would have died in his place!
If these men wanted his praise, they must earn it. They couldn’t hold a candle to his Michigan Brigade, no matter how hard he drilled them. His last hope was that he could forge the 7th Cavalry into a fighting unit in the heat of battle, but finding a battle also proved less satisfactory than it had before.
He likened the difference fighting Confederates and fighting Indians to being attacked by a bear or a mosquito. The bear had overwhelming force, he stood big, square in front of you, and moved predictably. The Indians fought like the mosquito. They stayed invisible except for the high whine in the ear as one flailed against them and felt the sting of their bite, but only the luckiest swipe crushed them, usually after they were already gorged with blood. Endless, itching irritation.
The dull rock of horses, the rub of Custis Lee’s saddle underneath, lulled him into dreaminess. The sun beat down against his felt hat, which shaded his eyes and nose, leaving chin and cheeks sunburned through his sparse mustache and beard. He pulled a kerchief from his pocket and wiped at the sand that crusted his eyes, blew his nose clean of mudsnot. He glanced at the men filing past—bowlegged, underfed, ill-bred. Soured faces and horned hands. Half were immigrants who had come after the War, unskilled laborers culled from the eastern cities who had no idea what they signed up for. They were squalid compared with his old Union volunteers. The only thing for sure was that such men were difficult to defeat because defeat already ran strong in their blood, and thus they had no fear of it.
A disturbance traveled through the column. The slightest threat from their surroundings registered physically through the men as if they formed a single entity. He shaded his eyes and saw far off on the blurred horizon dark human shapes. His heart added beats. The horses, sensing the new tension in the bodies of their riders, enlivened their gaits.
He halted the column, gathered his lead officers around him, good men who had weathered their postwar demotions as he had. Orders were given for arms to be made ready. Teamsters pulled rifles out from under wagon benches. He looked through his field glasses, but the waver of heat over salt pan made identification impossible. Was it a returning war party, or part of a larger camp on the move? He picked out an officer, and the two left the main body at a gallop to make contact. At hardly a quarter of the distance, the figures began to ride in a circle. His chest loosened at this signal of parley. He checked his relief with the thought that it might be an ambuscade, commonly employed by Indians.
When half the distance had been covered, he realized the horses were white men’s animals, not Indian ponies. His breath evened. Again he was aware of the burning sun on his back. Closing the final distance, he greeted herders who had lost their mules and then lost themselves on the deceptive plains. He pointed them in the right direction and then turned back.
Indians sparse as water, he thirsted for battle.
He twitched with anger at the sun, the dust, the runty men, the nag horses, the endless land that poured off in every direction like spilled tar. A passing soldier tilted a whiskey flask to his mouth in full view. All Custer could do not to order a lashing was set reins to horseflesh and follow the hounds away, over the nearby hillock where they had vanished.
His heart slowed, his throat loosened at the sound of pounding hooves. There was no glory like horses who ran not because they were spurred or whipped but from sheer animal joy, even if it was into battle.
* * *
ALONE, THE ASPECT of an inland grass sea was not as oppressive. He listened to the sound of dry thunder roll endlessly, unhalted by mountains.
If only he had Tom’s company, their roughhousing would alleviate his utter boredom. Where had those cagey dogs gone off? Disappeared again over yet another imperceptible swell of land like the barely visible but essential lift and fall of a breathing chest. And then he saw the cause of the dogs’ agitation.
Black against the burning light. The beast stood at least six feet high; if it wasn’t the biggest he’d ever seen he’d eat his hat. The head massive, winched down, so big and heavy it already seemed detached from its body. He could imagine it trophied above his mantel, the long horns unnicked and perfect wholes, sharp as cutlery. The body stood monstrous, broad chest tapering to the pure ironmuscle of hindquarter. The whole specimen deserved to be sent back east to be stuffed and set behind glass for posterity.
His attention, formerly scattered, now narrowed to a pinpoint. He was a wolf who had caught the whiff of prey. He hardly needed to goad Custis Lee to give chase; they were off. Air hot as if from an oven seared its way in and out of his lungs as he came alongside. Up close the animal grew even larger and more forbidding; he felt like he was trying to subdue a mountain. The coat was dusty as if the beast molted earth, creating the very ground beneath its feet as it ran. Maybe the Indian myth was true, of it being the source of all. Its acrid smell repelled him. Breath pumped through the bellows-like lungs of the animal as Custer drew close, leaned down, and placed the rifle’s muzzle to kiss the chest, but the moment was too perfect. He pulled off to prolong it, and the manbeast moved together in tandem a few more strides.
His horse was running full out, as fast and hard as during a charge. He wished they could go on tied like this across the vast, scrubbed emptiness forever. In pure joy he leaned down almost tenderly to deal the death shot. The molten power and rage of the animal made him want to crawl inside it, he felt such perfect awe. He was awake for the first time in days, nay months, years. It was almost as good as battle.
Just when he decided enough was enough, the bull, too, sensed a changed intention. It swung its giant head around toward the horse’s belly, the horn so close it could easily plunge through to the intestines or else rip the man’s leg off. The horse shied away, spooked either by the scrape of deadly horn or else the animal’s feral stink. Custer’s finger completed its downward pressure on the trigger as the sudden motion swung around the muzzle and instead exploded the equine head.
His Pegasus lost contact with the earth and for a divine moment became airborne before he crashed down into the ground with an impact so hard it broke both his front legs. Barely did Custer have time to pull boots from stirrups before the impact of horse against earth pitched him over the body, pushed him facedown, his mouth bloodied, nostrils packed with dirt. Many horses had been shot out from under him during the Rebellion, scores more he had ridden to death, or they had perished from scant forage and water, but the loss of a mount never ceased to be unique and painful to a cavalryman. It was an amputation of a part as essential as an arm or leg, and infinitely worse this time, because he had caused it in sport.
During the War things had happened quickly, there had been no time to feel. Now he lay in his man-sized earth depression, and time dragged along behind him. Weariness weighed him down so that he was tempted to not move but rest until the pious thought occurred that soon enough he would be resting for all eternity, so he picked himself back up.
In his stupor he’d forgotten the cause of his present affliction. The bull had not. It stood waiting, its small, prehistoric eye studying him while its flanks heaved great shovelfuls of air. Probably it was ailing, which was why it was alone, away from its herd. Solitude in the animal kingdom was an indicator of defeat and inevitable death.
Had he culled himself also? Where had his regiment disappeared?
Motionless, man and bull each eyeballed the other. At some invisible signal he knew the bull might turn its ragged anger toward him, and could easily outrun a man. It could impale him on one of those same spectacular horns that already he had mentally separated from its owner and mounted behind the fancy case of a museum. If Mr. Bull could read his thoughts, Custer was already as good as gone. A shame to die in such an ignoble fashion, but it could not be helped. A man was not always the master of choosing his final hour.
The wind notched stronger, the dusted sky yellowing to an unhealthy pallor. The bull lifted his head and scented the slightest degree right of the man. Was it hearing the lowing call of home? Longing for the comfort of being surrounded by a herd of his own kind, the distraction of mother bull, or was there a Mrs. Bull, or better yet a Miss Bull? The fall must have played tricks with Custer’s head; he felt both fear and not fear. For some inexplicable reason, he knew the animal would not charge. Never once was he tempted to reach for his shotgun. If one showed either Indians or buffalo one’s back, one was as good as gone. Both were warriors, each carried the bloodlust, just as he, a soldier, had the bloodlust. The most beautiful thing in life was to have an opponent worthy of oneself.
The ancient inspiration deciphered, the great beast tossed its head as if to clear it of cobwebs. Its comical small tail whipped up and down like a lady’s dainty riding quirt and off it trotted, stiff-necked, proud, without even a backward, menacing goodbye, stating clearly, Fool! Dismissive as if even he, Mr. Bull, understood that hidden in the surrounding bluffs and ravines lay fates far worse than he.
Custer’s legs buckled. Danger born, matured, and died away. Now on his knees a tremor shook him like he was a rag doll. Fear, although he refused to name it such. The sky howled overhead, a hollow and jaundiced thing, the featureless plains around him ominous as a bare stage.
He crawled over to his beloved Custis Lee, stroked the lathered shoulder, cursed his recklessness, not able to bear the mash of blood and bone and brain. He had truly loved the horse. His living link to his War was broken. Ashamed, he fiercely swiped at his eyes although there was no danger of witness. He had faced far worse than this on a daily basis during the Rebellion, both in numbers and kind, but here solitary mortality pierced him, made him feel exactly how small and inconsequential as a flea was the single passing of either man or beast.
He blubbered like a babe. He mourned Custis Lee in inverse proportion to how he had been unable to mourn his men during the rush of battle. He bawled and in the quiet afterward realized he was utterly forsaken. Out on that endless plain not a soul cared who he was, what he’d done, or what would become of him. It was his darkest nightmare: to die unknown.
The dogs were nowhere to be seen. Either they had returned to the regiment or had fallen back. Had he given chase to the bull farther than he remembered? He pulled himself to his feet and decided to walk to the highest nearby bluff in order to spot the column.
What should have taken him ten minutes took more than an hour. His feet ached, his mouth went dry so that his tongue matched the ground under his feet. He had not intended to be gone long enough to require more than the canteen of water that he had long before emptied. The top of the swell revealed prairie pulling away in all directions, devoid of human form. He had been mistaken about the distance and height of the bluff. When he finally climbed it—his only compass point the carcass of the recently deceased Custis Lee—higher ones surrounded him.
Unless he spotted the column he was helpless to guess what direction to take. He smarted at his unkept promises to Libbie—stay with the column, no hunting side trips, only leave accompanied in case of running into trouble. It was then that it occurred to him he needed not only to locate his regiment but must avoid Indian contact. He was a prime, coup-earning trophy, dismounted, armed only with carbine and pistol. Even Mr. Bull had forsaken him, disappeared from sight as if deliquescing into the raw earth.
Over the next hours he summited two more swells only to find that the geography remained unchanged at the top of each. He was marooned in a still ocean of grass, no end in sight, no human in sight either. The exact sorriest spot on earth. He had lost the marker of his Custis’s corpse, and until the sun began its decline he had no sense of direction. His eyes swam. Despite the heat, sweat dried on him, his insides wicked of moisture. In the distance were lovely lakes of water that he knew to be traps. Skeletons all over the prairie attested to the power of the ignis fatuus, which always hovered just out of reach, capable of driving a man over the edge. He resolutely shut his eyes.
At the foot of yet another bluff, he was tempted to lie in the nonshade of afternoon although he wouldn’t yet concede defeat. If you lay down, you didn’t get back up. Knowing better, he stretched out anyway, the hard ground as beckoning to his hurting self as a feather bed. He repeated the transporting lullaby of names: Bull Run, Antietam, Gettysburg, Yellow Tavern, Trevilian Station, Richmond, Appomattox. Fairy-tale names from another time so far from this stunted present, his change in fortune pained him. A hallowed time that created hallowed men, himself privileged to be among them. If there was a God, it was a time never to be repeated. The end of one thing that augured the beginning of … nothing.
He closed his eyes and was just about to fall asleep when he heard the wondrous call of a bugle. He blinked. Never had the nearness of such wretched soldiers swelled a heart so. His officers would find him soon, must be on his trail even now, but until then he would remain part of the earth. He crossed his ankles and tilted his hat over his reclining head to hide the panic still etched in his face.
—’Bout time you showed up. Set up camp here for the night. And bring me some whiskey while you’re at it.
Might as well make his broken promises to the old lady an even half dozen before he reformed on the morrow.