December 21, 1866—Fort Phil Kearny—Sullivant Hill—Lodge Trail Ridge
THERE IS THE SOUND OF HOOVES ON FROZEN MUD AND the rough footsteps of hurrying men and Kohn thinks to wake but sleep binds him. He has sat up watching his prisoner draft his confessions for the past several nights, and now he turns and hugs himself under his buffalo coat, the grass ticking in the mattress holding him in its warm embrace.
Molloy is dying and even in sleep Kohn’s body is thick and slow with the sadness of it. He dreams of the captain smiling. Or perhaps it is not a dream but a memory from a long time ago.
Private Rawson bursts into the visiting NCO quarters where Kohn sleeps and Kohn reaches for the pistol under his pillow.
“All up,” Rawson shouts, as Kohn’s hand reaches the walnut grip of the gun. “Colonel’s orders. All up to defend the woodtrain or stand picket. Every man who can hold a rifle. I got your horse saddled and ready outside. Hup, hup, Sergeant Kohn. Rise and shine, sweetheart.”
Kohn relaxes at the sound of Rawson’s voice and rolls over.
“All up and fall out, goddammit, Sergeant,” Rawson shouts, relishing his opportunity to let roar at Kohn, to rouse him from his sleep. “This attack ain’t like others. Bigger, fuckin’ big as they come’s the word. All hands to guns. Every damn body on post from chaplain to Guardhouse Charlie, says the colonel, and that means you too, Sergeant, so you may get your ass outta that rack and—”
One word sears through Kohn’s stupor and he throws off the weight of buffalo coat and blankets. Guardhouse. He jerks on his boots, shoves his pistols into his belt and holster. His gloves, his cutlass, the Spencer repeater he takes up from the corner beside his bunk.
“You tell me, Rawson, you tell me that guardhouse still has my prisoner in it.”
“Hell, Sergeant, I can’t tell you that but every man in the fort is called to defend it or the woodtrain so—”
“Where’s Captain Molloy?”
“Well how in a month of fucking Sundays could I know that, Sergeant?”
Kohn leaves the barracks and mounts his horse. He gallops her halfway to the guardhouse and stops on the parade ground, not needing to proceed farther. Molloy is standing in the guardhouse doorway.
“I was only following orders, Daniel,” Molloy shouts and Kohn has to strain to hear him over the commotion of horses, clattering kit on running men, barked orders and men mounting the sentry stands around the palisade. Molloy is smiling as he shouts and then begins to cough, a deep and malignant hacking that Kohn can hear clearly above the mounting din of readiness around him. God damn you, Kohn thinks. God damn you to hell, Captain. He turns his mount for the main gate and assembling troops without looking back at Molloy. He is not sure he could face the man if he had to.
HORSES DRAG AT REINS, nipping those around them, riders jerking them to order with gloved fists as the main gates to the fort are hauled open with a shriek of frozen hinges, the popping of winter-solid pine sap, and Kohn scans the horse soldiers gathered and waiting to leave the fort. Over the noise he can hear the faint crackle of rifle fire from some distance away but this is not what concerns him. He scans briefly the orderly files of the newly arrived company of cavalry out of Fort Laramie and disregards them, focusing on the loose rabble of mounted infantry, many in scarves and buffalo hats, several in buffalo coats that Kohn knows will make any fighting that may need to be done difficult and unwieldy. As he notes this, he sees him, one of the coated men. No hat but the heavy hide coat and a blanket roll strapped to the back of his saddle. God damn him! Kohn barges his mount through the rabble as the mass of horsemen begin to move out the gates. Somewhere behind him he hears an officer say to somebody that they are not to pursue the Indians, under no circumstances are they to pursue them.
“You will be back in that cell by day’s end, Private. Do you hear me?” Kohn says, coming as close as he can to O’Driscoll amid the mass of horseflesh and riders.
There are four men around O’Driscoll and they close ranks about him. Hard men. Scarred faces. Wide-eyed mounts keyed for the chase. One of the men speaks in German to him, blond hair spilling from under his kepi, a bugle on a strap around his shoulders, short in the saddle. “You will do better to stay here, Sergeant. No one knows where a ball will find its home once it is fired.”
Kohn says back to the bugler, in English, “I know mine will find a home in your head if you so much as look cross-eyed at me, Private.”
Someone shouts, “Heeya, move out.” O’Driscoll and the men around them spur their mounts and tug reins and they are away at a gallop out the gates. Keeping one eye on O’Driscoll, Kohn follows the pack of riders out onto the plain of winter-dead meadows that lead from the fort to the foothills from where the snapping of muskets has become so rapid that it sounds like a fire catching in dry grass.
MICHAEL O’DRISCOLL RIDES alongside Metzger and Daly and several others from C Company and these men form a phalanx around him. They will not see him taken by the terrible Jew but O’Driscoll knows as he rides that the cavalryman is behind him. He can feel the weight of his eyes on his shoulders, the burn of them, and he knows that if not the Jew cavalryman it will be someone else. Always someone behind him as it has been since his brother felled and killed that boy on the Kilorglin Road back in Ireland. The hot breath of the hunter, the guilt rousing him from sleep ever onward. He shakes these thoughts away. The gallows rope would have ended all this for him. Better the rope maybe, than living with one eye forever cast behind you. They crest Sullivant Hill, the thundering of several dozens of horses, and all such thoughts are banished by what Michael sees before him.
The woodtrain has halted some fifty yards over the lip of the hill, gunsmoke smearing the air around it, and a number of Indians charge the train, loosing arrows, one or two firing rifles, before taking their mounts down the slope of the hill and around a stand of trees at the bottom, as if making for open country. Michael and the pack of mounted infantry climb the trail, closing on the woodtrain, and as they do the Indians appear to see them and flee from their muster point at the top of the road above the train and at this the mounted infantry steer their mounts down the hill in pursuit.
Michael turns down the hill with the other riders, leaning back in his saddle as they descend, focusing on the frozen ground under the grass, the hidden furrows and rabbit holes that will shatter a horse’s leg and kill you on a hill like this as quick as a minié ball or arrow.
They reach the bottom and the ground levels out by a stream in the crux of two hills. Here the air is clear of gunsmoke and Michael can see the first of the fort’s contingent of cavalrymen under Captain Fetterman rounding the stand of trees to their right. A half company of infantry soldiers on foot come down into the streambed next at a jog, never having made it to the top of Sullivant Hill, and they too round the stand of trees, a winding blue snake against the snow-clad ground, and Michael and the other mounted infantry follow. Around this stand of trees there is a beaten path leading to Lodge Trail Ridge and then the undulating open plains where the Indians will lose them. He spurs his mount and pulls away from Metzger and his friends. Better to hunt than be hunted.
KOHN FOLLOWS O’DRISCOLL DOWN the hillside into the creekbed, riding alongside mounted infantry sloppy in their saddles, civilians, timbermen equally awkward in theirs, some of these carrying modern repeater rifles like his own. All hands to the guns. He notes arrows now, flashing from the tree line in stinging flurries, and sees a rider ahead of him fall. An arrow passes between him and another rider. The sound of musket fire again now from around the stand of trees and Kohn senses what is coming even as he knows he will not stop despite it, will not cease until he once again has Michael O’Driscoll in irons or sees him bleeding out on the frozen ground.
Kohn sweats under his tunic despite the bitter cold and he rounds the stand of trees and splashes through the shallows of another stream, the ground rising up from it on the other side to form a small ridgeline. It is more gully than valley here and in the tight suck of streambed between the tree line and rising ground uniformed riders have broken ranks and are riding in a chaos of directions. A rider with terror in his eyes barrels back across the stream and Kohn is forced up the bank to avoid a collision with him. As he does this, his mount slipping and clawing at the frozen mud of the bank for purchase, he loses sight of O’Driscoll, clamps his thighs around his mount as he senses her tense beneath him to leap up from the streambed onto flatter ground.
Kohn’s horse lands and skips awkwardly and Kohn thinks she has broken something or slipped a shoe and as he looks down to check there is a raking pain across the back of his neck, an arrow snagging at his skin and lashing his scarf out behind him in its lethal flight. If I hadn’t looked down, he thinks, then looks up and he hears it now, above the smattering of gunfire and through the gathering smoke in the gully where they have followed the Indians; where, as he sensed and now knows, the Indians wanted them to follow all along.
The sound is high-pitched and terrible, goose pimples washing up Kohn’s back as they did in the war when he heard a similar noise coming from rebel lines. Howling, yipping, barking, laughing. Like the rebel yell but not like it. Kohn forgets about his horse’s leg and spurs her up the incline toward the top, following any number of others who have done the same as Indians pour from the tree line, splashing through the stream, firing arrows, hacking, stabbing, howling. Kohn spurs his mount harder and can feel her fear beneath him as she can feel his. Still he searches for his prisoner.
O’DRISCOLL LEADS METZGER and the others as they round the tree line into the gully, their horses splashing, smashing through the thin sheen of ice on the stream. He sees the mass of cavalry ahead of them turning, firing into the tree line, flashes of fire followed by billows of smoke, and the cavalrymen turning in their saddles, pistols pointing into the wood. Whatever they are firing at is obscured suddenly in all the smoke and like Kohn, some thirty yards behind him on the upper bank of the stream, Michael hears the gathering howl from the cottonwoods and sees the ambushers emerging from the trees, the vague shapes of them coming, fifty, a hundred, in the swirling gunsmoke, and terror sparks down his spine and through his legs and his horse feels it too and lurches for the high ground and he lets her.
“Metzy,” he shouts. “This way, Metz.” His breath is barged from him as he is thrown back in the saddle, gripping tight to the reins as his mount eats yards of frozen hillside, kicking snow behind her as she climbs and then reaches the top of the low hill, bounding over it and into a raised and frozen meadow onto which, from all sides, hundreds more Indians come, howling, howling, some on foot, many more on horseback and what seems but a handful of blue-coated soldiers in a frenzy of terror. Horses are jerked this way and then, bolting for one side of the meadow only to find more Indians there, turned back and more Indians are coming. An arrow passes so close by Michael’s ear from behind him he can hear its hiss, feel it carve the air.
“Michael!” It is Metzger’s voice and his friend now comes thundering up to him, his mount’s eyes wide and white with terror. “They are everywhere coming behind us.”
A bugle sounds from across the meadow above the howling, a weak and incoherent bleating, a panicked cavalry bugler attempting to blow some sense of order to the fight or to the retreat and without waiting for an answer from O’Driscoll, Metzger raises his own bugle and sounds the order to retreat, loud and sharp in the icy air. He does not wait to be ordered to do it, in essence taking command of the fort’s riders, mustering them to flee behind the blaring of his bugle.
Michael scans the meadow—flailing tumult, pistols and rifles firing, smoke beginning to cloud the field—and then spurs his mount forward, north, away from the fort. There appear to be fewer Indians to the north of the meadow. He has his Colt in one hand and fires as he rides. Around him there is slaughter, the snow churned to mud and blood and Metzger is behind him and then is not. Michael sees an arrow strike Daly in the throat, another in the chest and Daly falls and Michael lashes his mount with his reins, horse and man thundering through the storm of ambush.
As he rides, long reins lashing, his senses are alive to flashing aspects of the battle. There is powder smoke in the air—he can taste it now and knows the taste well—and the heat of the beast beneath him; there is blood and glinting steel and bodies battered to the frozen ground. Most of all there are Indians and in their hands are every manner of swinging blade and bludgeon, gun and bow, spear and scalping knife. Michael has a flashing view of a bluecoat crumpling to the ground, an ambusher upon him before the soldier has hit it.
He is nearly clear of the tumult, more than halfway across the frozen meadow, when an arrow strikes his thigh with a force that feels as if he has been hit with a hammer, the arrow driving through muscle, deflecting off bone and emerging partly from his leg to enter his horse, pinning his leg to the beast as the horse bucks and turns and then continues on, riding, riding. Another arrow strikes his mount and she stumbles nearly to the edge of the meadow, to the decline there, the shelter that might be had in the cottonwood trees if he could make them.
Another arrow strikes Michael’s horse now and she falls and he is thrown, his fall tearing the arrow from the side of his horse. The breath bursts from his lungs as he hits the frozen ground and he gasps, bright lights like fireworks exploding in his eyes. He lies on his back, his mouth yawing for air and it comes finally, a deep relished breath that brings back with it the sound of the slaughter around him. Above him there is a brief respite of blue sky between the clouds. Around him there is smoke and blood and howling. He feels the approaching footsteps through the ground on his back.
KOHN HEARS THE BUGLE call to retreat as he crests the rise into the meadow and his eyes are drawn to the bugler and next to him is O’Driscoll who spurs his horse and begins to race across the meadow as if straight into the heart of the fighting, firing his pistol as he goes, and Kohn follows.
He is closing on O’Driscoll when he sees his quarry’s horse fall and watches as O’Driscoll is thrown. Watching this Kohn feels but does not see his own horse stumble as she crushes someone or something beneath her hooves, and from his left comes a rider, an Indian on a pony painted in bright shades of ocher, tomahawk raised, and this Indian closes suddenly, faster than Kohn imagined possible, the tomahawk coming down.
Kohn twists in his saddle and fires his pistol and the hatchet glances off his shoulder with a thud and lodges itself in the thick leather of his saddle and for a galloping moment he and the Indian are riding side by side, the Indian trying to wrench the tomahawk from the saddle and Kohn trying to thumb back the hammer of his Remington and finding his arm paralyzed by the axe blow and, as if sensing this, his horse turns abruptly away, pulling the Indian still gripping the tomahawk from the back of his own horse to the frozen ground. A fine horse, Kohn thinks. A wonderful beast. He scans the meadow as he rides, his eyes passing over the battle around him, looking for the fallen O’Driscoll.
Before Kohn has put forty yards between them, the Indian is back on his feet and he draws an arrow from the quiver at his back and strings it to his bow. He looses the arrow at Kohn and the arrow flies true and straight.