Chapter 9

January 17, 1873

At four o’clock that Friday morning, buglers blew reveille.

“Damn,” Ian muttered to himself, “if that don’t tell them Modocs we’re coming, I don’t know what will.”

O’Roarke pulled himself reluctantly from his frozen blankets. The air made a frosty halo before his face as he stomped into his boots, wiggling toes to stimulate warmth.

Last night had been hardest, that night before this coming unknown. As the temperature dropped and the heavy, humid air began to freeze a coating on everything, he had tossed in his blankets. Thinking hard on Dimity. Yearning to roll over and feel her warmth. Wanting more than anything right now after all these years to gently lift the bottom of that worn flannel gown and feel the softness of her hips as he ground himself into the heat of her—there in the blackness of their cabin beneath Mahogany Mountain.

But here he was among the hundreds of soldiers and volunteers. His hands shook with cold as he knelt to pull wood from beneath the oiled shelter-half where he had kept the firewood dry. Starting the fire as Fairchild and Dorris and others grumbled and kicked around, Ian listened to the high-spirited soldiers boasting of their coming march right into Captain Jack’s fortifications, when they would kick some Modocs all the way back to their reservation.

“We’ll be back by lunch!” came a cheer from a nearby soldier bivouac.

One of those Twenty-first fellas, Ian brooded as the split kindling clawed at his match flame and held it dearly. Ruddy foot-sloggers don’t have no idea the living hell they’re about to face they go in that devil’s cauldron to pull Jack out.

In a matter of minutes the assembly was blown, then orders grumbled through the massive encampment and the men began moving out.

For more than two hours the cold and apprehensive white men stumbled through the dark of winter’s predawn to reach the bottom of the bluff. From there the left flank led the way, marching carefully to the lakeshore, where the entire outfit filled their canteens for the coming fight. Once they were again formed up, Wheaton gave the order to establish a skirmish formation. The infantry deployed first: Company C on the far left, followed by Company B on the right. Next to them stood the Oregon volunteers, while Fairchild and his California volunteers were deployed on the left as flankers for the infantry itself. Perry’s cavalry, armed with repeating Spencer rifles, were on the far right as the command was given.

“Move out!”

The order was repeated up and down the line as men shuffled forward into the gray-black of that cold morning with a clatter and rattle of arms, both Springfields and Sharps rifles, along with the squeak and groan of each man’s own equipment. From this point on no one man would be able to see the rest of the formation. Ian could look both left and right, recognizing beneath the dim starshine no more than a half-dozen men in either direction. The broken, unforgiving terrain made it impossible for him to see any more of the command.

About six-thirty Wheaton ordered the howitzers to fire three shots—a signal to begin the battle. Yet instead of answering gunfire, there was an eerie lull from the Lava Beds.

One of the Klamaths who could speak Modoc was sent far forward to announce to Captain Jack’s people that they had ten minutes to surrender or be prepared to suffer the coming attack.

The sun came up late and lazy beneath the sodden clouds, to shine with a chilly light devoid of any warmth on this left arm of the attack. Ian could now make out the full extent of the thick fog souping the battleground below them. From this far right came the sound of sporadic riflefire.

“Sounds like the soldiers over yonder run onto some Modoc pickets,” said one of the soldiers as they continued to cautiously feel their way across the forbidding terrain.

Ian heard John Fairchild snort. “I doubt it,” the settler said.

“That’s right,” Ian replied. “It’ll be those soldiers over there shooting at shadows in the fog—thinking they’re Modoc warriors.”

Ghosts, Ian thought as some of the sharp rocks slashed through the thick hide of his boots. He felt the first nagging trickle of warm blood seeping into his torn, cold stocking.

Ghosts is what we’re sent in here after.

*   *   *

Jack hadn’t slept all night.

He was sure the dancing and singing had been heard miles away in the soldier camps. The white men were coming with the rising of the sun—so Curly Headed Doctor led the warriors in a wild, frenzied celebration of their war-spirits.

At the center of their Stronghold the Doctor had some young men raise a medicine pole—nothing more than a large limb cut from a nearby juniper. Once again, he declared, they would dance back the ghosts as the prophets in Nevada had taught them. From the limb’s grotesque shape the women hung several white-haired dog skins, hawks’ feathers, a white weasel skin and a glistening, dark brown otter hide. Then the music began. And the dancing.

With the women chanting the prescribed words to the ghost-song, Curly Headed Doctor started to dance the one-foot-step-then-drag that characterized the dance brought to them from Nevada. As he circled the pathetic little medicine pole, the women and warriors threw tiny bits of food and roots and other sacrifices into the bonfire casting throbbing shadows on the black walls surrounding their fortress.

With a wild flourish, time and again the shaman bent over the smoke rising at the edge of the fire. He would inhale deeply, drawing its potent power into his lungs.

Suddenly there had been a shriek—then many shrieks. Jack had turned to find the Doctor had fallen, convulsing on the ground, his eyes rolled back, arms and legs akimbo, thrashing in a frenzy.

“He is visiting the land of the ghosts!” shouted Hooker Jim, pushing the many back out of the way.

“Let him talk to our ancestors!” shouted Steamboat Frank.

“Their spirits help us drive the white man away!” Ellen’s Man George joined in.

First a few, then more of the women started dancing in the way shown them months before by the shaman. Shuffling, bent-kneed, hop-stepping, then dragging the trailing foot, they circled the medicine pole, chanting and keening all the while as the drummers pounded out the steady, hypnotic rhythm.

As the night wore on and the dancing ended, Jack dispatched his men to various stations on either side of their Stronghold. Forced to spread his warriors across a wide front, he brooded angrily that he had less than sixty men to throw against the might of the white man come the new day’s sun.

“It is not our numbers,” Scar-Faced Charley had said in the cold darkness of that morning-coming. “In each of us now is the strength of our departed spirits. Ka-moo-cum-chux has shown the Doctor that we will be protected from the soldier bullets. We will fight like demons—destroying ten times our number! They cannot touch us with their bullets.”

“Yes,” Jack replied, forcing himself to feel better for the coming fight. “And we have captured many of the white man’s guns and bullets for our own warriors to use.”

“Do not worry, Kientpoos,” Charley said. “We may be spread thin—but when the soldiers attack a portion of our defensive ring, we can rush more warriors to that position. When they attack another part of our defense, we will rush warriors over there. The soldiers will never reach our Stronghold.”

Jack regarded his old childhood friend carefully. “Because of the shaman’s red rope he has strung far around us?”

Charley shook his head. “No. Because we will be fighting to protect our families.”

*   *   *

After a bit, some of the frantic, scattered far-off shooting from Green’s and Mason’s soldiers tapered off.

Ian marched at a snail’s pace with the other Californians, listening for any sign of the enemy looming out of the roiling fog.

As the minutes passed into hours, more shots and shouting were still heard to echo from the right end of the formation. So retarded were they by the thick fog making their advance agonizingly slow, that by eleven A.M. they had only put some two miles behind them since leaving the staging area.

The only good thing about the pace was that few men had been hit during that morning of bullets coming out of the fog from unseen snipers and shadowy ghosts with sprigs of sagebrush camouflage tied atop their heads.

“Where’s more of that howitzer fire Wheaton ordered to soften the Modocs up?” grumbled Pressley Dorris.

“I figure Green canceled Wheaton’s order,” Fairchild replied. “In this damnable fog, I wouldn’t want those gunners not knowing where any of us are.”

“Listen!” yelled someone off to Ian’s right.

“Yeah,” replied another as every man strained to listen to the distant gunfire. “Sounds like Bernard’s outfit has gone and opened up on them at last.”

“Hurraw!” several cheered.

“We’ll send them Injuns straight to hell!”

“Here we go! Straight up their backsides while Bernard’s got ’em penned down!”

There was a wholesale rush by the Oregon volunteers and some of the young soldiers as the morning’s optimism reached its climax.

“Straight to hell!”

Ahead and to the right, rifles of a sudden cracked out of the soggy haze.

A nearby soldier called out as he fell. “Come get me! Pull me outta here! Oh, God—”

Two of those closest to him rushed forward into the whitish mist. More gunfire rattled. One of the rescuers spun around, his jaw gone, the bottom of his face gushing blood as he fell senseless, thrashing to the ground.

The second rescuer grabbed his leg, hollering as loudly as the first soldier hit. “My goddamned leg—don’t make me crawl outta here!”

“Fire!” ordered officers up and down the line.

Yellow and orange spat into the rainy mist of the clouds enveloping the whole battlefield in a surreal glow as the sun continued to rise far behind the fog. More men hollered out in pain and panic. Nearby Modocs answered with their own shrill battle-cries. The air stank of sulfur and blood and burnt powder.

“Charge that position!” yelled some officer, standing and pointing at the dim muzzle-flashes seen through the fog. “Charge!”

By now the white man’s bullets were ricocheting off black boulders and ridges looming out of the thick, icy mist. And soon the Modoc fire diminished as the warriors drew back, disappearing, only to reappear and attack farther down the skirmish line.

“We’re getting eaten alive!” growled Pressley Dorris.

Ian looked on all sides of him as the wounded were dragged back to cover, the dead allowed to lie where they had fallen in silence. “Not even given a chance to get our own licks in, are we, boys?”

The entire advance ground to a halt, men yelling at one another, suggesting orders, giving orders, refusing all orders to continue.

Major Green was among them suddenly, whipping them with his courage. “Up there!” He pointed with his pistol. “We’ve got to take that ridge—that’s where the buggers are! Drive them off—now, charge!”

The first handful obeyed, rising to plunge toward the nearby ridgetop. Two of them fell backward as orange bursts brightly split the fog.

“More—don’t give up now!” Green was hollering. “Charge!”

“You heard the major!” another officer took up the call. “Let’s take the ridge!”

But for every two men who rose to fling themselves against the Modocs atop that foggy ridge, there was a casualty who stumbled and fell. The soldiers left unhurt watched petrified as the wounded and dead piled up, until there was no courage left within them that could make the soldiers continue their suicidal charge.

For the next hour and a half the Modocs continued at will to snipe their way up and down the long skirmish formation, picking off soldiers from place to place while Oregon volunteers bolted and got themselves separated from Mason’s infantry. They had quickly recognized their peril, out on the far flank like ducks in a barrel for the shooting. Now they scurried backward in a rapid withdrawal. Most of them hunkered down behind larger boulders, heaving the cold air into their straining lungs after their narrow escape, listening to Modoc bullets smack the rocks or whine harmlessly overhead.

“You boys aren’t near as brave about eating Modoc steak now as you was the last few days,” Fairchild said to a knot of the Oregon militia.

“Give us a crack at something we can see,” one of them complained.

Ian shook his head. “Funny how them Modocs find targets to shoot at—but you boys can’t see a thing to make war on.”

Far in the distance the cold of the early afternoon air carried on it the sound of sustained volley firing coming from across an inlet of the lake.

“Sounds like Bernard’s got his men into the thick of it now,” O’Roarke commented, dragging a match over the heel of his scarred boot. He lit his pipe and set back with a sigh, trying not to dwell on Dimity and the children.

“Mayhaps Wheaton’s going to let them have a go at Captain Jack for a while now—and give us a break,” Dorris replied.

“Don’t mind this little rest, I don’t,” Ian said, blowing a thick column of blue smoke into the whitish, foggy air. “Shame of it is, this time gives a sane man time to think on just what the devil he’s doing here anyway.”

*   *   *

Bad as things were for Green’s troops on the west, things couldn’t be any worse for Bernard’s hundred men moving in on the Stronghold from the east.

Although the terrain they had to cross was not near as formidable as was the terrain on the west, Bernard’s men still suffered from the thick fog and the eerie black monoliths that loomed out of the cloudbank before them.

Perhaps halfway through their march, the soldiers and Klamath scouts reached a collapsed lava tube that formed a chasm some twenty feet deep. As their skirmish line came to a confused halt, the Modocs nearby opened a random fire.

No man was hit in those first few, frantic seconds—but the lead whistled overhead or zinged against the black lava formations, splattering with a lot of noise that caused every man to find the biggest place where he could make himself small. As much as the officers yelled at the soldiers, as much as they threatened with orders—the line did not rise from its bulwarks and advance.

“We can’t cross that chasm!” a soldier shouted above the din when the order to charge the Modocs was first relayed.

“That’s no goddamned chasm,” Seamus Donegan muttered, near under his breath.

Beside the Irishman, Captain James Jackson wagged his head. “Right now, that hole may as well be a chasm. We’ll not get these men across it.”

“Your sojurs still afraid of the Modocs after all this time?”

Jackson nodded. “Almost two months since that fight we had with Captain Jack in his village—and yes, they’re still spooky.”

Donegan poked his head up then down the skirmish line. “I don’t know how many warriors are out there in the fog, but they sure have a hundred of us pinned down here.”

“Jackson?”

Both Donegan and the captain turned at the sound of Bernard’s voice. He was crawling on his hands and knees across the rough ground topped by lava pebbles. They nodded to the senior captain as he came to a stop at their boulder.

“I’m deviled on what to do, Jackson,” Bernard hissed.

“We’d better pull back a little. There’s a spot we crossed—about a hundred fifty yards back. It’s there we can set up a defensive perimeter.”

Bernard wagged his head ruefully. “All right We’ll pull back without joining up with Green’s flank as Wheaton ordered.”

“You’re not going to move this bunch of sojurs in this fog,” Donegan said.

Bernard eyed him severely. “I’ll be damned if we aren’t having to fight the whole of Jack’s army out there.”

Jackson shook his head. “No way of telling—but I figure I’m of the same mind as the Irishman here. There’s a handful of snipers out there—picking away at us, holding one hundred soldiers down and turning their nerves to water.”

Bernard chewed at the inside of his cheek a moment. He looked overhead at the dim sun scorching a cold hole in the thick, whitish fog. “Perhaps if we hang on long enough, the sun will burn off this cloud. Pass the order along to pull back to a defensible position.”

In small groups and pairs the soldiers obeyed that order to retreat.

Scrambling back the way they had come, the men hurried more than a hundred yards and found what they were seeking: a place they could defend against an unseen enemy. Bernard and Jackson moved up and down the new picket line, stretching their defense from the lakeshore for more than a mile and a half by placing a soldier to cover every eighty yards of rocky terrain. Here the men piled up what rocks they could to form more protection against Modoc lead that continued to whine overhead. From time to time throughout that long afternoon, the soldiers would occasionally fire random shots in the general direction of their red-skinned tormentors.

Most of those bullets sailed harmlessly over Captain Jack’s Stronghold, chipping away at the rocky fortifications on the far side of the Stronghold, where Green’s and Mason’s troops huddled, pinned down by the rest of the Modoc leader’s ragtag band of ill-equipped warriors.