Cry of the Hawk

The following August day saw a repeat of the same failure—this time Red Cloud’s own, in another hot fight that saw the Oglalla chief’s horsemen hurl themselves against a tiny ring of wagon boxes where some thirty soldiers held out against the hundreds, a matter of miles from Fort Phil Kearny while the sun hung high in that summer sky.

Nothing moved on the Montana Road now. Winter had come, and only the army escorted its occasional supply trains north. From time to time a solitary mail carrier slipped through, riding by night, making himself scarce by day. Men like Portugee Phillips, who were made of sinewy stuff that could take what the land and the sky and the warrior bands handed out—and still not break.

Riley Fordham had decided he would wait for spring and the first civilian train to gather on the outskirts of Fort Laramie, bound for the goldfields along Alder Gulch and Bannack and Virginia City.

“A man gets older and learns a little humility, doesn’t he, Mr. Sweete,” Fordham had commented one recent evening, “when he finds out he isn’t so immortal.”

“Gives a man a whole new outlook on life, Mr. Fordham, it does.”

But the prospect of waiting out the winter at Laramie did not improve the deserter’s disposition. Most of the time Fordham was looking over his shoulder, watching every new group of horsemen come riding in from the east along the Platte River Road, or south from the Colorado Territory. Always on the lookout for a familiar face, someone who might be looking for his.

The uncertainty in that waiting must surely take its toll on a man, Jonah decided. Perhaps, just perhaps, as much as the not knowing took its toll on him.

He gave Riley Fordham a grudging respect for riding away from Jubilee Usher. Better had it been that he rode away with Hattie, rather than just saving his own skin. But then again, Jonah figured, Fordham would have to deal with that ghost of failure in his own way, in his own time.

“You know that band. I can tell you do,” Jonah said, the cold breeze whipping the breathsmoke from his face. The wind here came cruelly off the Medicine Bows to the west.

Sweete smiled a bit bigger now. “Ain’t that I know the band so particular, Jonah. But I do recognize three of them ponies.”

“You see her?”

“Yes,” he said finally, pushing the wolf-fur hat back farther on his brow. “I believe I do.”

It might have been difficult for some men to pick an individual out of that crowd of several hundred warriors, women, and children, along with the old ones too lame or frail to walk or ride atop the ponies. Those wrinkled ones cackled and complained from the travois slung behind many of the horses where they sat among the folded lodge skins and camp equipment, parfleches and rawhide boxes filled with dried buffalo. Man and woman looked so much alike at this distance, every one so wrapped in blanket and robe, hoods pulled up around faces, coyote and wolf and bear hides pulled down to eyebrows to keep out the blowing, stinging snow. A colorful parade this was, coming down to Laramie in a gray December snowstorm.

In the van rode the young warriors, each brandishing his favored weapon, bow or rifle. They gave the gathering soldiers and the great number of civilians employed at the fort a brief exhibition of their horsemanship; their animals kicked up great clods of the frozen snow as they tore past, hanging from rumps by one heel, hiding behind the great, heaving necks of the grass-fed war ponies recent of the buffalo hunts in the north country. Then came the old men, each one riding more stately than the prancing bucks, no longer having to prove anything to any man, white or red. On the scarred ones came, their fans and pipes and other symbols of office now on display as they arrived at this great gathering place to be counted in those discussions to come with the white peace-talkers.

At the last came the women, guiding, riding, or walking beside the ponies who packed on their backs or dragged behind them on a wide vee of lodgepoles the wealth of the band. Like the great arms of an arrow point behind their men, the women slowed their march as the young men slowed theirs, waiting now for the Medicine Pipe Bearer to show the site he had selected for their camp.

And once the word was passed that their long march south had ended, a great shout went up from the old men, echoed by the young warriors—answered and eventually drowned out by the trilling, keening cries of joy from the women and children. Dogs barked their agreement. It had been a long, long journey of many, many days. And this would be a good camp, with many presents yet to come just for listening to the words of the white peace-talkers.

“Shell Woman!” Sweete called out, flinging his voice into the cacophony of camp making as the women shouted to one another as they raised the swirl of their lodgepoles, forming the great horned crescent facing the east.

The old mountain man turned for a moment, reaching out to snag Hook’s coat and pull him along. “C’mon, dammit.”