Cry of the Hawk

Jonah wanted one last drink of that water as he corked his canteen and caught up the reins to his mount. He had to admit, his butt was growing accustomed to the riding when for so long he had either been languishing in prison or walking across the plains. Far better to ride.

And ride they had. Ever since arriving at the Sweetwater Station near South Pass, Lybe’s I Company had been busy almost daily, inspecting the emigrant road for telegraph line needing repair, replacing sections at times a mile or more in length dragged down by the hostiles.

Wire pulled down. Poles burned in blackened scars along the road, the scene blotted with tracks of Indian ponies and moccasined warriors. Yet Jonah Hook had yet to see a warrior. Some of the others in I Company had been blooded in skirmishes. One killed and one dead with First Sergeant William R. Moody. But for all of the excitement, Jonah had never been in the right place at the wrong time.

He kept counting the days until he would be shet of this land and back in the bosom of family in Missouri.

This short trip back down the road to Fort Laramie was just the sort of diversion to keep his mind off so much of the yearning. Captain Lybe needed supplies the Eleventh Ohio and Eleventh Kansas had used up prior to being replaced by the galvanized Yankees of the Third U.S. And the Confederates were owed a payday as well. Lybe said he would accompany some of the Kansas and Ohio troops east to Laramie where he could pick up rations, forage, and pay vouchers.

“Watch yourself, Sergeant Custard,” said the Captain as Sergeant Moody led out the mounted Confederates. “Reports of heavy activity between this spring and the bridge.”

“We’ll take care of ourselves, Captain. We’re strong enough to hold off anything these red bastards can throw at us.”

4

July, 1865

BLOOD WOULD FILL every boot track the white man made as he fled this sacred hunting ground of the Lakota and Shahiyena.

Crazy Horse lay in wait behind the low hills with the others gathered beneath the dark sky as the moon eased down into the west. And with the rising of the sun, the Horse would lead nineteen others to entice the soldiers from their fort walls, pulling them seductively into the trap set beyond the sand hills where the many others would spring from hiding to swallow the white men like nighthawks swooping down to gobble up moths on the wing.

They had been preparing for this attack for some time—ranging out in small parties and large, probing up and down the Holy Road. Once the Lakota had even lured out the soldiers from Fort Laramie under their soldier chief the Loafers called Moonlight. Instead of turning back with his horsemen when he failed to find any warriors to fight, Moonlight kept on marching west, right to the bank of Wind River—while the Lakota and Shahiyena joyously plundered the road behind the soldiers.

With twenty-four winters behind him now, Crazy Horse remained thin and sinewy, slightly below average height for a white man of the time and hardly 140 pounds in weight. So what was most remarkable about him was not only his lighter skin color, but a hair color much fairer than most Oglalla warriors. Behind his ear now he wore the pebble medicine made for him by a medicine man named Chips. The stone dreamer had made his young warrior friend a charm that had already proved itself potent, protecting the warrior through the many skirmishes of these past spring moons.

Crazy Horse shivered slightly beneath his blanket, wishing now for the warmth just the sight of Black Buffalo Woman gave his loins. The short summer nights in this high, flat country nonetheless grew cold when all heat seemed drawn from the land. Yet he shivered every bit as much from the remembrance of the horror suffered by the two Lakota men whose bodies still hung from chains lashed over a scaffold at the edge of Fort Laramie.

Early in the Moon of Horses Fattening, two minor Oglalla chiefs had purchased a white prisoner the Shahiyena had captured in their winter raids along the Holy Road. Although two of the woman’s older children had been taken from her, she was allowed to keep a suckling infant by her Cheyenne captor. In an attempt to win themselves some presents from the soldiers, the Lakota chiefs named Two Face and Blackfoot bought Mrs. Eubanks and her infant from the Shahiyena, and delivered their white prizes to the acting commander at Fort Laramie.

But instead of rewarding the two Lakota chiefs, the drunken soldier had ordered the pair shackled with heavy ball and chain, then strung up on a scaffold with more chain about their necks.

Even now the Horse winced at the horror—this terrible death for a warrior, chained and strangled, with no way for his spirit to escape through his mouth.