Cry of the Hawk

Moving off some distance from the fort, slowly so as not to raise a cloud of dust, the warrior bands went into camp as the summer sun set upon the cooling land. While some in that grand council held that night argued to attack the fort in force and overwhelm the soldiers, others argued for burning the bridge and killing soldiers as they came out to repair it.

Yet it was Crazy Horse and Young Man Afraid who gave voice to the battle plan that pleased most the warrior spirit of these fighting men.

“We will strike them in the open! Give these soldiers a chance to fight us like men!” Young Man Afraid had said only hours ago now at that council.

“Draw them out with our decoys and make them fight on open ground!” Crazy Horse had added.

Trader Bent’s half-breed Shahiyena son George would be one of the decoys, joining Crazy Horse and eighteen others who would lure the soldiers across the bridge and into these hills north of the river.

Yet some doubt remained in the Oglalla war chief’s mind if the akicita, the camp police, could keep a tight fisted rein on the eager young men until the moment had come to spring their thousandfold trap.

As the sun stretched itself in a bloody line along the east, then blinked over the horizon, a bugle was blown inside the soldier stockade.

Young Man Afraid nodded to his nineteen. Crazy Horse and the others discarded their blankets and robes, shifting quivers of arrows over their shoulders in the chill dawn air. While others shook out war clothing and freed medicine bundles from hiding, the Horse stood in prayer for the moment, facing the east. In ritual this morning, as he had done before every battle, the Oglalla warrior scooped up a handful of dirt from a gopher hole and tossed it over his head. Some of the sprinkling of dust clung to the earth pigment and bear grease smeared in a jagged lightning bolt from brow to jawbone. Another handful of dust he now scattered over the back of his pony before leaping atop the animal.

Wearing no more than a breechclout and his moccasins, a single feather tied so that it pointed downward at the back of his unbound hair, the Oglalla warrior rode around the base of the hills with the rest. Encircling his sinewy chest was a thin strip of soft buckskin that secured another small pebble beneath the left arm of Crazy Horse. More powerful dream medicine from Chips for this day.

“Look at the American horses!” shouted one of the eager young ones, pointing for the others to see as they neared the bridge.

“They will soon be ours!” Young Man Afraid answered.

“Bring out your blankets!” Crazy Horse shouted.

The twenty unfurled wide strips of blanket or pieces of noisy rawhide to startle the soldier horses into stampeding—just as the gates of the wooden stockade burst open and out poured some soldiers in dusty blue uniforms. Before the decoys could reach the river, the soldiers raced across the bridge to the north bank with a clatter of iron-shod hooves across the cottonwood planks—then suddenly stopped.

As planned, the twenty whirled their ponies for the hills, holding their mounts with a secure rein, while furiously whipping the ponies as if to show they were retreating in panic. The soldiers had far-shooting rifles. Spouts of earth erupted at his pony’s hooves.

“Man Afraid!” Crazy Horse shouted, pointing to the rear. “The soldiers do not follow!”

“We must make them angry as the hornets to follow us!”

Several of the warriors dropped to the ground, aiming their rifles captured along the Holy Road at the soldiers.

With a sudden roar, the big-throated wagon-gun on wheels the soldiers had pulled across the bridge erupted in flame. A moment later the ground near Crazy Horse exploded, spewing dirt clods in all directions. A second round was loaded and fired—then a third roared among the stunned, confused decoys.

Those loud reports from the mountain howitzer were all it took for the hotbloods in hiding behind the hills to burst past the camp police attempting to restrain them. First a handful, then by the hundreds, the warriors tore down off the sand hills, spreading in growing numbers like puffballs that cover the prairie after a spring thunderstorm, charging toward the surprised and frightened soldiers at the end of the bridge.

The white men were turning in a confused, milling mass of rearing horses when Crazy Horse spotted a small separate party of mounted soldiers returning to the fort along the timber on the south bank.

He was angry—his stomach boiling now that the decoy and trap had been spoiled. Perhaps his warriors could still count some coup before the sun rose from the edge of the earth this day.

“Come! Let us make sport of these soldiers!” he shouted, pointing.