Cry of the Hawk

Major North’s Pawnee scouts rode back into Connor’s camp brandishing the fresh, coal black scalps at the end of their coup sticks and from rifle muzzles. They howled like wolves and chanted their war songs. That night they began their ritual dancing around those twenty-four scalps, accompanied by the incessant beating of their small hand drums. The celebration went on for long past midnight and kept so many of the soldiers awake that General Connor had to order North to end the festivities.

For the next six nights, the trackers repeated their noisy dance, ending their celebration, however, by ten each night.

Only a week after that first skirmish with the Cheyenne, the Pawnee reported to Major North they had come across a large trail. North took word of the discovery to Connor.

The next morning, the general detached two companies of Ohio infantry, along with a troop of Seventh Iowa Cavalry, led by both the Pawnee and Omaha scouts. Bringing up the rear of the march was a pair of field pieces—six-pounders. This force would accompany Connor to the Tongue River in search of the migrating hostiles.

Into the rough badlands dividing the Powder River drainage from that of the Tongue, the general marched his trackers and troops. On past the Crazy Woman Fork, drawing ever closer to the bounty land of the Big Horn Mountains, where the men found not only an abundance of game, but fat trout as well in those clear-running streams far different from the alkali-tainted creeks in the Powder River country. The long column skirted the west side of a lake surrounded by ocher bluffs brilliant beneath a bright, summer blue sky.

“Water’s unfit to drink—thick with alkali. Years back, during the shining times of the beaver trade,” Sweete explained to Jonah as they rode past the long, narrow body of water, “this lake was named after the first Black Robe to come among the Indians of these northern plains.”

“What’s a Black Robe?”

“A priest. Name of Pierre-Jean De Smet.” Then Sweete laughed, as if enjoying a private joke. “I remember how Gabe used to tell pilgrims heading to Oregon about the thick oil spring you can find on the far side of the lake. Loved to get those pilgrims wide-eyed and gape-mouthed by telling ’em there’s a vein of coal under that lake they could set fire to, and by stirring up the oil and the alkali—make one hell of a batch of soap!”

It was here as well that they came across their first buffalo herds.

That first evening at the base of the foothills, Shad Sweete and a half dozen Pawnee trackers rode out to a nearby herd grazing near Connor’s evening camp and drove fifteen buffalo back toward the soldier’s bivouac, where the huge beasts were killed after they had been driven into a corral made of the expedition’s freight wagons.

“You still got your shooting eye, don’t you, Shad?” commented Jim Bridger as he walked up among the soldiers celebrating and butchering the shaggy buffalo.

“Bet I do, Gabe. Best you dive in now and claim one of them tongues for us—or we’ll be left with poor doings, certain,” Shad replied.

They shared a fat, juicy buffalo tongue that evening, cooked to a rosy, moist pink down in the glowing coals of a fire pit in the shadow of the Big Horn Mountains while Bridger told his old partner they would be taking some Pawnee ahead in the morning.

“Leave the Rebel behind this time, Shad.”

Sweete felt something seize up inside him. “Gabe, you and me been friends a long time.”

“We have—and that’s why I figure I can talk straight to you.”

“What stick you got to rub with Jonah?”

“Pawnee and me never did get along.”

“I don’t like ’em particular either, Gabe. What’s that got to do with Hook? Something Connor say to you?”

Bridger gazed at Sweete a moment in the firelight. “You stand by this Rebel?”

“He’ll do to ride the river with, Gabe.”

The old trapper wiped his knife across the top of his leather britches and finally smiled at Sweete. “All right. He’s your’n to worry about. I got enough to do keeping Connor’s balls out of a Lakota sling and his hair from ending up on a Cheyenne lodgepole.”

The next day as the sun rose and then fell, Shad and Bridger led Hook and a handful of the Pawnee north by west from the land of the Pineys, descending at last into the valley of the Tongue. They stopped, waiting a moment to enjoy the view of the Big Horns off to their left, waiting for Bridger and Captain Henry E. Palmer, Connor’s quartermaster, to come up.

“You see what lies along the horizon, yonder?” Sweete asked of the small gathering, his eyes resting a moment longer on the face of his old trapping partner.

While Bridger squinted his blue eyes into the hazy distance, Hook turned to glance behind them at the distant column winding its way through the broken land. Then he looked on up the Tongue, to the northeast among the Wolf Mountains, straining to make out what might be something out of the ordinary.

“Smoke. Plain as paint, Shad,” Bridger answered.

“Smoke?” Palmer asked, a touch of skepticism in his voice. “Where?”