Cry of the Hawk

From Fort McPherson, Custer led his cavalry west along the Platte River for less than fifty miles before pointing their noses due south.

For the next three weeks, the Seventh crossed Frenchman’s Creek, then the Republican River itself, looping first southwest, following the South Fork of the Republican, then slowly turning to the northwest once more, where they crossed the Arikara Fork of the Republican. Nearing the cruel sand hills of the South Platte country, Custer turned his columns back on themselves and recrossed the Arikara, moving roughly east along its southern bank.

Twenty-three days of staring into a merciless white summer sky with eyes scoured by alkali dust. The flour-fine dust still seeped beneath the damp bandanna Jonah Hook had tied over his nose and mouth. He tasted dust. No matter what they had to eat each night—the food still tasted like the dust he had eaten on the march that day.

Everything smelled of stinging, cream-colored alkali. No matter how fragrant was Shad Sweete’s coffee a’brew over the greasewood fires, all Jonah smelled with his crusted nose was the stinging alkali.

“You’ll sleep tonight, Jonah,” said the old mountain man, offering the young Confederate a steaming cup.

He looked down at the tin of coffee. Then reluctantly took it in hand. “Oh, for the want of a cup of some water come out of the mountains.”

“This alkali water giving your bowels the tremors, eh?”

Hook shook his head. “Cold.”

Sweete said, “Cold is what you want, eh? Water born of the high country.”

“Yeah,” he replied, his eyes squinting on those distant but remembered places. “I remember the taste of that water up there on the Holy Road. The Sweetwater, it was.”

“Lord! And so cold it would set a man’s teeth on edge just to drink it.”

“For just a cup of that now. Just one cup.”

“We’ve turned about, Jonah,” Shad said in that confiding way of his. “I think Custer figures he’s not going to find any Injuns this trip out after all.”

He nodded, blowing steam from the surface of his coffee, not relishing the hot liquid here after another scorching and dust-filled fifteen-hour day in the saddle. Jonah scratched at a saddle gall, the inside of his thighs chafed and raw from the nonstop sweat and rubbing of the past three weeks in the saddle crossing the high plains.

“Some of the others, they’ve started to call Custer Old Iron-Ass.”

Sweete glanced at some of the other scouts gathered about the evening fire. Hickok settled, knocking dust from the short leather leggings he had tied over the tops of his boots, stretching from knee to ankle.

“I heard that name too, and another. Some of them boys in Custer’s outfit starting to call him Horse-Killer.”

“He keeps up this pace, chasing smoke on the wind, there soon won’t be many horses able to go on. And if it ain’t horses Custer will kill on this march through hell,” Jonah grumbled, “it just might be the rest of us.”

29

June 24, 1867

THE SKY ABOVE Jonah Hook hung suspended in that moment when night is as yet undecided in giving itself to day ….

—a rifle cracked the still, cool air along the Arikara Fork.

Spencer carbine, he thought as he kicked his way from his sweat-dampened blankets.

“All out! All out!”

Men were shouting at one another. Most ran for the horse herd as the screeching war cries suddenly on the horizon drew closer to the near edge of camp with the thunder of hundreds upon hundreds of hooves.

“They’re after the horses!” hollered Shad Sweete.

Hickok was among them, both guns out, swirling darkly in the gray light. “Look lively, boys!”

Behind the handful of civilian scouts, soldiers came running from their bivouac like maddened ants driven from their hill. Yelling, confused, frightened. It was Pea Ridge and Corinth again—and Jonah remembered how the yelling gave a man a sense of courage, even if he didn’t feel particularly brave right at the moment. At least with all the hollering, a man wasn’t all that aware of fear boiling up inside him.

Then he was back on the high plains, blinking away the foggy mist of the hardwood forests. Here … damn!

More rifle shots. A bullet sang over his head. A second past his ear as Hook followed the rest into the murky darkness along the riverbank, flanking the horse herd.

“They’re in the river!” someone shouted.

To the man, the civilian scouts all stopped on the grassy sand of the riverbank and shouldered their weapons, firing at random, aiming for the inky forms looming out of the murky predawn darkness. The carbines punctuated that gray, ghostly light with orange spurts of muzzle flame. Behind him rattled more carbine fire as half a hundred soldiers appeared at the top of the bank.