A Cold Day in Hell: The Dull Knife Battle, 1876

“He was just arguing with Three Bears,” Grouard explained as he moved up. “Mad he didn’t get his sergeant’s stripes. So I figure he wants first strike.”

Everything was close to pandemonium as the troops finished dressing their formation, every last man pitching himself into the saddle with great urgency of a sudden, horses sensing what was to come. The allies pressed in upon the colonel and his headquarters bunch—eager to be off to join those three who had disappeared through the tall willows and around a sharp right-hand bend to the valley’s throat.

“Lieutenant Dorst—it’s time to order the charge!” Mackenzie bellowed above his group, again rising in the stirrups, finally ripping the floppy-brimmed hat from his head and waving it enthusiastically as his adjutant pranced up on his mount. Then the colonel turned to Crook’s aide. “Captain Bourke—would you care to take the order for our charge back to Major Gordon and his battalion?”

“I’d be honored, General!” Bourke replied, twisting his horse about in a tight circle and giving it his heel to race back across that patch of open ground.

Mackenzie was then waving his hat, emphatically signaling. “Major North! Now! In with your Pawnee battalion!”

Those forty-eight allies had stripped off coat and saddle, down to the barest battle dress, maintaining enough of their uniforms so that the soldiers would recognize them in the din, confusion and fear of the fight now about to open in all its color and splendor, the crushing weight of its blood and its terror.

“Major Cosgrove!” Mackenzie hollered as the North brothers galloped off, shouting their orders, the Pawnee sergeants twisting about on the bare backs of their ponies to pass on the commands to each troop of the battalion as an excited babble of many different tongues rose over the command. “You and Lieutenant Schuyler—in with the Shoshone! Take and hold that high ground on our left flank! In with you, now!”

Brave Wolf did not join in the dancing last night.

The Contrary warrior and a few of his friends successfully eluded the Fox Soldiers who were charged with preventing anyone from leaving camp … but slipping out was easy, for it seemed Last Bull’s warriors had celebration on their minds. Women and dancing. Women and laughter. Women.

It was easy for Brave Wolf and his friends to sneak from camp, thread their way through the leafless brush, and climb the plateau north of the village where one or more of them kept a vigil throughout those frigid hours among the rimrocks. Expecting the soldiers to approach the camp sometime during the night and attack once dawn had arrived.

In the cold light the flames from the huge bonfire were eventually allowed to fall, and at last the Fox soldiers allowed the People to stumble off to their beds. So weary were they from dancing nonstop across the night.

An old man looked up from his bed and asked his son, “You have been up in the rocks?”

Brave Wolf nodded in answering his father as he ducked into his family’s lodge. “Yes. We saw nothing. Some of us heard a rumble, in the east. But … we saw nothing.”

“They are coming,” his father declared, his eyes wide with anxiety.

Brave Wolf glanced at his mother, looking at them both, a blanket pulled up to cover most of her well-seamed face, only her frightened eyes showing like radiant pools in the dim light. His two wives and his children were already soundly asleep in their robes and blankets.

“What do you want me to do, Father?”

“Do not take off your moccasins,” the old man instructed. “Take nothing off … so you will be ready when the soldiers come here.”

“My mother is ready?” Brave Wolf asked.

“We did not take off our clothes,” his father replied. “None of us—not your wives and children—so we will be ready to run to the cliffs when the shooting starts.”

Swallowing with growing apprehension, Brave Wolf settled on his haunches before the dead fire his father was beginning to rekindle with shaking hands. “I told you, Father: we saw nothing. No sign of the soldiers—”

“You remember Box Elder’s vision?”

Brave Wolf nodded.

His father continued, “I believe the power of that man’s medicine. All the times Box Elder told our people some event was about to occur, it came true. I believe he is right when he told the village he saw soldiers attacking us here.”

“All right, Father,” Brave Wolf said as he crawled over to his blankets and robes. “I too will sleep with my clothes on—so I will be ready when the soldiers come.”

Around Seamus and Bourke crowded the Sioux, Arapaho, and the Cheyenne scouts under Lieutenant William Philo Clark and Second Lieutenant Hayden Delaney, their ponies prancing, sidestepping smartly—every man wound as tight as the mainspring in a two-dollar watch.

Mackenzie’s big chestnut was among them in the next moment. “Mr. Clark! Mr. Delaney—as ordered, you will lead your battalion up the center and into the village!” The colonel’s eyes fell on Donegan as men yelled and horses grunted. “You—Irishman! Watch that pretty head of hair!”