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

Warriors sweeping up weapons and cartridge belts, quivers and bows, hurriedly tying their war medicine at their loose hair or dropping the cords of pendants around their necks. Taking time for little else—this sudden attack did not allow them the leisure to paint, time to dress, the luxury of fleeing with blankets and robes. Instead these warrior would thrust their naked, shivering bodies between the first of the soldier scouts and their families. Protecting, defending. Laying down their lives.

And then Seamus realized what it was that was dragging its razorlike claws across the inside or his belly: he suddenly sensed how it must be to protect those you love, to defend your home, to stand and face the assault at all costs. Somewhere inside he sensed as he had never before sensed just how these Cheyenne warriors would fight this day—from lodge to lodge, rock to rock, yard by yard … and it scared Seamus down to the marrow of him.

Now Gordon’s soldiers were pressing hot upon the scouts’ tails, Mauck’s battalion coming hard behind them: a mad cacophony of men bellowing orders on the run above the deafening tumult of sound laid back upon sound within the re-repeating echoes quaking within that canyon—not a single mount slowing as the soldiers fanned out, sweeping into a broad front behind Donegan and those savage mercenaries Mackenzie brought there to destroy the Cheyenne.

As if they had suddenly emerged from the narrowing maw of a cannon, immediately before them lay the narrow plain—the enemy village no more than three quarters of a mile ahead. Behind him troopers whooped and hollered. Indian scouts cried out anew with their medicine songs. And every heel hammered unmercifully into the ribs and flanks and bellies of their heaving mounts.

Somewhere far behind him and to his right, where Mackenzie’s headquarters group would be, a lone bugle stuttered out the notes of the charge. Again and again it echoed back on itself from the terrible blood-tinged red walls.

As if any of these men had to be told, Donegan mulled to himself as he clamped tight and low to his animal. As if any of them had to be told they were to hurl themselves into the goddamned thick of it.

Ahead in that dusky darkness of a night graying into morn Seamus made out the first faraway muzzle flashes. The sharp cracks of carbines stuttered a heartbeat later. Then the big drum suddenly throbbed again, this time not with the steady, rhythmic beat that had signaled last night’s revelry. Now it was beaten frantically, a call of alarm hammered out upon its taut surface, warning and awakening even the heaviest of dark-skinned sleepers.

At that moment Seamus watched the North brothers turn their battalion off the narrow terrace that ran along the mountain to their left and plunge their mounts down into the boggy creek bottom to make a recrossing. For what godforsaken reason, he could not figure out. While the Pawnee ponies jammed up in the the miry ground, slowed to all but a stop as they struggled up to their bellies in the muddy swamp, Seamus and the other scouts rumbled past.

Then in the growing clamor of gunfire and wailing women, Seamus turned—suddenly hearing the eerie croon of that Pawnee’s sacred flute again in the noisy cacophony of gunfire and screaming voices, surprised to find the first of the North scouts freed from the boggy ground, all of them laid out along their ponies’ necks, racing with total abandon once more toward the heart of the village, which for the most part lay along the south bank of the creek as it flowed to the east out of the canyon.

A few gunshots rattled behind him—among the Pawnee.

They must have run onto a herder out alone back there, Seamus thought as his horse swept across the grass slickened with icy frost toward the first of the deserted lodges erected in the starkly beautiful amphitheater, the walls rising above them five hundred feet in places, a thousand feet in others. In numberless icy brooks and freshets, waters tumbled down into a maze of shallow ravines, each one slashing the valley floor in its race to feed its waters to the Red Fork, each crevice thereby marked with the telltale path of willow and box elder.

As the lodges loomed closer, his nose came alive.

Woodsmoke and green hides laid out for fleshing, roasting meat and animal fat to be mixed for pemmican with last autumn’s cherries, the odor of fresh dung and the scent of unmitigated fear. Donegan had smelled all these before—as far back as the summer of sixty-nine and the destruction of Tall Bull’s village at Summit Springs.*

On to the Comanche and Kiowa and Cheyenne camps huddled at the bottom of Palo Duro Canyon, which rose majestically above the smoke-blackened lodges in just the way this valley rose above these lodges he and the rest of the scouts found themselves among of a sudden.