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

Off to Donegan’s left the pony ridden by the Sioux chief Three Bears reared, wheeled, and shuddered, becoming unmanageable in the midst of all those singing bullets and shrill voices, wing-bone whistles and lead slapping into the frozen lodge covers. After a great leap while it bowed its back, the pony suddenly tore from side to side crazily, then bolted straight for a cluster of lodges where the rifle fire from a knot of Cheyenne was the hottest.

Almost as fast as the pony bolted away, another Sioux named Feathers on the Head recognized the trouble Three Bears faced. Slamming his quirt down on his own pony’s flanks, he bent low along the withers to avoid the enemy’s bullets. He was all of thirty feet behind Three Bears when the war chief’s horse wheeled to the left, leaped down the creekbank and up the far side, into the other part of the village still firmly held by the Cheyenne—only to halt suddenly in a spray of snow, go stiff-legged, and keel over, spilling its rider against a drying rack loaded with meat, and into the side of a canvas lodge.

Feathers on the Head was across the embankment and among the enemy lodges before a dazed Three Bears even had his legs under him. The horseman held out a foot and extending a hand as he wheeled his pony about, putting himself and his animal between the Cheyenne and his war chief, grunting as he pulled Three Bears up behind him.

It was a pretty, pretty show, Seamus decided, watching the two of them spin about in the next heartbeat, all four of their legs kicking the pony into a gallop to speed them out of that devil’s den of whining lead.

Something warned him, something so airy and ethereal—yet with enough substance that he thought he recognized it as Sam’s voice in his ear, crying out. Seamus jerked around, certain he would find her there, the voice had been that real. Instead, at seventy yards he saw them coming, ten, perhaps a dozen of them: bare-breasted warriors yelling as they raced toward him.

In that next breath Donegan realized he was alone.

With the whine of a bullet passing by his cheek, the Irishman collapsed along the neck of the bay and slapped the long end of the reins down its front shoulder, feeling it explode into motion beneath him. The animal leaped back out of the brush, across the icy stream, where it slipped twice before clawing its way up the cutbank to the north side of the Red Fork, hooves cutting into the crusty snow as lead followed man and horse across the flat toward Mackenzie and his bunch now that the other companies were just emerging along the north side of the canyon.

The cold, icy fingers of frozen mist were only then beginning to lift from the willow-clogged bottom ground.

Why everyone believed Hades was hot, Seamus figured he would never understand. As far as he was concerned, this morning had all the makings of hell itself.

* The Sacred Buffalo Hat.

† The Sacred Turner.

* Sosone-eo-o.

† Mo-ohtavaha-taneo, “Black People.”

* Darlington Agency for the Southern Cheyenne, Indian Territory.

Chapter 27

Big Freezing Moon 1876

The power of Maahotse must protect the People!

As he raced back to his Sacred Arrow Lodge from the hillside, raising the alarm, Black Hairy Dog found his woman already taking the Maahotse

bundle from its tripod where the Arrows hung at that singular place of honor in the lodge. When he burst into the lodge, his woman turned toward him with a start, carefully cradling the Arrows in their kit-fox quiver. Around it she had wrapped a layer of thick buffalo rawhide.

“I will follow you,” she said to her husband as she laid the bundle across his arms.

“Together we will protect them,” he said as her fingers brushed the back of his hand lovingly. “Just as these Arrows have protected our people far back into the time beyond memory.”

Outside the lodge a group of men and boys had already gathered by the time Black Hairy Dog ducked through the door into the swirling, freezing mist that clung about their ankles. Most wore a shirt, or a vest of wool or buffalo hide, yet none wore leggings. On every face was the grim mask of determination. They had come there to protect the second of those two sacred objects of the Ohmeseheso.

“We must go to the hills,” the Arrow Priest told them, slowly stepping into the small gathering without another word, parting them like a boulder thrown down in the middle of a narrow creek, the group closing in behind Black Hairy Dog’s woman.

He knew he must take the Sacred Arrows to a hill overlooking the upper end of the village, leading that small procession of those who would protect him and the Maahotse as the terrible clamor grew at the far end of the village: gunshots, hoofbeats, the cries of enemy Indians, and the shrill blasts of the soldier horns.