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

Little Wolf’s heart bled a little more. It felt as cold as his bare legs, and surely laid upon the ground.

The enemy was in possession of their village … beating that drum in victory even as the battle raged around the perimeter of the valley, the Wolf People scouts playing their flutes and whistles, the Shoshone firing from the ridge above him, and those Lakota who came to guide the soldiers—how it sickened his belly.

But what threatened to rob his spirit were the Tse-Tsehese scouts who had led the soldiers down upon their own people!

If he had the chance this day, Little Wolf vowed he would use all the strength in the Sacred Arrows and the Buffalo Hat to call down the wrath of the Everywhere Spirit upon those who not only turned their backs on their own people, but led the soldiers down upon this village to help in destroying the Ohmeseheso.

With his own eyes Little Wolf had seen Old Crow—who was himself one of the Council of Forty-four Chiefs—among the soldiers’ scouts entering the village. With the pony soldiers as well were Cut Nose, Little Fish, Hard Robe, Bird, Blown Away, Wolf Satchel, and more … most of them relatives of the one the People called Long Knife, the squaw man known as William Rowland among his own white people. These men were brothers and uncles and nephews of the daughter of Old Frog, the woman Rowland had married. Why, Old Frog had been a member of the Council of Forty-four in the time before the great treaty at Horse Creek.

And now these relatives had joined the white man in destroying their own people!

“Little Wolf!” one of his warriors cried in panic. “See!”

There at the mouth of the narrow canyon where he had taken charge of the other men who were helping the women and children to flee toward the mountainside and up to the breastworks, he turned to look. Little Wolf saw.

Through the last fringe of lodges advanced many pony soldiers; among the first of them to come out of those shrinking shadows were a few Wolf People. Voices called out among them and the horsemen stopped, the scouts too. All of them dismounted their big American horses, which were led away—back into the abandoned village.

Then the enemy began their advance on the mouth of the ravine and that high, narrow canyon where the helpless ones had disappeared in fleeing to the breastworks. Where they now stood behind their rocky fortifications and raised their strong-heart songs over this western end of the battlefield.

“Behind the trees!” Little Wolf shouted to his men. “Take cover behind the rocks—anywhere you can hide!”

“We cannot fight so many!” one of the faint-hearted screeched.

“We must,” Little Wolf growled, snatching hold of the man’s arm and shaking him as one might try shaking some sense into a wayward child. “If we cannot hold the soldiers here—then all will be lost.”

“But they have the village!” another cried as the lead began to snarl by them into the trees, slapping the bare, skeletal branches. “We are lost!”

“Let them have the village!” he shouted them down. “But we must not give up these hills. Never must we give up the hills where our people take refuge!”

He whirled as the white voices grew louder—snapping off a shot at the ve-ho-e. A soldier fell against those behind him, screaming as he clutched his chest.

As the other warriors took cover behind rocks or trees, down in the brush or behind a finger of land at the opening to the canyon, Little Wolf nonetheless stood his ground. Just as he always had. For he was an Old-Man Chief—and his first duty was to protect the People, even at the sacrifice of his life.

From moment to moment one of his companions cried out in pain, declaring they had been wounded in the leg, or the shoulder, perhaps an arm or hand. All the while the soldiers and their wolves continued to advance slowly, warily, for they did not know that they greatly outnumbered Little Wolf’s pitifully small force protecting the mouth of the ravine as the women sang out above them.

So it was that the brave chief stood in the open that morning, doing his best to draw the enemy’s fire, to taunt them, to make the soldiers angry as he sprinted back and forth before their massed front. Showing the other warriors just how poorly the soldiers and their allies shot their weapons.

Of a sudden he felt the sting at his back. The force of it bowling him over and over in the cold snow that shocked his bare legs. Lying there, breathing quick and shallow, Little Wolf put his hand to his lower back, brought it away with a thin film of red beginning to crystallize in the terrible cold. Then he pushed aside the short tail on his war shirt. An ugly, narrow finger of ooze was all it was. A flesh wound.

“Hoka hey!” he cried, leaping to his feet like a youngster a third of his years.

Little Wolf turned this way, then that so that his fellow warriors could see that he had not been seriously hurt.