Lay the Mountains Low (42 page)

It made the young man very angry to be left by so many to the soldiers. He did not care if he died; he was going to fight these
suapies
like a man. He had a reputation earned in the White Bird Canyon fight, and he would not lose it here.

Unafraid of the soldiers, Yellow Wolf crawled against two boulders and placed his carbine between them. Quickly levering shells, he fired six shots, stopping most of the soldiers where they were.

As the crack of that last shot faded, he heard heavy breathing behind him and immediately turned. Fire Body was grunting as he dragged his old limbs out of the brush in Yellow Wolf's direction.

“I just heard your bullets, so I realized you were alone, Nephew,” Fire Body said while he crawled up on his belly. “We are going to die right here! But remember: Do not shoot the common soldier. Shoot the commander!”
^*

He understood exactly what the older man said. Fire Body had killed the trumpet soldier at the
Lahmotta
fight and stopped the soldiers from advancing any farther. Now Yellow Wolf looked at the nearby enemy and spotted the commander who knelt behind his soldiers.

Yellow Wolf took aim, and his bullet struck that officer, knocking him back into the grass where others quickly dragged him out of sight. But it was not long before another commander took his place and hollered at the soldiers.

Yellow Wolf shot at him, too. As soon as their second
commander was hit, the soldiers promptly began to scoot backward, retreating. He wanted to cheer, for his bravery alone had caused that retreat.

Wottolen
pounded a hand on his shoulder. “That was good shooting, Nephew. I think the soldiers know to stay where they are for the rest of the day.”

As twilight arrived and it grew darker, the heat escaped the earth and the air grew cold and damp. As the stars came out, only an occasional gunshot was heard.

Through that evening, Yellow Wolf had stayed right where he had been when he shot the two soldier commanders. Even though he began shivering. Dressed only in his breeehclout, those two cartridge belts, and that pair of moccasins he had brought with him from the lodge, his body trembled. The night was clear and still. The earth's warmth quickly sucked into the sky. Finally, after moonset, he could not stand the cold any longer and crawled back toward the timber and rocks.

Back at the smoking lodge where the no-fighters had gathered during the afternoon's battle to talk about the fight and other serious matters, Yellow Wolf found no one awake. At least ten men lay asleep, curled up on the ground of the smoking lodge, clutching their legs for warmth. He found that Looking Glass was not among them. Earlier in the day, talk was that the chief made repeated trips down to the village rather than staying put on the fighting lines with his warriors.

Yellow Wolf did not tarry at this place of the no-fighters but crept on for the place where many of the ponies were tethered. He remembered how when the sun was high
Tee-weeyownah,
the old warrior called Over the Point, came among the ponies tied in the trees, clearly angry. Here and there this member of White Bird's band had selectively turned some of the horses loose. When those young men finally emerged from the safety of the smoking lodge, they were furious to find their ponies gone.

“Where is my horse!”
Alahmoot
growled. He was called Elm Limb.

Over the Point admitted, “I let them go.”

“You have no right to turn our horses loose!” Elm Limb blustered.

“You go too often to camp,” the older man explained as more warriors gathered to watch the argument. “We are here to fight.”

“I came to fight!”

“No, Elm Limb—you came to smoke and make others think you were fighting,” Over the Point protested. “All you young cowards,
^*
I will die soon. But you—you will soon see hardships in bondage to the Shadows. Your freedom will be gone, liberty robbed from you. Our people will be slaves for all days to come. Now, go fight and die for your families!”

Yellow Wolf crabbed into the grove, finding a few ponies still tied there, thinking hard on the old man's strong words. It was hard not to feel deep rage for those who did not help in that first day's fighting, leaving it to the few who did put their bodies on the line. Even Joseph, the village chief, climbed up to the bluffs to take part in the struggle. Shame was, only half of the men of fighting age showed their faces in the ravines or the snipers' grove: ten-times-ten against four, maybe five, times as many soldiers!
Eeh,
he thought, no matter that the warriors were outnumbered—they still managed to keep all of Cut-Off Arm's
suapies
pinned down without any water!

Suddenly spotting a man lying on the ground, curled up against some brush, Yellow Wolf asked the stranger, “May I sleep with you, on account of the cold?”

“Yes,” the man answered. “We can share our heat.” As Yellow Wolf knelt beside the man the stranger said, “Yellow Wolf, it is you!”

“Cousin!” Yellow Wolf said with no small joy. His heart was very glad to see
Teminisiki
again. They had known each
other from the time when they were both small children just learning to walk.

“There aren't many here now.”

“I know,” Yellow Wolf replied. “Where did they go?”

“
Ollokot
tried to stop them, telling all the fighters that they should stay and keep the soldiers away from the water.”

“Someone told them different?”

Teminisiki
nodded in the dark. “Looking Glass. He did not like
Ollokof's
plan to keep the soldiers from the spring, so most everyone else left for the camp with Looking Glass.”

“I am glad you stayed,” Yellow Wolf said as he eased himself down to the earth. “It is good to know my cousin is a fighting man.”

Just as he was lying down with his back against
Teminisiki's,
they heard soft footsteps and a woman's voice whispered from the darkness.

“May I stay the rest of the night with you? I have no blanket and I am cold.”

Without any hesitation
Teminisiki
said, “Come on! Get in here between us! You will keep warm that way!”

The woman quickly did as he suggested, scooting down between the two young men. As they lay there those first few minutes, Yellow Wolf felt her quivering between them, and it made him all the colder for it. He thought how good a woman felt, with her many curves and soft places. … Then he thought of the young woman who had touched his hand as this fight had started that afternoon. How he wanted to find her now—

But suddenly Yellow Wolf remembered what was taught him by the old ones, people who were no longer alive now—the wise warriors who had gone to the buffalo country many times, fighting the Lakota and others in that faraway land.

They had always said: In wartime a man cannot sleep with woman. He might get killed if he does.

“Where are you going, Yellow Wolf?”
Teminisiki
asked as his cousin stiffly got to his feet.

“I will go somewhere else to sleep. You two keep each other warm for tonight.”

He went off a little ways and found a low boulder where he could get out of the blustery wind that was growing cold. Whenever the breeze died, he could hear his cousin and the woman talking low. Despite the cold, Yellow Wolf was sure the two of them would couple that night.

But he did not want to take the chance. He wanted instead to believe in the ways of the old ones he had been taught summers ago.

Yellow Wolf shivered all night long, until it grew light enough for the fighting to start again.

 

*
”This characteristic of the Nez Perce's combat methodology was to singularize their performance in subsequent engagements with the army.” Jerome A. Greene,
The U. S. Army and the Nee-Me-Poo Crisis of 1877.

*
In Nez Perce culture, cowards or laggards in battle were rarely, if ever, shamed or ostracized.

J
ULY
12, 1877

T
HROUGH THE LONG, COLD, BLACK HOURS OF THAT NIGHT,
First Sergeant Michael McCarthy listened to the groans of the wounded gathered at the hospital behind the lines in the dark—their cries fading time and again into eerie echoes that stole through the awful suffocating stillness.

At least the wounded were lucky—they had been picked up off the battlefield and hauled back to the hospital in the wagons, where they lay under awnings erected for shade and waited their turn under the surgeon's knife and saw. The dead, all those dead, still lay where they had fallen.

Those cries of the wounded mingled with the harangues of the enemy chiefs as they exhorted their warriors in the still, gray hours hovering just before first light, while the clear, starry sky gradually faded far to the east.

Yet what nettled him most were the soft, sad whimpers of the women as they keened and mourned for their fallen warriors. Ghostly tatters of their pitiful wails drifted up
from the valley below. Enough to make a man give up even the thought of a belly-warming drink … if he'd been lucky enough to have himself a flask here on the line this bloody black night.

Hell, to have anything to drink would have been a boon through that first, long day.

When the soldiers went in search of water around midday on the eleventh, a few got close to a spring
^*
tucked up in the head of a timbered draw. But close was all they got. Every time some daring trooper attempted to cross from the cover of trees to the brushy spring, swaybacked under a clattering load of wool-covered canteens, Nez Perce sharpshooters drove him back. It was here “that Private Edward Wykoff was killed and another infantryman was wounded. As the hours dragged on and on, their horses and mules suffered every bit as much as the men hunkered down on that thin crescent moon of a battle line.

From time to time the enemy's leaders had signaled an attack or change in strategy to their warriors by emerging on some prominent point where one of them came out, jumping around as he waved a red blanket or circled a pony in some significant manner. At times, McCarthy even spotted blinding flickers of mirrored light and realized some war chief was sending a secret code to his men. Within minutes of every signal, a small group of four, perhaps five, warriors suddenly burst from hiding to make a noisy charge on a weak spot along the line, singing, chanting, screeching all the while. When they tore past his end of the line, it was enough to make even a brave man pucker. After all, Sergeant Michael McCarthy had been left for dead on the White Bird Battlefield. He knew firsthand what fear could do to a man.