40

Moon of the Last Cold 1875

THEIR ESCAPE FROM the yellow-leg soldiers at Palo Duro Canyon seemed like an eternity ago. More than four moons had come and gone since the Shahiyena and Kiowa, and the Comanche themselves, had torn themselves apart into smaller bands, scattering before the winds and Three-Finger Kinzie’s pony soldiers.

It had worked. Once more the Kwahadi had survived the winter undiscovered. As brutal as the weather had been, as hard as it was to find the buffalo that would prolong the life of the band, as often as they had been compelled to uproot and move to a new camp, they had survived.

The fight in the canyon had shown Tall One what few others were ready to admit. The white man and his army were not about to rest until they had driven the red man into the squalor of the agencies, until all the rest who remained out on the free prairie were ground under the heels of the tai-bos’ boots.

What a fight it had been. Something that lived on in the bitter recollections of the warriors who recounted their bravery in covering the retreat of their people against the overwhelming numbers and the total surprise of the yellow-leg attack. From their hiding places behind trees and boulders, the Kwahadi men disappeared, melting into the chill dawn mist strung in a gauzy veil over the narrow creek, flitting away like cave bats come the rising of the sun. With their women and children climbing out of the canyon, with the Tonkawa and Seminole trackers in full possession of most of the Kwahadi pony herd—there was nothing left to do but flee. To escape so they could fight another day.

So the gall of their defeat kept gnawing away at the men through that fall and into the time of cold. There in the canyon that morning they had been given no time for the women to gather up the travois ponies, to drag down lodges, to pack clothing and utensils, dried meat and robes, to ward off the coming winds of winter. Most everything had been lost to Three-Finger Kinzie.

Doing what they had done time and again against this same soldier chief. Tall One and Antelope had joined the Kwahadi men in falling back slowly, firing, holding the soldiers at bay while they could. From every crevice in the canyon walls, behind every rock and tree big enough to give them cover, the warriors dogged and deviled that solid blue phalanx.

Through the heated minutes of that fight the gray-eyed war chief was among them—Kiowa and Shahiyena as well as his own Kwahadi. He had exhorted them, rallied them, bolstered them as they fell back—urging them to hold the line a little longer. Many times during that hard winter Tall One recalled with great pride how he had stood with the war chief, he and Antelope some of the last to retreat.

“For our women and children!” the gray-eyed one cheered first in one tongue, then in another. “For our families! For them we leave our bodies here to protect the ones who flee!”

Back, back across the yucca and tiny prickly pear, across the white quartz studded in the red earth, the last holdouts had retreated, slowly scaling the upvaulted rock formations as red-tailed and swainson’s hawks drifted overhead on the morning’s warming air currents. For more than four twisted, tortured miles of that snaking canyon they had held the soldiers back. From afar Tall One had recognized the low, grumbling charge of the cavalry washing their way, so much like the sound of an old mare with her paunch filled with bad water. In the end it came time for the last of the warriors to disappear into the narrow washes and bent-finger arroyos like so many eye-corner wrinkles off the main canyon.

“Flee!” the war chief hollered at them there at the last, waving his warriors away with his rifle. “We will regroup at the top.”

It was there at the top of the canyon walls as that autumn day’s sun grew weary and desirous of seeking its rest beyond the far mountains that Tall One watched the gray-eyed war chief confront the headmen of the Kiowa and Shahiyena who said their people had suffered enough, who said they were turning away from the struggle. Would at last the Kwahadi join them on their road back to the agencies?

“No, I will not join you in turning my back on my country. I will never join you in giving up the life of my father on the free prairie,” he told them. “How can you presume to ask that of me—the one who had never taken a mouthful of the white man’s food! How could I ever consider the reservation my last option? When I am the lone chief here who has never set my foot on the white man’s agencies—never held out my hand to accept one of his thin blankets, or his rotten pig meat, or his bug-infested flour.”

The end had come there on the lip of that great crevasse as the Kwahadi war chief asked of those who were going in, “In your wisdom, tell me what my people are to do now. Is it better for me to lead them into the reservations now? Or better for us to continue this fight?”

In the cold, bitter, hungry days that followed, many more voices took up the questions as the Antelope People argued among themselves.

“Should now we be forced to walk the road those Shahiyena and Kiowa take? To follow their steps to the reservation, where the Kwahadi have never retreated, forced to turn over our weapons just so our starving women and children have something to fill their empty bellies now that these winter winds come slashing across the cold breast of our land? How do we expect the little ones, the old ones, and those who are sick to face this onslaught of winter bravely without lodges and blankets and robes, even spare moccasins for their frozen feet—when all was left behind?”

Time had altered their way of life as much as had the white man.

In the nine winters Tall One had spent with the Kwahadi, he had seen the tribe teeter, then slip, from their one-time greatness. No more did they roam in such numbers. Summer after summer of warfare against the growing legions of yellow-legs, winter after winter as they hunted the disappearing buffalo—it took its toll year after year after year. One had only to look around him to see that the number of lodges had been whittled down by nearly half. Yet something in these proud people kept them alive and off the reservation that winter.

They raised their crude shelters in the arroyos, out of the wind, until they could find enough old bulls to begin curing lodge skins once more. Again they hunted antelope and deer for clothing and moccasins. The few ponies they had escaped with had to be cared for more watchfully than ever, for those animals would allow the tribe’s finest horse thieves to strike once more come spring. Soon they would ride out as the grass shoved its first green shoots from the winter-weary ground.

Once the weather began to moderate, they broke into six small groups, Antelope riding with one of the four scouting parties sent off to wander in search of buffalo and to clear the path for those to come. The other two warrior societies escorted the women and old ones, stayed with the children who rode atop the few drags they had left. The strongest of the women pulled the travois now, the ponies gone with the warriors, gone with the hunters. Antelope’s wife struggled as best she could, young and strong as she was with one child barely walking, another infant lashed in a blanket at her back as they plodded north, waiting for spring.

Because he had chosen to stay with the village, Tall One too used the growing strength of his back to drag a travois across the cold ground. Atop the bundles on that travois sat his young nephew, wide-eyed and silent. More and more the face of Antelope’s firstborn reminded Tall One of his mother.

And because the village traveled so slow those last cold days of winter, Tall One was one of the last to know. It was Antelope who brought the news late of an early spring day as his warrior society rode back to rejoin the main village. What news they carried proved momentous.

“Soldiers?” asked Tall One.

“No,” Antelope answered his brother’s question. “But they are white men. Three-times-ten. With two mules along and many, many guns.”

“How close are they from catching us?”

“Two, maybe three days at the most.”

Over the days that followed their discovery of the Comanche trail, Company C watched the spoor of their enemy freshen, found the camp fires and their beds, watched as here and there more trails converged.

“Another bunch come in from the west, Cap’n,” Jonah told Lockhart.

“That makes how many now, Sergeant?”

Coffee consulted the small hand-stitched, leather-bound tablet he carried inside a vest pocket. “Near as we can count the tracks of them parties we’ve run across—we’re closing on seventy-five or eighty warriors now.”

“Sniffing up their hind ends you mean!” roared June Callicott.

Most of the rest laughed uneasily. It was better to laugh, Jonah knew, knowing they were already outnumbered three to one if things came down to a fight of it. And why wouldn’t things end up just that way? That was, after all, why Captain Lockhart’s men were trailing these Kwahadi, wasn’t it? To make a fight of it? But no one said anything of the odds. Though it might be there plain as paint on their faces if a man looked hard enough, long enough—no one said a goddamned thing about the odds that grew more stacked against them every day they dogged that Comanche trail.

“How many more you figure on joining up?” Lockhart asked.

Hook shrugged. “No telling. This could be most of the warriors. Could be just a small scouting party sent out to roam over this country.”

“What’s your guess?”

“I’d hate to hazard a guess, Cap’n.”

“Hazard one, Mr. Hook,” Lockhart snapped, the tension of trailing the Comanche finally placing cracks in the captain’s implacable exterior.

“All right. Were it up to me, I’d figure this is about half of what warriors there be in the village.”

“This half meaning seventy-five or eighty?”

“Yes, Cap’n.” As he said it, Jonah felt the palpable hush fall over the rest of those men as they sat their saddles stoically.

“We might face maybe as many as a hundred fifty, Mr. Hook?”

“Maybe.”

Lockhart swallowed that one like he had been given a woolly worm to eat. Still, he straightened, and tugged down the front of his wide-brimmed hat before he said, “Men, if we prepare for the worst that things could possibly be, then nothing can deter us from the success of our mission.”

The captain had looked at Jonah for a moment, as if measuring the plainsman one more time, as if to ascertain something before committing Company C to the do or die of it.

Then Lamar Lockhart quietly said, “Sergeant Coffee—we have Comanche to track. Put out our scouts and let’s get moving.”

There wasn’t a grumble, not a word one as Coffee put that outfit into motion again. Nothing but the creak of saddle and holster leather, the plodding of hooves and the silence of men in their own thoughts of what lay ahead. Still, one thing was plain as the sky overhead: Hook could see that this bunch would follow their captain not only to hell and back again, but six times around the devil on the way.

A good leader was like that, able to lead men against daunting odds where a lesser man couldn’t budge his troops. It was just the way a certain gentleman general had led the fight of the Confederacy through all its battles, over all those years. In the end these sons of Texas shared the same feelings about just such a leader as Robert E. Lee, gone peacefully to the ages barely five years after he had handed U.S. Grant his sword at McLean’s farmhouse. These sons of Texas followed a good man in Lamar Lockhart. Bound to follow him now into the jaws of hell.

A February sun continued its climb toward midsky, then fell back to their left as they pressed on, the trail they were following become fresher, the fire pits a bit warmer, the pony dung not near so dry. It was late afternoon when Two Sleep rode up, doing his best not to bring attention to himself, and signaled Jonah in the sign dance of the plains.

Hook in turn pushed his horse ahead until he rode beside Lockhart. “Cap’n, seems we’ve found something ahead.”

“Your Snake?”

“He run onto a Comanche pony. Calls the Comanche ’yellow jackets.’”

“Let’s go have ourselves a look, Jonah.”

After crossing the crest of that last hill, Hook spotted the animal more than half a mile away, even before Two Sleep pointed.

“I see him,” Lockhart said without being asked.

The miserable creature stood with its head hung among the refuse of an old campsite: a pitiful few rings, many fire pits, scraps of meat and hide and ruddled bone the porcupines and magpies continued to work over until the white men drew too close and stopped. Only then did the predators and scavengers scatter, and all was silent again, save for the hiss of the wind in the scrub cedar and the bare, skeletal branches of the mesquite.

Jonah’s eyes followed the moccasin tracks, the growing number of hoofprints. Another bunch had evidently joined up here at this campsite. And still the village moved north, rejoining in anticipation of the spring hunt. He gazed off at the path scoured in their leaving this place: a trail more than thirty feet wide pointing toward the Pease River country. Slowly he moved back and forth across the site with Two Sleep, absorbing every ring and pit, every gnawed bone and scrap of hide or discarded moccasin.

He had to admire them—no matter they were savages. If this was truly the bunch caught in the Palo Duro by Mackenzie’s Fourth Cavalry more than four months back, then Quanah Parker’s Kwahadi were something, all right. Starting the winter with next to nothing, for them to come out this well the following spring. How he prayed the boys were alive. Prayed they were with Parker’s fierce and hearty holdouts.

Eventually he walked back to the old pony the village had abandoned there when it had put to the trail once more. The animal suffered what looked to be a festering bullet wound low in the neck. The way the pus and blood had clotted and oozed around the bullet hole told the story.

“This bunch been fighting its way north, Cap’n,” Jonah explained. “Likely this pony got hit on a raid and stayed strong enough to carry its warrior back to the village. But the Comanche plainly saw what you and me can see: this critter’s dying.”

As Hook inched over to the pony, it vainly tried to move away, although it had strength to do little more than stay on its four wobbly legs. Carefully, moving slowly, Jonah inched up to stroke one of the forelegs before picking it up to inspect the hoof. He set it back down, patting the animal’s neck with one hand as he brought his pistol out.

That country proved flat enough that it swallowed his gunshot in the time it took the pony to fall without a struggle.

“What did the hoof tell you, Hook?”

He gazed up at Lockhart. “This bunch has been running. That hoof was sore and bleeding. Near worn out. Some of their stock didn’t fare the winter so well. And still, this bunch is fighting on.”

“Kwahadi, Mr. Hook,” Lockhart said respectfully.

“Yes, Cap’n. I’ve come to know just what you mean.”

“How long since they broke camp?”

He returned to the pony, rubbing his hand along the inside of the rear flanks, under the neck. The dampness of the hide and the heat of the animal gave him something to make his best guess.

“We’re behind ’em less’n two days now.”

Two Sleep came up. “Two days,” he agreed.

“They find out we’re back here, they’ll bolt,” Lockhart said to no one in particular.

Jonah shook his head. “I don’t expect this bunch will get worried all that much about our outfit.”

“You don’t think they’ll make a run for it—try to outdistance us?”

“No. From what all I’ve been learning about Comanche—I figure soon enough they just might turn around and wait for us to come right to ’em.”