The Last Crossing, page 36
Potts catches a flick of colour amid the black-haired Cree headed for the ravine, a head as bright as a September poplar leaf. A tall golden-haired man is covering the retreat. On foot, he calmly backs towards the coulee, keeping up a steady fire with a Many Shots rifle, holding the Blackfoot off as his friends race for shelter.
Potts screams to the Blackfoot, “Cut them down before they reach the coulee! Do not let them get to the coulee!” But Mountain Chief’s men have been joined by mounted Peigans and Blackfoot who hold only one thought in their minds, rub out every enemy they can lay hands upon. Potts cannot turn them aside from the slaughter. Blood mingles with sleet, turning the ground slippery with a pink slush.
More Cree and Assiniboine are reaching the safety of the gully as the Blackfoot round up Cree horses, gather captured weapons, brandish scalps. Horses snort their terror, nostrils filled with the smell of man-blood.
Potts had thought Ugly Man was killed in the charge, but he is limping about, waving a revolver he captured from a Cree. “I will kill Crees with their own gun!” he shouts. “I will make them feel their weapons as our people have!”
Potts understands what a bad mistake the Blackfoot have made in letting the foe slip through their fingers. Almost all the Cree and Assiniboine horseman have taken cover in the coulee. Potts sees Curly Hair is now beside his brother, protecting the retreat of the last riders chased by the Blackfoot. The Sutherlands’ blond hair flies in the wind as they aim and fire. The lower halves of their faces are painted bright blue, a marking that is clear even at a distance. Potts had never thought he would live to see yellow-haired men with paint on their white skins.
“Come with me!” Potts shouts. “Come with me to the coulee that runs beside the one the Crees hide in!” He trots his pony among the Blackfoot, feverishly gesturing, striking some with his quirt to catch their attention. The younger warriors heed him. “Go with Bear Child! Follow Bear Child!” They leap up on their horses as Potts wheels his pony and gallops away, hanging off his pony’s side, snapping revolver shots at the Sutherland boys as they slip down into the gulch.
Now everyone pelts after Bear Child, the warriors of the Blood, the Piegan, the North Blackfoot, all desperate to get at the Cree sheltering in the gully. Mountain Chief, whose horse was shot out from under him in the last minutes of the fight, rides behind Unborn Calf, arms wrapped tight around his waist, bouncing up and down on the hindquarters of McKay’s pony. Big Brave races his grey horse alongside them to shield his father and the half-breed from the Cree muskets spitting balls at them from the coulee. He taunts the enemy, flourishes a scalp above his head. Today, in his first big fight, the son of Mountain Chief has already sent three Cree to their deaths.
Led by Potts, the Blackfoot spill down into the gorge, a throng of hundreds of excited men and horses, all thrashing about in confusion. Potts dismounts, starts climbing the side of the coulee, grasping the tough juniper bushes, jabbing a purchase in the soft face of the incline with his moccasined-toes, calling out to the others to follow him. In moments, scores of men are scaling the slope, squirming their way to the top. A few Cree shoot down at them, but are forced back from their exposed position by the fire of the Blackfoot guarding the horses in the bottom of the coulee.
The two gulches wind along cheek by jowl. In places, as little as ten yards separate them. The sides of the coulees act as natural ramparts along which the Cree and Blackfoot distribute themselves, firing whenever an enemy’s head bobs into sight. The roar of musketry is a solid wall of sound, rifle smoke forms an impenetrable cloud along the narrow strip separating the combatants. The engagement has become a battle fought in a blinding fog.
Here and there, warriors rush each other’s positions, heave boulders down on heads, empty their guns into enemies who are briefly visible in the drifting pall, grapple with ghosts suddenly become flesh. In the crooks of the gulches, isolated pockets of Cree and Blackfoot fight hand to hand. Trapped men turn badger, dig the earth furiously with knives and hatchets, scrape dirt with their fingers in an attempt to provide themselves with a scrap of cover.
The battle teeters back and forth, one side or the other winning isolated victories. Calf Shirt staggers over to Potts and drops down beside him. An arrow has pierced his wrist. “You are wounded,” Potts shouts above the din. “I must draw that arrow for you.”
Calf Shirt pants in agony, but violently shakes his head. He pulls Potts down so he can speak directly into his ear. “My father painted my face this morning. He told me that he was given a vision that told him I must not pull any arrow from my flesh as long as this fight lasts. If I did as he said, the arrow would be my friend and help me. There were two Cree around that bend that turns to the east; everyone warned me off them because they had already killed several of us.” Calf Shirt lifts a broad, double-edge knife with his good hand, twisting the blade. “But I was certain this knife from my bear medicine bundle would overcome them. I armed myself with it and attacked. One of the Cree shot me with an arrow, but I did not let the pain stop me. I seized his bow with my wounded hand and snapped it like a twig. His arrow was a gift that made me strong. I drove my bear knife into him again. The other Cree became afraid of my power and ran, but I overtook him and killed him too. So you see, the arrow must not be drawn from my body until this day’s work is completed.”
“I understand,” says Potts.
Calf Shirt sighs contentedly, closes his eyes. “Let me rest here for a few moments and feel this arrow. When it rouses my anger I will go back and give some other raider a taste of my bear knife.”
Potts leaves Calf Shirt, runs stooped along the lip of the ridge, firing his pistols whenever he catches a glimpse of a Cree. When his revolvers empty, he dives back into the coulee, and from there he spies a low butte looking down on the Cree position.
Suddenly, just above him, Potts hears the sound of singing. His eyes shoot upward. An old Cree looms out of the smoke above him, grey hair fanned on his shoulders. His eyes are closed, his face is lifted to the sky, his lips are moving. Potts can just make out the refrain. “I am old. Hear that I am ready to die. Take me now.”
Potts leaves the Cree with his old man’s wish, his old man’s courage, and retraces his steps. Hurrying through the ravine, he finds the Montana Peigans, many of whom carry repeaters, and shouts into their ears what they must do. As they steal up the ravine, he sends the McKay brothers after them, and then collects the young men, tells them to mount up and wait for his signal.
Shortly, the McKays and the Peigans open up a terrific assault from the heights that Potts directed them to. The Cree and Assiniboine are unnerved by this sudden onslaught from an unexpected quarter. The bullets of the Many Shots rip into them, drive them back down the narrow confines of the gulch. Disorder spreads, a mob of panicked warriors cascades down the coulee, a swift-running river of Cree, a spate of heaving heads.
Potts looses his horsemen after them. The time has finally arrived to run the cows just as in the buffalo hunt.
The Blackfoot pursue them hard, killing everyone they overtake, harrying them onward as the Cree flee down the slope of the coulee. They push the Cree braves like their fathers did the Big Hairys in the old days, driving them over a thirty-foot drop to the river. As their enemies tumble over the brink, the most impetuous of the Blackfoot warriors leap their horses over the cliff after them. Ponies break legs, topple, roll, squeal with pain. The air curdles with the screams of the dying.
Potts reins in his pony. The Cree who have made it to the Belly are wading into the freezing water, churning it into foam. They are packed so tight a man could close his eyes, fire, and be sure of killing himself one. Potts yanks the Henry out of his scabbard. “Shoot the Cree in the water! Do not let them cross!” he shouts, and bodies begin to drop, the dead and wounded Cree spinning downstream in the current. The brown water of the Belly colours, shows threads of scarlet, then coiled ropes of red.
On the east side of the river, numb, exhausted Cree who have fought their way across the river drag themselves up the muddy bank. Already, Blackfoot are fording the Belly in pursuit. Potts spots the Sutherlands halting the fleeing Cree, turning them back to make a stand. He heels his pony down the steep bank and into the high river grass, eager to face Yellow Hair and his brother.
Suddenly, the dead and frozen grass crackles as a Cree flushes from hiding. A musket jabs up into Potts’s face, blinds him with its flash, stuns him with its explosion, bowls him off the pony’s back. For a moment, he gropes the ground on all fours, surrounded by bright, winking lights before he is submerged in a roaring, turbulent darkness.
Bit by bit, the sound of battle tugs him back into consciousness. Groggily, Potts registers astonishment to find himself alive. He gathers his legs under him, hoists himself upright. The Cree who shot at him is nowhere to be seen. Potts notices his pony unconcernedly grazing the grass a few yards off. He turns his eyes to where the fight continues on the eastern river flats, but everything that is distant is hard to make out. He blinks his eyes, but the murk and blur does not clear.
When he rides his pony into the river, the frigid water gnaws his legs; his stones flinch up into his body. But soon they are across, splashing up the embankment, steam bursting from their bodies. Potts looks to the north where he first saw the Sutherlands rallying their men. The shock of the cold water seems to have returned his sight to him. He sees dead men scattered everywhere, some of the Cree lie in heaps where they dropped down one on top of the other. Near a small grove of cottonwoods, the Blackfoot have trapped the last of the warriors, the Sutherland boys.
When Potts rides up, Yellow Hair and his brother are surrounded by taunting Blackfoot who shake their weapons at them threateningly, show the Sutherlands the scalps they have taken from their Cree friends. The brothers sit back to back in a puddle of blood, unable to stand. Both men’s legs are useless, broken by bullets. Their carbines are empty, but they have drawn their knives, prepared to fight to the death, to sell their lives dear. Potts swings down from his pony, hurries up to the ring circling them.
The river crossing has melted some of the paint from the brothers’ faces, and it runs in thin blue rivulets down their throats. The paint is the colour of their eyes, a hard, glaring sky-blue. Blackfoot prowl around them just out of the reach of their knives, laughing and making sudden, teasing feints. The bravest dash in and strike at them with coup sticks. One young warrior has already been wounded mocking the Sutherlands, he presses a bit of cloth to his forearm to staunch the blood one of them has slashed out of him with his knife.
The Sutherland boys hurl the insults of the Blackfoot back at them. They sneer and beckon their tormentors to come closer, invite them to taste the edge of their knives.
“Enough,” Potts calls out. “Finish them.”
The young men step back, surprised by Bear Child’s command. They finger their weapons in disappointment. The Sutherlands can read the gestures of the Blackfoot, their faces, and they know that in moments they will die. In a high, piping voice of defiance, Curly Hair begins to sing his death chant in Cree. In a low, sombre voice swelling deep from his broad chest, Yellow Hair launches into a different song.
The strangeness of an English death chant fills the Blackfoot with amazement, holds them still.
“Praise God, from whom all blessings flow;
Praise him, all creatures here below;
Praise him above, ye heavenly host;
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen.”
The autumn sunshine bleaches the pale skin of the Sutherlands even whiter, licks the butter of their waist-long hair. They wait, their knives held ready. The ring closes on them, the Blackfoot rush at the cold flash of the Sutherlands’ blades. Rifle butts, stone hammers crash down on blond heads, over and over. Potts has no wish to strike them, he only stands and watches what must be done. When the Blackfoot warriors step back, the brothers lie crumpled, their limbs tangled in a final embrace.
After that, there are only the remnants of the invaders to mop up. Ten Cree in a clump of poplar, their musket powder wet from the crossing, one revolver among them, are quickly dispatched. The rest who have made it into brush coverts to the north are allowed to escape. Everyone is tired from the long day’s fighting, the Blackfoot dead and wounded must be brought home. Calf Skin’s wrist has swollen bigger than his biceps and turned black. Nevertheless, he will not allow anyone to remove the arrow. Strapped to a travois, he is dragged back to his father’s lodge.
Potts and the McKays return to the Blood camp near Fort Whoop-Up. All the people honour Bear Child’s bravery, the cunning he used in turning the tide of battle in his people’s favour. They touch the thirteen scalps hanging from his belt. The children stare at the ear that the Cree warrior scorched with the muzzle flame of his musket, at the specks of black powder embedded in Potts’s cheek by the blast. Everyone praises the power of his cat medicine, which protected him even with a musket pushed into his face.
All night long the Bloods sing and dance in celebration of a victory that rubbed out three hundred Cree, but Potts refuses to join them. He hides himself away from his people in Fort Whoop-Up just as Mary hid herself from him the night the Blackfoot destroyed the Crow in Montana. Sitting silent on his bunk, absent-mindedly stroking his raw, burned ear, he thinks of the Sutherlands, half-breeds like himself, singing their two sides, the Cree and the Scottish, as they prepared to meet death.
The next morning, Potts rises early. A soft, bleary snowfall wraps the world in white as he rides to the place where the Sutherlands died. Their pale bodies, stripped by the Blackfoot, are hard to find in the snow. Finally he discovers them, wearing caps of gore instead of long yellow hair.
He works all morning, one by one lifting and carrying heavy stones to pile on the naked bodies of the brothers. In the cold, his fingers become claws, his nails break and bleed prying boulders from the frozen mud. He wishes to honour the Sutherlands who, fair enough to pass as white men, chose to give their lives for their Cree brothers. He wonders if the Scottish raiders his Almost Father Dawson spoke of, the ones who swept down from the high country into the land of the English, left the world with Yellow Hair’s song on their lips.
A little past noon his cairn is completed. Even though the Sutherlands were enemies, no Blackfoot will pass it without tucking a pinch of tobacco or a strip of red cloth into its cracks and crannies to honour their courage.
Potts stares off into the screen of snow. Right now, the Crow will be gathering in the basin of the Powder and Bighorn rivers to make winter camp.
Yesterday, he might have died. If the Cree’s muzzle had moved a finger breadth to the right, his brains would have been smashed by a musket ball like his own father’s were so may years ago. Mitchell would be orphaned as he himself had been.
Potts starts to shake. He is starved for the sight of his boy; his spirit is hungry to press his son close to him. There are no more excuses. The time has come to ride south, to beg forgiveness from his Crow family.
27
ALOYSIUS Custis pulled out of town with Charles Gaunt yesterday. Custis is some better, but I don’t judge him fit to travel. I told him this, but you might as well reason with a keg of nails.
All because four days ago a hide hunter by name of Cornelius Kopp rode into Fort Benton from the Basin Country carrying a message to Custis from Jerry Potts that a young, blond white man was living with the Crow down there. According to Kopp, Jerry Potts is camped on the outskirts of a big Crow village, working on his father-in-law to help patch things up between him and his wife, Mary. Strikes me that’s a risky business for Potts. Seeing as he has such a mighty reputation as a Crow killer, you’d reckon some young Crow buck would be determined to lift his hair. But Kopp says even though Potts ain’t welcome, the Crow don’t meddle with him. Maybe his foolhardy bravery won their respect and they’ve decided it would be bad medicine to touch him.
The particulars the half-breed sent was few. Didn’t have no name for the white man but the one the Indians call him by, Born of a Horse. The little Custis learned from Kopp, he passed on directly to Charles Gaunt. That got the Englishman all het up, out of his doldrums. For two days he pitched around town pestering people, offering the moon to anybody who would guide him down to whatever Potts has found. But he didn’t get no takers. Ever since Barker and Grunewald got back to Benton, they been running down Englishmen as travelling companions and the Gaunts in particular.
I seen Gaunt do it, right here in my bar, plead with Custis to take him south. He said there was nobody else he could turn to, that he needed to know who the fellow with the Crow was. If Straw wouldn’t take him, he had no choice but to try and make it there on his own.
It took some time for Custis to reply. I wondered if he weren’t weighing Gaunt’s chances of surviving winter travel on his own. I would have been sorely tempted to let him go if I wanted Lucy Stoveall all to my own.
Thing is, Custis melts under begging, and Gaunt begged him mighty insistent. Still, Custis sat staring out the window of the saloon without replying a word. Second week of November, but the day was warm and bright, last gasp of fine weather. Finally, Custis lifted his glass and drained it. “Travel is hazardous this time of year,” he said. “Weather is sudden and changeable. Temperature can drop forty degrees in the blink of an eye. Buy us a small tent. Get yourself some warm clothes. We leave tomorrow.”
CHARLES Mr. Straw is proving to be a trial. Ungenerous and unkind of me to think it, given the assistance he is providing me, but nevertheless true. What exasperates me so is that Straw does not understand that I cannot fall victim to unfounded optimism. And yet, I carry a pouch of twenty-dollar gold coins, ransom for the brother I dare not allow myself to believe I will find.
