The Rattler
Above all, it was the dust he would never forget. The way it got into everything: his clothes, his hair, even into his mouth and nostrils, as invasive and penetrating as a wound. And the thirst that the sierra winds carried, parching his mouth until it was as dry as the sagebrush. His tongue dry no matter how much water he swallowed from his canteen.
At intervals during the long trek into the Montana hills, when the troop dismounted to rest, he would clutch the saddle, certain that unless he did so the animal itself would disintegrate beneath his grip, its very atoms reduced to a shower of dry particles which the wind would simply carry away in a single breath. At other times the dust covered them both so completely they seemed to be one beast, a creature from a storybook that had no parallel in the real world.
The sand mixed with sweat to scour his eyes and blur his vision. Maybe that’s why the Crow scouts never saw how big the camp was. That the cavalry column hadn’t stumbled onto one end of the camp but blundered into its middle. Still the column pressed on, undeterred by the death song of the scouts, their eyes on the haunted hunting grounds that already lay before them.
The dust even eroded the last eager message that the Brevet Colonel (not really a General at all) sent back to the rest of the expedition, an excited scrawl asking for help: Come on. Big village. Be quick. Bring packs. His blood roused, just as it has been at the Washita. The bringer of death to women and children, (some taken as human shields), preening in his buckskins. "We’ve caught 'em napping, boys!"
But the extra ammunition, strapped in crates to pack animals, never arrived, lost in the dust storm, the prairie suddenly more immense than any ocean. The same maelstrom that would soon swallow over two hundred and sixty souls.
And it was out of that vortex, that haze of twisted refracted sunlight, that the warriors emerged. Spectral figures so much taller than the troopers, who could only cower beneath the stalking giants, the immortals with their stone axes and arrows dipped in wolf’s blood. Palm prints of the same on the flanks of the pony ridden by Crazy Horse, his war cry rising above the tempest like the call of an eagle. A summons that drew every brave in the camp, from lodge and tepee.
Rising from the ground like ash, the sand got into the barrels of the horse-soldier’s rifles and pistols, jamming the firing mechanisms. The same sand that hid the battle from view like the wall of a tornado, until it was all over. Until the bugles had lapsed into silence. Until the regimental colours had been captured. The courage of desperation a forlorn hope.
Not a massacre at all but something that smelt more like justice.
And when the prairie dust finally settled in that bend on the Little Big Horn River he knew that he alone had survived. He crawled beneath the bodies of the dead and waited for the scalping and the trophy-taking to run its course. And then he slid away in the sand, a cold-hearted creature of dust and blood, his broken body leaving behind a sinuous trail like that of a rattler.
A trail of broken promises.
A trail of tears.
