Jonathan Maberry - SNAFU - An Anthology of Military Horror

“He was here a minute ago,” Paulson answered Grant.

Guns came up and eyes scanned tall grass — a high-stakes Indian Button Game. In the Button Game, one team watched another team pass, or pretend to pass, a button back and forth. If they guessed the man who held the button when the passing was finished, they won. Now the button was potential targets and guessing was guns.

Grant calculated. If they were in the middle of an ambush, Jack was as good as dead, and they were next in line. However, if Jack had succumbed to heat exhaustion and fell off his horse, he’d disappear in the tall grass, and they’d have to backtrack to find him.

Breckenridge revealed he was thinking the same thing. “Jack wouldn’t have gotten sunstroke. He was Sioux.”

“What’s on his doggy?” Webster slid his hand along the shoulder of Jack’s horse as it sidled past him. His palm came away red with blood.

“Ride!” Grant shouted.

Grant spurred his horse before the order fully escaped his lips. The wind of passage dried the sweat of his brow. Hooves beating against the soft soil of the Montana plain sounded like fists pummeling a man to death. Grant knew he didn’t dare push the animal long. It’d burn out in this heat — all their horses would — and they’d be overtaken. He figured they were midway between the Tongue and Powder Rivers, which would intersect with the Yellowstone thirty miles ahead. That’s where they hoped to rendezvous with old ‘Hard Ass’ himself. In the meantime, the terrain left little options: nothing but grass to the north, too many Indians to the west and what looked like a rock formation to the east.

“Come on, Cerberus!” Grant urged his horse toward the rock formation, swatting its rump with the flat side of his saber for that extra motivation. Grant turned back to make sure the others followed. They did, riding low in their saddles. Blisters burst on Grant’s thighs as he faced front once more. They had been pushing hard since coming out of Fort Fetterman and harder still since the Indians turned back the rest of the Third at Rosebud Creek. Grant volunteered for leading the detail to warn the Seventh Cavalry. The Seventh had to know that General Crook would no longer be coming up from the south to support them.

Cerberus began to flag. Grant cherished the horse, once punching a man in the jaw for trying to ride him without permission, but he gave the animal no quarter in this race. Cerberus was a fine mount, and the Indians would surely keep him if they killed his master. Hence, Cerberus could rest once they reached their destination.

The rock formation was approximately twenty-five yards in circumference. Its western side was taller than the rest, with sheer walls nearly fifteen feet high. If the four of them could get to the top, they could hold off a large number of Indians. All they’d have to worry about was running out of ammunition, which shouldn’t be a problem. Indians typically didn’t lay siege, and each man carried a Spencer rifle with one hundred and forty rounds and a Colt revolver with thirty.

Grant pulled back on the reins as Cerberus reached the rocks. He flipped his leg over the stallion’s neck, grabbed his rifle and supplies (which were rolled up in a blanket) and clambered up onto the formation. He found cover in a shallow crevasse and aimed his Spencer back along the way he had come. Paulson, Breckenridge and Webster weren’t far behind. They jumped off the horses, gave them slaps on the hindquarters to get them out of the line of fire and joined Grant on the rocks.

“Webster, cover north side!” Grant ordered. “Paulson, east! I’ll watch south! Breckenridge, get up top!”

Grant surveyed the southern expanse through gun sights. No Indians pursued. The grass swayed with the wind, and clouds moved across the sky. A thin haze of alkaline dust made the horizon appear indistinct. The only thing that moved was Grant’s newspaper, which had fallen from his saddle and drifted on a breeze to nowhere.

Maybe they were in the clear, but Grant didn’t believe it. His sweat-soaked clothes felt clammy despite the day’s heat. The feeling in his gut was something he had never experienced before, even though uneasiness was the state of being for a cavalryman. Forty miles a day on beans and hay, wishing one would never come across an Indian, yet half-hoping one would, have it done with and go home.

“Oh hell!” Breckenridge cried from atop the rock formation. His bass voice sounded on the verge of cracking into a tenor.

“What is it?” Grant pressed.

“It’s Jack!”

Grant squinted to the limits of his southern view, trying to make out a distant rider. “Where? Is he being chased?”

“Not out there! Up here! Jack’s up here! ”

Confusion replaced Grant’s unease. Jack couldn’t be on top of the rock formation. Wherever Jack was, he was without a horse, and he couldn’t have outraced the four of them at the pace they had set. Grant didn’t doubt Breckenridge saw someone on top of the rock formation, however. Maybe it was a trick; maybe Jack turned turncoat; or maybe another Indian was up there in disguise, playing possum, waiting for Breckenridge to get closer so he could pop up, screaming and swinging his tomahawk…

“Watch my side!” Grant ordered Webster and scrambled up a cleft to the top of the rocks. Grant pulled himself onto the formation’s summit, which was flat as a plate and as wide as two chuck wagons. When he saw what was up there, what felt like a shot of whiskey came up from his stomach, and he forced it back down. Grant had seen bad sights before: men bristling with so many arrows they looked like pin cushions and men mutilated because the Indians believed they’d enter the afterlife maimed. But this was the worst case of such brutality yet. This victim wasn’t just missing eyes or organs. He didn’t have his tendons cut or muscles split. His body was strewn .

“It’s Jack,” Breckenridge said helplessly.

“How can you tell?” Grant asked.

Breckenridge kicked a head out from behind a rock.

“Holy—” Grant averted his gaze upward. He saw a low-flying bird — a heron, perhaps — with puffy clouds high above it. Then the bird disappeared, and Grant closed his eyes, thinking he was close to passing out if he was hallucinating birds like a punch-drunk boxer.

“What’s going on up there?” Paulson called.

Grant bit down on his composure. This excursion was his chance to shine, after all. If successful, an officer’s commission was sure to follow. “You and Webster get up here!” Grant managed.

While looking away from the mess, something else caught Grant’s eye — petroglyphs carved into the rock formation. Indians must have used the site as a camp during their hunting trips, or while passing through on their annual migrations. Many of the tribes were nomadic, only stopping in semi-permanent camps during the winter. This was a huge disadvantage in their fight against the white men because they had no industrial base to support a war. In effect, the Indians retreated even when they won because their supplies were exhausted. Furthermore, the military forces rooting them out knew this and ruthlessly attacked the Indians’ winter encampments, destroying whatever surplus they managed to squirrel away and leaving the Indians weaker with each passing year.

A buffalo, deer, fish, thunderbird, rabbit and wolf — Grant ticked off the animal drawings that made up the petroglyphs. He considered the Indians savages, but he respected their ability to live off the land and hunt the animals that shared the territory with them. The Indians used wildlife for everything from food, shelter and clothing, to boats, tools and, in the case of buffalo chips, fuel for their fires. Grant admired the practicality of it, to get rich off what one could pluck from the earth. Too bad it wasn’t that easy in white-man world. Money and reality were all that counted there. That’s how Grant knew the Indians were doomed. They still believed in birds so large their wings could create thunder. But how could that compete against people who believed in the bottom line?