Prairie Nocturne by Ivan Doig

Author:Ivan Doig
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

STRIPER

· 1888 ·

“SERGEANT, CLOSE UP their ranks again. They don’t need to smear themselves across the entire prairie, this isn’t one of their buffalo hunts.”

“Yes, sir. Good as done.” Drawing on his long experience at the pretense that all orders from a white officer were created equal, Mose Rathbun spun his mount from beside Lieutenant Pershing and spurred off to pass the word to his men as they endeavored to herd Indians. The line of march of the captured Crees, to call it that, had funneled nice as anything through the single street of Gros Ventre, but out here north of town the Indians were dribbling off again. The few good wagons with Little Bear and other chiefs were drifting out of line, already almost side by side across the grassland, and behind them kinked the long train of limping buggies and scraggly travois and even a few groaning Red River carts, with the spotted herd of horses fanned out behind. From past episodes of rounding up Crees, Sergeant Rathbun figured that the Indians gravitated out that way so as not to eat each other’s dust, but this new lieutenant could be a stickler when he wanted to. Pershing in fact reminded him of the bristles on a grooming brush, with that brisk cookie-duster mustache and his parade-ground way of sitting in the saddle even out here on the march. Not gonna cost me my honorable if I have anything to do with it, though. This was the big roundup, Little Bear’s band, and Mose Rathbun’s last before his retirement discharge at month’s end, and he was trotting along through it with a short-timer’s determination not to get out on skin ice with his commanding officer.

“Tinsley, Goggins, all you,” Mose called to his corporals and his troopers, “poke them up in here, or old Black Jack’s going to have you cleaning the stables until you’re gummers.” He stood in his stirrups and made a bunching motion to the trudging mob of Crees, not that he expected it to do any good. “Ride herd on those women and young ones, too,” he warned his men, “next creek we hit. They’ll light off out of here on their own, quick as anything.”

The greenhorn of his complement of men had the misfortune to catch his eye. “Bovard!” Mose bellowed. “Shove them together there, or I’ll curry your head with a quirt.” From everything Private Bovard had heard, it would not be the first such occurrence. He threw the heavy-shouldered sergeant a flustered salute and began swatting the nearest Indian pack ponies with the ends of his reins.

Mose knew he was going heavy on his troopers. But it paid. Their blue field uniforms were never more crisp, every buckle and button on them gleamed with polish, they wore their campaign hats cocked just so. The men naturally groused about it but by making them snap to, he pointed them up in the estimation of the white officers like Pershing. Call it a personal conceit,

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