0525427368 by Sebastian Barry Page A

placid than Caesar without needing to bother the major and by dawn of the following day we are setting out in good heart to see if we can locate the village, the svelte gun making a sort of merry rattle along the way.

C HAPTER E IGHT

T HE BOW IS DRAWN BACK and the bowman tries to hold it as taut as he can and then when he is satisfied with the position of his prey he can let the arrow loose. There is a fierce strange moment when the arm can no longer hold the pulled string, and nothing will do but to let it fly, so the bowman must know all the staging posts of his task, or make a bloody hames of it. I was just pondering along these lines as we went in fairly good order in the hoofprints of our Crow scouts. That Caught-His-Horse-First was a wily man and it would not be any picnic to find him and bring revenge to his soul. The sergeant thought it only right that as many of the old section who had found the killed men so many seasons before should go that day to find the village. Caleb Booth was there as the Jesus among us risen again. In the meanwhile Caleb had grown a big moustache and had a little baby son by a pretty Sioux woman, Oglala Sioux too, so I guess that was strange. I guess love laughs at history a little.
The year just gone had wore away at the sergeant and even if we were young and knew nothing we knew it was not only age was eating away at him. He is as gaunt now like the spike of a dead tree sticking up from the land and all his old measureof flesh and even his violent talk had withered away somewhat. The man I had took to be just something of a monster and even a wicked man in his way was grown different in my eyes. He was as rough as the Black Hills in his demeanour and his brain was full of nothing but orders, drinking, and tobacco. He never said a thing that wasn’t pickled with cusses. But that were just the front side of him. Around the back was a differing aspect, I won’t say roses and gardens, but a sort of queer quietness that I had come to admire. And relish even, so that I could quite easily find myself seeking out his company. He drilled us along the boiling summer ground as if he wished the American sunlight to burn us away like leaves in a bonefire. He was harsh and cruel when you mistook an order or wheeled right when you should of wheeled left. I seen him hit troopers with the back of his sabre and I seen him one time shoot at the heels of a erring trooper so that that man was obliged to dance and caterwaul to survive. But he was a handbook of war and war’s actions and he had never led a company to their detriment. And even though he were not the culprit for the massacre of our companions a year back he took himself to be so by some degree and his thought of revenge was a calculation to put back things that was amiss in his estimation in their place.
That he was a filthy bad singer I have said before and only the memory of his vile tones forces me to say it again and I do pray that in heaven the singing will be confined to the angels.
A day and a night passes and the sergeant keeps us moving and is against sleep. Sergeant thinks we is crossing so far northwest the darned Crows must be bringing us home to Yellowstone.That is a strange country we often hear stories of. By morning of the second day we begin to move into forest and the land is rising and the sergeant robustly rebukes the Crows. You the craziest damn wolves I ever followed, says the sergeant. How you expect me to bring this gun over that pile of rocks? So the field gun is left to follow with a dozen men who will need to raise it foot by foot on pulleys and all kinds of damn hard work in the sun. There is a Negro called Boethius Dilward driving the mules that pull the gun and he is said to be the best damn mule-drover in the regiment, but still. Mules like flat ground just like human beings do. Boethius Dilward shakes his head at the Crows too. You do your best, Boethius, says the sergeant, and I apologise for this stupidity. I