At last we stood on the bank of the Battle River,—and over there we were thankful to see the old Battleford stockade still sheltering the refugees we had come to save.
The Indians vanished on our approach, and pitched their camp on Poundmaker’s reserve, nearly forty miles away in the west. So in the afternoon of the first of May, leaving half our little force to guard the town, but taking with us a company of the beleaguered white men who had organized themselves as a “Battleford Home Guard,” we set out on the enemy’s track, carrying five days’ rations and little else.
All night we rode, and the sun was sending its first rays up behind us when we saw at our feet a little valley where Cutknife Creek wound in and out among bushes through a sandy bottom. From the other side of the creek rose a gentle slope of bare turf, flanked on either side by a gully. This was Cutknife Hill, where Poundmaker and his Crees had defeated Chief Cutknife and his Sarcees, many years before. But since then Poundmaker had distinguished himself as a peacemaker; it was he who brought to an end the age-long feud between the Crees and the Blackfoot confederacy.
A few hundred yards beyond the crest of the hill we knew that Poundmaker was now encamped, and we hoped that he and all his men were still sound asleep.
They were—all but one. Do you ask how I know that? Years afterwards I went over the battlefield with an old Indian named Piacutch, who had been in the fight. When I asked him how the Indians knew we were coming that morning, he told me—“There was an old Indian, named Jacob-with-long-hair, who always got up before anybody else. He went out over the hill, and his horse put up its ears, and then he listened and heard [a]Surrounded] wagons coming; so he galloped back and told us, and we strung out as quick as we could, one by one.”
Scarcely had the head of the column got across the stream when a scout dashed back with the cry “The Nichis are on us!”
The police were flying up the hill in a moment, with the gunners galloping at their heels, and gained the top of the hill in the nick of time, for the Indians were racing for the same point of vantage. Foiled in this, the painted redskins launched a volley of yells and bullets at the police, and fell back into a hollow, beyond which lay the Indian camp. Meanwhile the infantry had leapt from their wagons, and in less time than it takes to tell were lying in skirmishing order all along the edges of the slope.
Puffs of smoke began to rise from the gullies on our left, on our right, and even in our rear. We were completely surrounded by hidden Indians, every one of them a sniper. If a rifleman so much as rose on his elbow to fire, he was the target of a dozen marksmen. Cover we had none. The horses and wagons were just bunched together on the middle of the hill. The air seemed alive with whizzing bullets, and one by one our men were dropping.
Do you wonder what it feels like, to find yourself suddenly for the first time in the middle of a whistling concert of bullets, knowing that any one of them may get you? Well, some are scared for a moment, and a few stay scared. Others are exhilarated by the joy of fighting. On Cutknife Hill that day, I suppose nearly all, though tired with the long night ride, quickly recovered from the shock of surprise, and felt little anxiety except to do their duty as well as they could. Personally, [a]Heroism on the Field] I felt too much interested to be afraid; nor could I be upset by the sight of death in ghastly forms, for my calling had hardened me to that in time of peace. My chief feeling was just a keen desire to see and understand everything that was going on, to gather up all the incidents of the battle into a living and accurate story, so that others could read and realize what I had seen.
The volunteers, whatever they felt, seemed in action cool as veterans; cool of nerve only, for the sun beat down upon them with all its western might. They wasted a monstrous lot of lead at first, but presently settled down to more systematic work, and even imitated a favorite Indian trick—one man holding up a hat as target and his comrade picking off anyone who rose to aim at it. Those clerks from Ottawa and students from Toronto were as steady under the deadly hail as if they had fought through a hundred battles.