Little Bighorn, Montana – 27th of June 1876.
The men in the column led by General Alfred Howe Terry walk amidst the massacred bodies of the U.S. 7th Cavalry Regiment, littered with hundreds of worn boots stuck against torn and dried blisters. Severed fingers and human flesh decorate the basal leaves on the wild turnip field.
A soldier pressing a handkerchief against his mouth mistakes a section of gnawed vertebral column for a rattlesnake. His brain, shaken by the surrounding scene, switches on false electrical signals: He is certain that he sees the black tongue of the reptile dart out to target him, taste him, decide how much poison is needed before striking. The soldier opens fire several times with his brand-new Colt SAA 1873 six-shooter, while the veterans laugh and Sergeant Jordan kicks him in the ass.
“Respect, boy, respect!”
Lieutenant James Bradley of the 7th Infantry, amid the human waste dotted with fly eggs and the sun-dried entrails of soldiers, has found what is left of Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, the son of a bitch himself, the demiurge with a saber, the man the Indians used to call Long Hair.
