Five hundred civilian women, children, and wounded border rangers were trapped with their backs against a fifty-foot frozen shale cliff. It screamed as fifty mounted wolf riders circled them with raised lances.
The gorge floor was a slaughterhouse funnel.
The refugees had fled from the outer tenant hamlets when Fort Ironpass’s outer river gate was betrayed at midnight. They had dragged handcarts piled with grain sacks, salt pots, and winter bedding across ten miles of frozen river scree, only to find the southern exit blocked by deep, impassable snowdrifts.
Now, pinned against the black dark rock cliffs where the Red River curved through the narrows, they huddled together in a shivering, scared mass.
The human cost of the frontier collapse was laid bare in the snow.
Women with frostbitten fingers wrapped crying infants in ragged sheepskins. Elderly blacksmiths and leather-tanners from the guard post settlement brandished iron pry-bars and tanning knives, their breath wheezing from sub-zero tiredness. Along the outer edge of the crowd lay thirty corpses—rangers who had fallen during the running rearguard fight across the ice, their bodies stripped of their leather boots and iron gorgets by the pursuing raiders.
Thirty paces away on the frozen river ice, the barbarian cavalry circled like hungry dogs.
