This is the opening chapter of Howl: WT Sherman’s Monster Hunters
William Tecumseh Sherman saw his own death staring at him.
Less than fifty yards away, braced in the fork of a thick oak, a Confederate sniper was aiming his rifle right at Sherman. There was no doubt in Sherman’s mind as he locked gaze with the shooter that the man had him dead to rights at this close range. Sherman had already had one horse killed under him today and taken a bullet through the hand, which he’d wrapped in a handkerchief without dismounting. He’d ridden along his crumbling line all morning, shouting orders, pointing with his bloodied hand, indifferent to the Minié balls snapping past. He was the most visible man on this part of the field, and he knew it and he didn’t care. There were things to do, and dying would have to wait its turn.
But the man in the tree wasn’t firing blind into a line. He was aimed.
Which is when Sergeant Elias Mobb, standing next to Sherman’s horse, fired first.
Mobb hadn’t seen the rifle. He’d seen the branch and the glitter of morning sunlight off the front of the scope mounted on the gun. A slight shift in the oak’s canopy that didn’t match the wind—the kind of movement a man makes when he settles his weight to shoot, displacing a limb by half an inch. On the frontier, you learned to see that or you died. Mobb had been watching the spaces between the battle all morning—not the massed ranks, not the flags and smoke, but the angles, the gaps, the places where a single sniper could operate. He’d killed two men already today, both shots taken on the move, both clean. The Hawken .50 caliber was up and aimed before his mind finished the thought.
As the sniper fired, Mobb’s bullet hit the sniper a glancing blow on the left side of his face, smashing cheekbone and the lower part of the eye socket, sending bone fragments into the skull and flaying skin away. The impact and broken socket caused the eye to pop out, dangling by the occipital nerve. More importantly, it nudged the aim just enough to save the General.
Sherman’s horse buckled under him and he went tumbling to the ground, rolling to keep from being pinned under the dying animal. The horse screamed—a sound worse than any human sound on this field—and thrashed, and Sherman scrambled clear with the agility of a man too manic to be slowed by anything as trivial as gravity.
Mobb helped Sherman to his feet. Up close, the general was thinner than a man should be, vibrating with an energy that had nothing to do with fear. His eyes were electric. There was blood on his wrapped hand and mud on his uniform and he didn’t register either.
“There, sir,” Mobb said, pointing at a mount an aide was holding twenty yards back. He kept his voice flat. Urgency would be wasted on a man who didn’t seem to understand the concept of personal danger.
Sherman looked Mobb in the eye. Not gratitude—Sherman wasn’t built for gratitude in the middle of a fight. It was acknowledgment. A look that said: I know what you just did. I’ll remember. Then he leapt into the saddle and galloped off to rally his men, because there were things to do and dying still hadn’t made the list.
Mobb turned back to the tree.
Beaufort Slakin could see his one eye dangling in the peripheral vision of his other. But the signals were tangled. The dangling eye was still sending input—flashes of light and darkness, the spinning ground, a smear of red that was probably his own blood—and these images conflicted with what his remaining eye was trying to show him. The Union general, riding away on a fresh horse. Getting smaller. Getting gone.
Slakin brought the reloaded Whitworth to his shoulder. He shifted the rifle, pressed his cheek to the stock, and tried to find the general through the scope. The dangling eye threw ghost images across his sight picture—a doubled world, one sharp and one swimming.
He fired.
Knew he was off before the recoil settled.
And then the general was gone. Into the smoke and the chaos and the screaming men and the war that had swallowed this field and wouldn’t spit it back out for two more days.
A figure appeared below the tree. Slakin recognized him—a sergeant, from his company. A man who’d kept his distance these five months, the way they all did, giving Slakin the wide berth that men gave rattlesnakes and open latrines.
“Damn, Slakin, you torn up bad.”
The sergeant didn’t sound sorry about that. Nor did he offer assistance. He stood below the tree looking up at Slakin the way you’d look at a horse with a broken leg—with the dispassionate calculation of a man deciding whether something was worth saving.
“Maybe you ought give me that fancy rifle?” the sergeant suggested.
They all coveted Slakin’s rifle. The Whitworth rifle was a thing apart from every other weapon on the battlefield. Where the standard-issue Enfield and Springfield muskets used conventional round bores, the Whitworth’s barrel was hexagonal — six-sided rifling that gripped a specially cast hexagonal bullet and spun it with a precision no other firearm could match. At three hundred yards, a good man with an Enfield might hit a barn door. At a thousand yards, Slakin could put a bullet through a man’s chest. He had a four-power Davidson telescopic sight on it and worked from concealed positions far beyond the range any Union soldier believed possible. The unique shrill whizzing of the unique bullet arrived after the lead did. Manufactured in Manchester, England, and smuggled through the Union blockade, fewer than a handful had made it into the war, which made every one of them precious — and every man carrying one dangerous beyond all proportion to a single soldier. It was not a weapon for the line. It was a weapon for one careful shot, one specific target, and one kill that could change the course of a fight before anyone understood what had happened.
Before Slakin could curse at the sergeant, the man’s head exploded. A bullet hit from the east, from the direction of the Union line, and the back of the man’s skull opened and sprayed brain and blood and bone across the ground and up onto Slakin’s boots.
Slakin didn’t flinch. He was already reaching for his face, fingers finding the gouge where his cheek had been, touching exposed bone that was wet and sharp-edged, and then the eye—his eye, the right one, still warm, still connected, dangling against his jaw like a marble on a string. He picked it up between his thumb and forefinger. It was slippery and round and astonishingly small. Everything you see in your entire life comes through something the size of a walnut and here was his, loose in his fingers.
He shoved it back into what remained of the socket. Bone ground against the soft tissue. The eye didn’t seat—there was nothing left to seat it in, the socket was a cratered ruin—but it went in far enough that it stopped dangling. The images from it went dark.
He screamed. Not from the pain, although the pain was considerable and would get worse. He screamed from frustration. There was killing to be done, finally. Sanctioned killing—not like what he’d done before, back in Fayette County, where a man had to be careful and quiet and where there were consequences. Here the killing was approved, encouraged, rewarded with rank and praise. And now he couldn’t see straight and the best target he’d ever drawn a bead on was riding away.
He climbed down from the oak, one-handed, the Whitworth slung across his back. Blood ran freely down his face and neck and soaked the collar of his shirt. The shattered socket wept fluid. His head felt like someone had driven a railroad spike through it. None of this mattered. Not the pain, not the wound, not the dead man at the base of the tree. What mattered was that the world had changed—his world, the one seen through his eyes—and he would have to learn it again.
He would.
The Whitworth demanded it. And there was so much killing still to do.
* * *
Mobb had the wounded Confederate in his sights.
The man was climbing down from the oak, bleeding terribly, the Whitworth rifle slung across his back. He moved with a deliberateness that was hard to watch—each hand placement considered, each foothold tested, the body working through the mechanics of descent while the face above it was a ruin of blood and bone. Mobb could see the damage even at this distance. The right side was gone, caved in, a red mess. The eye was somewhere in it—Mobb had seen the man shove it back into the socket, a thing he wished he could unsee.
He should fire. He knew he should fire.
The man was done. That face, that wound—no one survived that. Not out here, not with the surgery this army had to offer, which was mostly whiskey and a saw. The sniper would be dead by morning from infection if not from blood loss. He was already dead. He just hadn’t stopped moving yet.
But there was something about him that Mobb sensed. Something he’d learned to read on the frontier, where you met men far from civilization and had to judge them fast because judgment was survival. Some men carried darkness in them the way others carried faith or fear. You couldn’t always see it. But if you’d been around enough of it, you could feel it—a coldness that came off certain people like heat off a stove, except the opposite. A pulling-in of warmth. An absence where something human should be.
This man had it. Even torn apart, even half-blind and bleeding out against a tree trunk, the sniper radiated that absence. Something best to be finished now.
Mobb aimed.
The Hawken was a single-shot weapon. An antique in some ways. The Hawken was the rifle that opened the West, it was the weapon of choice for mountain men, fur trappers, and frontier hunters who needed one shot to put down whatever was trying to kill them — grizzly, buffalo, or man. The .50 caliber half-stock plains rifle was shorter and heavier than the long rifles coming out of Pennsylvania and Kentucky, built that way on purpose. A man on horseback or crawling through timber needed a weapon he could swing and mount fast, not a five-foot barrel that snagged on every branch. The octagonal barrel was thick-walled and rugged, made to survive being dragged across a thousand miles of mountain and prairie without losing its truth. It threw a patched round ball with a slow, heavy authority that hit like a hammer. It had a limited range, maybe two hundred yards, a stark contract to the Whitworth.
The Hawken wasn’t built for long-range precision — it was built for hitting hard at practical frontier distances, where one shot had to anchor something big and dangerous before you had to reach for your knife.
He’d fired to save Sherman and hit the sniper in the face but not dead on. He’d reloaded on the run—the practiced movement, powder and ball and cap, hands working by feel while his legs covered ground—and fired again at the man below the tree, the one who’d been looking up at the sniper without helping. That shot had taken the man’s head off. Now Mobb had reloaded again, his third load in less than a minute, a remarkable pace, matched by few, and he had the sniper in his sights.
He hesitated.
Later—for years, for the rest of his life—Mobb would try to understand why. He was not a man prone to hesitation. On the frontier, hesitation was a death sentence handed down by your own body. You saw the threat, you read it, you acted. The sequence was automatic, drilled into the muscle and bone by years of practice and survival. Mobb had killed men without hesitation and slept soundly afterward because the men had needed killing and he was the one in position to do it. That was the whole calculation. It had always been enough.
But the sniper was so clearly destroyed. The face was a horror. Blood covered him from crown to waist. He was climbing down the tree. Every rational assessment said this man was dead in hours. Killing him now was redundant—mercy, even, if you wanted to frame it that way. Putting down a suffering animal. And Mobb, for reasons he would never fully articulate, found that framing distasteful. You didn’t shoot a man as a mercy. You shot a man because he was a threat. And this man didn’t look like a threat anymore. He looked like meat.
That half-second of moral reasoning—the decent hesitation, the humane pause—was the worst mistake Elias Mobb ever made.
Just as his finger moved back to the trigger, a Confederate soldier ran across his line of fire. The man appeared from the left, running low through the smoke, headed for the tree or past it. Mobb’s shot was already releasing—the trigger pull was past the point of conscious control—and the ball took the running man through the chest, knocking him to the ground.
Mobb shifted back. The sniper reached the ground, steadied himself against the trunk, and looked toward the Union line with his remaining eye. Even across fifty yards, through the drifting smoke, Mobb felt that eye find him. Not see him—find him. The way a predator finds prey across a crowded landscape, not by searching but by sensing.
Then the moment broke. Desperate orders were being shouted. Mobb’s fellow Union men were falling back on either side of him, trying to establish a new line of defense. The Confederate advance was pushing through the timber. There was no time for another shot.
Mobb ran with them, reloading as he did. The ability to reload on the run was a skill he’d learned on the western frontier, fighting an enemy—Comanche, Apache—who was faster than him and knew the land better. You survived by never being where they expected you to be. Fire, move, reload, fire. The powder horn came up, the measure poured, the ball seated, the cap pressed home—all while his long legs covered ground through the Tennessee brush, his moccasins finding solid footing by instinct. Do it fast. Do it on the move. A rare skill, but one that had saved his life enough times that it was simply how he fought.
This kind of fighting was different from the frontier. Impersonal. Over something more than just staying alive, although—he had to admit as he finished reloading—staying alive was pretty high on the list at the moment. He turned, dropped to a knee, brought the Hawken up and fired, and another attacker went down. A man he’d never seen before and would never think about again. Then Mobb was up, running, reloading again.
Sherman was gone, which was a good thing. Damn general was reckless—the most reckless officer Mobb had ever seen, and Mobb had seen his share of men who mistook exposure for courage. But Sherman wasn’t mistaking anything. He simply didn’t calculate personal risk. His mind was on the battle, on the line, on the thousand things that needed doing, and his body was a vehicle that carried his mind to where the doing needed to happen. It was the most dangerous form of bravery because it wasn’t bravery at all. It was distraction.
Mobb had met the general years earlier, in San Francisco, when Sherman was a civilian working at a bank and failing at it during the Panic. It had been a strange meeting. Mobb had been coming out of a dry goods store on Market Street when he heard the sound of a crowd turning ugly—a sound you learned to recognize, the pitch shifting from noise to intent. Six or seven miners, broke and drunk, had a Chinese laborer backed against a wall and a rope in hand. The man was on his knees. The miners were shouting about jobs and wages and the goddamn Celestials taking bread from white mouths, and none of it mattered because what they wanted was someone to hurt and they’d found someone who couldn’t stop them.
Mobb had walked into the middle of it with the Hawken at his hip.
“This ain’t happening.”
That was all he’d said. He hadn’t raised his voice. Hadn’t raised the rifle, not quite. Just stood there, a big man in buckskins with an old gun and a face that said he’d pull the trigger if the math required it. And the math had changed. One man willing to die for a stranger versus six men who wanted to kill but didn’t want to die for the privilege. The mob had backed down, grumbling, and Mobb had helped the Chinese man up and walked away without a word because there was nothing to say. Wrong was happening and he’d stopped it and that was the whole of it.
Sherman had been watching from a bank doorway across the street. Mobb didn’t know this until years later, when Sherman—now a general commanding a division—had asked for Mobb by name as part of his personal security detail. A man who will face down a mob for one stranger, Sherman had reasoned, will face down anything for the man he’s assigned to protect.
He’d been right about that.
Mobb was a large man, over six feet where the average height was five-eight. Lean where other big men were thick, built for distance rather than power, with a rangy frame that moved through brush and timber with an ease that startled men who assumed his size made him loud. He wore buckskin britches and a blue army shirt—the blue mostly to keep from getting shot by his own side, since nothing else about him looked military. He carried the Hawken because a man fought with what he was used to, and what Mobb was used to was a weapon from a previous era: a .50 caliber percussion rifle, heavy, accurate, powerful and with a firing mechanism that belonged to the 1830s. Against the Springfield rifles and Enfields that both armies carried, it was an anachronism. Against a single target at a hundred yards, it was as lethal as God’s own finger.
So far it seemed to be working.
He found Sherman again two hours later, on a third horse, still alive, still riding the line. Mobb took his position next to the general’s mount and went back to watching the spaces between things. But part of his mind was still at that tree. Still seeing the sniper climb down with his face in pieces. Still feeling the eye find him across the smoke. Still wondering why he’d hesitated when everything he knew about the world told him not to.
He’d killed the wrong man. The one who stepped in front of the shot. And he’d let the one who mattered climb down from that tree and walk into the smoke and disappear.
Mobb didn’t know it yet, but that man would not die. Not from the wound, not from infection, not from any of the things that should have killed him. The sniper would survive because whatever was inside him was harder than bone and colder than blood loss and more durable than any decency that might have suggested surrender. He would adapt. He would learn to shoot with one eye and kill with a precision that the wound should have made impossible. And he would spend the next two and a half years becoming something that the word “soldier” could no longer contain.
Mobb’s half-second of mercy had given the world a monster.
He just didn’t know it yet.
* * *
That evening, as darkness settled over the battlefield, Sherman found Grant standing under a large oak tree near Pittsburgh Landing.
Water dripped down from the newly budded leaves, the remains of a thunderstorm that had just passed. More storms, both natural and man-made, were in the area. Lightning flickered to the south and thunder rumbled, indistinguishable at times from the Union gunboats on the Tennessee River lobbing shells blindly toward where the Confederates were bivouacked. The bombardment was more a sop to bolster morale for the badly shaken northerners than anything effective.
Despite those noises, the screams of the wounded carried clearly. And there were many. The day had brought slaughter on a scale not seen on this continent before. Any sane person would be overwhelmed by it. Thousands upon thousands lay dead and dying on the ground between here and Shiloh Church, two and a half miles away. The rain had turned the field into a swamp of mud and blood. Men too wounded to crawl were drowning in it. The hogs had come out of the timber.
Sherman didn’t think about the hogs. If he started thinking about the hogs, he wouldn’t stop.
He peered at the commander of the battered Union forces in the darkness. Ulysses Grant was leaning against the oak, his cigar a dull red point in the blackness. He’d arrived from Savannah, Tennessee that morning, where he’d spent the previous night, and had taken charge of the collapsing defense with a calmness that bordered on the inhuman. His orders had been incisive, his presence steadying. Without Grant, the army would have been driven into the river. Some would say that later; Sherman already knew it now.
Grant’s leg was bothering him. He’d injured it days earlier when his horse fell, and he’d been on crutches. He wasn’t on crutches now. He’d abandoned them sometime during the battle and hadn’t mentioned the leg since.
“Well, Grant, we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?”
Grant drew on the cigar. The tip flared orange and for a moment his face was visible—blocky, bearded, utterly impassive. A face that could have been carved from a stump for all the emotion it showed.
“Yes. Lick ‘em tomorrow, though.”
Aides for both generals, standing nearby, exchanged glances in the darkness. The prevailing attitude among the staff had been retreat. The army was shattered. Sidney Johnston’s Confederates had achieved complete surprise at dawn and had spent the entire day driving the Union forces back toward the river. It had been a close thing—the closest thing of the war so far—and the men who thought about logistics and reserves and lines of communication were thinking about how to get sixty thousand men back across the Tennessee before morning.
Grant was not thinking about this. Grant was thinking about the fresh divisions coming off the riverboats at Pittsburgh Landing behind them—thousands of reinforcements, Buell’s men, untouched by today’s fighting. And he was thinking about the Confederate army out there in the dark, exhausted, disordered, their commanding general dead.
Grant waved a hand. A familiar gesture, economical and final. The aides withdrew out of earshot. Sherman watched them go and then turned back to Grant. Unseen in the darkness, thirty feet away behind a fallen log, Mobb sat with the Hawken across his knees. He’d tracked Sherman to the meeting because that was his job, and he would remain until Sherman moved again because that was also his job. He was close enough to hear everything.
“Do you suggest retreat?” Grant asked.
“To be honest,” Sherman said, “I was thinking that very thing as I rode here. But now? No. We can handle this.”
“Good.” Grant gestured toward Pittsburgh Landing below them on the bank of the river. Torchlight and lanterns moved on the boats. Men were forming up on the bank, fresh troops with clean uniforms and loaded rifles, blinking at the darkness and the sounds and the smell. “Old Sidney Johnston won’t know what hit him tomorrow. His men are exhausted and we have fresh reinforcements.”
“Johnston’s dead,” Sherman said. “Got it from a prisoner. Beauregard commands.”
“Even better,” Grant said. “He a lesser man and a lesser soldier.”
Sherman didn’t respond. The two men stood in the wet darkness, the dripping tree, the sounds of the wounded and the gunboats and the distant thunder. Grant smoked. Sherman didn’t—not at the moment, for once. His hands were still. His narrow face, barely visible in the flicker of a lantern someone had hung from a branch twenty feet away, was doing something it rarely did: it was quiet. The manic energy, the constant calculation, the restless motion of a mind that ran faster than the body containing it—all of it had stopped. What remained was a man standing in the rain among his dead.
Grant waited. The two men had a connection others couldn’t understand. Grant stood by me when I was crazy, Sherman would say later, and I stood by him when he was drunk. Each knew when to speak and when to listen in the presence of the other. Grant had spent a lifetime listening to people who talked too much and said too little. Sherman was the one person who talked too much and said too much, and Grant valued that because it meant he never had to guess.
Now Sherman was silent, and Grant knew to wait.
“The Confederates opened the gates of hell with this war, Sam,” Sherman finally said.
He was the only person who called Grant by his actual first name. Everyone else on the staff used Ulysses, which wasn’t his name either—it was a clerical error at West Point that Grant had never bothered to correct. Sherman used Sam because Sherman had known him that long and because using it was an act of intimacy that both men needed and neither would acknowledge.
“But we will all pay for what has been released.”
Grant didn’t respond. He drew on the cigar and waited, because there was more coming. With Sherman, there was always more coming.
“I’ve seen the devil,” Sherman said. “I know folks think I’m crazy. Maybe I am. I have been. But I’ve seen him. In my head, yes—in those bad months, I saw him there—but I’ve also seen him out here. Today. I’ve seen his monsters walking the field in our uniforms and theirs. And with the gallons of blood spilled today, we have let the demons out and they will reign havoc on our country. Not for blue or gray. But for the evil.”
A shell from the gunboats whistled overhead and exploded somewhere in the dark to the south. The ground shivered. Neither man reacted.
“It will get worse than this,” Sherman said. “Much worse. It scares me what men are capable of doing to each other when they are pushed to the extreme. And worse still are those let off the leash of civilization entirely. The ones who needed the leash. The ones who were waiting for it to break.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then:
“This is just the beginning.”
Grant was silent for a long time. The cigar had gone out. He didn’t relight it. He stood in the darkness with his weight on his good leg and his hands in his pockets and the rain dripping from the brim of his hat, and he thought about what Sherman had said. Grant was not a man who dealt in visions or metaphors. He dealt in men and ground and iron and the mathematics of force. But he trusted Sherman’s mind even when—especially when—it ran into territory that Grant’s own could not follow.
He put his hand on Sherman’s shoulder. A rare gesture from a man who touched no one.
“Then it’s best we be monster hunters, Cump,” Grant said, “and slay every one of them.”
Behind the fallen log, Mobb heard this. He sat in the wet Tennessee darkness with the Hawken across his knees and the blood of three men on his hands and the image of a one-eyed sniper climbing down from a tree burned into the back of his skull.
Monster hunters.
It sounded like something from the frontier. A wolf killing livestock. A mountain lion taking calves. The settlement needs someone to go into the dark and deal with it. Mobb had done that. More than once. He knew what it cost. He knew that the man who went in didn’t always come out the same as the man who’d gone.
But Grant was right. If the monsters were real—and Mobb had seen one today, had put a bullet in its face and watched it shove its own eye back into its skull and keep going—then someone had to hunt them.
The phrase lodged in Mobb’s mind. It would stay there for two and a half years, dormant, waiting. Like the sniper he’d failed to kill, it would survive the distance between this night and the night it finally mattered.
The rain fell. The wounded screamed. The gunboats fired. And somewhere in the darkness beyond the Union line, a man with one eye and white hair and a Whitworth rifle walked south into the war, carrying the darkness inside him like a gift he’d been waiting his whole life to open.
