North Star

by Richard S. Wheeler

  It proved to be the longest and coldest night in Skye’s memory. Outside, there was only the silence. He itched to go out there, help the horse. He thought to bring the horse into the lodge, but the lodge was too small and the door hole too low. He dreaded the sound of a thump, the sound of Jawbone giving up and caving in. It was too black to find the bushes that night, so Skye did what he had to, just outside of the lodge. He did not see the horse.

  Sometime in the small hours an understanding came to Skye, and he stared bleakly into the utter dark. He saw no stars up in the smoke hole, only unremitting blackness. There was Jawbone beside him, his flesh warm to the touch, his lopeared gaze upon Skye, his muscles rippling, his mocking joy at the very business of being alive. There was Jawbone, waging his war against rival mustang stallions, stealing their mares, dancing his victory dance on every ridge. There was Jawbone, his hooves murderous when white men collected around him.

  “Stay away from him,” Skye warned.

  “Does he kick?” they asked.

  “No, he kills,” Skye said.

  The gawkers had stayed away.

  Dawn came reluctantly, and as soon as Skye could see, he threw aside his robes, wrapped his capote around him, and plunged into the obscure light. He didn’t see Jawbone. The horse was not at his usual post a few dozen yards from the lodge. Where had Jawbone gone? He peered into the murk, discovering nothing. Impatiently he circled the lodge, feeling the snow squeak under him. He hunted for Jawbone, dreading to discover some dark lump sprawled on the white snow, and could not find him. Maybe the cottonwoods, then? Had the horse blanket revived Jawbone’s appetite? Was the medicine horse off in the thickets, gnawing at twigs, wolfing dead leaves and stalks and bark? Was Jawbone simply drinking from the steaming creek?

  He could not know. It would be an hour before enough light would collect for him to find Jawbone. He squinted into the gloom, knowing he must wait, and that he must gather wood and stir the fire and blow on coals until the tinder caught, and warm the lodge and comfort his wives.

  He slid into the lodge, more by instinct than by vision.

  “He is gone,” Victoria said.

  “He’s not there,” he said. “I think he’s in the woods.”

  “He is dead,” she said.

  “No, he’s warmed up and the blanket is helping him.”

  She turned her back to him, which was always her way of saying that he wasn’t listening to her.

  After a while it was light enough. A grudging fire was warming the lodge. Its smoke wasn’t rising, and they coughed now and then. It was time to find the horse. He pulled his capote over him, pulled the hood over his gray hair, and stepped into the deep silence of predawn. Now he could see. The woods were a dark blur. The village lay quiet in the menacing cold. The air stung Skye’s cheeks and burrowed into his moccasins and sliced at his legs.

  He saw no living thing. The horse would be deep in the snow-drifted woods. It was a little warmer there than in the open. Skye hiked into the silent web of cottonwoods and willows, the skeletal branches patching his vision. But he saw not a glimpse of Jawbone. He did not see any of the village horses here, but he didn’t expect to. He wandered helplessly among the copses of trees, but Jawbone was not present.

  Now at last the village was stirring. Old people, huddled deep in blankets and robes, were heading toward the willow brush. The sky blued, and then the rising sun caught the tops of the cottonwood trees, making them glow. But he did not discover Jawbone, and felt an odd and haunting worry.

  Jawbone was gone.

  Then Skye knew. The great horse wanted to do his dying alone. This was the stallion’s final gift. Skye would never see the husk of the great horse after life had fled.

  Skye understood. He lifted his arms toward the distant bluff and acknowledged what he knew, and then turned slowly to the lodge. But not before the people of the village caught it all, knew that Jawbone was no longer among them, and knew that Skye and Victoria and Mary had lost a mighty friend. They watched, all of them bathed in morning light.

  He stood at the lodge door, watching the sun illumine the ragged foothills, and then slid inside.

  “Goddamn,” said Victoria, and threw her arms around Skye, and wept into his capote.

  four

  Even before the April sun had pummeled the snow into the earth, Skye knew what he must do. He would find a good way to grow old. Jawbone’s wintry death had made it urgent. Jawbone, far from old, was gone. What might Skye’s fate be?

  He was suddenly aware of things he had ignored. His vision was changing, and he could hardly focus on things close at hand. His long-distance vision wasn’t as bad, but it was changing too. He could still hunt. He could defend himself—for a while more. He felt well enough, except for the rheumatism that afflicted his very bones.

  Most of those he knew in the mountains were dead. Joe Meek had headed for the Oregon country to farm in a placid valley. Gabe Bridger was ready to settle on a Missouri farm and spend his days enjoying life on his front porch. Others, like William Bent and Tom Fitzpatrick, had become Indian agents for the American government, struggling to help tribes cope with the onslaught of white men. For all of those men of the mountains, the United States was home, and most of them had headed back East.

  But not Skye. The United States was not his home. British Canada was not his home. There was no home to go to, no village or farm waiting for him, no relatives or friends or family. His only home, over a long life, had been Victoria’s people, and wherever they drifted, so did his hearth and kith and kin. And yet there was a home, a place where his heart sang and his spirit was at ease, and that was the Yellowstone country. Somehow, in the midst of all his wandering across the American West, he had come to love the stately river of the north.

  Maybe home would be the valley of the Yellowstone, a place still rich with game, filled with rushing creeks, pine forests, and breeze-tossed meadows. It was all the heartland of the Crow people. Montana was being settled west to east, the mining camps in the western mountains little islands of European life, while the plains, where Skye lived, remained a vast hinterland of untouched, unplowed, unknown country. That is how he wanted it. Maybe there would be a home for him after all.

  One late April day he proposed to Victoria and Mary that they head west to look for a place to settle. The very idea, settling down, seemed odd to him, but he spoke it.

  “No, dammit, you go alone, Skye,” Victoria said.

  That was unheard of. Through all of their years together, Skye had traveled with his women.

  “You go now,” she said crossly. “This is something you got to do.”

  “But it would be your home …”

  “I’m in my home.”

  “Go, Mr. Skye,” Mary said softly. “You go make a place for us. We will make a home with you. I have no other lodge in my heart.”

  Skye knew there would be no arguing with them. He knew from the sharp tone of Victoria’s voice that their decision had been made and it would not be revoked. They wanted him to find a place where he might grow old in comfort. And they believed he had to make these choices without consulting them.

  It wrought an odd sadness in him. He peered at his determined ladies, who sat in their warm lodge, and felt himself being torn from them. It was out in the open now: he, the European, could not possibly live to happy old age in their Crow or Shoshone fashion. Skye’s roots and their roots were too different to bridge this last great gulf in their lives. He had lost his medicine horse this winter, and now his wives were building a wall between them and him.

  This wasn’t going well. He was saying to them that their ways weren’t good enough for him. Long ago, Mary had hoped that when her and Skye’s son, North Star, grew to manhood he would welcome his aged parents and Victoria into his lodge, and would care for them when they grew feeble. But that dream had shattered when Skye had sent his son away to be educated. Now there were no sons or daughters who could care for Skye and his women.

  He l
eft the next morning riding an ugly ewe-necked gray mare. He was partial to ugly horses, the sort that white men laughed at and Indians put in their cook pots. But she was good and faithful and had heart. He tugged behind him a mule laden with buffalo tongue and pemmican, cookware and blankets and robes, a duck-cloth sheet for shelter, and his fine Sharps rifle.

  He wasn’t going far. The Yellowstone country he hoped to call home stretched west forty or fifty miles from upper Sweet Grass Creek, where his Crow band had wintered. He would hunt for the mystical place he saw in his mind’s eye. It would be a good place, well watered, sheltered from the north winds, with handsome views of the mountains, plenty of pine and cottonwood, rich with game. Maybe there would be a place on this earth to call home, a place for a homeless man.

  His women stood sternly outside his lodge, seeing him off, never smiling, somehow understanding the gravity of all this. Nearby, his Crow friends and villagers watched silently. He had said his good-byes to Broken Head and Sleeps In Rain, two of the headmen, and now he hurried the mare across the soft earth of spring, leaving the prints of his two animals behind him. Then he topped the ridge west of Sweet Grass Creek, and paused to look back. But his wives had vanished and the others had returned to their daily tasks. Victoria and Mary would give him no excuse to change his mind and return to the comfort of the lodge.

  Soon Skye felt alone as he made his solitary way across a snow-patched prairie divide and into the Yellowstone Valley, where snow and earth mottled the landscape. The birds of summer had not arrived to trill their songs, and Skye rode through a powerful silence unbroken even by breezes. Or was he only getting deaf?

  Uneasily he surveyed this corrugated land at the base of the Birdsong Mountains, and saw no sign of life. This was Indian country. Few, if any, white men ventured into it now, two years after the great Sioux war chief Red Cloud had banished the Yank army from this homeland of the plains tribes. The Yank army had lost that war, and didn’t much talk about it. Skye didn’t mind. Red Cloud’s gift to the Crows was to permit them to live their traditional life a little while more.

  Skye tugged his soft elk-hide coat tight against the cold, which penetrated to his flesh wherever it could worm its way past his armor. Victoria and Mary had fashioned the coat and quilled it and added a hood, and made gauntlets to go with it, and given it to him for warmth and comfort. He wore their moccasins on his feet and their leggings on his legs. These days he wore a flannel shirt and long johns gotten from the traders, but in all else his wives had outfitted him.

  Away from the Crows, his caution sharpened. He was alone, an easy mark for anyone or any group or any animal, such as a rogue grizzly. But on this sublimely peaceful day he saw only some ravens gossiping on a distant branch. Did old ravens fly as well as young ones? What happened to a raven that could fly no longer? Ravens were smart birds. How did they die? Were they smart enough to choose death? Skye found himself entertaining questions that had never filled his mind before.

  The pack mule came along willingly, carrying all Skye might need to survive in this lonely land. The odd thing was, Skye wasn’t certain why he was making this journey. What exactly was he seeking? What did he need that the Crows or the Shoshones could not provide him? It was worth thinking about as he traveled.

  Well, there were a few things. He wanted fields and pastures that would yield a living from gardens, grains, and livestock. He hoped to shelter himself behind a wall of thick logs, or rock, or adobe. A roof. A door that would stop arrows. He yearned for comfort: a real bed, with a real mattress to ease the pain in his aching bones. But that was only a part of it. He had, he knew, a white man’s urge to sink roots deep and true, to take up land as a possession, a holding. That flew against the visions of his wives’ peoples, who never dreamed of holdings, and considered the breast of mother earth to be beyond possession.

  He rode across open country, most of it the giant shoulders of the snowy mountains north and west. As the day waned he started to search for a secluded place only a few miles from the Yellowstone River where he intended to camp. It would be almost invisible now, with only a few spidery branches to reveal it and he wasn’t sure he could find it. This was monotonous country before it greened, and the brown reaches were deceptive. Far across the Yellowstone Valley lay foothills, and the great chain of the Rockies, running east and west here. He topped a ridge and could make out the distant Yellowstone Valley, which was veiled in haze. But he continued to hunt for the place, and just before dusk he dropped down a slope and saw his oasis, just as he had remembered it. He hurried the ewe-necked mare to the intimate valley, and paused at the water’s edge. There were several algae-lined pools and a faint smell of sulphur released when the hot water reached the air. He took hasty care of the mare, put her in a cottonwood grove where she could gnaw on green bark, and returned to his campsite. He collected dry wood for a fire, and started it burning, using a lucifer instead of flint and steel.

  He tested the waters with his hand, found a pool to his liking, as hot as he could stand, and then pulled away his leather clothing and his ancient union suit, until he was bare, and then stepped gingerly into the purling hot water and slid slowly into it, until he was immersed to his nose, and thinking this was an old man’s heaven. He toasted himself, paddling occasionally, letting his limbs float free, letting the water redden his flesh, until he could no longer stand the heat and he had to clamber out on some cold rocks. He found a small pool farther down, milder now, and slid into it, letting the tepid water cool him. Then he crawled out and dried himself at his fire. For this little while, he actually lived without pain, but by morning he would be hurting again. That’s what old age was all about. He wished there was a hot spring where he intended to make a home. But from the Great Bend of the Yellowstone there were several hot springs not far away.

  He camped that night under a south-facing bluff back from the springs. For much of this chill spring night, the sun-warmed bluff would spread its heat over him, and he would take his ease. He lay quiet under his blankets, knowing why he was looking for a place to settle. It was simple: he wanted a comfortable place to grow old. He would like to sit in a rocking chair on a veranda and watch sunsets, or feel the night-chill creep toward his door. There wasn’t anything more to it. And yet there was. A true home was more than shelter and more than comfort. It was rooted in family and friends and neighbors.

  He knew perfectly well where he was going. There were a dozen likely places along the Yellowstone River, but only one filled his mind. He would find a place somewhere near the great bend of the river, where he could see the craggy Birdsong Mountains aglow in the sunrise, and watch the sun plunge behind the Bridger Mountains at dusk. He would look out of his front door at the majestic Absaroka Mountains, somewhere near where the river punched through them in a narrow canyon. He would look out his back windows toward the westernmost edge of the plains, or the Shields River valley. He mused, as he lay in the quiet, that this whole trip, presuming to hunt for a place to live, was a sham. He already knew.

  But knowing the general area, and selecting a specific spot, were two different things entirely. He would hunt for a place where majestic cottonwoods lined the creeks, where there was good pasture grass, where a man could put in a garden, where cold springs would make delicious drinking in summers and keep food in a spring house during hot times. He would find a place that could not be surprised, where a man would have a few moments to reach safety. He would find a place where his eyes would feast on the world, and his flesh would rejoice, and his nostrils would suck in the scents of wild roses.

  The next two days he made his solitary way up the Yellowstone River, seeing no one at all. Sometimes he left pony tracks in decaying snow. At other times he took his horse through mud. His passage would be easy to follow, and for that reason he paused now and then to study the land behind him, sometimes watching from a forested spur of mountain. But he saw no sign of human life, and his journey began to take on the quality of a trip across the Atlantic in
a rowboat.

  But he didn’t mind. He rode carefully, knowing there would be no help if he got into trouble, broke a bone, took sick, or got caught in a cruel spring snowstorm. He had lived over six decades, much of it in wilderness, by being careful when he was alone, and strangely, by loving this land so deeply that he was nurtured and sheltered and fed by it. In some places the placid Yellowstone ran between yellow bluffs; in other places it ran through cloistered bottomlands guarded by rolling prairie. In other places along towering gray cliffs that hid the snow-clad Rocky Mountains to the south. That day he shot a yearling buck, apologizing to it for taking its life. The meat was good, and the weather cold enough so he could carry the meat with him for days.

  Then at last, after circumventing one impassable gorge, he drifted into the country that he intended to be his home the rest of his life. The great bend of the Yellowstone lay only a few miles ahead. And even before he reached it, he felt at home.

  five

  Skye hurt. Instead of sitting his horse and absorbing the area that would be his home, he slid painfully off and eased to the stony turf, knowing that the minute he alighted sharp pain would shoot up his legs. He had ridden horses all his life, but now it was all he could manage to sit a horse for an hour. The hurt would drive upward from his knees to his loins to his hip and back, and then he would have to dismount and walk awhile until the pain lessened.

  Now he eased to the grass and felt his moccasins touch earth. He was used to pain. He had bullet wounds, knife wounds, a nose pulped by brawling early in his life, giant scars and scratches, and more recently the pain of all his years, lancing his bones and settling in every joint.

  This would be the place of his old age, and he wondered why. Of all the ranges and prairies and hills and deserts he had roamed over a lifetime in the American West, why had he come to this place? He couldn’t say. It was beautiful, but there were many vistas across this country that were more so. It was not a lush land, and would not afford much of a living. He stood on a brushy and uneven flat that had once been riverbed. One would not plow here because the blade would strike the river cobbles that lay just below.