North Star

by Richard S. Wheeler

  “Is she a witch?” the boy asked.

  “She’s a medicine woman of her people. She has great powers. She’s also a warrior woman, very good with a bow and arrow. Would you like to meet her?”

  The question occasioned a flurry of worried glances among the adults, but then the boy nodded.

  “Come along now, all of you,” Skye said.

  They hesitantly followed Skye as he limped back to Victoria, and let them gather around her.

  “This is Many Quill Woman of the Absaroka People. I didn’t know her tongue at first, so I called her Victoria, after the Queen. And she is a queen. You might call her a princess. That’s a good word for her, because she was given great powers to help and heal people.”

  They stared at Victoria, seeing an Indian for the first time.

  “Is she a real princess?” one woman asked.

  “I would say so,” Skye said.

  Victoria felt the glint of wetness forming in her eyes.

  eighteen

  Barnaby Skye sliced the antelope haunch thin and used up the last of it. The company hadn’t had meat on its tin mess plates for a week. Some of the women contributed boiled spuds. Skye hadn’t had a potato in years, and relished every bite. The women from another wagon boiled a kettle of parched corn. With a little salt, it tasted just fine, and built a comfort in the belly.

  They all eyed the Skyes, sometimes furtively, sometimes boldly. They studied Skye’s top hat, this one the fourth or fifth he had owned, gotten at a trading post. It was a silk one because beaver had gone out of fashion. It sat rakishly on Skye’s gray locks, and never moved, as if it had grown from his scalp.

  Skye thought that Victoria had exhibited great restraint, remembering not to cuss in front of the smaller children, except for a few hells and damns, which they had already mastered from their fathers. Victoria had never quite understood tabooed words. There were none among the Absaroka People. All words were good. So over a lifetime she had derived a vast repertoire of forbidden white men’s words and phrases, which she employed with great relish.

  Soon the women hustled the children off to their bedrolls, which were laid out under the three wagons, and then most of the adults hastened back to the bright campfire, which the men of the company had built up to drive back the darkness. Skye never was quite comfortable with fires like that, which turned them all into targets. But he was too old and crippled to care now.

  The adults drifted to the campfire as soon as chores were done, all of them eager for what was to come. This would be a night of stories, and Skye knew they intended to pump him for all he could tell them. Much to his astonishment, these westering people pulled two rocking chairs from wagons, and these were soon occupied by elder women, the dowager queens of this wagon company.

  “Ah, Skye, did I hear you say you had a younger wife?” asked one of the gents named Monroe.

  “I do, sir, Blue Dawn of the Shoshones. I call her Mary. She’s quite a bit younger than I, sir, and a beauty.”

  “Ah, Skye, that’s very unusual.”

  “Not at all. In most plains tribes, men of prominence have several wives, and the more wives, the more prominent they are. A chief might have several.”

  “How does the Mrs. Skye with us feel about this?” asked a graying woman, in a rush.

  “Hell, I pushed and shoved for years to get my man to take one. I even made the match. The old cuss, he kept saying one was enough, but I would have liked a dozen. I’d get to boss’em all around, because I was the first.”

  “A dozen wives? Surely you’re making a joke!” said a lady.

  “Hey, wives do all the work, see? The more wives, the less work for me. I gotta scrape a buffalo hide for weeks if I’m alone. Get a bunch of wives, and I’ll scrape a hide and tan it in a day or two. I get tired of cooking. Give me a few wives, and I’m happy.”

  “But how … do you have separate teepees?”

  “Hell no, we’re all in there together. Me and Skye and Mary, we got one little lodge.”

  “One lodge! How do you manage? I mean, privacy?”

  “I don’t know that word,” Victoria said. Skye laughed softly. Victoria knew the meaning exactly, but it was more fun doing this her way.

  “It’s dark in there,” Skye said. He was starting to enjoy this.

  “Where is she now?” someone asked.

  “With her people, the Shoshones, far south of here,” Skye said. “That’s where we’re headed.”

  “I would think each wife would want a lodge of her own. Just to tell the children apart,” said a woman in brown gingham.

  “Children, they’re all the same. I got children I never had,” Victoria said maliciously. “Every time I look, there’s a new one.”

  Skye thought he heard breaths released.

  “I don’t suppose these were proper Christian marriages, were they?” asked a frowning young man.

  “We were married according to the customs of the Crows and Snakes,” Skye said. “A pleasant ceremony in which the parents give away the bride.”

  “Did you pay a lot?”

  “A gift to the family, sir, not payment. You offer a gift. Some horses, or a rifle, or blankets. You offer the biggest gift you can, and the bride’s family decides whether that’ll do. When you get married, they gift you back, help you set up your household.”

  “Sounds like buying a woman to me.” The stuffy fellow was determined to prove the moral superiority of whites.

  “Oh, white women sometimes come with a dowry. Their parents are buying a husband, I suppose,” Skye said.

  “That’s different,” the fellow persisted.

  “I’d like to buy a few white men,” Victoria said. “I’d like half a dozen.”

  That stopped the talk for a stumble or two.

  “Tell us about your days in the fur trade,” an older man asked, obviously steering away from plural marriage. “Were you ever comfortable, living in nature?”

  “Hardly ever,” Skye said. “We lived in the wilds. We took our ration of rain and sleet, of heat and starving. We took arrows and sickness, broken bones and tumbles off of horses. We froze at night, hurt all day. Some Yanks, they make it sound romantic, but I assure you, sir, it rarely was pleasant. My bones hurt just thinking about wading a river in winter. There weren’t a hundred comfortable days in a year.”

  “How many grizzly bears did you face?”

  “More than I want to remember. See this?” Skye lifted up his repaired bear-claw necklace “Those are grizzly claws, and they give me my medicine.”

  “What’s medicine?”

  “Inner powers, I suppose. Other things too. Bear wisdom. Bear whispers in my ear, sometimes, so I stay away from a cave, or watch out what’s on the riverbank, or I study the sky because weather’s coming.”

  They stared at the old necklace, that Skye had restrung half a dozen times in his life, including the time last fall when he stumbled upon a denning grizzly. Those six-inch claws were formidable.

  “You put a lot of balls into a grizzly? I’ve heard it takes ten or fifteen to kill one,” a man named Peters asked.

  “The grizzlies are my brothers,” Skye said. “They know another bear when they see one, and leave me alone. We see each other and turn away.”

  “You pullin’ our leg, Skye?”

  “It’s Mister Skye, sir. Form of address I prefer. When I was a seaman in the Royal Navy, the officers were all ‘mister’ or ‘sir,’ and the rest of us, we hardly had first and last names. When I got to the New World, to this place where ordinary men could be misters, I took to it. From then on, I was as good as any officer in the Royal Navy. Call me Mister Skye, and I’ll be grateful.”

  “You left the navy?”

  “I deserted, sir. I was pressed in, right off the streets of London at age thirteen, and it took me seven years to escape. That was at Fort Vancouver, on the Columbia River, in the twenties. I jumped ship with nothing but my clothes and a belaying pin. I’ve been on my own ever since. I haven’t re
gretted my escape, not for a moment. And I don’t apologize for deserting. They made me a slave and I escaped their slavery.”

  “Amen to that,” said Skaggs.

  “You fight injuns?” That question rose from a nervous young man with muttonchops.

  “There’s no way I could have survived, sir, without defending myself.”

  “Which tribes are the worst. The most ruthless?”

  “Goddamn Siksika,” Victoria snapped. “Blackfeet.”

  Several women began fanning themselves with their hats.

  “The Crows and the Blackfeet have a few grudges,” Skye said. “I think the fiercest I’ve ever faced were the Comanches. I tangled with them once, taking some people to Santa Fe. They don’t fear death and like to give pain. They are the world’s most terrible torturers,” he added. “We saw it, and we’ll never forget it.”

  Victoria looked grouchy. She considered the tribes of the southern plains to be toothless.

  “Cheyenne are better,” she said. “Old Cheyenne women, they’ll tie you to a tree and skin you alive, piece by piece.”

  That caused a stir.

  They listened to Skye tell about that trip, and his other trips from his years as a guide, and the people he had taken into the unknown American West, the peers of England, the missionaries, the scientists, the army officers, and even a traveling medicine show once. He told about meeting Victoria and courting her, and learning about her Otter clan and family and Kicked-in-the-Bellies band. He told them about the rendezvous of the mountain men, and the artists and noblemen and adventurers who showed up at them. He told them about Jawbone, the strange fearless colt that became his horse-brother, a ferocious warrior in his own right, and a sacred animal known to all the tribes of the plains. The ugliest, strangest horse that ever lived, but also the greatest of all horses.

  And before they knew it the hour had grown late, and these weary people were drifting off.

  “Well, Skye, ah, Mister Skye, this has been quite an evening,” Skaggs said. “We’re lucky to have run into you. We’ve never met a mountaineer before.”

  “Or a medicine woman, either,” Skye added.

  Skaggs seemed discomfited.

  Skye watched them settle. The men unrolled blankets under the wagons. The women and children crowded into wall tents. This company paused for evening prayers. Skaggs offered up the Lord’s Prayer, and then they drifted to their beds.

  Victoria was smiling broadly, as she always did when she had done the most mischief.

  They had hardly settled in their blankets when lightning whitened the western heavens, followed by a distant roll of thunder. They both sprang up at once. They had no shelter and needed one fast. June thunderstorms could be vicious, cold and cruel, and often dumped hail on unwary people. There were a few cottonwoods around, but they offered no protection.

  They had settled on an open flat at the confluence of the rivers. Behind a way, the south cliffs of the Yellowstone rose high, but these were half a mile off. They didn’t hesitate. Skye caught the picketed horses and threw on the blankets and saddles and pulled hackamores over their heads. Victoria rolled up their blankets and their handful of possessions, and tied them behind the saddle cantles. Gamely, he clambered into his saddle, while she climbed aboard her pony. They reached the majestic cliff about the time the sky whitened regularly, and a drumroll of booming thunder seemed never to stop. The wind picked up, eddying cold moist air over them, with its promise of torrents. An overhang eluded them, and Skye was just surrendering to the idea of an icy drenching when Victoria steered her pony up a crevice in the cliff and under an overhang. A bright white flash of lightning informed them they would share the refuge with an angry black bear sow and cub.

  There was perhaps twenty yards between the bears and the ponies. Skye halted. It was only the continuing lightning that revealed the presence of the bears.

  “We’re staying here,” he said to the sow. “Sister, you’re not going to scare us off.”

  She rose on her hind legs, while the cub ran behind her. Lightning caught her at her most angry, her claws extended.

  “We’re staying here, woman. Look after your cub,” he said.

  The rains swept in, a sudden rattling and clattering everywhere, and Skye was grateful for the refuge. It was even better than his lodge. The winds gusted moisture over them, but that was nothing compared to the torrent a few feet away.

  Somehow, the rain settled the sow, and she returned to four legs and then drove her cub to the far edge of the overhang, another few yards distant. There she paused, just before a sheet of water, and halted. It would do.

  Sister Bear would let Skye and Victoria live.

  nineteen

  Mary regretted slicing up the harness of those men. Now she was stuck on a mosquito-ridden island while they repaired it. She wore the poncho, and it helped, except around her ankles and neck and forehead. But the horse suffered, and the constant lashing of its tail did little to relieve its torment.

  And across the channel of the North Platte, those former Confederates were no doubt riveting or tying their harness, unable to move until they could hook the mules to their wagon. If they had rivets they could make repairs easily; if not, they would have to bore holes in the leather and then lash the severed pieces with a thong, a slow and miserable process.

  Mary bitterly endured, knowing the men were not far distant, beyond the band of riverside trees. She was fairly safe behind walls of brush and trees on her island, but the whine of mosquitoes maddened her and the horse. She finally led the miserable animal to a place where there was mud stretching into water, and patiently coated the horse with it. One handful at a time, she ran a protective coating of mud over its rump and flanks and withers and neck and chest, and then its belly and legs. The horse eyed her gratefully, she thought, and quieted. She rubbed mud over her own neck, without doing much good.

  At one point the horse’s ears pricked forward, and Mary feared it would whinny. She crept to the edge of the island and peered across the channel. Downstream a little, the men were watering their mules and her three ponies. She ached to have her own ponies back, but remained still. She glided back to her new horse and gently rubbed its nose, hoping to keep it from signaling the other horses. Eventually the men and the livestock left the riverbank.

  Mary hunted for food, but the bird nests she found were already deserted, and she spotted no turtles. She saw whiskered catfish, loathsome creatures, and would have eaten one if she had to, but she was spared that. She found bountiful cattails, and systematically pulled them up from their swampy habitat. They had gnarled white roots that could be pulverized and boiled into a thick paste that was nourishing, though vaguely repellent. She would do what she had to. Rocks were hard to find on that island, but she finally found what she needed and mashed the white roots, and added them to a growing heap in the copper pot.

  She built a small fire directly under a stand of cottonwoods that would dissipate the smoke, lighting it with the flint and striker that hung in a pouch from her belt. And then she waited for the water to soften the cattail roots into something she could stomach. Much to her surprise, this had consumed her day, and as twilight overtook her she doused the fire, let the mush cool, and then ate it with her fingers.

  She would not endure another night in this mosquito-misery, and resolved to use the friendly dark to escape, no matter that those men were nearby and might discover her. As darkness settled, she brushed mud off her horse, settled the blanket pad over its back, dropped the saddle and tightened it, and bridled the horse. She rolled up her few goods in the poncho, braving the whining mosquitoes again, and tied the poncho tightly to her saddle. She was as ready as she could be. She mounted, eased the horse across the gravel bar to the south bank without discovery, and made her way downstream, worried that she would be halted at any moment. She stayed in the loose-knit woods, finding just enough light to avoid copses of trees. No one stayed her progress.

  She startled a deer, which st
artled her, but soon she was some good distance from the men and wagon, and steered the horse out to the well-worn trail and into a starlit night. She did not pause, but rode steadily east, the Star That Never Moves always on her left. She rode past a wagon with people bedded down, and was glad her horse and their horses didn’t exchange greetings.

  She rode most of the night, and only when the first blue line of day stretched across the eastern skies did she look for a place to rest herself and the weary horse. She found a low knob, scarcely twenty feet above the country, and took her horse there. It was a much-used place, but there were no mosquitoes, and its contour concealed her from prying eyes.

  She rested until the day was warm and velvet. She saw no one. The Big Road was used mostly by people who could not pay to take the steam trains rolling over the nearby rails.

  On the south slope of the hill she discovered yucca plants, and she rejoiced. A large one dominated a dozen more.

  “I will leave you, Grandfather,” she said to it, but selected a sturdy one for her purposes. She had no digging stick, and would need to use her knife to cut the yucca free, which she did with great care because she did not wish to break her knife. She dug patiently until she could pull the yucca out by its roots, which were thick and long. These were her treasure. She cut off the top of the plant, but kept the roots.

  She eyed her mud-streaked horse and herself, and headed down the hillock and toward the river half a mile distant. The North Platte was lined with thick forest on both sides of its slow-moving current, forests that would shield her from the world. The sun had stirred a soft breeze that carried the scent of spring flowers. She thought she smelled roses, but maybe it was lady slippers. She could not say. She passed through lush grasses joyously reaching for the heavens, and wandered through copses of willows and trees she didn’t know, and finally to a riverbank where there was a soft curve of sandy shore. She scared up red-winged blackbirds, and alarmed a few crows, and then she found herself alone.