Beauty for Ashes

by Win Blevins

  It was cool. The sun wouldn’t broil him. He had nothing to eat. Nothing to drink. He couldn’t move around.

  He touched his ear and his hand came away sticky.

  Syrupy blood.

  He felt of his head. Bloody, matted hair. He remembered the slash of pain from the arrow that furrowed him. Well, the bleeding was stopped.

  He studied the hip. Couldn’t tell a thing about it. Mon dieu, he said to himself, don’t let me be a cripple.

  He slept.

  The morning sun woke him and brought riders. He listened, but the language of the hooves was babble to his ears. He stood up and pulled his throwing knife. He was pretty good with it. If someone crawled into his hideaway, the fellow probably wouldn’t crawl back out.

  The next day, more riders from time to time, close and distant. Waiting.

  He’d wondered how Indians went for days without water on their vision quests. Mostly a trick of the mind…

  So. He hadn’t bled to death from his scalp or his hip. He’d stood the thirst for two full days. He would leave tonight. He would be afoot, wounded, half-crippled, and alone.

  He grinned. Not bad fixings for a mountain man.

  “AFTER ZEM TWO days,” Gideon went on, “I take thought. You and Blue Medicine Horse are dead. Flat Dog, I don’ know—hightailing over the mountains, if he have good sense. I think where the Crow village might be. On the Big Horn somewhere, upper end maybe. Ze Crows, will zey help me? Don’ know.

  “One more chance. Ze general and Diah, they take the furs down the Big Horn to the mouth, float them down the Yellowstone. Then many trappers, they come back up the Big Horn, go toward pass to cross to Siskadee. Maybe can find zese trappers.

  “So I crawl. No can walk, hip is worse, all stiff. Crawl. In two days reach timber, get big stick, stand up and walk leaning on stick. Walk up creek, through pass, down mountain, across plains toward river. Walk maybe a hundred miles, maybe fifteen sleeps.

  “Eat? It is August. Lucky. I eat berries. Sometimes wild onions. Rose hips. You ever have serviceberries and wild onions in mouth at one time? Pretty funny.

  “I hungry, maybe starving, but not starving to death.

  “Get near river, sleep, one morning zis fou, zis madman, he stand over me.” He nodded at Clyman.

  “The Frenchy was sleeping on the sand within ten feet of the Big Horn. I wanted to throw him back, but Fitz said he was big enough to keep.”

  Gideon went on. “After fall hunt, I t’ink, Sam Morgan, if he is still alive…Maybe I shouldn’t hope. If still alive, he goes with village of Rides Twice this winter. I go there. I give him cussing he never forget. Lead me into ambush, get arrow in hip, lose horses and all possibles, ever’ damn t’ing make me a man, not a beast.” He put on his worst mock-angry face. “I cuss you,” he roared. “Now, what you do since August?”

  “On account of he led us into an ambush,” said Flat Dog, “he has given a sun dance.”

  That changed the expressions on the faces of Gideon and Clyman. They knew what it meant.

  The story took the rest of the night.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  OWL WOMAN LOOKED straight into Sam’s eyes. He saw then and there that she intended to tell him the truth, her truth.

  Bell Rock, the host, waited with a neutral face. Yellow Horn, Owl Woman’s husband, kept his gaze in the center fire, like he wanted nothing to do with this.

  “Because Bell Rock asks me to,” she began in the Crow language, “I will tell you what I saw, exactly what I saw.

  “It does not have to do with you personally. I believe you are a man with a good heart.”

  She took a deep breath and let it out. Then she seemed to go into a trance and report from there. “I had a dream. I was lost. I looked around in every direction, my head turning this way, turning that way, and I didn’t know where the people were. Yellow Horn, our children, our grandchildren, the village, all the people of Absaroka, I couldn’t find anyone.

  “I was by a small, pretty lake in the region of the stinking, bubbling springs. I knew it was said to be a special place. From there waters flow from one end of the lake into the great water-everywhere to the west, on the other end into the great water-everywhere to the east. It seemed a good place of green grass and thick stands of lodgepole pines, except that I was alone.

  “I didn’t know which way to go, what direction to start looking for the people. Soon, though, I heard something. It was hard to make out. Moans, maybe, deep, low sounds uttered by human voices, or voices that had once been human. I walked in the direction of those sounds.

  “But before long, even the moans were lost. Instead I saw white people, lots of faceless white people, marching through the country on horses. They rode, they rode, they rode. They didn’t see me. They didn’t look at me or anything, they just rode with their blank faces pointed toward some horizon, somewhere far off.

  “When I went in a different direction, I heard the human utterances again. I ran toward them. I lost them. I panicked. I heard them again and ran in another direction. I saw more faceless white people, riding, riding.

  “Suddenly I was on a path alongside a pond, among the white people, marching, marching. They didn’t see me, and I was alone. I could hear the moaning voices, soft, but close.

  “On the pond were lily pads. Except that the lily pads were faces, the faces of the Absaroka people under a film of water. The faces were dead, the people were dead. In rows many, many of them, they lay dead. Their countenances were ghastly white, their eyes frozen open, their lips vermilion.

  “I stood by the side of the pond and looked at the faces of all my people, dead. The white people marched by on their horses, not noticing. Forever they went on, forever and forever. And the people’s death went on forever.”

  She emerged from the trance and looked at Sam. “I understood this to mean that the white people will come into our country and go past and keep coming and going past and keep coming endlessly, and because of them the people will die.

  “I want our people to live. So it is very simple for me. I tell anyone who is willing to listen to have nothing to do with white men, nothing at all.”

  She sighed. “They do not listen, most of them. They want things, the many things you bring to trade. Needles, cooking pots, tomahawks, guns, cloth, blankets—all of these they want. Our women want them even more than our men. It will not stop. I cannot change everyone.

  “But anyone who will listen, I tell them, ‘Do not set your feet on this path. It is the path of death. And some listen. Gray Hawk and Needle, they listen. And they choose. Life, not death.”

  She heaved breath in and out once, as though she had run a mile. “Life.”

  Again she raised her eyes straight into Sam’s. “Meadowlark’s family respects you. I respect you. We know you mean no harm. But they see you, and I see you, the way we regard the first flake of snow in a pleasant autumn. The first sign of a long and terrible winter.”

  AFTER A FEW days Sam asked to speak with Owl Woman again. Yellow Horn sat with them, and once more Sam had the sense that the door of Owl Woman’s heart and mind was in some way open, Yellow Horn’s closed.

  He felt like he had to deal with that first. To Owl Woman he said, “My heart is good toward you, and I sense that yours is good toward me. But Yellow Horn, I sense that your attitude is different. I ask why.”

  Yellow Horn scowled and worked his mouth but stopped himself from saying anything.

  Owl Woman volunteered, “He has seen you work your power over the coyote and over the horse, so that they do your will. He believes that this power shows you possess a bad medicine. He thinks he, and all of us, should oppose this medicine.”

  She let Sam take that in. “I do not agree with him,” she added, “and that is not what you have come to talk about.”

  Sam looked from Owl Woman to Yellow Horn and back to the woman. He accepted. He would pass by Yellow Horn’s attitude.

  He had thought and thought about what to say about
Owl Woman’s dream, and all his thoughts came to nothing. He ventured forth in ignorance.

  “What you fear, I understand it,” he began in the Crow language. “But it is a fear only, not a prophecy. Many dreams come to make us afraid, or give voice to our fears. They are not gifts of the spirits. They do not foretell the future. They are a child’s fantasy only. On one breath of the wind of what is real, they blow away.

  “Most white people will never come to this country. Never. It is not the kind of country they like. They want to plow the earth, plant, grow their crops, and harvest. They want to feed their cows, have calves, and eat the meat that grows inside their fences. They have no desire to follow the buffalo. That seems idle to them, worse than idle. And they would not like the earth here. It is dry. There is little rain. Never would they be able to till the soil and grow their food, as they like to do.

  “This desire to grow things, to live in one place, to eat meat from animals they own—these wants live deep within them.”

  Owl Woman raised an eyebrow, and Sam knew she was reacting to the extraordinary idea that people could own animals. He pressed on.

  “We white men who come here are rare exceptions. We like the life they hate. They hate the life we love.

  “They have land in their own country, as much as they will ever want. Abundant land, waiting only for the axe to clear away the trees and the plow to cut the earth. They will never turn these arid plains into farms, or the high mountains into pastures.”

  Sam thought a moment. He was only saying what every mountain man knew. “As evidence I give you one fact. A few young white men come here. The women stay home. Home, a man’s center, the place he belongs. Where his woman is, there is a man’s home. No white women come here, or will.

  “Some few of us beaver hunters will join with your women. Then the place where we live, where our hearts sing, it will become home to us as well. You will not become white. We will become red.”

  She nodded. It was an acceptance that Sam, at least, had become a Crow.

  “Other beaver men, you will see, they will go home to their women and not come back. Already many have done that. Young men will have their sport, their great days of wandering and hunting. Then they will go home. You will see.”

  Owl Woman waited, gave Sam time to think whether he had anything more to say. He decided he didn’t.

  Finally she answered, “You speak with the voice of mind, I with the voice of dream. You tell what the two eyes of the head see. What I tell, that is seen only with the single eye that lives in the heart.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  WHAT OWL WOMAN said about the eye of the heart disturbed Sam. He didn’t know what to make of it. He spent that night telling himself that he and Meadowlark were finished. He spent the second night promising himself that he accepted this fate. She isn’t mine. She isn’t mine. She isn’t mine. Maybe a little bit of him believed it, and grieved.

  The next morning he ordered himself to stop maundering and get on with his life.

  Regardless of what the future might bring, Sam had a present to get straight. He and Flat Dog, having nothing to trade for a lodge, cut poles and built a lean-to that shared one wall with James and Gideon’s. That was shelter for the winter. Pemmican from the fall hunt, and the elk they would hunt in the snow, that made enough food.

  Then the future. Sam didn’t know what Flat Dog wanted, but he and Gideon needed plews to trade at rendezvous. He felt half-desperate to get a decent outfit again.

  By comparison Gideon was lucky. When he escaped from the Lakotas, he wasn’t stark naked. Aside from clothes, he had the gear he wore on his person, his rifle, pistol, shot pouch with powder, a few lead balls, and a vial of beaver medicine, throwing knife, butcher knife, patch knife, flint and steel, even the pipe and tobacco in his gage d’amour. Right pert fixin’s, some of the beaver men would have said.

  Sam needed all that and much more.

  Luckily, Clyman was willing to let the two of them use his traps. Unless a man was desperate, the few winter beaver weren’t worth the effort.

  Sam and Gideon laid plans to work the nearby creeks in pairs. Up one creek, down another, back to the village.

  So imagine when, in the twilight of their second day of work, they came into camp to find Needle and Meadowlark sitting at the mountain men’s fire, talking to Flat Dog and Clyman.

  Sam sat down and, keeping his eyes down, helped himself to the meat in the pot.

  It was proper, in a way. Proper for a mother and sister to come talk to Flat Dog. Proper for a young maiden to talk to friends of her brother’s, if she treated them like other brothers, and there was no prospect of courtship.

  There is no courtship, is there?

  Half an hour later, when the women got up to leave, Sam got up with them. He walked them back to their lodge. Needle had promised him three pairs of moccasins for an elk hide. Now she was going to draw around his foot with charcoal on deer skin to get his size.

  When Needle came back out with the charcoal, Meadowlark came with her. While Needle was bent over Sam’s foot sketching, Meadowlark mouthed three words to Sam. They were in English, a language she had never spoken a word of. But she had heard Sam say these English words many times to her: “I love you.”

  He looked into her face, and she opened it to him. He saw nothing there but sadness, and in her eyes infinite sadness. Having let him see, she tucked her head away, turned, and slipped back into the tipi.

  SAM USED FLAT Dog. That made him feel guilty, but he could see no other way to do it. The message was simply, “Meet me under the overhang at midday.”

  He stood half crouched, though there was no reason to crouch. His blood thrummed with anxiety. Would she come?

  This was a place the river had undercut the bank in the spring, when it was high. A fir tree stood on the point, and some of its roots were exposed below, where Sam stood. In another spring or two the river would cut too much dirt away, and the fir would pitch into the melt-swollen waters.

  Now the river had backed away, winter-thin. The overhang was cold. The sun, low in the late-winter sky, never reached this cave. Sam shivered. He looked along the sandy strip upstream, back toward the village.

  The corner of his eye caught the fall of a shadow, and he jerked his head the other way. Meadowlark, with Flat Dog. She reached for Sam’s hand, as she knew he liked, but she wasn’t smiling.

  “Better to be alone?” he said in the Crow language.

  Flat Dog’s face stayed impassive.

  “It’s better if my brother’s here.”

  “I love you,” Sam said in English.

  “I love you,” she answered, and maybe her lips did start to smile.

  In Crow he went on, “Let’s go away together. I have traded Muskrat Woman for her travel tipi.” It was a ragged affair, and they both knew it. “Spring is coming, and warm weather.” He paused, unable to think of what to say.

  “I love you,” she began, then proceeded in Crow. “Joins with Buffalo, I cannot go outside the will of my family, my people. I will live my life in the circle of a Crow village. In that circle are safety, caring, warmth, companionship, everything that matters. I will raise my children here.

  “Many people believe Owl Woman’s dream. Especially my mother and father believe it.”

  Sam wanted to rage that this was impossible. The beaver hunters were a couple of hundred men, the Indians ten of thousands. But he knew better than to argue.

  “Unless you can change their minds…”

  She turned away slowly. For a moment he thought she would turn back and say something more, something different. But she set her shoulders back the way she came, and in an instant was out of sight.

  Sam looked into Flat Dog’s eyes. There he saw compassion. In that moment he was sure that he and Flat Dog would always be friends.

  “I’m sorry,” said Flat Dog. “For both of you.”

  WEEKS PASSED, FOR Sam, in a fever. He and Gideon trapped. Sam and Flat Dog hunted
elk. Sam made arrows to trade for small items. Around their nighttime fires, the beaver men told stories, sometimes stories of the frontier back in the States, a land of fable kinged by alligator horses who could whup ten panthers at once and eat their whelp for breakfast. More often now they told stories of their own kind, the men variously called mountain men, mountaineers, and beaver hunters, men of the white, black, brown, and red tribes, men who had done things that would be remembered, that people would look back and tell stories about, tales with heroes worthy of big stories. John Colter’s run from the Blackfeet. Hugh Glass’s crawl across the plains. Diah Smith and the griz that bit his head. And they knew, wordlessly, that they themselves were doing deeds worth remembering and telling stories about. Sam wondered if he was a hero.

  He barely heard these stories, though. His mind was in a roil about what to do about Meadowlark. He saw her often, but never alone. He looked at her when he thought no one would notice. Sometimes she looked at him, and he saw in her eyes that she grew sadder and more hopeless by the day.

  He had no idea what to do, until he asked himself what would happen in one of these big stories.

  HE HAD NEVER been so frustrated in his life. Three straight days. Normally Meadowlark came to the river for water in the time between sunset and darkness. One woman from each lodge did. The first evening, though, she came with another girl, both talking gaily, so Sam did nothing. The next evening Needle came instead. The next evening, the same. Sam knew very well that Meadowlark usually made this trip, not Needle. He asked himself over and over if they had figured what he was up to. But they couldn’t possibly. He had been very careful.

  It wasn’t happening. He was ready, and beyond ready.

  This evening no one had come. Full darkness was gathering, and no one had collected water for the Gray Hawk household tonight. An impossibility, yet it was true.

  Squatting out of sight, he fidgeted.

  A shadow. It glided along the path, flickering between trees. He couldn’t see who it was. In the near darkness, it grew close and passed. The figure seemed to be running. He never did see who it was. Unbelievable. It was the right size and shape for Meadowlark, but most young women in the village were about that size and shape.