The Canyon of Bones

by Richard S. Wheeler

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  one

  two

  three

  four

  five

  six

  seven

  eight

  nine

  ten

  eleven

  twelve

  thirteen

  fourteen

  fifteen

  sixteen

  seventeen

  eighteen

  nineteen

  twenty

  twenty-one

  twenty-two

  twenty-three

  twenty-four

  twenty-five

  twenty-six

  twenty-seven

  twenty-eight

  twenty-nine

  thirty

  thirty-one

  thirty-two

  thirty-three

  thirty-four

  thirty-five

  thirty-six

  thirty-seven

  thirty-eight

  thirty-nine

  forty

  forty-one

  forty-two

  forty-three

  forty-four

  forty-five

  forty-six

  forty-seven

  forty-eight

  forty-nine

  BY RICHARD S. WHEELER FROM TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES

  Praise for Richard S. Wheeler

  Author’s Note

  Copyright Page

  For Win and Meredith Blevins

  one

  It was time to take another wife. Barnaby Skye had been thinking about it for a long time, and knew he could not put it off. White streaked his hair and the trimmed beard he wore these days. His youth was gone.

  He wanted a child, a boy if God would give him one. All these years he had hoped. But Victoria was barren or maybe he was, who could say? He had no child and thus was the poorest of men.

  A man without a child does not see far into the future or care about it; he can live only in the past or present, as Skye was doing more and more. It was as if life had become sunsets rather than sunrises, memories rather than dreams.

  He loved to awaken early, even before first light, and slip outside his lodge into the sweet morning air. Then he would stretch, enjoy his own well-rested body, and walk to a nearby hill to greet the day and to pray in his own way.

  Now he stood on a ridge, the Absaroka village still slumbering in half-light below him, while he absorbed the blue dawn and the quickening light that began to give color to a gray world. On clear days, such as this one, dawns started out blue, a thin line of blue across the eastern horizon, promising the return of the sun and the stirring of life.

  Those were the best moments. Victoria would still be asleep, warm under the thick buffalo robes in winter or a light two-point Hudson’s Bay blanket in softer seasons. All the years of their marriage she had been his companion, adventuring where he did, sharing his joys and perils. He loved her.

  And now he was aware of the passage of time. The life he had chosen had taken its toll on his body. One could not live as the nomadic Absarokas did without experiencing bitter cold and torpid heat, starvation, poor diet, thirst, and always the danger of war or pestilence. Ancient injuries, some of them going back to the days of his youth when he was a British seaman, would lurk in his body, awaiting the chance to hurt again. And his long thick nose, battered and broken by brawls, was as sensitive to hurt as baby’s flesh.

  The Crows, as they were called by white trappers, were blessed with a land that usually offered abundant food and hides from the thick herds of buffalo roaming the prairies; that offered strong wiry ponies descended from Spanish Barb stock released by the conquistadors. There were cool mountain valleys to comfort them in summers, sun-warmed river flats to pull the sting out of winter, alpine meadows rioting with spring wildflowers, tumbling mountain waterfalls, and bald eagles riding updrafts, to make a poet of each Crow.

  It was a good land if the Crow people could keep it. When Skye thought of the changes that were disrupting the world just over the horizons, he wondered what the future would bring for these cheerful people. Off to the south a vast migration of Yanks heading for the Oregon country and California had decimated grass and wildlife and woodlands for miles to either side of the trail. Riverboats plied their way up the treacherous Missouri, discharging adventurers as well as goods deep in this land where the tribes had been sovereign for as long as their memory knew.

  But so far, the life of the Absarokas hadn’t changed much. It followed the stately passage of the seasons, and Victoria’s people were just as they always were. Her band, the Kicked-in-the-Bellies, drifted from cool mountain valleys in summer to hunting on the plains in the fall to protected river flats in the winter. Its hunters had little trouble making meat; its gatherers had little trouble harvesting buffalo berries, chokecherries, wild onions, various roots and vegetables.

  This late summer day, the Crow people would begin their trek southward for their annual encampment with the Shoshones to trade and gossip, and to cement the alliance that helped both peoples to resist the dangerous Sioux and Blackfeet and their allies, the Cheyenne and Gros Ventres or Atsina, and sometimes the Arapaho.

  These were festive days. The band would load its possessions on travois, and then meander south past the Pryor Mountains, south past the Big Horn Mountains, then through an arid land along the great river called the Big Horn, to rendezvous with the Shoshones. There they would make sweet the days of late summer, enjoy the cool eves, flirt, smoke the red-stone pipes, and dream. This year the place would be on the extreme west edge of the Big Horn Valley, where pine forests guarded the land of geysers far above. It was a good place.

  It would take Victoria only a little while to load the two travois. He and Victoria had a small buffalo-hide lodge and few possessions. He might be a headman, a war leader for her people, but he was not rich the way most Crow chiefs and chieftains were. They had many wives to make them wealthy. A good hunter could keep a dozen women busy cooking meat, making pemmican for winter, and scraping and tanning hides that could be traded at the various posts for all sorts of treasures, such as guns and powder and lead, beads, knives, awls, calico, and great kettles. Some headmen had hundreds of horses that could be traded for valuable things. Skye had only a few horses. Jawbone, his strange, ugly blue roan medicine horse, was chief among them. There were a few more, two riding horses and two travois horses, and a few half-broken mustang colts for the future.

  His family was too small. Victoria was forced to do everything, and had no one to share the heavy load of daily toil. Neither did she have any children or sisters or grandmothers in her household to share the day with, to gossip with, to talk about herbs and medicines with, to discuss ailments with, to sew with, to make moccasins with, to dig roots with, to pound berries into fat and shredded meat with. It grieved her, having no other wife to share the toil of this household. It wore her down. Other senior wives among her people were luckier. There were younger wives to share the work. They were like servants, responding to the bid and call of the older or first wife, the sits-beside-him wife
. It was a matter of status. It was the right of the first wife to have the company and service of young wives.

  Which is why Victoria, as much as she loved Skye, was often moody and even angry, and spent much of her time away from his small and sterile lodge, preferring the society of other women.

  But there was something else. No self-respecting headman among the Absaroka people would think of having just one wife. A man’s authority was measured by his wives. His wealth was measured in wives. His status as an important man among the people was metered by wives. Even a young and modest youth who had counted coup once or twice, and dreamed of being a great leader of his people, managed a couple of wives. And a chief often had six or eight, and sometimes even more, and had fat lodges, with extra poles to hold up all that buffalo hide, to house his menagerie. And those fat lodges teemed with children too. A chief might have half a dozen, plus two or three pregnant wives to increase his family.

  It had taken Skye a long time to realize that Victoria was ashamed of him, for he had but one wife, a small lodge, no children, and few horses. Yes, he was esteemed as a hunter and his Hawken had contributed much meat to the band as well as defending it against horse thieves, Blackfeet raiders, and the ominous and ever-present Sioux.

  How often Victoria had hinted, and finally begged for a larger lodge. Far from dreading the presence of another wife or considering one a potential rival, she had pleaded for one or two or a dozen. And there it had stopped. Something in Barnaby Skye had faithfully adhered to the European way of looking at marriage: one man and one woman, bound sacredly together always. He had her and he loved her; why seek anyone else?

  He had always been hesitant. How could he split love in two? How could he bring another woman into his lodge and love and nurture her as he had tried to love and nurture Victoria? How could he divide himself in such fashion? How could he spend his nights in the arms of one and not the other? How could he even embrace one while the other lay inert in her robes, well aware of those intimacies that would fill the lodge with soft noises? How did the Absaroka people manage such things, except by indifference, and a sense of wedlock that had more to do with convenience and childbearing than love? In this tribe the women formed their own nation and society; the men formed another, and little did the separate nations care about one another. Find a gathering, a party, a smoke, a feast, and it would usually be all women or all men.

  He had not sought anyone else. At least until now. This dawn he was afflicted with two desolating thoughts. One was that he had wounded Victoria, not heeding her wishes and hopes and dreams. And yet she had faithfully abided in his lodge all these years, even as his own hair was graying and his life was beginning to enter its last chapters. The other, felt just as keenly, was a sense of loss. He would leave no child behind him. He would be a dead end. With him, the race of Skyes would stop. He was a sole son and if he brought no child into the world, the sun would set.

  It was an odd and sad moment. Had he grown up in London, secure in its ways, he would have an English wife and family now. But his life had taken a hard and in some ways cruel turn long ago, and here he was, swiftly becoming too old to rear a child, teach a boy how to read and think and reason, how to shoot and live in nature, how to respect women and elders and all helpless things. How to give a boy a name, or a girl a name, and make that name a part of his past and a part of the child’s inheritance.

  Now he stood on the brow of the hill watching the skyline turn gold, watching the earth turn into the sun, watching the smoke of cook fires rise from the fifty lodges below him. He scarcely knew who or what he prayed to; the old Anglican God he had always known, or some other great spirit, maybe the same great spirit, but one he saw simply as a Father of all things. He lifted his arms to the bright heaven.

  A wife, a child, a gift not just to himself but to Victoria. If it was not too late.

  two

  A good day! Many Quill Woman loved to travel. Now she busied herself preparing to move out. Skye had brought in the horses from the herd and they stood quietly near the lodge.

  She unpinned the lodge cover, which was held tight by willow sticks threaded through eyelets, and watched the lodge slowly slide to the ground until only the seven poles remained standing. This was a small lodge, truly a hunting lodge, and it grieved her to be so poor.

  Her friends always took pity on her because Skye had no other wives and she was alone. It took more than one woman to erect or lower a lodge. Yellow Paint and Scolding Bird appeared at once, and helped her drag the heavy eight-hide lodge cover free, fold it, and stow it on a travois anchored to the packsaddle of one of the ponies.

  “It’s very sad,” said Yellow Paint

  “Maybe someday he will bless you,” Scolding Bird added.

  “Sonofabitch,” said Many Quill Woman, her favorite English expression she had learned long ago from the days when Skye was with the trappers. The other women had heard this phrase many times, always expressed tartly when she was feeling testy, and laughed. They drifted back to their own lodges, for there was much work to do and the Absaroka women did almost all of it. Men hunted and made war and played games and made love and smoked and listened to elders and sought spirit helpers. Women worked.

  Many Quill Woman, whom Skye called Victoria after the great woman chief of his English people, lifted three lodgepoles from the skeleton, set them on earth, and then toppled the four-pole pyramid that formed the core structure of the lodge. It was her lodge, not Skye’s. Women owned the lodges. She unwound the thong that bound the four poles, stored it in a parfleche, and then anchored the long, slim lodgepoles to the packsaddle of another pony, a yawning mare that wasn’t good for much else.

  Skye wasn’t very ambitious, she thought She heaped their remaining robes and blankets and other possessions on the second travois. Some great men of the people required eight or ten travois and many wives to move. It was odd: the people respected Skye as a hunter and warrior, whose Hawken kept enemies at bay and brought meat to them all. But how could any Absaroka respect a man who had only one overworked wife? And hardly any horses? Something was wrong with him. She still loved him, and would always be beside him, but something was plainly wrong with Skye. And not just Skye. All white men.

  They all had just one wife except those ones who were heading for the big salty lake. One woman. It made no sense. How could they get along with only one woman? Many Quill Woman pitied those poor white women, living all alone, doing all the work. That was a great mystery. For years after she and Skye had become mates, she never saw a white woman Where did the trappers hide them? Back East, they said, but why? Why were white women hidden back there?

  Then finally she saw one or two who had come west with the missionaries, and knew immediately that white women were so frail and pale that they couldn’t stand living away from special shelters the white men called houses. That was it. They were all so weak and sick that they couldn’t function.

  It certainly made no sense, but white people made no sense at all and she had given up trying to understand them. For years, he had tried to help her with her chores but she had always shooed him away. Nothing could be more shameful than having a man who did women’s work. He kept trying to pack things in the parfleches, help lower the lodge cover, pack everything on travois, clean up after meals, while the whole band watched and shook their heads and women came privately to Many Quill Woman and expressed their pity, and hoped she could overcome the shame of it A man who did that wasn’t a man.

  So she had angrily chased Skye away and snapped at him whenever he tried to do woman things, such as gathering firewood.

  “All I want to do is help you. Make your life easier,” he explained.

  “Dammit all to hell, Skye, get out.”

  So he did, greatly puzzled by it. She knew he was trying to be kind to her, loving to her, but he had no idea what a scandal it was among her people. It took a long time, many winters, before she cured him of such bad habits.

  She saw him grooming
Jawbone and admired him anyway even if she didn’t understand him. He was combing the great blue roan medicine horse, while Jawbone snapped his teeth and switched his tail in warning. Never was an uglier horse born; never was a more noble and fierce horse set upon the breast of the earth. Jawbone had narrow-set eyes, flopping ears, an overshot jaw that gave the beast his name, and a nose as formidable as Skye’s own awesome beak, which rose from his skull like the prow of a ship, dominating his entire face. There was something strange and fearsome about it all; as if from the beginning of the world, Jawbone and Skye had been destined to come together.

  The Kicked-in-the-Bellies were soon ready. Children perched in baskets on travois along with the very old. A great mass of horses had been gathered and young herders were ready to drive them. Women had at last loaded their heavy lodges on groaning travois. Many were festively dressed in fine quilled doeskins, but a few had gotten themselves up in bright calicos from the trading posts. Even the young warriors had taken the time to put on their finery.

  The great exodus began without a visible signal from anyone. It simply began its course along the north bank of the Yellowstone, called the Elk River by these bronzed people. Soon it was stretched out a vast distance, but carefully guarded by outriders flanking it on both sides. Many Quill Woman’s heart lifted at the sight of the imposing column; the People of the Black Bird were a great people, strong enough to keep the more numerous Lakota and Siksika away.

  Skye was among those who guarded this great procession. His favorite place was far forward, where he hunted for surprises and ambushes. That was a dangerous place but he preferred it, and the war chiefs of the Absaroka preferred to see him there. Victoria sometimes saw his shining black beaver hat far ahead. He was like the antennae of an insect, sweeping and feeling the country for danger.

  Sometimes he left game in plain sight, a deer or elk he had killed. These were immediately given to the poorest and weakest among the Absarokas. When that happened Many Quill Woman was very proud of her man. His presence was blessing the People.