The Sundown Man

by Jory Sherman

  And that worried me.

  The next morning, two of the scouts came riding in with news of the Ota. From their sign language, I figured out that they had come upon one of the ponies and thought the Ota must be near. There was much gesticulating and a lot of grunts and terse words from the scouts. One Dog listened with impassivity, and I thought I could see his mind working, although he merely grunted in assent every so often and made no comment about the discovery.

  But the camp packed up to leave that place and go where the pony was supposedly waiting for all of us to see it. Scouts came and went, but it did not take long to find the pony. I recognized it as one of those belonging to the Utes, because it had markings painted on it that I had seen the day they attacked us. On its right shoulder was a round circle with a black spot in the center, and on the left shoulder a red feathered arrow. There was a lot excited conversation among those in the tribe who also recognized the pony.

  One Dog was speaking to his braves and using sign language to augment what he was saying. All the time, he was looking around him, up through the hills, at ridges and ravines. He made a sign that was unmistakable since I had some experience back home in Missouri setting traps on a creek. One Dog held both hands together flat and opened and closed them.

  He thought that the pony was a trap, and waved everyone to cover, ordered scouts to ride off in different directions.

  At the same time, One Dog hefted his rifle and checked the pan of the flintlock to see if his powder was still there and still dry. The people began to run toward hiding places while One Dog and some of the braves covered them, peering into the bushes and the gullies for any sign of Ota.

  A quail piped from somewhere up in the hills. One Dog stiffened, and the other braves swung their bows and rifles toward the sound. Another quail whistled from another place, lower down, closer. The braves dropped to their knees. A boy grabbed my arm and dragged me into a shallow depression below some rocks. The women and children all hunkered down and huddled like wet birds. There arose an awful silence.

  Then the silence broke with a piercing, high-pitched screech. Utes poured from hiding places like angry hornets, swooping down toward One Dog and his men on galloping ponies that seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. More yelling and the crackle of rifle fire removed all doubt that we were surrounded and the Utes were riding in for the kill.

  The Utes swooped down on top of us, some swinging war clubs, others shooting arrows at us. One had a Henry or a Winchester and was firing rapidly. He was afoot and trying to take careful aim. I saw him behind a bush, kneeling down on one leg, the rifle bucking against his shoulder with each shot. I had seen such a rifle before, in Hogg’s possession. He said it was a new Winchester ’73, and he had twenty of them that he hoped to sell out West when we got to Oregon. I wondered if he’d sold at least one to the Utes, or had bartered for his life with it. Anger boiled up in me when I thought about Cassius Hogg and his treachery.

  The Arapaho put up a good fight, the braves running from place to place, avoiding bullets and arrows, dropping Utes from horses with their arrows and bullets from their guns. But some Arapaho men fell, bleeding, and another’s head was split in two when a Ute brained him with a war club.

  Some of the bigger boys ran out, picked up weapons from the fallen braves, and chased the Utes on foot, firing arrows at them, arrows that had no force nor direction.

  Then, suddenly, the fight was over.

  The Utes rode right on past us and headed south at a full gallop, voicing their victory cries. The women scrambled from their hiding places and fell upon the wounded men as if trying to breathe life into them. They dabbed at their bloody wounds with cloths and thin pieces of leather.

  Some of the braves gave chase on horseback, but One Dog called the rest back. He had lost three good men and four others were badly wounded. Two boys were slightly hurt. Our small band was dwindling in number and the number of Ota scalps were but two, which a brave brought back to where we were, the locks dripping blood.

  The women keened for the dead. The boys built burial scaffolds and One Dog organized the band, giving orders quietly. He looked at me when he was finished, saw me standing there with my fists clenched.

  “So, you have anger,” he said to me.

  “Yes. Much anger,” I said in Arapaho without thinking.

  “You would fight the Ota?”

  “I would kill the Ota.”

  “You would kill for the people?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then, you are one of us, White Man. You are one of the people.”

  Realizing that I had spoken to One Dog in his own tongue, I went silent. I just glared at him, angry then at myself. Angry, not from giving myself away by speaking Arapaho, but angry at my confused feelings at that moment.

  I was wondering, when the time came, if I could kill One Dog.

  And if I did kill him, I wondered if I would have a guilty conscience.

  Eight

  The Ota had planned their ambush well. Two of the Arapaho braves who chased after them were killed soon afterward. From what I could gather after listening to the talk and deciphering the sign language, other Utes had been waiting for just such a move. As the riders rode down a narrow defile, Ota braves rose up on both sides and bombarded them with a cascade of arrows. One Arapaho had died instantly, I think, and the other bled to death on the ride back to where we were.

  It was a bad day for the small band of Arapaho, and I grieved for the dead myself just as earlier I had grieved when the Ota had killed Walking Wolf. All the dead men were laid to rest on the scaffolds. I learned later that they were left there to avoid having their bones scattered by coyotes. The buzzards and worms would pick the bodies clean, but their skeletons would remain intact. One Arapaho boy told me they had learned this from the Crow people, who lived to the north. Some of the Arapaho apparently buried their dead just like we did, wrapping them in elk skins or deerskins instead of putting them in coffins.

  One of the Arapaho braves retrieved the decoy pony, but when he tried to ride it, the pony turned up lame. One Dog told two of his warriors, Blue Cloud and Silver Rain, to kill it, and we ate horse meat while we continued to track the Utes through the rugged foothills. The Ota always seemed to be at least a day ahead of us.

  Arguments began to break out among the Arapaho. Some of the braves wanted to go to the Sun Dance ceremony, but One Dog wanted his horses back and wanted to kill the Ota and take their women and ponies. The braves argued that their power was weak because they were not going to perform the Sun Dance. One Dog said that they were weak because they had let the Ota take away much of what they owned. It was clear to me that One Dog wanted revenge. All I wanted was to get my sister back.

  A couple of days later, One Dog gathered his little band together and spoke to them.

  “The summer grows short,” he said. “Soon, it will be the Moon of the Changing Leaves. I know where the Ota goes. The Ota will also watch the sky and smell the wind. He will not go into the mountains. You women will take the children into the mountains to the place of the silver spring. You will wait there for us. The boys will make meat and you will sew the robes. You will wait for us. If we do not come before the first snow, we will return in the Moon of the Blackberries or the Moon of the Melting Snow.”

  No one protested. I sat there, listening, dumbfounded. One Dog was sending all the women and the children into the mountains, there to try to survive the snows and blizzards of winter. I wondered, and feared, what plans One Dog had for me.

  “You have many years,” One Dog said to me. “You are not a boy. You are a man. You will come with me and my braves. You will have a bow and a knife. But if you ever lift the bow or the knife against me or any of the people, you will die and your eyes will be cut out and your hands cut off. Your tongue will be cut from your mouth. You will wander the Star Path forever, unable to hunt or to see or to eat or speak.”

  “Why do you not let White Man go back to his people?”


  “White Man goes where One Dog goes.”

  That was all he said, and I knew that, in his eyes, I was still a prisoner.

  A young brave named Black Horse gave me a small bow, a quiver, and some arrows. These were not hunting arrows, but arrows used for killing men. He showed me the difference in the way the flint arrowhead was set in relation to the feathers. The killing arrowheads were placed so that they could penetrate between a man’s ribs, parallel to the ground. The hunting arrows were so fashioned that they could penetrate an animal’s chest, perpendicular to the ground.

  Blue Cloud gave me a bone-handled knife that was also small, made in some white man’s shop from a piece of thin iron ground to shape and sharpened on a grinding wheel. The quiver rode easily on my shoulder. It was unbeaded, so very unlike the fine quivers the Arapaho bore, but I was proud to have it, the bow, and the knife. These things made me feel like more of a man. But these tokens of manhood also bore a chilling message and a burden. With these lethal weapons, I knew I was expected to kill one or more of the Ota. The message I garnered was: kill or be killed. And I knew I would not necessarily be killed by an Ota, but if I did not carry out my duties as a warrior, the Arapaho would see to it that I lost my life and my scalp.

  I practiced shooting arrows every morning and night. Black Horse taught me how to draw an arrow quickly from my quiver and nock it to the gut string. Others taught me how to aim, the correct stance and proper angles of my arms. I became a pretty good shot in just a few days. Others taught me how to find water, seepage and springs. I carried one of the skin water bags, while other warriors traded off carrying our drinking water.

  The Ota were clever at concealing their tracks. They would sometimes ride and walk single file. At other times, they split up, scattered like quail, and the Arapaho scouts had to figure out which track to follow. Sometimes, the Ota doubled back and we were forced to go into hiding. There were days when I felt Ota eyes on me, and when I told One Dog about it, he said that it was probably true. The Ota were watching us.

  “Why do we not watch them?” I asked.

  “Do you not see that some of our number are never near us?” One Dog asked.

  I looked around and counted heads.

  It was true. There were some braves who never seemed to join us, or came in at night and then left quickly.

  “They are the watchers,” One Dog said.

  “How do they do this?”

  “They are like the grass and the wind. They are like the shadow of the fir tree and the spruce, the pine and the juniper. They become the earth, the mouse, and the rabbit. They are the snake and the hawk on the limb of a pine tree. The Ota do not see them. The Ota do not hear them.”

  One Dog’s words made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up and I could feel tiny spiders crawling up and down my spine. I looked around, wondering if the Ota could do such marvelous things.

  “The Ota are like clumsy elk,” One Dog said. “Their feet break dry branches. They stumble through the trees like old women. Pah.”

  “They sneaked up on us,” I said.

  “They put a crippled pony in our path and hid like children in the bushes.”

  One Dog had a point, but the way the Ota made their tracks slowed us down. Kate was getting farther away all the time, and I fretted that we seemed no closer to the Ota than before. I hunted the Ota with the Arapaho, but I was on foot and the Ota were on ponies. I felt like a tortoise trying to outrun a hare, which was a story I told One Dog. He laughed, enjoying the tale, then told me it was like one of the coyote stories the Arapaho like to tell.

  A day later, following this conversation I had with One Dog, the two invisible scouts suddenly appeared. Their ponies looked tired, and I thought they must have come from a long way off. But that was not the case. The two braves, it turned out, had much to tell.

  From the sign language they used and the few words I understood, they had seen a most remarkable sight and they could not wait for One Dog to come with them and read the sign on the ground.

  These two braves were the watchers. Their names were Gray Snake and Little Blue Lizard.

  “Many wagons come,” Gray Snake said. “White men with many guns. Ota make friends with white eyes. White men have horses. They chase us away.”

  “The white eyes saw you?” One Dog said.

  “They have the long eye,” Little Blue Lizard said. From his signing, I knew he was talking about a telescope.

  “Many white men. Many guns,” Gray Snake said again.

  “Let us go there and see what has happened,” One Dog said.

  It took us better than two hours to reach the spot where the two watchers had seen the white men in the wagons.

  There were plenty of tracks, but none of them made any sense to me. One Dog waited before riding down to the plain where all the tracks crossed and crisscrossed on hard dry ground. He sent scouts into the hills to see if any Ota were there. When they came back, saying that the Ota had left, he led us all down to where the maze of tracks told a story he much wanted to read.

  He made all the braves, save one, Gray Snake, stay away from the tracks. He and Gray Snake walked down and followed some. They bent over and pointed to significant tracks on the ground while I gritted my teeth, nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.

  Then, One Dog beckoned to me and I ran down to where he stood.

  “You look,” he said. “Read tracks.”

  He didn’t point to any specific tracks, so I just looked at them. I could see the wagon ruts, and the hoofprints of shod horses. I also saw boot heels where white men had walked around. I saw some smudged footprints too, which I gathered were the moccasin tracks of the Ota who had come down to talk to the white men. I saw part of a cigarette ground into the dirt and what looked like specks of tobacco that had spilled.

  I stopped looking, and I know I had a puzzled look on my face, because One Dog chuckled under his breath when he looked at me.

  “What do your eyes see?” he asked.

  I told him.

  He grabbed my arm and drew me toward some wagon tracks. He pointed at some smudged tracks.

  “Those your sister,” he said.

  My heart began to beat fast.

  He pointed to more tracks that I could not decipher. “White men trade for girls,” he said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Tracks speak. Girls get inside wagon. Your sister go with white men. Ota ride away. They get guns, get tobacco.”

  He showed me where a rifle butt had been pressed into the ground.

  “Kate gone?” I said, feeling stupid.

  “Gone. Away. White men take. Take people girls too.”

  So, the Ota had traded Kate and the other two girls for guns and tobacco. I looked at the wagon tracks, followed them for as far as I could see. They headed south and away from the foothills, and disappeared at my limited horizon.

  “We will follow the white man’s wagons?” I asked.

  “No. We follow Ota. We kill Ota. Get guns. Get tobacco.”

  My heart sank. Kate was being taken even farther away from me. I no longer cared about what happened to the Ota. I wanted to go and get my sister away from the white men who had bought her.

  I wanted to tell them that I was her brother and that we had lost our parents to the Arapaho. I hoped they would treat us both kindly, but at the same time, my chest tightened and I had trouble drawing a good breath.

  For some reason, a reason I could not clearly define, I thought Kate was now in more danger than she had been in before.

  It was just a feeling, but I could feel fear clutching my heart in its cold black hand.

  Nine

  Much to my dismay, we followed the tracks of the Ota into the hills. For a long time, I could see the wagon tracks on the plain below and my heart ached to follow them, find Kate. Gray Snake and Little Blue Lizard evaporated into thin air. I wasn’t even aware when they slipped away, but I knew they would soon find the Ota and turn invi
sible again.

  It soon became evident to me that the Ota were following the same course as the white men, since they rode parallel to the wagon tracks. From where we were, I could still see the ruts and the hoof marks down on the plain. My heart began to beat rapidly, and I had to take deep breaths to calm myself, for I needed to plan ahead, and plan carefully, to make my escape from One Dog and the ever-watchful Arapaho braves. I also needed to find a boldness in myself to attempt such a thing. And as I looked inside myself that day, I knew I needed to find something else, something that I was sure I didn’t possess.

  Courage.

  One Dog was not a stupid man. I thought he liked me, but I realized that was only my own perception, not his. He wanted me to teach him to read and write and talk English. Beyond that, he probably didn’t care if I lived or died.

  My hopes were dashed when we began to burrow deeper into the foothills and ascend even higher ridges. We soon left the wagon tracks and the plain behind. I did not know the West and I did not know where the white men were taking my sister, but I knew they had been headed south and I resolved one day to follow those tracks and find Kate.

  I felt like a blind man as we headed into rougher country. The air was thinner, the trees thicker, but we were still roaming below the jagged high peaks that I saw on the skyline, their snowy tops glistening in the sun, their massive hulks a soft gray in the distance. They were ever present, ever elusive, just like those damned Ota.

  Yet, I detected a change in One Dog soon after we went to higher ground. He was less talkative, more intense. I was burning with curiosity, so I asked him if the Ota were near.

  “There is a place where they go that we know,” he said.

  “What is this place? Where is this place?”

  One Dog merely pointed.

  “Far?” I asked.

  “Near.”

  Nearer than I would have guessed. The next morning Little Blue Lizard appeared out of the low clouds that seemed to have descended on us during the night. He looked haggard and tired. His eyes were red-rimmed and droopy, and he pointed to his moccasins. They were all worn on the soles from walking, yet he had ridden a horse. As I listened to him, I learned why his moccasins had turned to shreds of leather on his feet.