The Fire Arrow

by Richard S. Wheeler

  Skye smiled and refrained from a retort. If Rufus was the post’s hunter, they would be boiling bones for some thin soup most nights.

  Rufus laughed nastily, no doubt feeling he had put the Brit in his place, and slammed shut the massive gate behind Skye.

  Skye headed east again into a desolate emptiness. The river bottoms bristled with a latticework of naked branches. Animal trails laced the rotting snow. He studied them, wanting to know what sort of creatures had threaded through.

  The lonely white ridges that guarded the broad valley blended into a gray sky. He saw no movement this morning, not even a raven or the flash of a magpie, both of them wintering birds. No wind plucked at him, and he knew he would be warm this time. Some hunting trips had left him so numbed he thought no fire on earth could restore his heat.

  His horses followed dutifully behind. He didn’t need to lead them. Jawbone had accepted his packsaddle easily and seemed proud to carry meat. Sometimes Skye would hang two quarters of a deer from the pack frame. The little fellow was filling out. He was still fearless, facing danger by plowing toward it rather than fleeing, the way any ordinary horse would. That worried Skye. But something mysterious still clung to Jawbone, as if there was a Destiny about him beyond Skye’s fathoming.

  He checked his borrowed Leman rifle now and then, making sure a cap was seated and no snow or mud plugged the muzzle. It was a good enough weapon and he could afford to buy it now, after almost six weeks of service. But he wanted that Sharps and the cartridges and caps that it required.

  He walked quietly, his gaze alert for the flash or color of game. In their winter pelts, animals blended into the black and white world they inhabited. Hunting always made him lonesome. He enjoyed being out on a good day, matching his wits against a wily deer or a distant herd of antelope. And yet there was a sadness weighing it not because the animals anticipated death, but because he did. Animals lived in the moment. It was he who foresaw the yearling without the mother, the calf without the parent, the pregnant mother carrying a creature that would be born only two or three months into the future.

  He topped a rise and was startled to discover a dozen buffalo a thousand yards away pawing through crusted snow and snatching at prairie grasses. They were black dots in a white hollow. It had been weeks since he had seen a bison, and now he had a chance to kill two or three and bring in meat for two weeks. He would carry what he could and send an engage back for the rest. They were all facing away from him, save one. He saw no calves. This probably was a bachelor band, yearlings or two-year-olds, driven off by the old bulls, awaiting their turn to lord over a harem. Good tender hump meat tonight! Buffalo steaks for days to come!

  He felt no breeze, and wished he might because he didn’t know what direction the air was eddying. The animals were not on the alert, and were placidly pawing and eating, black behemoths under a leaden sky. He could not get close from this point of view, but to the left an intervening slope would give him cover. He backed off until he reached a coulee with brush in it, and tied his horses there, out of sight.

  Then he slipped leftward and worked around the slope until he found a small dip where he might approach without being seen. He wanted three or four good shots and he would have them. He stayed low, out of sight, knowing that buffalo had weak eyes and an excellent nose. As far as he could determine the air was lifeless. No breeze would carry ahead of him.

  When at last he spotted them again, two or three hundred yards away, they had stopped grazing and were all staring southward. He feared it was too late. He readied his Leman, choosing a big male on the far side of the herd, when on some sort of signal they all snorted and ran, scattering east and northeast. And moments later half a dozen Indians pursued on horseback, each after one or another of the buffalo. He could not make out who they were; only that he was in some company he may not wish to entertain. Men clad in buckskin; men with black hair, some braided, some loose, some pinned in place with red headbands. Men on good ponies.

  The ponies were slower than the buffalo, which were now running swiftly and oddly silently. Skye had always associated the sound of a buffalo running with thunder, but not this time. They were phantoms, easily racing away, with the Indian hunters not far behind. He could see several rifles and one or two bows among them.

  There went the buffalo steaks. He would have relished dropping a haunch of buffalo in Rufus’s lap this evening.

  He backed off and circled around the slope. He might yet bag a deer if he was lucky. He rounded the bend that led down to the coulee and froze. Two of the Indians had found the mare and Jawbone, grabbed the leads, and were hastening over the top of a grade and out of sight.

  Skye started to yell, and curbed the impulse.

  Not the mare, not Jawbone.

  He ran, his body thumping through brush and up the far hillside, his heart banging, his lungs pumping. He would stop them. He would catch up. He would shoot those thieves off their ponies. He topped the grade and saw them again, maybe a half a mile distant, mounted now, dragging their prizes behind them, looking backward to see if they were followed.

  Skye raised the Leman, sighted on the more distant of the pair, and lowered it. He didn’t know how many more were nearby, friend or foe. He hadn’t the faintest idea who they were.

  An anger welled through him. He was a walker. He would walk. There would be a trail. He would follow. He knew Jawbone’s hoofprint. There was a little snow to reveal it. He would walk until he dropped. But he would get his medicine horses back. He peered about carefully, looking for trouble, saw none, and began a slow, steady, methodical pace that would mount into miles and leagues. So far, at least, the thieves were sticking to the valley of the Yellowstone, and heading toward the fort. That was a bit of luck even if he was out of luck.

  twenty-one

  Skye stopped dead. He had neglected a cardinal rule. Now he studied every ridge and valley looking for the rest of them. He didn’t know whether he was among friends such as the Crows, or foes. The hunting party could have been Sioux, Blackfoot, or Assiniboine, and not a bit friendly.

  So he stood quietly and took the measure of the land and all upon it, noted places he might find cover, places that might conceal danger. But he saw no more movement this overcast day when the snowy ridges evanesced into dreary cloud. The rest had been chasing buffalo and were probably far away. Far enough so that he heard no shots, no rumble of hooves.

  He checked his Leman rifle. A cap rested over the nipple. He studied the route taken by the thieves, one that took them through river brush, concealed them from view, and afforded them endless opportunity to ambush pursuers. He would need to be doubly careful because he would not be trailing through open country with good views, but through the dangerous woods of the river bottom.

  Satisfied, he began the long walk. The prints were easy to follow, fresh in patchy snow. He walked into the river flats, wary of every thicket, every chokecherry or willow copse, every fallen cottonwood. But then he realized he would do better on the bluffs where he could see the whole country again, so he abandoned the trail, headed away from the great river until the land rose and the forests gave way to grassy slopes. He saw no evidence of the thieves and knew they were well ahead now, mounted and making good time.

  But he walked. He liked it better there just above the bottoms, the formations distinct, his gaze able to measure what came ahead. Now and then he could see the river, a great gray slab of water hemmed by timber. What he did not see was his horses or the thieves. But he did not give up hope. A man who had been left with nothing as often as Skye had realized that luck turns, a determined man rebuilds. Even so, this loss was acute. His medicine horse, his mare, his future …

  Then he did see them a mile or more ahead, fording the river, distant dots so small he had to focus hard, strain to make out what he was seeing, for the tiny figures working across that wide flowage could have been anything, elk, buffalo, even mustangs. But it was the thieves, both mounted, both leading Skye’s horses. That
deepened his melancholia. Unless the ford was shallow, and there were few of those on the mighty Yellowstone, he could not wade across. It was one thing to cross a river in winter on a horse that never got belly-deep in water. Another thing to wade across naked, carrying one’s rifle and clothing high above one’s head, hoping to build a fire and dry out on the other side before freezing to death.

  He continued along the bluffs until he came to the place where the thieves had forded, and there he cautiously descended into the thick cottonwood forest, and made his shadowed way to the riverbank. It didn’t take long to find the place. Prints in rotting snow told him what he needed to know. The Yellowstone was wide and ran fast there, rippled by a few rocks that broke the surface. But on the far side was a deep channel carrying gray water topped with foam. Death to a man on foot.

  The thieves had escaped.

  He stood at water’s edge, aching to cross, watching the turbid water roll by, and then slowly backed away. This was not done. Somehow, some way, he would find Jawbone and the mare and he would care for them the rest of their days. Somewhere someone would know, would show Skye the way.

  He took off his top hat, wiped his battered hand through his mop of hair, and stared across the barrier. He was familiar with water. For years, water was what imprisoned him. He could always jump off the ships that carried him; it was the water that robbed him of life and liberty and hope. Now he was thwarted by water again.

  He studied the distant ridges, and then began the slow, steady pacing that would take him back to the fort in perhaps three hours. He didn’t walk easily, the way some Yank frontiersmen walked, with a swinging gait and a way of galloping over the surface of the earth. But he walked, stocky, solid of limb, determined as a bull moose, and gradually he covered the miles that had separated him from Fort Sarpy. This night he would bring no meat. A pity, too, because he had buffalo in the sights of his rifle. Rufus would scorn him. Lost his horses! Returned empty-handed!

  But Skye knew something about young men like Rufus. They didn’t last in the wilds. They were killed as the result of their own recklessness, or driven out of stockades and posts by others, or they wandered back East to brag about their times out beyond the borders.

  He reached Fort Sarpy an hour before dusk. The gates were still open. There was a scatter of Absarokas outside along with horses and travois. Skye looked sharply among these but did not see his mare or Jawbone. He hailed a warrior he knew, one of Long Hair’s band, an Absaroka version of Beau Brummell who was parading his new red and black blanket before his woman.

  “It is a good day when I see you, Little Horse.”

  “Ah! It is the man named after the heavens above.”

  “Have you word of Many Quill Woman?”

  “I hear nothing, man named after the heavens.”

  “Or her family? Are they here?”

  “No, they are in winter camp. We came to trade.”

  “Did some of your party hunt this day?”

  “No, Sky Man. We came to trade. Why do you ask?”

  “I saw some hunters and they had found a few buffalo.”

  “The shaggy ones? Are they near?”

  Skye pointed downriver. “Half a day,” he said. “Are there any other of the People nearby this day?”

  Little Horse pondered it and finally shrugged. “It has not come to my ears,” he said. Skye thought his response was oddly secretive. But he knew he was in no mood to judge others fairly.

  “We are preparing for a great feast,” Little Horse said. “Our son is coming into his manhood. Even now, he is doing the manly things the elders and Tobacco Planters have given to him to do, and when he is called he will go upon a vision quest, and if his pleas are heard, he will receive his protector and learn of his medicine. And then we will hear what name he has taken.”

  “Congratulations,” Skye said. “Is he with you?”

  “No, he is preparing his way.”

  Skye nodded, bid the Absaroka good day, and headed into the post, where the high stockade was throwing cold blue shadow across the court.

  “Make meat?” Chambers asked.

  “Lost my chance at some buffalo.”

  “That’s not good, Skye. I’ve been feeding these big-bellies whatever chops we had lying around, so’s to get more trade. You know how they are. Give’em a rib and they’ll eat a haunch. If I don’t watch’em, they make off with half my stock. Bunch of thieving redskins.”

  Skye had heard all this before and turned away. Chambers wanted to gouge some headman a thousand percent profit for the Sharps, but complained when an Indian lifted an awl.

  “Where’s your plugs?” Chambers asked.

  “Stolen.”

  “Stolen? You let’em get away with it?”

  Rufus, at the hide press in the court, stopped his labor and stared.

  “If that’s how you want to put it, yes.”

  “Well, as long as you’re not doing anything, go cut some cottonwood bark for the rest of the nags. That’s a good little way to keep some meat on’em in the winter.”

  Skye nodded. He returned the Leman rifle to the trading room, and dropped his powder horn and other personal gear in his bunk, which was fashioned from some buffalo hide strung between two poles. The employees shared a common, ill-heated lean-to room against the rear stockade. Only Chambers had quarters of his own. Skye was weary after the long hike back to the post.

  Skye found an axe among the post’s tools and headed out the gates, his destination a thick grove of cottonwoods near the banks of the Yellowstone. Cutting bark for horse feed was hard work. He didn’t shy from it. But Chambers’s command was spiteful and had little to do with the welfare of the post. The Absarokas had pulled out, and the river valley was a solitary place now, in the lavender shadows. He found some suitable saplings, smooth green bark all the way, and slowly hacked them down and limbed them. Then he dragged the three poles back to the gates, carefully slitted the bark, and then peeled it off in large chunks. By the time he had finished and fed the fodder to the post’s horses, it was dark.

  “I want some more bark, Skye,” Chambers said.

  “In the morning?”

  “Now. There’s a moon coming up.”

  There was a post rule against needless night activity when Blackfeet and others were waiting their chance. Chambers was deliberately flouting his own orders and ragging him.

  Skye lifted his top hat and settled it again.

  “I guess I’ll be drawing my pay. There’s over six weeks of wage owing,” he said.

  “Draw your pay? You quitting me?”

  Skye nodded.

  “Your pay comes outa St. Louis. You walk out, you walk out with nothing. I always knew you couldn’t be trusted, Skye.”

  “Forty-five dollars,” Skye said. “And it’s Mister Skye.”

  Chambers laughed and walked away.

  twenty-two

  Forty-five dollars would buy him an outfit even if it wouldn’t buy him the Sharps he coveted. For starters there was the battered Hawken on the gun rack, not in the excellent condition of the one stolen from him, but a Hawken even so, rock solid with the thirty-four-inch barrel, low sights, and a fifty-three caliber bore. Seventeen dollars. The back wages would buy him that, a one-pound can of Dupont, a pound of precast balls, a box of caps, and some patches. And a pair of five-point blankets thrown in. He knew the prices; he worked most days in the trading room. He would take his wage in goods.

  He collected his capote, belaying pin, and buffalo robe, the meager possessions he could call his own, and headed for the trading room. There he lit an oil lamp with a lucifer and began laying out what he would take. He hefted the old Hawken. He had looked at it a dozen times before. Its stock was battered and the basket protecting the nipple was damaged. No matter. He set it on the counter along with the rest and began scratching a receipt. Let no man accuse him of theft.

  At that moment Chambers roared in, saw what was in progress, and yelled at him to stop right where he was.
/>
  “This comes to thirty-nine dollars and forty cents worth of trade goods, and I am taking my pay this way,” Skye said.

  “You are not. You walk out of here and you get none of it.”

  Skye thrust the receipt at Chambers, who backed away from the counter and reached for a huge dragoon pistol he kept under it for emergencies.

  Skye’s belaying pin pushed the factor backward so swiftly and steadily that Chambers found himself staring helplessly at the pin as if it were a snake, lashing slowly back and forth.

  “Sign here,” Skye said.

  Chambers twisted free, bolted from the dimly lit room, and Skye heard shouting. The factor was marshaling his troops, who were in the common room starting in on an evening’s meal.

  It would be no easy task to get out of Fort Sarpy along with his new outfit. He would have to take what he could on his back. There would be no second trip to pick up anything left behind. He slid into his capote, rolled the blankets into his robe for a bedroll, and hung it around his neck. He stuffed the powder and ball and caps inside his buckskin tunic and didn’t forget the unsigned receipt. Then he plucked up the Hawken and the belaying pin, one in each hand, and emerged into the court just as the engaged men burst out of the common room. Skye backed steadily toward the gates. Unbarring them would be a problem. He needed an extra pair of hands. But he would deal with that when the moment came. First, he would show them what a limey seaman with a belaying pin could do in close quarters. This was familiar ground to him, up close, his wooden club against sharp-edged steel.

  He dropped his gear before the gates and watched them boil across the court, the dim light from the hearth of the kitchen turning them into bobbing light and shadow. He didn’t wait; he pushed into them, bulldog strong, jabbing and whacking, spinning to crack one over the head. Chambers stood aside, watching, a coward. These were youngsters mostly, tough as warts on a toad, but they had never brawled on the bobbing decks of a man-o’-war. It was Rufus who worried him. Rufus didn’t plunge in but circled behind. Skye caught the glint of steel. Dead-eyed Rufus, the killer.