The Fire Arrow

by Richard S. Wheeler

  Skye wondered what that might be.

  “The whiskey traders are leaving and will not come back. And this is because you destroyed the whiskey. And you did it for my people.”

  “Yes, sir, that is so.”

  “Then you will lead us. This I saw too.”

  fifty

  Lead this band? Skye recoiled from that. “I am not one of your people,” he said to the elder, hoping his limited Crow tongue sufficed to make his views known.

  “You must lead us. I have seen it.”

  “I do not know your customs.”

  “There is no one else.”

  Walks to the Top stood before him, flinty, adamant, determined, his gaze boring into Skye.

  Skye hesitated. This thing was not unknown. His friend from the trapper days, Jim Beckwourth, had been a subchief. Others had lived with the Crows. Still, it didn’t seem right. And he had no honors at war. There were men in this village, the headman Otter, for instance, who had counted many coups, won much praise.

  “Many in this band would oppose it,” he said.

  “What band?” The old seer swept his gnarled hand imperiously. “What do you see? Nothing but ruin.”

  Skye saw a village that looked half dead. On a vibrant spring day this village should be teeming with life and joy.

  But the task of restoring it should not be Skye’s.

  “I must be with Many Quill Woman now,” he said. “She grieves her brother, and so do I.”

  “And let my people be naked before the world?”

  Skye retreated a bit. “I will help put things in good order,” he said.

  Walks to the Top nodded curtly and walked away.

  Skye beheld a mournful place, deep in grief, rudderless, in peril. There were always Blackfeet prowling, especially now that one could move over the land.

  He glanced at Two Dogs’ lodge, and saw no one. Victoria was within, and so were Two Dogs’ wives and family, and the flap was closed to the world.

  Many of the lodges were closed to the world. No one hunted. No one patrolled. No one gathered wood. Old people did not sit in the sun and smile.

  It could not be right, he becoming a subchief. It was not real. To be sure, he had been adopted long ago by Rotten Belly, and that made him a Crow after a fashion.

  He stood in the quiet, and decided the first step was to visit The Robber. He was silently welcomed and invited in by one of the chief’s wives, and found the chief sitting in a reed backrest, a blanket about his legs. The chief looked unwell, a grayness just beneath his coppery flesh. Two of his wives lay quietly in their robes, staring at him. Two others were ministering to them all, and seemed well enough.

  “The Seer said you would come, Mister Skye. Have a seat beside me. Smoke the pipe if you wish. There’s the pouch.”

  That was bad. The chief was not preparing the tobacco himself.

  Skye slowly filled a pipe and lit it with coals. “How can I help you?” he asked, after sucking the fragrant smoke and exhaling it.

  “I do not wish to do anything. When the sun is warm, I will sit in front of my lodge and greet the world.”

  “Are you unwell?”

  The chief pursed his lips, and nodded.

  “Was it the traders’ whiskey?”

  “It ate the heart out of me, with little teeth like a mink’s that devoured my flesh.”

  “You’ll get better,” Skye said. “It will pass.”

  “I want only to sit in front of my lodge on a warm day and watch the People.”

  “Who will lead them?”

  “You will. The Seer has seen it.”

  “I am not a warrior. I don’t know your ways.”

  “It is done,” the chief said, sharply.

  Skye finished his pipe in silence, thanked the chief for his hospitality, and left that unhappy lodge. There was one other thing he must do.

  He found Otter, the headman who had suffered so much loss on the hunting trip. Otter was unsmiling. “I knew you would come. The Seer told me.”

  “Then I need say only one thing: you should lead the band now. It is yours.”

  “It is not my medicine, Mister Skye.”

  Skye saw how this would go. “It will be soon. I will try to help this band but only for a little time. Then you will be its chief.”

  Otter smiled. “You are the right one. I will help. I will hunt. It is in me that we will have a great hunt and soon there will be more robes and plenty of meat.”

  So it was done.

  Skye said, “Come with me. I want the young men to police the village and protect it. I want a night herder to watch over the horses. I want young men out, watching, the eyes and ears of this band.”

  “They will hear you,” Otter said.

  “I have one more thing to do. Many Quill Woman must decide.”

  “Her?”

  “She is one of you.”

  “It is so,” Otter said.

  Skye found her sitting quietly within her brother’s lodge, and beckoned her. She stepped outside, into a somber spring evening.

  “They want me to lead them,” he said. “Is that right?”

  “Goddammit, Skye, if you don’t kick them in the ass, no one will!”

  BY RICHARD S. WHEELER FROM TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES

  SKYE’S WEST

  Sun River

  Bannack

  The Far Tribes

  Yellowstone

  Bitterroot

  Sundance

  Wind River

  Santa Fe

  Rendezvous

  Dark Passage

  Going Home

  Downriver

  The Deliverance

  Aftershocks

  Badlands

  The Buffalo Commons

  Cashbox

  Eclipse

  The Fields of Eden

  Fool’s Coach

  Goldfield

  Masterson

  Montana Hitch

  An Obituary for Major Reno

  Second Lives

  Sierra

  Sun Mountain: A Comstock Novel

  Where the River Runs

  SAM FLINT

  Flint’s Gift

  Flint’s Truth

  Flint’s Honor

  The arrow was unlike any Skye had ever seen. The entire shaft was enameled blood red. Large feathers, maybe hawk or falcon, adorned it. It lacked an arrowhead or iron point. A ceremonial arrow, then, and all the more ominous for it.

  “This is big medicine, Mr. Mercer,” he said. “See how it’s made. No point. All red. This is a medicine arrow, a message arrow.”

  “Who made it?”

  “Damned if I know,” said Victoria. “Makes me unhappy, I don’t know. Maybe the Spirits made it.”

  “Spirits?”

  “Stuff you and me don’t know about.”

  “Surely you don’t …” Mercer stopped himself.

  Skye smiled. Mercer was dismissing Indian legend but was being polite about it. Victoria studied the arrow, cussing softly. “Owl feathers. Owl feathers! That’s what these are. This is very bad, owl feathers.”

  “And what does it tell you, eh?”

  Victoria squinted at him. “We better damn well stay away. That’s what.”

  Mercer studied the red arrow, turned it over and over. “A taboo. A message. Oh, this is delightful. I love a taboo! I shall record it on the backside of my robe tonight. This makes the whole trip over here much more promising. Something to scribble about. There’s nothing like a good taboo to titillate a Londoner over his morning tea.”

  Skye was growing restless. “I think maybe we should consider it a threat, Mr. Mercer. Someone might have some rather lethal plans for you.”

  “Oh, pshaw! This is legend, and legend is my meat! We shall carry on.”

  “I think not. You should not take this lightly, sir.”

  “Don’t be a tiddlywink, Mr. Skye. This is grand. I haven’t seen the like since a human head the size of my fist was set in my path in the Matto Grosso of B
razil.” He turned to Mercer. “Have you an opinion on it?”

  “It would be more comfortable if we were armed, sir.”

  “But I am armed in ways unknown to you. I know how to deal with all of this. Why, I’ve dealt with bushmen, cannibals, Zulus, and Lord Admirals of the Fleet. And never had to draw so much as a pocket knife. Here’s the secret. We’re big medicine ourselves. I make magic. My magic is bigger than their magic, eh?”

  He thumped his head and then his skull as a sort of exclamation point or two. “I am the great Wazoo, Moomumba, Atlatl, Kitchikitchi Bugaboo, Lord of the Universe.”

  “Wazoo, I ain’t going,” said Victoria.

  Mercer’s smile was all teeth again. “Very well, then. The men will carry on.”

  She glared at Mercer.

  The explorer mounted his nag, nodded to Winding, and the pair of them proceeded upriver, past the threshold of warning. Skye knew he could either try to protect his client or turn back. There was no stopping Mercer. Uneasily, he climbed aboard the buffalo runner and followed. The women resolutely started their pack animals upriver too.

  The going was peaceful enough. Here there was enough bottomland for a river road. Here and there the Missouri was hemmed by great cliffs, often weathered to odd formations, and at these points the trail climbed to the high plain and then down again to the bottoms.

  Skye kept a sharp look for ambush, for a glint of metal along the bluffs, or movement around the crenelated rock, or the startled fight of a bird, or a sudden shadow. But he saw naught but silent bluffs and he was tempted to think the warning wasn’t for his party. He knew better. He kept his old Hawken across his lap ready for use. But whatever befell them would be larger than a lone man with a lone rifle could cope with.

  The river flowed quietly here, the icy water hurrying on its way to the Gulf of Mexico an impossible distance away. He saw an eagle floating above, an osprey, an otter, and something he couldn’t identify. The canyon narrowed but a trail carried them to the plains above. The day was utterly peaceful. Mercer was enjoying himself; the thought of doing something forbidden had transformed the man into a daredevil, but also into a sort of invincible, invulnerable purveyor of magic.

  They paused at a place where the trail dived downward into the gloomy valley, where the rock changed from chalky to tan, and then oddly blue. The bones were not far ahead. Victoria squinted at him.

  “Maybe we will walk the star-path together,” she said.

  She was saying she loved him and also saying good-bye. This plunge into the forbidden was tormenting her far more than she let on to Mercer or anyone else. Skye saw Mary sitting resolutely on her pony. She had kept her feelings to herself and would go wherever he went, be with him wherever and whenever she could be with him. Hers was utter faith.

  He turned to Mercer. “The bones are close now. Maybe a mile ahead.”

  “Good. And no lightning bolts have struck us yet, Mister Skye.”

  But square on the trail before them was a blue arrow, this one unbroken, erect in the ground, made by the same arrowmaker as the red one. Skye dismounted and pulled it up. Its shaft was a deep blue, a dye not easily found in nature; maybe trading-post dye. It too had been fletched with owl feathers.

  Victoria studied the arrow and sagged. “I don’t know what the hell it means. It means something bad, but I don’t know it.”

  “Ah! More taboos! More mystery! Skye, old boy, this is getting better and better,” Mercer said.

  “It’s Mister Skye.”

  Mary studied the arrow. “This is an arrow of respect,” she said. “We must honor what we see and maybe the spirits will not torment us.”

  “How do you know that?” Mercer asked.

  Mary shrugged and turned silent.

  Skye didn’t know. He thought he would need to know what blue meant to whoever fashioned the arrow. He liked the color. The Blackfeet used it a great deal on their lodges, in their clothing, beadwork, and quilling. For him, blue was the color of liberty. When he thought of himself as a free man, it was always somehow associated with blue.

  “There you have it,” Mercer said. “What does blue mean? Anything. We will be respectful.” He nudged his horse forward, and suddenly they were all descending a rough path down into the shadowed bottoms of the Missouri, past layers of blue-tinted sandstone, dropping precipitously, so much so that Skye worried that the travois might topple or twist the ponies off the trail. But soon they were at the river and entering a broad flat south of the water, a delta that had been carved from a tributary canyon and deposited there.

  This was the place. Skye recollected it now from his sole trip there years earlier. And he had the same eerie feeling now that he had then, a sense that indeed he was trespassing. It was quiet here, perhaps because no wind found its way into this sunken vault far below the high plains. There was blue sandstone layered up the south slopes, topped with tan sandstone streaked with red. He had the sense that this was an ancient place, one where the river itself was a newcomer, slowly sawing its way downward.

  They paused. Victoria pulled up her pony, and Mary did too. They were alert for trouble even without having any real reason to be alert. A great and old serenity lay upon the land. Skye felt a sort of sadness in him, and couldn’t say why. Maybe it was because he was about to experience the world’s darkness, something in these primeval bones that spoke of blood and ferocity and struggle.

  Mercer pulled up to, and Winding.

  “This is it?” the explorer asked.

  Skye nodded. He pointed toward a far blue escarpment.

  They rode quietly across the flat, which was sparsely vegetated with a coarse grass, and came at last to the blue sandstone wall.

  “I don’t see a thing,” Mercer said.

  “You will.”

  Skye noted evidence of other visitors. There was a medicine bundled hanging from a stunted cottonwood. On closer examination he found several amulets and totems, each suspended from a limb.

  He pointed these out to Mercer. “This is a holy place. This. is a place the Indians come to when they are looking for guidance or needing the story of their people.”

  “Medicine bundles. Why are they here?”

  “They are put there in reverence,” Skye said. “They are offerings to the spirits that live here.”

  They dismounted. The horses stood quietly, content to be in this sheltered flat. Skye led them slowly across the flat to the tumble of detritus that had fallen from the blue stone above. The strata were actually layered in stair steps, with the higher strata farther back from the river, and the lower strata closer.

  Victoria knew the way better than Skye, and veered left toward a sector where the ancient tributary had cut its own passage through the sandstone.

  She began climbing slowly, working past talus that erosion had tumbled from above. She reached a bench that lay at the foot of an overhang that sheltered everything that lay below it, paused, and decided to head right. The rest followed, somehow silent as they approached what amounted to a shrine carved out of a cliff.

  Then she stopped, and stretched to the balls of her feet, proudly. The rest caught up and stared at what lay before them. Protruding from the rock was a long skull of unimaginable size, the head of a monster.

  It was oddly quiet. No breeze penetrated here. There was nothing to say. They stood side by side, studying an elongated skull that rose only a little out of the sandstone in which it was embedded, revealing perhaps ten percent of its mass. But it was enough. The ancient jaws held monstrous teeth, each larger than a man’s hand, and shaped to pierce. The powerful jaw could catch large prey if indeed the beast was a meat eater.

  A huge eye socket, the hole larger than a human head, peered up at them. Slabs of humped skull bone formed a lengthy nose. The back of the skull stopped abruptly, almost as if broken off. Behind the skull, the spinal bones lay disordered, half buried in the stone. From the vertebrae rose flat-topped dorsal ribs, with smaller curved ribs below. From there, the fossil vanish
ed into the stone, only to reemerge ten feet further along. There were more vertebrae all in disarray, beyond the imaginings of the most learned doctors of nature. But here were giant ribs, familiar bones now that spoke of the chest cavity. And an array of tiny bones that formed forepaws. These were so small that Skye could not believe they belonged to the same animal. Maybe this was all an ancient boneyard, the grave of all sorts of strange beasts.

  There was a pathway that took them farther along, a path worn by countless visitors. A pathway recently used, with faint imprints in the dust Next was a few square yards of disorder, a great jumble of ribs and vertebrae, and then odd-shaped pelvic bones, broken into several pieces, mostly buried in rock. And then the shocking thing: monstrous leg bones, each taller than a tall man, mostly buried in rock, but the outlines visible. These were impossible bones, larger than wild imagination could fathom. Bones of an animal as tall as a house. And a few yards away, a well-preserved three-toed foot, a bird’s foot, delicately formed but still a pedestal that could support this monster. Beyond was a scatter of other bones, smaller and smaller, yard after yard, as if this strange beast had a twenty or thirty-foot tail.

  Skye had been here before, and now had the same response as before. Did this come from God?

  Now he watched Mercer; watched the man visibly abandon the notion that this was a carved shrine, some religious artistry worked by an ancient sculptor. This beast had perished beside a river or on a beach and had been gradually covered with sand, and over aeons had become a fossil caught in sandstone until some giant upthrust had pushed this rock high, and erosion had worn through the sandstone and bared these unimaginable things.

  Mercer took off his hat. He was not smiling this time.

  “How old, do you think?” he asked.

  Skye shook his head.

  “There’s more,” Victoria said. She led them silently along that worn path that skirted the sandstone outcrop, until they came to another ledge jammed with bones, these disordered so much a mortal could hardly put them together to mean anything. But there they were, a carpet of bones, mostly broken into small pieces, and yet parts of a beast as formidable as the more complete skeleton they had just visited. But no, this was not the same beast, for when they came to the skull, or the fragment left of it, they found a peculiar horn rising from its snout, a blade where no blade should be, an illogical blade that would serve no fathomable purpose. So here was another monster of the deep, another nightmare to float through a man’s soul when sleep beckoned.