Skye rode through the village, marveling at the uproar. Horses neighed and whickered, boys yelled, women howled, the town crier, leading this assemblage, bellowed his news and repeated it. Across the way, Skye spotted Victoria, her face flushed with joy, eyes shining, her gaze rapt as she absorbed this great moment of triumph. Her eyes were on the gaudy Beckwourth, but then she spotted Skye and smiled. He nodded to her, enjoying her delight. She was with several other young matrons, a flock of them, crooning their joy.
Beckwourth smiled at many women, and Skye knew that every smile was an invitation and that the Crows sometimes could not count the presence of one virtuous woman in a village. It galled him suddenly. Where was faithfulness and loyalty among these wanton people? He eyed her darkly, hoping that four good years had forged a bond.
At the lodge of Arapooish the crowd collected to hear the whole story. The chief wore a single braid this day, which fell loosely over his brown chest. He wore only his breechclout and leggings, though the air nipped at him. One thing about old Rotten Belly, Skye thought: the man had a certain presence. He looked like a chief, acted like a chief, inspired confidence and awe, as a great chief should.
In a leisurely way, playing to the eager crowd, Beckwourth described the foray. Three suns to the north, in the rough country near Square Butte, they had spied a herd of buffalo one evening, and also a hunting party camped on a creek. They were Piegans planning a good hunt at dawn when they would have light enough to make meat. Some Piegan boys guarded the herd, which had been nicely pinned into a creek bottom by bluffs that were almost impossible to scale … .
This was a great victory, better than any so far this season, and Arapooish commended each of them and gave Beckwourth a new name, Night Man.
Beckwourth, still astride his prancing brown, raised a hand. “To each of my brave warriors, I give two ponies. To my friend Mister Skye, husband of Many Quill Woman, I give two horses. The black horse to ride, and another to pack. Two horses do I give the young man who has come to live among the Absaroka.”
The people relished that. Any grand act appealed to them. They exclaimed. Victoria sighed, her eyes more on Beckwourth than upon Skye.
“Take the black and pick a horse, Mister Skye,” Beckwourth said in the Crow tongue.
Skye did, easing into the herd, finding a braided halter on the calm black. The horse led easily. He chose an ordinary dun for the second horse, not wanting to deprive any of these worthy fighters of a coveted animal.
“Mr. Beckwourth,” he said. “I thank you. You do yourself honor. With these I will hunt the buffalo and bring meat to this village. You have made me a wealthy man.”
“It is well said,” Arapooish added. “We will dance this night.”
The crowd returned to the cook pots and lodges while Skye gently worked his hands over the powerful black, admiring the strength of the stallion, its graceful stance.
“Sonofabitch,” said Victoria. “Some damn horse.”
“Tomorrow I’ll put it and the packhorse to good use.”
“Antelope looked so proud. Was ever there such a warrior? I saw the sun pouring from his eyes.”
She was paying too much attention to Beckwourth. Or was he paying too much attention to her? The prettiest, most desired maiden in the village not long before? She was even more the beauty after a few years with Skye. Something dark stabbed at him, and he pushed it aside as unworthy jealousy.
She smiled, winked, patted him on the arm, and drifted off. She had been like that lately, not unhappy with him but distant, absorbed in the thousand strands of life that occupied her village.
That evening he borrowed a pad saddle and braided hackamore and tried out his new horse. It glided easily, turned obediently, stopped with the slightest tug of the rein. He urged it into a trot, then a fine, powerful gallop, and knew he had a fleet horse, probably a buffalo runner, and that he could trust it. He wasn’t much of a horseman, having spent most of his years imprisoned on a sailing ship, but ever since joining the trapping brigades he had made a point of learning what he could, mastering horses, grasping their nature, riding, packing, picketing, grooming, caring for their feet. He was a passable horseman, but less a hand with a horse than any of these warriors, who had made horses an extension of themselves, so that warrior and pony became a single entity.
He examined the packhorse, too, satisfied that it would carry whatever burdens he placed upon it. Then he took the horses out to pasture in the hills north of the river, intending to leave them with the horse herd guards, doubled this night because of the possibility of retaliation. On second thought, he decided to tie them at the lodge. Early, before the village stirred, he would be off on a hunt. With each buffalo or elk or deer, he added to the security of these people.
In the darkness he summed up his perceptions. He had done well this trip, won war honors, obtained two fine horses, and gained some status in the village. But Beckwourth had gained much more by leading a spectacular raid without any loss, by bringing back many horses, and by giving Skye the black, the best horse of all. The Crows loved a magnanimous giver.
Skye wondered if he could ever overtake his rival.
nine
The next dawn Skye saddled the sleek black, haltered the dun, and rode into the sunrise. Victoria’s family still slumbered in their lodge. Not a soul stirred. Smoke drifted from the blackened tips of a few lodges. When he reached the periphery of the silent village a subtle change came over him. He was abandoning its safety and plunging into an uncertain and dangerous wilderness. Frost rimed the brown grasses. It would be a fine day to hunt.
This day he would try to find game and contribute to the well-being of the Kicked-in-the-Bellies. That would not be easy. The band had been at the great bend of the Yellowstone for some while, and the country had been hunted out. Soon they would make their winter camp in the Big Horn basin, but for the moment they would remain in their favorite grounds.
He enjoyed the powerful walk of his black horse. The animal seemed as eager for adventure as he. This was as much a journey to improve his condition as it was an effort to make meat. The Crows honored a good hunter, though perhaps not as much as a successful warrior. Skye had no great hunting skills because he had spent so much of his life as a sailor, but he had determination and that would suffice. The nippy air exhilarated him, and the bountiful and everlasting land, layered in blues and purples and browns, evoked within him a feeling so rare that he reined the horse briefly just to treasure the moment. Here he was, a free man, living entirely by his wits, rejoicing to be alive.
He began to study the ground, looking for the signs of passage: the delicate hoofprint of a mule deer in the frost; the nobler prints of an elk; the surprisingly delicate prints of a massive buffalo. He found nothing, but didn’t really expect to. Part of the joy of the hunt was the search, he against nature under the bowl of a bright autumn sky. What more could a man ask?
Still, as he worked eastward along the Yellowstone, he found no sign of game. He paused at a spot where the river glittered over some shallows, and decided to ford it and work his way up into the foothills, far from the great artery of the river.
The well-trained black took to the ford without balking, but Skye had to tug the lead rope of the dun. They crossed without getting into deep water because the river was at its seasonal low, and he rode up a creek valley. He had learned much in his four years on the wild continent; everything meant something. The sudden bolt of a bird, silence, the circling of hawks, the skimming of hills by a hunting eagle, all signaled things that could scarcely be translated to words. By noon he still had found no game. He paused under a barren cottonwood to let the horse graze and to let the faint warmth of the mild sun permeate his soft buckskins.
He rode through an afternoon without luck. Once he saw some tan-and-white antelope on a distant slope, but they edged away as he drew close. Then he saw a pair of gray mule deer at the edge of an aspen grove. But they vanished.
He walked his horse across drai
nage, topping ridges, looking for some shaggier, as the mountaineers called buffalo, but this was not his day. When the sun began to drop to the western mountains, he hastened back to the village, his Hawken unfired. It had, actually, been a splendid day, one he cherished. But he would enter the village once again with nothing to show for his effort.
He placed his gear in the lodge of his in-laws, hung his sheathed Hawken from the lodgepoles, and slipped on his camp moccasins while carefully avoiding his mother-in-law. They saw he had nothing to show for the day’s hunt, but said nothing. Walks Alone gestured toward the iron kettle that contained a supper, but Skye declined. Victoria wasn’t present. He retreated into the sharp air, took his horses to pasture—a mile from the village now because every patch of grass had been grazed into the dirt—and entrusted them to the herders, doubled now because these people feared Blackfoot retaliation.
Skye walked back to the village in gathering darkness, straight to the small lodge of Beckwourth, certain she would be there. He scratched on the lodge flap politely, listening to the muffled chatter within. One thing about Beckwourth: he was a spellbinder in several tongues.
“Come in, Skye,” he said, and Skye wondered how Beckwourth knew who was there. A tiny fire, no larger than a teacup, illuminated the lodge. And there was Beckwourth, Stillwater, Pine Leaf, Walks Into Wind—and Victoria.
“Home is the hunter. Loaded down with meat,” Beckwourth said, swiftly surveying Skye.
“Not this time.” Skye turned to Victoria. “Your family has meat in the pot.”
She shook her head. “I have eaten, Mister Skye. Antelope has given us buffalo tongue.”
Skye bit back the anger in him. He nodded curtly.
“Have some, amigo,” Beckwourth said.
Skye teetered on the brink of stalking out, but finally surrendered to his complaining belly and fished some slabs of fine, juicy tongue out of the blackened iron kettle.
“Antelope has told us of the great whiskered fish in the land where he was a boy,” Victoria said, making peace. “It is all lies. There are no such fish.”
Beckwourth smiled, his coal eyes glowing. “I’ll take you there and show you, my beautiful friend.”
Skye bridled. The man was flirting with his wife right in front of his face. Was this how it would be in this village? He chewed on the meat, anger percolating through him. Beckwourth would drive him to a showdown some time soon. All this was deliberate. Beckwourth was making a show of his position and power and gallantry.
Nothing in Skye’s life had prepared him for this sort of threat. His years as a pressed seaman had plunged him into an all-male world. Women were mysteries. Victoria was the only one he had ever been close to, and she was a Crow, whose ways he barely understood. During his years with the trapping brigades, none of the trappers had ever crossed a certain line; he and Victoria had been serene in their marriage and companionship, and the mountaineers honored their union. But here was Antelope Jim, enjoying Victoria, winning her smiles, and probably enjoying Skye’s discomfort.
Skye choked back his anger and anxiety, and tried to make himself at home around that tiny fire, which Beckwourth occasionally replenished from a small pile of kindling.
“Victoria is the most beautiful thing that ever happened to me,” Skye said quietly. “I met her at that first rendezvous and loved her from the moment I saw her.” He gazed quietly at his wife. “And I think she felt the same way about me. We couldn’t even talk with each other, and yet we communicated. These have been the best years of my life.”
Victoria rewarded him with a smile, and for a moment he thought everything was fine.
“I envy you,” Beckwourth said. “So fair a woman, the dream of every fine young man in the village. Truly, Victoria, you had your choice of anyone here. And you chose my most estimable British friend. Let me get out the jug, and we will toast Victoria.”
“No,” said Skye. “We will not toast Victoria now.”
Victoria glanced back and forth, not quite sure of what was happening here, spoken in the English she little understood.
“She chose me, mate,” Skye said, an edge in his voice.
“Ah, Skye,” she said. “I remember.”
“Let’s go, Victoria.”
“But, Skye, we haven’t even started telling stories yet.”
Skye knew that storytelling was one of the great entertainments of these people—and that no one told a better, funnier, wilder story than his rival across the little fire.
“I thought we’d take a walk. And then go to the robes. I’ll be hunting again in the morning.”
“Ah, the robes!” she said, and everyone laughed. “You go sleep, Skye. I will listen to stories.”
“Victoria. We’ll go now.”
She smiled at him across the tiny fire and didn’t stir.
“Have a good hunt, old friend,” Beckwourth said, something calculating in his face.
Skye was suddenly aware that he wasn’t really wanted there—and that the moment he departed they would be talking in the Absaroka tongue again, and that later in the night the stories would become bawdier, which was how the Crows amused themselves. He had heard these stories, some of them wildly inventive, some thinly disguised gossip, all of them told in mixed company, which embarrassed him acutely. And where did they lead? In the end, to liaisons, the participants eyeing each other contemplatively through the storytelling, their bodies howling to them.
And there he was. He had just dealt himself out. The dreaded possibility that Victoria would succumb, or abandon him, or return to her people’s ways, ate at him like acid as he nodded curtly and retreated into the night. He had rarely felt so stupid or jealous.
The night sky was clean and black, with hard white stars stabbing light from the dome of heaven. He stumbled through a hushed blackness with nothing to light the way. Most lodge fires were out, and no moon guided him. The night was as desolate as his soul.
Still, he had acquitted himself well. He had told Beckwourth, with all the dignity he could muster and all the earnestness in his soul, that he loved Victoria and prized her above everything else in his life. Surely his friend—if Beckwourth could be called that—would respect that. Surely Victoria would, too … .
He stumbled across the rim of a lodge and veered into the night, hoping his eyes would adjust. So black was this cold night that he feared he would wander into the wrong lodge. They looked alike in the darkness, vague cones with a forest of poles on top. He paused, trying to orient himself. He was lost in his own village. More by instinct than by sorting things out, he veered leftward, somehow made out Walks Alone’s lodge, and crawled through the flap into the utter darkness, enjoying the sudden warmth that persisted even though the fire had long since died. No one stirred. He crawled to his robes—borrowed robes, actually, provided by his wife’s parents—and dug into them. But he could not sleep. He tried hard to banish the terrible fantasies crawling across his mind: Victoria and Beckwourth, Victoria and Beckwourth, his friend and his wife …
She did not come home, and he did not sleep.
ten
Skye awakened with the first hint of light up in the smoke hole. Victoria lay beside him. He wondered when she had come home and why he hadn’t noticed. The evening’s dreads eddied through him. Had that damned Beckwourth seduced her? Did she still love him?
He swung out of his robes, pulled on his worn moccasins, and crawled outside into a predawn half-light. The camp stank in the still air. Why hadn’t Rotten Belly moved it? Skye walked down to the river and relieved himself, feeling his joints ache from the chill. He would hunt again this day.
He stood there in that terrible quiet, wanting succor. Where was God? In that faint band of blue light to the southeast? Skye prayed briefly, hardly knowing what to say to a deity who could give him anything he asked for—but didn’t. “Send me a buffalo, so that I may win the esteem of my hosts. I don’t know these people; guide me through the eye of the needle.”
He sensed the pres
ence of someone beside him and discovered Victoria’s father, Walks Alone. “I will hunt with you today,” he said.
“I would like that.”
“I will show you things. We will talk.”
Skye sensed that all this was good. Maybe the shaman, Red Turkey Head, had said something. Maybe Walks Alone had simply taken things into his own hands. They would talk. Skye could grasp the Absaroka tongue after four years with Victoria, but his father-in-law knew no English. They would get along, and there were the hand signs to fall back on.
They walked together out to the herd and nodded to the sole night herder. Skye found and caught his black easily, but couldn’t locate the dun in the half-light. Walks Alone caught his best horse, a buffalo runner, and a packhorse as well. In a while, when the sun rested coyly beneath the horizon, they rode north up the Shields River valley, staying close to the western foothills.
Walks Alone carried a full quiver on his back and his bow in hand. Skye carried his Hawken in his fringed and quilled sheath, hung from the saddle and tucked under his leg. They didn’t speak, content with the companionable silence, their senses alert for game. But there would be nothing so close. A hundred hunters a day had streamed out of the village for months, many in this direction.
When the sun finally broke over the eastern mountains, tinting the sky blue and the vast countryside brown and black, the mood changed. A day had begun.
“Among the People,” Walks Alone said, “a man with a disobedient wife is without face. The village makes jokes about such a one, and the jokes are cruel. Many Quill Woman does not obey you.”
Dark Passage Page 6
