The Spirit Path

by Madeline Baker

  Shadow Hawk nodded. He was not surprised that the Spirit Woman knew of Mahpiya Luta. Red Cloud was a man of wisdom, well known among the whites, though he was not as revered by the Lakota as Sitting Bull, or considered to be as good a fighter as Crazy Horse.

  “Red Cloud,” Maggie muttered. But it couldn’t be that Red Cloud. He’d been dead since 1909. “Do you know what year this is?”

  “Year?”

  Maybe he had amnesia, Maggie thought. Or maybe he was simple-minded and liked to pretend he was living back in the 1800s.

  “Do you know who the president is?” she asked, then frowned. In the old days the Indians hadn’t called him the president. “The Grandfather in Washington,” she said, willing to humor him, at least for the moment. “Do you know who he is?”

  Shadow Hawk frowned thoughtfully, trying to remember the name of the Grandfather Red Cloud had gone to see. “Grant?”

  “Oh, Lord,” Maggie murmured. Ulysses S. Grant had been president back in 1872 or thereabouts.

  “Have you ever heard of Bill Clinton?” she asked, knowing as she did so what his answer would be.

  He shook his head.

  “Do you know what television is?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know about cars? Fords, Chevys?”

  “No.”

  Maggie shook her head, refusing to even consider what she was thinking. She’d read books about time travel, people flitting back and forth from one century to another, she’d even written one herself, but it was just fiction. It wasn’t possible in real life. Was it?

  Yet even as she told herself it couldn’t be true, she knew in her heart that it was. He didn’t have the look of a deranged person, or one who was mentally deficient. He had the look of a man who was lost.

  “Then I guess you probably haven’t heard of Madonna either,” she mused or Vietnam or the war in the Persian Gulf, or…”

  Shadow Hawk shook his head, confused by the strange words, by the look of dismay and disbelief on the Spirit Woman’s face.

  “Why have you called me here?” he asked, determined to find the answer to the riddle before he went back to the cave.

  “I called you?”

  “I have seen you in visions four times.” Shadow Hawk stared out the window. Four, he thought. Four was a sacred number. Was that how he came to be here, because he had seen her four times?

  “I never called you,” Maggie said. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  He turned to face her again. “I saw you on the mountain when I sought my medicine dream, and then I saw you again during the Sun Dance. I saw you in the sweat lodge, and in the Sacred Cave. And each time I felt you were calling me.”

  Maggie went cold and then hot as she remembered dreaming of this man, painting him, writing of him in her books. Had she somehow summoned him from the past?

  “How did you come to be here?” he asked. “Why do you live in the sacred hills of my people? There was no white man’s lodge in the meadow when I entered the Sacred Cave two days ago, yet you are here.”

  Am I? Maggie wondered. Maybe she was dreaming again. She heard him sigh and she realized he looked suddenly faint.

  “Why don’t you sit down?” Maggie suggested, her mind whirling with questions. “You’ve lost a lot of blood. You need time to regain your strength.”

  It was in his mind to argue. He was a warrior, he did not listen to the counsel of women, but he was too weary, too confused, to protest. Moving to the bed, he sat down on the edge of the mattress, his hands resting on his knees.

  “You mentioned a cave,” Maggie said. “You said my house wasn’t here when you went in, but it was here when you came out. I don’t understand.”

  “There was a battle,” Shadow Hawk said. “We took shelter in the cave…” He wanted to tell her what had happened, to discover why she had called him to this place, but the wound in his side was throbbing monotonously, making it difficult to think of anything else.

  Maggie saw the utter weariness in his eyes, the fine lines of pain around his mouth, and knew she should let him rest. But she had so many questions. How had he gotten here? How long was he going to stay? Did he really know Red Cloud? She felt the excitement building within her as she considered the possibilities of conversing with a man from the past. Why, with his knowledge of history, she could write the most authentic historical romances the world had ever seen!

  “I must go,” he said, but he continued to sit on the bed, as if he didn’t have the energy to get up.

  “You really should rest,” Maggie said. “You’re not strong enough to make it to the Hills today. Maybe tomorrow.”

  As much as he hated to admit it, he knew she was right. He didn’t have the strength or the energy to go anywhere.

  Stretching out on the bed, he closed his eyes, surrendering to the weariness that engulfed him.

  Tomorrow he would ask her again. Tomorrow he would find out why she had summoned him.

  Tomorrow…

  Chapter Nine

  Veronica looked at Maggie as if she were crazy. “A man from the past! Are you out of your mind?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe! Maggie, you’ve been reading too many romance novels. People don’t travel through time. It’s impossible. He’s probably just another drunken Indian who doesn’t know what day it is.”

  “I don’t think he knows what century it is.”

  Veronica shook her head. “It isn’t possible.”

  “He said he’d seen me in a vision. On a mountain. In a sacred cave.”

  Veronica went suddenly still, the batter she d been stirring forgotten. “A sacred cave? He mentioned a sacred cave?”

  “Yes, why?”

  Veronica shook her head. “Nothing.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Among our people there’s an old legend about a Sacred Cave. It was believed that a medicine man with very strong power could enter the cave and see into the future.”

  “Our future?”

  “I don’t know. I never believed it, but my father did. There were tales of a medicine man known as Heart-of-the-Wolf who saw visions in the cave.”

  Maggie felt the same chill she’d felt when Shadow Hawk said he’d seen her in vision, a sense of being caught up in something beyond her understanding, beyond comprehension or rational explanation.

  “Did the Indians travel through time?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “But if a medicine man could see into the future, why couldn’t he go there?”

  “I don’t know,” Veronica said. She stared into the bowl of cake batter, then shook her head. “It was just a legend.”

  “But some legends are based on fact.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Veronica said. “It gives me the creeps.” She began to stir the cake batter again, determined not to think of it anymore. But she couldn’t help remembering when she was a little girl, sitting in the shadows while the ancient ones spoke of the past, of medicine men who knew the future before it happened, of Heart-of-the-Wolf, who had died inside the Sacred Cave. According to legend, his body had been found there, along with the body of a white man. A young medicine man had accompanied Heart-of-the-Wolf to the cave, but his name had been lost or forgotten.

  “Why don’t you go see if he’s awake?” Veronica asked. “Dinner will be ready soon.”

  Deep in thought, Maggie left the kitchen and went into the guest bedroom. Shadow Hawk was still asleep and she stared at him, wondering if she was letting her too fertile imagination run away with her. Did she really believe he had come here from the past?

  It really wasn’t that hard to imagine such a thing, perhaps because she spent so much time living in a fantasy world. Her last book had been a time travel novel about a modern-day Indian who went back in time. She’d received hundreds of letters from fans who said they wished they could go back in time, even a few letters from people who believed it was possible.

  She stared at the man in the bed,
noting again how handsome he was. Even in sleep he radiated a kind of restless power, a deep inner strength.

  She glanced out the window toward the Black Hills. The Sioux believed they were sacred, that all life had been created there, in the heart of the earth. Was there a cave up there somewhere, a sacred cave, shrouded in the mists of time? If he had traveled from the past to the future perhaps she could enter the cave and relive the past, change it so that the accident never happened.

  She glanced back at the bed to find Shadow Hawk staring at her.

  “Htayetu wasté,” she said. “Good evening.”

  Shadow Hawk nodded. She looked beautiful sitting there with the changing shades of twilight visible through the window behind her. She wore a pink dress with a long full skirt that fell to her ankles. Her hair was loose about her face and shoulders, like a dark cloud, and he felt a sudden longing to touch it, to touch her.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked. “Dinner is ready.”

  He nodded again.

  “Do you want to eat in here, or in the…” She had no Sioux word for kitchen, so she gestured toward the door. “Do you want to eat in the other part of the house, with me?”

  “Yes,” he said solemnly. “With you.” His gaze slid toward the round white pot he had been using to relieve himself and then moved back to her face.

  “The…” She frowned, wondering how to say “bathroom” in Lakota, and then shrugged. He’d been using a bed pan for the last two days, another night wouldn’t hurt. Cheeks red, she left the room.

  A few minutes later Shadow Hawk entered the kitchen. He was wearing his clout and moccasins, nothing more. His hair, long and thick and straight, almost reached his waist. Somehow, his mere presence made her kitchen seem suddenly small.

  Maggie pointed to the chair at the opposite end of the table. “Sit down.”

  He did so gingerly, as if fearing the cane-back chair wouldn’t hold his weight, then stared at the plate Veronica placed before him. Glancing across the table, he watched as Maggie lifted her knife and fork.

  “Meat loaf,” Maggie said, spearing a piece with her fork.

  “Meat loaf,” he repeated. “Of what is this made?”

  “Beef,” Maggie replied.

  Hawk nodded. He knew of beef, the white man’s buffalo. Somewhat reluctantly he took a bite. “Wasté,” he said, liking the taste of it.

  “Yes,” Maggie said. “It is good.” She pointed to the rest of the food on her plate, naming each item as she did so. “Potatoes. Carrots.”

  He nodded, wolfing down the meal, drinking the hot black coffee with obvious enjoyment.

  Veronica filled Hawk’s plate again, and then again, shaking her head as he put away three helpings of meat loaf and two servings of mashed potatoes and carrots, along with three cups of coffee before he sat back, a contented look on his face.

  “I always said you were a good cook,” Maggie said, grinning. “I’d better send Bobby to the store. I have a feeling our food bill is about to go up.” She looked across the table at Shadow Hawk. “Would you like to see the rest of the house?”

  “Yes.”

  He followed her quietly from room to room, saying little as she told him what things were called, coffee table, sofa, footstool, rug, curtains, fireplace, piano, cupboard, desk, computer, stove, dishwasher, pantry, book, mirror. He repeated each name carefully, the English words sounding flat when compared to the words of the Lakota.

  He was fascinated by lamps that gave light with the flick of a switch, mesmerized by the refrigerator and the microwave and the television, astonished by the sound of the stereo even though he couldn’t understand the words to the songs. Maggie blushed furiously as she tried to explain what the toilet was, and then decided to leave that to Bobby.

  By the time they’d seen the living room, den, kitchen, the other guest bedroom, and bathroom, he was looking a little dazed and more than a little tired, so she suggested he might want to turn in for the night.

  Sitting on the edge of the bed, Shadow Hawk stared out the window. Where was he? It was obvious he was no longer where he belonged, even though he could see the Black Hills silhouetted in the moonlight. The place was the same, he thought, and yet it was different. He had gone into the Sacred Cave with Heart-of-the-Wolf and when he left it, he had entered another world, the world of the Spirit Woman. Had she called him here to show him what marvels the white man was capable of so that he might go back to his own people and explain it was futile to fight them?

  He thought of Veronica Little Moon and Bobby Running Horse. They were Lakota, but they were more white than Indian. They spoke the white man’s language and wore his clothes, they ate his food and sang his songs. Was this to be the fate of his people, to become the slaves of the white man, to forget their heritage and turn their backs on their beliefs?

  “I guess you’re feeling a little confused,” Maggie said sympathetically.

  Shadow Hawk nodded.

  “Veronica told me about your sacred cave, that medicine men went there to have visions. She told me of a legend about a medicine man known as Heart-of-the-Wolf…”

  Shadow Hawk leaned forward, his eyes intent upon her face. “She knows of Heart-of-the-Wolf?”

  “Well, she said it was just a legend.”

  “No! He was my friend. He died in the cave.”

  “Veronica said only medicine men were allowed to enter.”

  Shadow Hawk nodded. “I was to take his place.”

  “You seem very young to be a medicine man.”

  “I have seen twenty-five winters.”

  “You are young,” Maggie murmured.

  “Are you so old?”

  “Thirty-two.”

  “Not so old as the mountains,” he said solemnly, though a faint smile tugged at the corners of his mouth.

  She’d thought him handsome before, but when he smiled it was like night turning to day, like rain after a long drought. She stared at him, feeling her cheeks turn pink. She’d never been one to blush, never been one to be caught up in a man’s looks. But Shadow Hawk was a singularly handsome man, with a physique like a Greek god and a smile that could light up a city.

  “Have others of your people ventured into the future?”

  “The future? Is that where I am?”

  “It would seem so. According to the white man’s time, you’ve traveled over a hundred years into the future.”

  Shadow Hawk gazed around the room. He knew the names of the unfamiliar objects now, pillow, mattress, sheets, chest of drawers, closet, nightstand, lamp, walls, ceiling, floor. But none of it seemed real, save the Spirit Woman, and he longed to touch her, to see if she was flesh and blood or spirit only.

  He looked at the blue of her eyes, the clear beauty of her skin, and felt a sudden heat pulse through him, a longing for something he had never known.

  “Why do you sit always in that chair?” he asked, needing to turn his attention to something else.

  “I can’t walk.”

  Shadow Hawk frowned. “You have been injured?”

  “Yes, a couple of years ago.” She shrugged. “I can’t walk anymore.”

  She said it matter-of-factly, but he saw the pain in her eyes before she glanced away.

  “You should get some rest,” Maggie said. “You lost a lot of blood.”

  Shadow Hawk nodded, his gaze following her as she left the room.

  Lying back on the bed, he stared out the window toward the Black Hills. His mother and his people crowded his thoughts. The battle would be over by now. Heart-of-the-Wolf had assured him his mother still lived, but Shadow Hawk knew he would not believe it until he had seen her for himself. And what of his people? Had they all been killed or, worse yet, rounded up and taken to the reservation? The need to know the fate of his mother and his people burned within him.

  The cave, he thought, the cave was the answer. On the night of the next full moon, he would go to the cave and see if he could follow the Spirit Path back home.

  Chapt
er Ten

  Shadow Hawk slept most of the next day and then, feeling he would go crazy if he didn’t get out of the house, he went outside and walked toward the Black Hills. They rose before him, rugged, beautiful, covered with tall pines, their branches lifting in silent supplication toward the clear blue sky. The Sacred Cave was nestled up there, waiting for his return. If he climbed the hill and entered the cave, would he find Heart-of-the-Wolf ‘s body lying where he had left it?

  He pressed his hand to his side as his steps slowed. The Spirit Woman had been right. He was too weak to climb the hills. His wound, though not serious, had drained his strength.

  With a sigh, Shadow Hawk turned and walked slowly toward the house. The young would-be warrior, Bob-by, was standing near a four-rail corral brushing a big black stallion.

  “It’s good to see you on your feet,” Bobby said, speaking Lakota. “I am truly sorry for what happened. I was after a deer.”

  Shadow Hawk nodded. “It is all right.”

  Bobby couldn’t help staring at the man. Was he really a warrior from the past? It seemed too farfetched to be true, but there were many strange legends among his people, mysteries that could not be explained logically. “Will you be staying here very long?”

  A wistful smile tugged at Shadow Hawk’s lips. “I do not know.”

  Bobby grunted softly. “Maybe we could go into town when you’re feeling better.”

  Shadow Hawk nodded, his gaze on the horse. It was a fine animal, big-boned and long-legged, with wide, intelligent eyes and a deep chest.

  Bobby grinned. Whether from the past or the present, the stranger had a good eye for horseflesh. “He is a beautiful animal. I have been trying to break him to ride, but I have not yet been successful. He is very strong and very stubborn, and I have the bruises to prove it.”

  Shadow Hawk smiled, thinking he’d like a chance to ride the black when he was feeling better. He nodded to Bobby, then went into the house.

  He paused inside the front door, staring at the painting that hung over the huge stone fireplace. He recognized the location in the background of the painting. It was in the foothills past Bear Butte. And the horse was Ohitika. There could be no mistaking the markings on the big calico stallion. And he was the man. The knowledge sent a shiver down his spine.