“Thought I’d take your meat back to camp in the wagon, if you were still here,” he said. “I’m going over to help your brother with his skinning and then head in—save you a bit of heavy hauling.”
“Appreciate it.”
He studied the pile of tongues, humps, hams, and backstraps. “You did pretty good, first time.”
“Thanks.”
He hadn’t laughed. Perhaps she was doing well.
“But that’s a lot more than three hundred pounds,” he said. “Good thing I come by.”
_____
WHEN HE FINISHED his killing for the day, Raleigh left Sykes to skin out. He rode northwest toward where he’d last heard Otto’s shots. He had tried to soothe Sykes’s ruffled feathers, but the cracker-eater was still all swole. Angry words had passed, and finally Raleigh had been forced to conduct Sykes through a brief but strenuous exercise in military discipline. He’d knocked Sykes on his ass and taken out a tooth with the punch. It was the only form of instruction his kind would understand. Raleigh knew this type of man. Deep down he was one of them himself—a hardscrabble Southern plowboy raised on red dirt and hookworm, grits and greens.
Not anymore, though. By Act of Congress he’d been pronounced an officer and gentleman of the Army of Northern Virginia, Confederate States of America, and though he often made light of that fact, he still carried in his war bag the parchment to prove it, with Secretary of War James Alexander Seddon’s signature across the bottom, dated June 16, 1864. Sure, he thought, but no Congress left to vouch for its validity, no C.S.A. left to defend, in gentlemanly fashion or otherwise. His commission was worth no more than a bankroll of Confederate shin-plasters. Good enough to patch bullets with, or perhaps start a fire.
HE FOUND OTTO and Tom on a windy slope, skinning the last of their buffalo. The spring wagon sagged with the weight of the day’s hides. Big scrub-horns, all.
“We near got enough for a run to Dodge,” Raleigh said. “I tumbled more than seventy today, and it looks like you did just as well.”
“Sixty-eight,” Otto said. “This new rifle shoots true, even in a wind, but only for the first couple of hours. Then it starts fouling something fierce. I think it’s these damned bottleneck cartridges, make the bullet fit too snug on the lands, and they scrub the soft lead right off it.”
“Go back to your old Fifty.”
“Too much drift in this wind,” Otto said. “I haven’t got your eye for Kentucky windage. Maybe I’ll get me a Ballard next time we’re in Dodge, or one of those new Remington rolling-block .44s, see if it shoots any cleaner.”
“Anyways, we ought to send some hides back north,” Raleigh continued. “You and Milo could go up there, get you that new rifle while you’re at it.”
“I don’t need one that bad.”
“Well, one of us ought to go along with Sykes. He had a little run-in with Miss Jenny this afternoon, she wanted to save the meat from his buffalo and he got all hot about it. Though the dim redneck bastard won’t stir his bones enough to butcher it out, let alone brine it himself. I tried to calm him and he got sassy with me. Had to knock him down, finally. Skinned my knuckles on his rotten teeth, hope I don’t get poisoned.” He showed Otto the barked fist. “Anyways, I can’t ride north with him, the mood he’s in, and if we send him alone he might make off with the money once he’s sold our hides. I suppose Tom could go along, but he couldn’t stop Milo from swipin’ our money, not in Dodge he couldn’t. Mister Lo don’t swing much weight in that town.”
“Ja, doch zwar.”
“You could leave here tomorrow, head up north-by-east past Owl’s Head Butte to the Cimarron, then cut the road from Camp Supply. Ought to make Dodge in a long three days, if it don’t rain none.”
Otto scanned the sky. “Doesn’t look like anything’s coming our way. Hey, Tom—is it going to rain or snow in the next few days?”
Tom didn’t even look up from his skinning. “Nope,” he said. “You never know with a norther, though.”
Raleigh said, “When you get to Dodge, why don’t you fire Sykes and sign us on a new skinner? Maybe two. We’re into the big bulls now.”
WHEN OTTO TOLD Jenny that he’d be leaving for Dodge with the hides the following morning, she felt a momentary qualm. “I’ll be gone only a week,” he reassured her. “And I’m taking Sykes with me. Heard about your run-in with him today, so he won’t be here to make trouble. Tom’s a good lad, though, and Raleigh—as he never tires of telling us—is a Southern officer and a true gentleman. He’ll take care of you.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Jenny said blithely, but she was embarrassed that her concern had shown.
11
RALEIGH SAT BY the fire, sipping bourbon again. He had been careful not to pay too much attention to Miss Jenny while her big brother was around. Though the men were friends and partners, Raleigh knew that even Yankees could prove murderously protective of their sisters. He’d seen his partner in enough fights, in saloons or out on the Buffalo Range, with fists or with guns, to know that the Dutchman was no coward, even if the regimental hat Otto wore hadn’t told him so. He also suspected that in a fistfight Otto might get the better of him. The Dutchman had a longer reach and moved fast as a striking blacksnake. Otto was strong, too. Raleigh had seen him sling three rolled bullhides in one armload onto the wagon. Green hides, at that. A green hide weighed anywhere from eighty-five to a hundred pounds.
But now Otto was gone. For at least six days, likely a week or more. Raleigh knew when a girl was interested in him. You can tell it by the way she moves and watches you, he thought, the way she talks to you. If you were a man like Raleigh McKay, you saved time by noticing these things. You didn’t waste jaw on ladies that showed no interest. Consolidate that interest, win Jenny firmly to his side, and perhaps by the time ol’ Otto gets back we might could show him a full-blown, honorable courtship.
He swallowed some whiskey, leaned over to the keg, and drew some more.
Raleigh’s intentions—strangely enough, he suddenly realized—extended beyond a quick roll in the hay, nice as that would surely be.
Oh yes, there’s a long, cold winter coming, on up to the Yarner, where the northers, by all accounts, roar ice-blue clear through the Fourth of July. But Jenny can cook, too, and I’ve seen her shoot. She’s passable for pretty, if you liked ‘em a bit on the gristly side, all muscle, no fat. I sure don’t mind. She’s clean, she’s not a boozer, but no Christer either. And she sings good, at least for a Dutch girl. Almost good as an American. Why, come to think on it, she’s downright intelligent. Wish she wouldn’t wear them pants, though.
What the hell was he tryin’ to argue himself into? Or out of. An armful of warm girl was the best bedwarmer he knew, and if she was a good catch to boot . . . hell then, why not marry her?
He had enough money now to marry. A few more years in the hide game and he’d have even more. Maybe him and Jenny could stake some land somewheres, up in the Smoky Hills. Prove it out fast, with her bustlin’ ways. Say, that’s pretty country up there, we’ll run beef critters, maybe buy a bit more land later. A thousand acres at a time dependin’ on how the prices go. Otto can come visit. We’ll go huntin’ together, the three of us, antelope and blacktails. Jenny likes to kill prongbucks, Tom Shields says. We’ll kill off all the lobos, though, first thing; a little strychnine will do it, and good money to be made off their pelts. Poor Lo ought to be tame by then, with the shaggies gone, tied to the rez by the government beef-and-blanket allotment, troops nearby to chase his sorry ass back if he gets uppity. Maybe me and Jenny’ll have young’uns, too. Why not? Name the boy for me, the girl for her. She can name the second pair. Or maybe I’ll call the second boy after my daddy, the second girl after Mother. We’ll name one for Otto, too, one that comes later. Ottoline if it’s a girl. That’s a pretty name, Ottoline.
“Otto-leen?” he asked the stars. The stars had no answer.
He walked out from the fire and looked up at the sky.
Cold out
here in the Indian Nations. All them dead Cheyennes on the Washita. Black Kettle’s ghost . . .
Why sure, that’s what he’d do—marry Miss Jenny Dousmann. Otto had been gone a day now and he’d better make his move quick if he wanted to be sure of her by the time Otto got back. He went to the fire and rolled himself in his blankets. That’s what he’d do, he’d woo her. Soon he was snoring.
MAYBE I’M GETTING too white, Tom Shields thought. You hang around with the spiders long enough, you begin to think like them. Take the simple matter of bathing. As a boy, growing up Indian, he had bathed in a cold stream every morning of his life, winter or summer alike. Sa-sis-e-tas lodges were always near water. White spiders didn’t live that way, not the hide men anyway. Now weeks often went by with no running water. At least in this camp there was the creek nearby. He felt human again only if he had his morning wash. The spiders were happy enough to survive on the stale water in their barrels. They usually camped on the buffalo grounds, where there was no water, only muddy wallows. At those times Tom couldn’t bathe if he wanted to. He had tried to sneak water from the barrels and wash himself, but Captain McKay caught him at it once and scolded him. “Don’t waste the water,” he yelled. “Our lives may depend on it. What if the Indians come and besiege us?”
If the Sa-sis-e-tas come, there won’t be any siege, Tom thought. You’ll all be dead before you can wake up.
Then there was this question of killing. No, not exactly killing, all spiders were natural killers, but what came after the killing. Mr. Dousmann had gotten angry at what Tom did to those Snakes, the horse thieves. Tom had only been protecting himself, all of them actually, from the revenge of the Snake ghosts. A blind ghost cannot see you, and even if it could, a ghost without hands or feet could not get close or do harm.
But then, in the middle of Mr. Dousmann’s sermon, Tom had suddenly seen what he was getting at. Yes, they were just boys, no older than he had been the night he stole Wind Blows, clumsy boys who knew little of war. Killing them was no more of a challenge than killing the yellow calves of the buffalo, and among the Sa-sis-e-tas only boys killed calves. There would be weeping in the lodges of the Snakes when those boys did not return. Mothers would cut off their hair, gash their heads, and if one of the sons was a favorite, his mother would chop off a joint of her finger. His own mother would have done so.
Too much white spider.
But the girl was pretty. She reminded Tom constantly of his mother. Especially when she talked Dutch words. His mother would do that when she was angry, or when she felt sad and homesick for her spider people. She would croon him a little song in Dutch, when he was small. Something about das Veilchen, the violet. . . When he was sick she made him soup from plump young prairie chickens and wild leeks, no other woman of the Sa-sis-e-tas did that. They made blood soup. Her hair was yellow, too, like Jenny Dousmann’s. Some of the other boys said his mother looked like E-hyoph-sta, the Yellow-Haired Woman in the old tribal stories, the woman who had brought buffalo to the Sa-sis-e-tas.
Long ago, that was. The Cut-Arm People were starving, eating only skunks and turtles and bitter roots. Yellow-Haired Woman came from beneath a spring on a magical mountain and brought buffalo galloping after her. She showed the People how to kill them and eat them, make lodge skins and shields and bull boats from their hides, scrapers and shovels and knives and needles from their bones, thread from their sinews, rope from their wool, water buckets from their stomachs, glue from their skins and hooves. The last thing she said was that when the buffalo were gone, the People would soon follow. The Cut-Arm People begged her to stay, or at least to return if ever the buffalo disappeared. She had only smiled at them. She went back to her spring on the mountain.
When Tom was very young he had asked his mother if she was Yellow-Haired Woman. His mother said she wasn’t. Then she started crying.
Tom rolled out of his blankets, under the spring wagon. The fire was down to embers. A half-eaten moon lay low in the west. He pulled on his coat and hat, slung Wind’s apishamore over his shoulder, and picked up the Springfield. The rifle was cold in his hands. There was already a round in the chamber. He walked silently to where Wind Blows stood grazing in the flat beyond the cottonwoods. She heard him coming and tossed her head. He placed the soft, tanned, buffalo-hide apishamore on her back, smoothed it, vaulted onto her back, and with his knees guided her southwest, first at a fast walk, then, when they were far enough from the camp, urged her into a gallop.
He rode fast for half an hour, to the spot where Raleigh had killed his last buffalo the previous day. There he stopped, near the top of a prairie swell. Tom took two bones from his war bag. One was the sinuous antler of a young spikehorn elk, with a snake’s head carved at the thicker end. The antler had forty-five notches carved into its back, which was painted blue. The belly of the snake bone was painted yellow. It was a ceremonial rattle, and it represented a snake revered by the Sa-sis-e-tas, the blue racer, which came from the sun. The other bone was from the shank of a prongbuck. Tom ran the shank bone along the notched back of the snake. The rattle sounded loud and ominous in the quiet prairie night. An answering rattle came from just beyond the crest of the swell. Tom rattled twice in reply. Three horsemen topped the rise. Tom took off his hat so they would recognize him.
They were young men of about Tom’s age, two of them naked except for breechclouts and knee-high leggings. They all wore their hair in braids adorned with the tail feathers of an eagle. The two bare-chested men carried cased bows, with quivers of arrows across their backs, and led a string of three tall horses. The third man, who preceded them, wore a tattered blue U.S. Cavalry blouse and carried a lance which was shaped at the butt end like a shepherd’s crook. The shaft of the lance was wrapped in strips of otter skin, with pairs of bald-eagle tail feathers attached at four places. A long-barreled rifle rested crosswise on his pony’s withers. It looked like a Sharps, Tom thought. The horses they led were not Indian ponies.
‘Two Shields,” the man with the crooked lance said.
“Crazy for Horses,” Tom answered in Sa-sis-e-tas. “Elk Soldiers. What news of the People?”
Crazy for Horses leaned from his pony and punched Tom lightly on the shoulder. “Bad since you left us. But it shall be better now that I have counted coup on you.” They both laughed, and the others joined in.
They were Tom’s comrades of many battles from his soldier band, the Him-o-weh-yuhk-is, or Elkhorn Scrapers, commonly called Elk Soldiers, as the Dog Men were called Dog Soldiers and the Red Shields called Bull Soldiers. There were seven traditional soldier bands among the Sa-sis-e-tas. The Elk Soldiers were also called Blue Soldiers, for the U.S. Army jackets they sometimes wore. They had killed sixty white-spider troopers near Fort Phil Kearny and taken the clothing from the dead. Crazy for Horses had been Tom’s best friend since that fight. Cut Ear and Walks like Badger were younger, but good soldiers.
Crazy pulled a redstone pipe from his war bag. Tom produced a tobacco pouch of antelope hide from his coat pocket. They filled the pipe and lit it, offering smoke first to the earth, then to the east, to call the blessing of the Medicine Arrows on their meeting, all still on horseback as they puffed and blew. Then Crazy dismounted and the rest followed suit. They squatted by their ponies as they refilled the pipe and passed it around, smoking now for pleasure while they talked, as the white spiders did. The talk was of births and deaths, ponies stolen, buffalo hunts, love affairs begun and ended, of raids on enemy camps, and of the four beautiful noot-uhk-e-a, the girl Elk Soldiers of the band—in short, Tom thought, what comrades-in-arms of every nation discuss, wherever they meet.
“When did you spot me?” he asked.
Crazy gestured with his thumb toward his chest, then toward Wind Blows, pointed to his eye, and made the sign for “night laid aside,” meaning “yesterday.”
“That is when you allowed me to see you as well,” Tom said.
“And you signed us to meet you at this place,” Crazy agreed. “That was wise of you
. When we saw your pony we thought a white spider had killed you and stolen her. We were going to kill her rider and lift his ugly hair and take your pony back to her People. We did not recognize you in your spider costume, which is truly very ugly. And your hair—you had such beautiful long braids before you joined the spiders. Then you saw us and made the signs.”
“It’s good you came,” Tom said quickly. He, too, missed his braids. “I have rifles for you. Not here, though. Two days’ ride to the north, beyond the Buffalo Bull, even beyond the Flint River.”
The Buffalo Bull was the river the spiders called Cimarron. The Flint River they called the Arkansas. He told Crazy how to find the cave on the Pawnee Fork where he’d cached the rifles.
“They are Yellow Boys,” he said, raising an imaginary Winchester to his shoulder and working the lever. Then he made the sign for “eighteen.” “Bring them to Oh-kohm, my father,” he said.
“Your father said we should seek you down here,” Cut Ear said. “During the time you’ve been gone, he has been on a great journey of his own—with the other Old Man Chiefs to the big camp of the spiders. What they call Washington. There they heard nothing but lies, of course. He wishes you to continue on your mission, learning the spiders’ true intentions, and getting more guns for us. Your mother still mourns your leaving . . .”
“I’ve told the spiders I hunt with that they are both dead.”
“Your mother says you must dress warmly, even here in the sunny South,” Cut Ear continued, grinning openly now. “You must also avoid being killed by the Apaches, who are very cruel. And you must under no circumstances marry a woman of the Hev-a-tan-iu, the Rope People of the Southern Cheyenne, for their girls are all horse thieves and have the spider pox.”
“Why did you tell the spiders your parents were dead?” Crazy asked.
Tie My Bones to Her Back Page 11
