The Owl Hunt

by Richard S. Wheeler

  Dirk discovered the chief sitting in deep shade, staring out upon the moon-washed night. He was wrapped in a red-and-white Hudson’s Bay blanket, the red barely discernible.

  Dirk settled himself in the next wicker chair.

  “It is a good night, brother,” Washakie said.

  “The Dreamers came.”

  “And went away.”

  “They frightened the vicar and his family.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “I told them about how Father De Smet had made friends of the very tribes most feared by white men, and how the father looked after their needs and helped those people deal with the tide of white men.”

  “And what did this man Partridge say?”

  “He said Father De Smet only delayed what was to come, and the result was the Little Big Horn.”

  “Then he is not a friend.”

  “No, sir. He burns with the need to civilize the savages and bring them to the True Faith and make the savages just like white men.”

  Washakie exhaled his exasperation. “And the Dreamers are devils, yes?”

  “Yes, sir. He thought they rose out of the pits of hell, out of the very earth.”

  “They left something for me.”

  Washakie handed Dirk a furry feather. It had to be from a Great Gray Owl.

  Washakie eyed Dirk. “I don’t plan to die anytime soon, but the Dreamers seem to have other ideas.”

  “It is a threat?”

  “Will they seek my life? No. But Owl, the great bird, will pursue me. As the whites might say, it is written. It has been seen.”

  “My mother didn’t explain all these things to me.”

  “Shoshones have no religion in the sense that white men have one,” Washakie said. “We are led to our own universe in our own way. Your mother had nothing to teach you because each Shoshone pursues his private path, often in secret. There is no white men’s Bible, no tracts, no catechism for the People. These mysteries are discovered by boys when their time comes to listen and wait. It is something for you to find, not for her to teach.”

  “I was taken away at age eight, put in a Jesuit school in St. Louis. That’s what separates me from you, Grandfather.”

  “Yes, and it was good you went to St. Louis. You are a brother, North Star. You are one of the People, and you will help us learn how to live the new way.”

  “Brother? Not by blood.”

  “By all the mysteries that bring life to the womb of a Shoshone woman. We live in a world we barely know, and some of what we know is not what we see, but what rises inside of us. It rises in me to call you brother of all my People.”

  “What will you do with this owl feather, Grandfather?”

  “Tomorrow I will ride in my wagon to the encampment on the river, and give the feather to Walks at Night.”

  “And?”

  “He will not accept it, but let it drop to the clay.”

  “And it will lie there.”

  “The winds of time will take it away. They will lift it a few feet, and blow it into the reeds. And the Americans will still be here. I have made them my friends. They call me a friend and are naming that army post for me in a little while. In a way, they are what they say. But their focus is not upon us, not upon their Shoshone friends. Their hearts are upon their lands and settlers and ranchers and farmers and the towns and mines they will start, and they will forget their Shoshone friends. And they will forget the Dreamers, and an owl’s feather will not change them in the slightest.”

  “And the People?”

  Washakie stared into the mysterious night. “The bodies of the People will live on, make babies, survive. But the People, the Snake People, they may be lost. The Dreamers believe it will not happen that way. Everything will return to what it was. But white men come with guns made of iron, with wagons and horses and steam engines, with plows and looms that make cloth, with steamboats, and the time of the owls and the buffalo fades into the past and will not be seen again. Only the bodies will live on, and those will be poor, small, sickly, and ill-made.”

  There was something prophetic in Washakie’s vision.

  “I have made my choices, for myself and for the People,” he added. “The Dreamers might put me on the spirit road, but the fate of the People would be no different. Go now. There will be an owl feather at the teacher house.”

  That chilled Dirk. He hurried across the empty fields to the shadowy schoolhouse and to his teacherage, only to find old Victoria waiting for him, sitting on the front stoop, wrapped in a striped blanket. She handed him the same furry feather that had been given to Chief Washakie, and maybe others this fateful night.

  He took it wordlessly.

  “Stuck in the door. Big goddamn medicine,” she said.

  “No, no medicine in it. It has no magic. A Gray Owl did not fly here and drop this feather for me to heed. It’s a warning, though. A Dreamer brought it. Maybe Waiting Wolf himself. The Dreamers are telling me something.”

  “I don’t know what. In the old days, when I had the inner eye, I could tell you.”

  “You still have medicine, Grandmother.”

  “I don’t see the magpie no more,” she said.

  He puzzled it, and remembered that the magpie had been her spirit helper all her long life, and in some strange way, she and magpies had bonded. For her, Magpie was one bird, even if she had seen thousands in her life. It was as if all magpies had become her spirit counselor. But what did her magpie have to do with this?

  “Grandmother, when did Magpie become your spirit guide?”

  “I was still a girl, and I asked for a spirit blessing, and went by myself into the mountains above our village, and there I waited, and then Magpie came. She walked right up to me, where I lay on a robe, and she looked at me with one eye, and turned her head and looked at me with the other, and then I saw her above me, big as the whole sky, and I came down from the mountain and told our chief, Rotten Belly, that I had received the gift, and he told me I had received great powers. This was before I ever met your father, Mister Skye. Such powers didn’t come often to a girl, but they came to me. But now I don’t see Magpie, and I tell myself that we will meet on the star trail soon.”

  Dirk settled on the stoop beside her. The moonlight seemed eerie, and sometimes Dirk swore he saw shapes gliding across the meadows. But these were nothing, figments of his imagination, ghost warriors, ghost dancers, ghost spirits playing hob with the peace. Odd how jittery he was, even though the Dreamers had vanished.

  The feather seemed cold to his touch, not just lifeless but radiating the coldness of death. It sent chills through him. He ascribed this to his imagination, but no matter how much of a white man he tried to be in that moment, his other blood froze in his veins.

  “The feather is telling you something,” she said. She had a way of seeing through with eyes that fathomed the unknown. “Magpie was always with me. I saw Magpie where she could not be. Magpie beckoned to me, or warned me, or chattered greetings, or let me know of a bear or a moose or a wolf. Magpie saved our lives, you know. Without Magpie, or your father’s grizzly bear medicine, you would not exist. Mister Skye didn’t know anything about living in this place and only his medicine and my medicine kept death away. He might have died a dozen times before he met your mother, but for Magpie, and the great bear claws that rested on his chest. They are medicine, even as that owl feather freezing your fingers is medicine.”

  Dirk didn’t want to believe it. Everything stormed inside of him.

  The arrow whacked into the porch post two feet from his head. He jerked back, and tumbled into the shadow of the veranda. Victoria didn’t move. His heart raced. He slipped to the floor of the porch to make himself smaller.

  But there was nothing to be seen. Only eerie white light from the impersonal moon, and those strange spectres that somehow shifted the light here and there. Someone had almost killed him. And still could. He debated what to do, how to hustle old Victoria into the safety of the house. He
studied the deeps, the shadows stretching from the school building and the distant agency, and the slumbering fields.

  “You get inside, Grandmother,” he whispered tautly.

  She ignored him, and stood in the light of the moon, a small wraith waiting there.

  He could barely discern the bushes from where the arrow had flown. He had nothing else to go on, so he sprang up and raced straight toward the brush, expecting more arrows to fly. He leapt into the brush, thrashing toward whatever was there, but found nothing. No one was fleeing, either. He roamed the area, but found nothing, and finally stood still, hearing only the hammering of his heart.

  He slowly made his way back to the porch, alert to any movement anywhere.

  She stood there, and sang softly. He knew it was not her death song, but an Absaroka song of courage. They stood while she sang her song, and then she turned toward the house.

  “Your father’s spirit is in you,” she said.

  He got his first close look at the arrow buried in the post. It had a steel head, was dyed totally black, and it was fletched with the soft feathers of the Great Owl.

  nine

  Owl knew the fate of the People was intertwined with his vision. He found himself almost alone now, a mystic, a visionary who was sought out for counsel that rose not from his own youthful wisdom, but from a larger and more terrible source.

  Like the great Lakota visionary and warrior Crazy Horse, who had defeated the blue-bellies led by Colonel Custer two years earlier, Owl chose not to adorn himself. He was only a vessel, one whom the spirits had appointed in one galvanizing moment to carry their message to the People. He was scarcely into his manhood, and only days earlier he had been a youth named Waiting Wolf learning white-man things in the schoolhouse.

  Now he wore only a breechclout and moccasins, his body at home with nature. Whenever he spoke of his vision, the Great Gray Owl stamped on the face of the dead sun, and the return of the brightness that lit the world of the People, he was heard with respect. Who had ever imagined such a thing? Who could dispute this sign from the all-knowing spirits? Who could bear to receive a prophecy from the Owl, harbinger of death, terror of the night, the aerial stalker floating murderously on the currents of chill air?

  And so the Dreamers had sprung up. Other men were seeking a vision, and dreaming, and receiving the Owl courage. The Owl Dance had begun, sung in the depths of the night to the soft melancholy of flutes, punctuated by a single drum, flute and drum, a death knell drifting over the lonely reaches of the Wind River Reservation, the prison fashioned by the white men to contain the People.

  Now there were Dreamers in every hamlet, and almost nightly they gathered in hidden valleys far from the ears of the Yankees, to dance the Owl Dance, to hear the flute send owl chills through them until they fell exhausted upon the dewy grass, still dreaming of the time to come whenever Owl should declare the moment was at hand.

  For Owl himself, it was all very strange. He was scarcely fifteen winters, but old men, seasoned warriors, battle-hardened scouts who had returned chastened from the Custer debacle, where a contingent of Shoshones had supported the bluecoats, all these now paid heed to this quiet, uneasy, sometimes arrogant boy. They called him Grandfather, the ultimate respect, yet he was barely into his manhood. They hung onto his every word.

  “I do not speak for myself,” he told them. “I speak only what comes to me, for I am no more than a bowl carrying the blood of life. I have taken the name of He who Speaks to the People.”

  He retained his humility, seeking nothing for himself, avoiding any declaration of his own authority, and because of that he fevered his followers all the more. For he was the vessel of great tidings for the People.

  He drifted into the hidden chasms of the Wind River Mountains, faded into distant camps, lived on high meadows, prayed incessantly to receive the word of the Owl, most dreaded of all the spirits. No white man saw him; no blue-belly army would ever find him. And yet the People somehow always knew where he was, many misty layers of foothills from the eyes of the whites. The Owl Dance spread, and now Dreamers danced it in every hamlet from one end of the reservation to the other, the flutes whispering the song of liberation, which somehow all the Dreamers learned and repeated and made into a ritual that swelled across the whole reservation.

  Owl himself was the principal Dreamer, and often took a blanket out to a breezy hilltop to listen, and always received new visions from the Great Owl. Sometimes those visions were slow to form in his mind, and then he supplicated the fearsome bird for direction. But sometimes he was transfixed, taken out of himself, floating through the night skies, so he could see his own resting body below. And then he received word. This he carefully conveyed to several trusted lieutenants, chief of which was Walks at Night, who spread the new understanding to the Dreamers, who now were located in every cranny of the reservation.

  The only unfathomable thing was the attitude of his own father, Buffalo Horn, himself a shaman, who glared angrily at the young man, as if he were committing sacrilege. But Owl simply stared back. Let the dead bury the dead; his was the true vision, the future brought to the present. And now many Dreamers had been given the vision.

  “How do these visions come to you?” Buffalo Horn had asked him.

  “It is not for you to know. It is my own medicine,” Owl replied.

  “Have you taken your visions to Chief Washakie?”

  “I have not. I will not.”

  “Have you called all the People together and told them of your vision?”

  “I do not share my visions. They are for the Dreamers, who also hear and dream.”

  “The Owl is the most feared of all creatures. Because he is death, he brings death to the People,” his father said. “All the People fear the Owl.”

  His father’s gaze was unblinking, so the youth met it with his own unblinking gaze, and then the older man turned away.

  That was the only trouble to befall the young man.

  They were all waiting for the moment when they would drive the white men away from their home, and the buffalo would return, and they would be free to go wherever they would go.

  Then came word that the blue-bellies had formed into an armed column and were marching. Could this be war? Murder? The column marched out in the morning, its flags flapping, its ponies groomed. It looked like a parade, just what the Yankee army did when a visiting general arrived to inspect them. Within half a morning, Owl knew all about this new thing. There were a handful of soldiers remaining at the post. The agency settlement was undefended but for those. The column slowly heading upriver was intended for show, not war. The white men’s message to the Dreamers was plain: stop it. Go back to your quiet ways.

  Now his lieutenants crowded around Owl, waiting for word. The young man slid easily into the authority granted to him. “Let them march. Let our camps vanish before the blue column. Let them seek the People and find no one except the older ones. Let them go where they will and return to their fort puzzled. Let those remaining at the agency, the mission, the school, learn that they are not safe. But do not harm them, not until the vision comes. Let them know that Owl has spoken.” He eyed his lieutenants. “And if the People go hunting away from the reservation, there will be no blue-bellies to stop them.”

  The lieutenants liked that. They liked taking direction from this stripling boy who could peer into the spirit world. They liked his authority. So Owl’s word was carried to every corner of the reservation except where the Arapahos were settling, and soon all the People knew what to do. They kept an eye on the blue column, led by Captain Cinnabar, and well before the column arrived in some camp, the lodges were dismantled and spirited away, and the place vanished. And some among them were well beyond the reservation, hunting game on white men’s ranches.

  Wherever the column rode, the soldiers were observed by many eyes watching from the surrounding hills. Plainly the captain was puzzled, and sometimes sent patrols out to follow the lodge trails, the furrows of the
dragged lodgepoles, and sometimes they found a lodge filled with elders living peacefully beside a creek. But when the villages dispersed, they took their lodges in all directions, so there were dozens of trails, and Captain Cinnabar had little understanding. If his was a show of force, it was proving futile because there was no one who saw it.

  Mare and Walks at Night were reporting each day’s events.

  “We drummed near the mission, not the Dreamer songs, but the drumming from old times, and soon the mission man and woman were frightened,” said Mare. “Skye’s boy appeared, and we slipped into the night. Later we put an owl arrow near him, always heeding Owl’s word not to kill, not now. But how I itched to plant that arrow in his chest. He was born of a Shoshone woman, and now he spends his days destroying the old ways. How I itched!”

  “What did he do?”

  “He rolled into the moon shadow of the porch, frightened, but then he sprang at me, and I reached the shadows just in time.”

  “He had no courage and sought the shadow,” Owl said. “His time is coming. He is a mixed-blood, born of the People only to betray the People.”

  Of all those whom Owl despised, Dirk Skye was chief among them. Dirk Skye had Shoshone blood but taught white men’s wisdom.

  “Let him think about the owl arrow,” Walks at Night said.

  “When the moon comes up, put an owl arrow close to Buffalo Horn,” Owl said. “Let him see the power of the Dreamers.”

  “Your father, Owl?” asked Walks at Night.

  “He does not see with true eyes and does not honor the vision of his own son,” Owl said.

  “But your father?”

  Owl stared at the older man until the man seemed to wilt into his moccasins.

  Someday all the People would rejoice in what Owl had done. The People would be free, and the land would be scourged of evil, and the Dreamers would be honored at all the lodge fires of all the old men. And Owl would be remembered even as Sweet Medicine was remembered among the Cheyenne, the lawgiver and the savior of the People.

  But that was not for now. That was for the time when Owl received the vision that would change everything.