“They’re sending you along to check up on me.”
“That’s what they’re up to, my boy.”
“I’m a two-blood, so I’m not trusted?”
“You got her.”
“And you’re telling me this?”
“Know somethin’, Skye? I got me three stripes because I make sure everyone I’m with knows I’m on the level. I ain’t keeping no secrets from you. You know what? I stay square, and that’s saved my life a few times.”
“They think I’d betray them?”
“Who knows, buddy boy? But I don’t think so. They just think you ain’t predictable. Like not going to shelter at the fort. It says to them, it says, maybe this Dirk Skye, he’s plugged in with them Dreamers.”
“I’m not, but I think the People have some grievances. And I know something of their thinking. They’re waiting for their spirit helper, the Owl, to steer them, and when they have a vision, it’ll be shared with everyone. It’ll be the most public news on the reservation.”
“Hoodoo,” Muggins said.
There was no arguing with the sergeant. Dirk thought of all the ways his people had interacted with their spirit guides. Even his father, Barnaby Skye, had bear medicine and a sort of bear knowing, and that had steered him out of danger, or helped him in times of need. And his old Crow mother Victoria always drew some mysterious wisdom from the magpie. It wasn’t just the magpie in sight throughout the countryside, but Magpie, the spirit of all the magpies. He remembered that the Jesuits in St. Louis had tried hard to dismiss such things as superstition, but it wasn’t. It was another way of knowing. Let the whites dismiss it as hoodoo. Maybe it was good that they were so blind.
“Glad you think so,” Dirk said.
Muggins was watching him intently. The sergeant’s stare was almost a physical force.
They rode through a day that was quiet in the valley and stormy in the mountains, mostly quietly but not without a certain silent camaraderie between them.
“Them Snakes sure are scarce,” the sergeant said.
“This time of year they’ll be as high as they can get,” Dirk said.
They rode past garden patches, mostly abandoned or seriously lacking attention. There wasn’t anyone in sight.
“Looks to me like the whole tribe jumped the reservation.”
The brown grasses of midsummer stretched silently toward the river bottoms, where a green bottomland stretched endlessly east and west.
“How often do they come in for their allotment?”
“Their flour and beans? Once a month.”
“They gotta come a long way.”
“It’s a long way to flour and beans, and a long way to whatever game they can find in the foothills and slopes. So they move two hundred miles a month, or more, to stay fed.”
They rounded a shoulder of land, and beheld a green valley, and a dozen lodges drawn into a semicircle there. It would have a headman, maybe several.
thirteen
The runner clambered the last steep grade to the hanging valley, and headed for the nest. Owl knew what he would say; Owl knew all things. Owl had received another runner, Weeping Woman, at dawn. Now Father Sun had climbed over the lip of the ridges illumining the valley where the Dreamers gathered.
Owl rose to meet the runner. With each passing night, Owl looked more and more like the spirit bird who had entered into his heart and now transformed him. Above all, Owl didn’t walk anymore; he glided over the land so softly no creature heard the flap of wings until too late. And now he had owl eyes. Every Shoshone knew it. Owl’s eyes were huge and unblinking and could see through everything to the innermost spirit. That was because the Owl had entered the youth, Waiting Wolf, and occupied his human body.
But Owl also wore an owl cape, fashioned by his sister, who had stitched the soft owl feathers into wings falling away from his elk-leather sleeves. This was a good cape, which blessed him with his owl nature, and identified him as the keeper of the Owl secrets. When any Dreamer approached, Owl stood very still, never even a facial muscle twitching, a ghost of a birdman, awaiting the moment of triumph. For Owl, there was no present; only the future, when his spirit bird inside of him would peck at his heart and a long night would begin.
Thus did Owl wait immobile while the runner, panting slightly, trotted across the mounting slopes. Owl knew this runner, too, a brother of Ah-Chee, who worked as a woodcutter for the agency. Owl knew the things that happened at the agency almost before other white men in the white men’s camp knew of them.
At last the runner, a certain boy, stood panting before him.
“You have come to tell Owl that the teacher and a soldier are even now seeking our elders and headmen,” he said.
The youth stood, amazed.
“Owl knows what there is to know,” Owl said.
“Owl, Grandfather, you have spoken truth. The teacher will tell the headmen they must attend a meeting at the agency after seven suns.”
“There will be many soldiers at the meeting,” Owl said. “They will be there to show the muscle of the white men.”
“Truly, Grandfather, you have spoken what I came to tell you. Your eyes are large and see all things.”
Owl was scarcely older than this runner, but he enjoyed being addressed as Grandfather, the term of greatest respect.
“Is there anything else, boy?”
“The headmen seek your wisdom, Grandfather.”
“Tell them to go to the white men’s meeting, as requested. I see outrage. I see insult. This must pass before Owl begins the new world, when the People can go where they will, and the buffalo are thick on the prairies.”
“Truly you have spoken, Grandfather. I will tell those who sent me of your wisdom. That they must attend the meeting at the agency, and be prepared for insult. Have I your message well remembered?”
“You have it. Rest and eat, and then go.”
The youth backed away, for it was not good to turn one’s back on Owl, and soon settled at a campfire where some Dreamers had a pot of elk stew bubbling.
“You have great eyes, Grandfather,” said one of the Dreamer subchiefs, Walks at Night.
“It is the Owl who has taken hold of Waiting Wolf. It is Owl residing in me, my friend. I am only a clay bowl holding what is sacred.”
Owl glided through the camps of the Dreamers, a hush surrounding him wherever he went. The Dreamers knew Owl to be surrounded by silence, and some said that even the wind stopped whispering where Owl walked. That is what made the People so respectful. Owl brought with him a world of stillness which wrought fear and obedience in all who approached him. What was greater than the power to quiet the wind?
This hanging valley was a good place. It was guarded by vaulting slopes on three sides, leading upward to perpetual snow. And it could be approached only by a steep and treacherous path from forested slopes below. A rill offered snowmelt, and game was still available to the patient hunter. Most of the People knew exactly where the Dreamers had gathered, but none would tell the agent or the teacher or the missionaries or the soldiers. Not if one expected to live.
He approached one knot of Dreamers and won their instant attention. “The agent is requiring the presence of the elders and headmen. This is not Chief Washakie’s doing. The headmen will discover more soldiers than they have ever seen before. The agent Van Horne will tell the headmen to bring the Dreamers to the agency, and there bad things will happen to the Dreamers. Owl has seen these things, and they must come to pass before the Time of Change we have dreamed will begin. Let it happen, for it is all a part of Owl’s design.”
“The headmen will betray us, Grandfather?”
“No, the white men will betray the headmen. These friends of the People have put us in a prison. Now they want to talk. But they don’t want to listen. They want to threaten.”
“Truly, Owl has peered into the thing that will come.”
Owl nodded, and glided to other knots of Dreamers, who had organized themselves into a war
camp, making lances and arrows because they had so few firearms. Owl didn’t encourage that; he knew that when the moment came, the white men would flee this land in terror, their hearts frozen by fear. Then the People would possess all that had been given them from the time of the grandfathers long ago.
Still, some blood would be shed, so he did not discourage any Dreamer preparing himself to do battle with the soldiers. He wished he had a weapon of his own, but none had come to him. He glided from group to group, and was always greeted as the salvation of the People, and that is how he saw himself.
The Dreamers had received a new dance, and now they danced it each night, often in utter darkness when it was far more engrossing than by the light of a fire. The Dreamers danced the Owl Dance, in which they glided silently, arms outstretched, not in a circle but each Dreamer on his own path, gliding without noise but for the thump of a single drum. It was the quietest dance anyone had ever known, so quiet that a pounding heart seemed noisier. The Dreamers glided through the evenings, immersing themselves in owl medicine, sometimes led by Owl himself, sometimes not. For it was night vision that the youth sought, this Waiting Wolf who now was a spiritual force among the People. Often at night he glided upward to the snow fields and made his vision bed upon a shelf of rotting ice, there to listen to the spirits. The Dreamers said that Owl returned to camp transformed, some mysterious force radiating from him after he had opened himself to the Other Ones who ran the highest ridges.
Owl knew where the teacher, Dirk Skye, and the sergeant would camp. He did not know how he knew; it was simply one of the mysterious powers he had acquired when the most dreaded of all creatures inhabited Waiting Wolf. The teacher and the soldier would invite eight or ten headmen to the meeting this day, and tomorrow would invite the rest, and return to the agency. But this night they would camp about two hours away by horseback.
He would greet them.
He found the swiftest horse among those herded by the Dreamers, slipped a hackamore on it, glided to its back, and steered it away from camp. A few Dreamers stared, but Owl’s lonely and mysterious trips were familiar to them all. Owl was forever communing with his spirit guides, and often left camp on his spiritual voyages. But this time Owl did not ride toward the great ridges and snow-choked chasms, but down from the hanging valley and then along a tumbling creek, and finally into the broad valley of the Wind River. He saw no one. His fine horse glided, even as Owl glided, and they covered much ground. He came to the place his inner eye had told him to come to, and found no one there. Unfazed, he picketed his pony and sat quietly. It was a good place to camp, and many before him had sojourned there, where grass for the ponies lay thick, and no mosquitos buzzed, and a fire could be hidden in a shallow drainage, and the wind didn’t whip.
So he waited patiently as twilight stretched toward darkness, and then his guests arrived just as he had foreseen. He stood quietly, letting them spot him and his pony. The blue-shirt was instantly alarmed, but Dirk Skye simply stared, saw a young Shoshone wearing only a loincloth and moccasins, unarmed, standing quietly in the blue last-light of the day.
“Who greets us here?” Skye asked in the Shoshone tongue.
Owl did not reply. Let Skye name him.
The sergeant trailed along behind Skye, his hand ready to draw a sidearm, but even the sergeant could see Owl had no weapon and was not dangerous in the slightest.
“You,” Skye said, finally recognizing the youth. “Waiting Wolf, is it?”
“The name you have spoken you must not speak, for he is no longer alive,” Owl said.
“Owl, then. I am pleased to see you. This is Sergeant Muggins, and we’re on an errand for Major Van Horne.”
“Yes, you are asking all the headmen to meet, so that something will be done about Owl and the Dreamers.”
“You are well informed. Would you join us while we make camp and cook a meal?”
“Owl will join you. And how shall I call you? North Star, the name given you by your mother?”
“My mothers called me North Star; my father called me Dirk. I have taken that as my way. I am pleased when my mother’s people call me North Star,” Dirk said, staying with the Shoshone tongue.
The sergeant set himself to picketing the horses and making camp once it became plain there was little to worry about.
“I will call you Dirk,” said Owl.
The teacher glanced sharply at him. “You’ve come here to tell me something. Or to give me a message to take to the Indian agent.”
“Owl sees many things. He sees a column of soldiers coming from Fort Laramie. He sees many soldiers at this meeting of the headmen and the agent. He sees that the white men are afraid of Owl and the dreaming, so afraid they would stop at nothing. Many Shoshone would die from their bullets. This is what Owl sees.”
Skye stared pensively at the small blaze that Muggins had kindled. “It’s not fear,” he said. “For them, an owl is not something to fear. It is a night-bird, nothing more. Some white men think the owl is very wise. But no one dreads it.”
Owl smiled. “An owl feather is left with missionaries. An owl feather is left with others. And the white men summon the army.”
“An owl arrow struck wood near me,” Skye said. “It was not meant to kill me.”
“Owl is a thief. Owl will steal what is in the heart of white men.”
“What are you saying?”
“Owl will steal the souls of white men. That is why they are so afraid. That is why a hundred more soldiers are marching. That is why Major Van Horne and Captain Cinnabar would like to catch me and put me in a prison and keep me from the People, and stamp out the Dreamers.”
“I’m not following you at all, Owl.”
Owl felt annoyed. There was too much white blood in this fool. “Owl glides quietly and pounces on its prey. The white men take the land and open the earth and plant grain and run cattle over the land and drive other people off the land and pen us up in reservations. That is their way. And then Owl comes and steals their spirit from them. They send an army and Owl steals their courage. They send missionaries and Owl steals their spirits and eats them. Owl steals the hearts from ranchers so they don’t know why they run cattle. Owl steals the heart from farmers so they don’t know why they plant. Owl glides through the times, in plain sight, and everything white men build and believe crumbles, because Owl has taken their souls from them.”
Dirk Skye was frowning. The soldier was trying to understand, and was having difficulty. Owl watched them closely. They did not know Owl, and did not know what the Dreamers saw, and now they sat beside the wavering flame not knowing anything that Owl was talking about.
“Why are the white men so afraid of Owl?” the young Shoshone asked. “They are strong and have many guns. But they are afraid of Owl because the Owl glides in the night and pounces on their spirits—ah, the word comes to me. Their souls. Those missionaries, they would know it best. Owl comes to steal their god, and soon they will see their god fail them, and when their god fails them, they will go away, and the army will go away, and the Indian agency will turn to dust, and the People will be a nation once again.”
That stupid Dirk Skye stared, without understanding.
“You are blinded, so Owl will show you how it will be,” he said.
Owl rose, walked to his pony, climbed onto it, and rode into the soft night.
fourteen
And then he was gone.
Muggins stared into the night. “I’ll be damned,” he said.
Dirk intuitively backed away from the flickering firelight, fearing an arrow out of the dark. But none came.
There was something about that boy that tugged at him. But even more that bewildered him. What were the Dreamers dreaming? And what did they want?
“Tell me what you think, Sergeant,” he said.
“You was talking too fast for me to follow. Owl talk, and I don’t know a beak from a tail feather.”
“It was about things of the heart.”
“
He probably wanted to cut out my heart and eat it,” Muggins said. “We shoulda nabbed him, took him in.”
“For what?”
“Just for being himself, starting up a rebellion.”
“Has he killed or injured anyone?”
“You defending him?” Muggins asked.
“What has he killed, threatened, wounded, or destroyed?”
Muggins sighed. “He’s gonna do it. We could’ve nabbed him and stopped it. If we took him with us, this whole Dreamer business would’ve gone the way of the passenger pigeon.”
“I’m a schoolteacher on an errand,” Dirk said.
“You’ll have to explain it to Van Horne and Cinnabar,” Muggins said. “How you could’ve ended this whole uprising but didn’t.”
“What has Owl done?” Dirk asked.
“He’s—who cares? Catch him and we stop it.”
“Sergeant, do you really want to know what Owl wants? He’s a missionary. He wants to enter us, pierce our hearts, toss out white man religion, and foster his own.”
“Missionary!”
“Do you think it’s only white men, Christians, who collect souls?”
“Jaysas, Mary, and Joseph,” Muggins said.
Something in this tickled Dirk’s humor, and he chuckled.
“We shoulda shot the little bastid,” Muggins said. “Now he’s loose.”
“Owl is collecting souls. That’s how I read the boy.”
“The boy’s a witch, that’s what. We should be drivin’ a stake through his heart and burying him in a swamp, sez I.”
“Muggins, why?”
Muggins glared at Dirk. “Because I say so, is why.”
“No, I want a reason.”
“You’re a half-blood, so you’d not know even if I told ye.”
Dirk marveled that the young Shoshone could evoke such malaise in white men. It was as if Owl had triggered every nightmare that could affect a white child in its crib.
The night passed peacefully, except for the time Dirk awoke to the hoot of an owl, bolted upright in his bedroll, and then settled into a fitful sleep. The next morning they forded the Wind River at a gravel bar and started east, planning to contact whatever Shoshone encampments lay on the north bank of the stream.
The Owl Hunt Page 9
