The Owl Hunt

by Richard S. Wheeler

  The reservation slumbered peacefully in the early sun, unchanged from time immemorial, as Skye and his military escort threaded their way toward the encampments. These were usually families or clans living as close to small game or berries or roots as they could, scratching food from a reluctant land to supplement the monthly flour allotments they received from the agency. In the decade of reservation life, little had changed. They still lived in lodges, but now that buffalo were no longer available, the ragged buffalo-hide lodges were being replaced by duck-cloth ones, which offered much less shelter against heat and cold, but did turn rain. Here and there were ragged garden patches, begun at the insistence of the white agents, who wanted the People to become farmers. But most had gone to weed for the want of cultivation and weeding, and yielded little to these hungry people.

  The sight of them depressed Dirk. Shoshone men would not tend the fields, and it seemed that little would change until a new generation would replace those who clung to the old ways. The thought left him restless. The things that had made the People hunters and gatherers of roots and berries might never diminish, and then where would these people be? If they survived at all?

  He and Muggins steered up a tributary creek tumbling from the Owl Creek Mountains, and found a desolate collection of patched leather lodges beside the creek, and people listlessly sunning themselves. These encampments exuded a sort of hopelessness, which was evident in the disorder, the middens of garbage, the stink of offal. The reservation life was tearing the soul out of the Shoshones, and the sight of these shabby camps pierced Dirk’s heart.

  Dirk and Muggins rode quietly into the place. No dogs greeted them. Every mutt had vanished into cookpots. These people looked gaunt. Dirk knew many of them. This was the Brother Otter Clan, and its headman would be Swimmer.

  They found Swimmer readily enough. He lay on an ancient blanket, staring into space, in some sort of trance, ignored by his women. This autumnal day was chill, but he wore only his loincloth, and not even moccasins. No one in the encampment cared who came in or out; in times past visitors would have gathered a crowd of boys and girls, barking dogs, men and women collecting to greet the newcomers. It chilled Dirk to see the stupor and squalor.

  Swimmer had been smoking. A pipe lay beside him, cold now, and Dirk wondered what weed the graying headman had burnt. There were some, he knew, that induced voyages of the soul, weeds that took a smoker to a distant place. The old healers of the People knew of them, or sometimes traded for them when tribes exchanged visits.

  Swimmer, like most Shoshones, lacked facial hair, save for a small tuft between his lip and chin, and that was gray. One of the tribe’s labels for white men was “hairy men,” because most white men had hair sprouting from their cheeks and chins. But hair was rare indeed on the faces of the People, and when it did occur it might grow from the face of either sex.

  The headman stared upward for some while before he wrestled himself up.

  “Greetings, Swimmer; it is a good day when we can see you,” Dirk said in the Shoshone tongue. We greet you, Father,” he said, adding the traditional words of respect for a tribal leader.

  “Ah, you, eh? Well, you caught me listening to the spirits.”

  “May we sit with you a while?” Dirk asked.

  It would be impolite to get on with business, as white men did. It would take a while, one could almost call it a courtesy period, to get around to delivering the word from Indian Agent Van Horne.

  One of Swimmer’s women, as emaciated as he, brought gourds of water and set them before the guests. The old courtesies had not vanished among these people. She wore brown gingham, gotten from the agency as part of the allotments. Dirk knew that the People had almost nothing to fend off winter now. There was no leather for coats and skirts and shirts and moccasins because there was no game, and the People had no access to buffalo. So many of them wore layers of rags, there being nothing else.

  “This is Sergeant Muggins, Father,” Dirk said. “He comes with me as we go to all the camps in the Shoshone home. He knows the tongue of the Comanches.”

  Swimmer smiled. “It is a bad tongue. They took our tongue and made it different. Tell him that the People speak the true tongue, and the Comanche words are no good.”

  Muggins nodded, and removed his forage cap.

  Swimmer eyed the sergeant. “He got my words.”

  “I got your words, Father,” he said.

  “The blue-shirts got killed by the Sioux, eh?” Swimmer said. “Washakie sent many of our young men to help Custer, and we got whipped, too, eh? No one’s any good anymore, eh?”

  The Little Big Horn was fresh in the minds of the Shoshones, Dirk thought. Maybe fresh in the mind of Owl, too.

  “You are looking well, Father,” Dirk said.

  “Ah! There is nothing left.”

  “I bring you a message from the agent, Major Van Horne, Father. He wants you to come to a big meeting at the agency five suns from now. There will be big talk, and he has things to give to the headmen of the People.”

  “Big talk, eh? Go catch Owl, and stop the Dreamers.” He laughed. “Big talk. Maybe we get a plug of tobacco, eh? Hey, Teacher, does the chief want this meeting?”

  “No, the Indian agent does.”

  “Chief Washakie, he’s coming?”

  “I don’t know, Father.”

  Swimmer stared into the bright sky. “It’s a long walk.”

  “Not far to ride, Father.”

  “Walk, that’s what I would do.”

  Dirk studied the camp and the fields beyond it, seeing no horses at all. He knew, suddenly, that this camp had none. They had been eaten when there was nothing else to eat.

  “It would be a long walk, Father. Maybe I can send a wagon for you.”

  “Ah, I don’t feel like going. Why go to this meeting? To hear the agent tell us what the fathers want? I think I won’t go.”

  That was familiar. Several of the headmen in the camps across the reservation had simply shrugged off the invitation. But there was more. Van Horne was showing disrespect for Chief Washakie, calling the meeting himself instead of asking the head of the Eastern Shoshone tribe to do it.

  “I will tell the agent that you will not come,” Dirk said.

  “Maybe I will, if I feel like it. Why should I go all that way to listen? He will talk and I will listen. I am tired of listening.”

  “Maybe you should go and tell him what the People need, Father.”

  Swimmer laughed softly. There were gaps in his incisors. “It is a good joke, Teacher.”

  One of Swimmer’s women appeared with a small kettle that issued steam.

  “Eat, eat,” Swimmer said.

  The woman smiled and handed gourd bowls to Dirk and Muggins.

  Dirk glanced at the stew, and needed some excuse to decline. There were boiled prairie dogs floating in it. Or maybe gophers, their bodies white and limber.

  And there was no escape from this hospitality.

  “We thank Swimmer and his family,” Dirk said.

  “Eat! Eat!”

  “Jaysas,” said Muggins.

  “We must,” Dirk replied.

  He dipped his half-gourd into the stew and extracted some juices, leaving the rodents behind. Muggins sat rigidly while Dirk glared, and finally dipped his gourd into the stew, until he had barely a tablespoon.

  Dirk sipped. Muggins sipped.

  Swimmer dug his gourd into the stew and filled it, including a pale gopher floating on it.

  He was laughing.

  A few sips later, enough to show some courtesy, Dirk and Muggins stood, wiped their mouths, and thanked Swimmer and his women.

  “We have a long way to go, Father,” he said.

  Swimmer smiled. He had downed two gophers. “Tell the white father that the Dreamers see a better world for the People, who will live in peace and friendship,” Swimmer said.

  Dirk nodded. It wasn’t a message that Major Van Horne would gladly hear.

  Dirk mounted his hors
e, and the sergeant collected his pack mule and mounted, while a small crowd of Swimmer’s clan watched.

  They rode along the north bank of the river, returning now to the agency as fast as they could.

  “Jaysas, they’d eat anything, them filthy people,” the sergeant said.

  “It’s all they have to eat, Sergeant.”

  “Naw, it ain’t. Look at all them pumpkin patches they didn’t weed, and the gardens they didn’t plant and hoe. They ain’t even herding a few cows and hogs and sheep. Too much work for them folks, I guess.”

  There was no arguing with that. The People preferred to eat whatever they could scrounge from nature to the toil of raising food.

  “We sure ain’t getting much from the headmen,” Muggins said. “I think Van Horne’s little parley’s gonna be a bust.”

  It was true. Scarcely any of the headmen in the encampments across the reservation made a firm commitment to attend. It was almost as if Owl and his quiet army of Dreamers somehow reached out to them all, and told them to stay away.

  fifteen

  An overcast sky, a harbinger of autumn, dulled the flat in front of the agency buildings, and the air had an edge to it. On this, the appointed day, a table stood in the grass, while in front of it were fifteen chairs spread in a semicircle. Behind the table sat Indian Agent Van Horne, flanked by two agency clerks, along with an American flag that wavered half-dead on its pole. The other party behind the table was Chief Washakie, wearing a black suit and a dour expression. This was not his meeting.

  Dirk sensed that the chief would much rather have occupied one of those fifteen chairs facing the table. His face was stony. On a nearby auxiliary table were the ritual gifts for the headmen: twists of tobacco, trade blankets, small sacks of sugar.

  Dirk was to translate, an office he would just as soon not fill, but the agency had few two-speakers, so he had been dragooned. Some of the civilians had collected to watch the proceedings. Dirk spotted several officers’ wives, along with Aphrodite Cinnabar, plus some teamsters.

  The post loafers, a dozen or so Shoshones who cadged a living around the place running errands or doing chores, had collected, along with full- and half-blood clerks, woodcutters, kitchen workers, and laundresses. All of these stayed far apart from the military wives and children.

  Over at the newly named Fort Washakie, Dirk could see blue-bloused soldiers hurrying about, but none were present at this conference—not yet, anyway.

  Major Van Horne fidgeted and examined his turnip watch and studied the three headmen sitting uneasily in the chairs facing him. There were a dozen empty ones. The three headmen had sat far from one another, as far as they could get, intuitively wanting to be isolated rather than to form a small clot of Shoshone leaders. Dirk knew them slightly. By coincidence, they were Big Foot, Big Nose, and Big Belly. All had come with their women, who sat demurely in the brown grasses off a way. All three were old men, chieftains long past their time of commanding a Shoshone band. He didn’t see Swimmer, Natoosh, Bad Ear, or any of the others, and wasn’t surprised. The younger chieftains were mostly Dreamers; others were starved, sick, or simply uninterested in these proceedings.

  This whole business had a sour quality to it that dismayed Dirk. He saw his Crow mother, Victoria, standing quietly, wrapped in a red blanket against the chill, looking like an axe.

  Van Horne gestured to Dirk, who approached the polished table.

  “Why are there only three headmen?”

  “I invited all I could find, Major.”

  “Invited! I asked you to compel their attendance.”

  “There is no word in the language to compel them, Major. Nor would I do so.”

  “You failed me! Three headmen! Big Nose! He’s ancient history. So’s Big Belly. I wanted every leader and elder present because they are going to get an earful.”

  “I suppose the others didn’t want to attend, sir.”

  “I should have rounded them up with bayonets.”

  “Yes, sir, that might have done it. Captain Cinnabar’s troops would have managed it.”

  Van Horne eyed Dirk. “I’ve put a lot of work into this. If it fails, I’ll know who to blame. We have an entire cavalry column up from Laramie, and I intend for every Shoshone headman to feast his eyes on it. They are going to get my message, one way or other. If this conference is a bust, then I’ll march the cavalry across the whole agency and into every camp until the whole tribe gets the message.”

  There wasn’t anything worth saying, so Dirk kept the peace.

  Van Horne fidgeted another half-hour, but no more headmen showed. The three who did come were all ancient, and an affable lot, mostly engaged these days in telling jokes to their clan members. But now they sat and waited. And a lot of other people were waiting also.

  The Indian agent, trapped by events, opened the proceedings with a rap of a gavel on the polished table. A clerk opened his ledger and dipped his pen into his inkwell.

  Dirk eyed the chieftains, who sat eagerly, their gazes straying to the table stacked with gifts.

  Oozing annoyance, the Indian agent eyed his audience.

  “This is an important meeting, and it is most unfortunate that the leaders of your people didn’t bother to come. I have important things to say.”

  Dirk translated, using hand gestures and applying a little diplomacy. “Major Van Horne welcomes you who are chieftains of your people, and wishes more headmen were on hand. This is an important meeting, he says.”

  The three Bigs nodded cheerfully.

  “I’ll get directly to the matters before us,” the agent said. “We have a crisis at hand, a crisis that could tear apart the peace of the Wind River Reservation. A crisis that could end up in blood and horror and starvation and tragedy. I have gathered you here at this hour to do something about it, and am seeking your utmost cooperation in the tasks and programs that I will lay before you.”

  Dirk was able to reduce that to a few words. Washakie was listening closely. He knew both tongues. But so far, at least, the chief had not frowned or corrected Dirk.

  “I speak, of course, of the Dreamers, whose announced goal is the expulsion of white men from this entire area, and the restoration of life as it was lived in ancient times. I speak especially of the young Waiting Wolf, who took a new name and now leads an insurrection against the United States of America.

  “I am here to tell you that the great fathers in Washington City won’t allow this to happen, and that the full force and might of the United States and its military will be brought to bear against this insurrection, and that the fathers in Washington will not permit this rebellion to take place on the soil of the American republic.”

  Dirk wasn’t sure whether the three Bigs were getting it, but he translated it into something the chieftains would understand, while Washakie listened closely, his face granite, his eyes impassive.

  “The government of the United States is a friend of the Shoshone people, and its Indian agents are leading the People toward a peaceable employment of the lands guaranteed them, toward a time of abundance, ample meat and grain, secure homes, and good educations, self-governance, and democracy. The fathers want their Shoshone children to live in peace and contentment. I am always available to listen to grievances and to act upon them to the extent that my office and wherewithal permit. That is the way of peace and prosperity, and the way I and the agents before me, and those who will follow me, wish things to be here in this fine land of the Shoshones.”

  Dirk wrestled his way through that. The three Bigs got most of it. Washakie listened as well, not intervening or correcting any mistranslation. Dirk saw the crowds listening intently; the white men restless, the Shoshones intent. A chill wind flapped the Stars and Stripes.

  “Now hear me well, my friends,” the major said. “Hear me well. Hear every blessed word I have to say.”

  He paused, staring with an unblinking gaze into the seamed copper faces of the three Bigs.

  “The Dreamers are engaged in an up
rising against the sovereignty and authority of the government of the United States. They will be stopped one way or another; by peaceful surrender, or by bloodshed. One way or the other. If they wish blood, we will give them blood. If they choose the way of peace, we will give them peace. We will give them ten days to surrender. To come out of the mountain fastnesses where they are hiding, show up here, take an oath of allegiance, and be paroled on their honor. That is their choice.

  “If, after ten days, they have not surrendered, abandoned their dreaming, returned to the pastoral life they were enjoying, then they will be declared hostiles and subject to military discipline, with whatever results they choose. The Army of the Republic of the United States is fully prepared to invade the most distant fastness, pierce the most remote alpine refuge, and gather up these devotees of an outlawed and criminal sect.

  “We leave it to you, the chieftains of the Snake People, to convey this choice to the Dreamers, near and far, in every village, every camp, every valley where the nighttime dancing transpires. It will be entirely up to you, who govern the Snake People, to take the word to the outlaw sect and require that they disband at once and report to the agency.”

  The three Bigs sat stoically and Dirk wondered whether they really cared. The Shoshones were caught on a reservation, and did not govern themselves, and finding their next meal was all that mattered.

  Major Van Horne drew himself up and waited dramatically for Dirk to translate and for it all to sink in. “Now, one last matter. The youth, Waiting Wolf, is in a state of insurrection against the government of the United States, and is therefore a wanted man. We all know how this started; we all know that he professed to see the hallucinations that now fill his brain. We all know he is preaching a new religion of liberation, that is false and abominable. We all know that it can lead only to tragedy and the spilling of blood. We all know that until he is brought to heel, my children, you all will suffer.” The major stared straight at the headmen. “Therefore, if he does not surrender, does not sign the parole we offer him, he will become a wanted man, and we will offer a large reward—two fat cows—for information leading to his capture.”