The Owl Hunt

by Richard S. Wheeler

  She nodded and plucked up her gray skirt. They would have to traverse some deadfall to get to the glade upslope. He started ahead, and then held back, wanting her ahead of him. He simply wanted to watch her walk; wanted to absorb her. She proceeded eagerly toward the grove of aspen. She held her skirts in both hands and lifted them slightly to walk over deadfall, and the sight of her filled him with an odd yearning.

  “I think Captain Cinnabar was happy that the Gatling felled the tree,” she said.

  “Do you prefer to call him captain?”

  “No, he’s usually Father. But this was a captain event. A military event. Shells demolish trees and people.”

  “And maybe whole ways of life.”

  “Yes, if a tree can be shot to death, so can everything someone believes in. So can every habit or custom, too.”

  They plunged into a golden-green glade, with sunlight filtering through bright leaves, and patches of blue sprinkled with lime leaves. There were windows behind them, affording a view of the peaceful post and agency, slumbering in the sunlight.

  Owl was waiting for them there. They hadn’t even seen him sitting on an old bare log until they closed upon him, though he had sat quietly as they approached.

  Dirk was astonished. The youth wore only a breechclout and moccasins, and if he possessed a weapon it was not visible.

  “Oh!” Aphrodite said, and shifted closer to Dirk.

  Owl gazed solemnly at them. “There, you see? The fast gun didn’t kill me.”

  “It wasn’t aimed at you, Owl,” Dirk said.

  “I was at the pine tree.”

  “You were? No one knew that.”

  “No one sees Owl until it is too late.”

  They stared uneasily at each other.

  “You have brought a lunch,” Owl said. “Eat.”

  “We will share it,” Aphrodite said. “I brought enough.”

  “You are the captain’s daughter.”

  Dirk said, “This is Aphrodite Olive Cinnabar. She prefers to be called Olive. And Olive, this is Owl, who was one of my better students at the schoolhouse.”

  “Call me Aphrodite,” she said.

  “The Greek goddess,” Owl said. “Even a Snake knows it.”

  She busied herself spreading a tablecloth and setting out cheese, a knife, and some bread. Owl watched, faintly amused at her malaise.

  Dirk sawed off some cheese and handed it to Owl, who lifted it high, in the four directions, before nodding.

  “Owl follows what the fathers taught us all.”

  Oddly, no one spoke. The cheese was too sharp for Dirk’s taste, but the others seated on that tablecloth seemed to enjoy it.

  “They are hunting for you,” Dirk said, after a while.

  “Ah! I am hunting for them!”

  “That’s what they all believe, and why they would like to catch you and put you in their prison.”

  “Owl glides through the night. Will you tell them I watched their entire parade?”

  “Do you want me to?”

  “Yes. It will madden them.”

  “Why are you here, Mr. Owl?” Aphrodite asked.

  “You are a polite woman. Owl awaits the vision that will begin the new world.”

  “Vision?”

  “The end of your time, when you will be naked.”

  “Naked?”

  “When there is nothing in your heart.”

  Dirk sat, transfixed. This was so far removed from what Van Horne and all the rest thought that it was as if he were on a different planet, and not just a thousand yards or so from Fort Washakie.

  “What will happen?” she asked.

  Owl peered into the cloud-specked sky. “It is not for anyone to know. I am only an empty bowl. I was given the promise. I know nothing more.”

  “But the Dreamers dance…”

  “The Dreamers invite the Owl to come. We dance to invite the Owl to change the world. We wait, and dance, and wait for the New Day.”

  In some visceral way, Dirk fathomed the boy and his vision, and yet nothing made sense to him. “Why are the white people afraid, then?” he asked. “If the Dreamers are only inviting a visitation from a creature dreaded by the Shoshones, what has that to do with white men?”

  “You have eyes but do not see, Dirk Skye.”

  “Why don’t you simply go to Van Horne and tell him about your vision?”

  “He would not understand. He thinks the Dreamers are planning to massacre white people.” Owl smiled for the first time. “Then there would be iron bars between me and the world. They would capture my body, but no one can capture Owl.”

  Dirk fought back his impatience with this boy and his mysticism.

  “Owl, tell me plainly. You are pleading for a vision. When the vision comes, what will happen? What will the Dreamers do?”

  Owl smiled, something glowing in his face. Dirk thought of saints and martyrs, of oil paintings of early Christians whose gaze was upon heaven even as they were being led to the flaming pyres.

  “When the vision comes, I will die. The Shoshone people will be born again. The white men will be emptied of everything in their hearts and minds, and walk away because there is nothing inside of them and no reason for them to be here.”

  “Nothing inside of them?”

  “That is what they fear most. Not an uprising, not blood and death, but to have their ways stolen from them.” He stared at Dirk, and then at Aphrodite. “Just as white men have stolen all the ways of the People. We cannot be ourselves now. They have taken away our heart.”

  It made little sense.

  Owl rose suddenly. “Here I am. Take me to the Indian agent. You have captured Owl. You can put Owl in a cage and stop the Dreamers and they will all go away to their families.” He held out his arms. “Tie my hands and feet. Take me. You can stop the Dreamers. You will have your reward. The Indian agent will praise you. The blue-shirts will praise you. You will be Dirk Skye, and the name, North Star, will no longer be spoken by the People.”

  Aphrodite was staring at Dirk.

  Owl smiled, and that smile seemed almost a mock. Some embers lit in his eyes, as if to hint of well-lit rooms behind that boyish face.

  An odd numbness stole through Dirk, almost a paralysis, as if the two bloods within him had come to a fatal separation.

  “Owl,” Dirk said at last. “Go from here, quickly.”

  “Ah, North Star, I will go. When the New Day comes, maybe Owl will give you dreams.”

  With that, the youth stood, nodded gravely to them, and slipped upslope through the glade until he had vanished. Dirk half-expected to glimpse the boy striding softly through the azure skies, over white clouds and joyous rainbows. But there was only the rustling aspen leaves gilded by a low sun and a strange quiet. Dirk felt energy hemorrhage from him, and sat limply.

  Aphrodite sat gravely, and then reached across the cloth to him and took his hand and squeezed. “I don’t know why, but I’m glad you didn’t take him up on his offer,” she said.

  “He’s a saint,” Dirk said. “And you know what the world does to saints.”

  “More of a mystic,” she said. “He has a mystical vision. It’s just the fevers of his imagination. White men won’t be emptied of all meaning and walk away and leave this world to the Shoshones. We’re here to stay.”

  Dirk remembered the catechizing of the Jesuits when he was being schooled in St. Louis, long before. They believed, and they ached to instill that belief in their Indian and half-blood charges. That wouldn’t change. And yet … there was something in Owl’s vision of the world to come that was unbearable, if not frightening. Hollow white men without dreams.

  “I’ve spent years here teaching the Shoshone children what white men have taught me, and now the Dreamers are pleading for a vision, a coming of an Indian Christ, who will sweep it all away,” he said.

  She smiled brightly. “He’s so beautiful. I mean, he’s so naked. Oh! I shouldn’t put it that way. He’s not hiding anything. He’s just, a beautif
ul boy.”

  Her cheeks had flamed, and Dirk looked elsewhere out of pure instinct. And maybe envy. He wished Owl would vanish from her mind.

  “He’s just an angry boy,” he said.

  She smiled wryly.

  They sat silently, neither of them hungry enough to finish the picnic she had so carefully packed. He wanted to say things, just to talk, to whisper in her ear, but he felt iron bars between her and himself, the bars of blood and breed—and now something else. Owl’s talk had stirred something in him, some deep yearning to return to his mother’s people and become one with them, share their fate, teach white men the mysteries.

  A single cloud obscured the low sun, which shot golden rays from behind the cloud and cast an odd shadow over the agency and the military compound below. Chill air eddied past them, on its long journey from alpine meadows somewhere.

  “Dirk, I’m glad you showed me the tree,” she said.

  “It was a perfectly innocent tree,” he said, “sacrificed to send a message.”

  “Do you think it will regrow?”

  “There are live limbs below where it was shattered.”

  “Then it will regrow. Some things are hard to destroy.”

  “Yes, one of those small limbs will become the new trunk, and it will reach upward once again. I will take it for a sign.”

  eighteen

  They straggled in for distribution day, and Dirk watched them uneasily. Things would be different this time. Scores of blue-clad soldiers milled about, eyeing the Shoshones as they gathered at the agency warehouse. At least the soldiers were unarmed, but their mere presence changed everything.

  Once a month Shoshone families gathered at the agency to get their allotments, the food guaranteed by treaty. They came from afar, some on horse, a few with pack animals, others with travois. A handful had a wagon drawn by a bony mule or burro. Traditionally these were happy days, the promise of flour and beans and maybe a little beef, along with some calico or gingham, brightening the moment.

  Many were worn by the hard trip, older Shoshones especially, who would struggle thirty or forty of fifty miles each way to load up their groceries. Still, hard or not, the distribution days were moments of celebration on the Wind River Reservation. With each distribution, sheer hunger was held at bay a while more.

  Dirk was usually on hand to translate when a two-speaker was needed, and few were coming to school anyway. He saw so many people he knew. Old Agnes Snake-eyes was waiting in line to collect flour for her and her bedridden man, White Bird. Young Turtle, heavy with child, waited patiently along with her three children. Dirk saw Deer Stalker sitting impassively on a mule. The knot of Shoshones kept growing as they waited, but there was only silence from the warehouse and the agency. Dirk wondered what had delayed Van Horne, who usually was eager to begin the handout, something the agent took pleasure in doing.

  The Shoshones huddled and gossiped and watched the soldiers watch them, and whispered to one another about the blue-bellies. The soldiers were unusual, but there was no cause for alarm; no one was at war, and no friendships had shattered. And the soldiers themselves had gathered in knots to gossip, or just watch.

  Then, when a goodly crowd had at last collected, Van Horne emerged from the agency, flanked by the clerks and warehousemen who would hand out the annuity goods as provided by treaty. The agent looked uncommonly important this day, in a black frock coat and bow tie. The man’s sideburns seemed almost to bristle.

  The Shoshones quieted, and watched as Major Van Horne mounted the warehouse platform and turned to face the goodly crowd.

  “Skye, come translate,” he said.

  Dirk, uneasy this time, joined the agent.

  “We will begin our distribution as usual,” the agent said. “Each enrolled member will make his mark. My clerks will see to it.”

  That was simple to translate, but Dirk knew what a shock it would be to the Shoshones. Up until now, heads of families could collect the allotments for the whole family, and the clerks would record the transaction.

  “People, Mothers and Fathers, the white father will give the food to each person who makes the mark,” he said in Shoshone.

  That was all. In the silence that followed, Dirk sensed the despair that snaked through these people. Only about a third of the enrolled members of the tribe were on hand, and they had planned to collect the distribution for the whole people.

  “We’ll begin now,” Van Horne said.

  No one moved.

  Dirk turned to the agent. “What of the old and sick? The ones who can’t travel?”

  “Sorry, Skye, no exceptions. That’s policy from Washington.”

  “That’s what they’ve told you now?”

  “No, it’s always been policy. Enrolled members must make their mark to receive annuities and distributions.”

  “Why now?”

  Van Horne chuckled. “It’s mighty inconvenient, isn’t it?”

  The clerks settled on chairs at a table and spread the ledger before them, along with a nib pen and ink bottle, and waited officiously.

  The soldiers watched idly. This didn’t concern them, or did it?

  And still no Shoshone moved. There was an odd anticipation among them, as if they were all expecting something. Or maybe they were simply waiting.

  Would two-thirds of the People starve the next thirty days?

  “If the missing show up in the next few days, can they collect their food?”

  “Oh, as a concession I’ll permit it tomorrow. You may tell them that.”

  Dirk turned to the anxious people whose gaze fixed on him. “The father says he will give food to those who come when the sun rises again.”

  That meant most of those still scattered over the vast reserve would not collect. It would be impossible for them to get to the agency in time.

  “A lot of Shoshones will starve, sir.”

  “A pity. They know they’re all supposed to show up and be counted. If they’re off in the mountains, that means they’ll have to feed themselves.”

  The Dreamers. This was Van Horne’s ploy to reel in the Dreamers, force them to show up at the agency if they wanted their allotments. No doubt Captain Cinnabar and the army were involved. Collect the Dreamers, who might number a hundred or so. Dirk wondered whether those unarmed blue-shirts had plenty of arms just out of sight.

  Dirk simmered, but kept his peace. A translator was only that. A schoolteacher was only that. The Dreamers were the prey this time, and when this distribution was done, Van Horne would have a good idea who the Dreamers were, just from looking at the ledger and seeing names with no checkmarks beside them.

  Dirk discovered Chief Washakie before him, and many of the Shoshones were eyeing him, not knowing which side he was on or why he had come to the warehouse.

  “I am glad you are here, Grandfather,” Dirk said to him in Shoshone.

  The chief nodded curtly, and turned to the People. “Come. Collect what is owed to you,” he said to the silent crowd.

  Slowly the gaunt People formed a line that stretched back from the clerks at the table. As each person reached the table, Dirk sang a name in English, and the clerks found it on the ledger and handed the pen to the Shoshone, who drew a careful X where it was required. Many an old woman eyed the clerks fearfully, or studied the chief, or Dirk, or Van Horne, or the warehousemen distributing the foodstuffs from heaps they had built on the platform. A sickening silence enfolded this place, some bleak sadness, the desolation of hunger perhaps, as the People collected sacks of flour and beans, rice and cornmeal.

  The women loaded flour and beans onto travois, or heaped the sacks onto the backs of scrawny mules, glancing furtively at the record keepers, who made the magic marks in their books. A few older men received their cornmeal or beans bitterly, their proud stare telling all who watched them far more than words.

  An old woman, the elder wife of Walks Along, received her ration and set it on the ground.

  “Where is the meal for my man?” she
asked Dirk.

  “Where is the meal for her man?” he asked Collins, the clerk. “Her man’s too feeble to come here.”

  The clerk shrugged. “You heard the agent,” he said.

  “Grandmother, they will not give his food to you. He must come for it himself.”

  She stared at the two clerks, at the orderly script on the pages, and then picked up her sack of cornmeal and smashed into onto the ledger. The cotton sack burst, showering the clerks and the table with meal.

  “It is better to die than to eat bad food,” she said.

  “Take her name down, Collins,” Van Horne said. “She’ll be docked next month.”

  The grandmother, her worn skirt dusted with yellow meal, stared at the agent and at the others and turned away.

  “Grandmother, stay,” Chief Washakie said. He turned to the clerks. “I will give them my ration.”

  “Very well, sign for it here, my friend,” Collins said. The chief slowly scratched a large X on the page, collected his meal and beans, and a sack of flour the old woman had not burst, and carried it away from the line. “Wait here, Grandmother,” he said.

  She waited, a small stack of cornmeal, beans, and flour at her feet. Others stared, but the line moved slowly forward, each enrolled member carting away his or her own allotment and no more. The pile of food on the planks of the warehouse did not diminish much.

  Chief Washakie returned with a wagon drawn by a scrawny mule. He and Dirk swiftly loaded it. To the meager supply of food allotted to the old woman, he had added gourds and melons and squash gotten from his gardens.

  “Come sit beside me, Grandmother,” he said. “We will drive.”

  “It is good to sit, Grandfather. It becomes very hard for me to carry these things on my shoulder.”

  “Well, now, that’s a mighty fine gesture, Chief Washakie,” Van Horne said to the leader of the Eastern Shoshones. “Let those who receive share with those who don’t. Let those who have share with those who don’t.”

  Dirk chose not to translate, but the agent prodded him. “Tell them that.”