The Owl Hunt

by Richard S. Wheeler

  Dirk and Victoria each sawed some juicy meat, and added a boiled potato, and settled at the trestle table, while the rest followed suit.

  “Is that meat suiting your belly?” Dogwood asked. “It’s a damn bore, but we got nothing else to offer guests of honor.”

  “It comes close to buffalo tongue,” she said.

  “There, you see?” Dogwood said. “I am defeated. We get whipped by magpies, whipped by blue-belly soldiers, whipped by stray redskins, whipped by old Indian agents, and whipped by buffalo tongue.”

  “My people lived here. We wintered here. We found buffalo here. Now it is yours,” Victoria said. “How could you feel defeated?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I’m defeated. I wanted to own Texas, with New Mexico tossed in, and got stuck with this miserable patch of cold ground somewhere north of the North Pole.”

  Dirk wasn’t quite sure where this conversation was leading, but the rib roast tasted just fine.

  “My pa jumped ship in Fort Vancouver with nothing but the clothes he wore and a belaying pin, and somehow he survived,” Dirk said. “He was a Londoner and made it to one of the early rendezvous.”

  “I’ve done a little research about that bozo,” Dogwood said. “This fella’s old man, Barnaby Skye, he was right up there with Jim Bridger, Tom Fitzpatrick, Will Sublette, and all the rest, back in the beaver days. There was no man his match, they said. He could lick a dozen Blackfeet, subdue a grizzly, bury a rival fur brigade, and whip any man that tried him.”

  “He was gentle to the last, sir. He avoided fights.”

  “That don’t tally, boy.”

  “If you imagine he was a big, tough mountain man, sir, you’d be quite wrong.”

  “What are you tellin’ me, boy?”

  “That he was a man of peace. He’d fight if he got forced into it, and only if he couldn’t escape it.”

  Dogwood masticated beef, glanced sharply at his cohort, and chewed steadily, digesting food and information.

  “That don’t tally,” he said. “But never no mind. What’s happening on the reservation? You hang that little firebrand yet?”

  “I tried to prevent it, sir. So did Chief Washakie.”

  “Then they should’ve hanged the pair of you along with the boy.”

  “They came close, sir.”

  “I’m missing a story here, boy. Tell the whole thing square and true.”

  Dirk set down his knife and fork, knowing he wouldn’t be eating for ten minutes, and plunged in. “You see, sir, Owl wasn’t a rebel. He was a seer, a boy filled with a vision.”

  Dirk talked quietly, straight into the mounting skepticism of the Texans. Only it wasn’t skepticism. They didn’t understand. They knew nothing of vision quests, the guidance of spirit helpers, and the world of auguries. They couldn’t imagine a bunch of redskins believing all that hoodoo. They couldn’t fathom the Dreamers, dancing in the night to evoke the blessings of the Gray Owl.

  “You and the chief, you stood against a line of blue-belly carbines?” Dogwood asked at the end. “You faced them guns, did you?”

  “It gave the people time to flee, sir.”

  “You should’ve pulled out a hogleg and shot that captain plumb dead. Fight to the death, like Crockett and Bowie at the Alamo. They’re heroes, boy. They’re three-ball roosters. They fought to the last man. They’re Texans. But you stood there unarmed? I don’t fathom it. What did it win you?”

  “It made them think twice about shooting us, Mr. Dogwood.”

  “Think twice about shooting you? No man in his right mind thinks twice about shooting anyone. He just does it.”

  Dirk smiled ruefully. “It cost me my welcome, sir. Major Van Horne didn’t like it. We’re on our way to the Crow Reservation.”

  “I hate the bluecoats, boy. Eat up and slice some more beef. Any enemy of the bluecoats is a friend of mine. I wish I knew what was cooking down there. I’d’ve armed the whole Shoshone nation, just to kill off some federals. A Winchester repeater for every bloody redskin. By God, that Owl fella had some sense.”

  “It never was about that, sir. It was about seeing the future, the world returned to what it was before white men arrived.”

  “That’s like sayin’ the Mexicans should have kept Texas.”

  There was no explaining anything to Yardley Dogwood, Dirk thought.

  “What’s on your platter, boy?”

  “Crow Reservation. I’ll start a school for them, if I can.”

  “With what?”

  “With nothing. My father arrived in the American West with the clothes on his back and a belaying pin.”

  In truth, Dirk hadn’t known what he would do until that moment, but once Dogwood had elicited it, he had an inkling where his future might lie.

  “Go claim some land up there, boy. I’ll send a few beeves to get you started.”

  “You, sir?”

  “Anyone faces down them Federals, he gets what he needs from me. You get yo’self some land, boy. You do as I say, now. You put some beef in the belly of the Crows. Maybe they’ll quit stealing mine.”

  Dirk couldn’t fathom it. The meal progressed quietly after that.

  “You two, you sleep in the barn if you want. No colored folks bed in the house, boy, but there’s hay in the barn. Your nag, give it some oats. Me, I’m going to pour three fingers of Kentuck, and go to bed.”

  With that, the massive host rose abruptly, and lumbered off. The others soon followed.

  It certainly had been the strangest encounter Dirk had experienced. Not a one of those Texans had grasped what the crisis on the Wind River Reservation had been about. But what did it matter?

  He and Victoria made splendid beds out of hay, and took off at dawn, when the ranch was just stirring.

  “Goddamn, that was fun,” his Crow mother said.

  Dirk found himself wishing his father could explain a few things to him about white men. About people like Yardley Dogwood, who tried to hang Dirk one day and offered him a few cows on another.

  He drove north, leaving wheel tracks in the heavy frost, and soon they were engulfed by silence once again, as the world poised itself on the edge of winter. This route, laid out by old Jim Bridger, would take them around the southern reaches of the Pryor Mountains and into Yellowstone country. With each passing day, old Victoria seemed to bloom. Dirk swore that a decade and fallen away, and then another decade. Her eyes brightened; her gaze was more keen. A flock of magpies discovered her and erupted in hilarious gossip. She beamed at Dirk, assumed more responsibility for setting up each camp, and sometimes remarked on old, familiar landmarks as the wagon pierced into the heartland of the Crow people. She was going home. She would soon be talking in her native tongue to her relatives and friends. She had been one of the Kicked-in-the-Bellies, and a member of the Otter Clan, and soon she would be among them. Her crinkled face was wreathed in joy.

  She had endured on the Wind River Reservation happily enough as long as Skye was there, but she had failed since his death—until now. The joy exuding from her affected Dirk in an odd way, and he pressed the old dray to move along faster as they passed through the desert between the Beartooth and Pryor Mountains and rolled into the still-green foothills of Yellowstone country.

  They reached the river and its multiple trails one chill afternoon, and paused only a moment. The new agency had been located at Rosebud Creek, off to the west, in some of the sweetest country the human eye could ever see, a land of foothill slopes, clear creeks, good bottoms perfect for crops, jack pine hillsides, and above, the bold blue Beartooth Mountains, already crowned with white. The original Crow Reserve had encompassed a vast homeland south of the Yellowstone River, but gold discoveries at its western perimeter had resulted in the loss of its westernmost reaches, and now the homeland embraced a tract that extended into the high plains as well as these majestic mountains and foothills. Shrinking reservations were already an old and irritating story to Dirk, but maybe the Crows, ancient allies of the white men, might fare better than
some tribes. But even as he thought it, he sensed a rising cynicism. Who could say what the Crows would end up with?

  Where the ragged two-rut road reached the Yellowstone, Victoria stepped to the earth, walked to the bank, ritually held her hands in the sweet waters, and then ritually cleansed herself, baptizing her hair and face and breast with the icy water. Something magical was refreshing them all. Even the old dray lifted its ugly head, let the breeze riffle its mane, and waited restlessly to start pulling the wagon west.

  They traveled under gray bluffs dotted with cedar and pine, and encountered nothing but a few mule deer in the lush Yellowstone valley. On the north bank there were signs of settlement; but there on the south bank, in the Crow Reserve, the valley was as it always had been, and perhaps always would be.

  When they reached the valley of the Stillwater River, old Victoria started humming, and as they ascended the valley, she began exclaiming at the occasional evidences of her people. Sometimes it was a cabin with a thin line of smoke rising from it; other times a lodge erected on a distant plateau. Once they saw a small herd of horses with saddle marks on them. Once they encountered a youth on a stubby pony, and Victoria chattered with the boy, in a tongue Dirk could barely grasp. But the smiles said more than the outpouring of strange words.

  “He says the agency is a hard day’s travel still, but we will find the people there, and everywhere,” she said. “He is Bull Tail, grandson of Walking Duck, whose kin I know well. Walking Duck is a clan brother of my friend Ice Walker. His father is a friend of Whistlers.”

  Dirk was rapidly losing track of the relationships and generations, but Victoria was recording them all in some sort of ledger in her head.

  As they progressed up the river toward the agency, they encountered more and more Crows, most of them snug in blankets or capotes against the numbing air. But it reached the point where they could hardly move a hundred yards before being hailed by various people, some of whom knew the old Crow wife of Mister Skye. They chattered, sometimes on horseback as Dirk steered the dray toward the distant adobe-and-log post. He knew some Crow, but this flood of words between his old Crow mother and this crowd came too fast, and he finally settled on keeping the dray moving to get out of the harsh cold of early December. There were patches of snow in tree shadow and gullies, and ice-sheeted puddles on the road.

  Now the agency loomed ahead, on a tributary called Rosebud Creek, set in an idyllic place untouched by the outside world, or so it seemed.

  They reached the agency, a two-story log building built in haste, and there a lean young Crow with an imperial gaze waited, his focus entirely on the old woman in the wagon.

  He was a stranger, and yet she seemed to know who he was, and when he offered her his hand as she alighted, she seemed almost shy.

  The Stars and Stripes cracked and snapped on the stockade’s staff as Many Quill Woman reached the hard clay, and stared at this rough settlement of log buildings, adobe structures, and lodges, many with smoke streaming horizontally from them.

  “I am Aleek-chea-ahoosh,” he said. “Plenty Coups.”

  Victoria was being welcomed by the chief.

  thirty-nine

  It was so good to hear Absaroka words. Victoria huddled on the wagon seat, shivering in her thin blanket, hearing the words she had thirsted for all those years on the Wind River Reservation. Now the words rose up around her, words out of her childhood, the drawn-out words, the abrupt words, the words that only an Absaroka could understand perfectly. She shivered in the flood of words.

  Now she was meeting the young chief of the Mountain Crows, as white men called them. Plenty Coups was his name, and she had heard of him, and perhaps had seen him as a boy long before, when she and Skye had lived among the People. Yes, she had seen this tall boy, who had become a great warrior, had counted so many coups people had lost track, and who had received so many visions that the Absaroka people revered him for being a seer as well as a warrior and now a leader.

  This place on the Sweetwater, it was a strange place for the Absaroka people to be as winter came. This was foothill country, and it would soon be engulfed in snow, just when the People should be farther down onto the prairies, wintering in river bottoms where there would be plenty of cottonwood to fuel the lodge fires.

  But here they were, in a rude place where the white men were erecting an earthen stockade and throwing up log houses, including the two-story one that housed the Crow Agency. There weren’t many of the People in sight, she thought, but her eyesight was bad, and so was her hearing, and she was shivering in her blankets as the Absaroka words flooded over her like summer sunshine.

  “Many Quill Woman, we rejoice. We have wondered how you and the beloved friend I cannot name were doing, so far away,” the young chief was saying. “We heard he had left us, but we had no word of you, and now we rejoice to see you.”

  “The one we cannot name lies in a graveyard beside his younger wife,” Victoria said, adhering to the forms. The dead could not be named, for it would violate their spirits.

  “And what of my brother Arrow and his family?” she asked. “I should like to see them while I can.”

  “Ah, Many Quill Woman, the one of whom you speak…”

  She knew then that Arrow, too, was gone from this world.

  “That one is walking the star path, and so is his woman, but his children live and will be pleased to see you.”

  Eight winters had passed since she had been among the People, and now she was acutely aware that life and death had continued their cycle, and that she had missed much of the affairs of her people.

  “But Grandmother, I see you are shivering in this cold. It would please me if you and your son, the son of our friend who lived among us for so long, would come to my lodge, which is that one.” He pointed to a square log cabin with smoke curling up from a stovepipe.

  “Come. Bring the wagon. The horse will be taken care of. I will give the word.”

  “We would be pleased to,” said Dirk.

  The young chief helped Many Quill Woman off the wagon and onto the frozen ground, where cold seemed to come up through her moccasins and made her feet numb. At the door stood a young Absaroka woman in cloth skirts, and a doeskin tunic covering her upper body.

  “Grandmother, this is my woman, Strikes the Iron,” the chief said. “And this is Many Quill Woman, wife of the man who fought beside the People and protected the People and gave to the People, who lies among the Shoshones now.”

  Strikes the Iron smiled brightly and ushered Victoria inside, where her shivering slowed a little, but was not conquered by the heat from the cast-iron stove. This was a dark and damp place, not like a good buffalo-hide lodge, with its winter lining up and dozens of thick robes on the ground to stay the cold rising out of the earth.

  The world had changed, she thought. A huddle of log buildings, an earthen stockade for the soldiers, and when the snows came, a sorrow of cold. She remembered happier times, when the People collected in great lodges warmed plentifully by tiny fires, to tell stories, to hear the seers and keepers tell of where the People came from, and to hear of all the things that happened in the winters of the past. And to play games, and flirt, and sing, and tell funny stories, and gossip.

  Still, here were the chief and his woman, making her comfortable. And Dirk, too, who had not a drop of Absaroka blood in him, but was made as welcome as a son of the People. They did not have robes on the ground here, and they sat on benches around the sides of the wooden lodge, which doubled as beds at night. The earth was covered with the split logs known to white men as puncheons, and these things were not as good, and they slowed the conversation because people were too far apart, and it was hard to hear. But of all this she kept quiet, for the flow of words over her was Absaroka, and the honey of her tongue caught in her head and lifted her spirits, so that her heart was full of joy.

  She huddled on a bench with her blanket tightly about her, her dim gaze upon the young chief, who was dressed in white men’s cl
othing, his hair in braids, his eyes watching her with affection. Soon Strikes the Iron placed tea before her, and she sipped, hoping to warm her body, but her body was too light, lighter than a feather, and tea brought no heat to it.

  The chief remembered her husband, whose name could not be said here, as the Englishman who helped the People fend off the Siksika and the Lakota and the Cheyenne; who came to live among the People, and shared their fate, and employed his big Sharps rifle on the buffalo hunts so all might have meat.

  And then, as word of her arrival swept the Absaroka people, Victoria’s clan and kin began to knock on the door, but these were mostly children and grandchildren of people she remembered, boys and girls she barely knew, except for the names of their elders. Here was a grandchild of Walks Backward, and a boy born of Ridge Walker, and a baby, scarcely a few weeks old, born of a son of the brother whose name she could not utter. And these were presented to her as gifts, the young people of her tribe, the clan sisters and clan brothers, where her blood ran in other veins.

  They came, tapped on the door, and Strikes the Iron opened it to still more, until the log house was jammed with Absaroka people, who had come from miles around to catch a glimpse of Mr. Skye’s wife, the old medicine woman of the Absaroka people who had traveled and fought where no other Absaroka had ever gone.

  She stared at them dimly, for her eyes were poor, but she could still hear the tongue given her at birth, and she listened carefully to these people, and to the young chief, who introduced each young Absaroka to the great grandmother they had known only in story and legend.

  The light faded, and Plenty Coups took each visitor to the door and then they disappeared into the twilight, and soon the chief’s cabin was as quiet as it had been when she first stepped in. She had seen her People. She had not expected ever to see them again. But here she was, among them, and she had seen them with her own eyes, and heard them speak her own tongue, and she was glad. She belonged to them, and all the time with Skye had not dimmed her belonging to the Absaroka, the people of the large-beaked bird that white men had mistranslated into crow.