The Owl Hunt

by Richard S. Wheeler

  It was cold in the room, but the others didn’t seem to notice it.

  “You will stay with me,” the chief said. “We will make good robe beds and you will be warm.”

  She didn’t think she would ever be warm, but she nodded.

  This cabin was something like a lodge, with shelf seating and bedding around the periphery, and a stove in the middle. She wanted a lodge. She wanted a Crow village outside this door, with the lodges raised in an orderly half-circle, their doors facing east, with just the right amount of space between each lodge, enough to give each lodge its own privacy, but in the midst of neighbors and all the People. But now there were scattered cabins, and no villages at all.

  Still, this was home; she had returned, like a lost child finding her family. She was among the speakers of her tongue, and that made her giddy and light-headed and her body was weightless.

  She learned many things about the first Crow Agency on Mission Creek, and how it was windy and white men didn’t like the wind, and how gold had been the excuse to drive the Absaroka people east, which they didn’t mind because they were closer to the sacred buffalo out on the plains. So they were here, learning to farm and raise stock in a place where farming was no good and the white men didn’t plant anything.

  Still, she had returned, and felt light, and that was what mattered most. In the morning at first light she would go outside to welcome Father Sun and raise her old arms to the great blessing of the day.

  “Grandmother, you’re nodding. We will prepare the robes for you,” Plenty Coups said, and instantly Strikes the Iron piled smooth, rich buffalo robes on the shelf to the right of the door, the place of honor in this wooden lodge, and Many Quill Woman was soon tucked in, a small sweet smile pursing her lips.

  She drifted into a light sleep, and found herself in the midst of flower-strewn dreams.

  She was a beautiful girl, one her mother had pridefully dressed in softest and whitest doeskin, and she was sitting on a sunny ridge watching a tiny rattlesnake as it watched her. A bold magpie lit on her lap and began chattering, and that stirred the tiny snake to coil itself. The magpie enjoyed the event, chattering happily, and when the snake struck, the magpie pecked it, and the snake slid away. She laughed, and the magpie pecked her hand delicately, and whirred away. That was delightful.

  She grew in beauty, and her family knew it, and she was often dressed in quilled doeskin, and her hair was combed until it glowed, and sometimes braided and tied with red ribbons. She lived in a time of flowers, and wherever the People went, they were surrounded by flowers. In the summer, there were alpine flowers; in the fall, out on the plains, there were fall flowers and bushes burning with berries waiting to be plucked and mixed with meat to make pemmican.

  The boys noticed and shyly watched her as she bloomed, and she knew they were thinking of taking her into their own lodges when the time came, and some of them contrived to talk to her when she was fetching water, and some played a flute or left small gifts at the lodge door, and her parents knew that soon most of the boys among the Kicked-in-the-Bellies would come to the lodge, bearing gifts, their eyes burning.

  But then one day she felt a strange calling in her breast, and she told her mother she would go away to the place of visions, where boys often went, to await with prayer and fasting whatever had been ordained. She went only with a small robe, and lay quietly watching the night skies, which were alive with falling stars, and she felt confused. Why was she there, all alone, in the vastness of the night? But dawn came, salmon in the east, and with it a flock of magpies, silent on wing, hushed instead of noisy, serene instead of agitated. They were herky-jerky birds with a waddle that made them awkward, yet she knew at once that she, the beautiful Absaroka daughter, would be given both a spirit helper all her days, and a mission.

  She had lain quietly in the dawn light, feeling the sun’s rays paint her, and all the magpies—more than she could count—settled close to her, and she was given to know things; she would lead a most unusual life and would not be given in marriage to any boy, but to someone who would be a great mystery. The magpies would give her medicine powers. She would be a medicine woman, with an inner knowledge of other mortals, and the power to heal and prophesy. And the magpies would be her protectors, for so long as she never lifted a hand against them, or her People, or the innocent.

  She took that great vision back to her village, and told it to the elders, and they purified her with sweetgrass smoke, and became a woman set apart.

  She waited for the next dream to come, because there were many flowers in it, strange flowers she had never seen, flowers from far-away places, with names she didn’t know. She knew this dream would be about the man she had wed, the strange one both fierce and tender, who had strange notions, and who loved her in some way so beautiful it was unfathomable to her, and she loved him back in the same manner, even as she continued to heal and prophesy, and to fight, for she had become a warrior woman, fearless, skilled with bow and rifle, beside this strange man. Now the petals were falling, drifting like a spring shower out of the heavens, and she saw no magpies at all. She wanted to dream about this man, and remember his face, and remember how it was when he held her in his arms, but her dream would not take her there, to the sacred places, and she began only to feel cold, first a little chill, and then very cold, and the petals stopped falling out of the blue sky, and then the dream stopped, and she could dream no more.

  forty

  She was gone. The dream keepers came for her, and now she was a weightless husk. Her spirit had been the heaviest thing within that ancient frame. She lay serenely in her robe, very still. Dirk stood beside the shelf bed, suddenly brimming with loss.

  Strikes the Iron had found her thus, and summoned Plenty Coups, even while Dirk slept, and then they had awakened him in the rose dawn of a clear December day. He absorbed her absence. She was on her way. The star trail would take her some imaginable distance away.

  He thought of her request to come here, to be among her People at the last. She had received her wish and now her life was fulfilled. She had come back to the people of her girlhood, to the relatives and friends and tongue and wisdom and ways she had known. She had returned to that which had stamped her, made her an Absaroka, given her a name, given her those medicine powers, given her those skills with a bow and arrows. He thought she was somewhere in her upper seventies, but those details, the family history, were confusing, and he simply wasn’t sure. There would be no white men’s records: birth, parents, marriage, death, place. The Crows had no parish records.

  He sat next to her, feeling a tug for this Crow mother, the older wife of Mister Skye, this woman who had no child of her own, and loved him as much as his Shoshone mother, who brought him into the world.

  “Her wish was to come here, and I brought her, and now all that she asked has happened,” he said to the chief.

  “I count it a blessing to have met her, talked with her, and offered her my hospitality,” he replied. “It was like opening the door to a magical person.”

  “I should have expected it,” Dirk said. “But I didn’t.”

  “It is good that you didn’t,” Plenty Coups said. “Have you any thoughts about what to do next?”

  “Grandfather, she is one of yours. I don’t know what to do.”

  “You are her son,” the chief said, firmly returning the decisions to Dirk.

  “She would want to be given to the sun,” Dirk said.

  “Yes! That is good!” said Strikes the Iron.

  “I will do that,” Dirk said. “But I would like for you, Grandfather and Grandmother, to choose a place and direct me in the ways of the People.”

  “It will be done.”

  “Should I go find the Indian agent?”

  “Major Armstrong? He does keep a book of births and deaths, and all who are enrolled at this agency. But Many Quill Woman was not enrolled. And he did start a cemetery, and wants us to bury our own as white men do, but the People don’t like it, a
nd the earth is not a good place.”

  Dirk knelt next to his Crow mother, who lay so still. He wanted to memorize her face, but there was nothing to memorize, and no photographs or tintypes or drawings that he knew of, so he would remember her only in small fragments: laughter, wit, a tender hand upon his father’s face, a rowdy story.

  He stood, slowly.

  “Grandfather, is there a ritual, a way of mourning? I am not of your blood.”

  Plenty Coups gazed through the real-glass window upon an autumnal scene, and shook his head. “We have no crier now. There once was one who would go through the village, from lodge to lodge, with the news. And then the women would gather and mourn, and prepare the body to be given to the sun. Now … those ways are gone.”

  There were no lodges visible; no village or winter camp, the lodges pitched in half-circles and facing east. There was only a scatter of rude cabins, most leaking smoke, scattered willy-nilly without heeding the old ways, or the old disciplines.

  Dirk peered out into the emptiness of the settlement, and realized that Absaroka life had been shattered in many ways with the advent of the reservation.

  “Grandfather, I will bury her as she would have wanted. To do that, I will need your wisdom.”

  “We will do this as she would want,” the chief said. “Go harness your horse; bring the wagon. We will cover Many Quill Woman in the old way.”

  Dirk clambered into his coat and stuffed his hat down, and plunged into a bitter morning. No one stirred. The scatter of cabins and the earthen walls of the post gave him the sense of being in a white men’s frontier settlement rather than at the center of Crow Indian life. He threw an icy harness over the dray, and slipped an icy bit into the dray’s mouth, which it tried to spit out, and eventually hooked the wagon to the tugs and steered the dray to the chief’s small cabin. In all that while, he saw no other person braving the wind.

  He parked there, and went indoors, and found that Strikes the Iron had wrapped Victoria in a blanket, and then a beautiful robe, and had tied the entire bundle with thong, so that no part of his Crow mother peeked out at him, and there was only the tightly bound bundle. The chief’s wife slipped into a capote, the chief chose only a blanket, and then he collected two axes and a ball of thong.

  He nodded to Dirk, who knew what to do. He lifted his Crow mother, who weighed nothing, and carried her into the bitter air, and settled her carefully in the wagon bed. And then the three of them climbed to the seat, and Dirk looked expectantly at the chief.

  Plenty Coups pointed, and his finger directed Dirk to a lengthy trail stretching south and west, away from the mountains and toward long, naked ridges stretching into the Yellowstone valley.

  They rode quietly, the horse settling into the task, and the wagon creaked through icy-skimmed puddles and over frosted grass. At a point where one majestic ridge declined toward the distant valley, he pointed again, and Dirk steered the wagon off the trail, toward a promontory with a grove of naked cottonwoods nearby.

  It would be a good and fitting place for Many Quill Woman, first wife of Barnaby Skye.

  A signal from the chief, and Dirk halted. It was quiet and cold and lonely, perhaps two miles from the agency. Far to the north lay the Yellowstone valley, the living heart of the country the Absarokas claimed as their own.

  Dirk walked slowly to the promontory, and then to the nearby stand of cottonwoods, and finally to a great willow standing among the cottonwoods. A limb split into a narrow vee, facing north. It would do.

  The chief handed Dirk an axe and took the other, and between them they cut crosspieces that would span the vee, and as swiftly as they completed a crosspiece, Strikes the Iron anchored it to the willow tree with thong, carefully tying each piece. They worked patiently, ignoring the cold, and in a while they had completed the platform that would become Victoria’s final home.

  Now, at last, giving Victoria to the sun, the wind, the night skies, the rain, the snow, the spring zephyrs, the heat of summer, proved to be hard and hurtful. He didn’t want to let go of her. And yet it was necessary to do what had to be done. The chief and his wife waited, for this was a task for Dirk alone. He peered at that bundle lying in the wagon bed, and then gently lifted it, feeling the softness of the richly tanned buffalo robe, feeling the tight cords that bound it together. He carried his Crow mother to the scaffold and lifted as high as he could, higher than his head, and then rolled her onto the platform. And then he straightened her until she lay exactly in its center, facing upward toward the skies.

  Plenty Coups sang a song, long and mournful, the tongue strange to Dirk’s ear, even if its message was not. He saw tears forming under the eyes of the chief’s woman.

  A magpie alighted in a willow branch, dark and saucy white, up there in the latticework of naked limbs. Then another, and another, and then still more, whirring down into the willow, settling silently on the limbs. And then there were a dozen, and twenty, and fifty, and a hundred alighting silently at this place in the heart of Absaroka country.

  And then, when it seemed that every magpie for miles around had settled in the willow tree, the entire flock lifted off, flapping upward, and then around, in a giant circle, a great spiral that grew larger and larger in the bright blue, with the willow tree at the vortex. At last the great congregation of black-and-white birds vanished quietly into the morning sky, and there was not so much as a crow or a hawk or a sparrow in the endless heavens.

  For some reason, Dirk found himself smiling.

  They rode quietly back to the agency, their backs to the wind, and Dirk welcomed the warmth of Plenty Coups’ log house.

  It was not a time for speaking. He settled himself on the bed shelf where his Crow mother had slept, dreamed, and died. Something of her lingered there. He felt alone, even though this good leader of a good people welcomed him and his wife slipped to his side, sometimes with tea, and other times just to offer company.

  He didn’t belong among the people of the large-beaked bird. All gone: his father Barnaby Skye, his mother Mary of the Shoshones, his Crow mother Victoria. All that remained were the stories, things he learned through childhood and manhood about this man and his women and his amazing horse Jawbone, who carved a joyous life for themselves in a wild world. All his life he had heard stories about his parents, all his life he had heard not just of their prowess and courage, but also their goodness. Barnaby Skye was a memorable man; Victoria and Mary were just as memorable.

  Chief Many Coups left Dirk to his silences and busied themselves with other things. They sent word out to the People that Many Quill Woman had begun the journey among the stars, and others could find her on the promontory if they wished. A few came to the house, and quietly laid their hands upon Dirk, who accepted their blessings with a smile and a nod and thanksgiving.

  Then, later that chill day, the chief approached Dirk.

  “Do not leave us,” he said.

  “Thank you, but I must.”

  “You could teach us. You know the tongue. You taught the Shoshones.”

  “The Indian Bureau would not permit it, Grandfather. They discharged me.”

  “The Methodist missionaries are going to start a school here in a while.”

  “I am not one of them and I have too many things inside of me.”

  In truth, Dirk felt close to all things. He was more than Crow and Shoshone. He was more than Indian and white. He didn’t want to build a cabin here or on the Wind River Reservation, where he would wait for his monthly allotments and loaf through the days, being only half of himself. He was more than a believer and more than a disbeliever. The Jesuits had educated him, but his own religion was larger than theirs. He had learned the Shoshone mysteries, the very mysteries that brought the boy, Owl, to his doom, but his vision of life was larger than that. He was more than a white man, able to move easily among white people, like his father, and more than a Shoshone, too. He had no family and yet he belonged to a larger family. He did not know his grandparents. He had no histor
y like his father or his mothers. No English relatives, no Crow ones, and only some distant Shoshone cousins. But he was rich in family and friends because he had two bloods.

  “Thank you, Grandfather and Grandmother. Tomorrow, if you will permit it, I will take leave of you. I brought her here, and her wish was fulfilled, and now it is time for me to go.”

  They did not object.

  In the morning he would hitch up the dray and go away, to somewhere as high as the heavens.

  BY RICHARD S. WHEELER

  FROM TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES

  SKYE’S WEST

  Sun River

  Bannack

  The Far Tribes

  Yellowstone

  Bitterroot

  Sundance

  Wind River

  Santa Fe

  Rendezvous

  Dark Passage

  Going Home

  Downriver

  The Deliverance

  The Fire Arrow

  The Canyon of Bones

  Virgin River

  North Star

  The Owl Hunt

  Aftershocks

  Badlands

  The Buffalo Commons

  Cashbox

  Eclipse

  The Fields of Eden

  Fool’s Coach

  Goldfield

  Masterson

  Montana Hitch

  An Obituary for Major Reno

  Second Lives

  Sierra

  Snowbound

  Sun Mountain: A Comstock Novel

  Where the River Runs

  SAM FLINT

  Flint’s Gift

  Flint’s Truth

  Flint’s Honor

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE OWL HUNT

  Copyright © 2010 by Richard S. Wheeler