Authors: Richard S. Wheeler

The Canyon of Bones (21 page)

BOOK: The Canyon of Bones

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forty

M
ary's absence was soon discovered. The man whose name was secret approached Skye. “Where wife?” he signaled.

“Don't know.”

“Gone to bones?”

Skye shrugged.

The headman issued a sharp command. Several Sarsi trotted their ponies back toward the coulee where Mary was last seen. Skye waited quietly. Victoria looked grim. She probably didn't approve of Mary's rescue attempt but it was her code to let anyone do what he or she would, and bear the consequences.

In a few minutes the Sarsi returned and consulted with the headman. They plainly had lost Mary and the rock-hard day of the area wasn't providing a track. Skye figured that Mary might even have a mile head start by then if she had urged her pony into a lope.

Still, she was four or more hours from the bones. And the sun this late summer day had been relentless. If she did escape, she probably would find Mercer and Winding dead at
the foot of the bluff. But she would try, and he marveled at that quality in her. His Mary, so newly his wife, had the same courage and spirit as Victoria.

The Sarsi were engaged in debate, probably whether or not to return to the bones, catch Mary, prevent her from saving those who had been sacrificed. Skye eyed them, eyed his pack animals, eyed his rifle snugged on one of them, wondered how to make use of this, wondered how to escape the four bowmen and lancers who were steadfastly guarding him and Victoria.

He edged Jawbone toward the impromptu conference and signaled: “Permission to speak.”

The headman stared, then nodded.

“Let us go. We have done you no harm. We did the bones no harm. Why do you keep us?”

The assembled Sarsi watched his hands work. Fingers were poor substitutes for talk, and he doubted he could do or say much that would persuade them. There were only a few hundred words in the sign language, and they had to do, and often didn't do.

The headman stared at the sun, which was heading west now, well after noon. It was very quiet. Skye could pretty well read his mind. If he released the white man now, could they return to the sacrificed ones in time? Why keep them longer? Keep them? Kill Skye and his wife? Chase Skye's younger woman who had escaped them?

The flinty headman stared proudly at Skye, and Skye wished he could befriend this one. He liked the man who had led a small group of young Sarsi to pay homage to the big bones. Maybe the headman liked Skye. He and his family had been treated with care and respect.

A bee hummed by, surprising them.

The headman with no name spoke abruptly to two of the boys. They trotted their ponies to the herd, cut out Skye's horses but not Mercer's, and brought them to Skye.

Skye lifted his hat. There was no good sign for thank you, so Skye signaled blessings.

The headman nodded. Skye took the reins, gave Victoria the lines of the pack animals, and turned away. For the briefest moment his back itched as if it would receive arrows, but nothing happened. Skye and Victoria walked their horses slowly back along the path they had taken, and in a while the Sarsi turned the opposite way, and receded from view.

“Oh, Skye,” whispered Victoria.

He saw the tears.

With the pack animals they could not hurry, but Skye thought they did not need to: Mary was hurrying. She had her moccasin knife. She would do what she could do if she was in time.

They rode steadily through the heat and the waning day. The sun was plunging below the horizon earlier now but Skye thought they would reach the bluff by daylight.

They paused briefly at a seep in a coulee, and Victoria dismounted, stretched, and smiled.

“I am going to put the tooth back in the jaw of the grandfather,” she said.

“Where is it?”

“Where it was dropped by the one whose name I will not say.”

That would be Mercer, whom she believed was dead now. Once the spirit had fled no plains Indian would name the departed.

“I will help you if you want me to.”

“It is for me alone. The bones are my grandmother.”

“We will watch for it, Victoria.”

Something in her face touched him just then. She loved him as much as he loved her. She loved him through best and worst, through times that challenged everything she clung to, believed in.

They mounted and rode steadily east, along the trail south of the Missouri River basin. The closer they came to the place of the bones, the more they rode deep inside of themselves. Familiar bluffs hove into view and finally the one that overlooked the flat, far below, where the monster lay in layers of sandstone, its bones a shrine to many peoples of the plains.

It was not easy to find the exact cliff; so many places like it crowded the river canyon, but slowly Skye and Victoria examined the likely places, one by one, until they did find the spot, and found fresh hoofprints in the dust. They dismounted. No one was sitting on that ledge below. Heat from the ledge still radiated fiercely, though the sun was now well to the northwest, and adding nothing to the temperature.

Skye walked down to the ledge itself, treading carefully because a misstep could send him sailing to his doom. He saw nothing there. He peered over the lip, and far below detected something crumpled, something he was sure was a body. He studied it, not knowing who, or whether the cloth heap down there was two bodies or one.

“Someone died,” Victoria said when he returned to the top.

“Maybe both.”

He stood a moment, feeling grief.

They mounted, followed the perilous trail down the cliff, and eventually reached the shadowed flat that lay very still, very lonely, in the late light of the day.

Skye was puzzled. Surely Mary would be here.

Then Victoria pointed. Mary was not near the big bones
but some distance away, at the bank of the river, doing something. Her horse stood quietly near her.

Jawbone whinnied and Mary's horse responded. Mary looked up, and then stood gently.

Skye and Victoria rode slowly there, through gloomy shadow.

At Mary's feet was the body of a man, legs dangling in the river. Skye and Victoria hurried close. It was Mercer, and he was alive, his body writhing now and then. They gazed down from their horses at a man whose limbs were monstrously swollen, whose shoulders had puffed up, whose hands were purple, whose face was sun-blistered, whose whole body was sun-poisoned, and whose blue eyes were filled with madness.

Mercer stared up at them from eyes sunk in puffed flesh.

“Ahhhh,” he said.

“This man, I find him up there and cut him free. Somehow we get down to the river,” Mary said.

She had been cooling him, pouring water over his shirt and trousers, finding a way for him to drink. But he plainly could barely move his tormented arms and hands, which projected out like bloated sausages to either side, in much the way they had been tied all day.

“Ahhhh,” Mercer said.

Skye knelt, felt the man's forehead, and found it feverish, as he had expected.

Victoria headed for her packs. She kept herbs in them for many an illness, including some that broke fevers.

“Winding is gone?” Skye asked.

“Ahhh.”

“You will survive this. You will be all right.”

Mercer groaned.

Skye and Mary pulled Mercer's feet out of the water and laid him flat beside the river. The explorer stared.

Great shadows filled the canyon of the bones. Victoria returned with some bark in hand and began steeping it in a buffalo-horn cup.

Skye stood slowly, his gaze on that brooding cliff. Winding was somewhere partway up it. He felt saddened. He liked the teamster, a man excellent with horses and filled with the sage wisdom of the wild trail.

“I find him there, and he is still talking a little. I cut him free and help him down. Very hard, he cannot walk, so we drag down together. He falls into river, and I pull him out and get water into him. At first he talks a little, enough so I can get his words. The man who died, this man lasted until around the middle of the day. But the rawhide it tightens, making him crazy, and then bees come and sting, and he screams and pushes himself, and he goes down the cliff and his spirit leaves him,” she said.

“Bees?”

“Bees sent by the spirit of the bones.”

“Is Mercer bitten?”

“No, just the other.” She, too, would no longer name Winding out of respect for his spirit.

Mercer gazed wildly upward at them, struggling for air and life, and sanity.

“How long has he been like this?” Skye asked.

“He is mad, his spirit gone to be with the owls,” she said.

“The bones did it,” Victoria added. “That was what happened.”

forty-one

M
ercer was out of his head. Sometimes he wailed. Sometimes he glared at one or another of them. “You have no right!” he said once. “No story,” he muttered. “Knight of the Garter.”

Skye wondered if the man even knew where he was or who he was with. Victoria tried to draw Mercer's swollen arms to his sides but he howled with every gentle tug. He simply would not fold his arms to his sides; something about it was too painful.

The women began to make camp. Mary was propping up the lodgepole pyramid and laying the rest poles into it. They were going to get Mercer out of the night air if they could.

Skye saw he was not needed and decided to tend to the next business. He hiked slowly past the bones and then climbed the steep slope laden with scree at the foot of the cliff where Winding had jumped. Enough light remained to hunt for the teamster. Skye hoped to offer the man a respectful burial. He had no spade; it would have to be another scaffold burial but at least it would be that much.

He did not see Winding in the talus, and stumbled about the base of the cliff hunting for the body. But it was not there, nor visible in either direction. He was mystified. Then, looking up, he saw Winding dangling seventy or eighty feet up the cliff, caught by the pole across his arms that had wedged into stone there. He saw only sheer rock, gouged by cracks, and no foothold or handhold.

He could not bury the teamster. The birds would soon reduce that hanging flesh to bones and then indeed the last of him would tumble.

He pulled off his old top hat and stared upward. “Mister Winding, I'll send a letter to your folks in Missouri. I hope they'll get it. I'd do more if I could,” he said.

A breeze turned the dangling feet.

A black bird, raven maybe, settled on Winding's arm. Skye found a rock and threw it upward. The bird flapped away.

It didn't seem right, didn't seem finished, but he didn't know what else to do so he retreated carefully down the talus, taking great care not to stumble and twist an ankle. Winding gone. Mercer out of his head. Corporal gone. What was left?

Slowly, in fading light, Skye descended the slope to the place of the monster bones and paused there. He felt the sacredness of the place. Generations of Indians had come to this place of mystery, taking away some intuition of the origins of life, giving something, reverencing the great bones projecting out of rock. Someone had restored the broken tooth. The piece, including the chunk of jaw, had been carefully restored to the monster's skull. Odd. He didn't remember Victoria or Mary coming to the bones to do that since they returned. They had been busy setting up the lodge and caring for Mercer.

Skye stood in the quiet, feeling the sour song of the bones churn in him. How old they were. It occurred to him that this
monster might be one of God's mistakes. Maybe God didn't fashion creatures he was satisfied with and kept throwing them out. Maybe this one was evil, cruel and wicked, and God cast it into hell, or into oblivion, which might be the same thing. Maybe heaven was merely the place for what was selected to survive, a place for what proved to be good. These seemed older than a hundred thousand lifetimes. God's early mistake, not a recent one.

His mind drifted back to the idea that these were sinister monsters, much older than God, that when God came along he destroyed the evil ones, including this huge creature with the enormous skull and long tail. Maybe the whole world was hell until God vanquished hell and all its monsters, such as this one.

Skye marveled. The sacred bones had started feverish speculations in him, things he had never thought about. He could not explain it. Why would giant bones make him so itchy, so unhappy with his paltry store of understanding? He had paused at the bones only a minute or two and yet in that time, his mind had catapulted into realms he had never dreamed of before. Suddenly he knew how Victoria's people must have felt when they first saw the bones; how the bones fevered their minds, fired their imaginations, and soon enough the giant bones were sacred to them, and had to do with their own origins. Skye wondered whether other tribes had found their origins in these bones. And what had they seen? A big bird, like the Crows? He left the shadowed crypt and returned through a peaceful twilight to the camp.

“The man who cared for horses?” Victoria asked, carefully.

“Dead. I can't reach him. He's hung high up.”

“The spirit put him there,” she said.

It was as good an explanation as any. “Did you put the broken tooth back?” he asked.

She stared blankly, then shook her head, and that was answer enough. He found Mary starting a campfire. “Did you put the broken tooth back in the skull? The one Mercer chopped out?”

She stood, and slowly shook her head.

“Someone's been here and did it,” he said.

But they saw no evidence of anyone.

“Very strange,” he muttered. He thought maybe one of the Sarsi had done it before they all left.

Their task was to move Mercer from the riverbank to the lodge. Skye brought a robe, and he and Victoria slid the man onto it. The explorer groaned and uttered one long wail.

“Is it all right with you if we shelter him?”

Victoria eyed him coldly. “I would not want it any other way. We will take care of him. Those who are mad must receive the greatest respect.”

“Filomena, will you ever forgive me?” Mercer said. “I could not help myself.”

They waited but the explorer made no more mention of Filomena.

Victoria slipped into twilight, toward a slough filled with chokecherry brush, and there harvested the last of the cherries as well as more of the bark and roots. She mashed the roots and set them to steeping in water that Mary had heated in a leather bag, using hot rocks. This decoction she slowly fed to Mercer, who sipped, gasped, sipped again, and gradually swallowed much of what she was giving to him using a horn spoon.

It was an old Crow remedy to quiet a person and settle an upset stomach. Skye thought it would have to do; there was little else growing there.

“Who are you?” Mercer asked.

“I am Victoria.”

“Where am I?”

“You are in the lodge of Mister Skye.”

“Who is that?”

Mercer didn't wait for a response but dosed his eyes and slipped into quietness. Victoria stood, her work done. Mary covered the explorer with a buffalo robe and they all crawled into their beds. It had been a brutal day.

Skye slept restlessly, something nagging him about camping so close to the great bones. If Mercer was able, they would leave for Fort Benton in the morning.

Some time in the night, Jawbone screeched. Skye awakened, and in one swift move lifted his Hawken and slipped into the night, the quarter moon his lantern. The horse was untouched and standing calmly. None of the other horses had been stolen or hurt. It was not uncommon for a horse to startle in the night but Skye ached to leave this place of the bones.

“Nothing,” he whispered to his women.

“The spirit,” Victoria said. “Jawbone saw the spirit.”

They slept fitfully the rest of the night except for Mercer, who seemed to sleep the sleep of the dead, never stirring. But when dawn's first light began to collect in the smoke hole, Skye discovered Mercer sitting up and staring. His arms were still grossly swollen but dropped to his sides now.

“Where am I?”

“On the Missouri River.”

“How did I get here?”

“We brought you here.”

“Who are you?”

“I am Mister Skye. These are my wives, Victoria and Mary Skye.”

“Why did you bring me here?”

Skye hesitated. “You asked to be brought here, to see some large fossilized bones.”

Mercer stared. “Why would I do that?”

It was plain to Skye and his wives that the explorer had no memory of recent events. He wasn't incoherent, just blank.

“We lost Mister Winding, sir,” Skye said.

“Who is that?”

“Earlier, we lost Mister Corporal. Floyd Corporal.”

“Sorry, the name's not known to me. Should I know it?”

Skye scarcely knew how to reply. “Have we met, sir?”

“Graves Duplessis Mercer at your service, Mister Skye. But I am a little hazy about how I ended up here. Am I a prisoner?”

“No, not that.”

Up to a point, Mercer seemed himself, but that was only if he spoke of events long past. It became clear that his ordeal on the cliff had blanked his memory. Engaging Skye and his entourage, the trip, the prairie fire, and the long trek to the bones before returning to England simply eluded Mercer.

“This is an odd place to camp, Mister Skye, down in this gloomy trench.”

“We came here because you wanted to see the bones, sir.”

“That's very strange. Now tell me, why do my arms torture me? They're swollen. My shoulders are unbearable. My fingers thick as sausages.”

Skye hardly knew how to proceed. “The Sarsi Indians here took offense, sir.”

“Took offense? But why?”

Skye decided that moment to hold off. “Let's get ready for travel, Mister Mercer, if you're up to it. We'll head for Fort Benton and they can put you on a flatboat going down the river.”

“Why would I do that?”

“It was what you had in mind, before â¦ this.”

Mercer struggled to his feet, and stepped out into the hush of predawn.

“It's all very odd,” he said. “I seem to have lost some time somewhere. What is Fort Benton?”

“We'll talk about it on the way, sir,” Skye said.

BOOK: The Canyon of Bones

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