The Canyon of Bones (5 page)

Authors: Richard S. Wheeler

BOOK: The Canyon of Bones

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S
kye drifted from the lodge after darkness cloaked the valley. The drummers had begun, their heartbeat drumming throbbed through the camp. A crowd had collected around them to listen to songs of triumph, great events, war, and power.

He was in no mood for that and wished the tribes had some other and quieter way to spend a summer's eve. He had no relish for the company of the explorer, Mercer, either. In fact, he was using the darkness to dodge the man. He had nothing against the energetic Briton who had welcomed him cordially, and yet he did not want further commerce with the man. Somehow, Mercer was an intruder, and few of the Absaroka or Shoshone people grasped that he was noting everything there was to know about them.

It was one of those moments he often experienced, when he felt caught between the European world of his youth and the world of his adopted nation, the Crows; a moment when he was not really comfortable in either.

He did not dislike Mercer, yet he found himself avoiding
the explorer and knew he would continue to do so, no matter that they shared a tongue and a world across the sea and the prospect of a few gin and bitters was enticing. He used the thickening dark to drift from camp, reaching darkness and quietness after he reached the Shoshone River. He treasured the quietness of the woods. A three-quarter moon, fat and yellow, was rising in the east and paving the path with glistening light. That was good. It bid fair to be a sweet summer's eve.

Soon the drumming was only a distant throb and then the sound vanished altogether and he was alone. He found a game trail leading upward through forested foothills, and took it, letting the white moonlight filtering through the pines be his lamp. Juniper-laden air eddied down the hill, perfuming the world. The pungence of the juniper, or cedar, evoked the biblical in him and made this place the Holy Land. The malaise he felt in camp left him and he was at peace. He climbed a sharp rise and found an open ridge, its rocky spine lit by moonlight, a place of peace.

And there was a woman. Yes, no mistake, a jet-haired woman sitting on the rock, her back pressed into a shoulder of rock, her gaze rapt. She saw him at once, a swift startled gesture, and he paused. He did not want to frighten her.

“I am Mister Skye. I will go. This is your place,” he said in Absaroka, but she did not respond.

He thought she might be Shoshone, but who could say? He made the friend sign, palm forward, the peace sign. She did not move. He felt himself to be the intruder, and turned to leave.

She said something he could not translate but her voice was soft and warm, and she patted the rocky table next to her. He accepted the invitation and discovered a young woman, slim and beautiful, perhaps half his age. She had the strong
cheekbones of her people, and almond eyes, and even in the white and glistening moonlight he caught her interest in him. Her survey was as complete as his own and lingered at his gray beard and the beaver top hat. She smiled and spoke again and he could grasp nothing except her meaning: come sit with me and enjoy this sacred place, lit by Mother Moon.

He did, easing himself to the sun-warmed rock beside her. They sat well above the valley of the summer camp, but could not see it here in this quiet basin, and were alone.

“I'm Mister Skye,” he said in English, “and I live with the Absaroka people.”

“I know,” she said, “and your name is familiar to me. We all know it.”

He wondered how he understood her. She said it in Shoshone. Maybe he knew more of it than he had realized. He liked her voice, resonant of woodwinds and wind chimes.

“I am called Blue Dawn,” she said. “I am twenty winters, and have turned aside many suitors because I wanted to.”

He thought about that a moment, her words meaningful to him, as if a wizard were translating somewhere in his soul.

He nodded. Neither she nor he spoke. It was as if they had already tested the limits by which two people of different tongues could understand each other. She had not used the finger language though she no doubt understood it.

Some night bird glided nearby, hunting the rocky ridge for a meal. A small cloud hid the moon, so he could barely see her for a while.

He thought of things to say to her and then spoke: “I wonder who you are. I wonder why you are here, apart from your people. I wonder how you chanced to hike up this side trail to this ridge.”

She smiled, almost as if she understood him. It was almost eerie. But of course she didn't.

“I wonder what your dreams are: each of us has dreams, but yours have taken you away from the drumming, and your people, to this place. It is a quiet place but not a lonely one. It is a place to dream, or seek help from the spirits, or try to find a way through troubles.”

She was watching him, so intent that he imagined she was understanding his every word.

“But I think you are not troubled,” he continued, imagining she understood. “I think you are seeking something, maybe something the moon can give. I am too. I am wondering what to do. It's my wife â¦”

She smiled. Could it possibly be? Yes, she was smiling.

“I know,” she said. He was startled. Had he really heard it? Of course not.

This was getting altogether too odd for his taste. He emptied his mind of everything and settled beside her, letting the sacred scent of junipers drift past him. But now he was imagining what she was saying, maybe because he knew a little Shoshone: it was as if she was talking and by some magic he was receiving every word.

“My spirit helper is the Unknown God,” she was saying. “He was made known to me by a white man, a priest of his people, named Father De Smet. Ever since then I have sought this Unknown God who abides beyond the beyond.”

Skye couldn't believe he was thinking such things. Once he got back to the camp he would inquire about her. What was her name? Had the great Jesuit, Father De Smet, ever visited her people? Surely this was nothing but fevered imagination at work.

Still, she smiled at him and reached across the rock to touch his hand with hers.

“You want a wife,” she said in her tongue. But he caught the meaning.

“No, not I, I'm married, I â¦”

He stared helplessly at her, his mind refusing to accept this mysterious talking, translating without a translator.

“It is known among us. Many Quill Woman has told all the People that you are looking for a young wife.”

She sat there quietly, her gaze dreamy, the moonlight flooding her face and revealing friendship in it. She really hadn't said anything intelligible. He must be imagining all of this. There had been only the deep silence of the wilds, the occasional whir of a night flyer, the fat moon slowly crawling upward into a smaller whiter ball, and peace. Not just peace, but a sweet and savory peace.

Now he spoke aloud: “I came here to dodge the white man, the Englishman with the wagons and two helpers. He's a good enough chap. I have nothing against him. But I am not at ease around him.”

She listened, her eyes uncomprehending.

“I don't really know what the matter is. We just don't mix. He's a storyteller, I guess that's as clear as I can make it. He's adventuring to the distant corners of the world, looking for strange things. Strange to him, anyway, but not strange to you or me. And he writes all these things down each evening, and then he goes back to England, the country of my birth, and tells them what he has seen. It might be volcanoes or geysers one story; it might be your people or my wife's people too. It might be strange animals, rare birds, who knows? But he tells the stories, and many people know the stories.”

She stared. Good. For a while there he swore he was out of his senses, thinking she and he were mysteriously conversing.

They watched swift silver-rimmed clouds play tag with the moon. Sometimes he discovered her gazing at him and sometimes their gazes locked. She didn't smile or seem flustered by it. She was accepting and enjoying this silent encounter. He felt drawn to her, as if she was offering him a circle of sweetness if he would step inside of its circumference.

Who was she? And why did this encounter play out here?

She said something he could not understand, and rose. She was going to leave.

“Would you like my company?” he asked in English.

She nodded, responding to words she didn't know. She smiled, touched his arm, and they started down to the summer camp. She walked ahead of him, lithe and sure of foot, until they reached the river and then they followed it to the moonlit meadows. The camp had fallen into slumber.

She paused at a place where her path would fork from his, looked up at him and smiled. He placed his hands upon her shoulders and drew her close, yet not touching. It was a gesture as ancient and universal as man and woman. She said something, placed his bearded cheeks between her hands, and pressed them gently. That was all.

She left him, walking toward the Shoshone lodges. A dog found her, raced up, recognized her, and trotted along beside her as she fell farther and farther from Skye's sight, until at last she vanished into silver moonlight.

A strange, sweet eve, he thought. He made his way to his lodge, found his way into its blackness, and tugged at his moccasins.

“Dammit, Skye, tell me about her,” Victoria said.

An awkward feeling engulfed him, but it passed.

“I don't know her name but she'd make a good wife,” he said. “If you want me to.”

“Shoshone,” she said. “No Absaroka wants a white man with smelly feet.”

She laughed, found him, and opened her arms to him as he settled beside her.

nine

W
ith the first hint of dawn, Skye slipped out of the lodge and into the chill. He always loved this hushed moment in the day, just before the world stirred. In that he was unlike his wife's people, who would sleep to noon if it suited them. For the Absarokas this was still the middle of the night.

Skye surveyed the camp. No cook fires burned either among the Crow lodges or the Shoshones. There was probably no one awake except the horse herders, whose task was to be alert for trouble at all times. It was an honor for a boy to be chosen as a herder. Great was the responsibility, and great was the trust, and it meant that manhood was not far off.

The sun was cutting a ribbon of blue on the eastern horizon, and soon the gray and night-shadowed world would take color into itself. Skye headed for the river, to perform his ablutions, and then he thought he would climb a slope and watch the sun come up.

But at the Shoshone River he found he was not alone: a woman stood silently, watching him. When he drew closer, he
was amazed. It was the young Shoshone he had spent time with at twilight. How could it be?

“Good day, Mister Skye,” she said. In clear English. “I wait for you.”

English? How could that be?

“Wait for me?” he replied, utterly flummoxed.

She nodded. “I know all that you do. You leave the robes before anyone else. You like to see the day begin. I do too.”

He could scarcely fathom it. “But last night you didn't speak English.”

“Last night I chose to listen. If you want to know someone, say nothing, and listen and watch.”

“How do you know English?”

“My father is called Pompey. My grandmother is named Bird Woman, Sacajawea in my tongue. I learned your tongue from my father and grandmother. They were very careful to teach me many words, saying it would be good for me to know this tongue. Your people are making the world that will come.”

“And you?”

“Blue Dawn. Like this.” She waved toward the sunrise.

“Then you understood all my babbling.”

She nodded.

“And you know me but I don't know you.”

She smiled. The widening light in the east lit her face. “I know you. Come. I will make a meal for us.”

He had the odd sensation of being drawn into something ordained or planned that he was the last person to know about. She smiled. He thought she was the most striking woman he had ever seen, straight and lithe and proud, with a long-limbed body that arched like a drawn bow.

“We will eat up on the meadow,” she said, leading him in
the direction of their rendezvous last evening. “I have made everything ready.”

He drew his top hat from his head, more and more uncertain about all this. Too strange. Back out. “That's a most thoughtful invitation, but I can't accept. I ought not to be accepting invitations from a lady I scarcely know.”

She smiled, her black eyes flashing in the quickening light.

“Come,” she said.

He surrendered and followed her as she trotted ahead of him, her doeskin skirts dancing about her calves as she climbed the steep side trail toward the plateau. She moved so fast that it winded him to follow, but when they did reach the high meadow he was glad he came. The whole eastern sky, with a handful of pancake clouds, had turned rosy, and the alpine meadow was gilded in silvery light. It was their private Eden, a place of beginnings.

But he could not fathom what inspired all this. Why she had arisen before light, prepared this place, and waited for him to appear.

She reached the very ledge of gray granite where they had sat only hours before, sitting in what he supposed was a babble of languages. But now she had a fire already burning. She added some deadwood and placed a small black iron kettle over her fire.

“This is all just fine but I'm a little confused,” he said.

“Oh, there is no reason to be. Time to be the wife. I decided to marry you.”

“Marry me? You decided â¦” This was progressing all too fast.

She smiled, this time shyly. “It is so. It is the word of Many Quill Woman that comes to us. Her man seeks another
wife. I think that I am this one. I have always known it. Long ago, when I was little, I saw you.”

Skye stared mutely. He could not think of a thing to say. Not one word. She stirred the contents of her small black kettle. Orange flame licked its bottom and a thin gray veil of wood smoke lifted up and drifted across this alpine park.

Now her demeanor was not so certain. “I will be a good wife for Mister Skye,” she said in a small voice.

This was taking more getting used to than Skye was prepared for. He saw doubt in her face, the beginnings of self-rebuke, and swiftly caught her hand.

“Blue Dawn â¦” He wanted to accept, but that seemed odd. He wanted to propose, but it was too late.

She smiled, clamped her fingers over his.

“I've never been proposed to,” he said.

“I waited for you,” she said. “I knew you would come.”

“Everything is upside down.”

She frowned. “What is upside down?”

He laughed. “It's when the sky is under our feet.”

She stared, a slow smile building at the corners of those young lips.

“I will get used to you,” she said. “I will try to be a good woman. A very good woman for you. I will work hard. I will be to you whatever you like me to be. Your beard will tickle my face.”

“Where I come from, men propose to women. And they get to know each other first.”

She smiled. “I pity the women where you come from.”

“It's sacred, you know. It's for a lifetime. You don't rush into it.”

“A lifetime! I wouldn't want to live with your people.”

“Your father must have told you about all that.”

“I didn't believe it. How could people be so savage?”

“But it's civilized.”

“Savage. How can a man and woman stand one another for an entire life?” She waved her horn spoon at him. The contents of the pot were beginning to bubble.

“I am glad my father did not take me with him,” she added.

“Where is he?”

“In some place called Europe across the sea. He said it's old and cold and I wouldn't like it. So I am glad I stayed here to marry you.”

“I haven't said yes yet I want to get used to this.”

“We can wait until tonight if you want.”

“Wait until tonight!”

“If you insist. Or, we don't have to wait at all.” She stood straight, smiled at him, and waited. “Are you my man?”

He was feeling half crazy. It wasn't yet six in the morning, and apparently he was betrothed. “I want to get the permission of your parents first,” he said, hoping that would delay matters for a few months.

She shrugged. “My father, he is far away. My mother,” she paused. “She is not here. She is dead. I am with my brother and my cousins. You call them cousins. I call them kin, little brothers, little sisters. You can ask him.”

Skye was feeling out of sorts. There she was, desirable, her lithe young body moving under those doeskin skirts, inviting him, provoking him. How could he be an honorable man? How could he do what's right? How could he be proper?

“Well?” she asked.

He lifted his top hat and settled it. “You have to meet my wife first. She has to approve.”

She was grinning fiendishly. Victoria had the same grin.
Did all Indian women possess that grin in their arsenal? “I already did,” she said.

“You met her? You met Victoria?”

“She sure swears, doesn't she?”

Skye began to shrink down inside of his buckskins. This was getting dangerous. Maybe he could bolt for his lodge, leave her stirring her stew.

She touched his arm. “You have a good woman,” she said. “She told me about you. She said I should tell you to marry, because you never would. She said you'd be very strange about it at first but you would like the idea. She said I should be called Mary. I think that is a pretty name. You need to name me with one of the names your people give to women. So she said I would be Mary.”

“She did, did she?” Skye squirreled his top hat around in his hands. He squinted at her. “She told you that? She set this up?”

“What does set up mean?”

“I don't know what it means,” he replied, feeling huffy.

She smiled. “Victoria said you'd be angry, and very strange, and then you would be very happy.”

“She said that too?”

Mary nodded.

“Am I Mary now?”

“How should I know? All I do is get moved around like a chess pawn.”

“What is that?”

He sighed. She was smiling sweetly. “Let's eat some of that good stew,” he said.