The Owl Hunt (17 page)

“Ah! It's the esteemed chief of the Eastern Shoshones!” the agent said, sliding his feet off the desk and planting them firmly before him.

Washakie removed his hat, as was the white men's custom when indoors, and waited for Major Van Horne to compose himself.

“And to what do I ascribe the honor of your company, Chief?”

“My people will starve, Major.”

“Now, esteemed Chief, let me see here. I do believe they were handed the staples the government provided for them. I do believe they pitched these wantonly to the earth, and walked away. If they suffer, they can only blame themselves.”

“That is what they told me as I rode back, sir.”

“Then why are you complaining?”

“They are going to be hungry.”

“And is that not their fault?”

The chief thought to drop this line of reasoning. He could do some blaming of his own. The distribution had been altered for certain political reasons connected with the Dreamers. And it would all end in accusations and counteraccusations. They would end up blaming one another and no food would end up in the bellies of his people.

He stood a little straighter, dark and stocky and massive and gray at the temples. “I told them to seek food wherever they could find it, beyond your medicine lines.”

The agent, who had been primed for more blaming, took a moment to register that.

“Beyond the reservation? But I did not give permission.”

“I gave them permission.”

“But you lack the authority.”

“I am the chief of the Eastern Shoshones.”

Van Horne laughed softly. “That's almighty right, my esteemed friend. But no one leaves the reservation without permission, and I don't give it. Not to anyone.”

“I have told them. They will go.”

“You could rescind the command, my honorable friend.” The agent smiled. “It would halt the trouble.”

“I have told them. They will go. They will hunt.”

The agent stood abruptly. “Then I'll take measures. Captain Cinnabar will enjoy rounding people up.”

“Then let it happen.”

Washakie stood, solid and unmoving, determined. “I made the treaty myself. We were given a homeland to possess and enjoy, safe from your people, safe from other tribes. We were not put there by force. Nothing in the treaty says we must stay inside the reservation. We are not a conquered people defeated by your army and put in a prison with invisible lines around it. We are friends. It is our land. These are our ways. I have sent my people to look for meat. They will do it. They will hunt buffalo and deer and elk. They will bring back meat for those who are poor and hungry. They will keep the People alive for one more moon.”

“Sorry, my esteemed friend, it's the fathers in Washington who've got the power, and they handed it to me, and I'm telling you now: tell your people to stay at home. Tell them!”

“No.”

Washakie stood quietly, waiting for whatever came next.

“Are you defying me?”

“I am the chief of the Eastern Shoshones.”

“And I'm the agent of the government. I could call the guard, you know.”

“Here are my arms. Here are my legs. Put irons on them and throw me into the cage at the fort named in my honor.”

The Indian agent subsided, stared into the late-hour skies, and came to a conclusion. “I'll deal with you tomorrow,” he said. “Don't think this is over.”

Washakie nodded. He walked quietly from the office, standing high, making his back large against the white man, and drove his wagon to his small frame house, which sat in bleak subjectivity near the agency. He pulled the harness off his horse, hung the harness on pegs, scooped some shelled corn and poured it into the manger, and closed the gate.

He did not enter his darkened home, but walked the quarter mile to the house of the teacher, and knocked.

The old Crow woman answered, and stepped back at once. “We are pleased to welcome the chief of the People,” she said. “Our house is blessed by your presence.”

Dirk Skye appeared, surprised by the presence of the chief, and waved him in. “Grandfather, we are honored to open this house to you.”

Washakie settled easily in a kitchen chair, and withdrew his tobacco pouch and a small clay pipe, which he filled carefully and then lit with a match he scratched on the underside of the table. He sucked slowly, until the charge glowed orange in his pipe, and then exhaled. North Star joined him at the table, and then, hesitantly, the old Crow woman, too.

“On this day I have told my people to hunt where they will,” he said, choosing English as the right tongue here. “When the sun rises I expect to be taken to the soldier camp and held there. Please make sure my will is known to the People. They must go where there might be meat.”

“Is there a problem with it?” North Star asked.

“I told the agent that it is my will and command. He said I had no authority. I told him I am the chief.” Washakie smiled suddenly. “And he told me that he is.”

“He threatened you?”

“I will not undo what I have done.”

“What will happen, Grandfather?”

“I believe that when the sun comes up I will be put in the cage at the fort.”

Skye looked stricken.

“Sonofabitch,” said the old Crow woman.

“Then the blue-shirts will ride out and catch the People and bring them back so that they can starve on our land rather than starve on the land of others.”

“The Dreamers,” North Star said.

“You speak true words. The white men fear the Dreamers. They turn our home into our prison and send more soldiers to keep us inside of it. Tell me, North Star. Why is this?”

“Grandfather, I wish I knew. They fear Owl and his Dream more than any army. They think that Owl and a few Shoshones are worse than any army.”

“I do not see clearly what is happening,” Washakie said.

North Star hesitated, and then plunged ahead. “Grandfather, Owl was here. He watched the soldiers parade. He watched them fire the Gatling gun. He watched the pine tree shatter. Later, he made himself known to me. He was amused by the white men. Owl's vision is not about war, not about armies, not about blood. It is about that which has no name.”

“Here, was he?”

“Watching from the hills.”

“They hunt him as if he was a rabid wolf.”

“They won't catch him, Grandfather. He is invisible to them. He walks among them and they don't know it.”

“And you did not tell the agent.”

“No, Grandfather. I would not betray Owl.”

Washakie grunted. “His days are numbered, North Star. I have said it.”

“Why do you say so, Grandfather?”

“They think he is the spark that will start the forest fire.”

He knocked the dottle from his pipe and stowed it in a breast pocket. “I am tired and my women await me. When the sun comes, I may be taken to the fort. Tell the People Washakie says to hunt wherever they wish; the whole world is their home. Find meat and eat.”

“I may join them, Grandfather.”

“No, teach the school, North Star. The old ways are doomed. Teach them the new.”

With that, he stood, pressed his hand firmly upon the shoulder of the old Crow woman, whom he admired, and slipped into the deepening abyss of night.

twenty

North Star would hunt. He awoke one chill and overcast morning and knew it. This was the right time, when the cottonwood leaves were turning bronze and the aspen made yellow patches on distant slopes. He would make meat for the hungry People.

He had dutifully remained at his schoolhouse post but the students had fled. The girls boarding with Washakie had been returned to their parents. The Shoshone people were shunning the agency and keeping their children away. It had been a dreary autumn, sitting in his empty schoolroom reading.

The Wind River Reservation was slipping into the fall, its starvation scarcely noticed at the agency. If the People were going hungry, the starvation was screened by silence. Dirk knew that the Dreamers, still gathering in the mysterious chasms of the mountains, were supplying a little meat to the People, but where they got it remained a mystery. He suspected it was not the meat of game taken on the hunted-out reservation.

He came to his decision suddenly, put away the geography text, and closed the schoolhouse door behind him.

At the teacherage his Crow mother rocked quietly and watched the clouds lower.

“Absaroka Grandmother, I am going hunting,” he said. That was the most formal way to address her. But he might properly call her Victoria, his father's name for her, or Many Quill Woman, her Crow name, or Crow Mother, for she had helped raise him.

She absorbed that cheerfully. “I will go with you,” she said.

“But Grandmother—it will be cold and hard.”

“You saying I ain't worth anything?” she said. “I'm going, dammit.”

“But you—but, Grandmother.”

“So, maybe I die. It is good to die being useful. I want to be useful. I can still do a lot of stuff, eh?”

Actually, she could. But this would be hard, and old people had few reserves. But she was determined.

“Good!” he said.

She erupted from the rocker with amazing force, and began gathering what they would take with them. He headed for the barn, harnessed a dray he liked, and drove the agency spring wagon to his house. By the time he returned, she had collected a heap of outdoor gear: two bedrolls, a canvas tarp for a shelter, a block and tackle, Barnaby Skye's converted Sharps, with cartridges, assorted skinning knives, ropes, mess gear, and a few pounds of cornmeal.

She had shed about ten years in the space of an hour, he thought as she clambered onto the bench seat beside him. He stopped at the agency, couldn't find Van Horne, and left a note saying he was going hunting. He was glad the agent wasn't around to heap sarcasm or worse on his plans. And that might include being fired for being away from his post. But somehow Dirk didn't care. If there was no one to teach, then his service as a teacher was meaningless.

But as they drove away, Van Horne waylaid him from the agency garden.

“Hunting, eh? Not a bad idea, Skye. Bring back some bear steaks, eh?”

“More likely a few pronghorns if we're lucky, Major.”

“And Skye, keep an eye out. If there's a revolt brewing, I want to know about it.”

“The reservation's peaceful, sir.”

“Hell it is,” Van Horne said. “You'll be my eyes and ears.”

“Goddamn Dreamers all over,” Victoria said.

“Not so funny, madam,” the major said.

Dirk wasn't sure where to go, but decided to ford the Wind River and head into the Owl Creek Mountains, and then the Big Horn Basin. The nights were cold: he could bring fresh meat to the People even if he had to carry it a couple of days.

The wagon was serviceable enough: it would carry two or three deer, maybe two butchered elk. With the block and tackle and some luck, he could load meat without help. A northwest wind snaked the heat out of them as they forded the river and headed into dry foothills, stained red this time of year except for bursts of green in spring-fed gulches.

Dirk knew there would be no game near the reservation. Upriver, the Dreamers were lodged in mountain valleys, drawing their sustenance from sheep and bear and deer. There were few Shoshone north of the river, and North Star steered the agency wagon across lonely reaches so empty of life that even the presence of a crow in the sky seemed welcome.

It was always like this. Around the agency he was Dirk; away from it, he somehow became North Star. Even as he steered the dray, he felt his Shoshone blood course through his veins, transforming him. He would bring food to the People, if he could.

North Star worried about the ancient woman beside him, but she sat stoically, wrapped in an old Hudson's Bay blanket, cream with red bands. She had been failing for months; her eyesight was weak; she had acquired a tremor. But mostly she had slept and slept and slept away her days.

“This is good,” she said. “It is better to hunt in the wind.”

He steered the bony dray horse up a draw, leaving behind the slight trail, and headed toward a distant ridge. There was no game in sight. It made the country odd; grasses and brush cured everywhere, untouched by four-footed creatures. North Star saw no sign, either, except for that of an occasional cow illegally on the reservation. He reached the spine of the ridge and paused to let the dray blow, and they found themselves gazing down upon a mysterious ocean of land. Far below, North Star spotted what he thought was a patrol from the fort, making its noisy blue way across the reservation. He saw no wildlife at all, nor any sign that wildlife had been here for a long time.

A dozen miles ahead was a saddle that might take him down to the Big Horn Basin, which was now cattle country. He hesitated. Agency Indians with a gun and a wagon could look a great deal like rustlers to any passing band of drovers. He might be a federal employee; he might speak fluent English. But the cattlemen up that way would see him and Victoria as rustlers and would not bother to get the facts.

It was something to think about.

The real problem was not Shoshones rustling cattle, but ranchers stealing grass. They sent small herds into the hidden valleys and obscure meadows along the northern edge of the reservation, taking their fill of the grasses that belonged to the tribe. All the agents, including his father, knew of it and tried to stop it, but lacked the resources. And the army tended to look the other way. So the Shoshone pastures had been steadily invaded, especially during dry years, and the several large ranches to the north were never punished. Neither were their transgressions acknowledged in the reports that regularly winged their way to Washington City. As much as two-thirds of the reservation pastures were encroached by cattlemen.

North Star drove into rougher upcountry, between escarpments of red rock laced with juniper. He doubted a wagon had ever traversed this country, and indeed he could be forced to turn around at any time. All it would take would be an impassable gulch or deadfall or a bottom choked with slide rock. The gloomy sky lowered over the distant red ridges, making the place somehow sinister. These were the Owl Creeks, and beyond the great basin of the Big Horn. Surely in a place so remote, there would be game.