The Owl Hunt (18 page)

He paused to let the dray blow at a narrows where passage was compressed between cream and red rock, some of it in tumbled heaps.

“Want to walk, Grandmother?”

“Hell yes. This is a spirit place.”

He scarcely knew what to make of that, but helped her down. She peered keenly at the vaulting stone, and headed at once toward an overhang where rock protected a shallow hollow, a brown shadow fifty yards up a talus slope. She wrapped herself tightly in the blanket to stay the wind, and pushed ahead so swiftly that North Star could scarcely keep up. But then she reached the wide hollow with its red roof, and stood quietly.

“Old ones,” she said.

He saw at once the figures daubed on the rear wall, vast numbers of them, some pale and ancient and flaked, but others newer and brighter. Some had been drawn in ochre; others in black, probably employing colored clay mixed with grease.

There were stories here, dozens, maybe hundreds of stories. Some of the figures clearly had been painted on top of ancient ones, destroying the earlier stories. But one in particular caught North Star's eye, vague and faded and higher than others. There were stick figures armed with lances and bows and arrows, and these figures had surrounded a giant beast, a strange beast, with monstrous legs, huge ears, great tusks, and a snake erupting from its head. A mammoth.

“Goddamn,” muttered Victoria. “This a bad place.”

There were stories of buffalo hunts, wars, fighting. There was a head with a war axe buried in the skull. There were human figures pouring arrows into a giant horned animal, an elk perhaps. Sometimes the stories were easy to follow: some were victory celebrations, memoirs of scalpings, battle stories, bravery stories, but there were other stories more obscure, some in which it was hard even to make out human figures.

They worked their way along the cliffside hollow, and then stopped at a recent image, its paint fresh. It might well be an owl, with round eyes, short ears, a curved beak, peering at anyone who might behold it. It was recent; there was a paint pot nearby, and daub sticks that would permit any passerby to add to the images. And some had. Here were new figures, pumping arrows into a different sort of beast, with small horns. Could these new animals be cattle? North Star stood, amazed, at the sight of scores of these bold new images, so new that they made the ancient figures pale in importance.

“Goddamn Dreamers boasting about supper,” Victoria said.

Somebody was doing a lot of painting, North Star thought.

He and Victoria seemed to have stumbled on an obscure artery that took people on or off the reservation. He remembered the times, a few years earlier, when the tribe's own cattle kept vanishing. His father, Barnaby Skye, had made it his first priority to build a herd of cattle owned in common by the Shoshone people. He had begged a few cattle from outsiders, helped the Shoshones guard and feed and water their little herd. But in all the years his father was Indian agent the herd never grew, and somehow cattle vanished. He knew, but could never prove, that cowboys from the neighboring ranch country simply pilfered the tribal cattle; that those cowboys drove their herds onto the good grass in the obscure corners of the reservation, paying nothing for the trespass, and usually nabbed a few Shoshone cattle when they pulled out. In the end, Barnaby Skye's dream had come to nothing, defeated by neighbors, by an army that didn't much care to protect the people on the reservation, and an uncaring Indian Bureau in Washington City. That defeat had filled Barnaby Skye with sorrow and anger, and hung over him until he died.

Now, as North Star stood before this wall daubed with a thousand stories, well above the bottoms of this obscure gulch, he intuited that this had been a great smuggler trail used by the cowboys on the ranches to the north, and now by the Dreamers. It seemed likely that the Dreamers, still drumming through the nights and awaiting their vision of liberation, were feeding themselves one cow at a time, pulled out of the herds beyond these mountains. Maybe the whole thing had been so slow and secret that so far, anyway, the ranchers were unaware of the loss. But that was speculation. What North Star did know was that no ranchers had come storming into the Wind River Agency demanding repayment and punishment of those who were taking livestock.

Maybe there was justice in it, he thought. All those years that the ranchers were stealing reservation grass and beef were being repaid now. But he didn't push that idea far. There was so little proof; nothing to prove that the cattle outfits had stolen Indian beef; nothing tangible now to prove that the Dreamers—if they were really involved—were thinning the herds to the north.

He helped Grandmother down the talus. She had reached an age when she seemed to glide, and so light was her body that she left no footprints behind her. He helped her into the wagon and set out once again, along this obscure gulch that would lead them—somewhere. Two hours later, still under a leaden sky, they reached the saddle, and peered into an obscure world, gray and silent, cold and angry, where three or four ranchers lorded over giant dominions like feudal barons, zealously excluding the rest of the world from their fiefs.

North Star fought off an odd fear, and slapped the reins over the dray.

twenty-one

Cold fog lay over the land at dawn, which made it even more lonely. The western reaches of the Big Horn Basin were as empty as any place on earth, featureless slopes scraggly with sagebrush, arid and dull, a place to hurry past to reach something, anything, more hospitable. A cast-iron sky continued to oppress the land, and occasional mists filtered down from a haphazard heaven.

North Star thought it would be a good enough place to hunt if only because it was so devoid of humankind that mule deer or antelope might prosper there. He wiped the moisture off his father's Sharps, the last of several that Barnaby Skye had owned, and checked the load.

Grandmother Victoria would tend camp. The moist air had set her bones to aching, and now she huddled under a half-shelter fashioned from the tarpaulin they had brought along. She fried up some johnnycakes for breakfast, building a fire of dead sagebrush that lasted just long enough for the task. The dray was finding grass tucked under the sagebrush. A seep provided water enough, though rather alkali.

“Just what an old lady needs for her stomach,” Victoria said.

“I'll not go far, Grandmother,” he said.

“Hunt,” she said crossly.

North Star headed up a shallow draw, his Sharps tucked into his arm. Maybe with some luck he could fill the water-beaded wagon with some antelope and deer and start back to the reservation.

No wind blew; maybe that was good. Wind sent notice far ahead, but this gray day the air was heavy. He crossed one ridge and headed down an anonymous slope, suddenly fearful of losing his bearings. There wasn't a thing to steer him back to Victoria. Not a landmark, not a mountain, not an odd-shaped cliff, not a tree. But there were his footprints in the dewy brush, which might not last long. He realized he would need to be careful about getting lost. Victoria couldn't harness that dray and had no means of going home if they should become separated.

North Star remembered his red bandanna and backtracked to the ridge where he could see their camp as well as the open country where he was headed. He tied the red emblem to the highest sagebrush, which stood glistening and silvery five or six feet above the earth. It wasn't much of a landmark, and he was going to have to be cautious.

Then he headed toward a flat where he thought game might be, trudging through silence. When he descended he saw that nothing grew there; it was a featureless bottom of naked gray clay. But out on that clay were creatures which proved to be antelope when he got closer. Their white rumps were turned toward him. He marveled at his luck. But he still needed another hundred yards, so he edged quietly, a few yards at a time, pausing frequently, alert to the slightest restlessness of the pronghorns. He saw no sentinel on a distant ridge, but maybe that was the fog closing between him and the sentinel. He made his hundred yards and decided it would do, especially if he could get a bench shot. He found a boulder, settled behind it, and rested the octagonal barrel on it, choosing the closest antelope. But he would have to wait until it stood broadside, so he settled quietly. This was good. He wasn't more than a third of a mile from Victoria. It was misting again, and he thought maybe the mist was what muffled his presence to the shy and alert antelopes.

His chance came moments later when the antelope turned. He shot, the boom vanishing in the mist, and the antelope dropped instantly. The rest scattered. He reloaded the Sharps and studied the ground. There were no antelope in sight. He found the dead antelope and tied a rope to its front legs. He would drag it if he could. That turned out to be a good choice. When he drew the antelope onto the thin grass the mist lubricated his passage. He pulled it steadily toward camp, over a ridge and down. In short order he was lifting the pronghorn into the wagon bed and untying the rope.

“The boys will chase the girls,” Victoria said, echoing a belief that antelope meat induced lust. “Goddamn, I wish I was young again.” She wheezed a little chuckle.

“We may as well break camp here; I've chased away any meat,” he said.

He collected his picketed dray and began harnessing it, while Victoria broke camp.

The collar and harness leathers were icy in his hand, but he didn't mind. The antelope in the wagon would keep well if this continued. He slid the bridle over the dray's head, making sure the bit was in place, and then went to help Victoria tuck the bedrolls under the tarpaulin. Sleeping dry was something they both cherished.

He helped her aboard and took the lines, only to realize he was seriously disoriented, with no sun, no sky, no features to guide him. Still, the ribs of land here ran from high country south and west, toward the valley of the Big Horn, east and north. That would have to do. If he headed downslope, he might eventually reach the river, and the bottoms where mule deer abounded. He started that way, driving downslope as much as his instincts permitted, his wagon wheels leaving a silvery trail behind.

The day brightened and the mist and fog began to thin, and North Star began to see the valley. The river was a black streak miles ahead. There should be plenty of deer.

The horsemen boiled out of the mist, four of them, riding wet horses, the dew silvery on their hats and coats. Cowboys. Dirk reined in the dray and waited, as the horsemen swirled close, eventually forming an arc in front of him. Then one rode close, studied the wagon, eyed the antelope.

“Good morning,” North Star said.

“Maybe it isn't,” the one who had peered into the wagon replied.

“I'm Dirk Skye, and this is my mother, Victoria. We're from the agency.”

“I already got that from the wagon,” the man said.

“The agency's short of meat, so we've been hunting,” North Star said.

“Hunting, eh? I'd call it something else,” the man replied.

“We have an antelope and are heading to the bottoms to hunt deer.”

“Deer, eh?” The man laughed.

The man's eyes radiated a certain cruel amusement. He was wire-thin, with an elaborate mustache, and a water-beaded revolver holstered at his side. His craggy face suggested an intimate acquaintance with outdoor living.

“Your name, sir?” North Star asked.

“It don't matter none, since you won't be around to repeat it,” the man retorted.

The others, sitting quietly on their water-stained mounts, eyed the wagon impassively.

“I'm the teacher at the agency,” Dirk said. “My father, Barnaby Skye, was the agent for the Wind River Reservation for four years.”

“That makes it all the worse, sonny boy,” the man said. “Old Yardley, he had nothing but grief from your pa, and that's a fact.”

So this was Yardley Dogwood's outfit. North Star knew all about the man, but had never met him. His father had clashed repeatedly with the rancher, beginning in 1870 when Yardley had almost strung him and Victoria up just for crossing the range the Texan was claiming.

“Well, talk to Major Van Horne,” Dirk said.

The cowboy smiled through the cracks and crags in his flesh, leaned over and plucked the Sharps out of the wagon bed. “Must be your old man's,” he said. “Old Skye, he was keen on Sharps. I ‘magine a few of us are, too.”

“Take it up with the army. Captain Cinnabar's commanding.”

“We ain't taking it up with no one,” the cowboy said. “Fact is, you're rustling. Now, don't gimme that bunk. That there antelope's a decoy, so you look like some friendly old redskin. Fact is, that wagon's about right to hold a six-hundred-pound mother cow. Fact is, you're off the reservation where you ain't supposed to be. Fact is, we're missing a few beeves and was getting mighty curious where they done disappeared to, and now we know. They been dragged over them mountains and fed to all the redskins yonder. Fact is, we caught you red-handed.”

Victoria started cackling. She laughed and wheezed, so the cowboy glared.

“Turn off the cackle, old woman,” he said.

“Go to hell, cowboy.”

“There ain't a tree in sight, or we'd string you up proper for rustlers. So I guess we'll just drive on down to that river, and string you from a cottonwood.”

Dirk stared, unbelieving. How could this be?

“On what evidence?”

“Hell, you being here in a wagon's all we need. Old Yardley, he'll be pleased as punch. A Skye whelp at that.”

Dirk felt his fate closing in on him, even as he sensed an eagerness build in these cowboys from Texas. He thought to whip the dray into a gallop, and gave up on that. Bleakly, he sought some exit, some escape, and saw none. They had him.

The cowboy grinned. “You gonna drive that rig peaceful to the hanging tree, or do we drive it for you?”

“You can drive it yourself,” he said. He saw no point in cooperating with his executioners.