The Owl Hunt (33 page)

It was well nigh dusk when they raised the cottonwood log ranch house off on the horizon, which already had buttery light slipping from its windows.

“You sure?” Dirk asked Victoria.

“This'll be goddamn fun,” she said.

There still were times when the old woman startled him. He hadn't seen her so gleeful in years.

The ranch yard was as large as Texas, it seemed. There was a log bunkhouse spilling light, a whitewashed board and batten foreman's cottage, and the main building, with massive cottonwood logs notched with gun ports and bulletproof window shutters. Off a way were pens and a barn and some rude outbuildings.

“Wasn't long ago he tried to hang us,” Victoria said. “Goddamn, that was funny.”

Dirk couldn't quite fathom where some of her notions came from. He remembered only the terror and the strange sick sensation of his imminent strangling.

No one stayed them as he drove the wagon into a loop that would take them to the ranch house. Maybe they were all eating, he thought.

At last the rattle of the wagon drew notice, and several rough-dressed men spilled through the massive door to see what was causing the commotion. Dirk circled his wagon around and parked it at the front door, while assorted Texans gazed first at him, then at the wagon, and the old dray, and finally at the brand, which was
US.
Dirk's horse was a condemned army dray he had purchased.

All of this sufficed to draw the rotund master of this empire to the door, where he was silhouetted by lamplight. Yardley now sported a goatee, a sure sign of status, at least in Texas. He peered into the gloom, registered Dirk and Victoria, and approached.

“Ah do believe it's young Skye off the reservation, and the old woman who commands all the magpies west of the Mississippi. Well, ah say, welcome. You defeated the Confederacy. You're just in time for dinner, but we haven't decided which of you to cook first.”

thirty-eight

“Gents,” said Dogwood to his cohorts, “these heah guests are my nemesis, my embarrassment, and my betters. This lady commands an army of magpies, and these miserable pests halted a good hanging and drove my entire command to disgrace. This heah gent, Dirk Skye, is the progeny of Barnaby Skye, the Indian agent who made me deliver prime beef to the reservation, and to watch my tally, because if I was one beeve short, he'd string me up by the privates. These heah are my archenemies and conquerors who have come to sup at my table and enjoy my misery.”

The gents were smiling. They wore trimmed beards of all descriptions, especially elaborate mustachios, and were well manicured even if their clothing was rough. Dogwood introduced them all, saying they were his Texas cohorts during the late unpleasantness, and now ran the ranch. There were another thirty in the bunkhouses and camps round about, and a few “yellow dogs”—which Dirk took to mean non-Texans.

Dirk couldn't remember all their names, but there was a Pickens and Smithers and Bannister and McGinnis and Peck. In turn he introduced Victoria. “She was born Many Quill Woman of the Absarokas, and was captivated by my father soon after he quit the Royal Navy and entered the fur trade in the twenties. I owe my life to her, because my father was a one-woman man and only her insistence that he take another wife resulted in his finding the Shoshone who became my mother.”

“Goddamn, I was stuck with all the work until he got another woman, and then I had someone to boss around,” Victoria said. “I wish he'd gotten half a dozen more, so I could be lazy, but Mr. Skye had all the women he wanted.”

“Well, sah and madam, you'll see none around heah,” Dogwood said. “I don't much care for 'em. Now, come set. We've a slab of beef out of the stove, ready to slice—prime rib, medium to rare, sprinkled with salt, to be specific, that being all we've got to eat around here, which is a bore. So grab a plate, slice off what'll fill you, and hit the grub.”

Dirk and Victoria each sawed some juicy meat, and added a boiled potato, and settled at the trestle table, while the rest followed suit.

“Is that meat suiting your belly?” Dogwood asked. “It's a damn bore, but we got nothing else to offer guests of honor.”

“It comes close to buffalo tongue,” she said.

“There, you see?” Dogwood said. “I am defeated. We get whipped by magpies, whipped by blue-belly soldiers, whipped by stray redskins, whipped by old Indian agents, and whipped by buffalo tongue.”

“My people lived here. We wintered here. We found buffalo here. Now it is yours,” Victoria said. “How could you feel defeated?”

“Yes, ma'am, I'm defeated. I wanted to own Texas, with New Mexico tossed in, and got stuck with this miserable patch of cold ground somewhere north of the North Pole.”

Dirk wasn't quite sure where this conversation was leading, but the rib roast tasted just fine.

“My pa jumped ship in Fort Vancouver with nothing but the clothes he wore and a belaying pin, and somehow he survived,” Dirk said. “He was a Londoner and made it to one of the early rendezvous.”

“I've done a little research about that bozo,” Dogwood said. “This fella's old man, Barnaby Skye, he was right up there with Jim Bridger, Tom Fitzpatrick, Will Sublette, and all the rest, back in the beaver days. There was no man his match, they said. He could lick a dozen Blackfeet, subdue a grizzly, bury a rival fur brigade, and whip any man that tried him.”

“He was gentle to the last, sir. He avoided fights.”

“That don't tally, boy.”

“If you imagine he was a big, tough mountain man, sir, you'd be quite wrong.”

“What are you tellin' me, boy?”

“That he was a man of peace. He'd fight if he got forced into it, and only if he couldn't escape it.”

Dogwood masticated beef, glanced sharply at his cohort, and chewed steadily, digesting food and information.

“That don't tally,” he said. “But never no mind. What's happening on the reservation? You hang that little firebrand yet?”

“I tried to prevent it, sir. So did Chief Washakie.”

“Then they should've hanged the pair of you along with the boy.”

“They came close, sir.”

“I'm missing a story here, boy. Tell the whole thing square and true.”

Dirk set down his knife and fork, knowing he wouldn't be eating for ten minutes, and plunged in. “You see, sir, Owl wasn't a rebel. He was a seer, a boy filled with a vision.”

Dirk talked quietly, straight into the mounting skepticism of the Texans. Only it wasn't skepticism. They didn't understand. They knew nothing of vision quests, the guidance of spirit helpers, and the world of auguries. They couldn't imagine a bunch of redskins believing all that hoodoo. They couldn't fathom the Dreamers, dancing in the night to evoke the blessings of the Gray Owl.

“You and the chief, you stood against a line of blue-belly carbines?” Dogwood asked at the end. “You faced them guns, did you?”

“It gave the people time to flee, sir.”

“You should've pulled out a hogleg and shot that captain plumb dead. Fight to the death, like Crockett and Bowie at the Alamo. They're heroes, boy. They're three-ball roosters. They fought to the last man. They're Texans. But you stood there unarmed? I don't fathom it. What did it win you?”

“It made them think twice about shooting us, Mr. Dogwood.”

“Think twice about shooting you? No man in his right mind thinks twice about shooting anyone. He just does it.”

Dirk smiled ruefully. “It cost me my welcome, sir. Major Van Horne didn't like it. We're on our way to the Crow Reservation.”

“I hate the bluecoats, boy. Eat up and slice some more beef. Any enemy of the bluecoats is a friend of mine. I wish I knew what was cooking down there. I'd've armed the whole Shoshone nation, just to kill off some federals. A Winchester repeater for every bloody redskin. By God, that Owl fella had some sense.”

“It never was about that, sir. It was about seeing the future, the world returned to what it was before white men arrived.”

“That's like sayin' the Mexicans should have kept Texas.”

There was no explaining anything to Yardley Dogwood, Dirk thought.

“What's on your platter, boy?”

“Crow Reservation. I'll start a school for them, if I can.”

“With what?”

“With nothing. My father arrived in the American West with the clothes on his back and a belaying pin.”

In truth, Dirk hadn't known what he would do until that moment, but once Dogwood had elicited it, he had an inkling where his future might lie.

“Go claim some land up there, boy. I'll send a few beeves to get you started.”

“You, sir?”

“Anyone faces down them Federals, he gets what he needs from me. You get yo'self some land, boy. You do as I say, now. You put some beef in the belly of the Crows. Maybe they'll quit stealing mine.”

Dirk couldn't fathom it. The meal progressed quietly after that.

“You two, you sleep in the barn if you want. No colored folks bed in the house, boy, but there's hay in the barn. Your nag, give it some oats. Me, I'm going to pour three fingers of Kentuck, and go to bed.”

With that, the massive host rose abruptly, and lumbered off. The others soon followed.

It certainly had been the strangest encounter Dirk had experienced. Not a one of those Texans had grasped what the crisis on the Wind River Reservation had been about. But what did it matter?

He and Victoria made splendid beds out of hay, and took off at dawn, when the ranch was just stirring.

“Goddamn, that was fun,” his Crow mother said.

Dirk found himself wishing his father could explain a few things to him about white men. About people like Yardley Dogwood, who tried to hang Dirk one day and offered him a few cows on another.

He drove north, leaving wheel tracks in the heavy frost, and soon they were engulfed by silence once again, as the world poised itself on the edge of winter. This route, laid out by old Jim Bridger, would take them around the southern reaches of the Pryor Mountains and into Yellowstone country. With each passing day, old Victoria seemed to bloom. Dirk swore that a decade and fallen away, and then another decade. Her eyes brightened; her gaze was more keen. A flock of magpies discovered her and erupted in hilarious gossip. She beamed at Dirk, assumed more responsibility for setting up each camp, and sometimes remarked on old, familiar landmarks as the wagon pierced into the heartland of the Crow people. She was going home. She would soon be talking in her native tongue to her relatives and friends. She had been one of the Kicked-in-the-Bellies, and a member of the Otter Clan, and soon she would be among them. Her crinkled face was wreathed in joy.

She had endured on the Wind River Reservation happily enough as long as Skye was there, but she had failed since his death—until now. The joy exuding from her affected Dirk in an odd way, and he pressed the old dray to move along faster as they passed through the desert between the Beartooth and Pryor Mountains and rolled into the still-green foothills of Yellowstone country.

They reached the river and its multiple trails one chill afternoon, and paused only a moment. The new agency had been located at Rosebud Creek, off to the west, in some of the sweetest country the human eye could ever see, a land of foothill slopes, clear creeks, good bottoms perfect for crops, jack pine hillsides, and above, the bold blue Beartooth Mountains, already crowned with white. The original Crow Reserve had encompassed a vast homeland south of the Yellowstone River, but gold discoveries at its western perimeter had resulted in the loss of its westernmost reaches, and now the homeland embraced a tract that extended into the high plains as well as these majestic mountains and foothills. Shrinking reservations were already an old and irritating story to Dirk, but maybe the Crows, ancient allies of the white men, might fare better than some tribes. But even as he thought it, he sensed a rising cynicism. Who could say what the Crows would end up with?

Where the ragged two-rut road reached the Yellowstone, Victoria stepped to the earth, walked to the bank, ritually held her hands in the sweet waters, and then ritually cleansed herself, baptizing her hair and face and breast with the icy water. Something magical was refreshing them all. Even the old dray lifted its ugly head, let the breeze riffle its mane, and waited restlessly to start pulling the wagon west.

They traveled under gray bluffs dotted with cedar and pine, and encountered nothing but a few mule deer in the lush Yellowstone valley. On the north bank there were signs of settlement; but there on the south bank, in the Crow Reserve, the valley was as it always had been, and perhaps always would be.

When they reached the valley of the Stillwater River, old Victoria started humming, and as they ascended the valley, she began exclaiming at the occasional evidences of her people. Sometimes it was a cabin with a thin line of smoke rising from it; other times a lodge erected on a distant plateau. Once they saw a small herd of horses with saddle marks on them. Once they encountered a youth on a stubby pony, and Victoria chattered with the boy, in a tongue Dirk could barely grasp. But the smiles said more than the outpouring of strange words.

“He says the agency is a hard day's travel still, but we will find the people there, and everywhere,” she said. “He is Bull Tail, grandson of Walking Duck, whose kin I know well. Walking Duck is a clan brother of my friend Ice Walker. His father is a friend of Whistlers.”

Dirk was rapidly losing track of the relationships and generations, but Victoria was recording them all in some sort of ledger in her head.

As they progressed up the river toward the agency, they encountered more and more Crows, most of them snug in blankets or capotes against the numbing air. But it reached the point where they could hardly move a hundred yards before being hailed by various people, some of whom knew the old Crow wife of Mister Skye. They chattered, sometimes on horseback as Dirk steered the dray toward the distant adobe-and-log post. He knew some Crow, but this flood of words between his old Crow mother and this crowd came too fast, and he finally settled on keeping the dray moving to get out of the harsh cold of early December. There were patches of snow in tree shadow and gullies, and ice-sheeted puddles on the road.