Night Birds, The (13 page)

She helped Jakob get the bacon started, standing on a low stool, the heavy iron skillet popping with grease. This would be her job now with Kate gone. She would have to feed and clean for four boys and a man. None had marked the passage of her twelfth birthday in late March as their steamboat took them through Keokuk. She bit down on her lip, thinking what a petty concern this was when so much else was happening. While she forked over the bacon, Jakob ground beans in a mill and got the coffee started. When he looked at her his black eyes glittered under his heavy brows.
“Mein apfel,”
he said, his endearment for her. She loved to be spoken and sung to in the language of the Old Country. “We are a long ways from God’s country now,” he said.

What is hardest to believe is that for a short time they were happy. Without shingles to repair the roof, they ransacked the canvas from their Conestoga wagon and stretched it across. This kept out the snow, but at nights when the wind stirred and rustled the canvas it seemed their cabin was alive and adrift, rushing across the dark toward some unforeseen destination. They burrowed under their blankets and didn’t get up at night since they didn’t have chamber pots and none wanted to brave the icy trek to their tottering outhouse.

The cold relented and lamplit nights passed as Jakob read aloud to them from
The Book of Wonders
to remind them of home.
Always plant potatoes in the dark of the moon,
he’d read.
It’s safe to plant beans when you hear whippoorwills in the rushes. When planting peach trees, bury old boots near the roots.
Hazel ground buckwheat in the coffee mill while Jakob chanted his litany. It sounded pretty read aloud, even if it wasn’t true. What they heard in his voice was a spell to ward off ill-fortune. What they heard was a shared dream for a crop that would feed them through the next winter.

At night Hazel lay on the floor near her brothers with the cat, Freyja, nestled on her chest, purring like a small steam engine, a second heartbeat in time with her own. They listened, the cat and she, to the wolves down in the grove. The wolves didn’t sound so lonesome after a time.
I amm heerre
, the wolves sang.
I am alive and a part of these stars, this April moon, this land dreaming under the snow
. The girl watched moonlight streaming through the canvas and listened.
I am here now
, they bayed,
I won’t be forever, but tonight I am, under these April stars, in my warm fur coat and I am alive and glad of it. I am here, and this life is savage, and this life is good
. Once Hazel heard the joy in their singing she stopped thinking this was such a terrible place. She lay quietly with the fat tabby purring on her chest, warm in her burrow of blankets, and willed her thoughts to travel out to their voices resounding through the prairie darkness:
I am here, too. I don’t know why or for what reason, but I am alive and all is well.

She felt this even as she missed humid Missouri and thought about her stepmother Kate and wondered if the woman was lonesome for them. To her surprise she found that she missed her. There was too much work to be done and she was only a girl and not ready for it. She missed Kate bustling her into petticoats and bemoaning Hazel’s slumping posture and glum frowns. For all her weaknesses and nitpicking, Kate brought a sense of order with her.
If only she had loved my father more
, Hazel thought. But the woman had seen an opportunity for escape and taken it.

Each morning Hazel rose and pulled on her night-chilled garments from a box by the stove where the ashes of the night before were banked. She rose and pulled on the one dress she owned and walked down the path to milk their cow, her footsteps crossing over places where paws had trod the night before.

After a week in the unseasonable cold, the cow went dry. She bawled at Hazel while the girl tugged on her teats and ducked the lashing tail. The girl’s mittenless hands were freezing. She pressed her face against the warmth of the flank and listened for some clue to what was wrong. They brought the cow fresh grain, wrapped her in an old blanket, rubbing down the hide, but nothing worked. Jakob said the cow was homesick. He said it was a foolish and sentimental creature, but that it would get over it and not to worry.

The next morning the cow disappeared. They found the frayed rope in the barn and the splintered beams around the door as though she’d panicked in the night and smashed her way out. Flecks of blood speckled the beams of her stall. The wind had been up the night before and they hadn’t heard a single thing. It howled around them now, a springtime wind out of the south to quicken the pulse of sap in sleeping trees and soften the ground. The wind seethed, melting snow, erasing all tracks of what had happened the night before. In the grove, the wind pruned winter-killed branches from the trees. They heard limbs crashing down in intervals while they paced around the sod barn and tried to make sense of the animal’s disappearance.

It looked as though the milch cow had rolled across the damp ground, throwing up great drifts of snow and mud. Only one set of tracks led away from the barn and down toward the river.

“Do you think the wolves got to her?” Caleb asked.

Jakob shook his head. “I think she just run off. She’s been raising a ruckus to beat the band, crying like she wanted to be back home. She’ll be calving soon. Maybe there’s something wrong. Either way she’s acting crazy and I’m gonna have to track her. If I don’t find her, I’ll go to Fort Ridgely and file a report. They pay settlers out of the Indians’ annuity funds for things that get stolen. Depredations, they call it.”

“You ought to take me, Pa,” Caleb said. “I’m good at finding things.” It was true. Back in Missouri, if one of the milch cows wandered away, Caleb would find a daddy long legs and whisper a ditty:
Old Man Spider, so many eyes, tell us where milch cows hide.
He’d screw up his face tight as if listening for the spider’s response, but this was just to impress his younger brothers, especially white-haired Daniel. Really, Caleb just read the tracks on the ground and knew the cows would head for the mud wallows when the flies got mean. Still there was something instinctive in how he hunted and found the lost.

Jakob studied him for a moment, this boy who had already grown taller than him. A boy with his first wife’s gold-brown eyes and sharp features. “No, I’ll need you to stay here,” he said. “I’ll be leaving the rifle with you. I don’t want you to leave these premises, you understand? No matter how long it takes me, you are to stay here.”

LOST

J
AKOB WALKED ON
water to find their lost milch cow. How the cow was lost and how he came to find it might have become the stock of Senger family legend had things turned out differently. He walked on water because the river froze once more and allowed him to pass over it.

The first time Jakob encountered snowshoe prints beside the cow’s trail he thought of returning to his children. Snow dropped from trees in loud clumps and Jakob heard the subdued surge of the river as the ice plates crackled and separated along the shoreline. The milch cow had crossed and re-crossed the river three times, always coming back to these woods. At last she had barreled up out of them, through a grove of maples, and onto the wide, white prairie.

The sun came out and turned the landscape into a single translucent glare, a glittering terrain that looked like thousands of mirrors flickering in the light. A layer of sleet had come down in the night and further glazed the remaining snow. Wind had scraped the ground clean of snow in places; pockets of tall golden grass mixed with pockets of snow where Jakob sank to his waist. He had been walking for hours, he thought. It was more difficult to track her with the sun out. Green fires flared at the edge of his vision, and had he been raised out here like the Dakota, he would have known this was the first sign of impending snow blindness.

He was no tracker, but he knew he had to provide for his children. They needed this cow’s milk to survive. It was here on the prairies that he first saw the snowshoe prints, faint impressions in the melting snow that appeared here and there around the cow’s tracks as though someone were leading her on this crazed journey. He knelt and traced with his mittens the outline of the print, the lace of branches. He held his hand over his eyes and tried to peer into the distance, across the bleak sweep of snow. The cow was not going in the direction he’d expected. Jakob had assumed when he set out to find her that she was headed back for New Ulm, the home that she knew. He’d been sure this stubborn beast had been trying to get back to her old owner, but her trail circled back onto the prairie and there was the mystery of those strange prints beside her.

Ahead of him he could see a grove of cottonwoods lining a ridge, the limbs leafless and bare; surely the tree line marked the beginning of another river. Something fluttered within the trees, pale pink cloths the color of human skin. His throat was dry. He knelt and cupped some of the snow into his mouth and it chilled him straight down. The cloths beckoned him toward the woods like fingers. Everywhere the land was glazed and glaring with the sun’s reflection.

He moved toward the woods, discovering as he came closer that the land dipped here into an ice-choked bowl of water surrounded by cattails and marsh reeds. The wind caused powdery snow to glide in serpentine patterns across the frozen pond. Farther out, past the pond’s center, he saw the speckled hulk of the cow. Then he saw the wolves as they lurched to feed on the body, four or five skinny wolves with mottled fur and red snouts. Crows cawed from the edges of the marsh and flew in circles around the scene. His gut churned at the sight below. A fat wedge of blood trailed from the pond’s edge. The wolves had torn her open from her hind end and strewn her intestines in a long red line. There was blood in the snow and gleaming bits of hide and flesh. The cow lowed, a rumbling, forlorn moan. She was still alive.

The sight filled him with rage and before he knew what he was doing, he charged down the hill, bellowing, waving his arms, and he was among the wolves. He slipped once in the bloody snow and fought his way back to his feet, the briny, sweet smell of her blood and intestines clinging to his clothing. The wolves ran from him at first, a wild-eyed man hoarse with rage, and then circled back. The largest, a gray with shimmering fur and yellow eyes, trotted around Jakob in an easy circle, its black lips drawing back to expose long teeth.

Jakob charged them again and again they danced away. The gray snarled. Another began to growl as they reformed their circle. Jakob’s breath wheezed in his chest. All the fury that had carried him into this fight drained from his arms and chest. He could not fight off five wolves with his bare hands. In his mind’s eye he saw their circle tightening and tightening and him at the center. He shouted at them, called them
see-lenraubers
and other things in a language they had never heard, but still they came. And eventually, in panic, he charged once more to the other side of the pond and broke past them.

The wolves didn’t follow him. He watched all the while: watched them renew their attack on the fallen cow, tearing out more and more ropes of intestines and then the terrible sac of skin that held the calf, breaking it open like a yolk on the snow, and the wolves drenched and radiant with placental blood, snarling and fighting after devouring the fetus, and then returning to tear out more organs from the still living cow until she loosed one last strangled scream, a sound almost human to Jakob’s ears, one last wail before she lay her snout in the snow and ceased breathing.

The children
, he thought,
I must get back to them
.

The sense came over him of being watched. Beyond the red-slick snow there were crows and the sun, always glaring. It had been glaring all along, a fact that only now he discerned as his vision shrank. He turned away from the carnage and looked toward that rise dotted with cottonwoods where he had seen the pink ribbons of cloth beckoning. A man was there, the quick silhouette of him fading into the trees. The footprints. He remembered the snowshoe prints alongside the traipsing cow. He was sick with rage and helplessness, a red shroud in his brain. This must be the one who had led his cow out here to suffer and die. Jakob drew in a deep breath. Here was something he could fight. Not a spirit, not the relentless wolves, but flesh and blood. As he walked he plucked a sturdy limb from the melting snow and stalked after the figure he’d seen at the top of the hill. Why was his vision shrinking, a circle of darkness closing in on his eyes? Needles of searing pain spiked from his eyes and into his mind. Sight became agony. He slipped several times before he gained the snow-lit rise, felt the chill of his clothes wet against his legs and feet. One of the wolves in the valley below had begun to howl, an echoing celebration.

Jakob stood in the circle of barren cottonwoods. He was alone. He saw that the pink ribbons flew from scaffolds and that nearly all the color had bled out of the cloth. His breath came and went in white clouds before him. In the trees there were scaffolds and in the scaffolds there were bodies. On the other side of the ridge the hill dropped down toward a river where he saw the remains of a village, four teepees. The only things stirring were his breath and the wind among the fluttering cloths. Then, like a shadow, he saw the form of the man moving away from him, running easily back across the snow in the direction in which Jakob guessed his own cabin and children lay. The shadow-form moved fluidly in the glare of snowmelt. The tunnel of Jakob’s vision shrank further.
I have been led here on purpose
, he thought.
My God
. All was radiant and glaring and then the tunnel of his vision closed and Jakob knelt, blinded, surrounded by the remains of a dead village.

The prairie night was immense and silent. The children huddled within their cabin and Caleb read to them from Pa’s book to keep their minds off his absence. “He’ll be back before dawn,” he promised.

“How do you know?” Asa said. “How do you know he isn’t gone forever, like my mother?” Daniel sobbed himself to sleep. Caleb drew Asa aside and voiced a threat only Asa heard. The youngest, Matthew, climbed beneath Hazel’s blanket, his body icy to the touch.

That night, the girl dreamed of her father. In the dream Jakob walked through a field of bones. They were all around him, along the roadsides, in a yard where a woman hoed her garden—skulls and bones gleaming among the tomato vines. Her pa’s head hung low as he stepped carefully to avoid treading on the dead. The skeletons were stripped of clothing and here or there a leather strap wound around an arm where someone had tried to staunch a gushing artery. He passed a skull with a stick clenched in its teeth, the jawbones sealed around the wood in a tight rictus of pain. Jakob was dressed in blue and carried a rifle mounted with a bayonet.

In the distance, lightning fissured in a blue-black sky.
Turn back, turn back
, she called to him in the dream. He was walking to a place at the edge of the world. The trees around him had been shredded into splinters and stumps by some earth-rending explosion. Fenceposts jutted from the road like javelins. He was alone in the dream.

Come back
, she called to him, but the wind swallowed up her voice. He marched on.

Across the river from the children, the medicine man Hanyokeyah stayed late in the boy’s teepee and fed slivers of cedar to the fire, smoke to guard against evil. “You are sure?” the old man said to Wanikiya. “You are sure he is back?” Wanikiya could only nod. The burrowing owl he kept for a pet flitted from his shoulder and circled about the room as if conscious of his owner’s distress, his own thoughts in flight.

He had seen his brother when he went down to the river to bathe. Even after all these years, water terrified him and this morning ritual— breaking the ice, scattering droplets on his skin while he prayed to the Great Mystery as the old man had taught him—was fraught with devotion mixed with fear. He broke through the ice with his tomahawk and then dipped his fingers in the frigid water rushing beneath. He made the sign of the four directions and had just begun the old man’s prayer when he heard the soft tread of moccasins in the snow. His own breath was a ghost; the sound of the water eating away the ice loud in his ears. Who was watching him?

He turned and there, after all these winters, was Tatanyandowan wrapped in a buffalo blanket with the hair turned out. He looked lean and healthy, his leggings and moccasins beaded and glistening. Wanikiya glanced down at his own clothes, the tattered wool pants favored by the
wasicun
, his soiled white shirt. No, there was something different about Tatanyandowan, beyond what had happened that day he’d returned to camp drenched in blood. Now he wore three eagle feathers in his headdress, each painted with a red dot to symbolize that the kill had belonged to him.

He told Hanyokeyah about the morning encounter while sweet burning cedar filled the teepee. His face shrouded by smoke, the old man asked Wanikiya, “Do you remember the story of Eya the Devourer?”

“Of course, the lost child of the woods. The one some say comes among the people like a sickness.” Wanikiya kept quiet, waiting for Hanyokeyah to take up the tale. Though terrible, it had always been a story he liked.

Hanyokeyah began in the traditional way. “This happened when the people lived close to the big waters. One day a girl hunting berries heard a baby’s cries echoing through the woodlands. Birds took wing. Squirrels and rabbits skittered past her as though fleeing a fire. Even a big shaggy bear crashed through brush and bramble until she was alone with the sound.

“The child’s cries pierced the girl where she stood. It awoke something motherly within her and she went toward the sound. She found the baby lying naked beneath a cottonwood tree. Its skin looked touched with moonlight. Its eyes were as empty as the snow. So cold and helpless was this squalling baby that she took it in her arms and carried it back to camp.

“Inside her teepee, she studied the baby more closely. It did not look like any baby she had ever seen. Its belly was grotesque and swollen and it had long yellow fingernails like an owl. She fed it strips of pemmican, softening the meat in her own mouth first. She fed and fed the baby and still it hungered. Each the time its mouth opened wide she saw it had fully developed teeth, and once, looking deep down into the mouth, down into the baby’s very stomach, she thought she saw human beings trapped there. She drew her hand back in fear. Still ravenous, the baby opened its mouth again and began to cry, ‘Hoo, hoo, hoo.’ The cries made the girl’s skin crawl. It was not a baby she was hearing but the screams of those down in the stomach.

“She fled the sound and ran for her father. When she told him, he understood immediately. ‘This is Eya the Devourer come to us in a new shape,’ her father explained to her. ‘And now you have taken it into our home and Eya will not be satisfied until it devours us all.’ So saying he took his daughter’s hand and gathered as many from the village as possible and they fled deep into the woods. And Eya came after them, lurching along with surprising quickness on its strange stumpy legs. There were elderly and small children with the people who were slow to escape. ‘Hoo, hoo, hoo,’ Eya cried as he came for them. When they could run no more, they hid themselves in the trees, shuddering as Eya approached.”

Hanyokeyah paused and stared into the fire. He used a stick to prod at the embers and after a long moment of silence, Wanikiya urged him on. “Iktomi,” he reminded the old man. “Iktomi, the spider, finds the people hiding and asks why they are afraid.”

“Yes,” the old man said. “That is how the story goes.” He yawned. “I am tired tonight. You finish.”