Powder River (3 page)

 

Dixon eventually engaged Mrs. MacGill, the Scottish widow woman who delivered Harry, to help with his three children, but the twins were coming up wild and everyone said so. Lorna and Caleb were difficult to manage and truly happy only when Billy Sun took them for visits to the Mountain Crow village, which he often did so their father could have some peace. They were more comfortable on the back of an Indian pony than on foot, and sometimes, mostly to annoy their older brother and Mrs. MacGill, spoke a patois of English, Mountain Crow, and wholly invented words, a language they called Bird Talk, intelligible only to them. They grew sturdy and brown as nuts, though they would never be mistaken for natural children of the Mountain Crows, for the Dixon twins had eyes that were pale blue in color and hair white as the flowers of the wild clematis that grew along the river.

The doctor was devoted to his work and often called away, especially after Fort McKinney was established to the south, in Powder River country, on the fertile benchlands of Wyoming Territory. The post was named in honor of young Lieutenant John A. McKinney, killed by the Cheyenne warriors of chief Dull Knife in the winter following the Custer fight. McKinney gained a sad kind of posthumous fame as one of the last bluecoat soldiers to give his life in the U.S. Army's campaign to eradicate the Indians from the northern plains. Dixon was frequently summoned to the post as soldiers billeted there were forever ill or injured and needing medical attention beyond what the regimental surgeon could provide.

Because of this, Dixon decided to pull up stakes and move his family south to Wyoming Territory, to the new town of Buffalo, on the Clear Fork of Powder River, some six miles downstream from the military reservation. His children did not welcome their father's decision. Fourteen-year-old Harry had grown up in Nelson Story's Bozeman home and loved his three sons (Ellen's much-loved and long-awaited babies) like brothers. All four boys wept like girls when it came time to say good-bye.

The day before they were to leave, Cal and Lorna mounted double on their pinto pony and rode away to join Biwi and Billy Sun in the mountains. The Indian woman embraced the twins warmly, for she loved them and had no child of her own, but she told Billy Sun he must take them back at once.

“Curtain Boy and Spring Girl, your place is with your father,” she said, speaking in the Crow language. “He is not a warm man, but maybe he will change. His heart is cold because he is sad. He is not happy with himself. Be good to him and to your brother and to each other. Keep your heart open to the world around you and be kind. Above all, be kind.” Here, she took each child by the hand and lowered her head so her face was just inches from theirs. “When the other voice speaks to you—the one we've talked about—do not listen. That one will bring the wolf to your door.”

Billy followed their pony back to the valley where Dr. Dixon was preparing to come after them. When he woke to find them absent, he knew at once where they had gone.

“Thank you,” Dixon said, offering Billy his hand. Behind him workers for a German-owned freighting company were loading the family's furnishings, including Rose's stove, into heavy wagons. “Thank you for all you've done, for me and my family. The children will miss you.”

“I'll miss them, too,” Billy said as they shook hands. The two were not close, though they had developed a respect for one another. Dixon was a skillful physician, one area settlers traveled long distances to see when a loved one was afflicted. Billy Sun recognized that, but at the same time he could not forget the disgust on Dixon's face the night he saw Biwi with his children the first time. For his part, Billy had built a reputation as one of the region's best horsemen. Ranchers sought him out when they had a green animal no one could ride. Within a day, Billy could turn one thousand pounds of angry bone and iron muscle into a docile palfrey, suitable for even the most delicate of lady riders. There was no mustang Billy Sun could not gentle, and he never had to stoop to cruelty to do it.

An awkward silence followed the handshake. Billy sensed Dixon had something to say.

“I want to thank you for everything you did for Rose that day.” Dixon's voice went thick with feeling, but he did not look away from Billy's green eyes. “I haven't said this to you before, Billy, and I should have. No one could have done more for her—I could not have done more. I was angry when she died, but not with you. If I've ever been unkind to you, or a member of your family, please accept my apology.”

Billy nodded. Like Dixon, he chose not to look back on that bloody day. For the rest of his life, he would regret he had been there, not because of the pain it caused him, but because he wanted to keep Rose in his heart as she had been. Billy wanted to remember her healthy and full of life, with freckles across the bridge of her nose and a right ear that stuck out just a bit, sometimes peeking out through the veil of her auburn hair. Their last hours together had robbed him of that memory.

“Thank you, Doctor,” he said. “This is good to hear.”

“Best of luck to you, Billy. I hope our paths cross again.”

* * *

Late that evening, when Billy returned to the village, he found Biwi in her lodge, sitting alone at her fire. He asked what she had meant when she warned the twins about “the other voice,” the one that brings the wolf.

She shook her head, her eyes on the glowing embers. “The child understands,” she said.

Dixon was happy to be returning to the green-skinned hills of Wyoming's Powder River country. His heart grew lighter with each passing mile, lighter than it had for years, and he felt an almost-forgotten sense of anticipation. This was true, even though his time at Fort Phil Kearny had been difficult. Besieged by Sioux and Cheyenne warriors led by Red Cloud and Crazy Horse, Dixon and Rose, along with others of Colonel Henry Carrington's 18th U.S. Infantry, had endured long months of bitter cold, hunger, and fear. The night of December 21, 1866, brought horror that would never leave him. The sights, sounds, and smells of Massacre Ridge—where Captain William Judd Fetterman and all of the eighty men who rode with him were slaughtered—had burrowed deep in Dixon's brain and would haunt his dreams forever. Fetterman's story was a tale of hubris, like George Armstrong Custer's ten years later, but now those heady times were gone. Fort Phil Kearny itself was reduced to a charred ruin, abandoned by the army and burned to the ground by the Indians. The departing soldiers saw the smoke as they marched away. Red Cloud and his warriors had won a great victory, though their time in the sun would be short. The Sioux leader and his ferocious fighting men were confined to reservations and no longer posed a threat to anyone.

The Dixons' journey to Buffalo would take them close by the site of the abandoned fort. Daniel had often thought of someday taking his children there, telling them of the adventure and hardship he and their mother had endured together, but he would not stop now. The sadness of walking those grounds again, standing in the very places where he and Rose had stood together, was still too great.

He hoped his children would come to share his passion for Wyoming's Powder River country. Dixon had loved it from the moment he first saw its rolling green hills, clear sparkling streams, and lush valleys where the blue meadow grass grew tall enough to brush the belly of a man's horse. The land filled him with a sense of hope. Perhaps in this lovely country he would come to know and love his younger ones as he loved Harry.

“What will Buffalo be like, Pa?” Harry said.

“It's a new town,” Dixon said, “just getting started, but it's growing fast. Already there are two dry goods stores, a bank, a hotel, a dentist, and a school you children will attend. It's about time. We'll stay in the hotel until our house is finished.”

Cal and Lorna, sitting in the rear of the wagon with Mrs. MacGill, looked at each other when their father said the word “school.” “He can't make us,” Cal said in Bird Talk.

Dixon turned his head toward the twins with a frown. “What did I say to you two about talking that gibberish? There'll be no more of that, you hear?”

“Yes, Pa,” they said in unison. Lorna reached out and took her brother's hand.

They rode on in silence, the only sound the clop-clop of the horses' hooves on the rocky road. Late in the afternoon they made camp along a wooded creek. Harry unharnessed the horses, rubbed them down with empty feed sacks, and fed them nosebags of grain while Dixon pitched two tents, one for him and Harry and another for Mrs. MacGill and the twins. The Scotswoman and her charges had no trouble finding dry wood, and soon a good fire was blazing.

“It's been a while since I slept out under the stars,” she said as she peeled potatoes. “Not since me and my old man, Keddy, first come out here all them years ago. Eighteen and sixty-three, it was and, aye, things was diff'rent then. My hair was black as midnight when me and him set out and white as you see it now by the time we put in at Alder Gulch. It was those nights sleeping rough and fearin' the Indians and the wolves what did it.” She rose and walked to the fire where she dumped the potatoes into a pot that already held salted meat, chopped onions, and carrots. Their meal would also include fried eggs and powder biscuits, now baking in a Dutch oven, with strawberry jam.

“Indians ain't nothing to fear, Auntie,” Cal said. “Who would be afraid of Biwi or Billy Sun?”

Mrs. MacGill stirred the stew with a long wooden spoon. “Mebbe they ain't so fearsome now, but they was plenty diff'rent back then, I can tell you that. Jerusalem!” She batted at an ember that leaped from the fire and ate a hole in her apron. “And I'm not sure you can ever completely trust them. The Injuns, they remind me of the Selkie folk from back home, from the Orkney Isles. You think you know 'em, but you don't. To think different is to get your heart broke.”

“Selkie folk?” Lorna said.

“I'll tell you and your brother about the Selkie after dinner, but only if you promise to be good and don't do nothin' to set off the doctor.”

The twins were good as their word, and the meal passed without discord, with plenty of stew and biscuits for everyone. After, Dixon smoked his pipe as Mrs. MacGill and the twins cleaned the pots and dishes in a wash pan of hot soapy water and toweled them dry. The snapping logs turned from black to gray and the evening sky purpled as a chill wind blew down from the mountains.

Finally the work was done, and Lorna and Cal wrapped themselves in warm blankets, ready for the widow's story. Her yarns were almost as good as Biwi's.

Mrs. MacGill plumped her pillow and lowered the lamplight so they could barely make out her white hair and dark, shining eyes. “So,” she said, “there once was a young man, a hunter of seals, who lived alone on the tiny island of Suleskerry. He was a proud young man, bonnie and strong, and he made good”—“guid” as she pronounced it—“money as well. There was no shortage of lassies on the mainland who had an eye out for him, but he would have none of 'em.

“‘What's wrong wi' ye then?' a friend asked of him, and the proud young man said he simply had no use for females.

“‘Wimmen was put on earth to try us men,' he said. ‘Adam was an owld fool, who would be living in Paradise still today if he haddna been led astray by Eve.'

“Well, time went by and one day the Suleskerry seal hunter was workin' on the beach when he spied a group of bonnie young people sunning themselves on a rock by the sea, and they was nekkid as the day they was born.”

“Naked?” Lorna said, her eyes widening. “Out in the wide open?”

“Aye,” the widow said. “As the day they was born. One was a lovely woman with hair yellow as gold, kinda like yours, my loves, and skin white as the finest Italian marble with nary a bump nor blemish on it. Well, the proud young man had never seen a vision like that before, and he was smitten. He started toward her, but the folk saw him comin' and grabbed up the sealskins that was lyin' beside them on the rock and dove into the sea. But the lovely woman's skin had fallen to the beach and the seal hunter got to it first. She fell to her knees, sobbin' most pitiful she was, and begged him to return it. ‘Please, please, kind sir,' she said, ‘I kinna live with my folk withoot it.' The man looked out to sea and saw a pack of selkie—seals is what you English call 'em—bobbing in the water, watchin' with sad, mournful eyes.”

“The young people turned into seals when they put their skins back on?” Cal said.

“Aye, and the beautiful maiden wanted to be with 'em but couldna without her skin, which the hunter wouldna surrender. Instead, he made her go back to his hut with him and be his wife. She had no choice, for he hid the skin from her and she couldna find it, no matter how she tried.

“They lived together for many years, and the seal-maiden bore the hunter four bairns, three lads and one lassie. They were a bonnie family, but there was a stone in the seal-maiden's heart. She pretended to be happy, but niver did she stop searchin' for her skin. One day, the lassie asked her, ‘Mam, watcha lookin' fur?' and the seal-maiden said, ‘Oh, peedie, I'm lookin' for a pretty skin to make you slippers wit.' The girl said she had seen her father take a very pretty skin from the rafters in the barn.

“Well, that was all the seal-maiden needed. She ran to the barn, found the skin, and fled to the sea where she slipped it on and dove into the waves, aswimmin' out to her seal-man husband who had been waitin' for her all these years. The proud man and his children never saw her again, though for the rest of his long life the Suleskerry seal hunter walked along the beach, asearchin'. He died a sad and broken owld man.”

Her story was met with shocked silence. Lorna spoke first. “But what about her children? Didn't she love them?”

“Aye, she loved them well enough, but she loved her seal-folk more.”

“She was a bad woman,” Cal said flatly.

“No,” Mrs. MacGill said, shaking her head. “The Selkie maiden was not bad, she was just bein' true to her natural self. That's the way the world is. No matter how much you love a person, ye canna change him or her, no matter how you try. Sometimes you have to say your good-byes and move on, no matter how it pains ye. Otherwise, you'll end up like the Suleskerry seal hunter, walkin' alone up and down that beach for the rest of his days.”

She expected more questions but none came. Soon she heard rhythmic breathing and thought the children were asleep. She was drifting into sleep herself when Lorna's voice startled her.

“You told that story because of Billy Sun,” she said. “You think me and him will never be together because of the difference in our ages and because he's Indian, but you're wrong. I love him and I am going to marry him someday. Just you wait and see.”

“Has Billy ever given you cause to think this, child?” Mrs. MacGill said.

“No, he doesn't know yet. I know things other people don't. You'll see.”