The Owl Hunt (11 page)

The major smiled. “This is my party. I'm running this little powwow. If Washakie calls them in, it's his show.”

“It would be a courtesy to include him.”

“Schoolteacher, are you lecturing me?”

“Yes, sir.”

Van Horne pulled a cigar from the humidor and scratched a lucifer and puffed until the tobacco glowed. “He's sulking in his house. That's where I want him. I'm bypassing him. We're going to have us a meeting with all the headmen, and he's not invited.”

“When?”

Van Horne sucked hard, expelled a cloud of blue smoke, wheezed, and smiled. “Fort Laramie's sending two companies. We can expect them in a week. You tell all those headmen to show up in a week. We're going to have us a conference, you translating, with all the Shoshone subchiefs, and two hundred blue-bloused United States Mounted Infantry and Cavalry making a nice little circle.”

“I will tell them what to expect.”

“No, my boy, you'll just tell them that their kind father, Indian Agent Van Horne, requires them to show up on the seventh sun. They've got fingers; they can count to ten.” He paused. “Sergeant Muggins, he's the army's interpreter, and he'll stick to you like glue.”

“And what will you tell them, Major?”

“Bring in the Dreamers before anyone gets hurt. Bring in the Dreamers, the whole lot, and we'll reward them.”

“Reward them?”

“We won't cut their rations.” He pulled a turnip watch from its nest and studied it. “Muggins will be here in an hour. You'll be ready then. You'll have army mounts.”

“I would suggest, Major, that you invite them yourself. I'll go along as interpreter.”

“Sonny boy, I've more important things to do.”

The agent knocked some gray ash to the floor.

“What will you do with the Dreamers, sir?”

“That depends entirely on the Dreamers, Skye. But they can save their asses by taking a loyalty pledge and surrendering their arms.”

“And if they won't?”

“The government has its ways, my young friend. Say, Skye, you do know who the headmen are, don't you?”

“Most of them.”

“I want all of them. I'll give you a list. You bring every last one of them in.”

“If I can find them, Major.”

“You'll find them, my boy. That's what schoolteachers are for.”

“I'm a teacher. I'm not paid to run your errands. I'm supposed to open the schoolhouse every day and teach. That's my job, sir.”

“You'll go because I'm telling you to go, and if you don't go, you won't end up teaching. You're becoming a problem. You have no students. What would the bureau think of that?”

The autocrat behind the desk was making himself very clear.

Dirk left the agent's office lost in melancholy. Everything was wrong. And he was to be the errand boy. His mother's people were friends, not hostiles. If there was trouble now, it was largely because the government had reneged on most everything it promised. And he was being stuck with the job of bringing the headmen into the agency. He thought wildly about quitting on the spot. He was being used. He wasn't teaching, and he was being paid to teach, not to be the emissary of the Viceroy Van Horne. Or the jailer for Prison Warden Van Horne. The command he would deliver to the headmen would insult them. The presence of two hundred soldiers surrounding the meeting would insult them all the more. Which was what the agent intended.

The veneer was wearing thin. The Wind River Reservation was papered over with a lie—that the Shoshones were a sovereign tribe, in permanent friendship with the Yanks, and that the tribe could live its own way on land guaranteed them by treaty. And not be punished by cutting rations. It all was official malarkey.

Dourly, Dirk repaired to the teacherage, told Victoria he'd be gone a few days, put a kit together, and waited for Sergeant Muggins.

Victoria hobbled up to him. “Make it work for the good of the People,” she said. “It is a chance for them to come in and tell the Indian agent a few things. He has eyes and ears but doesn't see or hear.”

He wondered about that. Van Horne seemed to know everything as fast as it happened, and it was rumored that he had a small army of paid snitches reporting everything, all for an extra pound of flour or an occasional sack of beans.

“A column is coming over from Fort Laramie,” he said. “They'll be here just in time for this little powwow.”

Victoria laughed malevolently.

Sergeant Muggins showed up with two saddle mounts and a loaded pack mule, and Dirk added his gear to the mule pack and climbed aboard.

“You steer me,” Muggins said. “You know where all them outlaws is hid.”

“No, Sergeant, I don't. They're scattered across a hundred fifty miles, and probably won't be in sight when we ride in.”

The sergeant was in uniform, with a nonmilitary lever-action repeating rifle in his saddle scabbard. He could spray a lot of bullets fast with that. He rode side by side with Dirk, tugging his pack mule behind.

“You know where them headmen are?” the sergeant asked.

“No, and at best we'll find four or five. Right now, the Shoshones are scattered in small camps from the west end eastward to the Arapaho settlements. I've met most of the headmen, but there's a dozen I don't know and wouldn't recognize.”

“Why'd he send you, then?”

“I'm half Shoshone. My father was an Englishman.”

“You favor one side over the other?”

“Well, Sergeant, whose side are you on?”

The sergeant laughed. “Funny thing is, I'm favoring the Shoshones. They've been licking spit around here.”

“You're a speaker?”

“Comanche, boy. I was stationed in Texas. I know Comanche real good, so I can understand some Shoshone if I try some. It ain't that different.”

“They're sending you along to check up on me.”

“That's what they're up to, my boy.”

“I'm a two-blood, so I'm not trusted?”

“You got her.”

“And you're telling me this?”

“Know somethin', Skye? I got me three stripes because I make sure everyone I'm with knows I'm on the level. I ain't keeping no secrets from you. You know what? I stay square, and that's saved my life a few times.”

“They think I'd betray them?”

“Who knows, buddy boy? But I don't think so. They just think you ain't predictable. Like not going to shelter at the fort. It says to them, it says, maybe this Dirk Skye, he's plugged in with them Dreamers.”

“I'm not, but I think the People have some grievances. And I know something of their thinking. They're waiting for their spirit helper, the Owl, to steer them, and when they have a vision, it'll be shared with everyone. It'll be the most public news on the reservation.”

“Hoodoo,” Muggins said.

There was no arguing with the sergeant. Dirk thought of all the ways his people had interacted with their spirit guides. Even his father, Barnaby Skye, had bear medicine and a sort of bear knowing, and that had steered him out of danger, or helped him in times of need. And his old Crow mother Victoria always drew some mysterious wisdom from the magpie. It wasn't just the magpie in sight throughout the countryside, but Magpie, the spirit of all the magpies. He remembered that the Jesuits in St. Louis had tried hard to dismiss such things as superstition, but it wasn't. It was another way of knowing. Let the whites dismiss it as hoodoo. Maybe it was good that they were so blind.

“Glad you think so,” Dirk said.

Muggins was watching him intently. The sergeant's stare was almost a physical force.

They rode through a day that was quiet in the valley and stormy in the mountains, mostly quietly but not without a certain silent camaraderie between them.

“Them Snakes sure are scarce,” the sergeant said.

“This time of year they'll be as high as they can get,” Dirk said.

They rode past garden patches, mostly abandoned or seriously lacking attention. There wasn't anyone in sight.

“Looks to me like the whole tribe jumped the reservation.”

The brown grasses of midsummer stretched silently toward the river bottoms, where a green bottomland stretched endlessly east and west.

“How often do they come in for their allotment?”

“Their flour and beans? Once a month.”

“They gotta come a long way.”

“It's a long way to flour and beans, and a long way to whatever game they can find in the foothills and slopes. So they move two hundred miles a month, or more, to stay fed.”

They rounded a shoulder of land, and beheld a green valley, and a dozen lodges drawn into a semicircle there. It would have a headman, maybe several.

thirteen

The runner clambered the last steep grade to the hanging valley, and headed for the nest. Owl knew what he would say; Owl knew all things. Owl had received another runner, Weeping Woman, at dawn. Now Father Sun had climbed over the lip of the ridges illumining the valley where the Dreamers gathered.

Owl rose to meet the runner. With each passing night, Owl looked more and more like the spirit bird who had entered into his heart and now transformed him. Above all, Owl didn't walk anymore; he glided over the land so softly no creature heard the flap of wings until too late. And now he had owl eyes. Every Shoshone knew it. Owl's eyes were huge and unblinking and could see through everything to the innermost spirit. That was because the Owl had entered the youth, Waiting Wolf, and occupied his human body.

But Owl also wore an owl cape, fashioned by his sister, who had stitched the soft owl feathers into wings falling away from his elk-leather sleeves. This was a good cape, which blessed him with his owl nature, and identified him as the keeper of the Owl secrets. When any Dreamer approached, Owl stood very still, never even a facial muscle twitching, a ghost of a birdman, awaiting the moment of triumph. For Owl, there was no present; only the future, when his spirit bird inside of him would peck at his heart and a long night would begin.

Thus did Owl wait immobile while the runner, panting slightly, trotted across the mounting slopes. Owl knew this runner, too, a brother of Ah-Chee, who worked as a woodcutter for the agency. Owl knew the things that happened at the agency almost before other white men in the white men's camp knew of them.

At last the runner, a certain boy, stood panting before him.

“You have come to tell Owl that the teacher and a soldier are even now seeking our elders and headmen,” he said.

The youth stood, amazed.

“Owl knows what there is to know,” Owl said.

“Owl, Grandfather, you have spoken truth. The teacher will tell the headmen they must attend a meeting at the agency after seven suns.”

“There will be many soldiers at the meeting,” Owl said. “They will be there to show the muscle of the white men.”

“Truly, Grandfather, you have spoken what I came to tell you. Your eyes are large and see all things.”

Owl was scarcely older than this runner, but he enjoyed being addressed as Grandfather, the term of greatest respect.

“Is there anything else, boy?”

“The headmen seek your wisdom, Grandfather.”

“Tell them to go to the white men's meeting, as requested. I see outrage. I see insult. This must pass before Owl begins the new world, when the People can go where they will, and the buffalo are thick on the prairies.”

“Truly you have spoken, Grandfather. I will tell those who sent me of your wisdom. That they must attend the meeting at the agency, and be prepared for insult. Have I your message well remembered?”

“You have it. Rest and eat, and then go.”

The youth backed away, for it was not good to turn one's back on Owl, and soon settled at a campfire where some Dreamers had a pot of elk stew bubbling.

“You have great eyes, Grandfather,” said one of the Dreamer subchiefs, Walks at Night.

“It is the Owl who has taken hold of Waiting Wolf. It is Owl residing in me, my friend. I am only a clay bowl holding what is sacred.”

Owl glided through the camps of the Dreamers, a hush surrounding him wherever he went. The Dreamers knew Owl to be surrounded by silence, and some said that even the wind stopped whispering where Owl walked. That is what made the People so respectful. Owl brought with him a world of stillness which wrought fear and obedience in all who approached him. What was greater than the power to quiet the wind?

This hanging valley was a good place. It was guarded by vaulting slopes on three sides, leading upward to perpetual snow. And it could be approached only by a steep and treacherous path from forested slopes below. A rill offered snowmelt, and game was still available to the patient hunter. Most of the People knew exactly where the Dreamers had gathered, but none would tell the agent or the teacher or the missionaries or the soldiers. Not if one expected to live.

He approached one knot of Dreamers and won their instant attention. “The agent is requiring the presence of the elders and headmen. This is not Chief Washakie's doing. The headmen will discover more soldiers than they have ever seen before. The agent Van Horne will tell the headmen to bring the Dreamers to the agency, and there bad things will happen to the Dreamers. Owl has seen these things, and they must come to pass before the Time of Change we have dreamed will begin. Let it happen, for it is all a part of Owl's design.”

“The headmen will betray us, Grandfather?”

“No, the white men will betray the headmen. These friends of the People have put us in a prison. Now they want to talk. But they don't want to listen. They want to threaten.”

“Truly, Owl has peered into the thing that will come.”

Owl nodded, and glided to other knots of Dreamers, who had organized themselves into a war camp, making lances and arrows because they had so few firearms. Owl didn't encourage that; he knew that when the moment came, the white men would flee this land in terror, their hearts frozen by fear. Then the People would possess all that had been given them from the time of the grandfathers long ago.