The Owl Hunt (15 page)

That done, she examined herself in the looking glass, and discovered a flush of color on her cheeks, and eyes that seemed to open on a secret world inside of herself. She didn't know whether Dirk Skye would think much of her company, because she was always on the edge of getting into trouble, but she thought he might. He was never far from trouble himself, so maybe they could make some trouble together.

She discovered that her mother was lying down in her room with a sick headache; that was nothing new. Her mother had a sick headache before almost every dinner party, perhaps because Captain Cinnabar sprang those parties on her, announcing only hours beforehand that he would be entertaining Lieutenants Smith and Jones, Captains Murphy and Peterson, or Lieutenant Colonel Digby and his second wife, Lettie. So her mother did what army officers' wives do, and prepared a dinner, and if the company was all male, she would retreat to the kitchen while the gentlemen ate and enjoyed brandy and good Havanas.

Aphrodite knew that was the life she could expect; indeed, her father was steadily introducing her to young gentlemen under arms, all suitable of course. But it wasn't a life she planned for herself if she could help it. She had an eye for someone else.

seventeen

Dirk discovered Aphrodite on the veranda, a wicker basket in hand, awaiting him. She hastened down the steps, smiling, and steered him away from the commander's residence. It seemed almost as if she wished to escape something, or wished not to introduce Dirk to anyone there.

He knew all about that. A man with Indian blood in him dealt with that most every day. But that didn't make it easier.

“I'll take that basket, Aphrodite,” he said.

He collected it even as she smiled. “I need to get away from the post,” she said. “And you're my rescuer.”

He hadn't thought of himself as a rescuer. He steered her along a grassy grade and up the flank of the foothill that stretched past the post. Fort Washakie was quiet now in the late afternoon.

Unlike the agency, a deep serenity pervaded the grassy slope. Breezes toyed with the tan grass. The white agency buildings grew smaller, and so did the tensions and alarms radiating from them. The sky was cloudless and anonymous.

Ahead of them loomed the shattered jack pine, which sagged like a broken crucifix, its limbs jagged against a blue heaven.

Something about the broken tree seemed sinister. Its green boughs flailed out from the shattered trunk. Dirk and Aphrodite approached warily, not knowing why. It was nothing but a shattered tree. The trunk had splintered perhaps four feet up, the yellow wood reduced to toothpick shards. Apparently three shells, grouped close, had severed the trunk. A breeze or maybe just deadweight had toppled the top, scattering green and brown needles. None of the shells were buried in wood; all had passed through, and some disturbed earth upslope hinted at where the Gatling shells had buried themselves.

“I guess it's not a place for a picnic,” Dirk said.

She eyed him somberly. “We shouldn't have come here.”

“I was curious. I wanted to see why an innocent jack pine died this morning.”

“I don't like this place.”

“Bad medicine. That's what my mother's people would say. But there's no meaning in it. There's nothing here but some shattered wood and a dead tree. It may not even be dead. The roots may throw up new shoots.”

“I agree with the Shoshones,” she said. “There's something awful about this.”

He disagreed. Some shells had shattered a tree. That was all. But he chose not to talk about it. “There's some trees up a little, over there. We can picnic and look down on Fort Washakie.”

She nodded and plucked up her gray skirt. They would have to traverse some deadfall to get to the glade upslope. He started ahead, and then held back, wanting her ahead of him. He simply wanted to watch her walk; wanted to absorb her. She proceeded eagerly toward the grove of aspen. She held her skirts in both hands and lifted them slightly to walk over deadfall, and the sight of her filled him with an odd yearning.

“I think Captain Cinnabar was happy that the Gatling felled the tree,” she said.

“Do you prefer to call him captain?”

“No, he's usually Father. But this was a captain event. A military event. Shells demolish trees and people.”

“And maybe whole ways of life.”

“Yes, if a tree can be shot to death, so can everything someone believes in. So can every habit or custom, too.”

They plunged into a golden-green glade, with sunlight filtering through bright leaves, and patches of blue sprinkled with lime leaves. There were windows behind them, affording a view of the peaceful post and agency, slumbering in the sunlight.

Owl was waiting for them there. They hadn't even seen him sitting on an old bare log until they closed upon him, though he had sat quietly as they approached.

Dirk was astonished. The youth wore only a breechclout and moccasins, and if he possessed a weapon it was not visible.

“Oh!” Aphrodite said, and shifted closer to Dirk.

Owl gazed solemnly at them. “There, you see? The fast gun didn't kill me.”

“It wasn't aimed at you, Owl,” Dirk said.

“I was at the pine tree.”

“You were? No one knew that.”

“No one sees Owl until it is too late.”

They stared uneasily at each other.

“You have brought a lunch,” Owl said. “Eat.”

“We will share it,” Aphrodite said. “I brought enough.”

“You are the captain's daughter.”

Dirk said, “This is Aphrodite Olive Cinnabar. She prefers to be called Olive. And Olive, this is Owl, who was one of my better students at the schoolhouse.”

“Call me Aphrodite,” she said.

“The Greek goddess,” Owl said. “Even a Snake knows it.”

She busied herself spreading a tablecloth and setting out cheese, a knife, and some bread. Owl watched, faintly amused at her malaise.

Dirk sawed off some cheese and handed it to Owl, who lifted it high, in the four directions, before nodding.

“Owl follows what the fathers taught us all.”

Oddly, no one spoke. The cheese was too sharp for Dirk's taste, but the others seated on that tablecloth seemed to enjoy it.

“They are hunting for you,” Dirk said, after a while.

“Ah! I am hunting for them!”

“That's what they all believe, and why they would like to catch you and put you in their prison.”

“Owl glides through the night. Will you tell them I watched their entire parade?”

“Do you want me to?”

“Yes. It will madden them.”

“Why are you here, Mr. Owl?” Aphrodite asked.

“You are a polite woman. Owl awaits the vision that will begin the new world.”

“Vision?”

“The end of your time, when you will be naked.”

“Naked?”

“When there is nothing in your heart.”

Dirk sat, transfixed. This was so far removed from what Van Horne and all the rest thought that it was as if he were on a different planet, and not just a thousand yards or so from Fort Washakie.

“What will happen?” she asked.

Owl peered into the cloud-specked sky. “It is not for anyone to know. I am only an empty bowl. I was given the promise. I know nothing more.”

“But the Dreamers dance…”

“The Dreamers invite the Owl to come. We dance to invite the Owl to change the world. We wait, and dance, and wait for the New Day.”

In some visceral way, Dirk fathomed the boy and his vision, and yet nothing made sense to him. “Why are the white people afraid, then?” he asked. “If the Dreamers are only inviting a visitation from a creature dreaded by the Shoshones, what has that to do with white men?”

“You have eyes but do not see, Dirk Skye.”

“Why don't you simply go to Van Horne and tell him about your vision?”

“He would not understand. He thinks the Dreamers are planning to massacre white people.” Owl smiled for the first time. “Then there would be iron bars between me and the world. They would capture my body, but no one can capture Owl.”

Dirk fought back his impatience with this boy and his mysticism.

“Owl, tell me plainly. You are pleading for a vision. When the vision comes, what will happen? What will the Dreamers do?”

Owl smiled, something glowing in his face. Dirk thought of saints and martyrs, of oil paintings of early Christians whose gaze was upon heaven even as they were being led to the flaming pyres.

“When the vision comes, I will die. The Shoshone people will be born again. The white men will be emptied of everything in their hearts and minds, and walk away because there is nothing inside of them and no reason for them to be here.”

“Nothing inside of them?”

“That is what they fear most. Not an uprising, not blood and death, but to have their ways stolen from them.” He stared at Dirk, and then at Aphrodite. “Just as white men have stolen all the ways of the People. We cannot be ourselves now. They have taken away our heart.”

It made little sense.

Owl rose suddenly. “Here I am. Take me to the Indian agent. You have captured Owl. You can put Owl in a cage and stop the Dreamers and they will all go away to their families.” He held out his arms. “Tie my hands and feet. Take me. You can stop the Dreamers. You will have your reward. The Indian agent will praise you. The blue-shirts will praise you. You will be Dirk Skye, and the name, North Star, will no longer be spoken by the People.”

Aphrodite was staring at Dirk.

Owl smiled, and that smile seemed almost a mock. Some embers lit in his eyes, as if to hint of well-lit rooms behind that boyish face.

An odd numbness stole through Dirk, almost a paralysis, as if the two bloods within him had come to a fatal separation.

“Owl,” Dirk said at last. “Go from here, quickly.”

“Ah, North Star, I will go. When the New Day comes, maybe Owl will give you dreams.”

With that, the youth stood, nodded gravely to them, and slipped upslope through the glade until he had vanished. Dirk half-expected to glimpse the boy striding softly through the azure skies, over white clouds and joyous rainbows. But there was only the rustling aspen leaves gilded by a low sun and a strange quiet. Dirk felt energy hemorrhage from him, and sat limply.

Aphrodite sat gravely, and then reached across the cloth to him and took his hand and squeezed. “I don't know why, but I'm glad you didn't take him up on his offer,” she said.

“He's a saint,” Dirk said. “And you know what the world does to saints.”

“More of a mystic,” she said. “He has a mystical vision. It's just the fevers of his imagination. White men won't be emptied of all meaning and walk away and leave this world to the Shoshones. We're here to stay.”

Dirk remembered the catechizing of the Jesuits when he was being schooled in St. Louis, long before. They believed, and they ached to instill that belief in their Indian and half-blood charges. That wouldn't change. And yet … there was something in Owl's vision of the world to come that was unbearable, if not frightening. Hollow white men without dreams.

“I've spent years here teaching the Shoshone children what white men have taught me, and now the Dreamers are pleading for a vision, a coming of an Indian Christ, who will sweep it all away,” he said.

She smiled brightly. “He's so beautiful. I mean, he's so naked. Oh! I shouldn't put it that way. He's not hiding anything. He's just, a beautiful boy.”

Her cheeks had flamed, and Dirk looked elsewhere out of pure instinct. And maybe envy. He wished Owl would vanish from her mind.

“He's just an angry boy,” he said.

She smiled wryly.

They sat silently, neither of them hungry enough to finish the picnic she had so carefully packed. He wanted to say things, just to talk, to whisper in her ear, but he felt iron bars between her and himself, the bars of blood and breed—and now something else. Owl's talk had stirred something in him, some deep yearning to return to his mother's people and become one with them, share their fate, teach white men the mysteries.

A single cloud obscured the low sun, which shot golden rays from behind the cloud and cast an odd shadow over the agency and the military compound below. Chill air eddied past them, on its long journey from alpine meadows somewhere.

“Dirk, I'm glad you showed me the tree,” she said.

“It was a perfectly innocent tree,” he said, “sacrificed to send a message.”

“Do you think it will regrow?”

“There are live limbs below where it was shattered.”

“Then it will regrow. Some things are hard to destroy.”

“Yes, one of those small limbs will become the new trunk, and it will reach upward once again. I will take it for a sign.”

eighteen

They straggled in for distribution day, and Dirk watched them uneasily. Things would be different this time. Scores of blue-clad soldiers milled about, eyeing the Shoshones as they gathered at the agency warehouse. At least the soldiers were unarmed, but their mere presence changed everything.

Once a month Shoshone families gathered at the agency to get their allotments, the food guaranteed by treaty. They came from afar, some on horse, a few with pack animals, others with travois. A handful had a wagon drawn by a bony mule or burro. Traditionally these were happy days, the promise of flour and beans and maybe a little beef, along with some calico or gingham, brightening the moment.

Many were worn by the hard trip, older Shoshones especially, who would struggle thirty or forty of fifty miles each way to load up their groceries. Still, hard or not, the distribution days were moments of celebration on the Wind River Reservation. With each distribution, sheer hunger was held at bay a while more.

Dirk was usually on hand to translate when a two-speaker was needed, and few were coming to school anyway. He saw so many people he knew. Old Agnes Snake-eyes was waiting in line to collect flour for her and her bedridden man, White Bird. Young Turtle, heavy with child, waited patiently along with her three children. Dirk saw Deer Stalker sitting impassively on a mule. The knot of Shoshones kept growing as they waited, but there was only silence from the warehouse and the agency. Dirk wondered what had delayed Van Horne, who usually was eager to begin the handout, something the agent took pleasure in doing.