The Owl Hunt (21 page)

“I have done these things. I have taken your name. I have told my story to the headmen of the villages, and to the warriors and boys. We all dream of you and dance to you. We are Dreamers, awaiting the time of newness, when the white men will leave our land forever.

“I have waited for you. The Dreamers wait for you, and drum for you, and sing for you. We have let the world know that Owl is coming, and Owl will make all things new. When Owl comes, the soldiers will go away. When Owl comes, the ranchers will drive their herds away and the buffalo will return. When Owl comes, the trappers and farmers and white people who live in wooden houses will go away. The earth will shine, and the buffalo and bear and elk will return.

“That is what you showed to me that hour when Mother Moon defeated Father Sun, and the world grew still and dark. I have done all things that came to me in my first vision. I have gathered the Dreamers in the mountains, where we celebrate your coming. I have sent messengers to other Peoples, Bannocks and Nez Perce and Paiutes and Arapaho, telling them of my vision, that all white men will go away where they make their camps, as well as where my People make their camps.

“Now, Blessed Owl, my heart cries for a vision. My mind cries for a vision. I want to take back to the Dreamers what I receive from you this night. I want to tell them that the time has come. That the Dreamers will drum and sing as the white men go away. That the buffalo will return, great black herds grazing where the cattle grazed, our meat, our life, our shelter, even as we had known in the times of our fathers.

“Blessed Owl, we are not far from winter, when the snows will fill the valleys that have been our refuges, when the Dreamers can no longer hide from the eyes of white soldiers. When the Dreamers can no longer find food or make lodges or stay warm, or escape through the snowdrifts to reach better places. The time is growing short. This is the moon of the frost. Any time now, the cold and snow will drive us out of our refuge.

“Owl, please give the word, begin the times when the People will be as they were in the times of the fathers. Owl, I plead with you now. I have come to this place, far from the Dreamers, and await a sign from you. Hurry! Do not forsake your servant, the very one known as Waiting Wolf, to whom you imparted a message in the time of the black sun.”

Owl's prayer flooded out of him almost miraculously, drawn from something so deep inside of him that it didn't need rehearsing. It simply rose to his lips, and he cast his words into the air, and stared at the moon as he pleaded for his vision.

They were waiting for him, far below. He had told them he would seek a vision, and was sure that the Gray Owl would hear his pleading. He would return with news. They had watched him hike up an obscure trail, walking closer and closer to the bowl of heaven. They were cold. Food was hard to find. The army was prowling, pushing into places the soldiers had never gone, looking for the Dreamers.

And soon there would be no meat, when snow lay on the earth recording every print of hoof and moccasin, making visible that which had been furtive and invisible all these moons. It was time to plead, and never stop pleading, because the Dreamers were on the brink of dissolving, filtering back to their villages to starve with the rest of the Shoshones, the people of hollow bellies and gaunt faces.

He saw only the cruel moon glaring back at him, and knew he must have patience, though he was wildly impatient, the spirit in his young body aching for news from the Great Gray Owl that had promised him a new world.

He settled back on the robe and stared at the moon, letting himself be transfixed by its relentless glare as it traversed the black sky. He ignored the cold creeping through his limbs, making his legs hurt and his hands numb. If the Gray Owl demanded that he suffer, then he would gladly suffer until the Owl saw that the boy had suffered and proved himself worthy. He would be worthy; he would ignore the ache, the killing numbness.

So he sat on the cold robe and stared at the cold moon and the cold mountains and the cold valleys, and waited. This night the Owl would grant the thing that all the Dreamers waited for. He was sure of it.

Time passed slowly. He stared at the moon and it stared back, and finally it passed zenith and started to slide away, and still the boy waited, so cold he could no longer feel his legs and his arms hurt as if someone were poking his flesh with porcupine quills. Once, when he could not endure longer, he stood, lifted his aching arms toward the black sky, and cried out. “I am your messenger. I am ready to carry the Word back to the People! I am ready to die! I am ready to do your bidding. I am ready and have waited, Gray Owl.”

But there was only silence and cold and darkness.

Later he stirred, for he could no longer ignore his body even though he tried, and he stood and paced and lifted his arms. He cried and sang his own songs, celebrating all owls and his new name and his mystical mission. And then he sat again on the frosty robe, and didn't move until the eastern horizon began to blue, and the moon vanished from the heavens.

The boy debated whether to leave. His pleading had gone unanswered. Some youths fasted and endured as many as four days, but he was numb and angry, too. The Gray Owl had not come with the promised word. He dreaded going back to the camps of the Dreamers with no word. He dreaded the things he would see in their faces, the sharp glances. They all followed their own roads. But somehow the boy knew this would be different, after months of dancing and pleading, and night music, and visions of the world they had lost and hoped to regain.

He stood bitterly, seeing the eastern skies redden and turn gold. Finally Father Sun blazed over the edge of the world, and Owl's bitterness turned to hurt. He picked up the ancient robe, wrapped it over his shoulders, and ignored the immediate warmth it gave him. He paused one last moment, doubtful, debating whether to stay on through another sun, or two suns, or three … and reluctantly started down the long trail to the valleys below. Owl felt the frost of the morning lace his legs. There would be warmth in camp where small hot fires would burn, their smoke dissipated to nothing amid the towering pine trees. His shame was fierce in him. He didn't know how he would face the Dreamers, grown men, hard and strong.

Then, even as he slid along the trail, a thought came to him as softly as the brush of an owl's wing, a feathered thought that took flight in his mind, a thought that brimmed with power. Yes, the Gray Owl had come after all, the Owl had brought a redeeming message, the Owl was his spirit guide after all. The thought grew large in his heart, and bloomed in his mind, and Owl knew that he had been visited by the feathered one, who had brushed its wings over the face of the boy. His blood danced through his body, his pulse lifted, his eyes brightened, and he danced down the trail, more alive than he had ever been in his short life.

He walked into his encampment, and instantly everything stopped, and the world was gazing his way. The Dreamers were still at breakfast and the smell of boiling beef rose from the black cookpots hanging over tiny fires. They stared. The spring in Owl's gait must have told them something, because they soon gathered at the center of the encampment, along with some runners from the other Dreamers, scattered through the misty mountains. They had all been waiting, and he would not disappoint them.

Owl knew well how he appeared to them. The boy had vanished and the man had risen into his flesh, and that was good.

“I greet you, my brothers,” he said.

“Grandfather Owl, we greet you,” one replied.

“You are waiting for word. Owl went off alone to plead for a vision, and now Owl has returned alone, and you are waiting for word. Have you eaten?”

“Not yet, Owl.”

“Then we will celebrate and I will eat with you.”

Eat! That meant that his pleading had ended; he had word. He would take food with them all. They collected closer, wanting not to miss a word. He saw his friends, men with whom he had shared moons in the mountains, and now they watched him sharply, missing nothing, their glances boring into him.

He raised an arm, welcoming them all to hear him, and soon every Dreamer in that remote camp crowded close.

“The spirit guide brushed me with his feathers this very dawn, my friends. The Great Gray Owl, most fearsome of all the creatures on the earth, above the earth, below the earth, and in the waters, has spread his wings over his servant who is one of the People.”

He paused. A deep silence ensued.

“The time is coming when all the white men will go away, and the buffalo will run in great herds, and the earth shall abound in elk and deer and wolves and coyotes and sheep and hares. I know this to be true. And there will be a sign. And the sign will tell all the People that the moment has come, and the sign will be known to all the Shoshones, and known to all the tribes in this land, to the north and south, east and west. This sign will signal the end of the white man. He will drive his cattle away. He will leave his houses. The soldiers will march east to a distant place. The missionaries will be stricken, and their false words will vanish from this land. And soon Father Sun will shine for the People, and Mother Moon will glow for the People, and all will be as it once was.”

He stopped, letting them digest all this good news, and he would not be rushed.

But then it was time to reveal the great secret, to let them bury it in their hearts and live with it ever more.

“I have the word, and it is good. This time will come at the very moment that Owl dies. When Owl dies, and begins the Long Walk, the People will be freed.”

The silence lay so heavily on this group that not even a bird sang in the morning light.

“I do not know when this will be, when life will be taken from me so that the People may be given a new life. But soon. Soon.”

This met with even more silence. “The white missionaries have their Jesus. The People have Owl,” he said, pointing at his chest.

He stood patiently, letting their gazes probe him. He wished to be probed by all their gazes, so that they might see Owl in his moment of glory.

“Go to your clans, your people now. The Dreamers will disband for now. Return, and wait. Filter back to your wives and grandparents and children, and be among them, and wait. Dance the Dreamer Dance now and then, in the quiet of the night, but wait. Wait for the sign. Wait for the time when Owl is sacrificed for the People. Wait!”

twenty-five

Prescott Cinnabar was determined to put an end to it. He would stop the Dreamers cold, and stop the cattle rustling that neighboring ranchers were howling about. If there was lawlessness on the reservation, he'd mete out whatever punishment was necessary.

Toward this end he had assembled a formidable force, which included cavalry from Fort Laramie, and had divided them into flying columns, one of which he would command. The ranchers were angry. The Dreamers threatened to start an uprising. That brat of a boy, Waiting Wolf, was stirring up an evil stew.

This time, by God, the United States Army would chase every Dreamer out of the mountains. And in the process, stop at every camp and village and settlement and put the fear of the army into the redskins.

It was, he thought, an enjoyable enterprise, and it delighted him to be in the field while the weather held and his encampments were pleasant.

“Whenever you reach a village, look for beef. If you find hide or bone or beef, we'll have the culprits,” he told his subalterns. “Catch the devils red-handed.” He laughed at his own joke.

He had formed them into three columns, two south of the Wind River, one north, and when they reached the mountains, they were to probe every glade and glen and hanging valley, and if possible drive the reprobate Dreamers toward the other columns, and then they'd herd the Dreamers like cattle back to the agency for some sharp disciplining.

But so far, there was no sign of anything illicit at all. The starving villagers had no meat and were subsisting on snakes and frogs. In a few lodges there was a little jerky, old and dried, the traditional emergency food of these people. Elsewhere, the soldiers discovered a little pemmican in parfleches. His men hunted vainly for cowhides, hanging meat, fresh leather clothing, new moccasins, cattle skulls or horns, hooves—any evidence at all of recent rustling. But there wasn't any of that.

The rancher who'd complained the loudest of all, Yardley Dogwood, kept escalating the accusation. At first he was missing a few cattle; then thirty or forty. Then a hundred. The last time he sent word to Major Van Horne, he alleged he had lost several hundred.

But that was the way the game was played. Cinnabar didn't doubt that the rancher had lost a few animals, but the inflated numbers were nothing more than a way to lodge a claim against the Wind River Agency for a lot of beef. Still … the army must act. And if the Dreamers were eating a cow now and then, the Dreamers must be brought to heel.

But the Shoshone villages seemed innocent. The columns marched into one after another, finding no meat or bones or hides. The one thing they did discover was that many of the young Shoshone males who were supposedly up in the mountains dancing through the nights, were living quietly in their villages. It was a puzzle.

The column rode into one camp on the Wind River and at once the Shoshones stood to watch the soldiers in smart blue coats and forage caps, clank and clatter into the quietness of the camp. This camp, perhaps a dozen lodges and wickiups, was somber. The ancient lodges sagged; even the newer canvas lodges looked worn and soiled. The people looked no better, most of them virtually in rags. They were mostly barefoot. They were gaunt, too, their cheeks hollow, their legs spindled, and their arms like twigs. Slowly, almost fearfully, they collected as the column rode in and stopped smartly. For an odd moment, there was only silence, except for the whispers of the chill breeze.

No headman appeared, and Cinnabar wondered whether the chieftain was sick. But there were a few younger men, their copper chests unadorned, perhaps because they had little to wear. The captain studied the surrounding trees, looking for hanging meat, and he checked each lodge, looking for a cowhide staked to the barren clay. He saw nothing from astride his chestnut mount. Maybe a search of the surrounding bottomlands would yield more. He would think about it.