The Owl Hunt (29 page)

“But what difference should that make?”

“He tried to kill white people.”

“But he didn't.”

“The missionaries were messengers. It was white religion he wanted to kill.”

“He had a dream, that's all.”

“Of you leaving,” Dirk said.

“Yes, of us leaving. He saw it. Sometimes I feel him saying that to me. ‘Go away. This is not your land. You don't belong here. Go away and let us be.' ”

“He awaited the vision,” he said. “A promised time. The Gray Owl's promise to him. He died for it. Turned himself in for it. He showed up here. No one caught him. He simply walked in, to his death. When he walked in, he knew what his fate would be, but he did it. He knew the future, in ways that I certainly don't. And if his vision is true, his death will begin this thing he saw, this exodus of white men away from the sacred land.”

She clasped his hand warmly. “It's hard to believe,” she said. “I don't understand these visions. But I do wish we'd pull out. I wish my father would load up his wagons and go away. It's as if we're the aliens here, the violators. I feel like, well, an invader.”

“It won't happen, you know.”

“I know. It's all hoodoo.”

“Yes. We are sitting next to a pine destroyed by a Gatling gun.”

“Guns are the reality? Nothing else?”

“That's where I'm torn by my bloods,” he said.

“Is there nothing more than gunpowder and iron?”

“I was schooled by Jesuits in St. Louis,” he said. “And now I don't know anything.”

“I don't, either,” she said, softly.

He found himself peering into her eyes, discovering hurt and fear in them, and something else. He found himself slowly leaning toward her, even as she was waiting for him, her lips parted, her eyes an invitation.

He kissed her, his lips touching hers in a wondrous way. His arms slid around her and drew her to him, and hers responded, her fingers tentatively crossing his back, until she and he clasped each other tightly, and he felt the rise of her breast against him, and her lips finding his.

She clung to him, and her arms searched his back, and he responded with wonder and joy. They stopped kissing, and simply clung, and he felt that he wasn't alone now. Not now. At last. Grief had brought them together. They were sharing loss and desolation, and maybe love, too. It felt right to share loss with Aphrodite, to feel her cling, for her to solace her sorrows in his arms. They had found a way to grieve for Owl, and now, in their small hollow on the hillside, they took full measure of what each could give the other. He felt her cheek against his own, and felt her tears melting into his collar, and felt her sighs. And also felt their communion, for in grief they were finding forbidden love, a white woman and a breed, walking up small steps, step by step, by step, to wherever the steps might take them.

The wind shifted and burrowed between them, and tried to bite through their embrace, but no wind could push its way through, and the wind fell helplessly away, and they still clung, desperately, with a need that could not be slaked. Then, finally, she tugged free, and turned a little, so that her head could rest in the hollow of his shoulder.

“Thank you, Dirk,” she said.

He wondered why she was thanking him, when in fact he ought to be thanking her. For a little while, the sorrows and griefs of the world had vanished. They sat a while more until the chill air finally triumphed, and then she stood.

“I must go.”

“Will I see you again?”

“Yes, if my father doesn't send me east.”

“Send you?”

“He says this is no place for a white woman to be.”

“Where would you go?”

“To a finishing school.”

Dirk had barely heard of such a place. “What do they finish?”

“Me,” she said, a sudden smile on her face. “I am unfinished on the reservation.”

“When?”

“I don't know. He and my mother tell me what they will do with me. And then I do it.”

“Have you been given any choices?”

She laughed, a slight bitterness in it.

“I'll walk you home.”

“It'd be best if you stayed here until I am on the post.”

“I see,” he said, saddened.

But she leaned over and kissed him, gently and firmly and with lips that sent messages. He returned her ardor. Then she stood, faced the bitter wind, smiled, and started down the slope, soon disappearing into the gulch. He watched quietly, knowing she would reappear below, and that in a few minutes she would be walking across the agency and toward Fort Washakie and her father's billet.

He felt bewildered. They had shared grief, mostly. They had found comfort when they reached for it. But there had been more, something that bloomed through the sadness and wrought something that would write itself on their hearts. She was the first white woman he had held in his arms. The first white woman to kiss him. The first white woman to share anything of herself with him. And she was the captain's daughter.

Below, the commons at the agency had cleared, but for the gallows and its burden twisting on manilla. Not even Owl's parents stayed; the wind had driven them off. The food line was empty, and a few clerks were stowing things in the warehouse. Van Horne was nowhere in sight. The blue-coated soldiers had returned to the post. He saw Aphrodite slip onto the parade and angle across it.

He felt the presence of someone there beside the shattered pine, but there was no one. He was alone. And yet he felt it, this ghostly presence, this spirit of Owl resting there before he began the Long Walk into the heavens.

“Yes? Yes?”

“You see, soon they will go,” Owl said.

Dirk didn't believe it. The white men were here to stay; it was their world now.

“It is a good dream, Owl,” he said aloud, into the emptiness of the afternoon.

“All things pass, North Star.”

“You did not have to turn yourself in to the agent. You did not have to sacrifice yourself, Owl. There are many Shoshone Peoples, stretching far to the west. You could have joined them safely and lived out a good life among them.”

Owl laughed softly. “The time of the white man will pass, and then the blessed mother will be as she was, and the People will remember,” he said.

Then the spirit vanished. Dirk could only sense it, but somehow he knew it. Owl was gone.

Dirk started down the slope and soon emerged on the flat that shouldered the agency and fort. Owl swung in the wind.

Old Victoria had boiled up some gruel for their supper, and they spooned it down. Dirk wasn't very hungry.

He avoided the north window, which looked past the schoolhouse toward the commons, where the gallows stood in the twilight, its burden spinning in the arctic wind.

“He is not there,” she said. “He is with the People.”

“With the People?”

“They will remember him forever,” she said.

“I don't think the People will survive,” he said.

She grinned. “Goddamn, you don't put much stock in redskins, do you?”

“It's the whites I don't have faith in.”

“Your father and I lived with joy for many winters, North Star.”

Later, when he lay abed, unable to sleep, he heard a rhythmic drumming, slow and steady, the sound of a heartbeat. He sat up swiftly, knowing he was hearing the Dreamers. The Dreamers were dancing this night, dancing their Dream Dance, their dance of pleading for a new world, a world like the one that was lost, Dreamers dreaming the promise of Owl's prophesy, that the white men would go away, and the People would live peacefully on their own land.

Sometimes the drumming seemed close at land, as if the Dreamers were circling the commons. Sometimes Dirk swore the drumming rose from the post. Sometimes the Dreamers seemed to dance before the agency buildings. Sometimes the Dreamers drummed a circle around his schoolhouse. Sometimes the Dreamers faded into silence, only to return. Sometimes the drumming rose from Chief Washakie's house out a ways.

He heard shouts, and knew squads of soldiers were hurtling this way and that, hunting down the Dreamers as if they were elk to be shot. But he heard no shots, no scuffles, no sounds other than hurried hooves clattering by. But the dreaming had stopped, and the night fell still, and a quietness returned not long before dawn.

Dirk didn't fall into sleep again. He lay abed, listening for the Dreamers, but with the dawning in the east he knew the Dreamers were gone, far away, off to their miserable huts and lodges and cabins.

When the light had quickened, he peered out upon the commons, and discovered that Owl was gone. And that the gallows had been dismantled and lay in pieces on the hard clay. The People had Owl.

thirty-four

Once again the schoolhouse was empty. That morning, Dirk opened the doors and admitted no child. What parent would send a child to the agency at such a time? From the school windows, a child could see the commons, see the dismantled gallows lying on the clay. No doubt the mothers and fathers of those little ones thought the children might see something else dangling in the wind.

In fact, there wasn't an Indian in sight at the Wind River Agency. The winds swept over the clay, scouring it of horror. But Dirk supposed it would take a lot more than snow and rain and wind to purge the commons of its memories, now scorched into the minds of the Shoshone People.

The school seemed hollow, and exuded a sense of failure. For years, he had struggled to teach the few children who did show up the knowledge they would need to survive in a new world. But he hadn't thought to teach them that the penalty for failing to learn white men's ways and beliefs could be death.

He built up the fire against the cold, and waited for some student, any student, to pull open the door and slide into the warmth. Often, Shoshone mothers had sent their children without a lunch, knowing that Dirk and old Victoria would somehow feed the child. And somehow the schoolmaster always did, finding room in his salary to supply some oat gruel or a few boiled beans to the hungry child. He thought maybe it could be considered a bribe: send your child to school and a hot lunch will be waiting.

But on this cruel November day, not one student appeared.

He fought off melancholia with dreams. If the students couldn't come to his schoolhouse, maybe he could take school to the students. Take a wagon out and spend time in each settlement, gathering students around and teaching what he could. That was an old dream he had nurtured ever since he learned that the Indian Bureau lacked the funds to build a boardinghouse for students. There would not be much education on the Wind River Reservation until the Shoshone young people could be housed right there at the agency.

But it was an idle dream. His contract required him to be present daily, to open the school every weekday morning, and to maintain the building. Many an idle day there was naught to do but read, but he was always in peril of running out of books, and had borrowed what few of them he could scrounge from the officers at the post.

Live students were such a prize for him that he had taken delight in them, nurtured their curiosity, worked swiftly back and forth in the two tongues, encouraged them, fed them, listened to their joys and sorrows.

But not this day.

There were no books at hand this day. The seven-day clock ticked slowly. The woodstove consumed its fuel and started to cool, but he threw another log into it. He would write, then, as he sometimes did to blot up time.

Letters. There were things that needed attention at this melancholic post so far from Washington City. Yes, write letters about the demoralization of the Shoshones, their near starvation, their lack of support from the bureau. He could write of Chief Washakie's efforts to bring his people into a herding and farming way of life. He could write of the problems posed by deeply felt beliefs, vision quests, the glory of hunters and warriors, the role imposed on women, the need to help these people into different worlds.

He wished Aphrodite would come to help out in the classroom, as she sometimes did. She didn't know Shoshone, but she could show them numbers and lead them through arithmetic and give them English words, and help to feed them when Victoria showed up with some beans or soup. But this day she was nowhere to be seen, and who could blame her?

Still, he yearned for her to arrive, with her usual smiles. They could while away the day, as they often did, and it would be good. He always felt himself melting into her sweetness when she was there, and now he wanted that all the more, especially after they had clung to one another up at the shattered pine tree, sharing a sorrow that deluged both of them.

Letters, then. He unstopped his ink bottle and collected pens with good nibs on them. Letters, but to whom, and about what? Who was he, to send missives to distant bureaucrats? He gazed out the window toward that sorry commons and discovered a work detail from the fort gradually loading the murderous timbers into two wagons. They were simply bluecoats, doing the task assigned them. The two draft horses yawned and waited. The men, working under that executioner sergeant, whose skills had just snuffed a life, were nonchalantly lifting the uprights and settling them onto a wagon bed. Then came the crossbeam, with a severed rope still wrapped to it. Other men were knocking apart the platform planks and loading them. The trap was intact, and the soldiers lifted it onto the planks. Thus did they remove the engine of death from the agency. Soon a Shoshone could walk into Major Van Horne's lair without being reminded of the powers that white men held over him.

Dirk discovered Chief Washakie standing at the far edge, watching, watching, as the death machine was turned into timbers.

He thought to write the Indian Bureau about all that but decided against it. Not just yet. The mails would be thick with messages to and fro, from the agent, from the captain, from the ones in Washington City who presided over flour and sugar and beans and death.