The Veteran (37 page)

She took a cotton handkerchief from her sleeve and dabbed his face, overcome by her sense of compassion for the troubled young man from the hills.

They walked back to the fort together. Satisfied that her underclothes were modern and there were modern medications to hand in the event of cuts, bruises or illness, secure in the knowledge that the Billings Memorial Hospital was only minutes away by helicopter, Charlie was beginning to enjoy the long cotton dress, the simple life and the routines of frontier-fort living. And now she knew that her doctoral thesis was a certainty.

‘Major’ Ingles’s lectures were obligatory for all. Due to the warm late-June weather, he held them on the parade ground, the students on rows of benches in front of him, his easel and pictorial material to hand. Once he was lecturing on the real history of the Old West he was in his element.

After ten days he reached the period of the War of the Plains. Behind him he had draped large-scale photographs of the principal Sioux leaders. Ben Craig found himself staring at a blow-up of a photograph of Sitting Bull, taken in his later years. The Hunkpapa medicine man had been to Canada for sanctuary but had returned to throw himself and the remainder of his people on the mercy of the US Army. The picture on the easel was taken just before he was murdered.

“But one of the strangest of them all was the Oglala chief, Crazy Horse,” said the professor. “For reasons of his own he never permitted himself to be photographed by the white man. He believed the camera would take his soul away. Thus he is the one man of whom there is no photograph. So we will never know what he looked like.”

Craig opened his mouth and shut it again.

In another lecture the professor described in detail the campaign that led to the fight at the Little Bighorn. It was the first time Craig learned what happened to Major Reno and his three companies, or that Captain Benteen had returned from the badlands to join them on the besieged hilltop.

He was glad most of them had been rescued by General Terry.

In his final lecture the professor dealt with the round-up in 1877 of the scattered groups of Sioux and Cheyenne and their escort back to the reservations. When John Ingles called for questions Craig raised his hand.

“Yes, Ben.”

The professor was pleased to take a question from his one pupil who had never crossed the threshold of a grade school.

“Major, was there ever mention of a clan chief called Tall Elk, or of a brave named Walking Owl?”

The professor was flustered. He had reference books back at the faculty to fill a truck and most of their contents were in his own head. He had expected a simple question. He searched his memory.

“No, I do believe no-one heard of them and no later witnesses among the Plains Indians mentioned them. Why do you ask?”

“I have heard it said that Tall Elk split away from the main group, avoided Terry’s patrols and wintered right over there in the Pry or Range, sir.”

“Well, I have never heard of such a thing. If he did, he and his people must have been found in the spring. You would have to ask at Lame Deer, now the centre of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. Someone at the Dull Knife Memorial College might know.”

Ben Craig memorized the name. In the fall he would find his way to Lame Deer, wherever that was, and ask.

The first visitor parties came at the weekend. After that the parties came almost daily. They came by buses mainly, and some in private cars. Some were groups in the charge of their teachers, others private family parties. But they all parked in an area half a mile away and out of sight, and were brought to the main gates in the covered wagons. It was part of Professor Ingles’s ‘getting in the mood’ stratagem.

It worked. The children, and they were mainly children, were thrilled by the wagon ride, which was new to most of them, and in the last two-hundred-yard approach to the gates could imagine they really were frontier settlers. They poured from the wagons in an excited throng.

Craig was detailed to work on his animal pelts, which were stretched on frames in the sun. He salted and scraped them, readying them for softening and tanning. The soldiers drilled, the smith pumped the bellows of his forge, the girls in their long cotton dresses washed clothes in big timber tubs and ‘Major’ Ingles conducted parties from activity to activity, explaining each function and why it was necessary in the life on the plains.

There were two Native American students who posed as non-hostile Indians living in the fort as trackers and guides, in the event the soldiery would need to respond to the emergency of a settler party out on the plains being attacked by an off-reservation war party. They wore cotton pants, blue canvas shirts, waist sashes and long black wigs under stovepipe hats.

The favourite attractions seemed to be the blacksmith and Ben Craig working on his pelts.

“Did you trap them yourself?” asked one boy from a school in Helena.

“Yep.”

“Do you have a licence?”

“A what?”

“Why do you wear a feather in your hair if you are not an Indian?”

“The Cheyenne gave it to me.”

“Why?”

“For bringing down a grizzly.”

“That’s a wonderful story,” said the escorting teacher.

“No it’s not,” said the boy. “He’s an actor just like all the rest.”

As each new wagonload of visitors arrived Craig scanned them for the glimpse of a cascade of black hair, the turn of a face, a pair of large dark eyes. But she did not come. July slipped into August.

Craig asked for three days to go back to the wilderness. He rode out before dawn. In the mountains he found a stand of osage cherry, took his hand-axe, borrowed from the smithy, and went to work. When he had cut, shaved and scraped the bow-stave he strung it with twine from the fort, as he had no animal tendons.

The arrows he cut from rigid and cue-straight ash saplings. The tail feathers from an inattentive wild turkey formed the flights. By a creek he found flint rocks and from these he chipped and knapped the arrowheads. Both Cheyenne and Sioux had used mainly flint or iron arrowheads, lodged into a cleft at the tip of the arrows and lashed in place with ultra-fine cords of skin.

Of the two the plainsmen feared the flint the more. The iron arrowheads could be withdrawn against the barb along with the arrow, but the flint variety generally broke off, involving deep and usually terminal no-anaesthetic surgery. Craig made four of them. On the third morning he took the buck.

When he rode back in the beast was across his saddlebow, the arrow still in the heart. He took the kill to the kitchen, hung, gutted, skinned and dissected the animal, finally offering the cook sixty pounds of fresh venison in front of a stunned audience of townsfolk.

“Something wrong with my cooking?” asked the chef.

“No, it’s fine. I liked the cheese pie with coloured bits.”

“It’s called a pizza.”

“Just figured we could do with some fresh meat.”

While the scout was washing off his hands and forearms in the horse trough the cook took the bloody arrow and walked quickly to the command post.

“It’s a beautiful artefact,” said Professor Ingles as he handled it. “I have seen them in museums, of course. Even the barred tail feathers from a turkey are clearly identifiable as Cheyenne work. Where did he get it?”

“He says he made it,” said the cook.

“Impossible. Nobody can knap flint like this any more.”

“Well, he has four,” said the chef, “and this one was right in the animal’s heart. Tonight I’m serving fresh venison.”

The staff ate it at a barbecue outside the stockade walls and enjoyed it.

Across the fire the professor watched Craig slicing slivers of cooked meat from a haunch with his razor-sharp bowie knife and recalled Charlie’s assurance to him. Maybe, but he had his doubts. Could this strange young man ever turn dangerous? He noted that now four of his female students were trying to attract the untamed boy’s attention, but his thoughts always seemed to be far away.

By the middle of the month the black dog of despair was beginning to overtake Ben Craig. Part of him tried to remain convinced that the Everywhere Spirit had not lied to him, not betrayed him. Had the girl he loved also been given the curse of life? None of the high-spirited group around him knew that he had already made a decision. If by the end of the summer he had not found the love for which he had obeyed the vision-quester’s plea, he would ride back to the mountains and by his own hand go to join her in the spirit world.

A week later the two wagons rolled again through the gates and their drivers halted the sweating draught horses. From the first poured a gaggle of young and excited children. He sheathed his knife, which he had been honing on a stone, and walked forward. One of the grade-school teachers had her back to him. From her head to the middle of her back flowed a torrent of hair the colour of jet.

She turned. Japanese-American, round puppy face. The scout turned and strode away. His rage boiled up. He stopped, raised clenched fists to the sky and screamed.

“You lied to me, Meh-y-yah. You lied to me, old man. You told me to wait but you have cast me into this wilderness, an outcast of man and God.”

Everyone in the parade ground between the buildings stopped and stared. Ahead of him was one of the ‘tame’ Indians, walking away. This man also halted.

The old face, wizened and brown like a burnt walnut, ancient as the rocks of the Beartooth Range, framed by strands of snow-white hair, stared at him from beneath the stovepipe hat. In the vision-quester’s eyes was an expression of infinite sadness. Slowly he shook his head. Then he raised his gaze and nodded silently, looking at a point beyond the young scout.

Craig turned again, saw nothing and looked back. Underneath his hat his friend Brian Heavyshield, one of the two Native American actors, was staring at him as if he had gone crazy. He turned back to the gate.

The second wagon was unloaded. A crowd of children milled around their teacher. Jeans, check shirt, baseball cap. She stooped to separate two scuffling boys, then wiped her shirtsleeve across her brow. The peak of her cap got in the way. She pulled the baseball cap off. A torrent of released dark hair tumbled down to her waist. Disconcerted by the sensation of someone staring, she turned towards him. An oval face, two huge dark eyes. Whispering Wind.

He could not move. He could not speak. He knew he should say something, walk towards her, anything. But he could not, he just stared. She flushed, embarrassed, broke the gaze and gathered her charges to begin the tour. An hour later they arrived at the stables, led by Charlie, their tour guide. Ben Craig was grooming Rosebud. He knew they would come. It was on the route.

“This is where we keep the horses,” said Charlie. “Some are cavalry mounts, others belong to the frontiersmen who live here or are just passing through. Ben here is looking after his horse Rosebud. Ben is a hunter, trapper, scout and mountain man.”

“Want to see all the horses,” yelled one of the children.

“All right, honey, we’ll see all the horses. Just don’t get too close to the hooves in case they kick out,” said Charlie.

She led the youngsters down the line of stalls. Craig and the girl were left facing each other.

“I’m sorry I stared, ma’am,” he said. “My name is Ben Craig.”

“Hi. I’m Linda Pickett.” She held out her hand. He took it. It was warm and small, the way he remembered.

“Could I ask you something, ma’am?”

“Do you call every female ma’am?”

“Guess so. Way I was taught. Is it bad?”

“Kind of formal. Like from a long time ago. What did you want to ask?”

“Do you remember me?”

Her brow furrowed.

“I don’t believe so. Have we met?”

“A long time ago.”

She laughed. It was the sound he recalled from around the campfires at Tall Elk’s lodges.

“Then I must have been too young. Where was it?”

“Come. I’ll show you.”

He led the puzzled girl outside. Beyond the timber palisades the peaks of the Pryor Range rose in the south.

“Do you know what those are?”

“The Beartooth Range?”

“No. They are further west. Those are the Pryors. That was where we knew each other.”

“But I’ve never been into the Pryor Range. My brothers used to take me camping as a kid, but never there.”

He turned and looked into the beloved face.

“You are a schoolteacher now?”

“Uh-huh. In Billings. Why?”

“Are you going to come back here again?”

“I don’t know. There are other parties scheduled to come later. I might be assigned. Why?”

“I want you to come again. Please. I must see you again. Say you will.”

Miss. Pickett flushed again. She was too beautiful not to have been in receipt of many passes from boys. Usually she brushed them aside with a laugh that conveyed the message but gave no offence. This young man was strange. He did not flatter, he did not smile invitingly. He seemed solemn, earnest, naive. She stared into the frank, cobalt eyes and something fluttered inside her. Charlie came out of the stable with the children.

“I don’t know,” said the girl, “I’ll think about it.”

An hour later she and her party were gone.

It took a week, but she came. One of her colleagues at the school was called away to the bedside of a relative. There was a vacancy in the escort group and she volunteered. The day was hot. She wore a simple cotton print frock.

Craig had asked Charlie to check the visitor roster for him, looking for a booking from the school.

“You have your eye on someone, Ben?” she asked archly.

She was not disappointed, recognizing that a relationship with a sensible girl could enormously help his rehabilitation to the real world. She was pleased by the speed with which he was learning to read and write. She had procured two simple books for him to read, word by word. After the fall she thought she could find lodgings for him in town, a job as store clerk or table waiter, while she worked on her thesis about his recovery.

He was waiting when the wagons unloaded their cargoes of children and teachers.

“Will you come walk with me, Miss. Linda?”