Scalpdancers (2 page)

Broken Hand's braided hair adorned with two eagle feathers and the beadwork patterns on his buckskin coat revealed he had fulfilled his vision quest and could be called by a man's name. He was a proud man.

“No,” Broken Hand said to Lost Eyes. “You will not share our fire. You have done enough. We will finish the hunt without you.”

Lost Eyes tried to step around the man only to be shoved backward. Lost Eyes batted the brave's hand aside. Broken Hand grabbed for the war club dangling from a rawhide tie at his side. He jerked the weapon free and raised it threateningly.

Lost Eyes made no move toward a weapon of his own. He merely stood his ground, his brown eyes gentle and filled with remorse. Yet there was no weakness in his stance. Though he grieved as much as any of the others, he would not accept blame for the death of Waiting Horse.

“Now will you slay me, Broken Hand, and take my scalp to hang upon your coup stick?”

Broken Hand glanced at the weapon in his hand. Slowly, reason returned to his expression, dimmed the fire in his gaze, dulled the urge to exact a vengeance that wasn't his to seek.

“Strike him!” Black Fox shouted.

“I will not.” Broken Hand lowered his war club and shoved the wooden shaft back through the rawhide loop at his waist.

“Strike him. Are you a woman to fear him so?” Black Fox snapped, his hand upon the travois. “He killed your friend.”

“
Iniskim
killed my friend,” Broken Hand answered.

“Your words, Black Fox, do not fly straight. They are crooked with the jealousy that wishes to keep Lost Eyes from calling your sister to his blanket,” Wolf Lance said, seeking to distract the hunt leader.

Two braves by the travois nodded in agreement, and as hunger overcame their sorrow, they fell to butchering the buffalo carcass. The animal's organs were quickly sliced away and carried to the camp fire.

Black Fox stood silently apart from the others for a while, then followed the aroma of roasting meat back to the fire and sat near Tall Bull.

Lost Eyes squatted near the flames and let their warmth leach the chill from his limbs. He took comfort in Wolf Lance's faithful presence.

“Someone must bring Waiting Horse back to our village,” Broken Hand said.

“I will do it,” Lost Eyes said and looked up into the faces of the hunters. “Then you may continue the hunt without me and perhaps find good fortune.”

No one offered a different suggestion. Lost Eyes didn't expect them to. By virtue of their silence, they assented. In the morning Lost Eyes would depart, taking his ill omens and misfortune with him, riding a lonely trail southwest, with naught for company but dark thoughts and a dead man.

This is a cold trail. I will follow it no longer. It is toward a vision I began. But the path is as fleeting as a shadow and I am the shadow walker, waiting to be made whole, to walk among my people as a man
.

Show me my spirit sign. All I see is what has been
.

Lost Eyes entered the village at midaftenoon. The same cold breeze that tugged at the newly budded aspen limbs ruffled the fringe of his buckskin shirt and leggings. Clouds scudded across the cobalt sky and cast their churning shadows on the valley floor.

The spring that fed Elkhorn Creek flowed from the side of a craggy ridge at the north end of the valley. Icy water seeped from a gaping wound in the slope, wore a furrow in the topsoil, and broadened into a creek about as wide as a young man could leap. The creek followed a course parallel to the bordering hills and meandered out into a mead-ow of yellow buffalo grass before it petered out a few miles from its source.

The Scalpdancers, a Blackfoot tribe numbering about one hundred seventy families, had settled their village against the northern ridge close to the spring. Under attack, the men, women, and children could flee upslope to the safety of the pine forest and higher still to the natural battlements of weathered granite ranging the length of the ridge like the exposed spine of some massive primordial beast.

Sometimes it is the sound rather than the sight of home one remembers most, the wonderful country longed for in the solitude of lonely odysseys. For Lost Eyes, home meant the bubbling of the spring that nourished Elkhorn Creek and the noises of children among the circle of tepees in the Blackfoot village.

Horses, grazing along the creek, whickered as the hunter approached on his gray. Boys afield laughed and challenged one another and fired their small bows at an escaping ground squirrel. Women sang as they gathered roots, carried water from the creek, or cooked. The faint rasp of scraping knives on drying deer hides lingered in the air, mingled with.the creek's own rippling music and a chorus of barking dogs announcing the arrival of Lost Eyes as he paused on the edge of the village.

For a moment the scene held, one of those brief fractions of a second when the sun seemed to pause in its westward trek, and a wondrous sense of peace filled Lost Eyes' heart.

Then the reality of his world intruded upon his thoughts: He was a man without a vision, and homecoming was not always a time of joy.

Several braves rode out from the village at a gallop, renting the stillness with their wild cries. They would have made a threatening sight to an enemy. Lost Eyes only smiled; he knew them all by name. They were youths on the verge of manhood, their heads already full of glorious deeds and daring days to come. Their enthusiasm faded as they saw Lost Eyes not only led a packhorse laden with meat but a second horse bearing a dead man. Three of the Blackfeet immediately took up a position behind the travois, forming a makeshift guard of honor for the dead man.

As old men and women, girls and boys, paused to watch, Lost Eyes rode straight toward the cluster of tepees adorned with the arrow markings of the Bowstring Clan.

Fool Deer, the father of Waiting Horse, saw the travois and recognized his son's horse. He stood; a shaft of wood and a stone tool used for straightening the shaft fell from his grasp. His wife, Many Walks Woman, rounded the lodge. She had been bathing with her sisters, and her shiny black hair was plastered to her skull. She entered laughing at some tidbit of gossip her sisters had just revealed, but the merriment ended abruptly and her brown eyes widened with astonishment.

Lost Eyes dropped the reins of the packhorse and then reverently handed the reins of the travois horse to Fool Deer. He was a good-natured man, but in this hour his demeanor was as formidable as a thunderhead.

Many Walks Woman ran to the travois; a stifled cry escaped her as she sank alongside the blanket-wrapped remains of her son. Her sisters, Berry and Dancing Creek, had already begun a lilting wail, a chant soon picked up by other wives of the Bowstring men.

“The meat is yours,” Lost Eyes told Fool Deer in a gentle voice. “Your son has given his life that our people might have food.”

Fool Deer glanced silently at the packhorse and then back at the man who had brought his son home. Fool Deer's expression revealed his black thoughts: A man without vision brings misfortune. It had happened before; it would happen again.

“My son rides with the Above Ones,” Fool Deer said in a hollow voice. “But who, Lost Eyes, will ride with you?”

Beat the drums for me. Play softly the ceremonial drums and face the four winds. And sing for me, Sparrow. Keep within me, and keep me in your heart. I will play upon my flute. I will call you out into the night. I will open my blanket to you, that we might stand together in the night, beneath the glimmering camp fires of the Above Ones
.

Breathe the warmth. It flows around me, through me
.
Sweat stings my eyes and I am blind. No matter. What I seek lies within. Like dreams. Like Sparrow
.

Lost Eyes rested on his bulrush bedding, his spine against a willow backrest, and watched Moon Shadow, his aunt, move her ungainly form about the lodge. Lost Eyes' mother had died in childbirth; his father had fallen to a Crow lance three years ago during a retaliatory raid against the traditional enemies of the Blackfeet. Moon Shadow was the only mother Lost Eyes had ever known. It was said that she had been taken to wife once long ago, and that her husband had been a cruel, ill-tempered man who had whipped her unmercifully. The people of the village had little tolerance for such behavior. The husband was eventually driven out, but Moon Shadow chose to live in the lodge of her deceased sister and care for the motherless boy.

Moon Shadow sang softly to herself as she brought Lost Eyes a rawhide bowl of boiled venison. Rolls of fat hung from her arms, and perspiration streaked her round, flat face. Her hair, streaked with silver, hung in two thick braids that rested on her immense bosom.

“Eat,” she said as if to a little boy. “I will bring you more.”

“There is only one of me,” Lost Eyes chided gently. “This will do.”

“A scrawny one at that,” Moon Shadow observed dryly. “Even the village mongrels do a better job of hiding their ribs.” She handed him a spoon carved from bone.

Lost Eyes scooped out a morsel of meat and dropped it into the small sacred fire that burned in the center of the tepee. By such an offering he hoped to please the All-Father. He took a pinch of cedar and elkmint and crushed bitterroot and sprinkled it onto the flames, completing the customary ritual. Then, with stomach growling, he devoured his meal while Moon Shadow, from her bedding across the lodge, looked on with pleasure. She was as sorry as anyone for the death of Waiting Horse. But she had seen enough of life to accept the inevitable. She was grateful that her son, Lost Eyes, had returned safely.

Sunset painted granite peaks crimson, gold, and deep purple, and left a flourish of clouds that lingered until the first stars glimmered on dusk's dark canvas.

Lost Eyes brushed aside the entrance flap and stepped out into the dying light. He watched the colors fade into night and felt the air grow chill as the earth released what little warmth it had harbored throughout the day. Moon Shadow came out and sat near the remains of the cook fire, banking the coals, then moving a tanning rack nearer to the embers, where the deerskin on the frame might dry a little more quickly. She took a stone scraper and worked the hide one more time. She would repeat the process come morning.

“That will make a good quiver for my arrows,” Lost Eyes said.

“
Saaa-vaa
,” Moon Shadow retorted. “Moccasins for my feet, selfish one.”

A shadow detached itself from a nearby tepee and moved toward the sound of their conversation. The mongrel approached, head down, ready for the first stone hurled in its direction. Moon Shadow tossed a strip of dried meat toward the dog. The animal quickly gobbled up her gift and came forward, tail wagging and licking its snaggy chops.

“You always have some gift to offer us homeless pups,” Lost Eyes remarked affectionately. The dog took a second tidbit and then happily scampered away.

“Always the same thanks. You take what I have and abandon me.” There was self-pity in her voice. Moon Shadow knew very well where he was bound in the night.

“I always return, my mother.” Lost Eyes pulled his pelt blanket around his shoulders and in so doing dropped a small reed flute he'd hidden inside his shirt. It was a slim little instrument, only six inches long, that he had carved himself. He sheepishly retrieved the flute. Taking care to avoid Moon Shadow's omniscient stare, he hurried from the lodge and walked out to the perimeter of the village.

He circled the encampment and entered from the north, passing among the tepees of the Kit Fox Society, whose members were always first in battle. Black Fox's tepee was near the center of the circle, for he had risen in prominence over the past few years and it was said he would one day sit in council as a chief of the Kit Fox Society.

But tonight, Black Fox was elsewhere. The proud warrior had a beautiful sister named Sparrow whom Lost Eyes was determined to visit. It was dark when he reached her lodge. Across the village, ceremonial drums had begun to sound a low, steady throb, and voices, in unison, sang the song of the dead. Yet Lost Eyes had chosen to stand in the night and play upon his flute for life and love.

Inside the tepee, Yellow Stalk, the woman of Black Fox, placed a restraining hand upon her sister-in-law's arm. “Sparrow, you mustn't.” The music of the flute drifted through the hide walls. A series of trilling notes came as rapidly as a bee darting among bitterroot blossoms, then slowed and became more lyrical and enticing.

Sparrow, at sixteen, was ripe like a wild plum, ready to be picked and savored. She was small boned but strong and quick, as strong willed and stubborn as her brother, and like a small bird she endured by being deft and observant. Sparrow wore her hair braided and adorned with clay beads and braid holders of brushed buckskin and porcupine quills. She wore a deerskin dress and calf-high moccasins, a gift from Yellow Stalk.

The wife of Black Fox was older by three years. Yellow Stalk had plain, square features that a smile transformed into a countenance of genuine beauty. She wore a buck skin smock that snugly covered her swollen abdomen, revealing her fourth month of pregnancy.

In truth, Black Fox's wife had been nothing but kind since Sparrow had joined her brother last autumn. The Blackfoot villages scattered among the northern Rockies gathered once a year, during the time of the Leaves Falling Moon, to renew ties, to tell stories, and to sing the sacred songs. Black Fox had met his wife at such a gathering several years ago and, finding Elkhorn Creek to his liking, had remained among Yellow Stalk's people. Sparrow had merely intended to visit her brother but prolonged her stay throughout the hard wintry months. The village of the Buffalo Grass People, where she had lived, lay farther east, out on the plains. Sparrow preferred the natural windbreak offered by the surrounding mountains. To the north and west lay Ever Shadow, where the terrain became even more upthrust and crisscrossed with rugged glacier-scoured passes: There the
Maiyun
, the Spirit Ones, sang in the lost wind and wandered the high lonesome. The flute song beckoned Sparrow like the voices of the
Maiyun
.