The Owl Hunt (30 page)

Where had the Dreamers taken the body of Owl? Surely to some secret place well hidden from the eyes of white men. And what would they do with it? And what would they think about it? Every one of them had heard Owl's prophesy: when Owl began his Long Walk, then would the white men be filled with doubt and they would leave.

Would the body be placed in a sepulcher, like the body of Christ? Would it vanish, its whereabouts known only to a few beloved brethren? Dirk ransacked all that he knew of his mother's People, and couldn't say. But he felt sure the final resting place of the boy, forever known as Owl, would be kept utterly secret, and utterly sacred.

He would write the men in Washington City about food—or the lack of it. And how the agent kept the People imprisoned; they could not leave the reservation to hunt without special permission, and that permission was rarely forthcoming. The People needed meat. And he would write about a tribal herd of cattle, one that could supply the People with meat each month once it was built up. And about the theft of pasture and cattle by surrounding ranchers, and about the bitter reality that little was done about it, and the People suffered.

Yes, it was time to write about that. Owl's death had stirred not only the Dreamers to dream again, but it stirred Dirk to do what he must to better things on the reservation, no matter what the risk. So he settled down at his desk, nib pen in hand, and addressed his first letter—there would be many, he thought—to the commissioner in distant Washington.

Dear Sir
—

A clatter on the steps halted that. He discovered Agnes Throw Dog, one of the clerks over at the agency.

“The major, he wants you quick,” she said.

“I'll be along.”

She stared at him, as if she were privy to something bad.

“He's lit a cigar,” she said.

That was bad. Whenever the agent fired up, things were bad.

She fled, and he watched her hurry through a gloomy morning and vanish into the agency. He had never been sure of Agnes's office over there, and suspected there wasn't any.

He stoppered his ink and set aside his letters. There would be time for all those, and he wanted to weigh carefully every word he set to paper.

Somehow, he didn't like this. He pulled a coat over his stocky frame, and plunged into the cold, reaching the agency moments later. The agent was waiting, his cigar chomped at one end and pointing upward at the other.

“Sit, Skye,” he said. “There's bad news for you. The bureau's canceling your teaching contract. You're done.”

He hadn't seen it coming. He thought he had done a good job. It hit him right in the heart.

“Out? But why?”

“Well, they think you're not adequate.”

“But why?”

The agent smiled slightly. “You know as well as the rest of the world that you've hardly advanced a student. You haven't put a single student though. The whole lot are as dumb as the day you opened your doors.”

Heat built in him. The school had no boardinghouse. “That's not the reason, Major.”

“It's one of the reasons. Young man, you've got a lot going against you, and the bureau thought to do something about it.”

“Such as, sir?”

Van Horne sucked hard on his cheroot, until its end glowed orange and crackled.

“You weren't following our goals, boy. You're supposed to be giving 'em a white man's education. You're supposed to be turning them into farmers and ranchers—and believers in what we believe in: democracy, religion, the United States of America.” He eyed Dirk. “Some think you're not even a citizen, not even a true-blue Yankee.”

“Half-Indian?”

“Well, no redskin's a citizen, you know. And you're no more than half of one, and your pa, the Londoner, he switched pretty near at the end of his life. So, no, boy, you weren't in there promoting the best interests of the Indian Bureau.”

“Then why was I hired?”

“Favor to your old man, I imagine.”

“Who—”

“Wires have been heating up twixt Fort Laramie and Washington City for some while, boy.”

That was as much an admission as he would get out of Van Horne.

“Was this because I schooled Waiting Wolf—who turned himself into Owl?”

“That came up, yessiree.”

“Owl's vision was peaceful, sir.”

Van Horne's cheroot wiggled violently.

“He started a coup. That little brat was fixing to overthrow the government of the United States, and it was pure luck that we caught him in time.”

“Caught him? He walked through your door.”

Van Horne straightened. “I'm not here to quibble, Skye. Pack up. You've got forty-eight hours.”

“To go where?”

“You're an enrolled Shoshone, but that don't mean I'll hand out chow to you. Next thing I know, there'd be another rebellion around here. You'd be the next lightning rod, Skye. You and that old crone, you fetch yourself out of here and don't come back. I'll take the schoolhouse key right now.”

Dirk handed it to him.

“And don't go in there. Leave the records.”

Dirk stood, shaken. His world had collapsed.

“You have some cash of mine in the agency safe, sir.”

Wordlessly, Van Horne opened the black enameled strongbox and handed Dirk his greenbacks, the paltry savings from years of teaching Shoshone children. It didn't come to much, but any cash would help him now.

Then, oddly, Van Horne relented a little. “You'll need to take the old woman off. She can enroll up at Crow Agency. I imagine they'd put her on. She's a card, Skye.”

Dirk rose, nodded, and stepped into a different world. The only home he'd had since his schooling in St. Louis was no longer a home. His mother's people were suddenly beyond his reach. His uncles and cousins were severed from him. His mother's grave and his father's grave would no longer be near.

A fierce heat stole through him. This was not about teaching. This was about the other things, and especially about Owl, and that dream of a world restored to his People, the world they dreamed of. Dirk knew what it was. His dark skin, his mother's cheekbones, his mother's ways and beliefs. They had hanged Owl and cashiered the half-blood young man who had once schooled the youth who had started the People to dreaming.

And now young Skye would merely be frontier riffraff, the same as a thousand other breeds, a man who would swiftly be forgotten.

It was a chill November day. He stepped into a different world, and crossed to the house he shared with his Crow mother, wondering what she would think, and what they would do and where they would go, and whether she could survive a long cold trip. It would soon be December, and she was as ancient and frail as papyrus.

thirty-five

Never had Dirk spent so restless a night, one haunted by dreams, regrets, loss, and mysterious terrors that lay beyond any reason he could summon. Several times he rose, peered into a misty night, swore he heard whole ghostly choruses singing, and then tumbled into his bed no more comforted than before he rose.

His old Crow mother had simply smiled at the news that Dirk was no longer the reservation's schoolmaster. Sometimes he didn't fathom her, and he thought she was getting a little daft. But her eyes were always keen, her comments often sharp, and he sometimes thought she was simply strange.

“Now we are free, North Star,” she told him.

“Free and penniless,” he replied.

“Many lodges would welcome us.”

But these night phantasms that were discomfiting him as he lay wrapped in his blanket were a wolf howl rising out of his Shoshone roots, and not his English ones. He could see nothing amiss outside. A cloud cover obscured even starlight, and there was nothing in the walls of black outside his windows to suggest unrest.

He was annoyed with himself. He wanted to be a modern white man but his Shoshone blood spoke to him of other, older, things. The chasm went deep. Aphrodite had seen it, but he didn't think anyone else had.

With the quickening of light piercing the overcast, the restlessness outside quickened, too, and he resolved to dress and patrol the agency, because there was something, a force or spirit, alive there. He poured water into a bowl and splashed his face and wiped it with a towel, and that would suffice. He hurried into his cord britches and a green woolen shirt, and then into the soft moccasins he usually preferred to white men's shoes, and opened the door.

It was hard to see what was seething there, small movement all across the agency commons, things disordered, out of place, wrong. He peered into the murk and discovered that the agency swarmed with people. He saw entire families, grandparents, mothers, fathers, infants. He saw old couples sitting side by side on blankets. He saw young men congregated into silent cohorts. There were women collecting in knots, settling on cold clay. The air was so chill that their breaths were visible. Old ones wrapped themselves tightly in striped blankets. No fire warmed these people, and for a while Dirk could not fathom why they were present.

These people were not chattering, not shouting, not engaged in activities such as cooking or fire building or raising lodges. They were waiting, waiting, waiting, their gazes shifting from the agency buildings to the distant Fort Washakie. They were calm and yet expectant. They studied Dirk as he stood in his doorway, but mostly they watched the fort, and Van Horne's darkened house. As the light quickened, so did these people, and they moved about for warmth. Dirk thought there might be two hundred of them, a significant portion of the Eastern Shoshone people, and they were waiting for this momentous day.

Waiting for what Owl had said would come upon his death. They were waiting for the white men to pack up and leave, for that was what the young prophet had announced would come to them now. The prophet had been sacrificed; now the great exodus of the whites would begin. If not this hour, or even this day, it would be very soon. And they would be witnesses.

Dirk watched, absorbed. These were people with their own vision of heaven before them. Had not this vision come from the most sacred source, the Gray Owl, speaking clearly to the boy who had taken the bird's name? These people would wait, and wait, and wait. They would wait through this day, maybe the next, maybe the day after that, until cruel reality sent them back to their camps and settlements.

By some means, they had gotten Owl's word, and the word was that this would be the great day, and so they had filtered into the agency all through the night, and that was what had made Dirk's night so restless. The Shoshone nation had arrived. There seemed to be almost a physical force in their presence, as if hundreds of hearts and minds were all focused on the inevitable. There was something grand in this, for he was witnessing the fruits of faith. Some of these people had come a dozen or more miles through the darkness to greet this special day in this sacred place. This would be a sacred day, the most holy day in all the history of the People, and now they were waiting for this magical thing to begin. They were not dancing, nor singing, nor shouting. Instead, they were spectators, gathered to witness a change in their world.

For a moment, he wondered whether it would all come true; the soldiers and agent would go away, their lives fallowed. There had been mysterious power in Owl's prophesy, which tugged at Dirk's soul. But he knew that would not happen. He wondered whether he should walk among these spectators, he who was half-white and half-Indian, and perhaps caution them. He decided not to. As the day wore on, they would see for themselves that the soldiers were not packing up, and the agent was not loading his worldly goods in his wagon and driving away. Let them see the white men living their daily lives, and maybe then the People would drift to their villages.

Still, this was a large crowd and a volatile one, and he sensed there could be trouble. So he wandered through the multitudes, addressing many by name, greeting them kindly. Here was Elk Hoof. There was old Feather Falling. Here were the families of the Dreamers, those who had dreamed and danced, and whose beliefs had spread among their kin. Here were watchful young men, thinking of good times ahead.

They were waiting for the dawn. When Father Sun came, their world would shine.

“Skye!” yelled Van Horne, who was standing on his front stoop. “What's this? Come here.”

The agent, dressed in a gray woolen robe, stood barefoot on his porch, astonished at the throng spread across the agency commons.

Dirk hurried to the man who had fired him.

“What is this? I demand to know what this is. An insurrection?”

“They're waiting for the sun, sir.”

“Why? Why?”

Dirk wondered whether he could even explain this event to this alarmed man.

“They are waiting for their world to be restored, sir.”

“Restored? Make some sense, Skye. None of your mysterious red superstitions!”

By now, the throng was ignoring Major Van Horne, and staring eastward at a pink streak across the horizon, heralding the arrival of Father Sun.

“They believe the prophet, sir. That's all there is to it.”

“Is this a rebellion?”

“Look closely, Major. Do you see warriors? Do you see bows and lances and rifles? No, you see families. You see old men and children.”

“They could have arms hidden in their blankets, Skye.”

“I suppose they could. Maybe the children have Gatling guns in theirs.”

“Which side are you on, Skye?”

There it was again.

“I will be leaving tomorrow morning,” Dirk said.

“Tell them to disperse, and right now.”

“They are doing no harm. By nightfall, they will leave on their own. When they see that Owl's vision wasn't true they'll quietly go back to their lodges.”

“I want them out of here right now.”

“Tell them yourself, sir.”

“I'll put it in your record that you've defied me, Skye.”