The Owl Hunt (12 page)

Still, some blood would be shed, so he did not discourage any Dreamer preparing himself to do battle with the soldiers. He wished he had a weapon of his own, but none had come to him. He glided from group to group, and was always greeted as the salvation of the People, and that is how he saw himself.

The Dreamers had received a new dance, and now they danced it each night, often in utter darkness when it was far more engrossing than by the light of a fire. The Dreamers danced the Owl Dance, in which they glided silently, arms outstretched, not in a circle but each Dreamer on his own path, gliding without noise but for the thump of a single drum. It was the quietest dance anyone had ever known, so quiet that a pounding heart seemed noisier. The Dreamers glided through the evenings, immersing themselves in owl medicine, sometimes led by Owl himself, sometimes not. For it was night vision that the youth sought, this Waiting Wolf who now was a spiritual force among the People. Often at night he glided upward to the snow fields and made his vision bed upon a shelf of rotting ice, there to listen to the spirits. The Dreamers said that Owl returned to camp transformed, some mysterious force radiating from him after he had opened himself to the Other Ones who ran the highest ridges.

Owl knew where the teacher, Dirk Skye, and the sergeant would camp. He did not know how he knew; it was simply one of the mysterious powers he had acquired when the most dreaded of all creatures inhabited Waiting Wolf. The teacher and the soldier would invite eight or ten headmen to the meeting this day, and tomorrow would invite the rest, and return to the agency. But this night they would camp about two hours away by horseback.

He would greet them.

He found the swiftest horse among those herded by the Dreamers, slipped a hackamore on it, glided to its back, and steered it away from camp. A few Dreamers stared, but Owl's lonely and mysterious trips were familiar to them all. Owl was forever communing with his spirit guides, and often left camp on his spiritual voyages. But this time Owl did not ride toward the great ridges and snow-choked chasms, but down from the hanging valley and then along a tumbling creek, and finally into the broad valley of the Wind River. He saw no one. His fine horse glided, even as Owl glided, and they covered much ground. He came to the place his inner eye had told him to come to, and found no one there. Unfazed, he picketed his pony and sat quietly. It was a good place to camp, and many before him had sojourned there, where grass for the ponies lay thick, and no mosquitos buzzed, and a fire could be hidden in a shallow drainage, and the wind didn't whip.

So he waited patiently as twilight stretched toward darkness, and then his guests arrived just as he had foreseen. He stood quietly, letting them spot him and his pony. The blue-shirt was instantly alarmed, but Dirk Skye simply stared, saw a young Shoshone wearing only a loincloth and moccasins, unarmed, standing quietly in the blue last-light of the day.

“Who greets us here?” Skye asked in the Shoshone tongue.

Owl did not reply. Let Skye name him.

The sergeant trailed along behind Skye, his hand ready to draw a sidearm, but even the sergeant could see Owl had no weapon and was not dangerous in the slightest.

“You,” Skye said, finally recognizing the youth. “Waiting Wolf, is it?”

“The name you have spoken you must not speak, for he is no longer alive,” Owl said.

“Owl, then. I am pleased to see you. This is Sergeant Muggins, and we're on an errand for Major Van Horne.”

“Yes, you are asking all the headmen to meet, so that something will be done about Owl and the Dreamers.”

“You are well informed. Would you join us while we make camp and cook a meal?”

“Owl will join you. And how shall I call you? North Star, the name given you by your mother?”

“My mothers called me North Star; my father called me Dirk. I have taken that as my way. I am pleased when my mother's people call me North Star,” Dirk said, staying with the Shoshone tongue.

The sergeant set himself to picketing the horses and making camp once it became plain there was little to worry about.

“I will call you Dirk,” said Owl.

The teacher glanced sharply at him. “You've come here to tell me something. Or to give me a message to take to the Indian agent.”

“Owl sees many things. He sees a column of soldiers coming from Fort Laramie. He sees many soldiers at this meeting of the headmen and the agent. He sees that the white men are afraid of Owl and the dreaming, so afraid they would stop at nothing. Many Shoshone would die from their bullets. This is what Owl sees.”

Skye stared pensively at the small blaze that Muggins had kindled. “It's not fear,” he said. “For them, an owl is not something to fear. It is a night-bird, nothing more. Some white men think the owl is very wise. But no one dreads it.”

Owl smiled. “An owl feather is left with missionaries. An owl feather is left with others. And the white men summon the army.”

“An owl arrow struck wood near me,” Skye said. “It was not meant to kill me.”

“Owl is a thief. Owl will steal what is in the heart of white men.”

“What are you saying?”

“Owl will steal the souls of white men. That is why they are so afraid. That is why a hundred more soldiers are marching. That is why Major Van Horne and Captain Cinnabar would like to catch me and put me in a prison and keep me from the People, and stamp out the Dreamers.”

“I'm not following you at all, Owl.”

Owl felt annoyed. There was too much white blood in this fool. “Owl glides quietly and pounces on its prey. The white men take the land and open the earth and plant grain and run cattle over the land and drive other people off the land and pen us up in reservations. That is their way. And then Owl comes and steals their spirit from them. They send an army and Owl steals their courage. They send missionaries and Owl steals their spirits and eats them. Owl steals the hearts from ranchers so they don't know why they run cattle. Owl steals the heart from farmers so they don't know why they plant. Owl glides through the times, in plain sight, and everything white men build and believe crumbles, because Owl has taken their souls from them.”

Dirk Skye was frowning. The soldier was trying to understand, and was having difficulty. Owl watched them closely. They did not know Owl, and did not know what the Dreamers saw, and now they sat beside the wavering flame not knowing anything that Owl was talking about.

“Why are the white men so afraid of Owl?” the young Shoshone asked. “They are strong and have many guns. But they are afraid of Owl because the Owl glides in the night and pounces on their spirits—ah, the word comes to me. Their souls. Those missionaries, they would know it best. Owl comes to steal their god, and soon they will see their god fail them, and when their god fails them, they will go away, and the army will go away, and the Indian agency will turn to dust, and the People will be a nation once again.”

That stupid Dirk Skye stared, without understanding.

“You are blinded, so Owl will show you how it will be,” he said.

Owl rose, walked to his pony, climbed onto it, and rode into the soft night.

fourteen

And then he was gone.

Muggins stared into the night. “I'll be damned,” he said.

Dirk intuitively backed away from the flickering firelight, fearing an arrow out of the dark. But none came.

There was something about that boy that tugged at him. But even more that bewildered him. What were the Dreamers dreaming? And what did they want?

“Tell me what you think, Sergeant,” he said.

“You was talking too fast for me to follow. Owl talk, and I don't know a beak from a tail feather.”

“It was about things of the heart.”

“He probably wanted to cut out my heart and eat it,” Muggins said. “We shoulda nabbed him, took him in.”

“For what?”

“Just for being himself, starting up a rebellion.”

“Has he killed or injured anyone?”

“You defending him?” Muggins asked.

“What has he killed, threatened, wounded, or destroyed?”

Muggins sighed. “He's gonna do it. We could've nabbed him and stopped it. If we took him with us, this whole Dreamer business would've gone the way of the passenger pigeon.”

“I'm a schoolteacher on an errand,” Dirk said.

“You'll have to explain it to Van Horne and Cinnabar,” Muggins said. “How you could've ended this whole uprising but didn't.”

“What has Owl done?” Dirk asked.

“He's—who cares? Catch him and we stop it.”

“Sergeant, do you really want to know what Owl wants? He's a missionary. He wants to enter us, pierce our hearts, toss out white man religion, and foster his own.”

“Missionary!”

“Do you think it's only white men, Christians, who collect souls?”

“Jaysas, Mary, and Joseph,” Muggins said.

Something in this tickled Dirk's humor, and he chuckled.

“We shoulda shot the little bastid,” Muggins said. “Now he's loose.”

“Owl is collecting souls. That's how I read the boy.”

“The boy's a witch, that's what. We should be drivin' a stake through his heart and burying him in a swamp, sez I.”

“Muggins, why?”

Muggins glared at Dirk. “Because I say so, is why.”

“No, I want a reason.”

“You're a half-blood, so you'd not know even if I told ye.”

Dirk marveled that the young Shoshone could evoke such malaise in white men. It was as if Owl had triggered every nightmare that could affect a white child in its crib.

The night passed peacefully, except for the time Dirk awoke to the hoot of an owl, bolted upright in his bedroll, and then settled into a fitful sleep. The next morning they forded the Wind River at a gravel bar and started east, planning to contact whatever Shoshone encampments lay on the north bank of the stream.

The reservation slumbered peacefully in the early sun, unchanged from time immemorial, as Skye and his military escort threaded their way toward the encampments. These were usually families or clans living as close to small game or berries or roots as they could, scratching food from a reluctant land to supplement the monthly flour allotments they received from the agency. In the decade of reservation life, little had changed. They still lived in lodges, but now that buffalo were no longer available, the ragged buffalo-hide lodges were being replaced by duck-cloth ones, which offered much less shelter against heat and cold, but did turn rain. Here and there were ragged garden patches, begun at the insistence of the white agents, who wanted the People to become farmers. But most had gone to weed for the want of cultivation and weeding, and yielded little to these hungry people.

The sight of them depressed Dirk. Shoshone men would not tend the fields, and it seemed that little would change until a new generation would replace those who clung to the old ways. The thought left him restless. The things that had made the People hunters and gatherers of roots and berries might never diminish, and then where would these people be? If they survived at all?

He and Muggins steered up a tributary creek tumbling from the Owl Creek Mountains, and found a desolate collection of patched leather lodges beside the creek, and people listlessly sunning themselves. These encampments exuded a sort of hopelessness, which was evident in the disorder, the middens of garbage, the stink of offal. The reservation life was tearing the soul out of the Shoshones, and the sight of these shabby camps pierced Dirk's heart.

Dirk and Muggins rode quietly into the place. No dogs greeted them. Every mutt had vanished into cookpots. These people looked gaunt. Dirk knew many of them. This was the Brother Otter Clan, and its headman would be Swimmer.

They found Swimmer readily enough. He lay on an ancient blanket, staring into space, in some sort of trance, ignored by his women. This autumnal day was chill, but he wore only his loincloth, and not even moccasins. No one in the encampment cared who came in or out; in times past visitors would have gathered a crowd of boys and girls, barking dogs, men and women collecting to greet the newcomers. It chilled Dirk to see the stupor and squalor.

Swimmer had been smoking. A pipe lay beside him, cold now, and Dirk wondered what weed the graying headman had burnt. There were some, he knew, that induced voyages of the soul, weeds that took a smoker to a distant place. The old healers of the People knew of them, or sometimes traded for them when tribes exchanged visits.

Swimmer, like most Shoshones, lacked facial hair, save for a small tuft between his lip and chin, and that was gray. One of the tribe's labels for white men was “hairy men,” because most white men had hair sprouting from their cheeks and chins. But hair was rare indeed on the faces of the People, and when it did occur it might grow from the face of either sex.

The headman stared upward for some while before he wrestled himself up.

“Greetings, Swimmer; it is a good day when we can see you,” Dirk said in the Shoshone tongue. We greet you, Father,” he said, adding the traditional words of respect for a tribal leader.

“Ah, you, eh? Well, you caught me listening to the spirits.”

“May we sit with you a while?” Dirk asked.

It would be impolite to get on with business, as white men did. It would take a while, one could almost call it a courtesy period, to get around to delivering the word from Indian Agent Van Horne.

One of Swimmer's women, as emaciated as he, brought gourds of water and set them before the guests. The old courtesies had not vanished among these people. She wore brown gingham, gotten from the agency as part of the allotments. Dirk knew that the People had almost nothing to fend off winter now. There was no leather for coats and skirts and shirts and moccasins because there was no game, and the People had no access to buffalo. So many of them wore layers of rags, there being nothing else.

“This is Sergeant Muggins, Father,” Dirk said. “He comes with me as we go to all the camps in the Shoshone home. He knows the tongue of the Comanches.”