The Owl Hunt (34 page)

Now the agency loomed ahead, on a tributary called Rosebud Creek, set in an idyllic place untouched by the outside world, or so it seemed.

They reached the agency, a two-story log building built in haste, and there a lean young Crow with an imperial gaze waited, his focus entirely on the old woman in the wagon.

He was a stranger, and yet she seemed to know who he was, and when he offered her his hand as she alighted, she seemed almost shy.

The Stars and Stripes cracked and snapped on the stockade's staff as Many Quill Woman reached the hard clay, and stared at this rough settlement of log buildings, adobe structures, and lodges, many with smoke streaming horizontally from them.

“I am Aleek-chea-ahoosh,” he said. “Plenty Coups.”

Victoria was being welcomed by the chief.

thirty-nine

It was so good to hear Absaroka words. Victoria huddled on the wagon seat, shivering in her thin blanket, hearing the words she had thirsted for all those years on the Wind River Reservation. Now the words rose up around her, words out of her childhood, the drawn-out words, the abrupt words, the words that only an Absaroka could understand perfectly. She shivered in the flood of words.

Now she was meeting the young chief of the Mountain Crows, as white men called them. Plenty Coups was his name, and she had heard of him, and perhaps had seen him as a boy long before, when she and Skye had lived among the People. Yes, she had seen this tall boy, who had become a great warrior, had counted so many coups people had lost track, and who had received so many visions that the Absaroka people revered him for being a seer as well as a warrior and now a leader.

This place on the Sweetwater, it was a strange place for the Absaroka people to be as winter came. This was foothill country, and it would soon be engulfed in snow, just when the People should be farther down onto the prairies, wintering in river bottoms where there would be plenty of cottonwood to fuel the lodge fires.

But here they were, in a rude place where the white men were erecting an earthen stockade and throwing up log houses, including the two-story one that housed the Crow Agency. There weren't many of the People in sight, she thought, but her eyesight was bad, and so was her hearing, and she was shivering in her blankets as the Absaroka words flooded over her like summer sunshine.

“Many Quill Woman, we rejoice. We have wondered how you and the beloved friend I cannot name were doing, so far away,” the young chief was saying. “We heard he had left us, but we had no word of you, and now we rejoice to see you.”

“The one we cannot name lies in a graveyard beside his younger wife,” Victoria said, adhering to the forms. The dead could not be named, for it would violate their spirits.

“And what of my brother Arrow and his family?” she asked. “I should like to see them while I can.”

“Ah, Many Quill Woman, the one of whom you speak…”

She knew then that Arrow, too, was gone from this world.

“That one is walking the star path, and so is his woman, but his children live and will be pleased to see you.”

Eight winters had passed since she had been among the People, and now she was acutely aware that life and death had continued their cycle, and that she had missed much of the affairs of her people.

“But Grandmother, I see you are shivering in this cold. It would please me if you and your son, the son of our friend who lived among us for so long, would come to my lodge, which is that one.” He pointed to a square log cabin with smoke curling up from a stovepipe.

“Come. Bring the wagon. The horse will be taken care of. I will give the word.”

“We would be pleased to,” said Dirk.

The young chief helped Many Quill Woman off the wagon and onto the frozen ground, where cold seemed to come up through her moccasins and made her feet numb. At the door stood a young Absaroka woman in cloth skirts, and a doeskin tunic covering her upper body.

“Grandmother, this is my woman, Strikes the Iron,” the chief said. “And this is Many Quill Woman, wife of the man who fought beside the People and protected the People and gave to the People, who lies among the Shoshones now.”

Strikes the Iron smiled brightly and ushered Victoria inside, where her shivering slowed a little, but was not conquered by the heat from the cast-iron stove. This was a dark and damp place, not like a good buffalo-hide lodge, with its winter lining up and dozens of thick robes on the ground to stay the cold rising out of the earth.

The world had changed, she thought. A huddle of log buildings, an earthen stockade for the soldiers, and when the snows came, a sorrow of cold. She remembered happier times, when the People collected in great lodges warmed plentifully by tiny fires, to tell stories, to hear the seers and keepers tell of where the People came from, and to hear of all the things that happened in the winters of the past. And to play games, and flirt, and sing, and tell funny stories, and gossip.

Still, here were the chief and his woman, making her comfortable. And Dirk, too, who had not a drop of Absaroka blood in him, but was made as welcome as a son of the People. They did not have robes on the ground here, and they sat on benches around the sides of the wooden lodge, which doubled as beds at night. The earth was covered with the split logs known to white men as puncheons, and these things were not as good, and they slowed the conversation because people were too far apart, and it was hard to hear. But of all this she kept quiet, for the flow of words over her was Absaroka, and the honey of her tongue caught in her head and lifted her spirits, so that her heart was full of joy.

She huddled on a bench with her blanket tightly about her, her dim gaze upon the young chief, who was dressed in white men's clothing, his hair in braids, his eyes watching her with affection. Soon Strikes the Iron placed tea before her, and she sipped, hoping to warm her body, but her body was too light, lighter than a feather, and tea brought no heat to it.

The chief remembered her husband, whose name could not be said here, as the Englishman who helped the People fend off the Siksika and the Lakota and the Cheyenne; who came to live among the People, and shared their fate, and employed his big Sharps rifle on the buffalo hunts so all might have meat.

And then, as word of her arrival swept the Absaroka people, Victoria's clan and kin began to knock on the door, but these were mostly children and grandchildren of people she remembered, boys and girls she barely knew, except for the names of their elders. Here was a grandchild of Walks Backward, and a boy born of Ridge Walker, and a baby, scarcely a few weeks old, born of a son of the brother whose name she could not utter. And these were presented to her as gifts, the young people of her tribe, the clan sisters and clan brothers, where her blood ran in other veins.

They came, tapped on the door, and Strikes the Iron opened it to still more, until the log house was jammed with Absaroka people, who had come from miles around to catch a glimpse of Mr. Skye's wife, the old medicine woman of the Absaroka people who had traveled and fought where no other Absaroka had ever gone.

She stared at them dimly, for her eyes were poor, but she could still hear the tongue given her at birth, and she listened carefully to these people, and to the young chief, who introduced each young Absaroka to the great grandmother they had known only in story and legend.

The light faded, and Plenty Coups took each visitor to the door and then they disappeared into the twilight, and soon the chief's cabin was as quiet as it had been when she first stepped in. She had seen her People. She had not expected ever to see them again. But here she was, among them, and she had seen them with her own eyes, and heard them speak her own tongue, and she was glad. She belonged to them, and all the time with Skye had not dimmed her belonging to the Absaroka, the people of the large-beaked bird that white men had mistranslated into crow.

It was cold in the room, but the others didn't seem to notice it.

“You will stay with me,” the chief said. “We will make good robe beds and you will be warm.”

She didn't think she would ever be warm, but she nodded.

This cabin was something like a lodge, with shelf seating and bedding around the periphery, and a stove in the middle. She wanted a lodge. She wanted a Crow village outside this door, with the lodges raised in an orderly half-circle, their doors facing east, with just the right amount of space between each lodge, enough to give each lodge its own privacy, but in the midst of neighbors and all the People. But now there were scattered cabins, and no villages at all.

Still, this was home; she had returned, like a lost child finding her family. She was among the speakers of her tongue, and that made her giddy and light-headed and her body was weightless.

She learned many things about the first Crow Agency on Mission Creek, and how it was windy and white men didn't like the wind, and how gold had been the excuse to drive the Absaroka people east, which they didn't mind because they were closer to the sacred buffalo out on the plains. So they were here, learning to farm and raise stock in a place where farming was no good and the white men didn't plant anything.

Still, she had returned, and felt light, and that was what mattered most. In the morning at first light she would go outside to welcome Father Sun and raise her old arms to the great blessing of the day.

“Grandmother, you're nodding. We will prepare the robes for you,” Plenty Coups said, and instantly Strikes the Iron piled smooth, rich buffalo robes on the shelf to the right of the door, the place of honor in this wooden lodge, and Many Quill Woman was soon tucked in, a small sweet smile pursing her lips.

She drifted into a light sleep, and found herself in the midst of flower-strewn dreams.

She was a beautiful girl, one her mother had pridefully dressed in softest and whitest doeskin, and she was sitting on a sunny ridge watching a tiny rattlesnake as it watched her. A bold magpie lit on her lap and began chattering, and that stirred the tiny snake to coil itself. The magpie enjoyed the event, chattering happily, and when the snake struck, the magpie pecked it, and the snake slid away. She laughed, and the magpie pecked her hand delicately, and whirred away. That was delightful.

She grew in beauty, and her family knew it, and she was often dressed in quilled doeskin, and her hair was combed until it glowed, and sometimes braided and tied with red ribbons. She lived in a time of flowers, and wherever the People went, they were surrounded by flowers. In the summer, there were alpine flowers; in the fall, out on the plains, there were fall flowers and bushes burning with berries waiting to be plucked and mixed with meat to make pemmican.

The boys noticed and shyly watched her as she bloomed, and she knew they were thinking of taking her into their own lodges when the time came, and some of them contrived to talk to her when she was fetching water, and some played a flute or left small gifts at the lodge door, and her parents knew that soon most of the boys among the Kicked-in-the-Bellies would come to the lodge, bearing gifts, their eyes burning.

But then one day she felt a strange calling in her breast, and she told her mother she would go away to the place of visions, where boys often went, to await with prayer and fasting whatever had been ordained. She went only with a small robe, and lay quietly watching the night skies, which were alive with falling stars, and she felt confused. Why was she there, all alone, in the vastness of the night? But dawn came, salmon in the east, and with it a flock of magpies, silent on wing, hushed instead of noisy, serene instead of agitated. They were herky-jerky birds with a waddle that made them awkward, yet she knew at once that she, the beautiful Absaroka daughter, would be given both a spirit helper all her days, and a mission.

She had lain quietly in the dawn light, feeling the sun's rays paint her, and all the magpies—more than she could count—settled close to her, and she was given to know things; she would lead a most unusual life and would not be given in marriage to any boy, but to someone who would be a great mystery. The magpies would give her medicine powers. She would be a medicine woman, with an inner knowledge of other mortals, and the power to heal and prophesy. And the magpies would be her protectors, for so long as she never lifted a hand against them, or her People, or the innocent.

She took that great vision back to her village, and told it to the elders, and they purified her with sweetgrass smoke, and became a woman set apart.

She waited for the next dream to come, because there were many flowers in it, strange flowers she had never seen, flowers from far-away places, with names she didn't know. She knew this dream would be about the man she had wed, the strange one both fierce and tender, who had strange notions, and who loved her in some way so beautiful it was unfathomable to her, and she loved him back in the same manner, even as she continued to heal and prophesy, and to fight, for she had become a warrior woman, fearless, skilled with bow and rifle, beside this strange man. Now the petals were falling, drifting like a spring shower out of the heavens, and she saw no magpies at all. She wanted to dream about this man, and remember his face, and remember how it was when he held her in his arms, but her dream would not take her there, to the sacred places, and she began only to feel cold, first a little chill, and then very cold, and the petals stopped falling out of the blue sky, and then the dream stopped, and she could dream no more.

forty

She was gone. The dream keepers came for her, and now she was a weightless husk. Her spirit had been the heaviest thing within that ancient frame. She lay serenely in her robe, very still. Dirk stood beside the shelf bed, suddenly brimming with loss.

Strikes the Iron had found her thus, and summoned Plenty Coups, even while Dirk slept, and then they had awakened him in the rose dawn of a clear December day. He absorbed her absence. She was on her way. The star trail would take her some imaginable distance away.