The Owl Hunt (7 page)

Thaddeus Partridge stared.

“Sonofabitch,” said Victoria.

“What does your father think of that?” Amy Partridge said.

“I'm too busy serving him hand and foot to utter subversions,” Olive replied.

Dirk laughed, but no one else did.

The conversation ended on that note. Dirk intuited that he would enjoy a lot more of Miss Cinnabar's company.

Olive headed forcefully for her quarters, her gait willful, while the Partridges gathered up their tow-haired Bobolink, who was prowling the stables, and they drifted toward the distant white Episcopalian compound: a small clapboard church, a Montgomery Ward prefabricated vicarage, and a prefabricated sexton's cottage, occupied by God, or at least an imitation—an old man with a flowing beard, sandals, and a gray monk's habit. His name was Alfred, but Dirk didn't know anything else about him. He either lived in his own island of the mind, or else was mentally slow. He swept, dusted the plain pews, tended a garden, served as handyman, and squinted at the Shoshones from watery blue eyes. Some of the Shoshones were sure he was Jesus come to earth and the Partridges either didn't know that, or didn't discourage the idea.

If anything, that afternoon was sleepier than usual, and Dirk scarcely knew how to occupy his time. He was obliged to keep the school doors open, which meant being there, which meant that he occasionally spent hours reading whatever came to hand, which wasn't much, considering the remoteness of the agency. On some days he was reduced to reading tea leaves.

“Tonight Owl visits,” Victoria said at the supper hour.

“What do you mean?”

“Owl will come. You'll see.”

“How do you know that?”

“I'm a goddamn medicine woman.”

“What will happen?”

“Scare the hell out of white men.”

“Should I alert the post?”

She started cackling. She'd lost a couple of teeth, and now her wheezing whistled through the gaps. “Hell, boy, I like Owl,” she said.

The drumming began sometime around midnight, when the whole world was fast asleep. Dirk awakened with a start, something within him responding to the muffled thump of drums. He found himself fully awake instantly. Outside his window, the sky was dotted with stars, and a gibbous moon glowed—and yet it didn't. A curious cloud obscured it, darkening this place but not blocking its bold light on nearby fields and slopes. That was an odd cloud, and then Dirk was chilled by it. He swore it was an owl cloud, an owl with spread wings, glowing eyes, curved beak, its claws tucked under. And it hid the moon.

Dirk dressed swiftly, plunged into the parlor only to discover Victoria grinning, and then hastened into the night. The drumming rose to the east, beyond the military compound, somewhere near the Episcopal mission. He hurried that way alone. The drumming hadn't disturbed the post, or awakened the agent or his minions. The drumming hadn't even stirred Chief Washakie's house. But it was drumming nonetheless, and every little while the drums climaxed into a brief violence and then returned to the soft heartbeat that somehow choked the night.

The Dreamers.

Dirk hurried there, wherever they were, but could not see them, and began to question his senses. Surely the Dreamers were somewhere, collected together to drum, their urgent chanting soft and knife-edged in the peaceful night.

The Dreamers had collected here after the soldiers had marched. The Dreamers would disturb, maybe even terrify, this small collection of houses and buildings. The Dreamers would sing their dark message until they awakened this whole scattered community known as the Wind River Agency.

A part of Dirk responded to this night-song, which followed the rhythms of his heart and set his own Shoshone blood to singing. He felt an odd empathy toward Waiting Wolf, whose prophesies and visions had inspired this. This was a song of defiance, a song that cried out to all listeners. You are not welcome here. Leave our homeland. Give us our lives and ways and visions. Go away, white man, go away, with all your armies and churches and condescension.

He reached the mission and found the Partridges in their nightclothes on the porch, staring into the moonlit night. He didn't see the sexton. The drumming was clearer here but lay somewhere beyond this place, perhaps in a copse of cottonwoods down the slopes. The Partridges stared at Dirk but said nothing, and Dirk acknowledged them with a wave. He saw that Thaddeus had a fowling piece in hand. Dirk had nothing, wanted nothing, for he would not need to defend himself.

He pushed toward the cottonwoods, passed the first trees, which rose like sentries, and then into a small park where the brown grasses had been trampled. There was no one, no swift shadows. And the owl cloud had passed away.

eight

The moon cast a sickly light over the slumbering slopes, a lantern for Dirk Skye. He made his way back to the vicarage, where the Partridges huddled on the porch, she wrapped in a vast angora shawl, he in a greatcoat over his nightshirt, and Bobolink barefoot in a nightshirt.

“They're gone,” Dirk said.

“How do you know they won't come back?” Partridge asked.

“I don't. But they made their point.”

“It was awful, just awful,” Amy said.

“It rose up from the bottom layers of hell. It was savagery, the howling of demons. This was the devil's own work,” Partridge said.

Dirk scarcely knew how to respond. “The Shoshone people have their own traditions, sir.”

“I tell you, Skye, this was something out of the bowels of the earth. That fiendish drumming, rising to some sort of crest and then fading away, only to rise again, sulphurous and sinister, unloosing all the demons of the netherworld.”

“They would not see it that way, sir.”

“Well, you're one of them, Skye. It was an assault, that's what. They'll come closer next time, and closer, until they do this under our windows. Deliberately terrorizing us. If we become martyrs, like the Whitmans in Oregon, then that's our fate. We're Americans, sir. We're bringing truth and goodness to these savages. We're offering them the hand of reason, and the keys to everlasting life. I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll talk to Van Horne in the morning. These ghouls must be punished.”

“I'll want the army here every night,” Amy Partridge said. “I'll insist on it.”

These people were plainly distraught.

“They're probably the Dreamers,” Dirk said. “They've received a vision of life as it was for them, life without the presence of white men. Life following the buffalo herds. Life honoring their traditions and mysteries.”

“Exactly, and it must be stamped out! Exterminated!”

Dirk tried another tack. “Have you heard of the Jesuit Father De Smet? For years, he wandered the West, befriending the tribes most hostile to white men, teaching them his faith, inviting them to masses. He helped them deal with settlers. He was their friend and they trusted him, and he was never harmed, and was much loved. He walked freely among the Blackfeet and the Sioux.”

“Yes, and all he did was delay the inevitable. We all saw the result at the Little Big Horn two years ago.”

Dirk found no opening in that closed mind. “Well, you're safe now. You can go back to bed.”

“I won't sleep a wink,” said Amy Partridge.

But they drifted into the rectory, and Dirk heard the door shut behind them.

Dirk drifted through the pale light. He saw a single lamp burning at the army post, and no light at all at the agency. No light burned at Chief Washakie's residence but Dirk was pretty sure the chief hadn't missed a thing. The Dreamers had announced their presence, choosing a moment when the army was miles away. This was probably the work of Owl, Waiting Wolf, and Dirk didn't doubt that the youth could run circles around the blue-shirts. The army probably would never catch the boy, not on a reserve with so many hidden refuges and mysteries tucked into its vast size.

As he passed the chief's residence, a quiet voice caught him.

“North Star, come sit with me.”

Dirk discovered the chief sitting in deep shade, staring out upon the moon-washed night. He was wrapped in a red-and-white Hudson's Bay blanket, the red barely discernible.

Dirk settled himself in the next wicker chair.

“It is a good night, brother,” Washakie said.

“The Dreamers came.”

“And went away.”

“They frightened the vicar and his family.”

“What did you tell them?”

“I told them about how Father De Smet had made friends of the very tribes most feared by white men, and how the father looked after their needs and helped those people deal with the tide of white men.”

“And what did this man Partridge say?”

“He said Father De Smet only delayed what was to come, and the result was the Little Big Horn.”

“Then he is not a friend.”

“No, sir. He burns with the need to civilize the savages and bring them to the True Faith and make the savages just like white men.”

Washakie exhaled his exasperation. “And the Dreamers are devils, yes?”

“Yes, sir. He thought they rose out of the pits of hell, out of the very earth.”

“They left something for me.”

Washakie handed Dirk a furry feather. It had to be from a Great Gray Owl.

Washakie eyed Dirk. “I don't plan to die anytime soon, but the Dreamers seem to have other ideas.”

“It is a threat?”

“Will they seek my life? No. But Owl, the great bird, will pursue me. As the whites might say, it is written. It has been seen.”

“My mother didn't explain all these things to me.”

“Shoshones have no religion in the sense that white men have one,” Washakie said. “We are led to our own universe in our own way. Your mother had nothing to teach you because each Shoshone pursues his private path, often in secret. There is no white men's Bible, no tracts, no catechism for the People. These mysteries are discovered by boys when their time comes to listen and wait. It is something for you to find, not for her to teach.”

“I was taken away at age eight, put in a Jesuit school in St. Louis. That's what separates me from you, Grandfather.”

“Yes, and it was good you went to St. Louis. You are a brother, North Star. You are one of the People, and you will help us learn how to live the new way.”

“Brother? Not by blood.”

“By all the mysteries that bring life to the womb of a Shoshone woman. We live in a world we barely know, and some of what we know is not what we see, but what rises inside of us. It rises in me to call you brother of all my People.”

“What will you do with this owl feather, Grandfather?”

“Tomorrow I will ride in my wagon to the encampment on the river, and give the feather to Walks at Night.”

“And?”

“He will not accept it, but let it drop to the clay.”

“And it will lie there.”

“The winds of time will take it away. They will lift it a few feet, and blow it into the reeds. And the Americans will still be here. I have made them my friends. They call me a friend and are naming that army post for me in a little while. In a way, they are what they say. But their focus is not upon us, not upon their Shoshone friends. Their hearts are upon their lands and settlers and ranchers and farmers and the towns and mines they will start, and they will forget their Shoshone friends. And they will forget the Dreamers, and an owl's feather will not change them in the slightest.”

“And the People?”

Washakie stared into the mysterious night. “The bodies of the People will live on, make babies, survive. But the People, the Snake People, they may be lost. The Dreamers believe it will not happen that way. Everything will return to what it was. But white men come with guns made of iron, with wagons and horses and steam engines, with plows and looms that make cloth, with steamboats, and the time of the owls and the buffalo fades into the past and will not be seen again. Only the bodies will live on, and those will be poor, small, sickly, and ill-made.”

There was something prophetic in Washakie's vision.

“I have made my choices, for myself and for the People,” he added. “The Dreamers might put me on the spirit road, but the fate of the People would be no different. Go now. There will be an owl feather at the teacher house.”

That chilled Dirk. He hurried across the empty fields to the shadowy schoolhouse and to his teacherage, only to find old Victoria waiting for him, sitting on the front stoop, wrapped in a striped blanket. She handed him the same furry feather that had been given to Chief Washakie, and maybe others this fateful night.

He took it wordlessly.

“Stuck in the door. Big goddamn medicine,” she said.

“No, no medicine in it. It has no magic. A Gray Owl did not fly here and drop this feather for me to heed. It's a warning, though. A Dreamer brought it. Maybe Waiting Wolf himself. The Dreamers are telling me something.”

“I don't know what. In the old days, when I had the inner eye, I could tell you.”

“You still have medicine, Grandmother.”

“I don't see the magpie no more,” she said.

He puzzled it, and remembered that the magpie had been her spirit helper all her long life, and in some strange way, she and magpies had bonded. For her, Magpie was one bird, even if she had seen thousands in her life. It was as if all magpies had become her spirit counselor. But what did her magpie have to do with this?

“Grandmother, when did Magpie become your spirit guide?”

“I was still a girl, and I asked for a spirit blessing, and went by myself into the mountains above our village, and there I waited, and then Magpie came. She walked right up to me, where I lay on a robe, and she looked at me with one eye, and turned her head and looked at me with the other, and then I saw her above me, big as the whole sky, and I came down from the mountain and told our chief, Rotten Belly, that I had received the gift, and he told me I had received great powers. This was before I ever met your father, Mister Skye. Such powers didn't come often to a girl, but they came to me. But now I don't see Magpie, and I tell myself that we will meet on the star trail soon.”